| --- Day changed Wed Apr 16 2008 | ||
| drazak | bah, he left | 00:37 |
|---|---|---|
| drazak | he never finished all those books | 00:37 |
| -!- epitron_ is now known as epitron | 00:56 | |
| -!- Aulere [n=dragon_d@131.229.176.252] has quit [] | 01:35 | |
| -!- kanzure [n=bryan@cpe-70-113-54-112.austin.res.rr.com] has joined #hplusroadmap | 07:34 | |
| kanzure | Hey epitron. | 07:57 |
| kanzure | fenn: I'm trying to figure out if I should link to my 2007 journal that I was doing for the local literature class. It's the closest thing to a raw mind-dump that you can come across. | 08:07 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/docs/cheat_sheet_writing.pdf <-- heh, an old document I wrote | 08:14 |
| kanzure | (found while trying to find a spot to upload the PDF) | 08:14 |
| kanzure | (the journal) | 08:14 |
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| -!- Splicer [n=p@h84n3c1o261.bredband.skanova.com] has joined #hplusroadmap | 18:06 | |
| Splicer | I have made an observation: | 18:17 |
| Splicer | When you talk about bioDIY with someone under 30 they go 'wow, that's cool, where can I find out more about it?' | 18:18 |
| Splicer | ...and when you talk to someone over 30 they go 'wow, that's cool, what stock should I buy?' | 18:19 |
| kanzure | Sort of. Anybody over 30 just kind of guys "Huh. Interesting." and leaves it at that. | 18:44 |
| Splicer | do you think it has the potential to be as big as the hacker culture? | 18:46 |
| Splicer | The idea of hacking life, it's enticing | 18:47 |
| kanzure | Surely. | 18:49 |
| kanzure | fenn: I have a riddle for you. | 18:49 |
| kanzure | What is a programmer without his computer? | 18:49 |
| kanzure | How do simulation packages usually work? I have seen a few 'alife' simmers and others, but I never thought to check into how they all plug in. Do you do simulation based off of interacting components? If so, how do you mediate the messaging between those underlying packages? | 18:50 |
| kanzure | I think we have to assume that all things can be sequentially simulated, otherwise we get into weird messaging interfaces that must be accounted for, which would be great if somebody wants to add them for each of the individual packages, but not an implementation requirement. | 18:51 |
| fenn | splicer you dont read much science fiction do you :) | 18:53 |
| Splicer | no | 18:54 |
| fenn | generally simulation packages dont work together, or if they do, one uses another's API as a sub-module | 18:54 |
| fenn | it's just too complicated to make everything happen at the same time | 18:55 |
| fenn | ever played with oregano? | 18:55 |
| fenn | (simple electronics simulator) | 18:55 |
| fenn | kanzure: a businessman? | 18:57 |
| fenn | (re: riddle) | 18:57 |
| kanzure | I was pondering that in school. | 18:58 |
| kanzure | I came up with this: "a prisoner." | 18:58 |
| Splicer | (being without net feels like that) | 18:58 |
| kanzure | http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin <-- guy getting rich off of automatically generated books. | 18:59 |
| kanzure | He's also thinking about doing erotica. "There are only so many body parts." ;) | 18:59 |
| kanzure | I used to do automatic story generators. It was getting intense, since I needed to do some linguistics and search databases for grammars, wording, and persistent subjects. But otherwise I had automated the Aristotlean plot with a RNG. | 19:00 |
| Splicer | music is probably easier | 19:00 |
| kanzure | it's been done | 19:00 |
| kanzure | but perhaps not to the exact sounds | 19:00 |
| Splicer | you mean the mozart one? | 19:00 |
| kanzure | Hm? I haven't heard of that. There's been some automated music generators, such as with cellular automata and random permutation libraries. | 19:01 |
| fenn | hofstadter claims to have a pretty decent mozart impersonator | 19:01 |
| Splicer | it could probably work very well, the parameters are finite | 19:02 |
| drazak | kanzure: can you finish sending those books? | 19:02 |
| Splicer | there is only so many ways to do an ac/dc song | 19:02 |
| fenn | i've heard a lot of really crap computer generated music, the trick is doing it well | 19:03 |
| fenn | and not just copying what already exists | 19:04 |
| kanzure | drazak: You'll need to send me the details again. | 19:06 |
| kanzure | drazak: Btw, it quit randomly during the night when I left it running. I don't remember any particular errors except 'connection lost'. | 19:06 |
| kanzure | fenn: randomly generated techno should work well, right? | 19:07 |
| Splicer | all music on the hitlists is bits and pieces put togeteher from old stuff | 19:09 |
| kanzure | Don't cite nickleback. | 19:09 |
| Splicer | ..and especially nickeback | 19:09 |
| kanzure | yawn | 19:10 |
| fenn | i'm one of those rare people that can tell the difference between good and bad techno | 19:10 |
| Splicer | nudity in the video? | 19:11 |
| kanzure | I haven't listened to techno but for a few days, what's the difference? | 19:11 |
| fenn | um, it's subjective | 19:11 |
