Passion

Blah blah blah

Points of View

When that happened, the good man who was your father was destroyed. So what I told you was true, from a certain point of view.

--Obi Wan

Typically, when you proverbially step into someone else's shoes, and see things from their point view, you may identify with them and come closer to a mutual understanding.  Not so with this cops-only forum I discovered today.  I don't want to post a link, but if you like to copy and paste:

http://forums.officer.com/f37/

Actually thats the exact page in the traffic section that I got to.  It took me 3-4 hours to comb through apparently 37 pages of people asking cops questions about traffic shit.  And, sadly, it made me respect cops less.

The first thing I was disturbed to learn was that my new practice of only rolling down the window 2 inches actually pisses them off.  So I'm going to start rolling it halfway down.  I think the 2 inches trick is only for potheads anyway; idk.  Also, I very carefully read some stories about what happens after people have gotten away during a chase.  Also, I learned that not even law enforcement officers can agree on the legality and effectiveness of LIDAR blockers.  Most of them were indignant at the very mention of them.

For law enforcement officers, giving you the ticket they think you deserve instead of letting you off with a warning is the police version of a Starbucks barista secretly giving you decaf because they hate you.

In general, though, all of the law enforcement officers answering the questions has this sort of...attitude.  It is hard to describe; the closest I can come is to point out that cops seem to hate the phrase "speed trap" and respond to questions on that topic by asking what a speed trap is or saying speed traps don't exist, etc.  Funny thing is, everyone who isn't a cop knows exactly what a speed trap is.

Law enforcement officers think that instead of complaining about private property use, people should thank them for going after speeders in their neighborhood.  Personally, I would thank them for not enforcing speeding in my neighborhood (preferably not on my planet).  In fact, I would bake them a cake if they did all of their speeding enforcement in the neighborhoods of people I hate.

Oh, and another thing I learned...is the laws about "obstructing justice" are apparently broad enough to be used for bullshit in traffic.  So my idea about how to reduce the effectiveness of DUI checkpoints...if anyone ever does that, make sure there is no evidence whatsoever that you are intentionally wasting their time, because apparently that is an arrestable offense.

Also, apparently in WA you can't speed while executing a pass in the opposing lane...so perhaps one of my lawyers was wrong.  Would explain why he suggested a plea deal.

Finally, we came to some threads on people warning each other about cops trying to catch speeders, and this is where the starkest difference comes out.  For one thing, at least use your flashers instead of your high beams.  For another, the law enforcement officers were indignant and even confused about why anyone would help another people avoid a speeding ticket.  I'm confused about why anyone wouldn't.  To me, this comes naturally.  Warning a fellow motorist about a speed trap is like warning someone they are about to step on a bees nest, or about muggers in a certain place.  I am genuinely confused about why cops don't immediately get why we help each other.

I think what's going on, is that cops have this imaginary link in their heads that connects breaking speeding laws and actually doing something wrong.  They don't see themselves as simply one piece of many is this large chess game that also involves city planners, judges, juries, manufacturers of radar detectors, and those shitfuckers that make red light cams.  They seem to believe that they were put here to punish people who exceed the speed limit, and they seem to be laboring under the mistaken assumption that all of the drivers, deep down, are members of this speeding-is-wrong club.

I felt tempted, just a little, to join the forum and explain to them that, for some of us, speeding is our religion and we take every step possible to (safely) exceed the speed limit by as much as possible, for as long as possible, and to help others exceed the limit, and do to anything and everything in our power to reduce the effectiveness of speed limit enforcement, and it has absolutely nothing to do with getting somewhere fast.  When they pull us over, we are not meek little civilians who feel guilty, but opposite players in a bitter, bitter war.  We are bringing our A game, analyzing every word said out of a desire to improve our position, drawing out prosecution of any ticket they write based on our theories about what is the least cost-effective options for them.

I didn't, though, and, of course, I am no such person.

I never speed.

Oh, and one last thing--there were some posts where police refused to answer questions, because apparently "tactics" are never discussed on an open forum.  Purely out of journalistic curiosity, I find myself suddenly interested in acquiring whatever training manuals they have.  If you know where to get such information, do let me know.  Also, I'm still bitter about being suspected of a DUI, so training manuals on that would be interesting also.

Also, ALSO, here is some information about the sort of state model of a traffic stop, based solely on information from the forum:

The transition from driving to a traffic stop happens when a cop gets reasonable suspicion, which is way easier than probable cause.  I don't think its hard for them to make shit up.

Escalating the shit they do to you during a traffic stop requires probable cause.  This one is more difficult for them to bullshit;  good cops claim to b.s. this step only rarely.  Probably cause is highly subjective, though.  Also cop safety can be used as an excuse to make you exit your car, and to subject you to a pat down.  Also if you legally own a gun traffic stops become more difficult for you.

The transition from traffic stop to arrest requires probable cause.

In some jurisdictions, an arrest doesn't mean you're actually arrested and getting booked with your Miranda rights read;  it might simply mean that you sit in the back of the cop car while the cop warant-lessly searches your vehicle, which he is only allowed to do because he just arrested you.  Or something.

Sometimes cops can steal ("seize") your vehicle and never return it, even if you end up being acquitted of the crime they accuse you off.  I am kind of fuzzy on my understanding of this one.

I don't know.  During a traffic stop, unless you are recording, you're basically fucked.  All you can do is be polite and hope the cop has some integrity.

Night Moves

A road ninja...

drives until there is no road left

runs until there's no land left
fights to the end of a contest
sees until there is no light left
drinks until there is no rum left
sings until his voice is a mess

 dances until there is no night left

does some things I can't mention here

Kansas City Shuffles...
and flees with the heart of a countess

-- The Road Ninja Creed

First night with a private salsa instructor.  My partner bailed, but fortunately the instructor was a girl so we just did a solo lesson.  It was very ego bruising.  I may have to re-learn everything from the ground up and change most of my habits.  However she was a great teacher.  I see a way back in the game.

Focusing on people is tought...for example, last Friday we finished a designed meeting at work around 4pm, and I started cleaning up this mess of a codebase we have.  I left at 6 am.  I reduced maybe 2,000 lines of code down to 1,000, but my skiing plans for opening weekend were shot.  It was addicting...I think I'm going to start describing the sensation I felt as a coding high.  The time flies by, and you type furiously, your hands trying to keep up with your brain.  I think this only happens when I am refactoring out redundancy.  When you are writing new stuff, or fixing a bug, you have to do a lot of thinking.  When you are looking at existing, poorly designed code, and see a giant pattern and repetitive coding that can be reduced down to something better--once you see that--there is not much more thinking.  You just become an artist.

We (the royal we) are spinning up settlers again.  I think I am going to try to make it bi-monthly, and maybe look into any games that are simple enough to have a real conversation while you play.  Or, keep the game complicated, but just have people over for drinks first, or whatever.  There's got to be a way to make settlers a better social event.

Moving forward...I have to figure out a way to plan christmas.  I really really suck at making plans ahead of time.  For years and years I existed socially by drifting along the edges of many social groups at once.  I think in Seattle I need to create my own...somehow.  I suppose the sort of goal is to get to a place where we can have fun parties, and it is not difficult to throw a party.  I mean, its nice to have goals.  Some guys are currently trying to figure out how to sleep at all while caring for a newborn and holding a job.  I'm learning how to throw parties.

Legos are a constant distraction.  I've thought of a hundred Lego-related business plans that are not profitable and only appealing because I could pretend to make money while playing with Legos.  I think, if I want to have friends, I need to disable the entrepreneurial circuit in my brain while I try to make trains, and just treat Legos like an addiction...buying a set here, and a set there just to stave off the cravings.

Although, see, I do have this one great idea right now.  I would get people to use ldraw to fabricate virtual lego buildings, and we would construct a single massive city that I would curate, perhaps by putting better-looking buildings on main streets and more amateur-ish buildings on side streets...idk.  And this would be navigateable on a website with Myst-style navigation...then maybe later more of a second life thing.  And you could click on a building that someone made, and buy directions for it, so that this virtual city would sort of function as a medium of instruction manual purchases, and the real sets sold by the Lego Group would be there, and there would be referal links to Amazon, and etc.  Oh and then, maybe we'd do a kickstarter and actually create the physical version of the city in a big warehouse somewhere and try to get enough people to come see it so that we pay for renting the warehouse and all the legos we bought.

Also my apartment is fucking overflowing with the damn things.  In the end I may die cold alone and childless because I got cock blocked by little plastic toys.

Shit...anyway.

Anyway.




[edit]
Christmas:

1. message people, or something
2. find out if anything good for actual new years night
3. decide when flying back to seattle
4. fill in calendar with salsa, karaoke, parties
5.  figure out where to sleep

[edit]
Current carry-on:  2' x 1' 3.5" x 9.5"

Smaller?

