we been unable to do anything about this unholy alliance, largely because of our widely differing views on the proper nature and scope of government, the trade-off between personal freedoms and collective responsibility, and the ways the government should control the market – or even if the government should control it at all.

so, although we all agree that the axis of avarice must be stopped, we disagree wildly on how to stop it.  instead of using our collective might to break apart this incestuous marriage between political power and financial destruction, we are fighting each other over the values we hold dear.

if we are to work together, we must find common ground.  with that in mind, i propose a simple change that i believe would have a powerful impact:

all members of congress, the board of governors of the federal reserve, and the president’s cabinet  permanently give up their right to privacy, in all aspects of their lives.

the government has decided it can track our locations, tap our phones, read our emails, monitor our internet access, and snoop into our library records if it deems necessary.

they have decided that we can keep no secrets from them, and so we must decide that they can keep no secrets from us.

if you seek power over your fellow citizens, then every word you speak, write, or type, every dollar you spend, and every move you make while you have that power will immediately be made public.

if we are going to pay armed men to protect you from us, then we will record you at all times, to protect us from you.

if you claim that your privacy is too high a price to pay, then we have no reason to trust you – because there are plenty of us who would gladly pay that price for the honor and privilege of serving our country.

if you are unwilling to live under total public scrutiny in order to prove your total loyalty to our country,  why should we allow you to send our soldiers to die for it?

i used to be incredibly uncomfortable with this concept myself, and it too me a very long time to accept it and then appreciate how hard it is for people whose sexual preferences differ from the ones our society says are normal. i think a big reason it took me so long to come around was the fact that i was constantly told by gay rights supporters that i was a bigot, that i was afraid of gay people, or worse. i understand now that i wasn’t afraid of gay people – i was afraid of the possibility that i might be among their number, so much so that i would refuse to consider this a possibility.

now, anyone who knows me well is aware that i am kind of really attracted to women. probably moreso than is healthy, but i’m working on that…

anyhow, i’ve come to realize, in the past six months or so, that i’m also attracted to men on occasion. most of the internal debate over whether i should post this was about whether i was really comfortable with announcing this to the entire world, when i’m still trying to make sense of it to myself. in the end, though, i figured i had told some people, but not others, and that a lot of people i told might have been confused or had their doubts because i haven’t really talked about it much outside of certain circles.

the first time i became convinced that i was into guys was this spring. i was incredibly manic at the time, though, and when the mania subsided, so did the certainty that i had about my new-found sexual identity.

it resurfaced a bit in june – again during a manic episode – and then went away again after i calmed down and came back to reality. i have come to realize, after a lot of therapy, introspection, and meditation – especially during all the time i spent alone in kiev – that the intensely convincing (and usually wildly sexual) psychoses i can experience during manic episodes are the result of different parts of who i am ‘fighting it out’ with each other, trying to establish a sense of peace with one another.

for years, i really didn’t like a lot of the parts of who i was. i’ve always been very impulsive, which has gotten me into trouble on more than a few occasions. i hated myself for not being able to think through the possible implications of what i felt the strongest instinctive urge to do before i did it, instead of simply being convinced i was choosing the right course of action. i’ve always been wildly emotionally erratic, which has had me seriously considering, planning, or attempting suicide more times than i’d care to talk about. i hated myself for being too weak to deal with my emotions the same way everybody else seemed to be able to.

when the psyhcoses started getting more and more intense, i grew to hate the part of my mind that caused them more than anything else. they gradually moved from ‘i can save the world if it starts to get too bad’ to ‘i am communicating directly with the entire universe via my intuition and impulses’ to ‘i am going to cause the singularity by starting a spontaneous dance party in the streets, which will lead to a public orgy, and when everybody climaxes simultaneously, the resulting brain wave frequencies emitted will trigger a massive standing electromagnetic wave in the earth’s atmosphere, acting as a carrier frequency for all of the waves emitted by all sentient beings on the planet, and causing a global subconsciousness to wake up from its slumber. somehow this is connected to math, music, dna, recursive self reference, and zen buddhism. also, i’m going to do this RIGHT NOW!’

the more intense the psychoses became, the more convincing they were. i had auditory hallucinations whenever i heard white noise – which is all over the place – when you tear a sheet of paper, that ripping sound is white noise. when it rains heavily, that pouring sound is white noise. when you hear static on the radio, that is white noise. even the sound of urine tinkling in the toilet bowl as you pee is white noise – and for some reason that was usually the noise that i found most convincing. i was even convinced i could hear the noise of air molecules bumping into each other at random, and that in all of this noise were the voices of my friends and family, all telling me that they loved me and cared about me and that things in the world were going to be ok because i would make it all better.

