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[[2008-10-12_-_Ag_Park_XC?]]
Mical Honigfort stands with her husband Paul near the starting line of today's 5k cross-country MCRRC race. She's truly radiant, only about six weeks away from her due date. Caren Jew and I are chatting with her. "You're beautiful, you know? Can I tell you a secret that no woman ever believes?" I ask Mical. "Men think that pregnant ladies look absolutely lovely!" As per prediction, both Caren and Mical disbelieve me.
We're at the county Agricultural Historic Farm Park in Derwood. Two hours earlier Caren and I arrive to get some extra miles in before the official event. Fog hangs over the valleys and the stars are bright, but a hint of dawn is beginning to appear in the eastern sky. Our headlamps make glowing circles on the dewey grass. Caren leads me on a loop around the big corn field, then into the woods on a pretty side trail that brings us through meadows where we startle several deer. Our feet get wet at a stream crossing. A trio of horses observes us curiously from the adjacent farm where Caren showed her own horse many years ago.
Back at the park headquarters an hour later set-up is beginning for the "Little Bennett's Revenge" 5k XC race. "Just put us down for 25 minutes!" I tell the officials there. Caren and I trot past them and down a gravel road, following what turns out to be today's course. It's already marked with little orange flags and traffic cones. We cross a wooden bridge to another huge corn field, turn left, and at my challenge run up a big hill, continue along a quarter mile, reverse course, and finish up by tagging our respective cars at 8am.
We greet Ken Swab, Michelle Price, and other friends, then go inside the building to sign up for the race. I snag a cup of water and several chocolate chip cookies. Back outside I find Christina Caravoulias and her friend Houra Rais. Chris takes photos of flower garden and various runners. at the starting signal Christina and Houra and I take off near the back of the mass. The race flows past uneventfully as I chatter away, much to Houra's amusement I suspect. We finish in a bit over 37 minutes, but speculate (as do others) that the course may be a tad short.
[[2008-10-14_-_Pride_Goeth_...?]]
As per Humerus Fracture, today is a mixed blessing: the Appalachian Trail familiarization run with Kate Abbott goes splendidly for the first dozen miles, and then I come a cropper. But all in due time ...
The almost-full moon is playing peek-a-boo behind mackerel skies at 0515 when I set off from home. An hour later I pull onto the side of the road near Weverton Cliffs to await Kate's arrival. ...
John Muir obituary from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0421.html
[[Singularity_Skepticism?]]
In "The Singularity Is Far" thoughtful computer scientist Scott Aaronson offers multiple reasons to disbelieve that hyper-accelerating technological progress will produce a radical transformation of humanity within the next few decades. His prose is entertaining and his skepticism is healthy.
In brief:
:The first, and most important, reason is also the reason why I don’t spend my life thinking about P versus NP: because there are vastly easier prerequisite questions that we already don’t know how to answer. In a field like CS theory, you very quickly get used to being able to state a problem with perfect clarity, knowing exactly what would constitute a solution, and still not having any clue how to solve it. (In other words, you get used to P not equaling NP.) And at least in my experience, being pounded with this situation again and again slowly reorients your worldview. You learn to terminate trains of thought that might otherwise run forever without halting. Faced with a question like “How can we stop death?” or “How can we build a human-level AI?” you learn to respond: “What’s another question that’s easier to answer, and that probably has to be answered anyway before we have any chance on the original one?” And if someone says, “but can’t you at least estimate how long it will take to answer the original question?” you learn to hedge and equivocate. For looking backwards, you see that sometimes the highest peaks were scaled—Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Poincaré conjecture—but that not even the greatest climbers could peer through the fog to say anything terribly useful about the distance to the top. Even Newton and Gauss could only stagger a few hundred yards up; the rest of us are lucky to push forward by an inch.
:The second reason is that as a goal recedes to infinity, the probability increases that as we approach it, we’ll discover some completely unanticipated reason why it wasn’t the right goal anyway. You might ask: what is it that we could possibly learn about neuroscience, biology, or physics, that would make us slap our foreheads and realize that uploading our brains to computers was a harebrained idea from the start, reflecting little more than early-21st-century prejudice? ...
