Something that often fascinates me about language is the presence of synonyms with oppositely charged connotations. Some examples:

-sensitive (good?) vs. vulnerable (bad?)
-dedicated (good?) vs. stubborn (bad?)
-innocent (good?) vs. naive (bad?)
-stoic (good?) vs. heartless (bad?)
-revolution (good?) vs. treason (bad?)

People choose one or the other depending on the context and how they feel about whatever they are referring to. But sometimes I like to pick the unexpected word, to remind people that they really mean the same thing and that any associated value or harm is subjective.

How to not piss people off: Always choose words with positive or neutral connotations.

EDIT: An important part of recognizing these synonyms (is there a better word for these?) is that there are times when something that seems like the good thing to do might not make sense. Using the good word all the time can be misleading. I know I have often pursued independence to an extreme, not realizing that other people would call me aloof instead.

"Superstimulus" (1, 2) is my new favorite word. It's a concept I've been aware of for a while, but I didn't know that there was a word for it until now.

Short definition: A superstimulus is a thing with a quality that we have evolved to appreciate in nature, such as the sweetness of ripe fruit, but isolated and exaggerated. We perceive it to be even stronger than the natural version, though it may be stripped of the reasons why we evolved to appreciate it in the first place.

Superstimuli include:
-candy: exaggerated perception of healthy food.
-sexual fetishes: exaggerated perception of health or gender/fertility/virility.
-cartoons, anime, manga: exaggerated perception of facial and body language expression.
-video games and money: exaggerated perception of accomplishment.
-music: exaggerated perception of spoken language expression.
-to some degree, pretty much all popular media IMHO.

Superstimuli aren't necessarily bad things. Like anything else, they are useful tools. But they are frequently exploited by corporations for money, and frequently misunderstood by everyone else.

My understanding of sound/music theory is rather lacking, but I'm working on it. Just a few days ago I discovered overtones. I'm totally excited now that I have some mental model of why the same note played on a piano and on a violin can sound different. Between the discovery of overtones, SFXR, and ARSS, I am suddenly inspired to write non-crappy sound synthesis software. I have had it with indecipherable arrays of knobs.

What I want to understand now is why the tunes created with this browser toy always sound awesome, no matter what you do with it. I was under the impression that random notes are supposed to sound bad.

A follow-up to my previous post: Yeah, brushing and flossing is probably a good idea. I was just using it as a hypothetical scapegoat. :P Though it sounds like most of the benefit of brushing your teeth is mechanical in origin rather than chemical, which is also true of hand-washing.

But don't take my word for it!

"Prevention > Cure" is one of my mantras. But it occurs to me, prevention gives you little opportunity to experiment. How do you know that, say, brushing your teeth prevents cavities? Sure, that's what people say, but then again, people say a lot of stuff like that; it's called branding. How can I trust that preventative products actually protect me from a real threat? Maybe cavities just kinda happen randomly, and merely serve as opportunities to reinforce: "You should have brushed more!" And if you've never had a cavity, toothpaste could be a total hoax and you'd never know for sure.

Certainly, there are problems with trusting cures as well. Between the placebo effect* and "Correlation != Causation", there's plenty of reason to doubt that cures work as advertised. But correlation is a form of evidence, at least, so when I take a pill and feel better**, I have evidence that the cure is working. And cures protect you from a known threat, so there's never any doubt that the threat actually exists by the time you're ready for the cure.

Maybe the toothpaste industry is lucrative and they've just been lobbying against anything that harms their image. Granted, I haven't researched toothpaste at all, this is just hypothetical, but the fact that I don't already know how toothpaste works and why it is necessary is a sign that the toothpaste industry relies on branding and faith rather than truth, and I should actually research it to determine whether I should continue to brush my teeth. I've seen plenty of toothpaste commercials as a kid. All of them went like this: "This sexy green stuff makes that squicky invisible stuff -- which we have conveniently anthropomorphized for you -- fade away for some reason."

Carefully researched prevention > Cure. Skepticism is healthy. :)

* I always read "remedy" as "placebo". I cannot convince myself to trust anything described as a "remedy". Is anyone else like this?

