You can’t believe how ridiculously excited I am right now. And relieved.
We’re going to see Skinny Puppy in Berlin on August 7th and then again in Prague on the 9th.
It was a quite an ordeal getting the tickets. I ordered them off a german website with minimal english and wasn’t even sure if they’d show up or not. They arrived in Dublin by registered mail and you have to sign for them. Last monday the doorbell woke me up. I was too dazed to get up in time and the postman left a delivery notice saying I could pick up the letter from the sorting depot in Blackrock the next day.
So on Tuesday morning we drove down to the depot and they searched around for the letter a good 15 minutes before giving up. The computer system was reporting that it was there, but they couldn’t find it. Gulp! They suggested it might be out on the truck again and to call them the next day. So Wednesday rolled around and I eagerly rang them to see if there was any news. Same again Thursday and Friday. Nada. I was starting to panic. While a trip to Berlin is cool in and of itself, I was starting to get the sinking feeling that we might get locked out of the concert. Well this morning they found them! WOOOOOHOOO!!!!
I tried a little something today — while fixing some bugs that snuck into 0.9.0, I whipped up a Java Web Start version for people to try out:
This launches CRON-o-Meter right off my website, without any installer. It always launches the most recent version. It will only work with Java 5 or later, so Mac OS X users running several versions behind the curve won’t be able to run this without upgrading to a newer version of OS X.
I’m curious to see how well it works for people, so please try it and let me know if it looks good. I’m especially curious to see if it fixes the Windows Vista issue someone commented about earlier.
I’ve received two donations to the CRON-o-Meter project since activating donations on sourceforge. Thanks!
It’s been a while since I’ve done a good old fashioned book-post. Here’s what’s sat on my bedside table recently.
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Iron Sunrise by Charles StrossYuck. After reading the astounding Accelerando!, I grabbed Iron Sunrise when I saw it at the bookstore. I didn’t realize it was the sequel to Singularity Sky, a book I really disliked. While far better than Singularity Sky, it’s still just stinky space-opera. Blah. Bah Humbug. |
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Rainbow’s End by Vernor VingeRainbow’s End is a mildly interesting cyber-punk novel about a man trying to reconstruct his life and identity after being given an experimental therapy to reverse his severe Alzheimer’s and restore his youth. It started with a really interesting premise but never really went anywhere. Not bad, but not all that good either. |
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Coalescent by Stephen BaxterI really enjoyed this novel. It was three-quarter’s historical fiction set during the Roman decline in Britain with a hint of Arthurian legend thrown in for good measure. The remainder was a present-day plot line peppered with some interesting speculative-evolution science fiction. I’ve just dipped into the sequel and so far I’m a little disappointed because it looks like book two is some pretty hard-core space opera, and I’m not enjoying it at all yet. |
Today I managed to wrap up a small update to CRON-o-Meter today. This is just a maintenance release:
- Improvements to data entry
- The derived Omega-3 and Omega-6 are now more accurate than in previous versions.
- Vitamin E’s %DV was previously incorrect (was 30 mg instead of 20.14 mg)
- Other minor bug fixes
I’m still refactoring all the data entry code to a unified model that will smooth the way for better biomarker entry and exercise panel. It’s not that much work, but I just haven’t had the motivation lately to dig my teeth into it. This release is also using some SwingX components in a few places.
Vanessa asked:
Anyways, still reading, keep posting. Last diet/CRON post was from March – any new thoughts or developments?
Yeah…. I’ve been eating like crap lately, and not been tracking very well. I’ve not been overeating, but I have lost that fine control over my diet that I had previously. The main difficulty is that I spend a lot of time at the office — and the office is extremely well supplied with free snack food. We also get cooked a free gourmet lunch. I tend to go for the fish and veggie entrees and the soups and salads, but I have to portion by eye, and have no clue how much oil is in the sauces.
And then there’s the social lifestyle of Ireland, which involves pubs, pubs, and pubs. A pint or two here and there adds up fast.
That said, I’ve managed to maintain a fairly steady weight and I’m starting to get more exercise. About 45 minutes of brisk walking per day on the way to work and back, and this week I even played basketball with some co-workers and some folks from the Dell office which is across the street from us.
