Paul Phillips

kids, stay in school

2008-04-18T13:58:57Z

I will write more about that other thing before I write much about anything else, but I'm working on my grad school applications and today is ivy's third birthday (!) so you will have to wait for next week. I find writing about drugs to be very difficult compared to most anything else, because I have so much to say and I know I'm up against many deeply held prejudices, so I have to say it exactly as I mean it on the first swing. I've started several times before and have only half-written unpublished expositions to show for it.

Here are ivy and her friend brynn sampling the birthday cupcakes.

some lawyers are easy to love

2008-04-16T13:31:07Z

Wow, I want this guy on my team: Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable.

veni, vidi, vici

2008-04-12T23:03:34Z

Oh baby oh! I absolutely aced the CS test. I'm, oh, 90% confident in 99th percentile and 99% confident in 90th percentile. Scores will be available in about a month. If I mysteriously don't post my score, it'll be because I don't want your monitor to crack under the weight of its awesomeness, not for any other reason.

I watched THE MIST in the hotel the night between my tests. Oh My God. I saw the ending coming but I still couldn't believe it. That's a little more messed up than I prefer my scary movies, thanks. Yikes.

gre imperfection

2008-04-11T23:56:52Z

I didn't realize you learn your score immediately. A disappointing-but-not-really 800/760.

Man, the first section after the writing was verbal and I knew I was acing it. Then the final question was one I recognized as an experimental format, so I knew the section wouldn't count, and I deflated at the prospect of suffering through another verbal section. I suppose one missed question isn't enough to knock me all the way to 760 so I probably missed two. One of the ones I missed was the last one, where I spazzed about what PUNCTILIOUS means, which sucks because I know. The other was likely from one of the interminable reading sections. If only the guys at ETS could bottle and sell that boredom, they'd be zillionaires.

You wouldn't think that cramming one or two hundred words would have too much impact, but there were two questions I might have missed without that preparation. One depended on my knowing the nutty word UNWONTED. Can't think of the other but I remember thinking "excellent vocab studying paulp!" so it must have happened.

I won't know my analytical writing score for a few weeks yet, but I'd bet it'll be 5.0 or 5.5. It can't be 6 because I couldn't resist writing like a blogger. You know what I mean, ignore the argument you're supposed to be analyzing and unleash some ad hominem on the author as you imagine him. Hmm, come to think of it maybe 5.0 isn't a safe lower bound. [Googling Happens] Hey, 5.5 is 86th percentile and 5.0 is 70th, and 4.5 is 51st. In that case I will file a formal complaint with the universe if I score below 5.5.

They have all the issue topics online, and I got lucky because mine was: "A nation should require all its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college rather than allow schools in different parts of the nation to determine which academic courses to offer." LAID TO WASTE.

mmmkay

2008-04-08T13:53:45Z

I would very much like to answer everything that came up in that last thread but these are my last few days before the GREs and I have no other time. I know I keep promising to come back to subjects and then failing, but this time it'll happen. You can use this thread to ask me anything you want about drugs and I'll attempt to work the answer into FuturePost. And/or, talk amongst yourselves!

the we inside of me

2008-04-02T11:25:41Z

A ted talk that should not be missed: Jill Taylor, a neuroanatomist, has a stroke and describes the subjective experience as her brain functions slip away.

Of particular interest to me were the last few minutes of the talk, when she speaks very emotionally about the awakening she experienced. Everything she said, with essentially no modification at all, translates to the transcendent experience many people have after ingesting LSD, psilocybin, or ecstasy. In fact, an entheogen-knowledgeable person who caught only the end of the talk would assume that's what she was talking about. It is very sad to me that there are millions of people like her who will never know that feeling unless they too have a stroke. It is not uncommon for a single drug use in a productive setting to enable profound, lasting, enormously positive changes, but all of that knowledge is walled off from the majority because, oh no, drugs! I mean oh no, drugs, except for the ones that come with childproof caps! So much unnecessary unhappiness, and for what? For nothing.

Update: now looking through the comments I see lots of people had the same reaction. This one sums it up rather sharply but not inaccurately: "That this experience can seem profound to either a neuroscientist or ted's audience displays some of the intellectual backwaters created by political repression of psychedelic substances. The talk is nice, but anyone who hasn't already had a similar experience should feel ashamed to categorize themselves as intellectuals."

visualize whirled peas

2008-03-31T10:34:38Z

Some of my friends have entered the "open beta" stage, so you should try it out if it's your bag: Whirled.