** Also hypothetical. I don't remember the last time I took any kind of pill.

P.S. A week ago, I was one uncle. Now I am two uncles. :D

I'm pretty excited about the recent announcement that the iTunes Store will be going DRM free. I have a backlog of unused iTunes gift certificates that I feel comfortable using now, and I'll probably even be willing to spend my own money on some music, which is something I haven't done for a long time. (For the past year or so I pretty much haven't acquired any new music, aside from Creative Commons stuff and ripped video game and anime soundtracks.)

So tell me what your favorite music is. I need recommendations. :D

( My taste in music. )

The consensus seems to be:
-LiveJournal is an angst repository for sharing your feelings with friends.
-Blogs are for posting information that may actually be useful to strangers.

Of course, this is bullshit. The only difference is that Livejournal's interface is centralized, meaning it is more user-friendly, even though you can produce much of its functionality in blogs using aggregators. Both LiveJournal and Blogs can be used however you like. But I'd be lying if I wasn't tempted to slap a different label on what it is that I do here if it would affect who would be likely to read it.

I'm looking for a utilitarian recipe website. The kind that has an entry for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches... with only three ingredients. I already know how to make peanut butter and jelly, but I'm looking for more foods like this.

( my taste in food )

So I want to learn more simple, boring, veg*n recipes. Unfortunately, my google searches for "simple recipes" have yet to reveal anything with fewer than six ingredients. :(

You know how your voice gets hoarse when you talk more frequently than usual? That happened to me this Sunday... The funny thing is, I spent all day alone at home.

See, whenever I'm surrounded by people, I feel like I would be intruding on other people's thoughts if I said whatever I was thinking out loud. In particular, I spend a lot of time thinking about algorithms, or something even worse, like shapes or textures. These are usually less interesting to other people than whatever was already on their minds, so in the end people probably appreciate it when I keep my mouth shut. This is especially true at public places like restaurants and trains and bus stops; you just don't start conversations with random strangers about algorithms; it doesn't work*. So on weekdays I spend a lot of time not talking. But when I'm alone on weekends, I am my own best listener. :)

* two semicolons in one sentence? does that even work?

I want to thank atomicteresa, rickynumber24, platypuslord, chrisamaphone, and Anonymous for their patient and insightful comments on my last post. Two decades of not giving a damn about politics and economics is catching up to me, and I appreciate the help. ^_^

atomicteresa said (paraphrased): the reason 5% of us are farming and not 95% is precisely because we have technology that facilitates mass food production... the other 95% have to create value so we have something to trade for that food... Even if all of society's needs are being met, you still have to make something people want, otherwise you, personally, will starve...

After some Googling, I think it's more like 1% or 2% of the US labor force. I think it's fantastic that it only takes 2% of the labor force to farm our food. The thing that bugs me is that only 2% of the individual workers are participating in that 2% of labor, rather than distributing the labor among everyone who wants it. I would love to have the opportunity to allocate 2% of my week, or more, for the guarantee that I will never starve. I already spend at least that much time on things like cleaning the house, doing my laundry, managing my finances, cooking, and other things that I could pay someone else to do -- and many people do pay for these services, and that's perfectly fine -- but I'd like to have the option to keep my independence and do them myself.

Granted, it's much more efficient for a small number of people to form a little assembly line, or whatever it is they do, than it is for a large number of relatively untrained people to jump in and each do a little work, which is probably why it is the way it is now. I understand that It's unrealistic to assume that I could feed myself with just 2% of my work week. But I think it's starting to make less and less sense to force everyone to create measurable, marketable progress in return for money that can be traded for food. I don't want to stop anyone else from putting all their energy into making progress and paying everyone else to support them, but it's not a system that I, personally, feel comfortable in right now. I want to see more alternatives.

I appear to be channelling Food Sovereignty.

Off the top of my head, I might like a system where you can "intern" at a farm for maybe a month every year, or however long it takes to produce a year's worth of food for several people, and receive credit that you can use to buy food from that farm network throughout the next year.

And I feel this way about housing, in addition to food. Housing is something I know even less about than food, but I find this project inspiring.

