// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

I just can’t. On small, mid, large-sized staplers or even on huge monster staples. Two pages, ten pages, fifty pages. I couldn’t staple if I had a two-barrel rifle pointed to my head. I can’t staple, which is becoming frustrating as meaningful subsets of knowledge become horizontally-differentiated stacks of paper.

If it wasn’t for electronic storage, I probably couldn’t make a living at all. I’m lucky to work at about the only place where having an econometrician around makes sense, even if I suck at sorting paper towers or spewing bogosity at meetings.

06/02 edit: Yeah, it’s a hella confusing text, and the Hacker News discussion on it made me consider writing this note. The elevator version is (0) Open source caters to hackers’ needs, not end-user’s needs(1) Open source has only produced cheapie knock-offs of ideas developed in the proprietary market and (2) who the hell cares about source as long as there are open APIs?

The Open Source movement is a bit unfashionable as something to think comprehensively about, in the era of interoperable web applications which are not open source yet fit an “open society” model of the web that many former open source enthusiasts have moved on to. Still, it’s worth pondering this 2001 paper by philosopher Manuel de Landa, whom has later discussed a general ontology for social thought in his 2006 book A new Philosophy of Society: Social assemblages and complexity theory.

In hindsight, De Landa underestimated how strong the link between the hacker culture and open-source was (in a nutshell, open-source software tends to fulfill the needs of hackers, not those of end-users) and appears to overestimate the stability of open-source movement as a social assemblage. But it’s interesting to look at the guts of how open-source was ran over by the “Web 2.0″ project as the (possibly temporary) core of the more general program of an information open society.

De Landa is a “real” philosopher (as opposed to inside-out racconteurs of the social processes in open source development by like Eric “esr” Raymond), and is particularly interesting in that he’s attempting to bridge together the opposing strands of philosophy (”continental”/phenomenological and analytic). To quote the introduction of Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, “history and geography have conspired to divide this world [of Western philosophy] into two almost exclusive camps, the Anglo-American and Continental camps, each with its own style, research priorities and long traditions to defend”, and De Landa larger program is “to present the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze to an audience of analytic philosophers [...] and scientists interested in philosophical questions”.

I’ve been wading through my better posts — the ones that actually “deliver the goods” — and I noticed an important difference between my writing and that of people who appear to be able to succintly convey comparably complex messages. There are two “styles” of storytelling, which I’ve nicknamed the mathematician style and the journalist style.

In a nutshell, the mathematician style is bottom-up and the journalist style is top-down, which means the journalist presents the gist of what’s being said right at the beginning, while the mathematician will demonstrate what he’s trying to say from ideas he assumes you’ll find trivial or obvious. On a blog journal post, that will often prevent the reader from getting his point at all. [The way this post is constructed, it has the journalist style if you read this paragraph or the mathematician style if you strike this one out. Try and start re-reading this post skipping this paragraph.]

A mathematician will always start in familiar territory. If you have basic (calculus, linear algebra, etc.) mathematical training, you can walk into a post-doc lecture on Anosov diffeomorphism in non-ergodic systems and understand the first two or three minutes of it. Much of advanced mathematics relies generalizations of simple structures one has learnt in basic training, and if you’re fluent in Riemann integration you might get an intuitive idea of the Stieltjes integrals the lecturer is drawing on the board. Sure, you’ll get lost soon because you never had the prerequisite knowledge to understand the actual point of the talk.

There are multiple reasons for this phenomenon. A mathematical lecture will often start behind its prerequisites, to get everyone’s brain into “math mode”, to ensure everyone’s in the same starting point — often terminologies vary, and what a brazilian calls a “body” (corpo) is what’s known in english as a “field” — and no one’s thinking of diffeomorphisms in ordinary topology, for example. This is also the way mathematics is done since calculus 101, and it probably trickles up throughout a mathematician’s career. The more important thing, though, is that mathematics is all about deriving the nontrivial from the trivial — which is why the obvious is stated first.

It is the poor carpenter who blames his tools. I should focus more on the writing and less on blog journal templates. In my defense, the last two layouts were plain weird and scared people away — and in a way, meant hiding behind my tools, the list-of-posts format hiding my writing.