This week I am here. I'm having difficulty remembering how to interact with real people.

I was happy to see that everyone and their brother knew FACTOTUM. It was pointed out to me in email that on the mud where I burned off at least a year of my life (which has been put back online in case you want to relive my sophomore year of college minus the other people) the wizard xyzzy's title was factotum, which I remembered once told. In a thousand or more hours online I didn't manage to learn even that one word. On the other hand, I did kill the ranger and take his fell sword on six billion separate occasions, so it wasn't a total waste. Good times.

more fun with words

2008-03-27T16:14:31Z

Can you define all of these words correctly without cheating? Liar!

FACTIOUS, FRACTIOUS, FACTITIOUS, FACTITIAL, FACTOTUM

I'm especially impressed by anyone who knows FACTOTUM. For good measure, some more words I've never seen:

FACTURE, FACTITIVE

Here's one that means what it looks like it means: FACTICITY. "Come on, man - the facticity of that statement is, like, zero."

This one too: FACTUALISM. "As an orthodox factualist, I must object to the fact that your so-called factoid lacks facticity."

Have you ever seen the adjectival form of TEMERITY? It's TEMERARIOUS. No joke.

hillary vs. the snipers

2008-03-27T12:16:10Z

That's about how I pictured it.

years of pain? sign me up!

2008-03-25T14:28:56Z

Now that I'm not worried about being derailed, it can be told: I decided I was enjoying life too much so I'm going to put a stop to that by going to grad school. You can get a masters in computer science a number of places without ever visiting the campus. Three cheers for location independence.

At first I was worried about being able to handle grad school material with twelve years of rustiness on my undergrad education. Happily that no longer concerns me as I've discovered that studying really hard accomplishes miracles in making me feel smarter. For the last few weeks I've been living and breathing textbooks preparing for the CS GRE, and secondarily I'm polishing up for the general GRE. I already aced the general GRE half a dozen times back when I taught for the princeton review, but scores are only good for five years so here we go again. Hey, there's an "analytical writing" section now and no paper-and-pencil option, both unhappy developments from my standpoint. I never quite managed a perfect score in the verbal - my best effort was 800/800/780 - so I've been studying vocabulary for the first time ever. Man, I wish I'd done this a long time ago. My entire vocabulary was built by osmosis. That's great as far as it goes, but structured studying consolidates and expands so much more efficiently.

I bought a box of 500 high-frequency GRE words and there were close to 100 that I didn't know with any confidence. You can make fun of me for not knowing these if you do.

Some Words I Should Really Have Known By Now: PALLIATE, BONHOMIE, CUPIDITY, SOLECISM, QUOTIDIAN, PUSILLANIMOUS, DECLIVITY, PROBITY, PHLEGMATIC, SALUBRIOUS, LICENTIOUS, LEGERDEMAIN, ENCOMIUM, INVIDIOUS, PROFLIGATE, ABJURE

Some Words I Thought Were Neat: DISTAFF, PERSPICACIOUS, CALUMNY, INTERREGNUM, PERIPATETIC, RACONTEUR, OROTUND, OPPROBIUM, LACHRYMOSE, CONTUMACIOUS, PANEGYRIC

Some Words That Look (To Me) Like They Mean Something Different: PULCHRITUDE, MERETRICIOUS, LIMPID, LACONIC, LUGUBRIOUS (and more from the preceding lists like PHLEGMATIC and CUPIDITY)

I find in vocabulary there's always a big gap between what you think you know and what you know - i.e. there are many words that you're accustomed to thinking you understand well enough in context, but if pressed for a definition you will flounder. Examples of this for me include LICTENIOUS, PROFLIGATE, and PROBITY.

