recently noted quotes

every ten years, collective wisdom degrades by half. -- nassim nicholas taleb's corollary to moore's law

the question to be asked at the end of each day is, "how long will you delay to be wise?" -- the good book [a.c. grayling]

Who’s to say that the tone-mapped creations of today will not be the bell-bottom jeans of tomorrow? -- guy tal

i'm sorry, but we can't send a search-and-rescue team into plato's cave. -- xkcd

a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. – Saul Bellow

light is the best disinfectant. -- Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice

my personal thing is, I don't want to step in the same river more than twice.-- sting

context determines appropriate tone, reader. no use fighting it. -- bill stott [write to the point]

in the realm of belief we are all hostages to fortune. -- michael philips [undercover philosopher]

remember: think different. that's why your macbook has the same hoary old architecture in ye old generic wintel box ... -- tenfourfox

human intuition is useless both in predicting randomness and in recognizing it. -- james gleick

[in front of a deer head] I'm confused. are we investigating a murder or preparing lunch for the palin family? -- mr nigel-murray [bones]

asked the kid where his protractor is. "how do you draw a circle? by hand?" he says "there is an authenticity to a hand drawn circle"

[kid helping me to meditate] let your thoughts blow away like the summer wind. [he includes the wind sound]

if aliens were ever to visit, NOW would be a good time! -- eren yigit

history, disconnected

in another blog, a long time ago, i had written this.

a pleasant surprise: google maps now have detailed aerial photographs of istanbul that include a part of my family history. the 11-storey building at the center of this image, named after my grandfather, is the third structure occupying that spot starting with my grandparents' family home. [where there are buildings now, there used to be pine trees, a windmill, and enough green space for sheep to graze in...]

the space of these structures aside, only two things have survived: a grape wine my grandfather had planted now covers a little gazebo [cannot be seen at this angle] next to the parking area at the back. the fig tree he planted in front somehow re-grew after it was chopped down during the last construction.

in a few days, this part of our history will be disconnected for me and my brother. there is sadness, but the realist in me reminds me that this is the price to pay when building a new life in another country.

on photography and geometry

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, discipline of mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry. -- Henri Cartier-Bresson [found on steve mccurry's blog entry]

quote of the day

we cannot afford as a polity to create classes of privileged speakers and press agencies, and underclasses of networked information producers whose products we take into the public sphere when convenient, but whom we treat as susceptible to suppression when their publications become less palatable. -- yochai benkler [forthcoming a free irresponsible Press: wikileaks and the battle over the soul of the networked fourth estate]

a random sample of napster, 2001.

a decade ago this month, i was sampling napster library content.

not what you are thinking. only the symbolic content.

this was a project for a research organization studying music trends among peer-to-peer file sharers. original napster had an interesting feature: it allowed users to view the entire library of someone who shared content. the rest is easy: i wrote a napster client to sample shared libraries. this client ramped into random sampling like this:

start with a set of seed search words
randomly pick from many responders [which changed rapidly]
get their entire library, save aside
use random picks from these libraries to seed a new search
repeat.

I sampled napster for four days, at its peak, and obtained 2647 unique libraries. [i dropped a very small number of duplicates]

here is the entire library data, unmodified, except all usernames were blanked out. you are welcome to do whatever you want with it, so long as you let me know of your research and analysis results, and give due credit.

enjoy.

ps: if you like to get this data with revision control: hg clone https://bitbucket.org/plan9/napdata

re-zoning [haiku]

winter sunset -
a hawk lands
on rezoning sign.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

recently noted quotes

If the Internet was walking around in public, it would look and act a lot like Julian Assange. -- bruce sterling

Your thinking is stuck in the maze of twisty little passages that is modern Unix and its version control systems. -- russ cox

A cloud computer is just like a regular computer, except you have to ask permission from the phone company every time you use it. -- cory doctorow

for every unit of concentration, there must follow an equal and opposite unit of relaxation. -- derren brown [tricks of the mind]

