I used to think that people were compensated for their deficiencies: if a person wasn’t too bright, he would have creativity and artistic talent to make up for it.

So a week ago, Obama announced his plan to create a government-issued “Internet ID” for citizens. After only reading the title of the article, people scroll right down to the comment box and cry ”omg government can control our internets” and ”omg obama is taking away our freedoms blah blah socialists blah, blah blah 1984!”. Privacy is one of those things that people don’t understand, at all.

The US Government is trying to tackle a problem that has existed for ages: identification. The password problem. What’s the password problem? Well, they exist. Now, I could write a whole lot about the ingenuity of memorizing arbitrary strings to prove your identity, but only Yahoo would cover that kind of crap. The problem is that the private sector has failed to provide a reliable way to identify yourself. We’ve tried password managers, stuff like OpenID, RFC1413 (lol what a joke). Because none of that works (and none of that will ever work), the government logically needs to step in a provide a solution, which is what they are doing.

However, you cannot mention the words “government” and ”internet” in the same sentence or thousands of incompetent dolts will crap their pants. Even semi-reputable news organizations are all over the hype, calling it a “Internet licensing system” and “a new low for them”. Whether they truly believe such nonsense or are just trying to drive more web traffic remains unknown, but they are at fault nonetheless.

Let me reiterate: the government wants to save you from memorizing bank id numbers and long meaningless passwords. They aren’t tracking your (questionable) internet activity or limiting your freedom. And above all, it is completely optional.

Then there are people who say the government can’t be trusted with all our identification. Like what if they do something evil with it, right? Hey, guess what? 40% of Americans trust Facebook with their entire online identity. Now, why would you trust a private company that is known for its history of disregarding privacy over the fucking government? I fail to see how all of these skeptics could possibly be compensated for their deficiencies. But you never know. Maybe one day, we’ll wake up to find that a large subset of highschool-dropouts have a knack for quantum physics.

Hah, this picture probably makes no sense to you. It’s a calculator with 5 buttons, but no apparent significance. Actually, these functions are the only things a computer processor can do: add numbers, memorize numbers, and compare numbers. Yet, people build everything computer-related from this foundation. It’s like the feeling you get when you think about the mathematics-physics-chemistry-biology-psychology-sociology chain.

I’m on StumbleUpon. It’s a very good example of good social networking principles: no obligation, no exit barriers, no fiery pits of infinite ignorance. I like it a lot.

They sent out the schedule for finals week during afternoon lab on January 3rd. It’s always interesting to see what they come up with. I bet some guy at the district office has to work out these schedules every time something weird happens. The times give priority to consistency for as many students as possible, which excludes periods 2-7 people. So, Mrs. Davies was the first to present the schedule. As a science teacher, she takes an holistic look at the schedule and is satisfied because, well, the data’s all there. What more does science require? Then Mr. Belcher shows it to us and even prints us all a copy, because apparently he likes doing that. He’s like “it’s very confusing, but it makes sense. the logic is there.” He shows us how we get review sessions the day before each final and how time is moved from the unimportant classes to the review sessions. Then, each final period lasts for exactly 2 short-class periods plus 1 passing period (110 minutes). This makes sense because linguists look for intuitive logic in unplanned, naturally-evolving languages, which is why sometimes grammar doesn’t make sense. Then Jeng shows us the schedule and points out the inconsistency on Friday where the final periods last for 115 minutes instead. Of course, math teachers notice these anomalies immediately. I wonder what a programmer would say. Perhaps something about the calibri..

In the 1950’s, the United States and the USSR were both competing to develop the first nuclear fusion bomb. However, scientists in both countries faced a similar problem: you really can’t perform nuclear fusion experiments in a laboratory because it requires enormous amounts of heat and pressure (think: the Sun), so everything had to be calculated theoretically. So the USSR, being the USSR, decides to pull hundreds of thousands of their math professors and mathematicians and college math majors, and then give each guy a specific math/physics problem to solve. Colleges started accepting more physics and math majors, just so they could dedicate more of these idiots to their massive grunt-work operation. At the same time, there was no apparent link between problems to any larger goal because, well, they had to keep things secret. The US, on the other hand, didn’t have this free grunt-labor system available so they invested in “electronic calculating machines” and did their number-crunching on those instead.

Hah. Programmers: kicking your ass since 1950. Man, I should really get back to my IA..

This just blew my mind. Take a good look before you read on. College admissions are an infinitely debatable topic. Who knows what goes on in the brief minutes that you spend years preparing yourself for. I realize dribbble gets some serious preview content, but nothing’s weirder than combining the all-too-familiar mainstream design with the pinnacle of scholarship.

Oh hey, you can see the rest of the set here.

You know, projects on dribble really put my “projects” into perspective. These pros spend months developing their projects that might not be successful. Man I hope I never have that kind of pressure.

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 damn, that thought too. The origins of favicons. Whether the laws of physics must be the way they are. Or even logic. Then, realizing that none of thought matters if you can’t rely on logic: logic must be assumed. Thinking about the people who are reading this, their very reactions. Thinking about what I’m thinking about so I’ve got something to write down. The reason why my hand hurts after writing so much. The subculture in which people think it’s cool to sleep late and cool to ignore homework. What would happen if this neighborhood turned into a warzone right now. What I would grab. Why I think it would be exciting, and what part of society pushes these ideas into our heads. The guy who’s behind social engineering in this country. The role of, what, disney movies and the internet in shaping our views. Maybe even biological explanations for why war interests us. What I’d do if I had to quit school and go get a job. Hey my hand’s better now, back to work.

