Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

1. The social implications of E=MC², or, what does relativity say about people.
2. The buoyancy of liquorice and it’s potential effects on attempts to traverse the interstellar medium.
3. A correlation study on electromagnetic field dynamics of cumulonimbi and ice cream sales.
4. The economical implications of a potential ketchup shortage due to bird flu.
5. Corporate managerial decisions as a key factor in suicides of low level white collar workers.
6. How Moore’s law may be applied to the fast food industry.
7. Panspermia as a religious foundation: How prostitution can be legitimized by the existence of extraterrestrial life
8. A summary of postmodern hermeneutic schemata of the biography of Richard Milhous Nixon.
9. Breast feeding as text: Towards a poststructuralist interpretation of neonatal nutrition and mother-neonate social bonding.
10. The application of NP-complete algorithms to the solution of NP-complete problems, and other interesting meta-problem classes.
11. Language-like grammatical structures in fluctuation harmonics of carbon nanotubes resonating close to 60 Hz.
12. A atom-for-atom description of the molecular structure of an asparagus, and the importance of such descriptions to future innovation in nanotechnology.
13. Analysis of the contamination of rural agricultural workers’ genepools by interloping law students on spring break with nothing better to do.
14. Common psychological features of Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, George W. Bush, and a carrot cake.
15. Bondage as an Olympic event: an anthropological feasibility study.

Good books I’ve been reading the last couple of days:

• Out of Our Minds, by Ken Robinson
• Democratizing Innovation, by Eric von Hippel
• A General Theory of Magic, by Marcel Mauss (gift from Steinn E. Sigurðsson)
• State of Fear, by Michael Crichton

Actually, the last one in the list isn’t all that good. Hörður lent it to me after having implied that it would change my stance on global warming. About 130 pages in it’s far closer to changing my stance on Michael Crichton’s writing abilities from “not bad” to “oh dear” - it just isn’t very well written, unlike most of the Crichton stuff I’ve read before. There’s still 500 pages wherein he could change my mind dramatically, but… well. I just find it hard to write off something like global warming as a conspiracy of academics and tree huggers. The reason:

Cause → Effect

People didn’t start talking about global warming until they noticed signs of it. This cause-effect relationship is a strong one.

Anyway, stuff waiting to be read:

• Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett (gift from Ester Sif Kristjánsdóttir)
• Overclocked, by Cory Doctorow
• Cellular Automata and Complexity, by Stephen Wolfram
• Critical Path, by R. Buckminster Fuller

This is one of those weeks…

I’m flying out to New York on Thursday and then continuing on to Boston on Sunday. My schedule is horrendously packed until the 5th of March, at least, and by then I’ll have a whole host of issues to take care of. The good news is I’m having fun.

There is the odd task I really need to finish before I leave Iceland though, such as spiffing up certain documents, getting currency problems solved (the USD always seems to stay around 60 ISK while I’m here but shoot up to 69 when I go over there) and fixing certain software packages I should’ve fixed a long time ago.

In addition to this I’m still not sure where I’m staying in NYC. I’m oddly tempted to just book a hotel and be done with it. Boston is a bit clearer: I know more people there and they live in less silly locations. Hopefully I can impose on them, and if not.. well. I’ve heard benches in Boston Common are quite comfortable. (Just kidding.)

This is brilliant. Exactly the kind of thing that needs to be done. Thanks to Vinay for pointing this out.

Also, congratulations to Kosovo on their independence! You’re all fighting for a good cause. I hope many other small nations will follow in your footsteps.

I haven’t been the world’s best blogger recently, sorry. I’ve been extremely busy. But I’m going to try and get better - if only by dumping odd links and such on here. In general, if I lapse in my blog activity, it isn’t because I have nothing to say, but rather that I have more to say than usually and just don’t have time to say it. Therefore, if I lapse, poke me.

Gummi pointed out A Short History of Psychological Torture to me. Very interesting. Gummi’s infrequent blog posts are worth reading too - he normally blogs in Icelandic, but if that’s something you can deal with his points hit home every time.

Vincent Kräutler wrote an implementation of Google Pagerank in 126 lines of Python. The accompanying article is rather good and is worth checking out.

(It’s not mathematically perfect - there are a few minor technical issues that I’m not going to bash him for, because it doesn’t actually matter to the implementation.)