I say studies to demonstrate what you already know are the best kind of research! -- stephen colbert [on protectmarriage.com]

the Crime was accidentally picking it up. the Punishment was reading it. -- karthik on crime and punishment

The real problem with open source development is it forces me to suppress my sense of humor. Irony doesn't work through a language barrier. -- rob pike

we find there is a fâçéböök page for @rosannecash but it's a mirage.

derrida, n. A sequence of signs that fails to signify anything beyond itself. -- philosophical lexicon [daniel dennett]

█████ ██ █ ████ everything ███ █████ is█████ ████ ████ fine ████ ███ █ ██████ love. █████ ███████ ███ your █████ ████ government -- bruno decock [on wikileaks]

magical thinking often encounters the law of conservation of energy, and ignores it as a way of self-invalidation. -- ozan yigit

this isn't shopping! this is Thunderdome! -- kid observes costco at xmas time

Between consistency and absurdity, I pick absurdity. -- I_am_Ozma

Give hackers an inch and they'll take you a mile. -- paul graham

guru portraits [repost from plan9 blog]

portraits of some friends from the turn of the millenium
[henry spencer, peter honeyman, norman wilson, david tilbrook]

nikon 801s with fuji reala. nikkor 85mm f/1.8 AF-D.

[note: these images may not be used without my permission.]

forgotten moon [haiku]

caught inside
an autumn puddle
forgotten moon.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

never were [haiku]

autumn nightfall -
he sees things
that never were.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

rand on jobs

came across this interesting bit of remembrance from rand's conversations with students:

For example, Steve Jobs of NeXT is a very tough client. If he does not like something, you hand it to him and he says, "that stinks." There is no discussion. On the other hand, I was lucky enough, I suppose, when I did the logo for him. After he saw the presentation of it, he got up - we were all at his house, sitting on the floor, you know, Hollywood style, with the fireplace going, hot as hell outside. He got up and looked at me and said, "Can I hug you." Now that is overcoming a conflict between the client and the designer"

a zen koan [repost]

the apprentice clodpool, in a rebellious mood, approached wen and spake thusly:

master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment?

wen considered this for some time and at last said: 'a fish!'

and clodpool went away, satisfied.

[terry pratchett, thief of time]

rooster's turn [haiku]

cicada chorus
suddenly quiet -
rooster's turn.

[oz/2010. all rights reserved.]

pie and poetry

farm house pie (multi-layer leek pie) comes with a poem on the box, written in chinese and english:

preparing me chicken and rice, old friend,
you entertain me at your farm.
we watch the green trees that circle your village
and the pale blue of outlying mountains.
we open your window over garden and field,
to talk mulberry and hemp with our cups in our hands.
... wait till the mountain holiday
I am coming again in chrysanthemum time.

an amazing line from a very old SF novel

I found this amazing line seconds into skimming a very very old book. given how old this novel is, I am moved by the author's sight into the future. can you guess who the author is, and what novel this is from? if you can identify it without googling it, consider yourself extremely well read in science fiction. a hint: the book's future date is year 2000. [if you google, may get one hit: from google's scan of the original. I hid the name of the character to make guessing the source a bit harder]

"It appears to me, Miss xxxxx," I said, "that if we could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained, and ceased to strive for further improvements."

[of course he could not have predicted the copyright mess we found ourselves in. this was written before music cartels existed.]

recently noted quotes

let the beauty we love be what we do
there are hundreds of ways to kneel
and kiss the ground -- rumi

The message that precedes all others -- in art as well as life --
is simple: pay attention -- Harlan Ellison [slippage]

the challenge of iconic places is shooting them with fresh eyes,
and ideally with a fresh opinion. -- david duchemin

creativity needs a constant flow of possibility, and negativity
stops that flow with No instead of Yes. -- david duchemin

organization pays dividends. unless you're organized, you'll
waste time looking for pictures. -- steve mccurry

for me the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and
spontaneity ... henri cartier-bresson

most creativity is a transition from one context into another
where things are more surprising. -- alan kay

smugness and self-satisfaction have no place in an artist's life.
-- walt stanchfield [drawn to life]