Want

http://www.opulentitems.com/hidden-bookcase.html


[Edit]
Also, just discovered that 7 cm must be the perfect hair length, at least on the top.  Perfect side hair length is about 3 cm.  I honestly don't think my hair has ever looked this good in my life.  Must have gotten lucky with the rate of growth since whatever happened at my last hair cut.

Suga

I had to hear it multiple times before I believed them:  apparently for some girls a skinny guy with little muscle mass is the ideal physique.  Yeah, I know;  I didn't believe it either.  I think the first time was when a girl stared at my chest and said "wow you're like the ideal male." I did at least have the grace to stare at her incredulously and look offended. 

I've run into a bunch, though, so I guess they must exist.   Weight lifting is still recommended, because it opens up all the girls who aren't into stick figures.  Anyway.  The point of this is that I considered my flat stomach to be my single advantage in the looks department.

You can imagine my alarm when I started getting fat, despite the fact that I was walking to work every day and had a standing desk.  Suddenly I had a belly like every other chump out there.  I'd always sneered at fat people, thinking "all you have to do to fix that is change your entire lifestyle."  Turns out changing your entire lifestyle is difficult, but I wanted my advantage back.  Nothing seemed to be working initially.

Then everything changed when I switched jobs, stopped walking to work, and no longer had a standing desk, and was working too much to go to the gym.  Didn't actually get much fatter.

Something inspired me to fix it again.  I signed up for a ridiculously expensive gym whose only real advantage was that it was located in the same building as work, so I'd have no excuse to skip it.

Two days later, I still had not actually gone to the gym and worked out.  Yet, as I was walking up the stairs, I noticed that the jeans I wear which typically choke the life out of my waist were falling down.  I had lost weight.

And it wasn't from exercising, or jumping on the sitting-is-evil bandwagon, or walking to work, or any of those other recommended lifestyle changes, or any physical activity like cycling, climbing, dancing or skiing (work left no time for any of them).  It was the simple fact that I had switched from drinking three 20 oz* bottles of mountain dew per day, to only allowing myself one 12 oz can (doubly ironic because I reduced my soda intake after joining the company that gives free fucking sodas).
 
So...while all those difficult life changes (that required significant willpower) probably had numerous health benefits, when it comes to being fat, drinking less sugary soda was more effective than all of them combined.  I find this discovery fascinating and utterly depressing at the same time.  I fucking love soda.  And now I get to look forward to months of not drinking it if I want to regain my previous belt size.

In conclusion:  holy fuck sugar makes you fat.



*Sure, 60 ounces of high fructose corn syrup might sound bad now, but when you have a shitty programming job at a company like Flabazon, that genetically engineered, unnaturally sweet poison is one of few comforts.  Seriously I can't believe I'm happier at Bikrosoft.

Dreams

Perhaps inspired by recent events, last night I had a dream that I was hanging out with a bunch of people from high school.  Except...these people in my dream don't exist in real life.  My mind stocked the dream plot with completely fictional acquaintances and siblings-of-friends.  And they had names.  That's never happened before.  Thought it would make an interesting story plot, but I didn't feel like writing a story.  Oh, and, AND, part of the dream was about one of my old motorcycles.  In my brain, the handle on this object was my old dual sport (can go offroad) dirtbike-like motorcycle.  You know, the second motorcycle that I owned.  Except I never owned such a motorcycle.  My second bike is the one I have now.  That didn't stop me from being confused for half an hour after I woke up, trying to remember this mysterious second bike I thought I'd forgotten about.  Not like it matters.  In the dream, I rode it around and then sold it to one of the fictional high school acquaintances that don't exist.  That might be a good story plot too...imagine if the main character simply discovers that he used to ride a certain motorcycle, and finds a picture of himself on it, but actually has no memory of it whatsoever.  I know the amnesia plot has been done to death for noir films, but what about a plot where the character is missing specific time periods or situations, and its not related to child trauma?  Hmmmm........

That dream, at least, was better then the penultimate dream in the list of ones I remember;  in that one I was in Disney World in like, Toronto or something, riding around on an imaginary monorail system much more impressive than the real one, and I was with a high school girl who was a romantic interest until I officially gave up a few months ago (guess my subconscious disagrees, because its a dick) and some guy dressed as a security guard convinced us to buy fake monorail tickets.   Seriously, dreams are the best inspiration for good stories.  I wonder if this is what being high is like.

I have a strong interest in lucid dreaming.  Its only happened a few times in my life, and usually all I do is fly around as much as I can before I wake up.  The last time it happened though, I had recent memories of articles I read about lucid dreaming, and so I deliberately tried to pull some Inception shit, and I have to say, the imaginative power at your disposal in a dream is pretty awesome.

Dear Fellow Star Trek Fans

I just realized Geordi LaForge is black.  I'm not even kidding;  I only now figured that out.

[Edit]
P.S.  I was briefly thrilled do discover someone on PlentyOfFish that liked sushi, salsa dancing and sportbikes.  Then I discovered I was reading my own profile....

I Bless the Rains Down in Aaaafricaaaaaa

The Ex

I have been really wanting to tell my ex these words:  "I miss you, and you were great."  ...because that is exactly how I feel right now.  However, upon consulting with friends, this would be perceived as a move and I'd have to ask myself a lot of complicated questions and I think I'm just going to hope that she is well and found someone who is almost is awesome as I am but more affectionate.


Lana Del Ray

Karaoke went well, well enough that I am willing to put up with the scheduling bullshit.  Next time, I am thinking salsa+karaoke in one night.  Another night, drinking and bowling.  Maybe.  I don't know.


Old Friends

Went to my high school reunion.  An attractive girl that I never hung out with in high school, I thought, made it a point to let me know she was single and three other things and I'm getting bored...well if we skip the boring part of the story I have her card and am pretty sure she'll never return my text--which is actually double sad because she hinted at a really interesting since-highschool life story that I was hoping to hear more of while also seeing more of her.  Unfortunately, as with the cute cafeteria girl at work, there was a strong internal debate between two possibilities:  "interested" and "just friendly."   This time I thought it was "interested" but it turned out to be "just friendly."  Damn those...friendly women and their friendliness.


Field Report

Today I aggressively attempted to perform "the zipper" while merging onto the highway, even though some asshat in a small green car sped up to block me.  I called his bluff but he didn't back off so I was forced onto the shoulder.  It was a sad day for the zipper.  I smiled at him from my new position of power on his 6, and he did something gay that looked like writing down my front plate.  I miss Pennsylvania.


The PenIs Mightier

While drinking with friends we decided that Chris and Kev will take all of the ridiculous things I write, including all of the posts I've started hiding since my last breakup, and publish them in some form that makes money.  Of course that same night I also started bitching about how much money 50 Shades made, and we decided that I was going to write a girl-on-girl version of it.  I started the second one on the plane back to Seattle.  Turns out, writing a story that is anything other than melodramatic bullshit betwixt my road ninja characters is actually quite difficult.  Even worse, writing the girl version of the book means I have to read the original.  I am not happy.  I'm not happy with the prose;  I'm not happy with the characters;  and I am not at all happy about the kind of social dynamics girls care about.  The author just keeps droning on about people being intimidated by this ass clown who maintains a hostile work environment at his company that does nothing.  Whatever.  I'm probably going to get tired of this in a week.  You know what?  I need a writing partner.  If you would like to help write a book that is basically 50 shades of grey except that the man character is a hot femme fatale instead of some dorky version of prince charming, and the book is different in every way that might otherwise allow the original author to sue us, then please drop me a line.  Especially if you can write the relationship parts.

Fun Facts

The TSA agent that groped me asked if I was ok becaused I "look[ed] pissed off."  Sometimes people just don't understand that I hate them.

If I ever become a pickup artist ( and I never would of course)  my gay little screen name would be "the doctor"

The Secret of Unhappiness

I'm going to be a giant dork about this post, because if I don't, I will write pages of text (already happened).

Choice 1:
A.  Move East to be happier by a certain margin
B.  Stay in Seattle to not burn bridges in the tech industry by abandoning a new job in less than 6 months (ouch)

Choice 2:
I forget what choice 2 was

Consequence:
I will be in Seattle when the world ends on Nov 8, 2013.

What to do with the time given to us, or, Operation Gandalf:
A.  Continue obsessing over 3-SAT, writing, or random side project business ideas that for three years have been no more than a fruitless self-employment fantasy
B.  Quit by current job to do risky writing/startup stuff:  already precluded by choice 1
C.  Go all in at work, and stop wasting time on side projects.

One thing I've learned:  I suck at identifying good projects to work on.  I hated the scroll wheel mouse, and I thought facebook was dumb, and I wasn't even impressed with Amazon even after they became a big success.  No one impresses me.  So I can't do the ideas party by myself.