| Splicer | There was a british band once called KLF, they had a number of hitsongs... they wrote a manual on how to do it, they basically said take what's been on te lists the last years and cut and paste. | 19:15 |
| Splicer | The book was often quoted in the cyberpunk culture... | 19:16 |
| Splicer | as part of that culture was the realization that we´re all just programs interacting. | 19:16 |
| drazak | kanzure: yeah, we were having brown outs | 19:17 |
| fenn | KLF was a sort of techno-wiki | 19:17 |
| fenn | anyone could post songs to their digital radio station | 19:17 |
| Splicer | they were many things | 19:18 |
| Splicer | Their legacy is "The manual": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual | 19:19 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/2008-04-16 | 19:19 |
| fenn | hmm not sure i'd want my brain to be rebooted | 19:21 |
| kanzure | they also did 'brain rebooting' in electroconvulsion therapy | 19:22 |
| fenn | did that reset addictions too? | 19:22 |
| kanzure | the concept was to send a few hundred volts through your head, kill you, and etc. | 19:22 |
| kanzure | dunno | 19:22 |
| fenn | it didnt kill you | 19:22 |
| kanzure | killed your brain, brought it down to 'zero' | 19:22 |
| kanzure | and then it sprang back up | 19:22 |
| fenn | according to zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, he was having a nice drink at a cocktail party, fell asleep, and then woke up in another body | 19:23 |
| kanzure | kill in terms of the way you can 'kill' your computer | 19:23 |
| kanzure | heh, I have a few friends who want to buy his motorcycle | 19:23 |
| kanzure | he still has it :) | 19:23 |
| Splicer | i loved that book | 19:24 |
| Splicer | the sequel sucked | 19:24 |
| Splicer | it's a very very good book | 19:24 |
| fenn | wow there's photos from his trip | 19:26 |
| kanzure | http://yaml.org/type/index.html yaml type repository | 19:27 |
| * Splicer gives krebs some acetyl-coenzyme | 19:28 | |
| Splicer | time to sleep | 19:28 |
| kanzure | cya | 19:28 |
| Splicer | cu, bye | 19:28 |
| -!- Splicer [n=p@h84n3c1o261.bredband.skanova.com] has quit [] | 19:28 | |
| fenn | tags are mostly inferred automatically, i think | 19:30 |
| fenn | it's something to worry about though, like you can get some error if a model number is supposed to be a string but gets parsed as an int | 19:31 |
| fenn | i guess that's taken care of in 'validation' | 19:31 |
| kanzure | yes | 19:31 |
| kanzure | I was thinking I'd do some py-yaml tonight and start looking into what it would take to do the 'mime db' at least | 19:31 |
| kanzure | or what environmental variables we'd have to use for the install script etc. | 19:32 |
| kanzure | let's use ~/.skdb/ for everything | 19:32 |
| kanzure | or maybe I should just ignore that at the moment | 19:32 |
| kanzure | that is easily changed | 19:32 |
| fenn | lets not worry about install until we have something to install | 19:32 |
| epitron | hey guys | 19:33 |
| fenn | i'm not a big fan of environment variables, fwiw | 19:33 |
| epitron | i see you're still chasing moby dick | 19:33 |
| epitron | \o/ | 19:33 |
| kanzure | go to hell | 19:33 |
| epitron | :D | 19:34 |
| * fenn was hoping kanzure would think of something clever | 19:34 | |
| epitron | seriously.. you think you can build what you want to build with our shitty stone knives and bearskins programming tools? | 19:34 |
| kanzure | fenn: so then let's do local storage at the moment | 19:34 |
| kanzure | let's put the mime db in /where/script/is/mimedb/ | 19:34 |
| epitron | TARPIT | 19:34 |
| epitron | TARPIT | 19:34 |
| epitron | TARPIT | 19:34 |
| kanzure | even though it's not mimedb, we'll just keep on calling it that | 19:34 |
| kanzure | I think part of the problem is that we need to start off with the plugins actually | 19:35 |
| kanzure | and then we can make the wrappers around it such as autospec, autogen, skdb, mimedb, ikiwiki+git+etc. | 19:36 |
| kanzure | so I guess I need to go experiment with serializing python data structs :) | 19:36 |
| fenn | yes i think specifications are the 'real deal' and trying to automatically run simulators is tilting at windmills | 19:36 |
| epitron | tarrrrrrrrrr pittttttttttttt | 19:36 |
| epitron | First I'll just reach in and pull my legs out. | 19:37 |
| kanzure | epitron: Give me another way of making a macroscale self-replicating machine. | 19:37 |
| epitron | And now I'll just pull my arms out with my face! | 19:37 |
| kanzure | solid state | 19:37 |
| fenn | doesnt have to be solid state | 19:38 |
| epitron | i thought you were working on apt-get for science | 19:38 |
| fenn | same diff | 19:38 |
| kanzure | fenn: as opposed to wetware, I mean | 19:38 |
| fenn | oh, i was thinking some plasma beast | 19:38 |
| fenn | you can make plasma out of almost anything | 19:38 |
| kanzure | epitron: you are terribly confused | 19:38 |
| epitron | what're you making? :) | 19:38 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Skdb | 19:39 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/mediawiki/index.php/Self-replication | 19:39 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/recursion.html (last paragraph) | 19:39 |
