Internet trials and freelance progress

I did not post anything on Saturday. For shame. Actually, I would have been happy to post a TED Talk or some musings on Saturday evening, if only the internet in my building had been functioning. It went down (sort of) by 3 p.m. and was not back up until at least 8:30 this morning. Over 40 hours. I had to go and buy some Dazbog coffee in order to get online this morning. (Well, ok, I could have walked to the library, but that’s a 20-minute walk and it was snowing.)

By “sort of,” I mean it was doing the Linksys router thing. If you aren’t familiar with it, every Linksys router (at least the four or so that I’ve encountered) suffers the same flaw. It works for some time — days, weeks, maybe months — and then one minute it kicks you off. The signal is still strong, often the strongest possible, but you cannot fully connect because either a) the attempt stalls and you don’t get assigned an IP address, or b) the attempt stalls and you don’t get assigned a network address. Either way, no intarwebz for you. Either way, the fix (always temporary) takes less than half a minute: find and unplug power to router; wait a few seconds; reconnect power to router; wait a moment while your intarwebz are magically restored. For some reason, forcing the router to reset in this way clears whatever was jamming up the connection. I don’t really know what’s going on, I just know it’s annoying, but an easy fix, but will repeat itself in due time.

And by “I had to … get online this morning,” I mean I actually had a responsibility to take care of that couldn’t wait until the manager got off his bum and reset the router. I finally had some comments to edit for the freelance project. I started at the office on Friday and finished working on the file (offline) over the weekend, but I’d promised to upload it and update the project manager this morning. So I did that.

Now I have four more files to work on (overall totalling about 1.5x the word count of the first file). The manager sent them a couple hours after I posted the finished file. So, cool.

2010
02/08
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Favorites from xkcd: Certainty

2010
02/07
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Piano for Friday: Clair de Lune (Debussy)

A while back, I posted Debussy’s “Arabesque #1″ — here’s another favorite of his, “Clair de Lune.” When I took a piano class in college, one of the other students played this for the end-of-semester master class (though I’d known it for years before that). It’s yet another on the list of songs I’d love to learn. The performance stops around 4:30 (if it were really 5:30 long, it would be extremely drawn-out…).

2010
02/05
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Blog mechanics: Comment spam

I have to wonder how the comment system works on WordPress (or other blogs, probably, but this is where I am and this is where I can see stats). There is always a steady stream of spam comments from I don’t know where. The interesting part of it is that I know these comments are spam, even the ones that trouble themselves to compliment my blog theme (it’s the newest one WordPress posted, incidentally, and I kind of like it). How do I know? The comments appear on days and times when there have been no visitors whatsoever to this blog.*

What I don’t understand is how they can do that. How can someone (person or bot) submit a ‘comment’ to one of my posts without registering any kind of visit on my tracking stats?

Also, why is every single one of them submitted to one of my xkcd posts? (Even more obvious way I know they’re spam: they compliment me on a great article, when I have done nothing but hotlink and link to a single comic from xkcd.) But really, why?

* I wonder what Hofstadter would say about the self-reference. There are some interesting quirks to the way we determine the referent of a pointer like ‘this’ — a phrase like ‘this sentence,’ for example, could be referring to itself or to some other sentence under discussion. But we almost never have to think twice about which it is, when we see it. (‘It’ would certainly have similar issues.)

2010
02/04
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Reading Sagan, the great popularizer

I decided that it’s time to get my Sagan on. Which is to say, having finished the tome that is GEB, I am taking a break from Hofstadter for a bit and reading a book by Carl Sagan: The Dragons of Eden, published in 1977. It’s about the evolution of human intelligence, and I’ve gotten almost as far as the evolution of human brains. I’m maybe 1/3 of the way through. Here’s my recap so far:

- Human history is crazy short, and the Trojan war was like seven seconds ago. (Sort of.)
- DNA is pretty impressive, but now we store way more information in “extragenetic” systems like brains (and books), and they’re the only things that’ll keep us going.
- We’re pretty sure that memories and other information are localized (stored in relatively specific places) in the brain, but we keep extra copies around in case one stops working.
- We’re smarter ’cause we have a higher brain-mass-to-body-mass ratio. Incidentally, dinosaurs were probably pretty stupid.
- There are a crazy lot of possible brain states.
- We can talk about the brain in three sections: the reptilian complex is the oldest and has to do with aggressiveness, ritual, and hierarchies; the mid-brain (limbic system) is maybe half as old and has to do with emotions, smells, religious feelings, and some other stuff; and the neocortex is the newest part and does a lot of sophisticated stuff like planning and language.
- …Also there was something about the Phaedrus and a chariot.

Of course, Sagan goes into a lot more detail about what each part of the brain does, among other things, and he gives examples like soldiers with particular injuries who lost very specific abilities due to the part of the brain injured, and gives some useful charts and diagrams. He also mentions that dolphins have the second-highest brain-to-body mass ratio, and sharks are the smartest fish.

I like it so far, but I should read Sagan in his forté. Maybe when I finish Dragons, I’ll go watch “Cosmos” on Hulu.

2010
02/03
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Lighthearted non-light reading

I just finished reading Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher, Bach. I had started it about a year ago, got halfway through, had to return it to the library, and didn’t pick it back up until January. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered another piece of writing (or anything, really) that is simultaneously so delightful and so exhausting.

The format may be the greatest thing about the book; Hofstadter plays with form and language like no other writer of a 700-page-plus tome ever did. The bulk of the work is interspersed with invented dialogues, many of which are composed so that they match a particular musical form. The Crab Canon would read about the same, line by line, backwards as it does forwards. Fugues have multiple characters jumping in in a staggered way, each speaking the same starting line before breaking off into their own ‘harmony.’ It’s great to follow, and I may have learned a little more about musical forms, too.

