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Bridge Building at Sunflower River.
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Oct. 3rd, 2008 @ 04:50 pm
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![[Alan in acequia]](http://pics.livejournal.com/yarrowkat/pic/001rbbkk)
At our last work party, we built a bridge over our acequia. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) appleang took a spectacular set of photos that we've uploaded to our community blog.
I was "point" on this project, meaning it was my responsibility to do advance planning and be able to answer questions about what we were doing during the day.
Prior to our work party, I put together a timeline and a description of each phase of the work project. I had twice the number of people I estimated we'd need, and it took us twice as long as the estimate suggested.
I was off, then, by 4x my original estimate. I failed to account for one major task that came up on the actual work day, and several tasks took less time than I imagined. Almost all of the time overrun was underestimating how long it takes to dig. We started the process of estimating in part to collect data about what things we did poorly at estimating. Nom data.
All the same, we got our bridge built!
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House rejects banking bailout
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Sep. 29th, 2008 @ 02:47 pm
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EDIT: I love this statement, from yarrowkat: In an unprecedented act of democracy, the house jettisoned the bailout.
The house has just rejected the proposed bailout of the banking industry. I am ridiculously excited by this news. From a purely symbolic point of view, the House has just changed the rules of the game. I think there was this general feeling that the bailout, by virtue of being the first suggestion on the table, was the only option available and that we needed to move fast. Certainly I didn't invent this notion:"Our time has run out," said Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican
on the House Financial Services Committee. "We're going make a decision.
There are no other choices, no other alternatives." This quote seems quite silly now, as we just opened door #3.
I haven't been able to find many statements from the house, or even check how the vote went, aside from a rough description of how the parties voted. I'm currently hoping for someone (anyone) from the House to stand up and starting speaking to the gestalt of the decision.
The stock market is, essentially, a Ponzi scheme. It is a 100 year old Ponzi scheme that has made many, many people rich, but it's still a Ponzi scheme. Chris Martenson has put together a very detailed 3 hour presentation on the topic, and if you have the time I would suggest watching it. But the short version is "the stock market (and our current financial system) relies on growth, which means exponential growth. The earth is finite, and when we run into the physical limits imposed by the earth, our financial system will be unsupportable." If for some reason you didn't have 3 hours but had 1 and a half hours, this series on the nature of exponential growth covers similar material, with fewer graphs but more rigorous (and dead simple) math.
Speaking to our current situation, we have by all appearances a banking crisis. This crisis seems to have been immediately borne out by the mortgage bubble, but structurally the situation has been building much longer. You could think of our mortgage bubble as our response to the dot-com bubble, wherein we reduced interest rates low enough to make homes seem affordable. That situation has its own causes, &c. Many of the issues that brought us here aren't limited to home mortgages. We haven't seen any news about car loan bubbles or credit card bubbles. They haven't happened yet, but we'd be foolish to think that the housing bubble couldn't portend such things. Ultimately, we have a problem with our currency--we have a problem with our debt's status in the world.
I really hope the House turns this into more than a symbolic gesture and that it opens up broader dialog on the topic. I don't think we have any control over the dollar's decline in value, but we have enormous control over how we can transition through this period.
I expect, generally, for the government to do everything it can to maintain the status quo. I'm hoping that this move will result in us looking two steps into the future instead of one, and asking how a currency crisis, not a mortgage crisis, will affect us. |
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Telling Time by Shadow Length
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Sep. 23rd, 2008 @ 05:51 pm
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 In a recent blog entry, I mentioned the idea of telling time based on the length of a shadow.
Monday was Mabon, the Vernal Equinox, so I spend last weekend camping at festival in observation of the holiday. I had time to perform measurements based on my calculation, which are displayed to the right.
Before collecting data, I had determined that I would not have a greater accuracy than 5 minutes. A 6 foot measuring device accurate to an inch leaves only 72 distinct measurements to predict the time over 6 hours. Spread evenly apart, that means that one inch has a resolution of 5 minutes. I'm taking a few liberties here[1], but this back of the envelope calculation gave me a rough idea of whether a number represented an error in my tools or in my equations.
As you can see by the graph, the time I predicted follows the same general trend as clock time, but it isn't yet terribly accurate. Further, the accuracy improves right at noon, and is better in the early and later part of the day.
I know why this happened, but first I should explain the equation I'm using.