| epitron | i've tried to read that first page like 5 times | 19:39 |
| epitron | it's horrible | 19:39 |
| fenn | epitron: i'm coming at it from the yak-shaving angle | 19:39 |
| kanzure | yak-shaving? | 19:39 |
| epitron | can't you summarize? | 19:39 |
| kanzure | epitron: we have for you, many times | 19:40 |
| kanzure | epitron: are you going to listen this time? | 19:40 |
| epitron | hahah | 19:40 |
| epitron | when did you do it | 19:40 |
| epitron | i'll read the logs | 19:40 |
| fenn | yak shaving is when you find yourself looking for a can of methanol because there's ice all over your windshield and you need to drive to the store to get a bolt to fix the washer to wash your coat | 19:40 |
| epitron | maybe you and i don't have the same definition of summary | 19:40 |
| kanzure | epitron: automated pathfinding algorithm through a project database, think of it like apt-get for packages that aren't just software | 19:40 |
| epitron | right | 19:40 |
| epitron | so basically a brain | 19:40 |
| kanzure | no | 19:40 |
| kanzure | no ai | 19:41 |
| epitron | but building a DB of all projects either requires I, or AI | 19:41 |
| fenn | its a logic engine, but everything has to be carefully structured/specified by hand | 19:41 |
| kanzure | yes, it does require I | 19:41 |
| epitron | and I is difficult to coordinate | 19:41 |
| kanzure | and that is truly unfortunate, however | 19:41 |
| kanzure | it's possible because of it's mutually beneficial aspects | 19:41 |
| fenn | if we could do it automatically, well, then that's pretty much magic | 19:41 |
| kanzure | yep | 19:42 |
| epitron | also, it's difficult for I to make things that a stupid machine (SM) can process | 19:42 |
| kanzure | good point fenn | 19:42 |
| kanzure | debian's APT didn't appear out of thin air either | 19:42 |
| kanzure | even though it's all software | 19:42 |
| epitron | right, but apt has very simple constraints | 19:42 |
| kanzure | so does this system. | 19:42 |
| epitron | ok | 19:42 |
| epitron | so you never explained that part ;) | 19:42 |
| kanzure | uhh | 19:42 |
| epitron | please don't give me that link again | 19:42 |
| * kanzure wonders if he is an obsessive compulsive link-giver. Probably not. :) | 19:43 | |
| epitron | when i read your SKDB page, i get completely lost | 19:43 |
| epitron | because it's all implementation details | 19:43 |
| epitron | an implementation of something i'm not aware of | 19:43 |
| fenn | and we havent settled the implementation completely either | 19:43 |
| epitron | you need a summary :) | 19:44 |
| epitron | a VISION | 19:44 |
| epitron | a DIRECTIOn | 19:44 |
| epitron | a GOAL | 19:44 |
| epitron | a LOW DIMENSIONAL SEMANTIC VECTOR | 19:44 |
| fenn | piss off already, sheesh | 19:44 |
| epitron | haha | 19:44 |
| epitron | alright | 19:44 |
| -!- epitron [i=epi@bito.ponzo.net] has left #hplusroadmap [] | 19:44 | |
| fenn | so, its taco night. i'll probably not be able to concentrate on programming | 19:45 |
| fenn | whining at people trying to get work done doesn't help anyone | 19:46 |
| kanzure | "you need a GOAL" | 19:47 |
| kanzure | what happened to macroscale self-replication | 19:47 |
| kanzure | wtf? | 19:47 |
| fenn | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_media_type | 19:48 |
| kanzure | how is 'stuffit' a common mime type? | 19:51 |
| fenn | destroy! | 19:52 |
| kanzure | if we add it to a 'not so common' list, then it will be destroyed | 19:52 |
| kanzure | but if we leave it, it's factually incorrect | 19:52 |
| kanzure | blah, wikipedia sucks | 19:52 |
| kanzure | they can stand to have that small line on their page | 19:52 |
| kanzure | but they would delete it if it was a list of uncommon content-types | 19:52 |
| kanzure | too many ideological 'tards or something. I don't even know how to describe the problem. | 19:53 |
| fenn | OCD | 19:54 |
| kanzure | toread: http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAMLDocumentation | 19:54 |
| kanzure | No, that'd be more about formatting, I think. | 19:54 |
| fenn | hmm. well, it seems like people get territorial about 'their' page | 19:54 |
| kanzure | Would OCD include content filtering for a status quo? | 19:54 |
| kanzure | sure | 19:54 |
| fenn | add a dash of NIH syndrome | 19:54 |
| kanzure | ah | 19:54 |
| fenn | i used to think that meant national institute of health | 19:55 |
| kanzure | haha, in my inbox: Please forward to interested colleagues and recent graduates. | 19:55 |
| kanzure | *New Hire: Assistant Prof. to teach synthetic biology* | 19:55 |
| kanzure | Please e-mail me your resume and brief cover letter stating your experience | 19:55 |
| kanzure | and motivation to teach synthetic biology to undergraduates. You will also | 19:55 |
| kanzure | have access to research facilities and this position could provide a | 19:55 |
| kanzure | springboard for your career. The institution is on the East coast and the | 19:55 |