when my logical mind would try to counter these thoughts by insisting that events like an orgy-induced electromagnetic atmospheric standing wave were impossible, the intuitive parts of my mind came up with physics-based explanations for how they could happen. the scariest part of all the psychoses was when i’d do so some research online to convince myself that what they were suggesting was impossible.  i almost always found that the explanations were within the realm of plausibility, but very difficult to test. for example, i looked up the possiblity of a standing electromagentic wave in the earth’s atmosphere, and learned about the schumman resonances – standing electromagentic waves in the earth’s atmosphere, with frequencies predominately between 3 and 60 hz  - the same frequency range as the waves emitted by our brains in various states.

so for months, i alternated between two wildly different thinking patterns. sometimes,  i was a prophet whose purpose was to save the world from destroying itself by triggering the singularity and uniting all minds to a single consciousness, so that we would realize that we are all the same and stop fighting each other so much.  other times, i was gradually losing my grip on my sanity and would eventually become one of the homeless people i walked by every day, covered in the stench of my own urine.

going to kiev and spending a lot of time alone in a new place, while starting to get into the groove of things at my new role as cto of a gaming startup – which was basically fulfilling a dream i’ve had my whole life – i started to make sense of things a lot better, with the help of a lot of meditation and therapy. i understand now that these psychoses were the parts of my mind that felt terrified of the world, constantly alone, and powerless to stop what i saw (and still see) as a worsening geopolitical and economic climate. when they realized that telling me i could make things better improved my mood and gave me hope for a bit, these parts of my mind started suggesting such things whenever i felt depressed, which was quite often. because i hated them for doing this, they felt more terrified, more alone, and more powerless – so they increased the frequency and intensity of their suggestions.

when i finally came to understand what was going on, i started talking to them whenever they made these suggestions to me. they answered back, not in words, but in feelings and intuitive notions.  they confirmed my understanding, and i explained to them why what they were doing wasn’t helping and promised to listen to them more in the future, and to comfort them with love instead of getting angry at them for trying to help me.  i also insisted that i would now see all of their suggestions about me being secretly omnipotent and unaware of the fact as coming from a place of fear and loneliness, instead of coming from the universe as a whole. i explained that doing so would prevent those thoughts from making me feel better, and allow me to address the fear and loneliness directly instead of running from it.  as a result of those conversations, the thoughts of omnipotence have largely stopped, and when they do occur, i am neither persuaded by them, nor upset by them – i simply observe them for what they are and take the action necessary to comfort the part of me that is generating those thoughts.

with this new understanding of what was causing my psychoses, i went back and revisited my memories of being incredibly manic, and things really started to make sense.  to this day, i am still unsure exactly which things i experienced were real, but misinterpreted by my mind as having incredible significance, and which things were simply hallucinations.  the feelings of attraction to men, which only seemed to surface when i was manic, seemed to be coming from a place of desiring to be protected and saved from the dangerous and scary things in the world.  i realized that the only men i’d been attracted to were older, seemed a lot wiser, and made a lot more money than me.  i figured that the only reason these feelings ‘came out’ when i was manic was due largely to the fact that i knew i had never had the same desires and sensations about guys that i did about girls i was attracted to.  because i was under the impression that being attracted to a person would always feel the same regardless of their gender, i never considered that i was into guys, until my desire and yearning for protection and wisdom from someone stronger and more experienced than myself came out in full force.

so … yeah… to sum it all up, i understand now that i am bisexual,  and that i didn’t understand this for so long because my attraction to men is very different from my attraction to women. if this bothers or upsets you, please know that i have no intention of doing either of those things.  instead of feeling angry or upset, i suggest that you have a conversation with the parts of yourself that are bothered or upset by knowing that i am who i am. ask them why they are upset, and what you can do to make them feel better. chances are, by doing so, you will improve your emotional well being significantly; you might even heal some emotional suffering that you never realized you were going through.

tl;dr: i have come to realize in recency, among other things, that i am bisexual. i am telling you not to make you feel uncomfortable or upset, but because i know a lot of people are aware that i’ve been going through some rough stuff lately, and i wanted to let you all know that i am doing much better as a result of understanding and accepting all of who i am.