As for brevity, I was able to condense the code to 110 lines without removing any of the documentation strings or damaging clarity - both of which were good in Vincent’s version and worth maintaining. Any further condensation I could come up with came at a cost either in increased complexity or decreased performance.

Documentation is important. My rule is that any code that needs comments to be understood is badly written and deserves a rewrite. Documentation, whether it be comments in the code or docstrings, manfiles or what have you, should augment the simplicity of the code rather than try to explain something complicated. Not everybody thinks the same things are complicated - I once wrote a very nice implementation of a permutation resampling statistical test in C, which makes perfect sense to me, but would probably appear quite odd to somebody who knows C but doesn’t understand computer intensive statistics. But since the code is clean and well documented, any complexity that comes from the algorithm is exposed as not being complexity induced by the language (or scruffiness of the programmer).

Essentially, it’s a question of clarity. Things like Duff’s device are brilliantly conceived, but they’re hacks, and hackish code is hard to maintain, regardless of how smart it looks. When programming, be smart, but don’t try to look smart. Vincent’s Pagerank implementation is a shining example of how things should be done.

There’s a lot of snow in Reykjavík today. My early morning activity was shoveling the driveway, followed by getting my mother’s car stuck and then maneuvering the packed motorway in a blizzard.

Of course, only certain days of the year are like this. This one in particular is my birthday - I have survived yet another full orbit of the sun. Yay for arbitrary time measurements.

I bought my ticket to New York and Boston last night, it cost an arm and a leg but I believe it was the right thing to do. My itinerary comprises of meetings, mostly, with Fab folks, MIT folks, US DoD folks, venture capitalists, sociopolitical figureheads of various description, grassroots movements, old friends, new friends and probably at least one bar. I’m also going to try and drop by and see the old Savoy memorial plaque and pick up a number of items for a number of people. It’s going to be fun, but exhausting.

XMPP doorbell.

If you’re in New York or Boston between 21 and 29. February, let me know and we can try to schedule a meetup. My itinerary is already rather packed, but the exact times and places are still floating around, so poke me and we’ll see what happens.

The TSA, an organization designed to maintain security in transportation - an organization that has been the greatest threat to the security of individuals attempting to travel to, from or through the United States for the last few years, has started a blog. Their tagline reads: “Terrorists Evolve. Threats Evolve. Security Must Stay Ahead. You Play A Part.”

While I applaud their support of the theories of evolution I think they’re still on the wrong side of the fence, and I’m not the only one if their blog post replies are any standard worth noting. This blog is a step in the right direction, but they’re still barking up the wrong Bush on most accounts when it comes to international security.

[Speaking of which, if you’re in Reykjavík, I recommend Alyson Baile’s course on international security at the University of Iceland, Wednesdays at 13:20, Oddi room 201]

Terrorists do evolve. Their techniques change to suit the purposes. But terrorism is related to ideology. One of the best ways to reduce terrorism is to stop imposing conflicting ideologies - freedom isn’t reserved for people with the right mindset.

Threats do evolve. But anybody can make threats, and anybody can follow through on them. Not just terrorists. I can threaten to eat one of my nephews. I probably won’t do it. But I could. Is that reason enough to knock my teeth out and deny me access to knives?

Security must stay ahead. I totally agree. But security cannot and must not be pushed ahead at the expense of personal freedoms. If you’re using restrictions to apply security, you’re doing it wrong. (This likewise to people who do computer security: blocking ports doesn’t increase security - you only need one open port to get in. However, educating your users might get you a long way).

We do play a part. Security isn’t the TSA’s problem. It’s everbody’s problem. And if everybody thinks clearly, acts rationally, and works together, we can fulfill TSA’s mandate several thousand orders of magnitude better, at no cost, and without touching on people’s freedom to travel.

On my arrival in New York last August I had to stand in line for the better part of an hour before being fingerprinted. This was the height of the unpleasantness I had to endure, and am fairly glad of that, because after reading several accounts of people being strip-searched, illegally imprisoned and even tasered to death, I expected the worst coming to somebody such as myself who has the damned insolence to openly criticize this kind of behavior.  I will be going to New York again later this month, and I very much hope I’ll be treated fairly.