| kanzure | appointment would start this summer/fall, international applicants are | 19:55 |
| kanzure | welcome to apply. May 1st is the last date we'll be accepting resumes. | 19:55 |
| fenn | just call it wikipedia syndrome, people will understand | 19:55 |
| kanzure | maybe I'll email my resume ;) | 19:55 |
| fenn | is that UT? | 19:56 |
| kanzure | no, east coast is not UT | 19:56 |
| fenn | oh. maybe it's east cost of texas :) | 19:56 |
| kanzure | nah, it's MIT | 19:56 |
| fenn | ah i see | 19:56 |
| fenn | i think you have to be an assistant professor | 19:56 |
| fenn | or is that the position they're filling? | 19:57 |
| kanzure | "young programmer looking to acquire an S6 moonbrain, references available upon request" | 19:57 |
| fenn | i just want an oneill cylinder, a small one will do | 19:57 |
| kanzure | hehe | 19:58 |
| kanzure | I should have kept adding to that 2007_journal.pdf file this year | 19:58 |
| kanzure | I regret not doing that. | 19:58 |
| fenn | no you should have started 2008_journal.pdf | 19:59 |
| kanzure | sure | 19:59 |
| fenn | its only april, eh | 19:59 |
| kanzure | I named it 2007_journal.pdf only yesterday | 19:59 |
| fenn | you have zillions of logs anyway, what more can you write? :) | 19:59 |
| fenn | just keep an irc window open with /msg kanzure | 20:00 |
| kanzure | I seem to work off of a caching system whereby I jump from one subject to another, and don't return from my recursions in a sense | 20:00 |
| kanzure | fenn: yes, that's what I do | 20:00 |
| kanzure | fenn: I have 5 megabytes of plaintext with myself | 20:00 |
| kanzure | actually, 20 | 20:00 |
| fenn | wow | 20:00 |
| kanzure | I was doing a textcrawler back in January | 20:00 |
| kanzure | trying to extract relevant notes and so on | 20:00 |
| kanzure | but the problem is that it's just flatout *hard* to do | 20:00 |
| kanzure | it's all lost, gone, hidden | 20:00 |
| kanzure | I should have been doing HTML pages on my site | 20:00 |
| kanzure | that's why I have recently been increasing the number of pages that I have been adding | 20:01 |
| kanzure | as opposed to /msg kanzure ;) | 20:01 |
| fenn | oh, structured text is easier to read you mean | 20:01 |
| fenn | then its all in the same place | 20:01 |
| kanzure | not only that, but I can section it up | 20:01 |
| kanzure | as opposed to the timestamped logging idea | 20:01 |
| kanzure | where everything is "send once, save forever" | 20:01 |
| kanzure | as opposed to editable, rewritable, linkable, markupable | 20:01 |
| fenn | you could dump your log into a wiki page | 20:02 |
| kanzure | blogging is otherwise known as the bookmarking dilemma http://heybryan.org/bookmarking.html | 20:02 |
| kanzure | I could, but then you'd get lots of nasty stuff | 20:02 |
| kanzure | haha | 20:02 |
| fenn | oh well | 20:02 |
| fenn | i can barely read all the links you paste as it is | 20:02 |
| kanzure | I try to eat +300 links/night at the moment | 20:03 |
| kanzure | but it takes 40 sec to bookmark these days | 20:03 |
| kanzure | so I've been falling behind | 20:03 |
| kanzure | that's why I've been adding pages on my site instead | 20:03 |
| kanzure | as an alternative. | 20:03 |
| fenn | you could keep folders (a tree map would be best) and drag'n'drop pages onto them, then you're dealing with files and directories. i guess this doesnt solve anything | 20:05 |
| fenn | http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap/ | 20:05 |
| fenn | there's a filesystem viewer like that somewhere | 20:06 |
| kanzure | yes | 20:06 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/todo.html <-- check this out | 20:06 |
| kanzure | (graphviz with a backend file system for directed cyclic graphs + virtual links would be *freaking awesome*) | 20:06 |
| fenn | on the other hand, i always have trouble sorting a link into just one category | 20:07 |
| kanzure | yep | 20:07 |
| fenn | tags are much easier to 'write' | 20:07 |
| kanzure | yes, but then you might change tagging policies or ontologies | 20:08 |
| kanzure | thus 'the refactoring problem' | 20:08 |
| kanzure | btw, todo.html was from 2005 | 20:08 |
| fenn | my (woefully incomplete) todo http://fennetic.net/milesaway/ben | 20:09 |
| kanzure | fishtub? | 20:10 |
| kanzure | re: "contact neil gershenfeld once a week until response, use different media" | 20:11 |
| fenn | well, i havent done that yet | 20:11 |
| kanzure | if you want that to happen, | 20:11 |
| kanzure | David works for Neil. | 20:11 |
| kanzure | and Noah gets computers from Neil. | 20:11 |
| fenn | who is noah? | 20:11 |
| kanzure | the Noah kid that came in a few weeks ago | 20:11 |
| kanzure | was talking with drazak. | 20:11 |
| fenn | well, gershenfeld is basically doing what i'm doing, but he gets paid | 20:12 |
| drazak | heh | 20:12 |
| kanzure | yes | 20:12 |
| drazak | Who? | 20:12 |
| kanzure | this is why I know David. | 20:12 |
| kanzure | http://cba.mit.edu/ | 20:12 |
| kanzure | Center for Bits and Atoms | 20:12 |
| kanzure | "It from bit, and bit from it." | 20:12 |