I just spent the last three nights reading most of the archives of Why Does Everything Suck. No, sorry, it's not a webcomic. It's a year's worth of a New York programmer's blog rants. Hank Williams is a brilliant man, and I feel smarter for reading what he writes. Upon reflection, I agree with most of the things he says... except probably not quite in the way he intended.

For example, a common theme in his blog entries is frustration with the devaluation of intellectual property. Between YouTube, torrents, P2P networks, and other mostly-illegal-but-nevertheless-widely-used services, consumers pretty much expect to be able to share music, video, software, and other stuff for free, regardless of whether they own it. He has a lot to say on the subject, but this quote jumped out at me:

I don’t think it would be at all good for people in America that every digital product becomes free because the digital/information world is increasingly the only type of labor we are going to be willing or able to do. If you don’t want to dig ditches making your daily bread, a free economy is not a good thing.

Ironically, when he phrases it like that, it just makes me want to leave the country. I'm not comfortable with the idea of a nation of people who refuse to work to produce their own food and shelter.

I devalue intellectual property because I think it's just not that valuable. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE music, movies, and games, and I am currently in the industry of producing such things, but these things just can't compare to how much I love survival. I am not prepared to say that my white collar labor is more valuable than anyone else's blue collar labor, no matter how much "smarter" white collar might be.

In fact, I kinda like manual labor. I am physically weaker than average, so literally "digging ditches" isn't terribly appealing to me, but we have technology to help with that sort of thing and I'm hardly a Luddite. Blue collar laborers embrace technology too. But I think there isn't nearly enough effort put into developing the technology to facilitate the production of bare essentials, and way too much effort being spent on creating intellectual property and unnecessary commodities.

I readily admit that the reactions to the "Japanified" face of Faith from Mirror's Edge (1, 2) are much ado about nothing, or at least more noise than signal, especially with the distracting, tangential boobjob and the baffling, unfounded claims of the relative realism of one face over the other. (EDIT: What I meant was that both faces are idealized.) Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the diversity and intensity of opinions on the Faith's eyes and jaw line, and how much humans read into faces. Seriously, people are making assumptions about Faith's personality and background in the comments, based on the size of her eyes and the shape of her jaw in a static image, and it's freaking me out a little.

I would also like to point out that, despite the title of the article in link number 2, neither one of Faith's faces is terribly iconic, from a Scott McCloud standpoint, which is probably the reason why this is a such a mess in the first place.

Whilst briefly attempting to dispel my naivete in politics, I decided to read the Wikipedia article on capitalism. I got as far as the middle of the first paragraph before I had to stop:

A core requirement of a capitalist society, is that a large portion of the population, must not possess sources of self-sustainment that would allow them to be independent, and must instead be compelled, in order to survive, to sell their labor for a living wage.

Commas aside, and without making any assumptions about the accuracy or objectivity of the article, the very idea makes me want jump up and down a lot. In anger.

Iji (Windows only, unfortunately) might be the most important free game I've played. It's a 2D action game, where the protagonist is forced to defend the planet from militant alien invaders, except that there are consequences for killing your enemies, and it's possible to play most of the game as a complete pacifist by just dodging and running past everyone who's trying to kill you, resulting in a different story. This isn't a new idea, but I've never seen a game that pulled it off nearly as gracefully as Iji does.

Also... FINALLY a game where you can kick down doors.

I just found some guy's deviantART gallery of photos he takes of bizarre small creatures. It is pretty much my favorite gallery ever. I'm not just referring to galleries on the internet; I'm having trouble thinking of a museum I like anywhere near as much as this. Aquariums come pretty close, actually, but this guy's camera captures bugs and other small creatures with much higher fidelity than the naked eye possibly could. Aquariums just can't compete with that.

Here are some of my favorite insects in the gallery. Make sure to click on the image to zoom in.
6 Mantid Faces
Looks like Dracula
Looks like Bambi to me
This photo is titled "Shinigami"
Clearly a warrior
Also a warrior
I like the color on this one
Long and thin

He's got plenty of stuff that's not insects. He's even got some photos of people. Check it out, it's really a fantastic gallery.

Entropy is the tendency of things to become less interesting over time. As such, it is my arch-nemesis.