:The third reason is simple comparative advantage. Given our current ignorance, there seems to me to be relatively little worth saying about the Singularity—and what is worth saying is already being said well by others. Thus, I find nothing wrong with a few people devoting their lives to Singulatarianism, just as others should arguably spend their lives worrying about asteroid collisions. But precisely because smart people do devote brain-cycles to these possibilities, the rest of us have correspondingly less need to.
:The fourth reason is the Doomsday Argument. Having digested the Bayesian case for a Doomsday conclusion, and the rebuttals to that case, and the rebuttals to the rebuttals, what I find left over is just a certain check on futurian optimism. Sure, maybe we’re at the very beginning of the human story, a mere awkward adolescence before billions of glorious post-Singularity years ahead. But whatever intuitions cause us to expect that could easily be leading us astray. ...
:The fifth reason is my (limited) experience of AI research. I was actually an AI person long before I became a theorist. When I was 12, I set myself the modest goal of writing a BASIC program that would pass the Turing Test by learning from experience and following Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. I coded up a really nice tokenizer and user interface, and only got stuck on the subroutine that was supposed to understand the user’s question and output an intelligent, Three-Laws-obeying response. Later, at Cornell, I was lucky to learn from Bart Selman, and worked as an AI programmer for Cornell’s RoboCup team—an experience that taught me little about the nature of intelligence but a great deal about how to make robots pass a ball. At Berkeley, my initial focus was on machine learning and statistical inference; had it not been for quantum computing, I’d probably still be doing AI today. For whatever it’s worth, my impression was of a field with plenty of exciting progress, which has (to put it mildly) some ways to go before recapitulating the last billion years of evolution. The idea that a field must either be (1) failing or (2) on track to reach its ultimate goal within our lifetimes, seems utterly without support in the history of science (if understandable from the standpoint of both critics and enthusiastic supporters). If I were forced at gunpoint to guess, I’d say that human-level AI seemed to me like a slog of many more centuries or millennia.
Aaronson also notes:
: ... Now, it’s clear that a human who thought at ten thousand times our clock rate would be a pretty impressive fellow. But if that’s what we’re talking about, then we don’t mean a point beyond which history fundamentally transcends us, but “merely” a point beyond which we could only understand history by playing it in extreme slow motion.
:Yet while I believe that the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s “near” (where “near” means before 2045, or even 2300). I see a world that really did change dramatically over the last century, but where progress on many fronts (like transportation and energy) seems to have slowed down rather than sped up; a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans, and supercharging its climate; a world where technology is often powerless to solve the most basic problems, millions continue to die for trivial reasons, and democracy isn’t even clearly winning out over despotism; a world that finally has a communications network with a decent search engine but that still hasn’t emerged from the tribalism and ignorance of the Pleistocene. And I can’t helping thinking that, before we transcend the human condition and upload our brains to computers, a reasonable first step might be to bring the 17th-century Enlightenment to the 98% of the world that still hasn’t gotten the message.
... summarize, turn into list?! ...
"Lord Privy Seal" --- an ancient British government office with no duties today (sort of a "Minister Without Portfolio") --- but Robin tells me that it's also used to indicate an over-literal-mindedness in a movie, as in showing a picture of a lord, a privy, and a seal to illustrate the phrase "Lord Privy Seal" (^_^) ...
NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/opinion/22thu2.html editorial and item "Doctors Who Say They’re Sorry" ...
purpose of life? --- get stuff, then give it away ... can't avoid eventually giving it all away ... some people get stuck on the getting part ... applies to ideas as well as physical stuff ...
Proof that String Theory is true? --- little hairs, bits of lint, threads, etc. constantly seem to appear on my laptop's keyboard, stuck between the keys, etc. ...
left over from Massanutten etc.
Final observation: the prior evening I've inserted 10 sheet-metal screws (#6, 3/8th inch) into each of my shoes, to test the Screw Shoe recipe for safer running on ice. When I get home and count, I find that 3 of 10 screws from one shoe and 4 of 10 screws from the other are missing. Apparently they work themselves loose during long runs. Fortunately I bought a box of 100 at the hardware store, so at this rate I should be fine for several hundred miles. Whew!
((quote some examples of Yoda-Speak here)) ...
The late Keith Laumer, one of my favorite science fiction writers, often had ...
