I have to shred XML movie data from IMDb into a relational structure, for a project at work. I whipped up something using Perl's XML::Simple, because it's a simple problem, but then I figured it would be nicer if I could use standards to translate from the XML to the insert statements, especially if I could use a stream-based parser to keep memory requirements lower...as you might imagine, IMDb has a lot of movie data. So, I decided to look into XSLT, which I hear is the de facto XML transformation standard, and really awesome, if you can wrap your head around it.

Having been told, by a number of people, that it's actually a fairly difficult idea to wrap your head around, I set aside a large chunk of time to go and learn it. (I'm using the rest of that time to write this rant.) It took me 20 minutes to realize it was just a gimped version of LISP macros, and I'm embarrassed it took me that long. There's nothing conceptually innovative there; it's just a case of looking up the syntax when you need it.

I hate XML. For years and years, I saw the hype, and everyone was "learning" XML. I saw XML listed under "programming" sections in bookstores, and even on resumes. It's just a file format, people! Ever look at HTML? Now imagine that you can specify anything you want for element names between the angle brackets. Throw in a few optional headers at the top, and you've got XML. Want to specify which element names are allowed, inside of which other elements? Make a DTD, describing what elements can contain what other elements. This is not rocket science, and it's not even innovative -- LISP had the same type of hierarchical data structures, complete with a similar syntax, in 1959.

My main beef with it, I think, is that it's so godawful hard to read. Why oh why did anyone think that <name>content</name> was a good set of delimiters? Wouldn't it be clearer -- and more consistent with the underlying structure -- to use simple parentheses, like (name (content)), or even (name content)? That would be much easier to read. Less redundant. Oh noes, we have to count parentheses, instead of searching for a specific end tag! Err...except for the times when we have to count the tags too, because they're nested. Okay. It's a shame there's no hierarchical data syntax that uses that. Oh wait. Nevermind. LISP data syntax. In 1959.

And now, there's XSLT. Well, since 1999 or so. We can embed control flow into our data! Now that control flow is in the same syntax as our data, imagine the possibilities for templating: we can intersperse data and code! Surely, this is innovative. Oh, wait. No. LISP made that innovative leap in 1959, with its partial-execution macro system. (Granted, in this instance, XSL may be easier to read than the LISP macro syntax.)

I admit that it's easier to specify a tree structure with an XML DTD than it is in LISP, or actually anything else I can think of. You can do it, though. Since 1959. Because data and code are the exact same thing in LISP (wow, what an innovation!), you can just "evaluate" the data as code: If it parses, it's legit.

I'm mentioning LISP a lot because it was first. all of these things have been around, and exist in a number of other languages. Perl, Ruby, Python, ML and lots of other languages have hierarchical data syntax. SAX parsing? Every compiler known to mankind uses a similar technology, since the nearly the dawn of compilers. XPath? You have to index the heck out of your XML to make that fast, then you use -- surprise! -- relational databases to do it. The worst of both worlds: Hard to parse by humans, and hard to parse by machines!

XPath, XSLT, SAX ... they're all just libraries implemented for manipulating an arbitrarily decided "standard" syntax. There are better tools for getting each of those jobs done. It's (now) universally supported, so I suppose I'm stuck with it. That's really the only reason to use it, in my opinion. It just happens to be a very compelling reason.

So, yeah. XML is another stupid file format, amid a plethora of equally useful formats. The only thing making it special is organizational backing. Go ahead and use it, but stop thinking it's innately special somehow. Please? It's getting really old.

I often do things that anger people.

Yeah, what else is new, right? Everyone does. One of the things that's somewhat different, in my case, is that I often know I'm doing it. I often do it on purpose, knowing that it will anger someone. ( I don't do it with the purpose of angering them... )

... so I'll just feel what I feel, I guess. My first response to most stressful things is an enforced apathy, so I'll have to wait until that goes away before I can get a read on how I actually feel about this. It's weird that I can't even figure out what I'm feeling, but there you have it. Forest through the trees, and all that. All I know is that my reaction is a strong one.

My dad just called me and told me he and my mother were having problems, and he's talking about leaving her.

My youngest brother is 16 now. I know for a long time my dad was sticking it out largely for the sake of us kids. I mean, there were other reasons, too, not just that. But, now that the kids are no longer very dependent on them, maybe those other reasons weren't quite enough to offset all the shit that is their relationship.

One of the reasons I'm so against high-maintenance relationships is because my parents' relationship took so much maintenance. Daily talks on the topic of "us" for weeks at a time, in and out of counseling since I was very little, and lots of literal, written contracts regarding behavior. I'm talking about mowing the front lawn before the back lawn, here, not about anything kinky. (Who knows? Maybe they have contracts about that, too.) Taking immense time off work to come take care of things in the family, rules about leaving work exactly at 5pm every single day no matter what.

