Mike Linksvayer

patrissimo @ 10:11 pm: Tortuga & Calderon Cohousing in LA Town Crier
Local newspaper article about cohousing communities

Tags: tortuga

fare @ 04:40 pm: You're invited to my Birthday Party!

Next Saturday November 21st 2009, from 2pm to 10pm, I'll have a late house-warming party and an early Birthday party, in Cambridge Massachusetts, and you are cordially invited.

112 Thorndike St #2, Cambridge MA 02414
Near to Lechmere Station (Green line) and not far from Kendall Sq/MIT (Red line).
Phone: 617 595 2601

Sorry for a late notice. Please RSVP with number of guests.

Tags: birthday, boston, en, party

crasch @ 04:21 am: It’s Time to Legalize Drugs

Original: craschworks - comments

Via the Washington Post:

Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.

We simply urge the federal government to retreat. Let cities and states (and, while we’re at it, other countries) decide their own drug policies. Many would continue prohibition, but some would try something new. California and its medical marijuana dispensaries provide a good working example, warts and all, that legalized drug distribution does not cause the sky to fall.

Having fought the war on drugs, we know that ending the drug war is the right thing to do — for all of us, especially taxpayers. While the financial benefits of drug legalization are not our main concern, they are substantial. In a July referendum, Oakland, Calif., voted to tax drug sales by a 4-to-1 margin. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug w

crasch @ 02:59 am: A Radical Solution to End the Drug War: Legalize Everything

Original: craschworks - comments

Via Esquire

Last year, Franklin went public with his conclusions by joining a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Since then he’s made it his business to talk to other cops about the subject, and he’s been surprised by another discovery: “I find that 95 percent of my law-enforcement friends agree that we have to take a different direction, but they’re not sure what direction that is — and probably 60 percent to 65 percent agree that we should legalize.”

And why, exactly, don’t we hear about a possibly overwhelming majority of police wanting to legalize — not just decriminalize, but legalize — major narcotics?

“Selfish reasons,” he says. “There is a lot of money to be made in law enforcement. If we were to legalize, you could get rid of one third of every law-enforcement agency in this country.”

crasch @ 02:24 am:

Original: craschworks - comments

Ólafur Arnalds - Ljósið (Official Music Video)

Tags: uncategorized

fare @ 02:14 am: Stolen Concept of the day: "Social Contract"

"Social contract" theorists try to replace universal natural law with arbitrary social constructs, but start by stealing the very concept of contract from the framework of natural law that they are claiming to do away with.

If there is no prior, higher, Law, then no contract whatsoever, "social" or else, is binding. Anything goes, contracts are void at best, fraud at worst, but fraud, theft, rape and murder are just as good as anything else, so who cares?

If there is a prior, higher, Law, that says that contracts are binding, and provides for enforcement of such contracts, then who needs a social contract? There already is a Law. Moreover, an alleged "Social contract" can neither contradict nor override this Natural Law without which it is void.

In either case, "Social Contract" theorists are crooks, and their theories are just another fraud to justify the arbitrary power of the mighty over the weak as if it had been somehow consented.

Tags: en, epistemology, natural law, social contract, socialism

bramcohen @ 10:08 pm: Comments on Go
Here are my preliminary thoughts on the Go programming language.

The most interesting feature for me personally is the built-in threading. Aside from its superb support for multi-core, it's just plain a good set of ways of doing networking. The lack of a decent built-in networking library (and generally coordination library) in Python has been a thorn in my side just about forever. In particular the promotion of queues to being one of the few built-in primitives with their own special syntax encourages good threading practice and is clearly warranted. Even such a simple command as 'wait until either the UI thread or the networking thread comes up with something' is a source of ongoing pain in most languages, but is built into Go as a core concept using select.

Go seems to finally get the static typing problem solved. Its := operator is a reasonable middle point between C++'s ludicrous verbosity and ML's excessive magic. Types being structural is also a huge win. There's no end of stupid architectural haggling over what module a base type sits in and who owns it, and the answer 'nowhere' completely gets rid of that problem. It seems to me that there are deep subtle problems with such declarations - for example, how does it statically check that the parameters accepted by methods of a type you're receiving are compatible with what you want to pass them? But maybe I just haven't thought about it enough. It's too bad that Go doesn't currently have generics. I for one won't start any new project in it until it reaches that level of maturity.