• It should be incredibly simple to use. No Microsoft-Style function names like LogMessageAndTimeStampToFileRightNowPleaseThanks.
Python makes this goal easy to accomplish with decorators; just slap a @LogThatShit("INFO")onto functions that you’re interested in, and you can call it a day.
• It should be performant. This may not seem like it matters much, but it’s important because the less of a performance impact your logging system has, the more extensively people will use it, and thus the more information you will have when something goes wrong and you’re shipping three hundred five ounce packages of spaghetti sauce to Siberia every minute.  Ideally, this means you are asynchronously firing off your logging messages over a socket to a logging aggregator, or at the very least, queueing them for processing in a background thread.
• It should be structured. Consider the two following messages:
  
pants fell down!
as compared to
  [Sunday 5-8-2011 13:04:22.372 PM] [WARNING] [ belt.js: 92] pants fell down!

Most people would say that the second logging system is better because it provides more context for a message.  When the date, a ‘level’, and the line in the code where the log occurred are prepended to the log message, it’s a lot easier to determine what happened there on the dance floor. Most people know this already; the second log message is pretty standard these days.

Now consider something like this:
{ 'time' : 'Sunday 5-8-2011 13:09:22.823',
'type' : 'warning',
'trace' : [

{'file' : 'lib/clothes/belt.js', 'function' : 'crank', 'line' : 92},

{'file' : '/lib/dances/crank_dat.js', 'function' : 'crankItems', 'line' : 153}],

'message' : 'pants fell down!',

'app' : 'nodedancer',

'request' : '/dances/soldja_boy?superman=dat_ho',
'requester' :  { 'user' : 'jimbob', 'ip' : '127.0.0.1'}
}

This logging format is much more verbose than the second. Is it better? Of course! You have much more information about what is going on, and it should be much simpler to figure out that your pants fell down while you in the process of supermanning that ho. How embarassing!

Note that not only is it easier for a person to tell what happened, this sort of format makes it MUCH easier to perform post-hoc debugging with automated tools.  You could even gather statistics on which dances caused pants to fall down the most often, which users cause the most errors, and even which programmers are involved in the most bugs.

Thats all for now. Feel free to log your comments below.

Capital markets should be encouraging investment, not speculation. They should be about adding value through producing new and better goods and services, not by manipulating public perception.

That’s all I’ve got for right now? Think I’m awesome and want to share mad props? Think I’m an asshole who needs to get punched in the face? Leave a comment!

Determining what tradeoffs you’re willing to make when you are designing a distributed system and you’d  like consistency, availability, and resistance to partitioning is hard.

Writing HTML templates to manage and validate forms is a pain in the ass.

Building a scalable architecture for distributed mathematical computing in an environment where latency requirements are measured in microseconds  is hard.

Handling inconsistencies between different browsers is a pain in the ass.

Making a design that will attract users and allow them to easily navigate your page is hard, but that’s not web programming, that’s UI design.

A task is hard if it pushes your mind to the limit, if it challenges you to learn new abstractions and relationships, and to think in ways you’ve never thought before.

A task is a pain in the ass if it requires you do so  something incredibly simple over and over again over again, either because there is no better way, or because somebody somewhere else screwed up and you have to pay the price.

Give me hard any day. Pain in the ass, no thank you.

Why? To me, “P = NP” is not just a statement about computational complexity theory; It’s about optimism: the idea that things which seem impossible are only impossible because they seem that way. It’s about courage and self-confidence: having the intellectual fortitude to challenge conventional thinking. It’s about imagination: considering possibilities rejected by most as unlikely or absurd. Lastly, it’s a statement about the inability of mathematics to completely describe the true nature of existence, in all its full beauty.

– Begin Email —

Dear Mark P Neyer,

Congratulations! The IRS has accepted your federal tax return. There’s nothing else you need to do. We have decided to give back some of the money we took from you, although we still plan to spend the rest of the money we took on stupid shit that doesn’t matter, because we can.

Lest you think we are providing important services with your hard earned money, we remind you that education is largely handled at a local level, and we pretty much have monopoly on that, so we have little incentive to improve education in any way. As far as the roads go, we’re already making way more money from the gasoline provided by the oil companies than anyone else involved in the process of delivering that oil to you, more than enough to pay for the roads. We don’t plan on lowering the gas prices, however – we need that money. How else are we supposed to fund parties costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for ourselves?

Please note that because some of the money we steal from you is indeed used to pay for highways, we reserve the right to withhold your own money from you if you don’t do what we say, even if what we say happens to be patently unconstitutional.

On top of all that, we plan to continue  depreciating the value of your saved assets by exercising an overly inflationary monetary policy, as well as by printing money to give to large financial institutions.  These policies are great for people who like to gamble with large sums of money, but they aren’t very good for anyone else.   So why do we do it, then? Fuck you! That’s why!