I’ve got a buncha CRON-o-Meter stuff done for the next version — just a tiny bit of work left to wrap it up, but it’s been hard to find the time to do it.
Two weekends ago I bought a Wii, which isn’t helping matters.
Currently listening to: John Zorn: Masada.
Dublin in the spring has HUGE snails all over the place. They are so awesome, with their little antenna eyes and the way they just glide across walls and shrivel up into their shell if you frighten them. Here’s a big guy I found sliming the garden wall in our backyard.
Poker Academy Prospector was released this week. It’s a very comprehensive
hand history analysis tool for Texas Hold’em. I worked a little bit on the beginnings of this product last year, so it’s cool to see the finished product today — it has come a long way, with an amazing set of features and killer performance. The guys have really done an amazing job — if you play online poker, check it out!
I like to think that I’m a pretty smart guy, but when I read the works of people like Eliezer Yudkowsky, I feel mentally disabled.
Humans are so poorly equipped for objective rational thought. There are several classes of hardwired thinking errors we upright-monkey-people make consistently, and are largely blind to. Everyone should read this paper (Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks), slowly, carefully, and honestly. We are all guilty of making these mistakes in the course of our own rationalizations. Only systematic training and awareness allows one to avoid these mental pitfalls. Read this paper and examine your own rationalizations for these biases and blind spots. It is a difficult and humbling task to do this mental spring-cleaning. What convictions do you hold under the pretense of your own flawed rationalizations?
This is why the public discourse on controversial topics like global warming and the war on terror is such a clown show. Everyone is heavily biased and yet feels they have the full weight of logic, reason, and evidence on their side. We heavily over-value our opinions disproportionately to our knowledge. As a liberal leaning person, I will automatically tend to be swayed by arguments in favor of my liberal bias. Without concious effort, I will tend to seek arguments that confirm my beliefs, without seeking for evidence and arguments against. It’s a human flaw, and there’s no shame in it, so long as you acknowledge and deal with it. Or as my father more eloquently puts it, “It’s no shame to have lice, but it’s a damned shame to keep them.”.
I’m currently reading Al Gore’s new book The Assault on Reason, which so far, is excellent — well researched, articulated, and reasoned. There’s been a lot of speculation as to whether Gore will attempt another run for the throne. I think this book is proof he will not, as there are several passages discussing the evolutionary biology of the brain. Admitting a heretical belief in evolution is pretty much an immediate disqualification for American politics.
Fun Fact: The results of 2007 Gallup poll of % of Americans who would vote for a: Catholic (95%), Black (94%), Jew (92%), Woman (88%), Homosexual (55%), Atheist (45%). (source article)
And consider this doozy:
In 1987, Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush was asked by Robert Sherman, a reporter for the American Atheist news journal, if he recognized the “equal citizenship and patriotism” of atheists in America. Bush responded: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. (source article)
Clearly, committing to paper a belief in evolution is an effective form of political suicide. He can’t possibly contemplate running for president now.
Last week, out of the blue, I was invited to join the Scientific Advisory Board of the Lifeboat Foundation. I’m quite flattered to be asked — there are a lot of big names on that list. The Lifeboat Foundation charges itself with the task of safeguarding humanity from existential risks.
I was struck by the number of familiar names on the list of advisors. It really is a small community of global citizens, shock-level-3+, looking to the problems and solutions of the future of humanity. It’s really a largely overlapping list of names from all the other future-oriented organizations like the Methuselah Foundation, the Immortality Institute, the Extropy Institute, the World Transhumanist Association, the Foresight Institute, and the Singularity Institute.
I guess my name popped up in a few of these future-tech places, hence the invitation. I’ve always been fascinated with these big picture concepts. I don’t believe the future is set in stone. The future doesn’t just happen to us — we create it. We have to proactively engineer the future we want. That’s why I’ll be happy to join this group of people in keeping an eye on our existential risks, and helping to develop programs that will concretely address them.
I especially like Anders Sandberg’s creative series of Warning Signs for tomorrow.
I realized today while shaving that I hadn’t seen my chin in my adult life. I think the last time I saw it was almost 10 years ago. Ladies and gents, hold on to your hats! I present to you my chin:
A moment of silence please for the passing of the goatee. No doubt it shall be seen again, along with long hair sometime down the road. I don’t know how long I can handle looking this respectable…