(cf. NotCare (13 Feb 2006), ...)
more by John Stuart Mill? History of the British East India Company by James Mill? Will Rogers biography? Mickey Spillane?
of course, most questions are extraordinarily good, if properly interpreted ... mention genius of Hans Bethe for instance ...
scholarship, Heathkits, oil well logging, ...
For me, every run is a miracle --- just like every day being a holiday ... need to read Terry Pratchett story with the golem who feels that way ...
Robert A. Heinlein novel Glory Road --- quotes and jokes from it ...
Nikon and Canon as optical glass companies ... lenses as materials with particular properties to bend light ... Fermat's least-time principle for optics ...
NYT business section 14 July, Ebay moving away from auction site to become mass-market retail channel ... hmmm ... maybe Google will move away from search engine to become a place to click for advertisements ... maybe Microsoft will move away from operating systems and applications to become a marketer of video games ... it's all about selling stuff, apparently, nowadays ... cf. OurOneRing (18 Dec 2001), SomethingToSell (14 Apr 2002), ForThemselves (8 Jun 2003), CircusSponsorus, MoneyOlympics, ConspicuousAnticonsumption, ...
Moments that smile back:
Sun's disc peeking above the trees,
Eyes meeting across the table,
Moments that happen often in youth, in love,
Away from the usual, immersed in the usual
Moments that fail with custom, with jade,
When unstrung with sorrow
What counts isn't what you write in the logbook, but what you do ... but on the other hand, the logbook is so good at reminding, and teaching, ...
[[Singular_Value_Decomposition?]]
If you're standing on a mountainside it's pretty clear which direction you should head to go uphill most quickly. If you've got an oddly shaped object, sometimes it's easy to tell which axes you can spin it around without wobbling, but sometimes not. If you've got a few thousand web pages it's not at all obvious which combinations of words distinguish sets of pages from one another most clearly. (These pages are about politics; these are about fruit; these are about math; etc.)
But all of these situations are related to a math technique called "singular value decomposition". The basic notion is like in the first example, climbing a mountain—but it's a mountain in a higher-dimensional space, where which "direction" to head ... pick the steepest ones ... rotate and stretch ... ???
(cf. Multidimensional Mountaineering (1999-12-13), ...)
physicist's vocabulary of metaphors ... principal axes, fields, ...
"Pilot new methods using old data" --- test new tools/techniques on something you know well already
weight of evidence ... entropy ... information ... seeing a non-black non-crow adds a tiny bit to the hypothesis that all crows are black ...
friend (DW) and I discussing "earworms" --- tunes that get stuck inside one's head --- Robert McCloskey's "Homer Price" story about the jingle that took over everyone in town --- had to get rid of it with a counter-jingle that would leave one person as it infected another --- Mark Twain story "Punch, Brothers, Punch", taught to one person from a group, person then leaves town ...
:That a food conglomerate [developed the first business computer] seems almost incredible. New Scientist said in 2001: "In today’s terms it would be like hearing that Pizza Hut had developed a new generation of microprocessor, or McDonald’s had invented the Internet." ...
and
:The finished LEO, which had less than 100,000th the power of a current PC, could calculate an employee’s pay in 1.5 seconds, a job that took an experienced clerk eight minutes. Its success led Lyons to set up a computer subsidiary that later developed two more generations of LEO, the last with transistors, rather than the noisy vacuum tubes used in the first two models.
and
:Mr. Caminer ... had many explanations for the failure of Lyons to press its advantage. One was that it had no idea how rapidly technology would advance. Another was: "We were too often arrogant about always knowing best."
from the Steven Seagall movie Under Siege (written by J. F. Lawton):
Jordan Tate: So who are you? Are you, you, like, some special forces guy or something?
Casey Ryback: Nah. I'm just a cook.
Jordan Tate: A cook?
Casey Ryback: [Whispering] Just a lowly, lowly cook.
Jordan Tate: Oh, my God, we're gonna die.
[[Being_Nobody,_Going_Nowhere?]]