If I was a truly great writer my text would look good even if illegibly scribbled on dirty old walls. In my defense, I never really thought (consciously) that better designs flattered my writing, and much of this dancing and spinning of templates stems from my general geekery, while the actual act of writing would have to tap the creative side that has been open less times than I wish it would, particularly because writing in english is the essayist’s equivalent of wearing high heel shoes — makes you look powerful but fucks up with your feet at the end of the day.

The list of posts format was an attempt to avoid hiding good texts behind new goop — in the past, I’ve gotten to the point of not posting to keep giving good writing more visibility time. But hey, let’s face it — this is a blog blog journal . I’ve published quite a few deep essays in it, which are all very googleable and have even been plagiarized on Yahoo Answers. But I should keep to the blog journal format, lest I spend precious time writing when I should be out there living. Life’s too short to try and attempt the grand essay format.

desde que eu comecei a conseguir andar de skate mais rápido do que ando a pé, andar a pé é um suplício. acabo pegando ônibus pra evitar …

These are the (more interesting) results of a Flickr search for “Dayvan Cowboy”). Titles after images.

xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, mathematics and language, contains a number of references to skateboarding and specially to longboarding. This is one.

I never really noticed how prominent longboarding is in xkcd. In my hardcore xkcd-er days, I hadn’t begun skateboarding yet. It’s funny/interesting how much a staple of geek culture like xkcd is also into longboarding. I really thought I was the only one in that intersection of lifestyles.

o logo do google de hoje é really fucking cool.

Don’t.

Seriously. It’s my own “agenda” to defend, my own mountain Everest to climb, my own life pursuit. It’s also a nondescript umbrella term whose meaning I’ve been and probably will be shaping implicitly in my writing.

Sure, you could hypothetically try to infer a cloudy idea from what I’ve been saying and try to follow it. But hey, trying to shape oneself into a dayvan cowboy is not something a dayvan cowboy would do. It’s not just the chutzpah, the deleuze-ish ultraphenomenology of crashing down the plane of imannence, or even the zen idea implied by the very idea of “don’t try, just do” implied in this paragraph.

It’s not like there’s a crowd to worship the idea either. But I worry about myself, about being blinded by the idea that I have some big secret to share. Something like Being alive: a primer needs to be fueled by a sense of self-assurance that is both positive in that a dayvan cowboy should just dive into things as if they’re liquid — they always are — and negative in that begins to convey a sense of closure. As if I had it solved, or at least knew I was heading into the solution.

I registered this domain like, what, 2 months ago? and my PageRank with Google implies an exposure I don’t see reflected in my viewer stats. So I started comparing it along blog blog journal s. As a measure of comparison, Wikipedia and the New York Times are a 9. The scale maxes out at 10. Jason Kottke and Nick Carr are a 7, Waiter Rant is a 6 and The Last Psychiatrist is a 5; I’m a 4 and annoyingly, Violent Acres is below me at 3. PageRank is bunk, dude. V. from Violent Acres has been at it for years, consistently kicks ass and is guaranteed to have controversy in her comments. She’s in a way someone I admire, as she’s been living out her life pursuit in her very own way — she’s far, far from being a dayvan cowgirl — and what’s more, consistently avoided letting herself indulge in her own identity. This is the girl who went (voluntarily and with a plan) homeless to pay off debt.

For a while, the word “hacker” seemed to have lost its historical meaning and migrated to the one used in the moral panic-happy media. Quoth Stallman:

Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think. You can help correct the misunderstanding simply by making a distinction between security breaking and hacking—by using the term “cracking” for security breaking. The people who do it are “crackers”. Some of them may also be hackers, just as some of them may be chess players or golfers; most of them are not.

His insistent campaigning did not seem to work for the longest while — years and years. The word had been abandoned by those who would refer to themselves as “hacker” under the original definition of an amateur (someone who does it for love; might be a daytime professional) maverick (meaning precisely Wordnet’s definition of someone who exhibits great independence in thought and action) programmer.