So the next thing to think about is meeting people.  Again.  I have this theory about the number of hours I spend with friends during the week, and how lonely I feel, and I think I could empirically derive a loneliness formula (accouding for things like weekend days having a higher weight) and then determine the minimum amount of time I need to spend with friends in order to not be lonely at all, ever.  I'm not going to do that though.  Just going to go back to meeting people.  That is really the only reason I'm writing this--to remember that I'm supposed to be meeting people and not starting and abandoning another hundred side projects.

Again.  Meeting people.  Poker, skiing, settlers, go kart racing, salsa, and maybe another thing.  I'm probably going to forget all of this anyway.  Oh!  And playing more games online with friends, maybe.  Ooooh and we could start up the lan parties again, and that other idea that I can't mention here but we'll refer to as....mmmmmmmmmmmmm....Operation Clove Hitch.  Fuck that took a lot of concentration.  Was there anything else?  Thats probably en--oh yeah, and finally, actually going to europe.  Maybe co-writing a novel with another person--i will reeeeeeeally want to get into the romance novel market.  I don't care that most girls think I'm an emotionless robot, or that I have the social skills of a computer scientist.  I saw what happened with 50 shades and I want in on that cash cow.  Shit we're going back to projects again.  If I write it with another person--ooh, like what if I find a girl who can describe all of the relationship shit, but doesn't want to deal with the prose, and we'll keep it interesting by adding what will appear to be kinky sex scenes but upon a re-read will turn out to be just bland romance scenes, and maybe I'll put in a road ninja character just for funsies.  Did I write that I wanted to go to europe?  I'm not proofreading this post.  I'm really almost sorry about that.

Ok.  Again, for my memory:  people.  That is the new project.

I've always wanted to make a spreadsheet with all of the girls I've ever fallen in love with or hooked up with (in an ideal world those sets would be equivalent) and then figure out how I met them, and then rank social activities based on past successes.  Unfortunately, as we all just learned recently, any girl I ever date in the future (or in the past) might read this post, so....I'm totally not going to do that.


[Edit]
and motorcycling on the Isle of Man


[Edit]
Ok maybe hold off on the no projects thing....what if we made a game that was Dota2 + C&C Renegade?  It would be just like renegade except that bot soldiers are constantly running out and fighting...I think that would be awesome.


[Edit]
Forget all that.  Here is a simpler SAT thing that might be easier to compute:  instead of going after all possible unsat instances, start with a SAT instance, and check all UNSAT instances that can be made out of it.  Use a DFS that branches on the clause being in it or not, in order to avoid duplicates.  Well, some duplicates.

Things I Didn't Want to Learn Today

Superblock does not wear tights

Here are some things I didn't want to learn today:
1.  Those cheap, foxconn computers are apparently worthless in any role where you are accessing storage via USB
2.  Though fsck may call your ext3 filesystem an ext2 filesystem, it does actually know what its doing.
3.  The command to search for backup superblocks is dumpe2fs:
sudo dumpe2fs /dev/sdb1 | grep -i superblock

  Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-117
  Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-32885
  Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98421
  Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-163957
  Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229493
  Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-295029
  Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819317
  Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-884853
  Backup superblock at 1605632, Group descriptors at 1605633-1605749
  Backup superblock at 2654208, Group descriptors at 2654209-2654325
  Backup superblock at 4096000, Group descriptors at 4096001-4096117
  Backup superblock at 7962624, Group descriptors at 7962625-7962741
  Backup superblock at 11239424, Group descriptors at 11239425-11239541
  Backup superblock at 20480000, Group descriptors at 20480001-20480117
  Backup superblock at 23887872, Group descriptors at 23887873-23887989
  Backup superblock at 71663616, Group descriptors at 71663617-71663733
  Backup superblock at 78675968, Group descriptors at 78675969-78676085
  Backup superblock at 102400000, Group descriptors at 102400001-102400117
  Backup superblock at 214990848, Group descriptors at 214990849-214990965


4. and then maybe you fix it with this?  Note its e2fsck and not just fsck

sudo e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/sdb1


What is a superblock, you ask?  A superblock is this thing in your hard drive that both of us don't want to know about.  I spent $805 last month renting windows azure computers that generated so much data I had to then buy a $200 western digital external hard drive.  Since I regularly flip between windows and linux, I connected the hard drive to one of my cheap ass foxconn computers.  That may have been a mistake, because after downloading most of the generated data, the journal and primary superblock of the filesystem got corrupted.

Anyway, might as well put these here:




Lets find out if any of these are still good!  Yay!




[edit]
running fsck on /dev/sdb will always fail because you need to run it on /dev/sdb1 ....

[fiction] The Independant Jetsam

When I stepped off the boat, I had nothing but my clothes and a guitar with a broken E string on my back and a million dollars in an offshore account.

I followed streams of people around for hours, wondering what brought me to this particular city.  I was very tired by the end of the day.  Then I spotted it.  Part of the skyline was wrong.  Not ugly, or different, but wrong.  Wrong like seeing a red sports car in a swords & sandals movie wrong.  It just shouldn't have been there.

I hopped on a ferry across the water, standing outside to face the wrong part o the skyline.  It came into view a little bit more.  I could make out spires.  Or maybe towers, or something.  After the boat I walked to it on foot.  Got there at twilight.

It was a church.  Well...not an actual church.  It was church-ish.  Churchy.  Gothic.  The floor was a hair salon.  I won't know what the other floors were but the windows were boarded up and we were in a neighborhood where white people shouldn't be out after dark.

Then I felt it.  It.  A sort of coldness, and from all directions there was this force that tore color out of the world, and there was a sinking onrush of fear of something coming, but without the adrenaline.  I moved to the site of the door of the hair salon, ducking into a gothic alcove.  Something dark shot out of the entrance and went off somewhere down the street.

Color came back into the world, and I hugged myself, shivering slightly.  Then I went inside the hair salon.

Aside from the ugly wall color, there didn't seem to be anything amiss.  There was a radio in the corner of the room playing The Bad Touch by the bloodhound gang.  I listened to pleas for doggy-style during science fiction television while I examined each hair-cutting station.  Other than the door being unlocked.  I found a stair in the back.  Every floor was empty.  The top is where things got interesting.  Of course the roof door was unlocked.  Like it ever wasn't.

No, it was the person standing on the roof.  He wasn't supposed to be there.  Not only was the entire building wrong, but the person standing on it was even more wrong.  It was as if some cosmic jackass had offended the rules of the universe by placing a building that shouldn't exist, just to piss off the laws of physics, and then another cosmic jackass led this man up to the roof just to piss off the first jackass.

He was the sort of person that would be sitting in the audience during a very important trial, or who would be seen running into the background when a tiger escapes at the zoo, or who would be sitting at a cafe when a car chase rushes past.  He was so unremarkable that he made the act of standing too close to the edge of a tall building seem mundane.

There was nothing about his person that caught my interest.  He was tall, wearning moderately fashionable jeans, a typical leather jacket, and shoes that didn't quite work in the same way that most men's shoes didn't quite work.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

He looked up, and held up a large laminated sheet in his hands.  "Ice cream menu," he said.  "Its the strangest thing."

I frowned.  I was hoping for something more about the very suicide-like pose he was striking than ice cream, but he kept talking about the fucking ice cream.

"It's strange," he said.  "I always order the same thing.  I have good reasons that I can't order anything else--there's a reason for each of these...allergic, allergic, hate mint, awful flavor...reminds me of my ex-girlfriend..." he was pointing to each one as he said it, going through the entire menu, "...which leaves us with this one.  I always choose it.  Its as if its not even my choice, even though I'm the one choosing it."

I looked behind me.  I saw nothing.  Of course that didn't count for much.  If this guy didn't clear off the roof he was going to become a casualty.

"What's your name?"

"Thomas," he said.  "What's yours?"

"People call me the Dragon."  It was the truth.

Thomas looked at me strangely, with a hint of the kind of disdain you use when glancing at someone you just decided to start ignoring, as if my unusual moniker was somehow stranger than breaking into a hair salon in a building with out-of-place architecture to go stand on the roof and bitch about how unoriginal your desert choices are.  Fucking asshole.  I frowned right back at the fucker.  Just my luck.  Couldn't be a girl cute up here, maybe trapped, maybe cold yet smoking hot, maybe some kind of vulnerability complex that leads to impulse sex against a backdrop of rain and kind words.  No.  It was this fucking guy.

The guy--oh right, Thomas--tossed the ice cream menu into the air and walked past me as if that wasn't a weird thing to do.  I was then free to concentrate on what I'd come up here for.  Then I remembered that it was apparently all about that guy.

I followed him down the stairs.  The stairs became darker and darker as I descended, until finally I pulled out my cell phone to use as a makeshift flash light, but the screen was dim and flickering.  The phone said the battery was at 70% though.  That is when I realized the stairway wasn't dark.  It was something else.  Something cold.