( All the trigonometry you forgot in high school )
For Mabon next year, I'd like to build a sundial in our ritual field, with a marker for each event laid out along the sundial so that when the gnomon casts its shadow over the object, the event is scheduled to start.
Performing this experiment also got me some positive attention, which I'll talk about in a later entry.
[1]: Specifically, the shadow is longer than the measuring device for the early and late part of the day, improving my resolution, and the length of a day happens to be roughly 12 hours now, but that isn't true closer to either solstices.
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Overcoming Bias
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Sep. 12th, 2008 @ 12:49 pm
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I've recently been introduced to a really fantastic website: Overcoming Bias.
My introduction to the website was in doing some research on project planning, and encountering the article titled "Planning Fallacy." The article starts with what is common knowledge amongst project managers: People are really bad at estimating how long something will take. It is actually a bit shocking just *how* bad we are at planning, however. When asked to estimate a best case, mean case, and worst case scenario; and then to perform the work in question--it usually takes longer to complete the task than the worst case scenario estimate!
From there, however, Overcoming Bias talks about what it is about our brains that causes us to be such poor planners. It deconstructs the problem by discussing what it is about our brains that make us unable to perceive reality.
This is generally the theme of the website. Our brains perceive reality in a particular (and therefor biased) way. We generally don't understand *how* it is that are brains are working, so we are prone to mistaking this bias for fact. The website explores this topic wherever it comes up, which turns out to be pretty much everywhere:- An Alien God: If you were going to read one article on this website, this would be it. We found God, the Ghost in the Machine. It was so alien--so genuinely different from us--that we didn't recognize it.
- Fake Justification: The method by which we make a decision and the one we use to justify that decision are completely different. I've said before that "reasons are rationalizations." This is a much deeper exploration of that statement.
- Evolving to Extinction: The difference between the science of evolution and popular conception of evolution.
- Burdensome Details: It may well be we are so poor at planning because we are equally poor at probability. Probability is often counter intuitive, and when combining the probability of separate events, we assign cause & effect whereas probability doesn't. This mistake is exploitable in people--our brains are not perceiving reality.
This last one particularly touches on a subject that I currently have a lot of confusion about. Overcoming Bias is in many ways about reductionism. Shedding "high-level" details for "low-level" details, until you're down to atoms, quarks, or whatever it is that stuff is made of. But complexity--and our ability to work with complex systems--is extremely detail shy. We often perform better with less information. Details are paralyzing. But how do we reconcile these two positions?
I'm attracted to this site because it provides a framework for exploring the following topic, which I copied from a conversation on Slashdot many, many years ago:Has Microsoft taken away your right to form a militia? Has Pepsi told you what religion to practice? Has Exxon tried to force you to harbor soldiers against your will? No, but... They have used highly advanced social engineering to take advantage of the fact the people are sheep, and further bred and proliferated the sheep mentality. This leads to people not forming militias, homogeneously practicing religions, and accepting the pretense of authority of any central organization that is sufficiently proficient in the art. It's not really the use of force. It's something new that really only came of age in the 20 Century. I don't think that philosophers and political thinkers have come to grips with it yet, or even done a good job of identifying it, so it doesn't classify as a crime or oppression by most people's standards, yet. Maybe in 100 years, the behavior of Microsoft and Pepsi will be viewed as politically oppressive, and people will wonder with amazement as to why the people of 2001 just stood there and took it.
I think the recent history of our culture can be described as people and organizations with a highly developed sense of statistical outcomes and probability exerting an enormous influence on a vastly larger body of people that lack any appreciation for how their behaviours reliably conform to this space. We laugh at the idea that someone already predicted how we would behave, or consider ourselves the perpetual exception to the rule. The method by which we assign motivation to others we wouldn't think of applying to ourselves, and hence we are blind to our own complicity.
If it were an arms race, the weapons of manipulation (advertising, politics, &c) are far stronger than the defenses against it. The situation is so asymmetrical that we're don't even know we're being attacked. We're still searching for the right way to articulate the problem.
I see in this website a means of developing the kind of toolkit that rebalances this relationship. It is a means to understand at least as much about ourselves as those that manipulate us understand about us.
EDIT: Added one more link in the bullet list above.
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archaic timekeeping devices
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Sep. 10th, 2008 @ 03:35 pm
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Short Version: zomg nomograms!