Go's lack of exception handling is a real problem, and another thing I'm blocking on to do real development in it. My own preferred method for adding it would be that if you call a function which has multiple return values and you don't handle one of them, it defaults to shorting to the same return of the caller, although some people might complain about that being too much like Java's 'throws'. That said, I've gotten so used to debugging by stack trace that I'd be loathe to not have stack building built into the language in some form, and in fact I've gotten really attached to a tricked out logging tool I wrote which can decorate any object and automatically logs a full stack trace of every assignment which is made to the object and allows you to print them all out at once. But perhaps such trickery is really the domain of highly dynamic languages, and not appropriate for something as low level and performance oriented as Go.

The primitives in Go are quite good. All languages should have special maps and lists built in. I think it actually doesn't go far enough with giving them special status, and should have Python-style special syntax for maps. The curly brackets could be freed up by simply eliminating their current usage and making formatting have syntax. It's more than a little bit absurd that the language designers themselves have a setup where a utility standardizes the formatting of their own code every time they commit, but they still maintain the nominal free-form nature of the language. Really guys, I know you were traumatized by Fortran's original awful enforced formatting, but that was a long time ago and it's time to let go.

That said, the primitives are given too much special status in other ways - they're the only things which have type parameterization, making it impossible to even implement their interfaces yourself, and worse, they're the only things which are call by reference. The call by reference thing worries me a lot. I really, really don't want Go to become the reference/pointer mix hell which C++ has become, but it's already headed in that direction. It really shouldn't matter that much - things which are passed are either an address or a copy, and the reference/pointer distinction really just has to do with what's the default (okay, so typically references don't let you overwrite either, but that's not a fundamental property). I for one strongly prefer the default be an address, and clearly when push comes to shove Go's designers do too, but more important than which way it is is that it should be consistent. Already transitioning to something consistent might require rewriting huge amounts of code, and it's getting worse, so fixing this problem might have to happen soon or never, and I'm afraid that it might already be never.

Go's speed of compilation is very nice, although I'm afraid I view that not so much as a strength of Go but as an awfulness of C++. Why C++ continues to take forever to compile even on machines many orders of magnitude faster than the first ones I ever used it on has long been a mystery to me. I hope the answer is simply that it's a language which wasn't designed with ease of parsing in mind, and has a whole layer of preprocessing on top of it which is horribly abused.

It's interesting that Go is going the garbage-collected route. If such a low-level language as Go can get away with that (and, truth be known, their preferred garbage collector isn't really integrated yet, so it's a little early to call it) then we may never see another non-garbage-collected language ever again.

I despise the use of initial capital letters to specify that something is public. Maybe if I used it for a while I'd learn to not hate it, but for now I hate it. Does chinese even have uppercase?

It's entirely possible that after using Go for a while something else would really start to gnaw at me about it, but it generally has a good smell, so hopefully not.

If you've read this far, you should follow me on Twitter.

patrissimo @ 07:02 pm: Warm & Healthy foods?
My diet principles include: low calorie density, minimal processing, lots of fruits & vegetables. Not that I stick to them perfectly, but at least those are the goals.

I've been having more trouble now that the weather is reminding me that I live in Northern California. I crave warm food, but fruits, vegetables, and salads are usually cold. I am having trouble coming up with warm foods that are high in vegetables and low in calorie-density. Vegetable soup? Steamed vegetables? Stir-fried vegetables?

Ok, that wasn't hard. But I see the real problem now. All of those require cooking. One of the hidden benefits of "minimal processing" is that food often goes from the store to the fridge to my tummy without the inconvenience of passing through the stove. Warmth = cooking = stove. Hmph.

Tags: diet

patrissimo @ 01:12 pm: Thiel Foundation Website
The Thiel Foundation (sadly no longer called "The Shire") has a fancy new website up. You can find TSI under "Freedom", and some other familiar faces under Science & Technology.