I didn't want to descend.  I wanted to do anything other then continue descending.  However, I learned a long time ago that so long as fear does not stop your heart or make your hands shake too much to accomplish your task, all it takes to move forward is a somewhat detached, robotic control of your extremities.  I wouldn't have had a chance in hell of threading a needle in that state, but I cure sure as hell put one foot in front of the other going down those stairs.  When I got to the bottom it was pitch black.  The sun was still up outside but where I was, it was pitch black.  No lights from curling iron AC adapters or glowing click dials or cracks of light through windows or doors.  Just black.

And then, an outline.  Two, actually.  I could see Thomas in front of me, and in front of him, the outline of a sort of minotaur person.  That's how I always saw them; outlined by some kind of grayish light that was always behind them.  It appeared to be trained on Thomas, moving in for a kill stroke when it suddenly stopped.  I saw its head tilt.  Then it evaporated.

Light burned into my eyes, searing, painful light like kind you get when you walk out of a dark theatre onto the boardwalk of a beach in the south.  When my eyes finally adjusted I could see the hair salon clearly.  I looked up at the florescent lights.  I could them flickering.  Not flickering, like they were broken, but I could see the constant light dilation emitted by the gas.  When I looked down, Thomas was staring at me.

"What the fuck was that?" he asked.

"It's a long story," I began.  Thomas insisted on hearing it, so I began telling it, the "guardian angels didn't plan for exponential growth" part, but by the time we reached the exit and stepped out onto the street, he had completely forgotten what he just saw.

The Answer

It's the question that drives us, Neo. It's the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did. 

--Trinity

I have thought of a counterpart to my polynomial-time 3-SAT algorithm.  The purpose of the counterpart algorithm is to attempt to discredit the 3-SAT algorithm, by doing something complicated that looks a lot like exhaustively searching for a problem instance that I don't believe exists.

Unfortunately, this algorithm is at best, even in computer science terms, ridiculous.  Every step of the algorithm contains exponential sub-parts, and the branching factor itself is exponential.  Its failure for a number n proves that my 3-SAT algorithm will succeed for all 3-SAT instances of size n.  Therefore all I have to do is code it and run it on the set of Natural Numbers.  Small problem--more of an issue, really--that set is infinitely large, and therefore impossible to do with a homemade supercomputer, but, ironically, this is the closest I've ever come to proving P=NP.  Wouldn't it be hilarious if NP-Completeness ended up like the Continuum hypothesis?

I am one of those people who religiously cling to the school of thought that science is things that are unprovable theories that we can never know for certain (although you shouldn't mention this around jaded atheists that read Reddit all day), while mathematics is everything that is abstract and provable with absolute certainty.  I cling to this distinction because it is convenient, and because, despite what 1984 claims, even the most hardcore religious extremist or politician can't deny 2+2=4.  Why?  Because you need math to measure the ingredients in your stupid ass bombs that kill people, and you need math to count all the money you bring in from donations/tithes, and you need math to count votes.  You can deny math in some kind of masturbatory game of existentialism, but no one will care, and no one can stand on a pulpit in a church or body of political representatives and convince reasonable people that math is wrong, because it proves itself.  See Bad Wolf.

The World is Full of Possibilies

The World is Full of Possibilities - yet it is hard to balance realizing them against all of the other concerns in life.  Maybe I'm inefficient;  maybe its the golden handcuffs.  I simply feel like I should have accomplished more by now.

[notes] Random 3-SAT Notes

Had this in a notepad:




exhaustive generator:   maintain sorting


constraints:

#T's less than #

(x = y) or (x != y)

--> can be used to advance open list


what happens if we demorgan the whole expression?



----
ideas:


temporary roomates

long term...quit job to do:  kickstarter ?

should really try:  http://evernote.com/evernote/

SkyAutumn

I didn't realize this at the time, but apparently the IMAX showing of Skyfall that I went to today was some kind of special preview, and the new James Bond movie doesn't open to the general public for another day or two.  So, that's awesome.  I just saw the new James Bond movie and you all didn't.  Also, to the section of this paragraph that you already read I inserted an awful spoiler.

No I didn't.  Anyway.  It is not bad.  This latest one is coming around to something closer to what I would call a James Bond film.  So that was pleasant.  If you have a degree is computer science, though, you may want to avert your eyes the minute you see a giant [c.s.] graph on a computer screen.  Fair warning.

Anyway, more importantly, I am coming home for thanksgiving. I didn't think to make vacation days a bargaining point when I switched companies, so now I am back down to almost nothing.  Here is my schedule though:

Wed night:  arrive
Thursday:  family stuff
Friday:  whatever.  Philly?  Salsa or karaoke?
Saturday:  High school reunion, then maybe out drinking near ptown?
Sunday:  Free early in the day, then I have to fly back.

I'm posting this here because I keep forgetting to let people know I'll be home.  So there is a sort of announcement.

Cloud Map

Spoiler Alert.  I'm about to spoil you.

The feature film Cloud Atlas has no point.  The preview, I thought, implied that all of these different (or same?) people living in different ages (or different universes?) realized that something (someone?) was controlling things and...

Well no.  They don't seem to realize anything.  Cloud Atlas is basically The Matrix, except for all of the parts where Neo or anyone else wakes up from the Matrix.  It is basically about The Matrix, except no one realizes it and Hugo Weaving just creeps some people out.

One interesting thing I noticed, though, was that many of the characters switched sides between good and evil (or maybe good and neutral in the case of Keith David), Hugo Weaving's character is always evil, and Halle Berry is always good.  In a way they act as poles of the conflict.

Unfortunately, wikipedia doesn't mention this so it must be unintentional.  According to wikipedia, the plot has something to do with turning Tom Hank's soul from a killer into a not a killer over time, except that, chronologically, in the second to last story he is still a killer.

Fun to watch though.

[lyrics] sappy emo lyrics that are lame and boring

we took a ride down to the valley of the moon
I hid my rocket in the shadow of a pirate's tomb
it must have been a hundred miles until we met again
I feel there's nothing left to say...yeah

it must have been a hundred miles until we met again
I recognized the scent of lilacs floating on the wind
I really don't care which flag you make your home
as long as you'll keep my sins with your own

if I go crazy then will we still reach the promised land?
if shadows fall and burn will I see your face at world's end?
I'll be safe in the darkness, my sweetest silence
white spades, in lace

I've stolen from them all the secrets that you're paid to keep
you could have stopped me all those times you found me indiscreet
you stumbled in and cut me loose if not for me you'd miss the truth
I stood it up, kept it out of evil hands

if I go crazy then will we still reach the promised land?
if shadows fall and burn will I see your face there at world's end?
I'll be safe in darkness, my sweetest silence
white spades, in lace

The Population Cycle of Lemmas

You don't "cover" for me; you manage expectations.

--Donald Draper

Previously, I mentioned that I was solving a trillion instances.  That was the original plan.  One thousand instances in a modified cnf file, one thousand files in a folder, one thousand folders in a zip file, and one thousand zip files.  Somewhere along the line, maybe precisely when I realized that individual uncompressed folders exceeded 500 mb in size and I couldn't even fit a thousand of them on disk, I switched the thousand folders per zip file to 1 folder per zip file, and promptly forgot the effect it would have on the order of magnitude of the size of my data set.  So, I'll be generating 1.001 billion instances to test with, as opposed to 1.001 trillion.  Yes, I could simply generate a million zip files and stick them on a giant hard drive, unfortunately, I've also recently discovered that with the resources at my disposal it would take years to accomplish that.

I could generate 1 trillion, if there were exactly 1000 clones of me (thanks to the .001 its one thousand and not 999 clones) but I think I'm going to settle for the billions instead.  Either sum is pathetic compared to the size of the search space (number of atoms in the universe?  please) so what does it matter?  The only danger is if there was an elusive, super-hard worst case instance that was only going to appear if I generated a trillion.

I need to begin work on the proof anyway.  Why do I need to begin this?  Because I just hit the limit for the number of cores I am allowed to rent from Windows Azure.  Fun fact:  if you need to do CPU intensive work, you may find it far cheaper to rent 8 extra-small shared-CPU instances than to rent a single 8-core server.

The next technical difficulty other than maxing out my Azure subscription (a point in Amazon EC2's favor) is getting the data off the hard drives before they fill up.  Given that I can apparently only use the most basic libraries with mono, and given that I want to move the files and not just sync them, the best option was to use FTP.  You know, that old ass file moving protocol on port 21.  Well, guess what.  FTP is actually not a simple file moving protocol that does everything through port 21.  Port 21 is just the beginning.  If you have to manually open ports to a box in order for it to work, you are going to learn a lot about passive mode, and active mode, and port 20, and ranges of ports in both the client and server, and bugs in various popular FTP clients.  I'm sure the cludgy-ass design made sense back when harddrives only held 30 MB, but holy shit it is awful now.  And it transmits the password in clear text!  If I was going to design a protocol to be a headache of a security risk, I would write FTP.  I got an active-mode FTP client that can punch through the Azure firewall.  Unfortunately it does not work from inside the Azure firewall.  Go figure.  I would like to formally protest all network protocols that can still have connection failures after you've established a connection.