| kanzure | self-replicating machines and so on | 20:12 |
| kanzure | I saw David in some old news articles and then saw that he was associated with CBA, and jumped on the opportunity -- stalked him down and got to know him | 20:13 |
| kanzure | we're good friends now :) | 20:13 |
| fenn | boston just seems so dreary and big-city | 20:13 |
| kanzure | I wouldn't mind trying it out. | 20:13 |
| fenn | so i have some pointless fears | 20:13 |
| kanzure | drazak: Neil Gershenfeld is head of the MIT Media Lab. Has lots of big names in there ... | 20:14 |
| kanzure | Ed Boyden, Marvin Minsky I think, etc. | 20:14 |
| kanzure | http://edboyden.net/ | 20:14 |
| fenn | eh? minksy is comp sci/AI lab | 20:14 |
| kanzure | 'As a corollary of this work, we also seek to develop methods of human brain augmentation.' | 20:14 |
| kanzure | Ed has an interesting page on his site entitled 'Everything I learned at MIT' http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~esb/sb1/ | 20:16 |
| kanzure | Ed, me, and a few others work together through http://innerspacefoundation.org/ | 20:17 |
| kanzure | Ed, I, and a * | 20:18 |
| kanzure | whatever. I need to go. Will be back in a bit. | 20:18 |
| fenn | ciao | 20:18 |
| kanzure | fenn: http://heybryan.org/mailing_lists.html | 21:22 |
| fenn | bloom's taxonomy is interesting. i've never seen half of the words on your english/writing pdf | 21:23 |
| fenn | words/phrases | 21:24 |
| fenn | i've whittled my mailing lists down to about 3 | 21:25 |
| fenn | bloomington linux user group, luf, emc lists | 21:25 |
| kanzure | heh | 21:27 |
| kanzure | my bio teacher taught us bloom's taxonomy, | 21:27 |
| kanzure | he had us doing very 'weird' assignments that were like: | 21:27 |
| kanzure | "Illustrate an understanding of long-term potentiation in vertebrae phylums." but they were much more vague than this | 21:28 |
| kanzure | so basically he was looking for his students to be able to do the impossible | 21:28 |
| kanzure | we all hated it | 21:28 |
| kanzure | results: http://heybryan.org/school/Biology/ | 21:28 |
| fenn | if you submit a formal proof that an assignment is impossible, do you get extra credit or sent to the principal's office? | 21:29 |
| kanzure | ex: http://heybryan.org/school/Biology/10-23-06,%20AP%20Biology%20-%20Transport%20Objectives.html | 21:29 |
| kanzure | he wouldn't read it | 21:29 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/school/Biology/12-01-06,%20Nutritional%20requirements%20of%20animals%20assignments.html | 21:30 |
| kanzure | ' Using your lecture notes, develop a narrative to accurately portray the amphibolic nature of cellular respiration. The narrative can be descriptive, analogous, or scientific, or another approach to your choosing. Whatever style you choose, the narrative must reflect the scope and sequence of your respiration understanding.' | 21:30 |
| kanzure | (exact wording) | 21:30 |
| kanzure | that's not too bad though | 21:30 |
| kanzure | but of course, this is only in retrospect | 21:30 |
| kanzure | from the opposite direction, those types of assignments are frightening | 21:30 |
| fenn | the example doesnt look too bad | 21:30 |
| fenn | mostly terminology/jargon | 21:30 |
| fenn | lol "Describe our current understanding of human consciousness." | 21:32 |
| fenn | i bet he thought he had an answer too | 21:33 |
| kanzure | well, be careful | 21:33 |
| kanzure | he didn't write most the assignments he gave us | 21:33 |
| kanzure | it was the ones that he gave to us verbally that were terrible | 21:33 |
| kanzure | not 'bad assignments' but just a nightmare to work through | 21:33 |
| kanzure | but I wouldn't say that now | 21:33 |
| kanzure | they were very open ended, so you had to be confident :) | 21:33 |
| fenn | better than memorizing multiple choice questions | 21:34 |
| kanzure | yep | 21:34 |
| fenn | i assume he actually taught the answers to most of the questions | 21:34 |
| kanzure | hm, no | 21:35 |
| kanzure | he did very good Socratic lectures | 21:35 |
| kanzure | yes, socratic method for bio sounds awkward | 21:35 |
| fenn | it's what ends up happening anyway | 21:35 |
| fenn | tangent tangent tangent | 21:35 |
| kanzure | you get to some Bloom stuff at the top of | 21:36 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/school/Biology/notes/output.html | 21:36 |
| kanzure | wait, apparently not | 21:36 |
| fenn | blah | 21:38 |
| fenn | that's like 50% of what i learned in college right there | 21:39 |
| kanzure | that's depressing. | 21:39 |
| kanzure | CyberYoda asks "wtf, where do youg et the time to read all those?" (re: mailing_lists.html) | 21:40 |
| kanzure | I need a witty answer. | 21:40 |
| kanzure | I am thinking about saying I have a brain implant. | 21:40 |
| fenn | well, telling the truth is one option | 21:40 |
| kanzure | or making some pseudoreligious comment about attaining godhood | 21:40 |
| kanzure | haha, truth? | 21:40 |
| kanzure | :P | 21:40 |
| fenn | i'd also like to know | 21:40 |
| fenn | obviously you've learned some sort of speed-reading method | 21:41 |