One Word That Made Me Say WTF: NUMISMATICS. This was ostensibly a box of the 500 most frequently tested GRE words. NUMISMATICS? I'd like to meet the guy who is better prepared for grad school because he knows what NUMISMATICS means. "Sorry, son. It came down to you and one other guy, but he knew his NUMISMATICS. You shouldn't have wasted your youth playing dungeons and dragons - you should have wasted it collecting coins."

overheard in NYC

2008-03-24T15:44:30Z

"How is it that we have no best picture oscars? Everyone loves our films."
"We came close in 1996... the english patient? Are you fucking kidding me? Anyway, I think they take us for granted now."
"What we have to do is stop worrying about real people and make a film specifically for the critics."
"That jaded bunch of asshats? What did you have in mind?"
"They watch so many movies that they're starved for novelty. We've been delivering novel material, but what we need now is novel delivery."
"Hmmm... okay, I'm just spitballing here, but how about this. We'll do the first 80% of the movie normal - lots of suspense, tension, what have you. Then, instead of a climax, we kill the protagonist off-screen and switch the focus to a peripheral character."
"You're a genius! But it doesn't go far enough. The peripheral character should go on about nothing for the final twenty minutes. What's the least interesting subject you know?"
"Dreams! He should ramble incoherently about his dreams, grandpa simpson style. Then, bang, movie's over. Normal people may say WTF, but the critics will cream themselves."
"Start polishing that acceptance speech, buddy. This can't miss."

when your best isn't quite good enough

2008-03-20T00:58:05Z

If your boss ever gets on your case about your overly vague estimates, next time be sure to work in a mention of Graham's number so you look precise in contrast:

It is too large to be written in scientific notation because even the digits in the exponent would exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe so it needs its own special notation to write down. [...] Consider an n-dimensional hypercube, and connect each pair of vertices to obtain a complete graph on 2n vertices. Then colour each of the edges of this graph using only the colours red and black. What is the smallest value of n for which every possible such colouring must necessarily contain a single-coloured complete sub-graph with 4 vertices which lie in a plane?

Although the solution to this problem is not yet known, Graham's number is the smallest known upper bound for it. [...] They also provided the lower bound 6, adding the qualifying understatement: "Clearly, there is some room for improvement here."

In Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers, Martin Gardner wrote, "Ramsey-theory experts believe the actual Ramsey number for this problem is probably 6, making Graham's number perhaps the worst smallest-upper-bound ever discovered." More recently Geoff Exoo of Indiana State University has shown (in 2003) that it must be at least 11 and provided proof that it is larger.

You hear that, Gardner? It's at least ELEVEN!

tha'ts not a chart - THAT's a chart

2008-03-17T22:44:13Z

Hey, at this writing the chart doesn't show today's drop from 30 to 5. Still, that's some thrilling toboggan run. Have to give this one to the black swan.

turn a pillow into yoghurt

2008-03-17T12:40:48Z

It's time for another episode of cute stuff my (older) kid said! She is almost three now so she says ten cute things before breakfast - this is only a tiny sampling.

Her time awareness is increasing - it wasn't that long ago that she couldn't meaningfully talk about the past or future - and I never tire of her improvisations. The first time I noticed her reference the past she said "I saw a rainbow last year," meaning last night. She frequently calls yesterday "last day" and today "this day". She also uses "last night" to refer to "this morning".

She was sitting in a circle with a half dozen stuffed animals and apparently they had all bonked their heads because "Lamb bonked her head, Douglas bonked his head, Pinkie bonked his head, all their names bonked their heads." Lacking fluency with "everyone", she literally said "all their names". She constructed it from the language building blocks she knows and it makes perfect sense.

We're reading "Mr. Popper's Penguins" at the moment, and the family's money struggles became a plot point so I tried to explain what money was all about.

ME: So let's say you have too many... (looks for nearest object) pillows, and you want something else. You could sell a pillow to someone else in exchange for money. And then if you were hungry you could buy some (first food that comes to mind) yoghurt with the money. So in a manner of speaking, you used money to turn a pillow into yoghurt.
IVY: Turn a pillow into yoghurt? That's a pretty silly thing to do.
ME: When you put it that way, yeah.
[the following evening - every night we review the previous evening's chapter before continuing]
ME: You remember last night we talked about money?
IVY: TURN A PILLOW INTO YOGHURT!!

So I think what I got across is that there is a branch of alchemy that transforms textiles into dairy products, and money is at the center of it.

Then there are the answers out of left field:

ME: Are you ready to go take a bath?
IVY: No, it's party time.

