handslive

Someone at work pointed to this yesterday (and I see Slashdot has a post).  If I point back here to my earlier post (TL;DR -- PIN selection is important if you're worried about the cops copying all your emails off your iPhone), one of the things I said was that for most people the 4 digit PIN would be fine, especially if you're backing up regularly and you've set the data wipe option (kicks in after 10 failures).  Well, make sure it isn't one of the 10 most popular PINs from that first link there: 1234, 0000, 2580, 1111, 5555, 5683, 0852, 2222, 1212, or 1998.

In the alt-text for this XKCD, Randall suggests that following the first content related link (ie not in italics and not in parentheses) on any Wikipedia post will lead you inevitably to philosophy.  Naturally, I had to try this, but it doesn't seem to work for me.  Once you hit mathematics, the links lead the reader in a circle that comes back to mathematics.  Many pages lead to this topic, so this seems like a fundamental flaw in his proposed logic or a lack of understanding of his rules on my part.  Or, he's satisfied that he's ended up in "philosophy" once he reaches "property (philosophy)".  If I skip loops by moving on to the second link in an affected post, then, yes, I do seem to end up at philosophy in the half dozen pages I tried.  Sometimes by very convoluted paths.

This was an easy bit of thumb-twiddling during a meeting where i only had to listen to folks on the phone.

So, the drywall is coming along on the second floor and, to my surprise, the siding has also started. The colour is everything I'd hoped for.

Did a walk-through with the electrician yesterday. This was also the first time I'd been up there when it wasn't raining or overcast, and the first time purplejavatroll had been up there at all.

I sucked at statistics when I took the required courses at university.  But I also developed an appreciation for the kind of bent thinking statisticians have to do sometimes when looking at the data they analyze.  Yesterday I saw a remarkably fun example, which I probably wouldn't have posted about frankly, that's related to an older problem first proposed by Martin Gardner called the Two Children Problem.  There's an excellent article about it here (warning: contains a light coating of math and fun thinking about sampling biases).

The reason I'm posting at all is because /. then had a link to a fantastic report on Daily Kos about rigged poll results and how the company they had contracted for polling services was defrauding them.  That one contains scads of statistical analysis.  It's also fascinating to me because tests for randomness are fascinating to me (and seeing human biases creep in because of our assumptions about randomness is even cooler).  It's good reading just to see what bad data looks like and how even simple tests (the first test is so simple you could teach it to junior high school students, I think) can make you skeptical.

On Monday, some of us went out to Clifford E Lee again.  There are photos here.

Also, more work has been done on the house.  There's some of a second story there now.

Way back when, I posted this screed on passwords.  In there I said:

Comment on this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate with you.  Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.  As provided by buhrger.

Encryption

I have at best an amateur's appreciation for it.  The very first thing I found out about it at work is that encrypting things is easy.  Managing encryption keys is hard.  Encrypting them is easy for much the same reason that programming is easy but writing programs is hard.  A lot of smart people have done the heavy lifting for me.  Then they hand over the tools and I'm free to make amazingly destructive and asinine mistakes.

The most recent thing I've learned is that we (meaning security folks for the most part) do not know what people actually do with the information they handle every day.  And once you learn what they do, it doesn't tell you why.  Adding encryption into that mix in order to control access to information or at least prevent it from leaking out means having to learn why in a lot of cases.  Managing people using encryption is also hard.

Peter Watts

Over beer at a con in 2007, Peter described a premise for (I'm going to make up a term here) a generative device.  I say "generative" rather than "literary" because it wasn't clear as the discussion progressed that he was talking about a novel or even a narrative per se.  He had several thoughts for how the premise might expand, change, progress, or be experienced by the audience.

He's posted snippets of text in his blog that refer to this idea and they're definitely enticing.  I mention this simply because I can imagine this premise in several different media and I wouldn't mind experiencing it in any of them.  In a sense it's too bad he couldn't produce something in all of those media formats.  And I only say "too bad" because I can't imagine such a broad swathe of people understanding what they were looking at and going, "Oh, yes, please."

Vague enough for you?

Poetry, Piano, Aikido

Yeah, I'm combining all 3 of these.  The point of commonality I'm going to hitch them to is "art".  Weirdly enough, I don't mind saying that I have some handle on making "art".  I may not be any good at these arts, but I have felt and directed consciously the outcomes of some of my efforts in them (whether the results were any good is pretty dubious).  This is my preface for a comment about what could laughingly be called my path for "art".

I've been fiddling with poetry longer than I've been playing piano, and doing both of those for longer than I've played around in martial arts.  Much longer than I've been learning aikido.  But I'm going to start from aikido because I think that's where I learned my first steps towards treating it like an art.

If you troll back through some of my first postings on LJ (don't do it!), there are comments about the role of intention in my training.  This is the biggest thing for me and it was my first realization about training.  I want to do what I intend.  Prior to understanding this, most of my efforts were focused around technical skill and a reactive process.  I would feel my partner move a certain way or anticipate the movement and react to this with an appropriate technique.

When buhrger gave me these 5 topics with the challenge to combine some of them, it occured to me that this starting point of intention was something that had also been developing in my poetry and music.  From the very beginning, playing piano was not about technique for me, but about bringing out the music I felt or sometimes heard inside.  To a lesser extent my early writing was the same.  This isn't any kind of unique experience.  What's the point of angsty teenage poetry in the first place?  To bring out feelings, images, and an expression of oneself in words.  But, again, the process is inherently reactive; it occurs in response to the feelings that prompt expression.  So, I'm not saying how I approached it was special, but that doing what I intend in music or writing is really just the same creative process that many people go through.

Where I've moved somewhat in my aikido is in the shaping and control of my intention.  I don't feel I'm at the point where that happens regularly or even consistently.  It's certainly easier in some exercises than others.  Previously, for example, I'd have said it didn't matter which way I moved to avoid an attack; there would be an appropriate technique to do from my new position.  Now, I'm starting to feel like there may be a particular outcome or expression of intent that should be present in my movement.  This will mean I must move to a particular place or even that I actively work to create the situation that allows that movement.  It isn't enough to intend to avoid the attack.

This is something that I'm not sure I have in my writing.  It may be the thing that is missing (and there must be something missing).  Similarly, I'm not sure that I have this ability with the music I've made.  But I think I understand what has to be done in order to begin learning it there.  I can feel where I need to stretch myself.  Truthfully, I feel less and less like someone with any artistic sense these days, so it's not like I'm regularly and honestly developing myself.  Makes the whole discussion above feel horribly pretentious.  But I tied the topics together anyway.