| kanzure | well, do you speed read through Google search results? | 21:41 |
| fenn | maybe i just need a better mail client | 21:41 |
| kanzure | I've done over 25,000 Google searches-- at some point I just started being able to *know* when a post was relevant or not based off of title, author, format, keywords, and then how much my reply would be worth - i.e., sometimes people are so fucked up that I would have to write 500 words to explain to them a better idea. | 21:42 |
| fenn | i end up spending like 2 hours per message if i do write a response | 21:42 |
| fenn | otherwise its just "wah i'm right and you're wrong" | 21:43 |
| kanzure | yes, I've been tempted to start posting up my better emails on my website so that I can preserve them more accurately | 21:43 |
| fenn | indeed | 21:43 |
| kanzure | for other people to find them at the moment would involve searching across hundreds of mailing lists, thousands of forums | 21:44 |
| kanzure | http://heybryan.org/forums.html | 21:44 |
| kanzure | etc. | 21:44 |
| kanzure | I've been tempted to take out my cheat_sheet_writing.pdf when doing essays for the lit class. Just sprinkle in some fallacious arguments. Otherwise writing is difficult. | 21:53 |
| fenn | heh, makes it fun to see if the teacher catches them? | 21:53 |
| fenn | or just that it's hard to always be right | 21:54 |
| kanzure | no, while the teacher is a great guy, he's not monitoring for these sorts of things | 21:54 |
| kanzure | he's looking for "good writing" | 21:54 |
| fenn | here's another one for your too-long list of lists: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/NEAmines/ (i havent actually read it) | 21:56 |
| kanzure | crap, how do I miss something like that | 21:56 |
| fenn | it might be invite-only | 21:56 |
| kanzure | why would they not invite me. | 21:58 |
| kanzure | seriously. | 21:58 |
| fenn | because they only want 'serious contributors' | 21:58 |
| kanzure | *cough* | 21:58 |
| * kanzure whistles | 21:58 | |
| fenn | hm. dataportability isnt as general as i'd hoped | 21:59 |
| kanzure | it has some big names appearing on that list | 22:00 |
| kanzure | lots of web2.0 CEOs. | 22:00 |
| kanzure | (whatever that's worth) | 22:00 |
| fenn | at least they're doing something | 22:00 |
| kanzure | http://dataportability.org/ | 22:00 |
| fenn | its basically semantic web re-worked for consumerism | 22:01 |
| kanzure | it was my understanding that they want to make sure that we can harvest our data from the databases | 22:01 |
| kanzure | so yes | 22:01 |
| kanzure | fenn: So one of the things that I have learned from contributing to so many mailing lists is that nobody is really all that active. | 22:04 |
| fenn | you mean it takes a fucking long time to get anything done | 22:05 |
| kanzure | I mean, nobody is "all there". They simple are not. I have no idea WTF they must be doing, but there is very little that impresses me coming from the contributors, not too often is there something 'high impact'. | 22:05 |
| fenn | (secondary reason i quit science) | 22:05 |
| kanzure | nah, I think science can take a short amount of time - if you have the resources | 22:05 |
| kanzure | to do real science it takes a few decades to get your own lab, it seems | 22:05 |
| kanzure | and even then. | 22:05 |
| fenn | yeah a lab is not the same as an army of grad slaves | 22:06 |
| kanzure | Anyway, no matter how smart these people are, why is it that *I* had to come along to release http://biohack.sf.net/ ?? | 22:06 |
| kanzure | and why is it *I* that had to write up the start to the roadmap? | 22:06 |
| fenn | uh, "its just a zip file" | 22:06 |
| kanzure | blah, perhaps | 22:06 |
| fenn | i havent looked at it | 22:06 |
| kanzure | instructions for all sorts of tools, experiments, genetic engineering riggups, etc. | 22:06 |
| kanzure | lots of protocols too. | 22:06 |
| fenn | what about protocols.com or whatever | 22:07 |
| kanzure | protocols-online.org ? yeah, it doesn't have a cached copy | 22:07 |
| kanzure | but I figure that I will do a crawl soon and include it in the next zip | 22:07 |
| kanzure | it has the entire OpenWetWare wiki though | 22:07 |
| kanzure | so that's good | 22:07 |
| kanzure | My point is that they are slow. | 22:08 |
| kanzure | or not thinking high-impact. I don't know what's going on. | 22:08 |
| fenn | (*&@# domain squatters! | 22:08 |
| kanzure | basically. | 22:08 |
| fenn | i was referring to the domain squatters around protocol-online.org | 22:08 |
| kanzure | oh | 22:09 |
| kanzure | Part of the problem might be just that most of these guys are old. | 22:09 |
| fenn | most people arent leaders, so they never have a *chance* to decide if what they're doing is going to make a difference or not, they're just getting paid | 22:10 |
| fenn | the leaders are usually too bogged down in details keeping people pointed in the right direction | 22:10 |
| fenn | its very rare that an individual can make real progress on something | 22:10 |