It’s fine thinking about this crud, but it’s rather beta to be blogging about it.. hmm, but both possibilities considered, I’ll hit the publish button. Hope for the best.

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 universal-login systems: they’re not gonna work. Then the report goes and talks about the individual API’s of the individual social networking companies. I’m sure they have “we need to standardize this by getting the W3C’s ass off the ground” somewhere, but I can’t find it for now. Section 10’s interesting: OneSocialWeb and Diaspora, fancy ideals but really they’re not gonna work in practice. Not unless the W3C lays down concrete must-follow-or-we’ll-shoot-you-in-the-foot specifications for 1) cross-network communication and 2) cross-network authentication. They need to do this now before Facebook replaces its grassy brick walls with concrete.

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 naturally-occurring subatomic events. Like, hold up, here i’ll tap my foot once a second and you count how many times that thingy flashes and we’ll tell everyone about our new definition for a second. Then we’ve got the evolution of calendars and even date formats with people thinking DDMMYY is masterrace. And then ISO8641’s convoluted time formatting, which sounds all advanced and such but is really all based on my flashing/spinny thingy and bro’s foot tapping. What was the Y2K scare all about? The number 2000 doesn’t have any significance. First of all, it only looks interesting on a base-10 system. (7D0  has no significance to a computer) Now, on January 19th 2038 (or the 18th in PST), every computer program that deals with Unix based time could really fail, because it’s exactly 2147483647 (2^32-1-1) seconds after January 1st 1970. Which is another problem. Why’d they all choose the Unix Epoch to go on new years day? Why couldn’t it have been valentines day or my birthday or something cool? O: Heh that really would be cool. How about the RogerHub Epoch, beginning on August 26th 2009 0:00:00 PST with 64 bits, unsigned timestamp? That’d give enough space for times until um.. 5.8x10¹¹ years. source. happy new years

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 by lines that go 2013, 2014, 2015 and so on. Really, the great thing about the wealth of information isn’t it’s existence, but how it came to exist. In the David Kernell case, the server logs could have been created by anybody to frame him. What has the world come to when it accepts microscopic positive and negative charges on a plate of iron as decisive evidence in court? The value of the logs isn’t their actual content, which is quite meaningless without an interpreter. It’s the fact that these regions of electromagnetic charges just so happened to be created at a certain time in a certain place. Then, the next step is seeing that there are different tiers of value between different types of data. Server logs are fairly useless, unless your name is Sarah Palin apparently. There are books, blog posts, websites protesting schools that teach about the occult. There are stupid, obscure facebook messages that idiots write to confuse people. There are one-of-a-kind data like Boggert’s core code or maybe even some word document we had to print out for class. The combined effort of humanity to create meaningful data is so perplexing that some people just can’t resist the urge to write about it. Ultimately, you can blab all you want and list these poorly-known examples to sound smart and it really fills up volumes and volumes of utter crap but the feeling is simply not transferable. Granted, most people have never taken the time to stand back and survey the breadth of humanity’s creation but that doesn’t mean they have to. Let facebook entrap their population of idiots and forever retain their worthless data. And worthless indeed because, in the end, all of it is meaningless because even my printing press is well aware of it. see the irony? Heh.

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 tell your friends about those TV people having fun and it’s completely normal because convenience has become so integrated in society. It’s not even shameful anymore. People are rewarded for making things more convenient. Rewarded is an understatement. Convenience is the goal of science, engineering and just about everything, which is inherently contradictory because if all professions are geared to the ultimate goal of perfect convenience, what’s left after that? Maybe it’s unattainable and, as time goes on, technologies that make life more convenient are harder and harder to invent. What was super-genius-pro a thousand years ago is common knowledge now, but that argument goes nowhere. Perfect convenience probably isn’t attainable because it sounds unreasonable. Even so, our baseline for convenience from the standard-of-living POV has rapidly increased as things become more convenient. For example, even the homeless today don’t have to walk miles and hunt for food in the forest. If convenience is steadily increasing and science is steadily increasing, then it’s all fine right? Science fuels progress and society relates progress with increased convenience. But then, why are there books and organizations and cults and stuff that are completely against increased convenience? Like the whole Brave New World thing where physical effort and difficulty are great. Looking at the general trend, the average worked a hundred years from now wont be doing construction. He won’t even have an office job managing the corporate database. He’ll be well-educated (for our standards, he’s average for 100-years-in-the-future standards) and he’ll be doing jobs that, in our POV, require a high level of cognitive ability. He’ll be doing computer programming (very likely), product engineering, or some future form of non-BS government position. People are okay with doing jobs that are not below their ability threshold. This concept is especially hard to explain: So, I like programming because I believe it’s near the top of my ability threshold, meaning it is the most efficient/productive way for me to produce results (i.e. convenience). Someone in the future wouldn’t be satisfied with just simple programming; they’d want a job that stretches their mental limits for a couple of reasons: First, the general trend of jobs will involve scrawnier-looking guys, more white cubicles and bigger brains. Second, as convenience increases, every job becomes more and more menial as measured on an absolute scale of willingness to work it. These two combined force people to educate themselves better and challenge themselves with increasingly difficult problems in order to stay competitive in society. Human threshold of effort? Nonsense. You might think that people in the future would give up trying to stay on top of the increasingly large pile of intelligently designed technology just like people in the past wouldn’t even think about taking a job involving typing programs in a small room for hours on end. It sounds contradictory, but somehow, human capacity to persevere will increase over time. Now, if you apply this to present day, people are all different in their maximum thresholds for perseverance and work. But inevitably, this must increase. Wanna try harder now? Yeah heh...