www.seatyourself.biz/walnutchoir I wish people would stop substituting “cum” for “come”.

My hands hurt and I’d like to type something for a change. I’m reading a thread on strange things people think about, and it’s all surprisingly familiar, which is actually not too surprising. How nothing is really solid and what we feel as solid is actually the repulsion between static charge of atoms. Thinking about the four forces of the universe. Looking outside and wishing it’d rain. Thinking about air pressure and humidity. Feasible projects that could completely screw over the world. Why there are so many people in the world and how things would be better if humans just all went extinct. Thinking about the structure of society and how it’s all so damn neat. The world as an experiment, carefully watched by some outside scientists who even planned to have this very thought occur to me. And oh… more →

Hoh, this is rather old but the W3C had a workshop on the future of social networking and they came up with “review and map existing data formats and protocols used for interoperability among social networks” and crap like “demonstration of a decentralized social network architecture”. Gotta keep in mind that the W3C has to consider things like monetization and profitability for social networks, not just the idealistic communication parts but they’re altogether moving rather slowly. It’s better to have a few growing pains than to keep stalling. They’ve got their incubator group report (source) which I know you don’t want to read, really I’m just putting that there like a bookmark. It does a good job of laying out the problems and, nothing good exists about social networking, so it just lays out the problems. Also OpenID and other… more →

Hey it’s 2011 and winter break’s over. In just 21 hours, we’ll be sitting in bio lab again. Meanwhile, stupidity proliferates and some other guy’s making money off it. You know what’s also new? It used to be taboo to have the client’s web browser manually resize images, either through CSS or through the DOM attributes. When people were using IE6, yeah horrible problem because the resizes would turn out all chunky. Now, it’s not so bad anymore. Start embracing it O: Here’s a wild idea: why not let the W3C take over social networking? Make it into a standard protocol with standard ways for websites to communicate socially. Just don’t hand it to the IETF, they’ll make some convoluted shit out of it like they do everything else.

Time is such a crazy concept. It must have really taken a genius to figure out that time was something that can be separated and split into distinct intervals. I still remember getting home from kindergarten at 11 AM and wondering why seconds go by so slowly, and it’s like time’s just not the same anymore. A bajillion years ago, setting global standards for time was easy because all you would have to do is go ask the guy who ruled the whole world, you know? But now that everyone speaks different languages and has, like what the hell, the time on your clock changes depending on where you are in the world? Then we’re all trying to cling on to the definitions of time set by some old dead guys a million years ago, defining them as multiples of… more →

I saw my friend reading a book about the explosion of data that comes with the evolution of the Internet and really those books are all plain stupid. You can’t read about information logistics: there’s no easy way to experience it short of actually working with the enormous amount of data that, simply, exists. So lets say I’ve got a printing press that has 75 wheels of letters. Each wheel has stamps of the 50 most common alphabet characters, numbers, spaces and punctuation marks used in English. Then, this printing press starts printing out every sentence that can possibly exists by combining random combinations of these 50 letters in sets of 75 characters per line. Most of the lines are utter gibberish like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa but once in a while, it’ll say something insightful: the world will end in 2012, followed… more →

I’ve just finished. 125454 letters in 2600 lines of code, now I just have to get this project off the ground.. yeah maybe later. It’s not exactly exciting telling people about your weekend programming, even if it was with awesome rainy weather and even if you did get.. like a third of the size of your last 4-month project done in 4 days. People like telling stories about sports and stuff because they think its exciting. It gets to a point where it’s actually more exciting telling the story than experiencing it. See, why is this? It’s because, one day, an idiot saw how much trouble people had coming up with interesting stories and decided to fix it. He wanted to make it convenient. Then there’s reality TV where you can watch other people having fun. Then, you can even… more →

There is no combination of lights I can show you on this 10-pound chunk of glass, metal, and plastic that will make you any happier than you are now. Yet, I’m here every day thinking of ideas. Ideas that could be wonderful if they ever worked. Ideas that promise success and recognition as if some peculiar combination of lights on the crystal display will break this haunting premise. Conversely, you’re staring at this pane of falsehood and illusion for hours a day trying to attain the same impossible utility that I try for, but in a completely different way. We both spend a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time on this pinnacle of human innovation and we both forget: A computer is just a fucking tool. See, social networking principles dictate that the purpose of digital communication is to better communication… more →

There are programs. Then, there are programs that help you make programs. Then, using those programs, you can create a program that will help other people create programs. I was reading about the pioneer plaque and, really, it’s amazing. So, on Pioneer 11 and 12, there are plaques with information about our human race in case aliens ever find the spacecraft. Assuming the aliens have some sort of mechanism to read and process electromagnetic light, they could gather information about our location and our intelligence, just by understanding the supposedly universal symbols on the plaque. But that’s the problem. How could anything be universal? Alien’s don’t know what an arrow is or what it means. They wouldn’t know who Pythagoras was but they’d know his theorem. They would probably use a different number system with different symbols and base. But… more →

It’s raining right now. I was thinking how nuclear fallout can cause rain and stuff and then I thought about nationwide programs for this sort of stuff and then I thought about NASA and their publication about the bacteria that incorporate arsenic into their organic molecules. Did nobody else notice this? A few months ago, Obama cut NASA’s budget, forever destroying the dreams of 10-year-old astronauts. Then, NASA spent a ton of money trying to get public attention, spreading rumors about them finding organisms that completely redefine what we consider to be organic. I thought they had silicon-based life or something they found on another planet. But arsenic from Mono lake? Big whoop. Maybe that’s important to some people, but anyone would guess that this is NASA’s sucking up to Obama so that he’ll give them more money. Oh, you… more →

For the longest time, I’ve had this idea on my get-rich quick million-dollar programming ideas list but today I found out that someone’s already done it. Long story: Internet TV Streaming is fine and all, but it just doesn’t work, especially in the US because of the copyright crap. Centralized distribution of content is just a bad idea because, eventually, someone has to take the blame for it. So, I thought of applying decentralized P2P protocols to movies and TV which would be entirely possible. Let’s say there are 100 publishers with distribution centers around the world that publish TV content. While these guys are downloading content from the distribution server, they’re simultaneously uploading what they’ve got to other watchers. The video is encoded in a streaming-enabled format and sliced into bits. The earlier bits are given more priority and, with… more →

Would you do something for free? Like, no recognition at all, and it doesn’t soothe your conscience either. Think of it like this: Your friend’s about to die, but you have a way to save him.  It involves killing yourself, but afterwards, everyone will remember you as the biggest douchebag ever and you won’t even remember you did it, but he’ll live (still thinking you were a shitty friend). If you let him die, you’ll forget that you ever had a chance to save him. You’ll feel pretty bad, but come on, as bad as it sounds, your life will go on. “That’s dumb, NO way man, why would I do that?.” It feels awkward thinking about these situations, so we avoid applying logic to them. But consider it: Even the soldier getting blown up knows very well in his… more →