In light of this, the least amount of work is probably going to be to manually log into the servers and clean the files out myself.  Oh, I forgot to mention I implemented a simple workflow engine in mysql and php.  That was fucking awesome.  Anyway.

Azure has its own version of S3, but you can't directly upload files larger than 64 MB do it--you have to break it up into blocks, and the libraries provided probably won't run in mono.  In the choice between [not using mono, and therefore .NET on windows, which means] having to log in to my servers with some graphical bullshit, verses having to manually move files, the latter seems way more fun.

I want to say that I don't understand why you still can't just ssh into windows (powershell doesnt count) but I actually know why;  I just want it to complain about it.

My next strategy with the proof aspect is I'm going to try and see what small things I can prove about my algorithm (if condition X, can I always succeed at clause finding?) and then see if I can build a proof out of those smaller statements.  I believe these are called lemmas, and then the axioms are the ones that are obvious/self evident.

Knowing that girls in the future could read what I write today is making temporal mechanics a real problem for my writing.  For now, I haven't written anything but math shit, yet my readership is growing.  I wish blogger would let me ban Seattle IP addresses.  In this town all of the attractive girls that know how to set up a proxy to get around regional restrictions always turn out to be guys in real life anyway, which is {tolerance affirmation}.

Stuff from Reddit

Now that I work for a certain company, I have to use a certain operating system.  The chief characteristic of this operating system as it relates to this post is that I have to restart it all the fucking time (because of forced security updates).  I got in an argument--well a discussion actually--with my coworkers about it.  A discussion is a lot like an argument except that you simply cave to whatever their opinion is after a few minutes.  Anyway apparently the reason a certain OS needs to be restarted all the time is backwards compatibility--they can't fix how the system is architected because they want to stay compatible with ridiculously old programs.  In fact, the people I was arguing with weren't even sure that you could architect a system with enough things in user space so that you don't need to restart for every little update.  I had to point out three times that linux has this capability, and that since linux exists, is proves it is possible.  They still weren't sure.  People here seem to have some kind of filter.

Anyway, since I have to restart I want to same some random links I've accumulated.  These are mostly from reddit, thanks to the time it takes to install a certain operating system on 10 virtual machines:

1. TODO:  get a profile picture like this:   http://imgur.com/s10M4

2.  Amazing bigass ship:     http://imgur.com/a/oRQQx

3.  Awesome comic making fun of eco nerds:  http://www.explosm.net/db/files/Comics/Rob/ecofriendly.png

4.  Awesome clock make of a candle:  http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candle_clock#

5.  Reason to own a baboon someday:  http://www.earthfoot.org/lit_zone/signalmn.htm


some stuff on azure blog storage:

-http://blog.smarx.com/posts/windows-azure-storage-libraries-in-many-languages

-http://www.codeplex.com/

Today I Learned, Part 2

Mono has a bug in the built in .NET json serializer that causes your program to fail immediately with an IL code failure, which is kind of fine, because the .NET people who wrote the built in json serializer love xml too much, and treat json like an idiot step brother of xml by making you use the xml parsing classes, which is quite unfortunate because the chief benefit of using json is not having to use an xml parser, which is just fine because the time it took to write my own weakly-typed json parser was significantly less than the time I spent investigating the mono bug, which is perfect because I originally wanted a weakly-typed json parser anyway.  Other People's Code:  it sucks.


Generating 1 trillion small 3-SAT instances overnight would cost roughly $3000, which is the price of a Ninja 250 circa 2000ish.

With 34 computers, I could generate 1 trillion instances in 1 month.  These estimates are quite rough.

I've generated 30 million so far.

Today I Learned

The Netgear Genie WNDR3400v2 is my near least favorite device.  The people who make shitty consumer-grade routers have gone ever further in the narrower-use-case and dumber-customer direction to the point where the router basically sets itself up, which is unfortunate because they didn't include a step for reading my mind to get the network settings I want.  The simple act of plugging in a cable into the internet port causes their shitty automatic wizard to render irreparable harm to the configuration that can only be undone by a hard reset.

The morons who designed Ubuntu decided they needed to fuck with the different run levels.  Instead of run levels 1-6, Ubuntu basically has two different run levels:  useless, and everything.  I can't imagine why they would do this.  The stupid people they market their distro to don't know what run levels are.  And almost everyone in the universe who does know what runlevels are wants runlevel 3 to be multi-user, network enabled mode.  Runlevel 3 is known in some languages as turn-off-that-bloated-graphical-shit-runlevel.  So far all of the information I see requires you to identify which graphical login ubuntu is using and kill that.  You're still not in the real runlevel three; you simply broke 5.

If you have a recent version of ubuntu, here is the easiest way to pretend you are at runlevel 3:

sudo killall lightdm

The Cloud High Club

Yesterday I learned that 1 million sat instances, uncompressed, may take up 500 megs of space, which means if you leave it running for a few days and the whole machine only has 4 gb to its name (because you wanted to save money!) you might come back and find out that it spent most of its time doing nothing with a full disk.

One of my foxconn supercomputing nodes appears to have crapped out for what is either no reason, or I bumped the thumbdrive that the operating system is running on.  Who knows.

My wireless network is, at times, and because of interference from neighboring apartments, too poor to support an ssh command and a netflix movie at the same time.  So, now I'm faced with upgrading my home network and best buy is closed.

I experimented with the Azure offering.  Amazon's prices are probably better...they offer a ton of options like spot and reserved instances to help you play games and keep the price down, but it was far easier to get an Azure machine up and running.  I was stuck on the password screen for a very long time;  they force you to include characters other than numbers and lower-case letters in your password.  Using passwords that only contain lowercase letters and number is a religion of mine.  Its bad enough when a giant software company that pays you to do computer shit forces you to have a gay ass password with capital letters in them.  Its a completely different level of awful when you are forced to do it on your own time.  Feeling violated, I first tried to use EC2 instead and then remembered what a giant pain it was to get those damn ssh keys set up, and went back to Azure.

Anyway, getting a SAT instance in Azure running was super easy.  I think that was the point of this post.  In less than the time it took to open the case of a foxconn computer with an improperly sized screwdriver (2 hours) I was able to get an Azure completely up and running.

Also, the Azure instances have domain names that are much easier to remember.  So that is super awesome.  I am a bit curious if I am the only customer on the planet using Azure for linux systems.

So.........I forget what the point of this was.

Hacking the Gibson

When all else fails, read the manual

--Unknown

It turns out, and maybe I've mentioned this before...a trillion 3-SAT problems is actually a lot of problems.  Its hard to describe my exact rational for picking that number, but I know I was staring at a page with things like 10^200 and 10^48 on it and when I realized that a trillion might be in the realm of possibility (that is, I might solve that many before my attention span expires) I wrote 10^12 on the paper and it was, like, settled then.  For no reason.  I make great decisions.

Its taken longer than I'd like, but I have one Foxconn NTA350something up and running.  I've spent hours screwing around with booting off USB drives in an attempt to avoid spending $70 on a hard drive.  Turns out no one makes a live-USB image with mono, sshd, and the WPA key of my wireless network.  However, if you want to run a permanent installation from a USB stick (and not just a "livecd") I found the trick is to use a USB stick with the livecd on it to install the operating system onto a second USB stick.  Ridiculous but simple.  This thing has two cores, so it can generate two million problems in slightly more than a day.  If only I had 49 more of these.  Also, note:  the Foxconn manual makes it look like you have to buy and install a wifi card, when, in fact, it comes with one already installed.  So, whatever.

Next, I experimented with the Mini Android PC.  I had high hopes for this device, and was especially excited that is was so cheap and small.  I had dreams of constructing a super computer out of these things.  Unfortunately, there is something wrong about the implementation.  The HDMI output didn't work with my monitor, and the screen was corrupted and clipped on the TV.  It has some kind of wifi card that kept dropping the connection, and running one instance of Firefox and two terminals taxed the thing beyond its abilities.  Also the USB mouse I had stopped working for no reason.  Also, it has no power switch.  It just switches on when you plug it in.  Also, the manual is written in broken English.  I gave up on any hope of using this computer, but, fortunately, the little green box it came in is pretty and looks great on my shelf.

I ordered a second Foxconn machine today.  There are a dozen barebones PCs made by that company listed on Amazon and Newegg and I can't tell the difference between them so I just ordered the exact one I have because I know it works.  I want to order more but quick estimates show that buying these machines is only cheaper than Amazon's EC2 if I run them for 100 days straight, and I would really like to wrap up this little trillion-instance stunt by November.  Of course, then again, I get to keep the machines when I'm done.

So, I guess its on to the EC2 instances.  This is typically the stage where I discover the flaws of whatever algorithm I'm using, so I guess the fun is almost over.  Actually, no.  November is the deadline for creating the samples.  I'm not even talking about actually running them yet.