Long Version:
 From time to time I make a post about archaic technology. I was recently out on a field trip looking at some land. As I was hiking around, I starting brainstorming on how one could tell time without strictly knowing what direction you're facing. As the sun rises and sets over the course of a day, the length of a shadow cast by an object will change. Most sundials take advantage of the fact that the angle of a shadow also changes. If you don't know which way is north (i.e., you're walking around a lot), the angle doesn't help you very much.
In its most basic form, measuring the length of a shadow can be used to determine the angle of the sun in the sky. In theory, you could use this to calculate the time of day, but it is mildly complicated. You need to know your latitude as well as the time of year (to compute the sun's declination). With these, you can use the sunrise equation to determine how many hours of daylight you'll have today, as well as determine the highest point in the sky the sun will reach. (which is called noon.) You can then figure out where you are between those two points to arrive at the time of day. After that, you have to convert to railroad time (which requires knowing your longitude) and whether daylight savings in is effect. I haven't finished working out the equation, but when I showed it to yarrowkat she chuckled, wondering how I would run the calculation every time we wanted to know what time it was.
Despite the apparent complexity of the equation, it boils down to running a fairly detailed calculation in the morning, based on the year day and latitude, and writing down that number. Then you measure the length of the shadow of your walking stick, and consult a table to convert that length into another number. This table is constant for a particular walking stick. You then multiply those two numbers together and convert the result to hours and minutes before or after noon.
Certainly one can look up a result in a table and multiply two numbers together reasonably quickly, and working out the problem has so far proved entertaining. Today, however, I'm all a-wiggle over discovering nomograms. I've actually heard of them before, as they are similar to slide rules. But how they were actually useful has escaped me, until I got a chance to see a working example.
I realize now that telling time by the length of a shadow can be accomplished by constructing a nomogram, which would avoid the need for running any calculations at all. You would only need to "dial in" the device with your latitude and the length of your shadow, from which you could then read off the time of day. How cool is that!
One could also construct a nomogram for sunrise and sunset, phase of the moon, or to tell time at night. (Which, incidentally, is called a nocturnal, and I've been wearing the one that yarrowkat got me as a gift since our handfasting. I didn't realize it was a specific example of a neat general principle, however.)
And since role playing games have been on my mind, nomograms apparently see use in wargaming as well. One more point for role playing games as practical learning & practice tools.
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Solo Adventure Games
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Sep. 4th, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
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Recently, yarrowkat showed me an article in the current edition of Black Gate, a fantasy literature magazine. The article was a solo adventure game: Each paragraph is numbered, and you are presented with a series of choices that direct you to the next paragraph to read. Solo adventures resemble the more familiar Choose Your Own Adventure books, but they have a much finer-grained decision tree, tactical combat, and record sheets.
This was my first exposure to this kind of game, but they have come and gone as popular media, peaking in popularity sometimes during the 1980s. Popular series of solo adventure books were Lone Wolf, Fighting Fantasy, and The Fantasy Trip.
( My initial research on solo adventure games )
If you wanted to put a toe in the water, I'd recommend playing Quest for the Auburn Pelt. You print out a single (double-sided) sheet and play. No dice, no cards. Just the sheet and your pencil.
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I *like* non-hygenic macros thankyouverymuch.
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Aug. 25th, 2008 @ 01:51 pm
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For years I've been asked why I wrote a particular piece of code a certain way, and I've often responded with "Oh, I've studied a lot of Lisp and it influenced the way I write code."
Now, after asking how to port some code to an upcoming release of chicken (A Scheme compiler, Scheme being a dialect of Lisp), I've been asked why I wrote a particular piece of code a certain way.
This is either a new low or a new high.
I never thought the lisp community would grow so quickly that the way they wrote code would perceptively change. I could have guessed I would like it better the way it was though. damn kids schemers.
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Of all, we are the least: brief thoughts on rabbits
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Aug. 12th, 2008 @ 01:33 pm
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appleang took this photo of our rabbits at our work party this Saturday. I can't tell by looking whether this is "catchable" or "uncatchable." I can only tell when I open the cage. Catchable runs up to be held, while uncatchable runs away. ![[rabbits at sunflower river]](http://www.c0redump.org/img/lj/rabbit.jpg)
I've been enjoying "Rabbit's Song" by S. J. Tucker on her album Blessings[1]. For Hare Moon last year I did some research on hares in folklore, but this subject is wide and vast. This song isn't a bad starting place, however.Lyrics to Rabbit's Song.
If you needed a size comparison, here is the same litter 40 days ago.
[1]: Can't recommend this album enough, btw! |
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