Old School Times Two

Oh how sophisticated we have become in our old age. There used to be a time when just about every web page that was hip and up-to-date had a silly "hit counter" on it. It counted the number of times the page was viewed in a very simple-minded way. It didn't care about unique hosts or anything useful like that, it just incremented its count every time the page was accessed.


Hit counter!

Well, the good old days are back! In an effort to beat the nixie tube theme to death I offer you, free to use, your very own nixie tube hit counter. It will remember any page you stick it in, it will increment every time the page is displayed (of course, actually, every time the image is displayed), and it will impress your visitors with old-timey geek power. Or not. Either way feel free to stick it on your page and have a go.

To use the super-cool nixie page counter, just use it like an image, so:

<img src="http://kovaya.com/nixie-count.cgi"
       alt="Nixie Hit Counter!" width=210 height=77>

That's all there is to it. Now there is no guarantee that it will continue to operate so don't base a business model on it, but if you think its fun and want to try it out, please do. Thoroughly tested but bug reports should go to the email address in the sidebar over there.

Happy counting!

Absolute Confusion

A fundamental error among people looking for Truth (with a big T) is to imagine that is is a nothing but a bigger version of "truth" (the little T kind). Small truths are simply things about which we agree. We say "that is true" to mean just that. "I agree with you" or, " you should agree with me" are equivalent and work everywhere "it is true" is used. Because the same word is used we take big Truth to be a bigger version of small truth.

The reality is that small truths don't actually resemble what people imagine big Truth to be. Small truths are descriptions of things that use words we understand from their context. The entire web of meaning that leads to small truths is based on a context of assumptions. People believe that Truth is "absolute" by which they mean there is no contextual component, but we can see that small truths are entirely dependent on the context in which the occur. So, what we call "truth" cannot be the same thing as the idea of big Truth.

If there is something like big Truth it must be something other then contextless small truth. Small truths are products of this big Truth, not a different sort of the same thing. There is no occult version of Truth in them. They are just what they are, no more. The confusion arises because they share a name.

From the Ashes (but still a bit sooty...)

Miscellany's previous home became suddenly unavailable. As you can see, it's back online but it is not yet completely status quo ante. Please excuse any funny behavior, or missing functionality as I scramble to restore things to normal.

On a positive note, I am now using Linode and I am very pleased and impressed. Low cost, slick as a Linux-geek's forehead and cheaper than his wardrobe. I can unhesitatingly recommend that you check them out, if you want to have high quality hosting and root.

Nixie Tube Fun

Your IP Address

Nixie tubes are a retro-technology well beloved by artsy nerds everywhere. My own memories of nixies are as the classiest digital displays, before being supplanted by the MAN-1 seven segment LED display. Today, nixie tubes are lovingly turned into clocks of very modern accuracy and even unlikely wristwatches.

The nixie tube was the invention of the Haydu Brothers Laboratories which was purchased by the much larger Burroughs Corporation who made it a commercial product in 1954. The name comes from the designation assigned to the "Numeric Indicator Experimental No. 1" by Burroughs who trademarked it.

Lately I don't have time to build my own clock, though I would like to. I have settled for building you a slightly useful toy. The display shows your IP address, and improbably, I knew ahead of time just how many digits I would need to display it.

Maybe I will build a clock eventually, it would be nice on my desk.

It Lives!

No, this blog is not dead.

Some folks have even expressed concern that perhaps something has "happened" to me. Rest assured, it is nothing more than life's demands overwhelming free time.

Thanks for the concern. I have several articles partially completed so look for my triumphant return soon.

As a reminder, I always enjoy receiving email, and you can find a link in the sidebar. I enjoy feedback and reactions to what I write and will always respond (if not instantly, eventually.)

Thanks for reading.

The Weather Outside is Frightful

larger version here

It's been snowing around here. I don't like snow but at least it is pretty.
This photo was taken about two hours before sunrise. It is a one second exposure.
 

The Saw of Science

Tools are inert. Every tool must be wielded by a person. People use tools to achieve goals. The result of wielding a tool is a product of the skill and intent of the wielder, and the suitability of the tool to the task. Consider a tree saw: it can be used to destroy a tree, to kill it, or it can be used to prune a tree, cutting away deadwood and diseased limbs to strengthen it. The way in which it is to be used is up to the person wielding it. Is either way "true", or "good", in some objective sense?


What happens next depends on you.

Consider science: it is also a tool which can be used to destroy or improve, not physical objects but ideas. A person can choose to destroy an idea by cutting it off, or improve it by pruning away the bad branches. You might reply: "Science depends on truth and so it can only cut away the bad. If it cuts down the idea, the idea was bad." This isn't honest. All ideas are subject to denial. All ideas depend on assumptions which can be shown to be suspect or "wrong" given the right context. The result of wielding the saw of science is very strongly dependent on the intent of the wielder. This intent is often an a priori attempt to disprove challenging ideas. This is a terrible way to use such a powerful tool.