There's no denying that Ayya Khema is a mystic. Her "Meditations on the Buddhist Path" are far too fuzzy-minded to be fully satisfying to a physicist, as Mary Ewell warned me when she lent me the book. But setting aside the scientific misunderstandings, Being Nobody, Going Nowhere is a fine series of sermons, a set of thirteen talks given to a group of students in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s, often poetic and moving in their images. For example, in Chapter 4 ("Four Friends"), a metaphor for life:
There is a lot to learn in this realm and that is its purpose. It is a continual adult education class, that is what this whole human realm is designed for. Not for the purpose of finding some comfort, not in order to have riches, wealth, possessions. Not to become famous or to change the world. People have many ideas. Life is strictly an adult education class and this is the most important lesson, namely to cultivate and make the heart grow. There is no lesson more important. ...
... and later in the same chapter, some sage advice that echoes
(cf. BennettOnStoicism (1999-04-29), EatTheOrange (2004-11-28), ...)
from the New York Times:
October 17, 1988
ON YOUR OWN: Fitness; Strategy for Workouts: Mind Over Boredom
By WILLIAM STOCKTON
THE great scourge of keeping fit is being bored. So people have devised all sorts of schemes to fight the tedium of a workout. Personal stereos are a favorite. Some people go over their mental laundry list. Others work out with a companion and chatter the entire time. Then there is meditation. This is a subject surrounded by more hyperbole than a Hollywood premiere, and there are as many definitions of it as there are sports psychologists. For some it conjures up images of Far Eastern yogis sitting cross-legged, their minds far away. For others it sounds touchy-feely, indeed, too touchy-feely. After all, we're here to exercise, to get through the run or the bicycle ride, to get the pulse and respiration up, to challenge the body and then get to the office. These are practical, tangible goals and we're all busy people. So who has time to sit around meditating?
But meditation seems to be here to stay in competitive athletics. Perhaps most important for the fitness workout, there are those who see meditation as an antidote to boredom.
In this approach, meditation becomes a means of paying careful attention to the body during a workout. In the act of focusing on the workout second by second, the mind begins to transcend the pain or the shortness of breath or the sluggishness we feel at the moment, all those things that make the workout such a chore. Time flies in this semi-altered mental state, the proponents claim. They say that when we reach this wondrous plateau, the entire body seems to be moving in synchrony, effortlessly.
The mind tends to become very one-pointed,said Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, an associate professor of medicine in the division of preventive and behavioral medicine at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine in Worcester, and a proponent of meditation.For the runner it's when you hit that sense that you could run forever or the swimmer could swim forever. The mind is still, just kind of there and still. Completely connected to the body.October 17, 1988
ON YOUR OWN: Fitness; Strategy for Workouts: Mind Over BoredomBy WILLIAM STOCKTON
THE great scourge of keeping fit is being bored. So people have devised all sorts of schemes to fight the tedium of a workout. Personal stereos are a favorite. Some people go over their mental laundry list. Others work out with a companion and chatter the entire time. Then there is meditation. This is a subject surrounded by more hyperbole than a Hollywood premiere, and there are as many definitions of it as there are sports psychologists. For some it conjures up images of Far Eastern yogis sitting cross-legged, their minds far away. For others it sounds touchy-feely, indeed, too touchy-feely. After all, we're here to exercise, to get through the run or the bicycle ride, to get the pulse and respiration up, to challenge the body and then get to the office. These are practical, tangible goals and we're all busy people. So who has time to sit around meditating?
But meditation seems to be here to stay in competitive athletics. Perhaps most important for the fitness workout, there are those who see meditation as an antidote to boredom.
In this approach, meditation becomes a means of paying careful attention to the body during a workout. In the act of focusing on the workout second by second, the mind begins to transcend the pain or the shortness of breath or the sluggishness we feel at the moment, all those things that make the workout such a chore. Time flies in this semi-altered mental state, the proponents claim. They say that when we reach this wondrous plateau, the entire body seems to be moving in synchrony, effortlessly.
The mind tends to become very one-pointed,said Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, an associate professor of medicine in the division of preventive and behavioral medicine at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine in Worcester, and a proponent of meditation.For the runner it's when you hit that sense that you could run forever or the swimmer could swim forever. The mind is still, just kind of there and still. Completely connected to the body.Dr. Kabat-Zinn uses meditation both in sports settings and at the University of Massachusetts stress reduction clinic, where people are taught to cope with chronic illnesses. He teaches associative behavior through meditation and he stresses simplicity.
