we should build

4·6·08
okay, with the blue eyed problem, let me explain my predicament:
assume there are 100 blue eyed people. then the very least anyone sees is 99 (each of the blue see this). now a blue eyed person knows they are either blue or brown, and knows that brown produces a lower result on the number of blue, and hence an earlier date of death. so if they consider the situation in which they are brown, they would expect a true blue to see only 98 blue. they could then reason that the true blue did exactly as they have done, and expect a group who sees only 97. but you know that no one would ever expect less than that. and you are uncertain if anyone would even expect 98. if the blue eyed person assumes they are actually blue eyed, they can reason that an actual brown eyed person will do the exact same thing, only with every number shifted up by one. a brown eyed person can follow all the same reasoning. so all members of the group must have 'common knowledge' that all members in the group see at least 97 people. but this is a problem, because a brown eyed person will actually assume that everyone in the group knows everyone in the group sees at least 98 people. so the lower bound on the common knowledge is not the same for the two groups of people. but it is much greater than 1 or 2 or 3, and so its difficult to see why they would wait the first 98 days. it does not seem like a valid induction step to go from n blue eyed people with 0≤n≤4, to n>4. maybe i am still overlooking something.

nice.
this is helpful.

sometimes people take offense, when i criticize marriage, but im not criticizing what marriage represents, or the reason people get married. i have no qualms against fidelity or love, or commitment, or monogamy. in fact, i almost feel as if the modern implementation of marriage is a mockery of those deeper ideals.

heres a question: has anyone ever considered al qeda to be a greater threat to america than the ussr? it certainly doesnt seem like we should. the ussr had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, a huge army, and technology that often rivaled our own. they had a far larger budget. did we ever torture any russians? i suppose its possible that we might have...

this is pretty funny.

the question mark was emphasized.

dont take any guff from these swine.

after much deliberation, i decided not to call you tonight. i decided it would be more suspenseful to wait a day, and call you tomorrow.

what if we made an organization that was controlled by its members? well, how do i prevent the members from cheating? we could make member power related to member donation, and then cap it. that way, a certain dedication would be required for change, but no one could seize too much power. maybe? probably not.

osculating curves (mathematical porn).

is every aspect of me completely contradictory? i am as easy-going as one can be (im fairly confident than anything beyond this, or possibly including this, would be labeled insanity by the average person). and yet i have a natural tendency to tip-toe around others, to the point that i have to consciously, deliberately express things that i expect may cause conflict, purely out of an attempt to suppress the awkward result of my natural caution. lately this has been going pretty well. last night i met a lot of people in boston, with my friend, and i seemed to be fairly natural with my ability to converse with strangers. i actually seemed to come across as charismatic. somewhat new to me, though i think that was me on the first date with E too.

we should build a factory full of robot building robots.
we should build a factory full of robots building factories full of robots building robots.
we should build.

whoa: i wonder if we could relate an entropy-like quantity to a particular instance of an NP-problem, and the difficulty in solving it. wait, this sounds like it might be legitimate. nope, i thought about this more and now it just seems stupid. though now once again i cannot decide. clearly i am out of my element.

the gods have spoken.
the spell is broken.

hey, maybe if there were enough stupid religions, like scientology and similar ones, that people raised in even the more commonly accepted religions would start to get a negative view of the more common ones as well.

i am super happy all of the sudden, because i read this sentence, and it made sense:
"This is a natural decision version of the problem, analogous to those frequently used for optimization problems, because it can be combined with binary search to solve the function problem version in a logarithmic number of queries."
or maybe more accurately, i understood it. though i would like to see what the actual procedure for doing this would be. seems like i should be able to think of it myself; maybe i am too lazy, unknowledgeable, or assuming more than i should about its difficulty.

even you dont think i should trust you, right?

in the last few weeks, i think ive become increasingly paranoid that my thoughts are crankish, unjustified, or maybe just plain old insane. it is a terribly strange position to find oneself in. though it would seem that an acute awareness of the dangers of insanity might prevent one from actually going insane, it is hard not to see that a deep obsession with determining ones own sanity may come to constitute insanity itself. or maybe it was just the blue/brown eyed islanders puzzle. that really blew some circuits in my brain, i think. in fact, if i did not have such an excitingly awesome saturday night and sunday, i probably would have spent the entire weekend diving deeper into that logical dilemma. controversy. puzzle? mystery?

i dont know how to tell the difference between prying, and just asking someone about their day. and i dont know the difference between being clingy, and distant. i mean, i guess i might have my own ideas on that, but when i begin to try to judge other's opinions of these things, i find myself getting lost, much the way i do with the puzzle. finding increasingly convincing reasons to believe what become increasingly dichotomous decisions.

i am enjoying this very much. thinking about seeing you is exciting. is that weird?
am i hopelessly misguided?

we couldn't stop these clowns.

4·8·08
and then i began to think, maybe thats the exciting part! maybe thats the reason this is so much fun!

whoa, wait. for years, ive repeatedly convinced myself not to display affection in public, out of a weird idea that the person i would display it towards, would be embarrassed. and my assumption, this entire time, including tonight, has been that the person i am with is trying to hide me from someone else. and so in public we just have to look like friends. holy crap im so lost in this world. what will it take to get out of that mindset? maybe just an awareness of this problem is enough to solve it. though it seems a large part of this is my familiarity (or lack thereof), since with someone new, i can be whoever id like to be. need not be restricted to my usual self. though i know that does not restrict me in any situations really.

veiled hate mail. thatll be the next big thing. ill get it going.

im sure most christians would call it unfair to bring up people like charles manson or, i dont know, plenty of others though.

i have, regrettably, been focusing my attention elsewhere. my infant understanding of CS has stagnated in the mean time.
well, not all of that 'attention elsewhere' is 'regrettable'. wink wink wink.

the difficult thing to remember is that for any given organization, the members who feel the strongest about whatever their organization adheres to (believes? promotes? does?), are the members who will be most widely heard/known. in extremely large, loose organizations, there can be a very broad spectrum of interpretations of doctrine, so for example, in the larger religions, extremists are awfully extreme. i might be biased, but it seems that atheism does not suffer this nearly as much as christianity and islam. furthermore, the religious extremists tend to be the least informed, least open minded, least sensical members, of humanity even, where as many of the louder atheists tend to be very open minded and very informed. probably due to the opposing approaches of promoting free thought (within atheism generally), and promoting religious doctrine (see religion).

businesses ought to use a wiki for data organization.


4·13·08
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery


underneath the edge of something grand.
ta dah!