It seems to me that a person interested in truth should turn science on their own ideas as a skeptic. One way to do this is by attempting to find the truth in those things that are challenging. If we do this we will find and fill the gaps in our own ideas. This goes beyond science to things about which science has nothing to say as well. In our lives, as we consider the ideas of other people we know to be sincere and intelligent, it damages us if we do not consider their ideas as seriously as we consider our own. The world is vague and as much as we want to have clear lines we cannot.

Clarity

Anything completely clear is wrong, or not very interesting.

 

Redeeming Social Value

Now that something about 150,000 of you have visited this post, and about 19,000 of you have made links to it, perhaps I can do something to redeem all the attention paid to it. In a way loosely coupled to INSERT COIN, the campaign to save trees, through reminding people where we get paper, came to my attention.


What can be better than reminding people of what they already know?

I have modified the program (available here) to be a little friendlier and have a fixed message, "Remember... These Come From Trees". It is easy to use, you just need to give it a hostname or IP address on the command line. More information on making it work can be found in the context of the original post. For most smaller displays the message will scroll, marquee-like for a nice effect. The bigger displays may benefit from printer-specific formatting with spaces in the message string (in the quotes on line 47).

I hope this can do a bit to conserve paper. I am particularly interested in conservation as a way of improving the world. Saving energy and natural resources by not wasting them is a no-brainer. It is very clear to me that not conserving when the opportunity easily comes to hand is ethically indefensible.

Order some stickers, too, for those things that aren't HP printers.

Relatively Monstrous

Today, Shlomo (our youngest, at 6), came walking stiff-legged into the room and up to my wife.



Where did Igor get that brain?

Shlomo:  I am acting like Frankenstein. E equals M C squared.
Shoshi:   That's Einstein.
Shlomo:  Oh.

Sometimes Shlomo says things that leave us scratching our heads. I still don't know where he learned about E=MC².

You Are What You Eat

Around here the squirrels can be a bit nutty. They get used to humans and lose much of their fear. This leads to odd behaviors. I have seen squirrels do this in the trees but never like this, on the ground.


In spite of appearances, the little guy did not just come from the tree

It is very hard to avoid assigning human emotions to animals. I don't know if this squirrel was really having fun but it certainly looked that way.

I like squirrels, I think I will take more photos of them.

What Do You Use?

There are hundreds of application download sites out there, but can you trust their ratings and awards? Probably not.



Luckily, if you are an OS X user, my friend Marcus has come up with a great solution for you. Combining the idea of social networking and tagging sites with software recommendations, his site here, lets the user community give the recommendations. Just like digg or del.icio.us, iusethis.com lets you use common wisdom (number of users) or choose trusted individuals for recommendations.

It is a great idea that works and deserves a lot of attention, check it out.

The Two Sides of a Coin

Lately, I have been working on a heuristic for systematic thinking that I believe is very powerful. I'd like to share it with you. Maybe you can help me refine it. For a long time I have found myself alternately embracing opposing viewpoints. At first this bothered me. It seemed to be non-committal, indecisive and not useful for decision-making. However, I have come to see it as quite useful, indeed.


There's no such thing as a one-sided coin. It's a package deal.

Today I was listening to the Philosophy Bites podcast featuring Anthony Grayling, a prominent advocate of atheism. When asked about agnosticism he rejected it as a "wishy washy, fence sitting kind of view". He went on to attempt to draw a parallel between the belief in "faeries" with a belief in any supernatural phenomenon, and therefore to reject agnosticism on the basis that if faeries aren't real then it is silly to hold out for any view that isn't strictly naturalist. I mention this because it is what provoked into writing about this topic today.

When I have found some set of rules that nicely explains a given aspect of reality I also find myself invariably dissatisfied with them. There always seem to be things that I believe are correct, but that those rules cannot reach. This, I think, is related to the idea of incompleteness in mathematical logic. Kurt Gödel provided a rigorous proof that any system of formal logic, which sufficiently complex to be interesting, is incomplete. That is, there are true and false "statements" within its rules that the rules themselves cannot derive. (A note to mathematical logicians: I am not claiming this is a rigorous definition or application of Gödel, consider it loosely-coupled)

Similarly, the rules-based systems you and I use to make decisions about morality, politics, aesthetics and the like are also incomplete. There are things that we can feel are correct but cannot show as correct. This is what lead to my alternate embracing of first one idea, then the opposing one. Was that wrong?

Many of the greatest thinkers in history, particularly those with a "spiritual" bent are described as confusing the people around them by first embracing one idea, then its apparent opposite. This seems inconsistent and mysterious. Maybe it isn't. Let's take a very simplified example from politics. Our hypothetical left- and right-wingers are faced with a problem. The poor need to be fed. Excluding actual extremists, who might either suggest that everyone should be fed by the government (putative left) or that people who cannot feed themselves should be allowed to die (putative right) we are left with two sides that agree some people should be helped by the government and the some people should be completely on their own.

The difference between them is that on the left, expansion of the government program is the tendency or even goal, which on the right it is contraction of the program. Is one of these positions "correct" to the exclusion of the other? I don't think so. I also don't think that an artificial "middle" is correct, either. That is, the ideological "average" of the left and right is not an effective position. What then, can we make of this?