The Ghost in the Serif

So do, I warn you
I see things when I hold you
But I’ve whispered: "it’s alright"
It is you and me and a long night

You're a ghost in the doorway,
I can see through, but I hold tight,
I’ll just stay on holding until it hurts,
I just want you to know you're lovely

Kryptonite is an amazing song.  My band started playing it, and for once I'm doing the riffs and not just playing rhythm.  Something came over us--at least two of us--when we played that song.  I experience a pronounced, special sort of feeling of pure joy the first time I played a song with other people.  It was Gambler, and it was months ago with mostly the same people I play with now.  When we played Kryptonite together last practice, at just the moment the song started to mesh together, I experience that feeling all over again.  Some songs are more fun to listen to;  some songs are more fun to play.  Kryptonite is both.  And I can play the solo!  But no, back to "something came over us."  It was probably measurable empirically, because we noticed it while playing the next song, "I'm Just a Girl" by No Doubt.  Typically I have difficulty playing the riff up to tempo, but when we played it will all of the energy we had just after playing Kryptonite, something was very different.  I didn't have trouble with the riff at all--not until I started thinking about it.  My fingers were flying over the strings, and everything felt very...light to the touch.  It was as if previously I had been smacking trees with a bat, and now I was just tipping strands of grass over with a feather.  I've been excited before, but in this particular case I experience a marked improvement in my skills.  Oh, and so did our drummer.  Our vocalist and guitarist didn't say anything;  they probably thought we were crazy.

Doctor Who is a show that I am watching now.  Sometimes the faces of all the past lives flash on the screen.  Sometimes the faces of all the girls I've loved, or nearly loved, flash in my mind.  I have a new one to add to the list.  I have no ill will towards her--I hope that she goes on and has an amazing life and that everything she hopes for comes true;  I just wish it hadn't ended the way it did, and that I could have been a better boyfriend, and that I wouldn't feel the way I do now.  I realize, once again, probably, that feelings of sadness for that person don't completely go away.  They just become another ghost in the corner of your eye that you pretend you don't know is there.

My Research is at a standstill.  Actually its not, but it feels that way.  I'm not generating or solving 3-SAT instance right now.  I'm acquiring hardware and figuring out the most boring of details involved in generating a trillion instances.  I have been pretty hairbrained since my last post, going back and forth about which way to do it--my hardware? ec2? azure, since I work there?  Should I write another generator in Ruby so its easier to run in linux--oh wait, theres mono?   For now, I've settled on playing with a some new toys I bought for myself, and we're gonna see if I can get some generators running 24/7.  Then, I hope to investigate running a SAT generator on GPUs.  Then, once I have all that worked out, I'm going to start reading the existing SAT research.  Actually I already started, but I'm going to put effort into it.  All I know so far is c/v = 4.26 and something I don't understand about c = v^(3/2).  After that, when we get to the last 700 million instances or so, I'll spin up EC2 or Azure instances.  And then figure out a proof?  Or prove myself wrong.

[Edit]
Fun fact:  this post has been classified as "pornography" by the genius web filter installed in the offices of a certain large software company.

The Angels Have the Phone Box

What is the absolute most important thing to be concerned about when trying to prove P=NP?  Is it the rigor of your mathematical proof?  The soundness of your implementation?  The depth of your testing?  Is it the peers who review your work?  Your sample size?  No.  It is none of these things.  The absolute most important thing you need to worry about is making your implementation play the "Job's done!" clip from the video game Warcraft II [1] [2] [3] [4].

Now that...hey it just finished another batch!  Anyway, now that...now I forget what I was going to say in this paragraph.

Generating a million instances for a SAT instance with 16 variables (and running a brute-force solver to count the number of solutions for each one) took more than a day.  So, obviously ramping that up by a thousand is going to take years.  I don't want to be one of those guys that spends ten years on a hair-brained polynomial time algorithm to post on the internet and get laughed at.  I want to be the guy who spent slightly less than maybe a month on a hair-brained polynomial time algorithm to post on the internet.  Corollary:  I don't have a thousand computers.

I do have one desktop with 4 cores, an old desktop with fried video cards thanks to my bitcoin endeavours, an old eepc that was filled with viruses because of unprotected surfing, and an apple air that I bought to make working from home more productive shortly before finding a new job at possibly the only company on the planet where I am never going to be able to work from home on a computer made by apple.  Oooh!  There it goes again!

Anyway, ...once again I forget--oh right.  So one idea I have, partly thanks to my failed bitcoin experiments (never spend a thousand dollars on top of the line graphics cards that each require two power connectors and then try to save $40 on a cheap power supply two weeks before the bitcoin market crashes), is to write some cuda (or whatever) code and use some GPUs to do the work.  The difference between the CPU and GPU for bitcoin mining was incredible, and I believe that SAT could be equally paralellizable.  I would want to be personally, absolutely certain that I was right about this thing before doing that, though, because that is a lot of work an I'm lazy.


Anyway, I think I'm going to break down the trillion problems into four categories:

1. Breadth Testing:   Tiny problems (16ish variables) - SAT and UNSAT instances - c/v in [2.5,6.02] ?
2. Breadth Testing:   Small problems (20ish? variables) - UNSAT only - c/v in [3.26,5.26] ?
3. Targeted Testing:  Small problems, UNSAT only in [2.5,3.26] and SAT only in [4.26, something]
4.  Depth Testing:  Medium problem (50?  100?) at c/v = 4.26.  Skip brute force checks ahead of time.


Where c/v is clause to variable ratio.  Small and tiny problems will probaby have to be well under 30 variables, because that is when the time required for a simple brute force solver gets ridiculous.  Unless I utilize GPUs.

#3 might be the most useful.  Unless I'm an idiot, my algorithm is guaranteed to stay within O(n^10), and, in fact, can only reach n^10 IFF the instance is UNSAT.  The only danger is reaching a stage before then where the algorithm cannot continue.  I have a fuzzy idea in my head that it will never reach this point.  Solving a trillion instances would give enough credence to that fantasy to try to prove it.

The Trillion Instance Algorithm

"It was first suggested that a googolplex should be 1, followed by writing zeros until you got tired."

--Kasner and Newman

 

"And so it came to pass that Ryu, son of Dragon the Shogun, ascended the steps of the great Temple of The Real Projective Plane, and stared into the mobius vortex.  By surviving he earned the right to study with the Don, and learn his mathematics.  And when Ryu, son of the Dragon, left that temple he found the Don's mathematics more powerful than the math of any warrior he encountered, and Ryu laid waste to the land, for in the vortex he had lost his sanity, and for the rest of his life the drum beats in his mind never ceased."

Yeah, anyway.  After scribbling on enough paper to kill a few trees (not that it matters) I came up with a 3-SAT algorithm, and coded it in two days.  This time I am certain that the upper bound is O( n ^ 10 ) but uncertain that it will solve all 3-SAT instances.  With this algorithm, there is no risk of it exceeding the upper bound; it will simply get stuck and sit down in the sand and cry boolean tears.

Obviously,  since programming is, to me, more fun than mathematical proofs, my next instinct was to think about simply solving every 3-SAT algorithm in existence.  I tried calculating an upper bound on the number of 3 sat instances that could exist.  For a problem of 20 variables, the number of possible instances that can exist is a number with hundreds of decimal places.  This might be the first time I've noticed a finite set of things that could not be adequately described by the word fuckload.  Maybe a...oh wow there are actually words that go that high.  So, its less than a centillion, however so much more than a vintigillion that its not even worth comparing.

Anyway.  I don't have the hard drive space to store that many instances, and lets not even talk about the issue with duplicates.

Instead, I am making it my goal to solve a trillion instances with my new algorithm, which doesn't even have a name (other than "Algorithm.cs") because I've just given up naming these things.  All it takes is one boring meeting and another 3-SAT algorithm pops into my head.

Anyway, once I solve a trillion instances...I suppose I would take it more seriously and do the actual legwork to create a proof.  Although, I am much more a fan of this model:

1. Solve one trillion instances
2.  ...
3. Prove P=NP !

Step 2 is actually the same exact step in the standard startup business model:

1.  Cool idea
2.  ...
3. Profit!

So I know I'm not that crazy.  Whatever the case, it's nice to have a distraction.

I'm pretty sure I write a post like this every time I think I've gained traction with one of my 3-SAT ideas.  I'm pretty sure of this because when I was calculated the total number of possible instances, I remembered how to do it because I did it before, and I remembered how I wrote about it last time.  So, welcome to recycled content.

Day 2 of Recovery

Thanks to a certain jackass I disabled access to this blog to everyone but me.  Then I realized that I had given the link to my "In Seattle, the Ducks Ride You" post to a paralegal that is drafting a deposition (fuck, even that makes me miss my ex-gf!) for use in a legal case against the duck fuckers.