| kanzure | I don't know. It's like the WIkipedia article on Transhumanism. I try to edit it to include references to all of the do-it-yourself genetic engineering as evidence of direction towards transhumanist tech, and they just delete it | 22:11 |
| kanzure | "Bah! No! Impossible! Irrelevant!" | 22:11 |
| fenn | did they provide justification or just 'because i'm an ass' | 22:11 |
| kanzure | "you need to cite other sources" | 22:11 |
| kanzure | apparently primary sources don't count | 22:11 |
| kanzure | and I don't want to mess with it | 22:11 |
| fenn | lack of sources never stopped anyone from writing a wiki article | 22:12 |
| fenn | sure, just link to your page and people will see it if they're really interested | 22:12 |
| kanzure | that's bias, isn't it? | 22:12 |
| fenn | 'a refutation of common misconceptions about transhumanism' | 22:12 |
| fenn | what's bias? a link? | 22:13 |
| kanzure | yes, but then they will question my 'authority' | 22:13 |
| kanzure | yes, because I am the one who wrote the link | 22:13 |
| fenn | you arent allowed to link to your own page? | 22:13 |
| kanzure | the contents of the page over on the other side of the link, I mean | 22:13 |
| kanzure | that's my impression | 22:13 |
| kanzure | I might be wrong. | 22:13 |
| fenn | so, who decides what's 'authority' then? | 22:13 |
| fenn | the CSS you use for your website? | 22:13 |
| fenn | i mean come on, 90% of the stuff on the internet was completely fabricated | 22:14 |
| kanzure | I suppose. | 22:14 |
| fenn | 99% of statistics are made up on the spot | 22:14 |
| fenn | [kanzure 2006] | 22:14 |
| kanzure | heh | 22:15 |
| kanzure | one of the problems with transhumanism, if you haven't noticed, is that it's too much about politics and other bullshit | 22:15 |
| kanzure | whereas our interest is hard tech obviously | 22:15 |
| kanzure | and that's what it was originally about | 22:15 |
| kanzure | this is probably why it's not more popular among tech enthusiasts. Otherwise it should fit perfectly. | 22:15 |
| kanzure | anyway, enough on that | 22:16 |
| fenn | agreed | 22:16 |
| kanzure | I'm losing focus. | 22:16 |
| kanzure | ouch, Tony's mom just had a stroke | 22:17 |
| fenn | problem with your diy-bio conglomeration is it's full of lame ideas and duplicates | 22:19 |
| kanzure | obviously needs some work | 22:20 |
| kanzure | I was hoping to have some community response, maybe from people that can contribute small, short tutorials etc. | 22:20 |
| fenn | it would take a normal person a long time to read all of that | 22:20 |
| kanzure | unfortunately it looks like I'm going to have to do the work | 22:20 |
| fenn | and it's all stolen from other sources, so probably copyrighted | 22:20 |
| kanzure | so I'm looking around for a cheap webcam and will be doing some videos this summer | 22:20 |
| fenn | your sf page makes it sound like it's a finished product and all you have to do is download for instant enlightenment | 22:20 |
| kanzure | hm | 22:21 |
| kanzure | I didn't consider that | 22:21 |
| fenn | i mean there's no info about who you are or what exactly you did and where you see things going | 22:21 |
| * kanzure needs to do an edit soon | 22:22 | |
| fenn | oh, there is a link to your roadmap, i guess that's good enough | 22:22 |
| fenn | i think its funny the lifeboat foundation was 'angry' about it | 22:23 |
| fenn | so you see skdb as being the way to shape up biohack.sf.net | 22:24 |
| fenn | so i guess ellington's famous: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=728 A guy named Andrew Ellington has developed a method to initiate “…some therapeutic action that would be directed only to that cell…” | 22:34 |
| fenn | projected <$1000 mini-robot rapid prototyping toolkit: http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/DESKTOP/index.html | 22:45 |
| kanzure | neat | 22:58 |
| kanzure | fenn: Ellington's famous work is about automated aptamer selection experiments. These are molecular sensors that can be selected for like the directed evolution experiments. | 22:58 |
| fenn | pardon my ignorance, but how's that better than monoclonal antibodies? more convenient? | 23:00 |
| fenn | or is it specifically dna aptamers | 23:00 |
| kanzure | how do you create new antibodies? | 23:00 |
| fenn | when an organism with an immune system is born, it creates billions of random permutations, one for each b-cell | 23:01 |
| fenn | you then sensitize it to your antigen, and find the b-cell that makes that antibody | 23:01 |
| fenn | antibodies are handy because they have a common/conserved stem | 23:02 |
| * fenn reads the aptamer wikipedia article again | 23:02 | |
| kanzure | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptamer | 23:03 |
| kanzure | heh | 23:03 |
| kanzure | yes | 23:03 |
| kanzure | http://aptamer.icmb.utexas.edu/ | 23:04 |
| kanzure | I guess this just might be better since you don't have to do billions of random permutations and can instead combine rationalization and DNA synthesis etc. | 23:04 |
| fenn | ohh selection in vitro | 23:05 |
| fenn | now that's different | 23:05 |
