A long while back, I remember reading about Stallman proposing a change to copyright time. I thought that the setting of a particular figure, and then refining it was an absurd solution. In my opinion a much better solution is to set a formula by which the length of copyright is to be calculated, and a figure on how often that length should be recalculated.

Today, I finished reading My Life as a Quant. Somewhere in the middle of the book he talks about the drive to become a partner at Goldman (before it’s IPO). The firm had some specified number of partners, and a means by which to add to that group. I also assume that they had a beneficial profit sharing scheme. These partners would also form the committee that decides policy and in what direction to take the company.

The world seems to run more on figures than formulas. The US Constitution is anomalous in this regard, because of a formula for specifying how representation in Congress should be calculated. Interestingly Congress’s composition is determined by a formula based on state population while the Senate is fixed at 2 members per state. There have been many arguments (mostly a result of integer arithmetic) about this formula, beginning with the framing of the constitution itself.

I thought it would be interesting if a business’s direction were a summation of the votes of it’s employees. Of course we wouldn’t want to represent everyone equally, and so a weighting by salary would probably be good (even though managers get paid more, the workers probably get more in total). But it’s difficult to cast company-wide votes because of issues with wording and understanding of what’s at stake. As an example, suppose a trading company wanted to keep it’s risk in sync with those working at the company. During the hiring process, each new employee could take a risk-assessment test (so popular during the 80’s) that would chart their personal risk-profile. Then this graph could be added to the sum of everyone’s profile in the company (weighting by salary) to obtain the risk profile of the entire company. This graph could then be handed off to the market modeling groups and trading desks who would use it for portfolio calculations.

I also am really fond of the use of internal markets to make company decisions. Formulas and markets are simply more flexible and responsive to changing environmental conditions. Constructing a bureaucracy on formulas rather than figures would likely give you a very competitive edge, and it lets everyone feel a modicum better about their representation. I call this the Democratic Business Model.

Also of interest is a post on what Gen Y wants from work.

Ok, well it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. Some interesting stuff has been happening in my life though.

• The software project I’m working on has surpassed 10,000 lines. While this in itself is neither an unusual nor unexpected event for software, it marks a personal milestone. Previously, I’ve only written stuff that was 3-400 lines maximum. Command line scripts and other small utilities. This time I’ve created a GUI (also my first) and had to deal with issues such as design and architecture. I’ve learned much from this experience.
• I realized that I’m undervalued at work, and I’ve decided to speak out about it. Nobody else I work with could have accomplished what I said above, and I’m being penalized for intangibles such as ‘personality issues,’ rather than being rewarded for my technical merits, and accomplishments. One of the biggest problems that I see is that it’s very difficult to get people to value your work, when they have no clue as to what’s involved.
• I’m not genius, but I love learning. I’m the only person that I know who will go home and read a text book or solve math teasers for relaxing pleasure. I care deeply about my technical abilities and devote much of my free time to learning new things. I am not among peers, and I need new friends.

I feel unsatisfied and intellectually stifled. There are no opportunities for creativity at work, and nobody with whom I can share the new ideas I read about at home. (I recently read about Cook-Levin’s proof of NP-completeness in Sipser’s book, Theory of Computation)

It was about 12am, and I was driving home listening to A Farewell to Kings, after having talked to a drunk all day about conspiracy theories and loss of the American Dream. I was thinking about Language and yesterday’s failure to compare languages for Lego robots. I had failed because I actually needed to have experience in programming with those languages in order to make a good comparison, I couldn’t do it without actually using the languages that I was comparing. Then, in a flash I had this idea. How can Linguists compare languages without actually using them? I suppose the just pick and choose idioms and grammer structures. But a real comparison would be a detailed, recorded history of the new constructs and pieces that a person picks up via learning a new language. This learning history would be the precise recording of the new things the person had to learn, and thus a precise recording of the differences, semantic and syntactic, between what the learner already knew (the old language) and what the learner must add to their knowledge (the new language).

So has any researcher taken this approach? My guess is that most sit in the Ivory tower that Chomsky has given them, and few have ventured forth to try and learn a new language (the anthropologists do well in this regard), and that even fewer, perhaps none, recorded, in detail, the cognitive journey of assimilating that new language. So, while many learn new languages, they don’t fully record that journey.

I was reading Hofstadter’s latest book, I am a Strange Loop, and encountered some rather provocative statements. Hofstadter is one of the only authors that I’ve read that is not afraid of explaining in great detail why materialism is both necessary and sufficient for all the complexity of human life.