Peter's essay on The Contrarian Hero particularly resonates with me:

Contrarians stay centered for the same reasons they see so clearly—because rigorous application of fundamental principles aligns thinking with feeling, creating a clear picture of the world that explains how it ought to work, how it does work, and our place in it. Once you achieve a clear and true picture, apparent contradictions fall away. The right road is still steep and treacherous, but at last it's clearly marked.

This is the predicament of the contrarian hero: his eyes are opened. Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, and every step reveals not only the futility of reaching the peak, but also the impossibility of turning aside.

Tags: peter thiel

patrissimo @ 12:55 pm: posts other places
I won't cross-post everything, but as I'm trying to establish traffic for these blogs...

On pua4ltr: choiceful posts How to Make your Woman Happy: Study PUA, and I post The Repetition Game And Presence.

On LATNB: Second talk from Seasteading09 is up: Michael Strong on Free Zones and how they could lead to innovation in government.

crasch @ 12:16 pm: How to get over unrequited love

Original: craschworks - comments

As Sarah disembarked from the plane, I stood holding a red helium balloon.  This was an innocent time, before 9/11, when the non-ticketed could still meet passengers as they disembarked from the plane.  She saw me, smiled, and came close.  “Chris!”  “Sarah!”  We hugged.  “Chris, I’d like you to meet someone.  This is Tom.”  From behind her, stepped Tom.  My smile froze.  Tom?  I didn’t know Tom was going to be here.  I thought it was just going to be her.

Alone.

I hand her the balloon, Tom looking on.  “Welcome to L.A.!”  “Oh, thank you.”  She gets a nervous look in her eye.  Tom and I shake hands, and we exchange pleasantries.  We start walking back to my car.  Five minutes later, a porter comes running up with a balloon.  “Welcome to L.A.!” he beams.  We go another couple hundred feet.  A shoeshine man runs up with a balloon.  “Welcome to L.A.!”  Sarah gives me a quizzical look.  As we walk, more and more people people come up and give her a balloon, each wishing her a warm welcome to L.A.  She eventually ends up with a dozen balloons in her arms.  “What’s going on here?!?”

Verliebtheit was what was going on. Or forelskelse, enamoramiento, or влюблённость.  In English, it’s been called “love madness” or “oneitis”  Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term limerence to identify it.  Limerence is defined as  “…an involuntary cognitive and emotional state of intense romantic desire for another person, enduring for months, years and even a lifetime.  It’s characterized by intrusive thinking and…can be experienced as intense joy or as extreme despair, depending on whether the feelings are reciprocated.”

Sarah and I had met in college, in Lambda Nu’s computer cluster.  Back then, Sarah was dating Adam, one of my dorm-mates in Lambdu Nu. While she was waiting for Adam, she would frequently come to the computer cluster and chat me up.  She seemed warm and nice, but she was a feminist studies and film studies major–I didn’t think we had much in common.

We graduated, and lost touch for a while.  I moved to Rancho Cucamonga, to work for 21st Century Medicine, a biotech firm specializing in organ cryopreservation.  I was 25.  One weekend, I decided to go visit my friend Carly who was working in the Sweet Hall graphics department at Stanford.  As I wandered among the cubicles, I saw a familiar face.  Sarah?  Yes, it was her!  We chatted about half an hour, and agreed to hang out later in the weekend.

We went hiking around campus and had dinner together.  After dinner, we stayed up late into the night, just talking.  I fell asleep on her couch.  We clicked! 

I returned to Rancho Cucamonga.  I could not stop thinking about her!  I wrote her a passionate email revealing my love for her.  Her first response was short and formal.  So I wrote her more emails.  Each of her responses was shorter and colder.  Eventually, she told me  to stop contacting her any more.

I was crushed.  And embarassed. 

A year passes.  Every day, I thought about her.

After a year, I email her a brief note, apologizing for my previous behavior.  She responds positively.  Subsequently, we talk on the phone and email each other fairly frequently. 