This is where the coin comes in. If we imagine the problem to be solved, which both sides agree upon, as the coin, we can see that the two sides of the coin can be analogous to the two positions. The coin itself is a good coin, We all like it. If we are on one face, though, we cannot see the other at all. It appears that the other face is mutually exclusive with our face. If we look at the coin, though, we see that both faces are required. So, it is my contention that when we find ourselves with what we consider a "good set of rules" we should immediately seek out the opposing view. That view is actually complementary to our own. It literally completes it. When we come to a conclusion with our own rules we then need to analyze with "their" rules and refine our conclusion.

Sometimes, it seems wise to actually adopt a opposition opinion where our own system seems deficient. Sometimes it is just a matter of polishing our own ideas. Eventually, we might stop thinking of our "side" as the "correct" one and instead embrace the entire coin. Then it becomes a matter of where to draw the line in tension between the two. In that idea I believe is the essence of how the world operates.

I will write more on that, later.

Amazing NASA Imagery

NASA has provided satellite views of the recent Southern California wildfires. These pictures bring home both the enormity and insignificance of the fires. Compared to the land mass of the US they are small spots, but the smoke they are producing is prodigious.


Wildfires burn in California
(full size image here)

High resolution versions of other great photos available here.

Your Shoe is Untied

How many times do you stop to ties your shoes in one day? If your answer isn't "once for each time I put on my shoes" maybe you need to know about "Granny Syndrome" ("double-knotters" I am talking to you, too.) About 20 years ago I got tired of constantly retying my shoes. They would come untied a dozen or more times a day. I decided to do something about it. I set out to invent or discover a better way to tie shoes. My discovery might just liberate you, too.


If your laces look like this you are a sufferer. Check them, if they are still tied.

I ran across a fantastic volume called The Ashley Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley. Ashley himself is a fascinating person worthy of separate discussion but his book was the key to my cure.

It turns out that Ashley has no solution at all for tying shoelaces. "Shoelaces" appears in the index but he only writes about lacing shoes. Among the literally thousands of knots documented in the book, however, is the common reef knot (also called the square knot.) The reef knot gets its name from its use. You have probably heard the expression "reef the sails". "Reefing" is rolling up a sail to some extent to reduce its effective area. When you reef a sail you have to tie it in place. The reef knot is used there. It has the property of being very secure unless you pull one of the loose ends across the knot which causes the knot to "capsize", or "spill" and come undone. You can see how this is useful on a reefed sail.

A reef knot is quite simply tied. Take a half knot (the first step most people take in shoe tying) and then take another half knot in the opposite direction on top of the first. If you take the second in the same direction, you get a granny knot which, being frictionally unbalanced, will not stay tied.

By now you may be starting to twig to the problem. It turns out that the common bow tied in a shoelace is a reef knot taken with two bights (loops in the rope) which is called a "slipped reef knot". So, very simply, if you try to tie a slipped reef knot in your shoelace and you end up with a slipped granny knot, it will come undone. So how to fix it?

Here is the secret to tying your shoes just once each time you put them on: reverse the direction of the first half knot you make. If you normally put the left over and right under, put the right over and the left under, and vice versa. Then, proceed to tie as usual. It's that simple. It will save you time, embarrassment and for some, pain. It will eliminate the ugly, dubious "double knot". Double knotting is completely unnecessary. The shoes stay tied and they look nicer.

More Information

In researching this post I ran across a site from which I got the picture, above: Ian's Shoelace Site. The site is wonderful. It covers this topic, lacing, tying (17 knots!), and many other shoelace-related areas. It is a great place for advanced shoelace studies or to see pictures of what I am talking about if you can't understand my description.

In our correspondence Ian and I agreed our independent, informal visual surveys indicate about 40% of people suffer from Granny Syndrome. Once you figure it out you might just find yourself mentioning it to friends when you spot their telltale parallel bights.

I Love My Car

About a year ago I bought a new car. OK, new to me. She is about 13 years old now (yes, it is a she and her name is Inger). She is a 1995 850 Volvo Estate Turbo. I paid $4,800 cash for her and have her title.


Inger in her favorite color, red. I think she is lovely.

Her original MSRP was about $35,000. She has a full leather interior, power moon roof, CD changer, fancy climate control... lots of stuff. She is sporty, too: 222 bhp and 0-60 in 7 seconds, and passive rear wheel steering. When I drive her around, listening to say, Debussy's Estampes or Steely Dan's Aja I am happy. I have wanted a Volvo 850 Estate since 1995—now I have one.

She, like me, is a little idiosyncratic thanks to her age. But she is nice to look at and great to drive. Her quirks are just her personality and the patina of age is just character. I like to think the same of myself. Inger has 166,000 miles on her and because she is a Volvo 300,000 is not asking too much. I drive very little, about 500 miles a month. At that rate she could be the last car I own. I wonder if it will work out that way.

One of the things that makes me specially happy is that I have no car payment. I own this car free and clear. I cannot imagine taking out a car loan any more. In the past I used credit. Today I have no credit cards and no car loans. I don't own a lot of expensive items but I do really enjoy what I have. I only wish I had learned about this 20 years ago.