I look at things like that, and the amount of time poured into simply maintaining the relationship -- not making it better, just preventing it from getting much worse -- and I really, really don't like it. I hear people talking about committing yourself completely to one person ... that's what my parents did. It sucks. My mother has no friends, and my father can't keep a job -- who wants to keep an employee who takes so much time off "for the family" that he's undependable? (Edit: After looking at some numbers from my Dad, I realized that this isn't actually true. He's had 9 employers in the last 28 years, with 5 months of being unemployed. This gives him a 98.5% employment record for those 28 years, with an average of 3.1 years per employer.)

Give me, instead, a relationship where we can just be happy with what we've got, little to no maintenance required. I'm happy? You're happy? Yay. When we have some spare moments, let's make the relationship even better -- but not in a way that requires maintenance. Lots of little things that require a little maintenance add up to LOTS of maintenance in the long run. Want a deeper relationship? Let's take a few hours and spend some time talking about what we want in our lives, or talk about how emotional things affect us. Let's share ourselves with each other, a one-time act that deepens our understanding of one another, and hence our emotional intimacy. Let's not make an agreement to have sex at least twice a week, or to see a movie once a week, or to give gifts once a month, or -- and this one is the worst -- never desire anyone else again. Let's let those things happen as we want them to happen, at the time. Strangely, when there's an actual dearth of something, the desire crops up anyway.

Now, when I promise to give you flowers every week, that's really sweet, isn't it? When I actually give you those flowers every week, is that really sweet? Maybe, especially at first, but after a while it's just the status quo. Let's say I don't promise, and I give you flowers somewhat sporadically, maybe averaging once every couple months, that's really sweet, isn't it? Even years down the line? When I've promised and don't bring the flowers, that's pretty low of me, isn't it? When I do something sweet that then takes lots of effort to maintain -- and that effort doesn't further help anything -- that's creating maintenance. That's stupid. It also makes it so the best I can achieve is status quo, and failing that is bad. Without the maintenance, giving flowers is a positive thing, and not giving flowers is the status quo. It's a difference between being able to make someone happy and being able to avoid making them sad. Stupid. Especially when you make lots of such promises.

That's about it. I'm happy? You're happy? Yay. No need to ask for more.

Actually, a lot of my philosophy stems from this concept. I don't look for problems to fix (badness to turn into neutral), I look for things to improve (neutrality to turn into good).I don't look back for mistakes I've made, I look back for things I could do better. I don't look for flaws in a design, I look for improvements that can be made. Personally, I think it makes it a lot easier to overall improve a situation, because instead of looking only at the flaws, you're picking the best way to improve the situation. Sometimes that improvement is made through removing a flaw. Sometimes that improvement is made by adding something new. In any case, things are how they are, and all you can do is go from there, so you may as well take right now as neutral and go for making it better.

I don't understand the reasoning behind limiting yourself to one sexual partner. I mean, it's just another physical act, like going on a rollercoaster, or kissing, or dancing. It just seems rather arbitrary to me.

I can understand why it would have been a good idea as little as 50 years ago for safety reasons, but with proper use condoms plus spermicide -- which are amazingly cheap -- you literally have a higher chance of dying in a car accident than getting pregnant¹, yet we think nothing of driving cars or crossing the street.

STD's are now an issue, of course, but if you're concerned about that you can both get tested first and exchange test results, obviating the issue on a case-by-case basis. (If you know they have an STD and you sleep with them anyway, well, that's kinda like jumping out of a plane. No one pushed you, and it's your own damn fault if you didn't check your safety gear carefully enough.)

I kind of understand the "in order to fit in" argument. I don't particularly feel a desire to fit in, though. Never really have. I've found that standing out has generally done me better.

Still, an amazingly large number of people think that limiting yourself to one sexual partner² is a great idea. More than that, an amazingly large number of people think it's the only viable option.

Why is that? Is it just a religious preference?

EDIT: I'd really like to get the opinions from people who have been polyamorous in the past, and are now monogamous. I know some of you are out there. Please?


¹: I ran the numbers. Feel free to do it yourself. I used the USDOT fatality numbers for 2004 (which are lower than 2003 and 2002, and the latest I could find) and the effectiveness ratings published by Planned Parenthood for proper use of condoms and spermicide. Depo alone is even more effective.
²: At a time, at least. The whole "single boyfriend/girlfriend" thing, and only sleeping with them. Nothing says you can't find another significant other, but that typically ends the current partnership, and all that.

In my last entry, I mentioned a few things about exclusivity and commitment. This sparked some conversations in the comments that brought a few other interesting things to the forefront of my mind, and they're actually a bit more organized now.

There are at least two types of commitment. There's the "de facto" situational commitment, which comes from the environment you're in, and then there's the internal commitment, which is a decision to see something to its end.