Then one day, she says she’s coming to L.A. for her website launch, and could I pick her up from the airport…

Of course, I knew that Sarah and Tom were dating, but I didn’t know how serious it was.   I thought that if only I could impress her enough, she would dump Tom, and date me.  So I tried to think of something that would be sweet, and novel, and would impress her. Hmmm, balloons?  But that’s too traditional and not particularly impressive.  I remembered she had previously expressed her distaste for L.A.–she thought it was an artificial, unwelcoming city.  I know, I’ll prove to her that L.A.’s truly a welcoming city by having employees in the airport hand her the balloons, and say “Welcome to L.A.!”

So that’s what I did.

The ride to the hotel with her and Tom was rather awkward.

And, of course, we didn’t get together. 

Something about Sarah flipped a deep switch in my brain on that day in Sweet Hall.  Had I been lucky enough  to flip the same switch in her brain, we might have ended up like one of those sickeningly sweet couples who can’t get enough of each other, even after 20 years of marriage.  Unfortunately for me, my emotions were not reciprocated.

To this day, I still think of her almost daily.  

So what to do?  Although I think thoughts of Sarah will intrude occasionally until the day I die, I’ve learned several ways to a) reduce the pain, and b) avoid embarrassing myself as much as I did.   These are written from the perspective of a man, but most of them should be equally applicable to women too. 

1. She owes you nothing.   Contractual obligations aside, everyone in your life is there at their pleasure.  If she wants to leave and be with someone else, it’s her right to do so, as it is yours.  All you can do is to try to make your life so compelling that she chooses to share it with you.
   
   
2. Be cool.  Don’t take it personally.  Look at it from her perspective.  How many of the women you meet do you want to date seriously, if at all?  Probably only a small fraction.  You just didn’t make the cut for her.  Also, it might not be all about you.  She may have emotional problems that make her run from any close relationships.  There may be objective barriers to the relationship.  For example, she may live in a distant city and not want to put up with the rigors of a long-distance relationship. 
   
   
3. Be excellent.  Remember: you are a prize as well.  Just as she’s qualifying you, you should be qualifying _her_.  Is she up to your standards?  Enumerate her faults.  Does she smoke?  Is she a hypochondriac?   Knock her off her pedestal, and put yourself there instead.  Ask yourself, “What makes me so cool?”  Enumerate your virtues and your accomplishments every day before falling asleep.  Immerse yourself in work, exercise, and social activities so that you’ll be more attractive to the next woman you desire.   Money may not be able to buy love, but it can buy plane tickets, nice clothes, a comfortable pad, and good drugs.  Moreover, the more money you have, the more secure you’ll feel (up to a point), and the more attractive you’ll be to women. Exercise has been shown to have the same magnitude of  effect as anti-depressant drugs.  And women are just as attracted to handsome men as men are to beautiful women.  The flatter your stomach, and the bigger your muscles, the more you’ll be able to attract and keep a woman’s attention.  Finally, spend time with your friends and family.  Not only will that help reduce feelings of loneliness, but it will help you keep your social skills well-honed, so that when you do meet someone else, you don’t behave like a bumbling idiot.
   
   
4. Be gone.*  Always be prepared to leave.  In their book, High Probability Selling, Jacques Werth and Nicholas Ruben wrote “[S]uppose I give you a deck of cards, face down, and tell you I’ll give you five dollars for every ace you find in the next two minutes. And suppose the first card you turn up is a six. How much time would you spend trying to convince the six that it’s an ace?”  You should adopt the same strategy with women.  Don’t waste time trying warm up a woman with tepid feelings for you.  Instead, spend your time looking for the woman who is enthusiastic about you from the start.
   
   
5. Reframe.   What good will come of this?   For example, maybe she had a difficult childhood.  Now you’re free to find someone who doesn’t have so  many crazy relatives.  Does she live far away?  Now you’re free to find someone closer. 
   