Hahaha,

United States Federal Government

I pride myself on my rationality.  Whenever I have an idea, I try my best to check it for unsupported axioms, and I try to make sure it is consistent, both with itself and with other ideas that I know make sense.   Years ago, I concluded that God, as described by Catholicism, could not possibly exist. There was too much suffering in the universe for that to make sense, I thought.  I even believed that arguing for the existence of a God was in some way justifying all the suffering. If God is all powerful, I reasoned, he could simply wipe away all suffering and make it impossible for us to be unhappy. Because there is definitely suffering in the world, then anyone who believes in a just God must also believe that the suffering is somehow just, because a just god would not allow injustice.

I thought a lot about suffering and pain and problems in the world. My understanding of science told me that the universe is made up of lifeless particles interacting according to simple mathematical rules, and that humans are biological robots made from those particles, competing with each other, and with other organisms, for the limited resources that the world has to offer.  As I saw it, we were either going to exhaust all available resources and make our world completely uninhabitable, or we were going to destroy each other through warfare. I saw the world as a horrendous place, and instead of viewing my life as a gift to be treasured, I saw it as a curse inflicted upon me, and often wished I could simply disappear.   When you think that the universe is fundamentally an awful place, it’s hard to be happy, even for a little while.

All of this has changed for me, though, largely thanks to my girlfriend, Megan.   We met almost exactly a year ago, and as I got to know her I soon realized she saw the world in a different way. To her, the world is a beautiful place and life is a gift. At first I figured she was just deluding herself like everyone else, but I soon started thinking she might be right. She saw life not as a curse but as a wonderful blessing, a gift, and this view of life made her happy, gave her peace of mind, and helped her not to worry about stupid things that really don’t matter.

I wanted to share Megan’s optimistic view of the universe, but I felt that science made it very clear that the optimism was completely unwarranted.  I recently realized, though, that perhaps my understanding of science was incorrect.

Or Perhaps Not?

Everything in the universe that has momentum has a wavelength. It’s called the de Broglie wavelength, and it’s a result of quantum mechanics.  Simply put, everything in the universe, from the smallest atom, to very the galaxy we live in, is vibrating at a specific frequency. Not only are there spatial vibrations; light is also a wave characterized by frequency.  Every object that has a temperature emits light; the frequency of this light is determined by the object’s temperature.  This light is called ‘black body radiation‘, and everything that has a temperature emits it. On top of the spatial vibration due to the de Broglie wavelength and the electromagnetic vibration due to black body radiation, scientists also think objects with mass emit gravity waves, although these have yet to be detected.

So everything in the universe is sending off all kinds of different waves.  The waves that are emitted by a given object are not random, though, they have specific frequencies.  A question arises: do you know of anything that could be described as collection of waves with carefully selected frequencies? Sure you do – it’s called music. The universe is not some giant computer simulating biological robots competing for scare resources; it’s a musical instrument. The very laws of physics that govern our universe and make it work are designed so that everything is vibrating and giving off  different waves.

The interesting part hasn’t even come yet. If the universe is playing a song, who’s listening? What does it sound like? We are all part of the universe, which means we are all listening to the song.  Every bit of information you have about the outside world comes to you through your nerves. A nerve is a special type of cell that can fire a chemical pulse. If a nerve is stimulated beyond a certain threshold, such as a nerve responding to the temperature sensing a temperature above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it fires a pulse, and that pulse goes to simulate the other nerves to which the firing nerve is connected.  After a nerve fires, it has to wait a bit before it can fire again. The minimum time a nerve needs to wait before it can fire again determines the frequency at which the nerve fires.  A nerve is like a string on a musical instrument that can be plucked, and when it is plucked, it plays a specific frequency to your brain.

So the universe is playing a song, and your nerves are translating electromagnetic waves entering your eyes, and sound waves entering your ears, and heat entering your body,  the music of the universe, into a music that your brain understands.  Your brain listens to this music, and it responds by sending signals along various nerves, causing your muscles to contract and your vocal chords to move. How does your brain send signals to your body? it causes nerves to fire signals to your muscles.  As I explained before, a nerve is like a string that can be plucked because it can fire at a specific frequency and is either firing or not.  Your brain is singing a song to your body, causing it to move and manipulate the universe, changing the song the universe sings back to you.  If you go to a house with a dial-up connection to the internet, you can pick up the phone while a computer is connected to the internet via a modem, and you can listen to the computer singing to the internet service provider.  Your brain sings to your body in the same way.