This quote starts out on page 289 in Chapter 20: A Courteous Crossing of Words. The characters in the dialog were labelled “Strange Loop #641″, the viewpoint of the book, and “Strange Loop #642″, a skeptic. I’ve renamed them.

Searle: Ouch. Now just listen for a moment. My question is very straightforward. Anybody can understand it (except maybe you). Why am I in this brain? Why didn’t I wind up in your brain, for instance?
Hofstadter: Because your “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, into some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable events that befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It couldn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.
Searle: But why couldn’t I have had those experiences as easily as you?
Hofstadter: Careful now! each “I” is defined as a result of its experiences, and not vice versa! To think the reverse is a very tempting, seductive trap to fall into. You keep on revealing your tacit assumption that any “I”, despite having grown up inside one particular brain, isn’t deeply rooted in that brain — that the same “I” could just as easily have grown up in a band been attached to any other brain; that there is no deeper connection between a given “I” and a given brain than the connection betweer an give canary and a given cage. You can’t just swap them arbitrarily.
Searle: You’re still missing my point. Instead of asking why I ended up in this brain, I’m asking why I started out in that random brain, and not in some other one. There’s no reason that it had to be that one.
Hofstadter: No, you’re the one who’s missing the point. The key point, uncomfortable for you though it will be, is that no one started out in that brain — no one at all. It was just as uninhabited as a swinging rope or whirlpool. But unlike those physical systems, it could perceive and evolve in sophistication, and so, as weeks, months, and years passed, there gradually came to be someone in there. But that personal identity didn’t suddenly appear full-blown; rather it slowly coalesced and came into focus, like a cloud in the sky or a condensation on a windowpane.
Searle: But who was that person destined to be? Why couldn’t it have been someone else?
Hofstadter: I’m coming to that. What slowly came to pervade that brain was a complicated set of mental tendencies and verbal habits that are now insistently repeating this question, “Why am I here and not there?” As you may notice, this brain here (mine, that is) doesn’t make its mouth ask that question over and over again. My brain is very different from your brain.
Searle: Are you telling me that it doesn’t make sense to ask the question, “Why am I here and not there?”
Hofstadter: Yes, I’m saying that, among other things. What makes all of this so counterintuitive — verging on the incomprehensible, at times — is that your brain (like mine, like everyone’s) has told itself a million times a self-reinforcing story whose central player is called “I”, and one of the most crucial aspects of this “I”, an aspect that is truly a sine qua non for “I”-ness, is that it fluently flits into other brains, at least partially. Out of intimacy, out of empathy, out of friendship, and out of relatedness (as well as for other reasons), your brain’s “I” continually makes darting little forays into other brains, seeing things to some extent from their point of view, and thus convincing itself that it could easily be housed in them. And then, quite naturally, it starts wondering why it isn’t housed in them.
Searle: Well, of course it would ask itself that. What more natural thing to wonder about?
Hofstadter: And one piece of the answer is that to a small extent, your “I” is housed in other brains. Yes, your “I” is housed a little bit in my frustratingly dense and pigheaded brain, and vice versa. But despite that blurry spillover that turns the strict city-limits version of You into Greater Metropolitan You, your “I” is still very localized. Your “I” is certainly not uniformly spread out among all the brains on the surface of the earth — no more so than the great metropolitan sprawl of Mexico City possesses suburbs in Madagascar! But there is another piece of the answer to your question “Why am I here and not there?”, and it is going to trouble you. It is that your “I” isn’t housed anywhere.
Searle: Come again? This doesn’t sound like your usual line.
Hofstadter: Well, it’s just another way of looking at these things. Earlier, I described your “I” as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I’ll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth.
Searle: A myth?! I’m certainly not a myth, and I’m here to tell you so.
Hofstadter: Hold your horses for a moment. Think of the illusion of the solid marble in the box of envelopes. Were I to insist that that box of envelopes had a genuine marble in it, you’d say that I had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a tactile illusion, wouldn’t you?
Searle: I would indeed, although the feeling that something solid is in there is not an illusion.
Hofstadter: Agreed. So my claim is that your brain (like mine and like everyone else’s) has, out of absolute necessity, invented something it calls and “I”, but that thing is as real (or rather, as unreal) as is that “marble” in that box of envelopes. In that sense, your brain has tricked itself. The “I” — yours, mine, everyone’s — is a tremendously effective illusion. and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our “I”’s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life.