In case this person needs to review the entry for factual accuracy, I am re-allowing access until the deposition is ready and signed.

After that, I don't know.  I'd like to write some custom blog software that blocks access to people who both have Seattle IP addresses and don't know how to use proxies, but I don't know how I would handle mobile phones, and I am trying to concentrate on learning C# as I ramp up on projects at my new job at Bikrosoft.

Part of the reason that my now ex-girlfriend and I are splitting is that I am unable to provide an adequate amount of emotional affection.  Affectation might be the best I can do.  Maybe I am like The Doctor...maybe I should just search for some kind of female companion and forget about all this romantic nonsense.

At this point, it seems possible that our relationship could be saved, if I insisted on meeting with her and hashing everything out and promising to make real changes...tell her she is beautiful more frequently, etc.  I can't figure out if it is the right choice or not.  I want to live with no regrets, but I don't know if I will regret getting back together, or letting her slip through my fingers.  Maybe I would regret either, and there is no easy answer.

I wish that I could edit my own brain and disable loneliness, love, longing...really all of the L emotions.  Probably take out sadness while I'm at it.

Stark's Legacy

 This post is about 3-sat! Yay!!!!

To quote wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-SAT#3-satisfiability

3-satisfiability is a special case of k-satisfiability.  Oh.  Who knew?  K = 3.  This is one of Karp's 21 NP-Complete problems?  What is NP-Complete?  Glad you asked.  But first, more from wikipedia:

There are two classes of high-performance algorithms for solving instances of SAT in practice: the conflict-driven clause learning algorithm, which can be viewed as a modern variant of the DPLL algorithm (well known implementation include Chaff, GRASP) and stochastic local search algorithms, such as WalkSAT.

A DPLL SAT solver employs a systematic backtracking search procedure to explore the (exponentially sized) space of variable assignments looking for satisfying assignments. The basic search procedure was proposed in two seminal papers in the early 60s (see references below) and is now commonly referred to as the Davis–Putnam–Logemann–Loveland algorithm ("DPLL" or "DLL"). Theoretically, exponential lower bounds have been proved for the DPLL family of algorithms.

In contrast, randomized algorithms like the PPSZ algorithm by Paturi, Pudlak, Saks, and Zani set variables in a random order according to some heuristics, for example

It feels like something has been ripped out, and I am bleeding off into some dimension I can't see.  I know that this type of wound closes on its own eventually, but until then, it feels like someone has hung a heavy garment bag on my soul, and I am restless...unable to think or focus on any one thing for too long.  I dread going to my job tomorrow because I'm going to face it without her random chats to brighten my day.

A long time ago, I spotted a book called Game of Thrones in the airport bookstore, and ended up hating it, only to find that one of my friends absolutely loves this book.  I did everything I could to rain on his parade, everything I could to ruin it for the billions of people on this planet that needed to be saved from what appeared to be some new and daring form of literature but was actually just a soap opera written to be marketable.  But I digress.

Ostensibly in response to my hatred of this book, this friend of mine revealed to my girlfriend the secretly public location of this very blog.  The security of this blog is based on preventing people in Seattle from reading it, mostly by doing silly things to keep the posts out of relevant search indexes.

At the time I thought nothing of it, and was already planning my next response:  waiting for the last Game of Thrones book to be released, staying up all night to read it and take notes on the major plot twists, and then flying across the country and renting a generator and large speakers and blasting my friends house with a speech revealing the ending of the last book.  I figured that kind of response was on the same level.

Then my girlfriend read my blog, focusing specifically on the parts about her.  I was not prepared for a real problem to occur here.  At first, my sarcasm and use of negative words as compliments infuriated her.  Then, she read a post that cut far deeper, right down to a existing fissure in our relationship.  The actual post was something that, if part of a scrubs episode, would have been a sudden plot development that becomes a major but surmountable set back that ultimately leaves J.D. still dating the girl.  In real life, though, things are different.


While I watched my close college friend get married in an elaborate catholic wedding, my girlfriend was crying, alone, in the hotel room.  A few days later we broke up as she dropped me off at my apartment.

The suffocating feeling that is like a vice squeezing the life out of your heart has actually gone away, mostly, and in its wake is nothing but the dull emptiness that lingers after every girl disappears.

Perhaps expecting this to happen, and preventing myself from getting to emotionally attached, became a self fulfilling prophecy.  Perhaps its true that we really weren't compatible.  Whatever the case, I cannot even begin to put into words all of the things I am going to miss about her, and the thing that hurts the most is knowing that it was my carelessness that hurt her.

Unfortunately, its just another noir ending.  Here's looking at you, kid.

Life Goals Update

5.  Possibly get into game development.  Maybe.

Transition

Recently, I changed jobs.

In order to protect my ability to say whatever the hell I want without consequences, I'm going to cleverly disguise the identities of the companies.  Lets just call them Flabazon and Bikesoft.

I showed up at Flabazon thinking everyone was a genius.  I was thrust into a complicated software migration, not yet knowing that was a way of life in that department, and found out that my team has an "on call" that is always dealing with problems, and who gets woken up in the middle of the night by a pager.  And sometimes the entire team needs to help.  Then I was introduced into a complicated build system with the terrible property that any time one of its tendrils touched your project, nothing would work until you completely integrated your shit with the entire build system.  I spent years developing the skills to fight that battle.  Working at home was extremely difficult.  It took a lot of investigative work, charming the IT department, and buying a $1000 laptop from Apple to get a situation where I could work from home effectively.  In three years I never managed to get email on my phone or even be able to respond to pages on my phone.  Work was so boring I spent considerable portions attempting to find a polynomial-time solution to 3-SAT, just to keep my brain from dying.  I should have been programming regularly, but work was so tedious that by the time I got home I didn't have the mental capacity to work on side projects.  Also, the team that I was on was largely responsible for a business-logic level codebase, and for fixing other people's problems.  Management came down hard on us because other people were not fixing their problems.  The "other people" I refer to were often in other organisations and, knowing that we lacked leverage, completely ignored us and our escalations.  I doodled through meetings, fought to hide my disdain for our position because I knew my brand new manager would chide me later.  One of the things that my brand new manager told me was a business version of the alignment chart, where on the bottom you have people that lack ability, and on the top you have people have have ability.  On the left you have people unwilling to learn, and on the right you have people willing to learn.  He told me I was top-left:  I had ability, but I was unwilling to learn.  He talked as if this was supposed to be some kind of revelation to me.  After being shoved off on the losing side of a team split because I happened to be familiar with some bullshit, I had actually spent the last least 2 years doing my best to remain strategically ignorant of all of the moldy, rotting systems I hated; I was sad only that I'd been caught.  Flabazon's performance management system turned out to be different than what they presented at first...their "career management" sessions were really just masturbatory self-flattery that obscured the true machinery of the business until I got my foot stuck in it and couldn't move teams.

Then I left Flabazon and got a job at Bikesoft.  At Bikesoft, my team owns platform level code.  Platform level is the opposite of business-logic in that it doesn't suck and make you want to kill yourself.  At Bikesoft, my primary job will actually be writing code, and adding features.  In three and a half years at Flabazon I spent one month actually adding features to something.  Now I will be doing it all the time!  At Bikesoft, I am not a member of an unloved team with a revolving door of managers.  My team has no "on call" and no pager duty.  No one acts like you are committing a mortal sin for desiring to not be on call.  On my first fucking day in the office, I had corporate email and calendar on my personal fucking android phone.  It was painless, and took five minutes.  Five minutes is 0.000643% of three and a half years.  I don't know much about Bikesoft's build system, but it doesn't suck, and I've never really liked Bikesoft's software anyway, so I just gave in to everything and used it without complaining.  The department I'm in functions much like a start up.  My manager's manager told me, up front, before I checked in a single line of code, how their performance managment and promotion system actually works, so that I can make good decisions.  Also I have my own office.  I can close the door, and I'm actually not bothered by anyone.  And I worked all day.  All day.  Like 9am to 8pm, and I still had energy left over.  Also, Bikesoft is not super-fucking-cheap ("frugal") about everything.  I have a computer that is actually powerful enough to do things like run software, and I have my own fucking office.  At Flabazon, even the president of the United States has to share an office with someone.

I am certain that I will become frustrated and jaded about many, many things at Bikesoft.  However, so far is looks like whatever my future frustrations will be, they will be new and completely different.

And this time, I know how to play the game.

Whatevs

Wedding.

New job.

Portal 2 with girlfriend.

Books I should probably read

Website that makes me feel like the genius product of two superhuman uber geniuses

Life Goals

1. Come up with an easy way to meet people, including, this time, people that are not girls.  The psychological marginal cost of any particular night needs to be effortless.