   
6. Be gracious.  You may feel hurt and angry if your advances are rebuffed.  Such feelings are normal.  But don’t act on such feelings.  Don’t communicate with her when you’re feeling angry. If she’s treated you poorly, forgive her.  Anger, bitterness, and cynicism are turn-offs which will make it more difficult for you to win the heart of your next girlfriend.   Don’t defriend her on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.  Unless she’s behaved unethically, it’s probably worthwhile to maintain her friendship.   At a minimum, in the future, she can introduce you to her friends, and endorse you as someone worth knowing.  However, sometimes the emotions can be so strong, obsessive or distracting that you need to more severely limit contact.  In that case, don’t call her, don’t go to the places where she will hang out, and don’t invite her to group activities with you.   If you must defriend her on Facebook or other social media, be discreet.  Your goal is to get over her, not draw her attention to yourself.  If they’re a source of obsessive behavior, you may wish to delete her pictures and emails.     Maybe when you have another girlfriend, you can be friends again, but right now, you may want to remove any reminder of her.
   
   
7. Behave proportionately, if you choose to maintain contact with her.  Keep your correspondence brief, and infrequent.  How would you feel if an unattractive woman kept sending you frequent, lengthy emails?  You’d probably feel a little sad, a little awkward, and maybe a little scared.  You’d probably ignore the emails, and hope she gives up.  The object of your affection will feel the same way.  Such emails won’t change her mind, and as they sit unanswered, you’re going to feel like a shmuck.  
   
   
8. Don’t play white knight.  You might believe that if only you proved yourself enough to her, she will fall in love with you.  You might be tempted to be a sympathetic ear, or help her when she’s down.  “If only she sees what a caring, helpful guy I am, she’ll want me!”  Superficially, it makes sense.  After all, women do want caring, helpful men in their lives.  But consider the meta-message you’re sending.  The message you may be trying to send may be “I’m helpful, I’m kind!  I would make a good partner for you.”  However, the meta-message she’ll receive is likely to be “If you’re such a prize, why are you spending time and money on me? Why aren’t you spending it on someone who actually wants you?  Since you’re not, it must mean that no one else wants you.  Ergo, why would I want you?”   Or she might think “He doesn’t think that he has to offer is enough to warrant my attention.  Therefore, to make up for it, he thinks he has to ply me with gifts.  Ugh, I can do better.”   Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should be cold and uncaring.  But it only takes a small action to show you care.  If she’s having a bad day, send her a brief note with a joke or funny picture.  But don’t make any grand gestures or significant investments in her.  As a good rule of thumb, ask yourself:  would I make the same effort for a male acquaintance?  If you wouldn’t, it’s definitely too much. 
   
   
9. Believe actions, not words.  Rejecting someone is emotionally painful for most people.  Therefore, she may not be blunt about her feelings.  She may send mixed messages.  She might tell you that you’ve been “a huge influence on her life”, that you’re a “great guy”, or “she really wants to get to know you better.”  As a result, you may believe you have more of a “shot” than you really do.  What matters are her actions.  Does she return your calls and emails?  Does she ask you about your life as much as you ask about hers?  Does she make time in her life for you?  Good relationships are balanced, with each partner bringing something to the table.  If she’s not contributing to the relationship as much as you are, over time, it’s time to let go.
   
   

Finally,  build a life of abundance.  The best way to get over a lost paramour is to find a new one, and the best way to find a new love is to throw yourself into life.  You should have so much going on in your life that how any particular woman responds to you should be of small consequence.   Cultivate a deep, and wide network of friends.  Host parties.  Find a passion, and throw yourself into it.  Learn how to salsa.  Ask your friends to hook you up with dates.  Your attitude should be "My life is awesome! Wanna play?"

*Credit to “The Tao of Steve”. 

Tags: uncategorized

gustavolacerda @ 04:26 am: Gibbs sampling
According to the sources I've read, Gibbs sampling doesn't really tell you how to sample... it's just divide-and-conquer: you still need to sample each variable from its full conditional.

In my problem, that would be more trouble than it's worth, since no denominators are canceling. So I'm doing good old Metropolis-Hastings, with a proposal that makes its trajectory resemble Gibbs: it randomly chooses one variable to modify, and then randomly chooses a value for that variable. In other words, the proposal is uniform over the neighbors in the "generalized hypercube"^*.

I can easily compute the posterior. In traditional MCMC, I think you would weight the samples by how often they appear. But doesn't it make more sense to directly compute the posterior in all sampled models?