So each of us is engaged in a duet with the entire universe.  Everything you see and feel and touch, every sensation you experience, is a note in the song the universe is playing for you.  Everything you do, every action to take, every muscle you contract and each word you speak is a note in the song that you are playing for the entire universe to hear.  What does this all mean?

You can’t predict anything with this theory;  and because it doesn’t predict anything (that I can think of) we can’t really test it.   Is it true? I’m not sure.  The thing is, it’s completely consistent with a logical, science-based understanding of the world, but it’s also beautiful. When you realize that your life is a song you are playing for the entire universe, how could you not want to make that song as beautiful and inspiring as possible? How could you not want to learn to master your instrument and learn all of its techniques? Just looking at the science, with a strictly rational perspective, you can be incredibly positive about the nature of the universe and about your own life. When you realize that the universe is playing you a song, you can start to listen for it, to understand the chord structure and the melody and to enjoy it in a way that you never would have imagined.

When you hear the song of the universe, you realize that even though life has pain in it, and that bad things can happen to you, focusing on those bad things is completely missing the point.  Living life with a negative focus, complaining about problems in your life and in the world is like being a concert violinist who is playing her most important performance ever, but instead of doing her best to play her instrument with passion, doing her utmost to make the song as romantic and wonderful as possible, to play a song fit to be the song of all existence, she’s fixated on whether the guy two seats over isn’t maybe just a little out of tune.  When you live your life fixated on bad things that might happen and things that hurt in the past and what pain could lay ahead, you’re missing the whole song. You’re not playing it as best as you can, and you’re taking away from the whole.

Because I thought the world was a horrible place, I thought about suicide a lot.  If I killed myself, I knew it would hurt a lot of other people but I also knew that it would prevent me from suffering any more pain.  I realize now how stupid this way of thinking is. Imagine a beautiful concert, the orchestra playing the most wonderful piece ever, and right in the middle of the song, one of the violinists cuts the strings off his violin.  Not only will his part stop abruptly, but the snapping of the strings will make an awful noise which will distract all the other musicians; they may get so upset about what he did that they miss their queues and they forget to play their parts.  Do I really want my last action to be screwing up the song of the universe?

Your death is not the end of your song, because the song you are playing right now is altering the physical structure of the universe, changing the way in which the universe vibrates. The song you play resonates on long after you’ve played your last note. It plays on in the ideas you’ve created, and in the things you’ve built. It plays on in your family and the people who loved you when you were still playing; we hear the songs we play for each other and inspire each other to create beautiful new melodies.  The melodies and phrases that you create are shared and passed on, enriching the song of the universe long after you’ve breathed your last.

Your life is a song that you are playing through your actions, your contribution to the song of all existence.  What reason could you give, what excuse do you have, not to make it the best song you possibly can?

I  propose a simple solution to the problem of increased tuition: Any school that takes federal funding is required to let  anyone who wants to sit in for whatever exams they would like, as long as they pay the university a nominal fee,  perhaps $50 per exam. If a student can pass the final examination for a course, the school must give that student credit for the course; if the student has obtained enough credits to graduate, then the school must issue that student a diploma, just as if the student had paid whatever ridiculous amount the school would normally charge students for tuition, room and board, and a million little fees for this or that.

Intelligent, motivated students could learn what they needed to on their own time, by teaching themselves or paying private tutors who would work for a fraction of the cost of tenured professors with Ph. D’s. A degree from Harvard or Stanford would no longer be something only available to those privileged enough to afford it, and it would be possible for students to work to put themselves through college, rather than relying on financial aid from the government.

Who would gain from this new rule? Millions of people with the intellect and personal ambition but not the means to afford a college education would be able to better their lives and their futures by obtaining college degrees from reputable institutions.  Businesses looking to hire top talent  would have a much wider pool of empoyees to choose from.   Increasing the number of people trained in practical fields would do wonders for the economy.

Who would be hurt by this new rule? Universities would lose some of the money they gain from tuition, but for institutions like Harvard, this wouldn’t matter, because they get most of their money from their endowments.   Tenured professors might find themselves out of a job, as people who are capable of teaching themselves would simply pay the $50 fee and take the exams.  The people who would lose the most from this system, though,  would be those rich enough to afford a degree from Harvard who would now be forced to compete with people who are more intelligent and more ambitious than they are, but who couldn’t afford to go to Harvard because they weren’t lucky enough to be born into a family wealth enough to afford it.

Imagine a world where being born into a family with money no longer meant that you only required modest social abilities to succeed in life, and where the only thing required to attend a prestigious institution would be a sharp intellect, a strong work ethic, and a hunger for success, instead of the ability and willingness to pay $200,000 for a college degree.