Wishlisting

I am slightly crazy about a few bits and pieces of computer hardware at the moment.  I think it is the effect of having zero spare dollars.  A local cunning weasel cracked our wireless network and used half or more our 12GB of 3G mobile broadband allowance in the first week. We have week to go and are $110 over. I feel a little like Ron Burgundy when Baxter ate an entire wheel of cheese.  'You got that much downloaded from our Vodafone? I'm not even mad. That's amazing.'

Kogan WQHD IPS monitor $400
AMD Radeon HD 7750 ($125 for passive cooling) or 7850 ($210) with 'Never Settle' bundled copies of BioShock Infinite and another game ($100 value).
Bluray drive $60.
8 GB ram kit $65
Cm hyper 212 eco cooler ($35)
Discount Am3+ mobo for upgrade ability if/when AMD gets Steamroller sorted out for high precessing power and lower power consumption. ($29) This would retain PCI slots for my TV tuner card, and is slightly more power efficient. I'm worried PCI slots may disappear altogether in a few years.

I'd like to get a seasonic or viewsonic platinum low noise 400W power supply, but they are $200 and even on 100% use, the saving above my bronze (noisy) earthwatts is like $20 a year.

Free upgrades / changes in the pipeline:
-I think I've got mythtv shutting itself down and starting up in time to record shows, fingers crossed.  Saves power and also makes you stop and think about whether you really want the TV on. Fingers crossed.

-Phoronix reported that full decode on AMD hardware support was available through the vdpau interface. When that's in fglrx, I can probably switch to onboard hd 4200 video. Then I can get rid of my nvidia gt210, freeing the pcie slot it is in, and a neighbouring PCI slot which can take an old single tuner card I have.  This would give us the upper hand in the broadcast channels' ongoing campaign to put the weeks good TV on the same hour or two of the same night.

Strange projects I've completed

Going through old PC hardware I found this Geforce FX5600 video card, for which I made a standoff block of solid aluminium to for a silent peltier-based cooler.  Looks awful, but I ran like that for several years.

Mailing it in

Here's two real Georgia juleps, prepared quite late in the peach season.

Recipe:
2 bourbon
2 peach juice (I had infused the bourbon)
Muddled mint
Lots of crushed ice
(Brown sugar to sweeten if your peach doesn't cut it.)

Serve in a pewter mug.

Photo from the Nexus 4 I'm using now.

What to think about everything, or 'Life is NP-Hard'

This post was entitled 'What to think about everything', and waiting in my drafts.  Naturally I got excited, but it turns out that it was not populated. I've no idea what I would have said, but anyway...

The world is a place full of entities and possibilities, because its always developing through time.  The brain is nature's way of keeping the world's tendencies to kill your genes from developing into actualities.  The mind is the brains way of keeping the brain's tendencies to kill you from developing into actualities.

The brain is solving the problem of Abduction - relating a schema of the super-sensible to a limited observation of a reality in motion is an NP-hard problem (C.S. Pierce first showed that thinking depends on abduction; there are a variety of papers on it but Bylander et al 'The Computational Complexity of Abduction' 1991 is pretty good). NP-hard in a large world means that you can't solve it fully in a reasonable amount of time*, unless you can reduce by orders of magnitude the number of involved entities by:

• lumping up sensations into objects which are cleanly defined by not being other objects, excluding them from their space.  Sensations denote limbs and a body which is really just one bear that can be treated as a point, in relation to the question of what to do next.
• expecting repetition of familiar scenarios.  Run away.
• importantly, being set up to be pretty darn insensitive to things that don't matter, like 'what if this bear just a regular cuddlepie who are not out to kill us?' meh. No one cares about that. Assume everyone's out to kill us, especially people who look like they don't have our genes.
• Being sensitive to generalisation logic, to reasoning with representations rather than imagining entire entities.  I really like Lukacs Kaiser's paper on building a logic detector and solver for tic-tac-toe, connect-four and other simple games. It shows the potential power for symbolic reasoning to play games, and I think games, narrative and dynamic logic are going to get unified pretty thoroughly pretty soon.
• Letting a really simple brain (the emotions) cooperate with you and run the mechanics of the limbic system and what not, and even take over entirely at times, causing you to punch people, cry, or start a blog.
• Making contingent decisions and commitments that will be modified soon.

Over time, the disintegrated solvers get fine-tuned to my environment and it becomes possible for them to be more and more integrated.  For me at least, many of those integrations didn't come up with more than a fractious truce.  My emotions are kept at arms length a lot of the time, and I don't feel very much, and I don't imagine how something would feel for myself in the future or another person in the present all that well.  My reasoning has not been very purposive - I hardly plan, am often unproductive, and get motivated about weirdly small things, and deeply dejected about normal size things, like having a job and a few extra-curricular commitments. (To illustrate agonizing about the very small, I spent a number of hours agonizing about buying a couple of computer components totalling about $30 which I don't need.  They were heavily marked down.  But I couldn't (or didn't try to) imagine a me in the future who just didn't care that he didn't have them, or a me who did but was disappointed, or a me who suddenly saw what that $30 could have gone toward.  I stalled in the emotional desiring and the super-ego's denial.)  My reasoning is also unmotivated by anything except deeply personal felt trouble.  The mere promise of approval and acceptance, of satisfaction in a job done (whether well, or medium) moves me very little, unless the job is immediately in front of me.