Should I be using MCMC at all?
How else am I going to find the set of high-probability models? (Maybe what I want is a mode-oriented stochastic search, as my EA project did.

Believe it or not, it's my first time actually implementing MCMC.

Also, I'd like to know what proportion of the posterior mass my sampled models account for... but this is probably VeryHard to do if I can't enumerate the models (otherwise we could know whether the chain has mixed).

---

^{* - what do you call a non-binary hypercube? I mean: let each node be a string in {0,...,k-1}^n, and neighborhood relation is defined by set of strings that differ in exactly 1 character. When k=2, we get the n-dim hypercube. What's the word when n>2?}.

Tags: machine_learning

gustavolacerda @ 12:40 am: conduction, convection and infrared
Having a TV this week is putting me more in touch with ordinary folks, for whose sake science maxims are subverted, e.g. "The NuWave Oven uses all 3 forms of heat transmission: conduction, convection and infrared!!". Everyone knows that "radiation" is bad for you...

As you may know, MRI used to be called NMRI, but medicine and "nuclear" don't go together.

crasch @ 01:23 pm: GEEK: talmudic notes in vim?

Original: craschworks - comments

When reading new code, especially code in a language I’m unfamiliar with, I sometimes have to translate each symbol/method very methodically in order to understand what the code is trying to do. Often, I’ll put my notes in the code as comments. While this helps me, this can make the code more bulky and difficult to read for those who are familiar with the code/language. Ideally, I’d like a vim plugin in which I can keep notes on a file, without actually changing it. Anyone know of such a plugin?

patrissimo @ 11:38 am: Structured Procrastination
Posted on Less Wrong. Upvote it unless you are a horrible human being who kills puppies for fun.

(Writing this post does not count as structured procrastination, btw :) )

Tags: less wrong, procrastination, self-development

gustavolacerda @ 05:45 pm: Facebook to Google Calendar
Has anyone succeded in automatically syncing Facebook events into Google Calendar, as soon as I select "Attend" or "Maybe Attend"?

patrissimo @ 12:13 pm: Nightwish & Tarja
(background: I get into new bands rarely. Nightwish is one of the 2 bands I've gotten into in the last ~4 years. They are "Operatic Metal", which is just plain awesome. The singer and the band didn't get along and split up a couple years ago, the rest of the band kept the name Nightwish.)

I finally got and listened to the two post-breakup Nightwish band member albums: the non-Tarja Nightwish album (Dark Passion Play), and Tarja's solo album (My Winter Storm). My conclusion is that more of the awesomness of Nightwish lies w/ the non-Tarja than the Tarja. The replacement singer is noticeably worse than Tarja (who is amazing), so I don't like the new Nightwish album as much as the old ones, but it maintains the atmosphere and awesome energy.

Whereas Tarja's new album, while her voice is lovely, frankly sounds rather uninspired. My favorite song is her cover of Alice Cooper's "Poison", because Alice Cooper rocks hard, unlike Tarja's original songs.

Tags: music

patrissimo @ 11:19 am: Happy relationship > competitive govt
On it's 2nd day, PUA4LTR already has more traffic/day than an average day on Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. Apparently it's a topic of more general interest...whoodathunkit?

:)

next post will address "PUA as manipulation"

patrissimo @ 09:48 pm: Email

E-mail is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move…But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a pebble!

(Life After College)

patrissimo @ 09:42 pm: genetic explanation for higher male variance?
those who, unlike me, know something about genetics can tell me if this is plausible or not, but it sounds plausible to me:

I think the reason for the preponderance of males amongst important creative geniuses comes in part from their chromosomal structure. Females have two X chromosomes, so a recessive mutation on one chromosome is less likely to be expressed. Males are more likely to express both recessive mutations on the X chromosomes and all additional traits coded in a Y chromosome. In this way, males are capable of greater variation in all traits because 1) they have more variation in their genetic material. Two X chromosomes are redundant in a sense, whereas X+Y is an X and an additional Y, and 2) males are more likely to express recessive mutations on their X. What is well known is that having one X chromosome in males leads to a greater likelihood of some disorders, but it could also be the case that only one X also leads to a greater incidence of positive deviations from the norm.

Tags: genetics