outward not upward

This is just a quick post on one way that I’ve realized I think about my commitments. This model works best with the tasks you select for yourself, but there are plenty of variations to which it also applies, including assignments from your school or place of work.

In a nutshell, the Over-Under Model states that what you want to do and what you’ve committed to affect you in different ways psychologically. Specifically, you place things that you want to do beneath (under) you, and you place what you’ve committed to (either to yourself or to someone else, tacitly or verbally) above (over) you. Read the rest of this entry »

This post has been redacted due to an illuminating discussion with a member of the Grooveshark team.

Productivity expert and jet-setter extraordinaire Tim Ferriss has a proposition for you. Work four hours a week, he says, and you’ll find that you can become wealthy while still having time to do all the things you want to do.

Ferriss emphasizes the idea that (i) reducing information overload and (ii) outsourcing tasks, combined with (iii) remaining-results oriented will result in a tremendously liberating situation where the practicing individual has copious free time on a weekly basis in which they are free to travel the world, or even have multiple, parallel mini-careers. This sounds excellent, and I was enraptured by the notion at first (as were, seemingly, the millions who have firmly planted FHWW on the New York Times best-sellers list). I was especially turned on by the inspiring presentation Ferriss gave with Marci Alboher for Authors@Google.

Shortly, though, I became aware of an insidious side-effect of this kind of workload reduction, which was initially veiled by my selfishness and my entrepreneurial sympathies.
Read the rest of this entry »

A very noteworthy shift occurred in the world of physics in the early part of the 20th century, and I’m not talking about Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis. In fact, much of Einstein’s work was diametrically opposite what I’m talking about: use of statistics as a foundation for physics.

I have to note a quotation from Niels Bohr, which shines with uncommon insight:

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.

I think many scientists before the Modern era would have disagreed with this. Einstein would almost certainly have disagreed, because of his unusual obsession (shared with Newton) with mathematical beauty. It is explicit throughout his work that Einstein believed (and this rings out in Hawking, too) that the “mind of God,” or absolute reality, must be able to be inferred from physical observation.

After 1905, though, things turned ugly. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last couple of days, I’ve put together a little program I’m calling RabidRead*. RabidRead was conceived when I read a forum post by someone about how he was able to achieve very high comprehension at very high speeds by using a piece of software he wrote.

Programs of this sort are called “serial readers,”and they work by presenting a single word (from a long text) at a time, in rapid succession (say, between 200 and 1000 words per minute).

Read more here!

I have to preface this post by saying that I happen to be reading Douglas Hofstadter’s latest book, I Am A Strange Loop, and, while some of these topics are covered in it, my discussion predates (and presages) my encounter with them in the text. In other words, while I am riffing on Hofstadter, I’m not ripping him off.

I believe that it will be extremely hard - well beyond the current estimates of futurists and Singularitarians like Ray Kurtzweil - to duplicate human cognition in silicon and code. While I was, and still am to some degree, wildly optimistic about the future of the computational study of cognition, reading Hofstadter’s new book has made me reflect more deeply on what has been called “Strong AI,” its possibility, its likelihood, and the form it would take.

I have become skeptical of predictions of human-equivalent artificial intelligence for three reasons, explained below. First, though, I have to say that I don’t think the limits will be strictly technological. In other words, I believe we will, within a couple of decades, have the raw processing power to emulate a sophisticated (if still somewhat simplified model) of a human mind, the sticking point being how to coax the hardware and software to give rise to such a thing.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some projects I’ve hacked on in the last couple of years:
Caffeine (Game Engine)
Amphetrace (Raytracer)
APOTAX (Automated Theorem Prover)
Bash-Em Smash-Em Robots (Fighting Game Demo)
Project:Ominous (FPS Game Demo)
SolarSystemBrowser (3D Solar System Model)
Wander (Text Adventure Game Written in 1 Day)

Some projects that never really got off the ground:
Decaf (Software Renderer)
Barista (Game Scripting System + Editor)
COED (3D Modeling Package)
Golem (Rigid Body Physics Framework)
SpeechVis (Speech Interest Metrics Analyzer)
Tonk (2D Networked Tank Combat Game)
REVIS (Real-Time Video Blending Suite)
Cocorun (Casual Game Demo)

…and some projects I’ve worked on with other people:
Roswell (3rd Person Game Demo)
Native Conflict (Turn-Based Strategy Game Demo)
Metabolic1491 (Metabolic Pathway Modeling Tool)