Long ago I learned about the idea of gradable and ungradable adjectives or, as I thought of them, non-binary and binary adjectives. The difference being that you can be very hot, very scared or very tall, but you can't be very unique, very pregnant or very amazing. The latter class is binary: it's either true or false. I think with superlatives (very fantastic, very amazing, very awesome) it's reasonable to discourage their use. After all, "very" is an intensifier, and if you already have the most intense form of a word, intensifying it more isn't really necessary.
However, cases like "very pregnant" are interesting, because they bespeak a certain confusion about the way we analyse language vs the way language is constructed. While it's true you can construct a formal grammar in which certain properties are binary and certain properties aren't, I don't believe that is actually reflective of our thoughts or our speech. "Pregnant", like "German", "boiling", or "fatal", is a cluster of concepts that we associate together. Much like nouns, which in theory refer to a single thing, but whose basis is really a fuzzy cloud in concept-space. You can easily reveal the nature of that cloud by turning the noun into an adjective: what is the most "chairy" chair you can think of? What is the least chairy?
I explained this idea to a friend and asked whether there was anything you couldn't do this trick with; that you couldn't make non-binary if you tried hard enough. The response was obvious, in retrospect: mathematics. Can x be "very equal" to 3? Obviously not. And in a sense that's the point. Our formal systems are designed to have these strange rigid properties that are alien to us.
Perhaps, if things were different and we were beings of pure binary logic, we might find ourselves inventing systems for fuzzy reasoning instead.
I fell asleep unexpectedly early last night and didn't write anything. This shares a common theme with mostofmyfailures in that something happened around the time I was going to write, either social-related or a sudden attack of tiredness. I think a sufficient level of sacrifice would also prevent those failures, but I'm not convinced it's sustainable long-term or in line with my true priorities.
Separately I've had a class of... you might call them semi-failures, or lack of imagination as far as specification goes. I've been writing every day, as defined by the time between when I wake up and go to sleep. Unfortunately, sometimes (like during timezone transitions) the mapping between my day and an Earth day gets a little bit out of whack. For that reason, my posts have been a little bit behind schedule; I've still been writing them every day, but the date they're labeled with is a few days behind the date I write them. Effectively, my dates and Gregorian dates have gone out of sync, and I suspect I'm in need of some calendar reform.
Related problems with posting to my own schedule are that the time when new posts will appear is somewhat unpredictable for others, and that it's easier for me to accidentally miss a day without an absolute reference for where I'm up to. So ironically I need a solution that is simultaneously more consistent (so posts appear regularly) and more flexible (so it can survive occasional life intrusions). Luckily, I have just such a solution prepared.
I'm going to shift from writing in arrears to writing in advance. That is, I'll alter the site so that a post only becomes visible if its publication time is earlier than the current time, and I'll write (up to) one day ahead of the time each post will be published. This should mean a more consistent reading experience without really changing my writing experience. I'm also going to change the post date on the articles to midnight UTC, which is 10am here. That should mean that in the event of a disastrous good-night's-sleep-related accident, I'll still have time to make my deadline in the morning.
Doing things this way also provides the opportunity to front-load posts if I expect to be away from a computer for a little while. I'm not sure if I'll actually do that, but it's nice to have it as an option. Meanwhile, I need to actually make the transition to normal calendar dates, which I guess means having my own annus confusionis.
A friend once said to me that if I ever needed access to a gun, despite guns being illegal and pretty tough to find in Australia, I could get one easily. I should just find the dodgiest person I know, and ask them for the dodgiest person they know. That person, without a doubt, could get me a gun. I thought about this briefly and realised that my second degree of dodgy is probably in jail.
It would be pretty fun to make an exercise of going through a few different characteristics, finding the friend-of-a-friend who maximises each one, and interviewing them to find out a bit about what it's like in their life.
A few interesting examples:
Richest
Most influential
Smartest
Happiest
Most athletic
Most friends
Fewest friends
It would also be a little bit interesting to see how transitive those properties end up being. Does the most interesting person I know have more interesting friends? It'd definitely be interesting to find out.
A while back I managed to get a fairly respectable system out of an Android tablet with a keyboard running a stripped-down Ubuntu in a chroot container. The process was somewhat involved, but despite the macguyveresque sense that it was all held together by tape and prayer, it was actually quite stable and I used it for a long time as a portable development machine.
In fact, later on I realised that it was actually the best Linux desktop environment that I've used. You get all of the standard apps and things you're used to (it even runs Photoshop... kinda), but under the hood it's still a fully functioning Linux machine that you can do Real Work with. The only problem is there's a kind of disjointedness because the two halves aren't really working together, they just happen to mostly stay out of each other's way.
The more I think about it, the more I realise that with only a little bit of rejiggering, you could bring those two halves together. You could have a standard Linux environment all the way up to running system services, one of which is the Android Runtime. Then any apps you want to run happen in the sandbox on top of that. You'd end up with something fairly similar to the current developer-friendly state of Mac OS: pretty UI up front, serious unix business in the back.
Maybe that would also be a reasonable direction for the Perpetual Year of the Linux Desktop. New attempts to remake the desktop environment are all the rage these days, but none of them come with millions of apps. It seems like if you could weld the Android frontend onto the existing Linux backend, you'd have an easy winner.
I wonder if anyone's already working towards this. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
An idea came up today that's been floating around in my head for a while. I keep running into issues where no single computer I have access to has the exact mix of resources I need, and I wonder why it is that running things across machines is so difficult.
An example: I was recently working on some large files. I had to copy them around, write some custom code to do processing on them, and then turn them into dvd images and upload them somewhere. The problem is that my home internet connection is too crappy to upload a lot of files in anything close to a reasonable amount of time.
So instead, I provisioned a cheap little ARM-based cloud machine in France. Unlike Australia, Europe has good internet, so the uploading and downloading was no longer a bottleneck. But the latency is really high, so I had to kind of awkwardly shuttle things back and forth so I could write code on my local machine and run it on the remote machine.
During the whole process I remember thinking how cumbersome the whole thing was. It's great that I could do it at all, but it definitely wouldn't be described as a seamless process. I think if the Glorious Cloud Future is to occur, we need something better.
What I'd like to see is a kind of metacomputer: a computer built out of other computers. It would automatically distribute computation depending on the kind of resources required and the cost of transferring data between resource locations. The end result would be that you can add lots of different kinds of resources, and even do it dynamically, and the system turns that into the best computer it can.
In my example, it would recognise that the cost of transferring the large files is high and the cost of transferring my keystrokes is high, but the cost of transferring code is low. So the file processing would be allocated to the remote server, but the process that turns keystrokes into code (my editor) would be allocated to my local computer. However, if the server was much closer to me (but I still had crappy internet), maybe it would just move all the computation to the remote server and leave my local computer as a dumb terminal.
What's even more exciting about this is that you could integrate such a system so well with cloud server platforms. If the metacomputer can automatically redistribute resources when they become available, there's no reason it couldn't automatically add more resources when needed. You could even give it a value-of-time measurement, up to which point you'd be happy to spend money if it saves you processing time.
It's such a shame our computer architectures have not changed significantly in the last half-century, even as the context we use them in has changed a lot. I think at some point it's gotta give, though, and when it does I hope metacomputation is where we end up.