A sigh of relief

Wikileaks to Release 5000 Open Source Java Programs with Abstract and Final removed.

Somehow I found Steve Yegge's blog, and was drawn by some of the humor.

Busy Week

We wanted to see "The Artist" on New Years Day, but the showing we planned on was sold out. Our second choice, "A Dangerous Method", left us with one hour of free time. The theater in Evanston has a Cost Plus next door, so we decided to while away the time in there. My wife found these very attractive blue leather chairs, and launched on a mission to replace our used Ikea chairs with the white slipcovers with these 'more adult' chairs. We placed a hold that day and borrowed a truck from someone who owed us a small favor for moving their things on New Years Eve. We were able to find a home for the other chairs with a friend the same day, and now we are back to a normal set of two chairs in the living room.


While at the friends apartment delivering chairs, I picked up her copy of "The Winter of Our Discontent" by Steinbeck and have since devoured it. I look forward to returning it with positive reviews.

Lately I've been reading through some of the published ACL2 'books' for inspiration. The system looks quite readable, and after wrestling for some time with Cyc, it's a pleasure to find something so aesthically pleasant. The modifications and extensions to the main CL functions are mostly removable from the axioms file, and implementing and testing some of the methods has been a relaxing pastime. Having the full source in /usr/share is a wonderful benefit to the curious. Anyone looking for hints on how to bootstrap lisp in lisp is encouraged to read through the beautifully documented acl2.lisp file, which sets up all packages and handles masking  out the existing language while preserving the system's symbols in another area.

School starts Monday. I picked up my bus pass and last book yesterday. I look forward to the interaction and stimulation that a group effort to understand some thorny subjects will bring.

I've recently started using github. Somehow, within 24 hours, a friend from school had found me and followed me. Amazing how quickly information spreads. Nothing I've put there is particularly interesting, but it's useful to think I can have an additional backup, and starting to use vc is enlightening. I think I hear sourceforge slowly collapsing.

Beth left town tonight for the weekend. That leaves me to indulge in stuffed green peppers and Sabado Gigante. I can't wait to watch el Chacal de la trompeta eliminate some more contestants.

Branding

xkcd: Brand Identity

In an unrelated note, I added "No Logo" to my wishlist yesterday.

Euler

I finally got around to doing what I intended to do over the break, which was to make a little progress on project euler. I knocked out a few problems today, and will likely make some more progress between now and the 9th, when I go back to class. It's a useful activity if only to remember how to write what you mean when you have an idea and need a computer to do the boring parts. It's a challenging list of problems if you don't have a great mathematical preparation (guilty as charged). The best part is of course unlocking the forums, to see how others solved the same problem. Sometimes it's a radically different approach.

Gloves and Mittens

Watching children dismantle the careful barriers their parents erect to keep them warm reminds me how much we all dislike wearing gloves. Watching babies removes their socks or booties makes me wonder how long it takes a young person to learn to ignore the discomfort of wearing shoes. Looking at the footwear of the women downtown makes me think we may have taken a necessary process far beyond its original intent. Those can't be comfortable at all, and seem not to provide much protection from the environment. The open-toed dress shoe is a strange beast.

Bridges

One of the many simple ideas of economics is the principle of diminishing marginal utility. A single bridge linking two sides of the river has a very high marginal utility, boosting trade from one side to the other, opening opportunities to residents of both sides to conveniently work, shop or play on the other bank. However, any economic benefits derived from the first bridge will need to be revised downward for each additional bridge. Downtown Chicago has an enormous network of bridges over a rather small river, with the business core spilling over to the north and west from the loop. More or less every street in the central district bridges the river, since the river magically makes a 90 degree turn at wolf point, so that the loop is bounded by water on 3 sides. Although the short length of these bridges made construction less costly than longer bridges (Astoria or San Francisco), each bridge costs money to maintain, at approximately fixed levels (a low value bridge is likely just as troublesome to operate each year). I can see in the future a number of these being abandoned, and traffic routed over some of the remaining ones.

The government highway inspectors lament the sad state of the network of highway overpasses and bridges in the US, after considerable scrutiny followed the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi crossing in Minneapolis. The obvious answer is to pour more federal and state funds into repair and replacement of an aging infrastructure. Which is great, since the federal government of the US, just like that of Italy, Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Mexico and all the other countries of the world, can just print money indefinitely, and use its sterling credit rating to finance an over-sized network of roadways. Hmm...

Recent Thoughts

So, this morning I was reading an article in this month's Harpers, where a woman had traveled to Cuernavaca with her daughter to learn Spanish. She noted the immediacy of the dead in the life of the host family. I started to think that maybe a great thing about having decidedly distant places for the afterlife is that the dead are not in the backyard complaining to you, wondering why no one cleans their graves, and generally being troublesome for the living. It may be that the progress of Christianity and its cosmology has allowed more freedom from the ancestors.

Second, I occasionally find myself thinking back to 'The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted' and the system of Individual Mutualism. When I was 12 (and read this), the existence of a long line of anarchist thinkers was far from my imagination, so any relation to historical mutualist theory was lost to me. I think I may want to add some of these 19th century thinkers, probably Proudhon more than Kropotkin to my reading list. It's a shame that anarchy and its philosophy have been hidden from young people by rather loud shouts from metal heads (do these still exist?). I think reading Chernyshevsky's 'What is to be Done' over my vacation this summer may have rekindled some interest in the matter. Any technical measures to bring this about should do a little reading into the history of mutual aid or friendly societies as they were known 200 years ago in the US. The big advantage of small scale local social units is that we won't require a revolution in the state to effect the kind of change and organization required to put these ideas into practice.

Unfortunately, the state and finance are balanced in favor of a debt driven consumption system, as anyone who has tried to get a mortgage for a coop can attest. My understanding is that a coop is owned jointly by the tenants, so unlike a condo, cannot be foreclosed at the unit level, only the whole building. This makes bankers hesitant to lend without security. It makes me wonder what other types of organizing property are prevented by the structure of lending and the legal system upholding property.