Hofstadter is interested in the question of how consciousness arises from the very much non-conscious matter that makes up the human body. The book is an (extremely) in-depth exploration of the issue, ranging from the title subjects of math, art, and music to molecular biology, self-reference in language, and artificial intelligence. It’s pretty interesting, incidentally, to read his predictions about AI, which he wrote in the late 70s. He was pretty confident about the ultimate prospects for AI, though he was careful not to speculate about timeframes. Still, even such a small victory as the mid-90s Kasparov-Deep Blue match was a long way away when GEB was published.

I’d like to own the book. I’d like to think I’ll read it again, but I don’t know. It is not a book to pick up lightly, although you will laugh along the way (if you’re inclined to puzzles, especially). It is impressive that one person discussed so many topics at such depth.

2010
02/02
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Wherein Arestelle ridicules an ink seller for publicizing false information (but in a nice way)

My printer is unhappy with me. I haven’t replaced the ink cartridges for over a year; I haven’t printed more than a few pages during that year, but the old cartridges have been empty (not just low) for at least that long. So I finally decided to get some new ink; I was considering buying remanufactured/compatible cartridges, but the website I would buy from has a page yield estimate of less than half the normal for my i960’s BCI-6 ink. So I asked what the volume of ink in their cartridges is — turns out it’s normal, so I’ve no idea why the page yield would be so low. (I bought genuine from Amazon after all.)

But I decided to ask about a curious claim on their “About Us” page while I was at it…

…I also just noticed this on your website: “printer manufacturers charge more for an ounce of printer ink than an ounce of Chanel No 5.” (From the “About Us” page.) What are your numbers for that claim?

Thanks.

[Arestelle]

…As far as the source of the “printer manufacturers charge more for an ounce of ink than an ounce of Chanel No5”, see the below graphic from Chronicle Research:

If you have any additional questions, please let me know.

[ink seller]

Thanks for getting back to me with those volumes.

For interest’s sake, the Chanel website lists their No. 5 ‘parfum’ at $260.00 for one ounce. (The price in the graphic is in the ballpark for the less concentrated ‘eau de parfum,’ though the picture is of the ‘parfum.’)

Color cartridges of the pictured BCI-3e ink are sold on Canon’s website for $12.99 each, each having about .44 oz. That’s about $29.52 per ounce. The black ink (as well as multi-packs) costs less. (The BCI-6 that I’m interested in comes to about $31.80/oz, at $13.99 per cartridge.)

That’s expensive, but not as expensive as the graphic indicates – and not as expensive as Chanel No. 5. It makes perfect sense that ink should be more expensive, ounce for ounce, than a product intended to be consumed several ounces at a time, even when you pick one that’s pricier than others of its type (as is Dom Perignon). Does make a dramatic comparison though.

Fyi.

Cheers,

[Arestelle]

Is this mean?

* * *

In other news, the freelance gig is still on hold; there was indeed a third delay, and this time the local company said they’ll just call us when the client company gets their flippin’ act together. Not in quite those words, mind you, but that was the gist of it. Supposedly it will be early this week. Clearly it isn’t happening today, so that leaves tomorrow before we’re ‘mid-week’ … and then ‘late-week’ … and then …

2010
02/01
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Favorites from xkcd: Labyrinth Puzzle (246)

2010
01/31
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The world at your feet

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

(Franz Kafka)

In grade school, I often deferred to my parents’ 1992 Encyclopædia Britannica set, which held a prominent space in our living room, when I had an assignment that required a bit of research. I felt lucky–and a bit superior, I must admit–to have such a thorough and well-regarded source of information right at my fingertips. Practically anything I might want to know about, it seemed, was right on that bookshelf. Whew.

Now, that set seems like a relic.

Who needs a hundred pounds of printed material whose contents will be obsolete within a few years anyway, now that we have the Internet? With a four-pound device and a wireless connection to this global network, I can access any information from an up-to-date version of the Encyclopædia, not to mention a veritable deluge of scholarly entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and numerous other specialised sources. (Forgive the British spelling; I couldn’t resist.)

Through this interface, I can read news almost as it happens–as a matter of course–and I can follow magazines on any subject; and I can discuss this information with others who are reading it at their own terminals located around the world, all in real time. These are people with whom I never would have imagined, a couple of decades ago, I would ever speak.

This is a portal to a globally-connected communication network, and it’s a little screen sitting on my desk. I have access to much of the knowledge and research of my entire species (over its entire history), with just a few minutes and a few words typed into a device the size of an average hardback book. I can converse with people sitting at similar terminals separated by hundreds or thousands of miles’ distance. I can reach all of this without standing up from my desk, inside my home. I can carry it with me, too, but I can just as well connect to a terminal at any of numerous other locations. The network is ubiquitous, as are its terminals. It is communications interface, media outlet, entertainment complex, publishing center, darkroom, library, and storage cabinet at least as large–figuratively–as a house.

How can I not be amazed?

2010
01/30
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Piano for Friday: “Memories of Life”

Let me tell you: video game music has come a long way since the midi days of NES. A long way. Of course, you might have caught that (if you didn’t know already) when I posted a video of YouTube’s ‘ailecec‘ playing “To Zanarkand” from Final Fantasy X. But since I spent a lot of time playing FF IX over the holidays, I wanted to post another example. FF IX has some of my favorite music of any game I’ve played yet; and the intro theme harks back to the medieval setting of most traditional RPGs, while being a delightful little piece of music itself.

This video is a piano version of a theme that recurs throughout the game, played by ‘kylelandry.’

2010
01/29
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