ME (rhetorically): Ivy, how many times do I have to tell you!?
IVY (guilelessly, holding up three fingers for emphasis): Three.

One frozen day kathleen and ivy were getting the mail, and kathleen's mailbox key broke off in the lock. A few days later ivy and I were getting the mail, and as we pulled up to the boxes ivy said "Stupid mailbox!" This delayed echo from one parent to the other happens all the time now, with entertaining results.

In summary, if you're at all on the fence about kids, I can't recommend it any more highly.

pillow angels

2008-03-13T01:30:44Z

One maddening thing about the degree to which idiocy dominates public discourse is that there are a lot of interesting moral dilemmas out there, which maybe we'd be debating if people would get their heads out of their asses about the obvious stuff. And technology is going to keep the dilemmas coming fast and furious. If we could somehow drag everyone out of the dark ages, agree on a few obvious things like "science works" and "don't torture others, it's not nice" then maybe we could move on to some new material. Such as...

She was born brain-damaged, with a condition described as static encephalopathy, or cerebral palsy. One of her doctors described her mental capacity as that of a 6-month-old, dependent upon her parents to meet every need. She does not walk or talk; she's fed through a tube and wears diapers. When Ashley was 6, her parents approached Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, for the operations. They believed this would make it easier to cuddle and carry a child who can do little more than lie propped on a pillow.

Weight and height are the "worst enemy," they write, for children such as Ashley, for whom they've coined the term "pillow angels."

In 2004, Children's Hospital performed a hysterectomy, removed Ashley's breast buds and gave her high-dose estrogen to retard growth and sexual maturation -- a procedure that has risks, but to date has not harmed her, her parents say.

Even if we discount the usual religious objections (which I obviously do) there are a lot of good reasons to oppose something like this. But there are a lot of good reasons to support it. I find it highly nonobvious. Usually I have some gut reaction to the rightness of things, but I don't even have that. Would someone like to present a compelling case one way or another?

the spitzer oops

2008-03-11T16:56:24Z

It's pretty impressive how much power there is in politicizing the justice department, as touched on in The Spitzer Sex Sting: A Few More Questions. Once again, the problem of silent evidence is paramount. We hear about the politicians who get caught, and not those who don't - and if the distribution of who gets caught does not reflect the distribution of who errs, then our beliefs have been shaped without the puppetmasters having to utter a word. Just like the best code is the code you don't have to write, the best distortions are the distortions you don't have to articulate. The kinds of people who still populate 30%erland are most easily manipulated in this way, but everyone is vulnerable to some significant extent.

If we all brought an appropriate level of skepticism to our own beliefs - that is, why we think what we do - it'd be nearly impossible to have much confidence about any nontrivial subject. I suppose this is what people mean when they say the older I get, the less I know.

zomg it's awesome

2008-03-10T13:32:53Z

Where has THIS been all my life! Install it and try a google image search. Yay PicLens.

the olestra fish

2008-03-06T17:24:35Z

Yesterday kathleen said she'd bought a new fish for us to try. I had run across this fish before because it's one of the six anagrams in the ORACLES group, which by the way I still knew off the top of my head so good for me.

We're a little paranoid about mercury so I googled it. Turns out mercury is not the problem.

Escolar, the popular fish with unpopular side effects
Escolar - a fish with a caveat
Not my kind of dish

I like how all those titles dance around the reality. "Escolar: the fish that makes waxy orange oil explode uncontrollably out of your ass."

Consider some of the comments:

Having seen what this fish caused my body to expel, I really pity the two thirds of the population who CAN ingest it - really - if you could see what your body was absorbing, you would never put this fish any where near your fork, let alone your mouth.
After a couple hours, I experienced violent cramps then what I thought was a regular fart. However it wasn't regular. This orange waxy/oily substance came out with it. I was mortified, I was at work. I coulding keep it in. Every move, every bit of gas, was accompanied with by this nasty substance, which ruined my office chair, and my cordouroys. I had to go home.
If you enjoy violent diarrhea, by all means, go out and order it.

Most enlightening comment: here in the philippines, people actually like the effects of escolar/gindara because it helps them lose weight. Now that is a weight loss plan anyone can embrace. "Eat all the delicious escolar you want and watch the pounds melt away!"