I've been reading 'The mindful way through depression' by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He points to a similar phenomenon in depression, of using the reasoning ('doing') executive brain parts in fruitless wars against desire; in inquisitions against feelings of disappointment or remembered shame; and (I suspect this in my case very much) in abdicating to the emotions when pressed to work hard at something that doesn't seem immediately personally relevant (item 0 -> coaching the emotional brain into useful contribution by putting the right prompting and questions to it).

These two (and other faculties of body and mind) are me.**

*Well, we can't at the moment. Some problems that are NP-hard have no conventional (Turing/von Neumann etc) computing algorithm that completes in polytime, but Shor's algorithm is a famous example that means a quantum computer could complete it in polytime.

** The recent PEL podcast on Lacan suggested that this unification of the divided subject, taking responsibility for all the internality (however it was produced. Mostly made of externality (cultured stuff)) was the goal of psychoanalysis.  This is a Pennebaker Essay on how I overcame the major psychic division and became cheerful, emotionally alert and productive. 

300*

Well, my 300th post after a long delay.

My first 299 have been a model of idiosyncratic self-service.  If you weren't bored by the philosophy, I bored you with screenwriting. If you thought those were interesting, I digressed into politics, or computer hardware. And the religiousness - either too christian or not christian at all.  This post, after a six month silence, is another example, entirely self-referential.

I haven't been able to alienate my whole audience, but I have been able to alienate a lot.**

* Movie title reference
** Homer Simpson reference.

This place feels expensive...*

SFB is coming to you live from a new-bought laptop.  It's an Asus U36SG-RX138SS.  These were new perhaps 12 months ago, and are now being cleared out at a discount to make room for the next gen of ultrabooks.  I considered some other options, but concluded I would save some money - partly because we are getting the house re-stumped and it keeps getting more expensive (there were some concrete stumps in place on the only exposed side, so I thought it likely it had been professionally restumped, which would mean all the stumps were done.  But no, after the restumpers dug around it turned out that almost all the stumps were still the original 1930 red gum. Shenanigans.)


Intel core i5 - 2430M (2.4GHz up to 3+GHz with 'turbo-boost')
750GB HDD with ~4GB of NAND Flash as cache, which means some things are supposed to be fast and low power. It has seemed extremely fast.
8cell, 83 Whr battery, claimed good for 10hrs, in reality good for 5+ hrs.
1.7kg - nice and light.
White - actually incredibly similar to my previous laptop that died in colour, although the new surface coating doesn't mark as easily.
3 USB ports, VGA and HDMI, gigabit LAN, a SD/MMC card reader.
Allegedly it gets hot when gaming,but its nothing compared to my old ASUS laptop.
Bundled with a USB DVD burner & Home&Student Office
Screen is 13.3" 1376 * 768, but really poor - noticeably grainy. The illuminated space of each pixel is isolated - you can see the fine pattern of the grid, and the 'gamma' changes wildly with viewing angle.
The touchpad has some multitouch and I'm getting used to it.

$800 from MSY. My last laptop (in addition to being this colour, rather light, and prone to overheating to the point that I remember swearing to buy Apple next) was also bought somewhat reduced as it was superceded.  Here is a very good review.

I don't have buyers remorse, but I am reminded of a pair of proverbs that used to be translated:
If a fool persists in his folly he will become wise.
Though a fool persists in his folly, he will never become wise.

* Homer Simpson reference

Denominations

Whose likeness is on the coin?

I would be interested to know if the government could administer all electronic financial transactions - or at least the infrastructure. People like financial advisers, banks and credit unions could repackage the wholesale credit, but switching from one bank to another would be close to free because it would just change one or two fields in a common data set.*

If the government controlled the electronic and cash infrastructure, it would be more feasible to reduce the fungibility of cash (if you wanted to). You could have a dole moneykind that worked for healthy food and drink, for heating and electricity bills, and for modest internet - enough to do text things like read, write and learn. You could have other moneykinds for objects of addiction, like technology. Or perhaps the moneykinds should be more and more fungible - the most desired work earns the most versatile money, basic non-destructiveness is compensated with basic necessities. The careful contracting of lending and the 'capital controls' and food vouchers instead of cash are all examples of where restrictions on how money can be used could be useful. But I'm not sure this is even an idea.

* we could call it the National... well the Commonwealth... well, we could call it something.

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