2. Create income streams that are independent of my day job.

3.  Excel at my day job

4.  At some point in my life, own an Ocelot.

Get Spotify without Facebook

Facebook is a service that I joined and continue to tolerate because girls use it.  Since becoming a member I watched the site become public to non-college students that I didn't want to interact with, and then I watched redesign after redesign make everything less private while facebook tried to reach its tentacles into ever area of your life in an effort to turn you into a better advertising target.  I remember a change they made to your "interests" category where every interest you had must be linked to a "page."  My first interest listed was "girls" and unfortunately the page that ended up linking to...well facebook had a completely different idea in mind about what I meant by that, and I ended up leaving my interests blank.  I ended up removing most of my private information and started offending people like close relatives by refusing to be their facebook friend.

I was able to maintain this careful balance between keeping my personal information safe and not looking like one of those privacy weirdos.  When I noticed that the facebook app on my phone wanted access to my GPS location I quietly stopped using it.  The damn thing crashed every 2 minutes anyway.

This balance was threatened when the people in my band decided that we needed to use some service called Spotify to organize lists of songs that we wanted to play.  What is spotify?  I don't know because it won't let you sign up unless you integrate it with your facebook account.  In a perfect world a statement like this wouldn't need explanation, but since it does, I would just say that in general it is bad when two parties you deal with trade information about you behind your back.  Anyway, I'm getting bored with this post, so if any of you want to use spotify, here is a handy link:


http://www.spotidj.com/blog/how-to-get-spotify-without-facebook/


[Edit]
Ok the german proxy is not working... :(

This proxy did work though:

http://www.4proxy.de/

I made it through the initial registration.  When I selected the free subscription, clicking next returned me to the same page.  However, I was able to go to the US site and log in!  Fuck you Spotify, and Fuck you Facebook.

An Essay on the Weak Points of Sobriety Checkpoints

The theme music for this post is provided by Walk the Moon - Anna Sun.

Ever since I was legally able to both drink and drive I have striven to never mix the two, ever.  Strategies like one-drink-per hour, or not drinking at all and enduring people whining at me (seriously, people who are drinking has the most deep seated insecurities I've ever seen when someone near them doesn't drink with them) were the bread and butter of my compliance with the law.  My opinion of sobriety checkpoints was one of cheerful compliance since I figured mere innocence was enough to protect me.  It was the same line of thinking that leads idiots to question a person's use of the 5th amendment.

All of that changed when a cop pulled me over and gave me a sobriety test while I was completely sober.  And then, tonight, a youtube spree that began with my girlfriend sending me this somehow landed me on this crazy story.  If you want to know more, your google keywords are "Couple Arrested For Asking Directions" although there is little information in the first page of google results (all I ever read) to follow up, corroborate, or cast doubt on the poor couples story.  I had a friend with a similar experience in Camden, New Jersey, though so the only thing I question is whether the Baltimore cops are just as--I'm not going to finish that sentence.  Anyway, one thing led to another and I found this surprising piece, and, well one thing led to another a second time and suddenly I was reading instructional PDFs for law enforcement agencies performing field sobriety tests, looking for weaknesses. I found one.

The rest of this post--actually this entire post--is written in the context of brainstorming possible elements of works of fiction which feature vigilantes performing illegal acts which vehicles.  Nothing written here has any connection with what anyone might do or have done in real life.

Being sober is not the magic bullet:  if you read the single-glass-of-wine story, the comparison between the sober woman's account of the bullshit tests, and the officers written account of the bullshit tests vary widely.  This makes me concerned that no matter how sober you are, the officer performing the test might decide to fail you anyway.

Quick tip:  verify which section of the alphabet they want repeated using alpha bravo codes.  For example, if he says "start at D and go to S" then you can say "Ok I'm going to start at delta and end at sierra."  Then the cop will probably be all like "NO I SAID S!  S AS IN XYLOPHONE!" and then mark down that you were being belligerent and argumentative, but at least you can rest assured that there was no confusion about which letters of the alphabet you're doing.  If there is one thing--only one thing--I remember from learning to fly, it is how to be damn clear about letters of the alphabet.  But I digress.

The best weaknesses I can find with sobriety checkpoints lie in the chase cars.  As anyone who thinks and reads about this as much as I do probably already knows, setting up a sobriety checkpoint requires a careful balance between the manpower required and the amount of traffic expected.  They are optimizing for a certain expectation of human behavior.  If you change the human behavior on a large enough scale, well, the sobriety checkpoint will experience the same scaling problems as a Large Online Retailer server that gets hit by an unexpected call pattern and tanks.

The chase cars are for catching people that try to avoid the checkpoint.  The manual I just read makes it sound like there might be some kind of obligation for the police to put up a sign warning of the checkpoint in a place where you can legally turn off.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that cops typically do the exact opposite of that.  Whatever the case, these guys aren't clowning around.  Cars, or perhaps motorcycles, are specifically designated for chasing people that wish to avoid the checkpoints.  This is where things get interesting.

Because certain cops are on chase duty while the others are busy bothering people, what we formerly thought was one resource (X cops at the checkpoint) is now two or more resources (X chase cops, Y sobriety cops, Z traffic-directing cops).  Based on the instructions I'm reading, it sounds like either it would be difficult to shift resources between roles, or switching resources between roles would cause immediate impairment of the service.

The weak link here is that the police are not expecting many people to avoid the checkpoint, because most people actually don't, which means that few cops will be allocated to the X category, and it will be easy to deplete that resource.

Depleting the X resource, unfortunately, cannot be done by one man.  However, if a critical percentage of drivers, perhaps somewhere around 30%, all avoided the checkpoint by doing an immediate (likely illegal) U-turn when the flashy lights of the checkpoint come into view, that would immediately deplete resource X.  This would mean that all of the chase cops would be busy chasing the cars that are turning around.  One possible outcome is that they simply run out of chase cars, and anyone can get out of the checkpoint simply by performing a casual U-turn and casual speed-limited getaway cruise.  Other outcomes involve officers being shifted from other duties.  This would lead to traffic backing up, or to a high number of cars making it through without being checked.  Both of these scenarios cause the checkpoint to fail.

So that's it, folks.  The optimal move we as citizens can make at a sobriety checkpoint is to drive until it is visible and then do a casual U-turn.  The downsides of this are that it only works if everyone does it, and you have to be willing to take the hit of an illegal-U-turn ticket, so there might be some tragedy-of-the-commons issues.  I'm going to refer to the brave citizens performing the casual U-turn as "ninjas."

The effectiveness of individual ninjas can be increased by increasing the amount of time every cop must spend chasing them down.  The goal here is to maximize wasted time and minimize damage to yourself, so an outright chase is not advised.  The first opportune time to drag out the event is when they first signal you to pull over.  Take your sweet time finding a safe spot, preferably wait until a public parking lot is available.  Drawing out the "interview" is ill advised because the cops probably have more experience than you in that situation and as always, it is best to literally say nothing to them.  Instead, the second opportunity can be accomplished when they ask for your documentation.  Cops don't always ask for both your insurance and registration, but they usually ask for at least one, and that is the best time to grab all of the papers in your glove compartment and go through them in a painstakingly slow manner.

Remember, though, all of this only matters with the first cop who pulls you over immediately after you evaded the checkpoint.  That is the chase cop.  That is the cop whose time you must waste.  If they switch off, and a second cop arrives to do the part where they try and incriminate you for drinking, its probably not worth it to try to waste his time.  Just fall back to your typical sobriety defense...namely being sober and not talking to them.

Ambitious ninjas could optionally drive for as long as possible under the speed limit while the cop is following them.  I was in a car with a girl who did this by accident; somehow neither of us noticed the flashy lights for a number of miles and the cop never turned on the siren.  He was super pissed, but the girl, who was crying, did not receive an extra citation for not pulling over fast enough.  Come to think of it...most of my pulling-over experience with that girl and all the times she got pulled over for allegedly speeding even though I, even as a passenger, thought she was driving slow.  Anyway.

Oh shit...I hope this would go without saying...like I shouldn't even need to write it...like if this next part is a revelation to you, you should never do this...and you're probably too dumb to drive at all:  don't give the cops any kind of clue, at all, that you are deliberately trying to waste their time.  Also, don't give them any kind of explanation about why you did a U-turn.  Literally, don't answer questions, unless they are asking about the location and status of your cars registration.  I really hope this paragraph was not news to anybody.

Also just...stay the hell away from D.C.  And Oregon.  And New Jersey.  And Baltimore, I guess.

Also, my second ticket that I got during vacation was done with a laser.  So all of my daydreaming about fancy radar devices is for naught.  Fucking lasers.  I can't come up with a...oh hello.  Apparently there are countermeasures.  Probably highly illegal.  I did just find this forum.  You know...its times like this that I wish I could just marry the internet.

Oh ok these things are called laser jammers.  I have some reading to do.

See also http://www.laserjammertests.com/


[Edit]
HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA.


[Edit]
http://waspeedingtickets.com/how-to-hire-us/