After one bite of escolar, all I could think about was my six ounce limit. How much is an ounce again? I also had to take into account that when it comes to orange oil exploding out of the ass, what is possible for others will be probable for me. So I cut off the escolar. Then I saw the pool of oil on my plate. Was it soaking into the other food? Should I count that toward my six ounces? I realized I wasn't hungry anymore. Even so, for the next couple hours I thought each stomach rumble portended incipient catastrophic expulsion. Thankfully, no.

drug-crazed addicts freaking out at 20,000 feet

2008-03-04T15:30:54Z

I've been mostly successful at stomping out anything that could be characterized as "web surfing", but when ruby is asleep on me and my movements are limited, sometimes I'll treat myself.

Here is the TSA "blog" about shoes. "It’s not all about Richard Reid", it begins, before proceeding to prove that it is all about richard reid. I read most of the comments and my patience was rewarded when "TSO Tom" appeared to defend their policies:

Shoes, wow this is a hot topic and I certainly understand why. But lets talk about the threat that can be posed by someone trying to do harm to others on an airplane. Of course when we talk about shoes the first thing that comes to mind is Richard Reid and the "shoe bomb" and this is a real threat. One person tried and failed, but someone else may just succeed then the public would be screaming about "where was security?" So lets talk about how shoes may pose a threat to air travelers, we're not just talking about explosives, other things can be hidden inside shoes as well..razor blades for instance. A razor blade in someone's shoe could pose a risk...however small you think it might be....to you and or other passengers on an airplane. And items like this have actually been found at the checkpoint. Also, drugs have been strapped to people's ankles, a bank robber was caught in Philadelphia after a TSO found a crack pipe strapped to his ankle. A note that he used in a several robberies was found in his belongings. Cocaine has been discovered as well as marijuana, and other drugs. So the removal of shoes is important, lets not forget that most shoes will alarm the Walk through metal detector and be required to be removed anyway.

Someone responded to this thusly:

[...] IS COMPLETELY INSANE! Are you implying that the flying public is at risk because someone might have some coke or pot in their shoes? OR are you implying that the TSA is using this security theater to expand the government's drug war into airport security lines? Perhaps they should also examine the contents of any paperwork or laptop records to make sure there are no tax cheats as well?

TSO Tom again:

Dear anonymous;
you have the luxury of addressing me personally, but you choose to remain anonymous. That's okay, lets address your concerns:
First of all, razor blades MAY be detectable by magnatron without removing footwear, however x-ray screening is the best method to discover something inside someone's shoes. Secondly, would you want someone doing drugs on your flight, with the potential of becoming violent in the middle of the flight? I know I wouldn't. It has nothing to do with the war on drug, or the war on anything, it has to do with common sense, x-ray screening is REQUIRED of all footwaear because this is the BEST method of discovering prohibited items.

Would YOU want someone smoking crack and embarking on an orgy of violence on YOUR flight? NO? Then take your foot fungus and like it!

These little hitlers always, without fail, when defending the security theater of the absurd, say that if anything ever happens again people will be hollering "where was security?" I'd like to go on record as saying that if there is ever an outbreak of sanity and some of these restrictions are relaxed, and then there is an attack that might have been foiled if only we'd all submitted to the rectal probe of the hour, I will not be hollering "where was security." In fact, were most people really hollering that even after 9/11? If they were then it's just proof the public is totally irrational and should be completely ignored when formulating security policy. Hmm, given the apparent level of support for mandated athlete's foot exchange, I think the TSA has already taken that advice. All that's left is for them to apply it consistently.

Overall the comments increased my awareness of some issues I hadn't much considered. Among the points made:

a) lots of older people can't take their shoes off while standing up, yet there's typically nowhere to sit
b) lots of older (and some younger) people have painful foot conditions that take the security game well past mere annoyance
c) people with weakened immune systems can die from minor ailments

Also, I thought I'd already read about most major plane crashes, but I'd never heard of John Gilbert Graham until now. Nutty.

Can't wait to fly again!

I am midas

2008-03-03T13:42:41Z

Everything I touch explodes in popularity within a few years. I thought I was retired from having that kind of impact but thanks to ooda_loop I see that my spectacular talent cannot be contained. It is now inescapable that soon millions of people will be programming in haskell and erlang, and using those languages to solve abstruse math puzzles. Get on this bandwagon before it's a fad!