And there you have it. None of our selves really exists. Well we do exist, but that existence is a software symbol running on the hardware of our brains. We are neither incorporeal spirit nor materialistic bodies. Children and retards aren’t as human as adults, and are therefore subject to different laws; There isn’t an afterlife when the body dies, because the mental patterns cease; We have internal conflict, because the self is a symbol just the same as all the others in your brain; Multiple personalities can inhabit the same hardware just as virtual machines contain different operating systems; Consciousness is the sublimely subtle dance of memes; It explains the inherent difficulty of sharing the qualia of experience with another being.

And thus Hofstadter reveals the lies we tell ourselves. But it won’t be prooven until we successfully build a fully-fledged artificial intelligence using this concept of cognition; and even then people will doubt because the self-reinforcing myth is more compelling than objective reality.

Well, I’ve really been out of it. Not much has been happening, and there’s not much that I want to rant about.

• I successfully installed OpenWRT on my new wireless router. Though I now have wireless, I noticed that my upload rate on torrents has noticeably declined; and this is after configuring iptables. It’s a low-priority item, and will probably never get resolved.
• The program that I’ve been writing at work has now passed the 10,000 line mark. (that’s a rough count: cat *.cpp *.h | wc ) It hasn’t fit in my head since around the 2,000–3,000 linecount stage, which was quite some time ago. This not only makes it the first program that I’ve ever written that’s more than 1,000 lines, but also my first GUI program. I’ve been working on it since December, and it’s already gone through 1 complete rewrite. I rather satisfied with the current design, and it’s already been able to cope with requirements changes nicely. Because it doesn’t fit entirely in my head, I now have an inkling about what professionals mean by Software Systems Design and Architecture.
• I also wanted to do a linguistic comparison paper for some of the top NXT lego robotics languages, but without the time to actually try out the different languages, and without a robot to test them on, I’ll have to wait for the Lego robotics class at the local college to start up this Fall.

Ok, so the site has been down for a week. That’s because my computer’s HD crashed. Fortunately, I was able to goto Staples and purchase 2 Seagate 500GB SATA drives. That’s 1TB purchased on a whim for $260! You couldn’t do that 1 year ago. I’ve set them up as a RAID 1 (mirror) so that one drive is a backup of the other.

Along the way, I had to copy all the stuff off the old drive, which caused an infinite loop for the automounter in both the Gentoo 2007.0 LiveCD and Ubuntu 7.04 CD. Using Ubuntu, you can kill the automounter, and mount by hand. I then copied all my data using ‘tar pipe tar’, (so that permissions, ownership, and timestamps are saved for all files) and saved this blog by exporting all the MySQL databases from within a chroot environment.

After installing a new OS (Gentoo Linux) onto the new drives. I just make myself a new user, and copy the saved version of my home directory onto the new system, making sure that my uid hasn’t changed. Restoring the website was just as easy: copy the webserver settings from the old HD to the new ones, and import the MySQL databases. The coolest thing of all in this world of paradise is that KDE has session management, and so all the browser windows that were open when the crash occurred just pop right back up, as if I’d never left.

Ok, so it took awhile, but I’ve got everything back. Let’s explore how this would have worked on a Windows system. Well, since that drive refused to boot, and then also refused to automount, all that data would have been lost forever. Even supposing that I could access it, I’d have to copy all my user preferences. That requires visiting many different directories, C:/Documents and Settings/User/* for most stuff, but then what about IE bookmarks, and email, or stuff on my Desktop? All this stuff resides in different places!! Fine, so you could, potentially, comb the system and save all that stuff. What about a website? Well, you can export stuff from a database just as easily (but that assumes it’s running, which means the drive would have to be booted). Pretending that we could’ve come this far, and that we copied all this stuff onto the new system, there’s still one last hurdle: All the applications have their default behavior restored! Customizations like that require copying registry entries, a prohibitively daunting task.

KISS wins again! You see, in *nix-land all application settings are kept in plain ascii text files in the /etc directory, and all user preferences are similarly kept in the users home directory. But in the world of Gates, user preferences are either in registry entries, or spread out all over the system in crazy directories, in proprietary binary formats. Windows as a software system suffers serious design flaws, and the fact that the name Microsoft is associated with computers, is an embarrassment to the industry.