Yet there is a ressurgence in the original use of hacker. I can think of a few reasons. Firstly, improved computer security made amateur “hacking” as in break-and-enter either unfeasible or dangerous. Secondly, the absence of news stories revolving around computer-based swindles begot a general lack of usage of the word “hacker” in the media. Thirdly, a new generation of hackers-in-the-Stallman meaning got connected with the hacker lore and started to define to their amateur personal hacking as, er, hacking — with all the implications of not being professional but done for love and curiosity and exploration. Finally, a few financial successful members of this generation have come publicly using the word “hacking” to describe what they do.

http://tinyurl.com/6klrvv

Here’s to the fucked up. The crazy ones. The misfits. The chronic wallflowers The suicidal. The manic. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. And while some may see you as the ones with weird issues, I see life. Because sometimes, just sometimes, the people who are fucked up enough to think they don’t fit in this world, Are the ones who change it.

1. Trinity said it best. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

Just as I stole the general structure of the opening verse from an old Macintosh ad, I stole this soundbite and others from Alone from The Last Psychiatrist. Credit where it’s due: it’s another blog blog journal ger hipster quoting the Wachowskis about the same context I do. I’m also gonna steal some soundbites from Jerod Poore, the mastermind behind Crazy Meds! All of these might be used way out of context. Do read these guys. They kick ass, know more about the psychostuff than I do and make for general pleasant reading. But let me cut to the chase and repeat it.

The Matrix cannot tell you who you are. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are.

The first step out is acceptance. Self-acceptance.

Some of the most fucked up people I know are people who invest all their energy and all their soul into passing. Passing as what they’ve grown to believe normality is. Passing as what their parents expected them to be like, passing as what their peers have always been like, passing as someone in their condition is supposed to be like. These are the people who can’t give a shred of an answer when you ask them who they are. They are, um, what people are. Normal people.

Eu tenho uma força de vontade muito grande. Por isso preciso fazer muita força pra fazer algo que não me dá vontade de fazer.

Twitter posts will be auto-posted on the blog blog journal . This might make it even more bi-lingual, but what the heck, read stuff when you manage to …

About the Vetta project’s gradual discovery of matrix-oriented programming:

I got used to coding like this on a summer course (way beyond my actual understanding level) on numeric methods for partial differential equations. We used Matlab back then. Then, in the next trimester, I took a neural networks course. The actual course assignments didn’t require much coding, but I spent at least a week writing a somewhat generalized backpropagation learning algorithm in terms of matrices. The code is unreadable now, if not followed with its (long lost now) paper documentation, which consisted of some scrabbling and hollow matrix shapes. Now, I find matrix-oriented programming fascinating and (I was told in my summer course) it’s great for automatic parallelization but it’s somewhat of an anti-pattern for most purposes (like financial code, for example). It also may lead you (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis-wise) to phrasing problems in inappropriate terms. The whole of economics spent the 20th century mis-describing the functioning of a modern economy in matrix form, and I’m not just referring to input-output analysis, but to the greater program of neo-walrasian/debrevian program of general equilibrium.

I was such a dayvan cowboy that I spent many a night rewriting code instead of learning how to use neural net software. Boy, do I miss programming. I feel like I’ve lost some intellectual edge by fitting into the “stable mood” box. Talk about the temptation of dropping the meds.

On A new library allows readers to borrow people for a 30-minute chat. Here’s the experience of one man who offered himself as a human book

“Stories from the city, stories from the sea” é um álbum consistentemente pleasing, depois de audições repetidas e freqüentes.

I ended up working all night long to finish work due today. I’m still expected to get the comments on a previous version of this tomorrow morning and have a meeting about it all in the early afternoon. It also takes me a two-hour commute to get to work.

I accidentally skipped my meds after staying out all night friday. My drug schedule is all screwed up, not to mention the 15mg of Ritalin I took along the last 12 hours.

So I can either take the 8:40 bus and get there at about 10PM (and risk my colleague not being there with the comments) or take the 10:30 bus and get there about 12PM. I’m supposed to maximize for un-sleepiness and information digested and processed by the time of the meeting.

Should I just skip my antipsychotic again? All reason points to no — I need to counter all the craziness and be sane by tomorrow. On the other hand, if I take my antipsychotic and my benzodiazepines I might not be able to wake up at all, no matter how loud the alarms. And I skip the benzos I might be sleepy and get that kind of “hidden anxiety” that gets me deep into the DR/DP twilight zone.

Oh fuck, I’ll just take all my meds as prescribed this time. Work be damned.

(Edit: I just took twice the antipsychotic “to make up” for the one I missed, for an “extra unscrambling factor” and just for the heck of it, to knock me out reeeeal good. ‘Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony that’s life)