The planet Earth appears to be a counter example to the law of entropy. We rapidly grow more fascinating every day now as we produce and share new culture. But our secret weapon is our Sun. Transmittable energy is one necessary weapon in the war against entropy. Energy is finite, and entropy is not.

My task, then, is not to stop entropy. That would be a naive and futile goal. Rather, my task is to create as much peculiarity as possible with the energy I've got.

(I'm taking some poetic license here. I believe what I said, but I'm not using strict definitions of entropy and energy. If you'd like, there's a much more accurate description of evolution and energy vs. entropy here. And to balance out all creationist hatin' in that article, this one is pretty good too. I may be a militant atheist, as are many of you, my friends, but I'm not a hater.)

A while ago somebody hired me and then put me under a non-disclosure agreement. The latter has been lifted. :) I'm one of the coders behind PlayCrafter, a new website where you can build quick 2D Flash games, and then post them wherever you want:

www.PlayCrafter.com

Send any complaints, bug reports, and fits of profound spontaneous inspiration my way.

An example game created with PlayCrafter, by me, is under the cut:

( Matcheroo )

I haven't seen Wall-E yet. I want to, actually, despite the content of this post. I'm happy to see that a movie can be made with very little dialogue and still become mainstream. But after reading an interview about it, I had to get something off my chest.

Wall-E's design was inspired by a pair of binoculars. The director was holding this pair of binoculars, and he was like, "Whoah, dude, I can make expressions out of these by bending them! Awesome!"* And so Wall-E's head became a pair of expressive binoculars.

My immediate reaction was, "Wait, so the design for a head for a ROBOT -- a TRASH COMPACTOR robot -- was chosen based on its potential to express HUMAN emotions?" This sort of thing happens all the time in movies, of course. Pixar's target audience is, in fact, human beings, who are really good at empathizing with other humans and human-like things... and really bad at empathizing with non-human-like things. I just find it frustrating that, while Wall-E goes so far, it stops short of actually making a movie about robots. It's no more about robots than Adaptation is about flowers.

Sometimes, I am similarly annoyed by how LOLCats projects human-like personalities onto cats, and how people generally perceive their pets and even their own offspring as "cute". I believe that to perceive an organism as "cute" is to misinterpret what's going on in its mind. I'd prefer to characterize the curiosity of a newcomer to the world as "beautiful", but even that isn't really the right word, too idolistic**. It is what it is, and as soon as you put a label on it you mess it up.

I want to see some truly alien media. I mean, it's there, it exists. I was raised on Metroid. That's some really alien stuff right there, espcially if you didn't bother to read the manual, and I loved it, up to and including Metroid Prime 1 (not Fusion). But the newest Metroid games are littered with reminders of humanity and it's not the same. It's hard to find other sources of media that do not fall back on human-like characters to carry the story.

*paraphrased
**not a word

In my humble opinion.

Ready for more crazy philosophy?

Consciousness is the derivative of the brain.

As I type this, my brain is constantly throwing signals around, constructing sequences of ideas and then translating it all into English. The internal state of my brain is animated. I am changing my mind.

If you were to take a snapshot of my brain, it would not be a snapshot of consciousness, even if you were able to represent whatever mental image I had in my brain when the snapshot was taken. Maybe I was picturing a red balloon. Maybe there were a bunch of items hanging out in my short term memory that also get represented in this snapshot. But no matter how accurate and detailed that snapshot of my brain is, it is still not a snapshot of consciousness, because it is static. The moment my brain stops changing is the moment I lose consciousness.

If you were to freeze me, or put me in so-called "suspended animation", and then reanimate me an hour later, I would lose and regain consciousness. This makes intuitive sense, but I feel that this is a clear, clean example of precisely what consciousness is: an animated brain. Or, more generally: an animated, self-modifying system.

Caveat: The popular definition of "consciousness" excludes sleep and dreams, but mine does not exclude dreams. I feel that dreams are more of an interruption to awareness than to consciousness.

Most computer programs do not change their mind. A human programmer writes a program once, and then the program remains static, aside from shuffling some data around using a predetermined algorithm. This is why conventional computer programs are not conscious.

Current Music: Kevin MacLeod - Skye Cuillin