Meditation is really a form of concentration. Concentrate on the body. Pay attention to what it is telling you. The mind will wander, so learn to quickly notice when it wanders and bring it back to focusing on the physical task at hand. For example, a runner might focus on each footstep or the swimmer on each stroke or the oarsman on the rhythm of the moving oar. Each time the mind wanders, bring it back, gently but firmly. If there is pain, focus on it. If this is done with enough concentration, the mind turns inward, to a state of relaxed concentration, of detached awareness.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn wrote a chapter on meditation in the book
The Sports Performance Factors(Putnam, 1986), and he described the wonderful moment of inwardness like this:It's as if your mind has gone beyond thinking, to a realm of moment-to-moment awareness in which the entity we usually refer to as 'I' seems like just another thought, rather than the ultimte source of your decisions and actions.To the pragmatic fitness buff, this is almost too much, a signal that it's time to go for a long run and let the mind wander at will. But supposing Dr. Kabat-Zinn is correct, how do you get started?
Breathing is the answer. When he teaches this technique to athletes, college varsity rowing teams, for example, he has his subjects sit comfortably and concentrate on their breathing as the diaphragm above the stomach moves up and down. Feel the respiration for several minutes and concentrate on it. If the mind wanders, bring it back to concentrating on the breathing. Do this 10 minutes or so each day for several days, or longer.
Next, apply it to the workout, running, for example. While running, you'll concentrate on the breathing. When the mind wanders (a recklessly driven automobile has just forced you to leap for your life into some bushes), you'll bring the concentration back to the breathing. You'll focus only on the instant.
So now it's time for a morning run. Same route through the streets, same boring sights. Concentrate on the act of breathing. The Mets lost. Concentrate. Who will win the World Series? Focus on each breath. Here's the same elderly man walking his dog, who strains at the leash and barks. Concentrate. There are more buses than usual and they show no regard for a runner. Turn the mind inward. An ambulance screams past. Focus. Another runner nods and smiles. Concentrate. Who will win the election? Listen to each breath.
And then it's over. To be sure, detached awareness is missing. But is there a hint of it? Perhaps. And the boredom seemed less. Could Dr. Kabat-Zinn be right? Perhaps if one practices his form of meditation enough, sits quietly and thinks about his breathing.
But nevermind. It's time to get ready for work.
How to Begin Meditation Training
Sit comfortably in a chair with your eyes closed or unfocused.
Become aware of your breathing at the diaphragm level. Feel the breathing and concentrate only on it for several minutes.
Count each exhalation, beginning with 1 and counting up to 10. Then repeat the count, again and again.
Should you lose track of the count, draw your concentration back to your breath and pick up the count at 1 with the next exhalation.
After 5 or 10 minutes, cease counting and simply feel your breathing for a couple of minutes more before ending the exercise.
[[Pulp_Fiction?]]
from writer's almanac:
It's the birthday of Lester Dent, (books by this author) the American adventure and mystery novelist, born in La Plata, Missouri, in 1904. The Dents moved to a remote part of Wyoming when Lester was two years old. While he was a telegraph operator for the Associated Press, one of his co-workers published a story in a pulp magazine. Dent read it and thought that he could probably write a story that was at least as good, maybe even better. And since he had the graveyard shift, he started writing at work. His first story was accepted by a pulp magazine, so he and his family moved to New York, where he became a full-time writer of pulp fiction.
He's most famous for his many stories and novels about Doc Savage, a superhuman scientist and adventurer. With the money he made from writing, Lester Dent was able to do all the things that interested him. He earned an amateur radio license, a pilot license, and he passed both the electricians' and plumbers' trade exams. He loved mountain climbing and exploring deserts and the tropics. He spent three years sailing around the Caribbean on his yacht, diving for treasure during the day and writing Doc Savage stories at night.
Dent wrote more than a thousand pulp fiction stories, all with the same formula, which he detailed in an article that explained an exact formula for writing a 6,000-word pulp story.
excerpts from the Lester Dent page http://www.miskatonic.org/dent.html :
Here's how it starts:
FIRST 1500 WORDS
SECOND 1500 WORDS
THIRD 1500 WORDS
FOURTH 1500 WORDS