* I operated a web server when there were maybe a few thousand web users, and a few dozen web servers. In those days there was a list of all known web servers you could check once a day for new additions.
* I advocated for java when there were a few thousand java programmers, if that. Maybe a few hundred.
* I played on the poker tournament trail when there were a few dozen regulars at most.
* I switched to OS X before it was a complete no-brainer.

Okay, that last is only a 3/10 on the earliness scale instead of 1/10. I bet I'm forgetting some other winners here. (I KNOW I'm forgetting all the losers.)

From the article:

Until Scrabulous landed on Facebook, no one could have mistaken the game, which had only a few thousand users, for a fast-growing phenomenon.

Hey, you ignorant reporter! Where are the web, java, poker, and OS X today? That's right. If you'd bothered with a little basic legwork you'd have known what was coming.

“People believe it to be in the public domain, like chess,” Mr. Williams said. “The idea that Scrabble belongs to a corporation is something that people don’t or are unwilling to accept.”

I am pleased to see that hundreds of thousands of other people can now experience the frustration that comes with this, which is a huge part of why I stopped playing. Hasbro owns the game, controls it like a paranoid tyrant, and treats its most devoted players like pieces of poo on its corporate shoe. No shit people are unwilling to accept that. Do you want to live in a world where people would think it makes any sense at all? Is the precise configuration of the rules of scrabble so goddammed inventive that we should stop playing because hasbro says so, more than fifty years after the game was invented? As I've mentioned I no longer accept any form of intellectual property, but other than those who own hasbro stock, who could think this is sensible?

man I want this

2008-02-27T15:13:18Z

The WAF is going to be within an epsilon of zero, but ivy says "let's get that!" so maybe I can push it through:

Here's another item that would improve any loving home: a lethal injection attack droid!

do not neglect mr. euler

2008-02-25T15:52:20Z

My friend is doing project euler in scala and he's up to #32. He's ten times the programmer I am so I had better get back to work. I did the first 46 in erlang but as of problem 47 I switched to haskell. That should mean I'd have to re-implement many of the utility functions I already wrote in erlang, except that I'm "borrowing" anything I already wrote in erlang so the language jump doesn't hurt too badly.

I'm just starting to wrap my head around haskell so if you must ridicule my code at least suggest improvements.

-- #47
p47 = p47try (map compress_factors factorizations)

p47try list = 
	if all (\x -> length x >= 4) seq &&				-- each has 4+ factors
		sum (map length seq) == length (nub $ concat seq)	-- all factors distinct
		then map unfactorize seq
		else p47try $ tail list
	where seq = take 4 list

Note that factorizations is an infinite list:

factorizations  = map factorise [2..]

compress_factors [] = []
compress_factors xs =
        (head(xs), length top) : compress_factors (drop (length top) xs)
        where top = [x | x <- xs, x == head(xs) ]

unfactorize xs =
        product [a^b | (a,b) <- xs]

That's my favorite part of haskell, that you can have data structures that represent infinite lists. Since everything is evaluated lazily, it's happy to let you work with infinite structures - but if you ask for the last element of the list you may have to wait a bit. Grab some coffee.

Sorry that some of the syntax coloring is hard to read - this is the default HsColour html output. I'll see if I can find something more readable.

Update: problem 48. One liners are nice.

-- #48
p48 = sum [x^x | x <- [1..1000] ] `mod` 10^10

a real genetic headscratcher

2008-02-22T14:13:08Z

This is completely fascinating.

I bet comment #41 has it right.

books to read aloud

2008-02-21T18:54:38Z

I finally found an book exporting format I could stand, so here are a few dozen of ivy's (and my) favorite books: Read to your kids! They're all linked to amazon for your impulse buying pleasure.

In the case of several authors, the book I chose is representative of dozens. You can't go wrong much with Sandra Boynton, Jack Prelutsky, or Dr. Seuss, although the doctor has a few clunkers. I included some lesser-known seuss books that I think are great.

they only come out at night

2008-02-21T14:49:54Z

I hope everyone saw the lunar eclipse last night. It was super clear from here, the best one I've ever seen.