21st century problem solving requires anticipation + resilience +
discourse + art. -- david brin

creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. art is knowing
which ones to keep. -- scott adams

a photograph is a secret about a secret. the more it tells you,
the less you know. -- Diane Arbus

move your feet. it's called perspective. -- thom hogan [things
you should do but don't]

shortcuts in art lead to cliche and propaganda. -- david duchemin

creativity is one of those things you replenish by the very act
of using it, giving it away. -- david duchemin

we all try to avoid cliche shot, but the cliche comes in not what
you shoot but how you shoot it - david duchemin

the ability to concentrate flows naturally from the ability to
choose something interesting. -- david mamet

probably the most important tool in creativity is the use of an
analogy. -- richard w. hamming

stay dissatisfied with your work. but also appreciate the advances
you make. do it quietly, though. -- chris floyd

if you work too long on tedious stuff, it will rot your brain. --
paul graham [how to do what you love]

some people take pictures, i find them. -- jane bown [unknown
bown]

in essence, art lies embedded in the conceptual leap between the
pieces, not in the pieces themselves. -- bayles & orland

we are rhythmic creatures who move in patterns and feel most comfortable with those who move in synchrony with ourselves. -- b. hood

pixel peeping: LR 3 b2 and C1 pro 5

I have been playing with and testing four photography workflow tools. each one has something I like and dislike. the thing I dislike about lightroom is all the hype. It is a good tool, but not the best for everything. so now, lightroom 3 (in beta) has a new rendering engine. wonderful. it really needed one. I have been looking at that engine, and i would say adobe has more work to do. these are basic tiff extracts from capture 1 pro (first image) and lightroom 3 (b2)(second image), with no changes to images. basically: import raw, export tiff. look at the detail at both, and tell me if the difference you see is the result of sharpening or differently capable de-mosaic algorithm. I am reasonably certain it is the latter, because no amount of tinkering with lightroom sharpening tools will match the capture 1 pro image.

really. all because of the chain. you see, the faint impression you get from capture 1 pro rendering is that something with a unique structure. lightroom gives you something indistinct: a rope, or wire, or chain, whatever. the correct answer is that it is a chain with long straight pieces and loops[*], as it faintly appears to be with capture 1 pro.

is this important? i think so. beyer interpolation is a way of guessing what you don't know. better guessers produce image data that is more realistic. everything else in your digital darkroom follows from that.

[* you are thinking: you already knew this. answer: i did not. after looking at the capture 1 pro rendering and thinking "how odd" I went back and examined nearly a dozen images of the suleymanie mosque ceiling with good details of the chains that hold the giant light fixture. now I know what they look like.]

luhn validation code in go

this is the fast luhn validation code in go that uses the pre-calculated numeric transformation table, and a toggle-free left-to-right scan i came up with. details are found here. [again, i excluded the isdigit check]

var ltab = [10]int { 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 }

func luhn(s string) bool {
    n := len(s)
    if n < 2 {
        return false /* less than minimum */
    }

    /*
     * if the length is odd, add the value of the
     * first digit and skip
     */
    sum := 0
    i := 0

    if n & 1 == 1 {
        sum = int(s[i]) - int('0')
        i++
    }

    for i < n {
        sum += ltab[int(s[i]) - int('0')]
        sum += int(s[i+1]) - int('0')
        i += 2
    }

    return (sum % 10) == 0
}

autumn cleaning [haiku]

yellow leaves
on discarded chair -
autumn cleaning.

[oz/2009. all rights reserved.]

more notes coming soon.

i have been tweeting a lot lately, and not keeping my online notebooks as up to date as i would like. [my paper notebooks doing just fine] on the other hand, there are a number of ongoing notes, everything from photography to my carefully considered strong atheism, to software engineering (or lack thereof) not to mention bits of poetry that need to be finished and posted. i hope to get back to my blog late august. at least that is the best laid plan...