| kanzure | she died 10 minutes after I mentioned that | 23:06 |
| kanzure | yikes | 23:06 |
| fenn | my condolences | 23:07 |
| kanzure | http://fuckdeath.org/ | 23:07 |
| fenn | the aptamer database kinda sucks as far as usability goes | 23:14 |
| kanzure | when I think/know "I can do better", am I just an ass? | 23:15 |
| fenn | i'd expect some kind of standardized 'binding specificity' and 'binding strength' | 23:16 |
| fenn | not just a crapload of papers to sort through | 23:16 |
| fenn | i'm sure each of those papers took at least a month of someone's time | 23:17 |
| fenn | not that hard to make the data useful | 23:17 |
| kanzure | I should be able to create a python object as I would normally, and then say 'yaml.dump(myPythonVariableObjectInstance)', yes? | 23:21 |
| kanzure | http://pyyaml.org/wiki/PyYAMLDocumentation search for the part that says '!!python/object' | 23:22 |
| kanzure | awesome | 23:23 |
| kanzure | 'You may even dump instances of Python classes.' | 23:23 |
| kanzure | that's pretty useful | 23:23 |
| kanzure | don't know about yaml error catching though | 23:26 |
| kanzure | with autospec why would there ever be a yaml-validation error? | 23:27 |
| kanzure | as long as you follow all of the dependencies? | 23:27 |
| kanzure | maybe yaml complains when the 'type' (the python/integer/double/ stuff at the top) is not available, and mentions the type required | 23:27 |
| fenn | i dont know how code would be represented in yaml | 23:28 |
| kanzure | not code | 23:28 |
| kanzure | you do a dump of an instance of a class/object | 23:28 |
| kanzure | erm | 23:28 |
| kanzure | an object is an instance of a class | 23:28 |
| kanzure | so you do a dump of an object | 23:28 |
| kanzure | and then it needs that class to be available on the receiving end | 23:28 |
| fenn | oh. that works. | 23:30 |
| kanzure | just wondering how it checks if that class is available, and what it says if that class isn't. | 23:31 |
| kanzure | does it say "please find it" or does it just make the entire program halt? | 23:31 |
| fenn | throws an exception hopefully | 23:31 |
| kanzure | hopefully? | 23:31 |
| fenn | well, i havent used it yet | 23:32 |
| kanzure | I thought we want to automatically handle the problems? | 23:32 |
| kanzure | exceptions usually halt | 23:32 |
| kanzure | and aren't easily parseable | 23:32 |
| fenn | no, you can catch an exception and fix the problem | 23:32 |
| kanzure | maybe it can throw an exception in yaml! | 23:32 |
| fenn | automatically | 23:32 |
| kanzure | hehe | 23:32 |
| fenn | heh | 23:32 |
| kanzure | yeah, but what's the exception going to look like? | 23:32 |
| fenn | ImportError: No module named foo | 23:32 |
| fenn | or whatever | 23:32 |
| kanzure | hopefully 'foo' is a variable given to us, not just plaintext (yuck) | 23:33 |
| fenn | >>> try: | 23:33 |
| fenn | ... import foo | 23:33 |
| fenn | ... except ImportError: | 23:33 |
| fenn | ... print "foo not loaded" | 23:33 |
| fenn | try help(ImportError) | 23:35 |
| kanzure | huh? | 23:36 |
| kanzure | help() does what? | 23:36 |
| kanzure | or do we write help()? | 23:36 |
| fenn | tells you how to use the object (the exception object in this case) | 23:36 |
| fenn | uh, that wouldnt be part of the code | 23:37 |
| kanzure | was thinking it was some sort of autospec 'autohelp' submethod | 23:37 |
| fenn | http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-September/164412.html | 23:40 |
| fenn | i'm not that experienced with exceptions, but python doesnt just dump it in the user's lap like most languages | 23:42 |
| fenn | ok, bitched to ellington :) | 23:44 |
| fenn | a decent selection of aptamers sound like a nice commercial niche business | 23:46 |
| kanzure | you bitched to him? | 23:46 |
| kanzure | what'd you say? | 23:46 |
| fenn | er.. i just closed the window with the form | 23:46 |
| kanzure | oh, on the db? | 23:46 |
| fenn | basically, there needs to be some standardized metrics and not just a bunch of paper references | 23:46 |
| fenn | if the db is to be useful | 23:47 |
| fenn | oh, earlier you asked about 'fishtub'? it's my inventory system, and the only thing keeping me from going barking mad in my own obsession with collecting junk: http://fennetic.net/pub/camera/DCP_0256.JPG | 23:51 |
| fenn | they're used for airmailing fish fillets | 23:51 |
| kanzure | not bad | 23:52 |
| fenn | its amazing how stuff compresses when you have identical sized containers to put it in | 23:53 |
| fenn | anyway, the local coop stopped using that fish distributor, and they dont get any more tubs | 23:53 |
| fenn | plz share any python-yaml stuff you create | 23:55 |
| kanzure | sure | 23:55 |
| kanzure | but right now I'm stuck in a DBZ rut in the background before I head off to bed | 23:55 |
| * kanzure checks, apparently he is on page 13 of Google image search results | 23:56 | |
| kanzure | trying to find a certain image for a page of mine. | 23:56 |
| fenn | okies, gnight or something | 23:56 |
| kanzure | g'night | 23:56 |
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