Today at his blog, Peter Woit responded to some rebuke or other from the stringeratti cabal on his disrespect for their sacred creed and its inevitable ascendance. He's got a severe commenting policy there and I don't begrudge it. I can imagine someone with his votive alert for bullshit borne out of disgust of general delusion as an ecclesiastical order coopts fundamental physics in a way everyone loves to compare to the celebrated hubris that was shattered 113 years ago--I can imagine someone in his position carefully inscribing himself from the ruling academic class with an appreciable buffer that protects comments as well.

But this is my blog and, waxing bold in my own sovereign licensure, I have neither professional apprehension towards the high court of ivy strangled decorum nor reverence for an ostensible ranking of living minds and I grant myself permanent freedom to post whatever I fancy. The following comment was deemed inappropriate for the curated safe comment space on the blog itself:

If we're now in the business of measuring and comparing the 'intelligence' housed in discrete human instances, I'd say that Woit's smarter than any of those anointed to ascend into the high ivory tower incapable of discerning that the multiverse has no clothes, despite whatever whizbang smoke and mirrors they're able to conjure in its favor.

If this comment seems gratuitously homenim, it's because I err towards frustration with the status quo keepers of the theoretical enterprises in fundamental physics rather than wanting or not to construct Woit paean.

It is unfortunate that iptables does not have a simple builtin option that does this, as I'm too impatient to type out this loop every time I need to see what's really going on. I'm for sure too impatient to type out 5 parallel commands. The -S option does not give the same useful formatting as -L and no option can be combined with -vL to request the rules from all tables. I may just have to add this to my shell init.

for table in filter nat mangle raw security ; do printf "\n===== %s =====\n" $table ; sudo iptables -vL -t $table ; done

I finally got around to setting up TLS to the IRC servers that I use. It is incredible that this is not default or that there does not even seem to be conventional ports. Freenode suggests 6697, 7000, and 7070, but there is an independent draft standard for 6697.

Read more…

I occasionally find code examples online where the author, in their effort to fully communicate the breadth and detail of a proposition and solution, has commented almost every, or every single line of code.

Read more…

I have long thought about the thesis of and cultured indignation against the rapidly evolving phenomena detailed in this article. I read/skim ~70 articles per day, so it is rare for me to read an entire article, but I recommend you to read this one as I have done. Normally I only have to read a few sentences or sometimes even the title and a few sentences before I can gauge the argument, tone, evidence, and novelty contained in an article, know how I will assent as much against my own worldview bias, or don't care. I have been reading the news for so long and have formed a comprehensive library of opinions and perspectives and can already reduce most articles to a few data transactions against the representative opinions. This is, however, the subject of another post.

Read more…

Recently I began working on a recreational programming project that unites several subjects I have been wanting to explore for many years: AI, GUI programming, certain mathematical problems, and the intellectual zen and stimulus of gamifying them. My experiences with computer games growing up were quite limited despite that our family was somewhat early to install a 'family computer' in the library in 1992, a 80286 loaner at first and then a late model 386 with a turbo button on the chassis that doubled the CPU freq from only 33 to a screaming fast 66 MHz. I attribute this to my family's traditionalist values. Whether these positively or negatively curtailed my proclivities and aptitudes for computer-based labor, I cannot say for sure. It is true that I did not waste months of my youth on low quality game time, but I've never been wont for abdicating my languid and wastrel temporal habits. I recall several days or even weeks of boredom, and I am sure I have even made up some of the deficit in recent years with several offerings of temporal squandering in low grade video game time: a burning of time against the relentless scourge and depression of real adult responsibility.

Read more…

While imagining how awesome of a maths and philosophy teacher I am going to be for my daughter, whose patience occasionally expires in expressions such as "dad, you don't have to teach me all the time", I recalled my own experience with elementary maths and how wastefully and long I fought against both the formalism and, more significantly, the threat and charge of inadequacy for miscomprehension or substandard performance--so much for meritocracy.

Read more…