As an example of situational commitment, consider going to college. If you are halfway through college, and you've taken out loans to pay for the first two years, you will be screwed if you drop out, have loans to pay, and can't command a salary high enough because you have no degree. You are situationally commited to continuing, because there's an immediate cost to leaving. If, at that point, you no longer care about your schooling, it's still in your best interest to keep slugging along. You may eventually hate it so much that you leave anyway, but it's less likely. That's a type of commitment.

As an example of internal commitment, consider going to college. If you are halfway through college, but all of your college career is paid for by grants, if you drop out, you're fine. If you stick it out, you'll be sinking more of your time into the gamble of coming out ahead in the end, but there's no "penalty" for ditching besides discontinuing to learn. If you stick that out, that's an example of internal commitment. There's no "cost" of leaving -- actually, there's a cost to stay, and you're hoping that cost will be worth it when you get to the other side. That's a different type of commitment.

Imagine what happens to the first student if someone comes and somehow makes all his school loans go away. Huge inheritance, rich uncle, whatever. If he doesn't care about his schooling anymore, that student will drop out of school in a heartbeat. There's no internal commitment there.

Now, take a look at exclusivity in relationships, and how it affects commitment. If exclusivity is a requirement for the relationship (romance, business partnership, whatever), then you've got all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. You're forbidden from setting up alternate options, which means that if the relationship dissolves you're left with nothing, and have to start over from zero. You're setting up a situational commitment: There is a cost to leaving, making it the easiest choice to stay, even if your heart isn't in it. This is a huge difference from open relationships, where you explicitly have other options readily available, and leaving only means that you don't get to continue.

What does this mean? Well, just as with school, it means you're probably going to deal with issues that arise, instead of just leaving. It takes a really big issue to get you to leave, because the cost of leaving is so high. You'll have fights but will work things out, and you'll be safer joining money matters because your partner won't leave so quickly.

After you've been together with someone for a while, you can look at the relationship and realize you've built something good. You can look back and realize that, even if you weren't situationally committed, you'd stay with them, because you care about continuing the relationship. Perhaps you've realized that you're becoming a better person for it, perhaps you've realized that you really like spending time with them, or perhaps you've realized that their presence makes your life better somehow. This is the hope.

There's another option. After you've been together with someone for a while, you can look at the relationship and realize that you've built something bad. You can look back and realize that, if you weren't situationally committed, you'd leave in a heartbeat. If you build something bad enough, as with college, it might be worth leaving anyway. And if that cost of leaving were to vanish -- for instance, by randomly (or purposefully) coming across another option, like another lover for emotional support or a different business partner -- you would leave. Then, exclusivity becomes what's keeping you together.

That other option is really bad. It's like the student who hates school, but is sloshing through it anyway just to get through it, because it hasn't gotten bad enough to warrant the cost of leaving yet. That student will probably never finish anyway, and just incur more loans as he keeps taking the short-sighted easy decision of one more quarter until he can't stand it anymore. It becomes a balancing act between the cost of leaving and the cost of staying, and that's just not fun for anyone involved, especially if it continues.

With exclusivity, you're gaining a situational commitment. That is, you're manipulating the environment around you to enforce a situational commitment, regardless of where one's internal commitment lies. This isn't always bad, by any means. It's great if, for example, you need a kickstart to build something. It gives you the safety of an environmentally enforced commitment, while reasons for an internal commitment can be explored and possibly created. This is often an excellent idea, and can lead to the first option, above, where you'd stay with them even if that situational commitment were to vanish.

With an open relationship, you're avoiding that situational commitment. You don't have the option of depending on it while you build something. On the other hand, you also can't get into that choice between a rock and a hard place, where you have to decide between the cost of leaving and the cost of staying. All commitments that exist are internal commitments.

What does this mean? It means that your partner has no reason to leave you, other than wanting to leave you. It means that if they want to leave you, there's nothing external that's stopping them. I'll say it outright: They're more likely to leave you, and they're more likely to do it sooner.

But! If you can manage to actually build something worth keeping, that first option above, they won't want to leave. The ones who leave will either leave before something is built (the downside of being in an open relationship), or after something bad is built (the upside). Whoever stays, you know they stayed due to an internal commitment, which isn't subject to environmental fluctuations, like meeting a hot secretary at work, or a one-time better price on a business deal.

Really, it's all the same arguments as for and against a free or controlled market.

What does all this mean? Well, if you think you have good chances of building something without any need for environmentally enforced commitments, then try open relationships. If you think you have bad chances of building something without environmentally enforced commitments, try exclusive relationships. Or, if you're like me and place great importance on avoiding the possibility of that bad, second option, go for open relationships. If you're not like me and place great importance on avoiding the possibility of losing a great partner at the beginning due to environmental fluctuations, go for exclusive relationships.

Personal choice and all that, but I for one prefer to avoid situational commitments. I don't seem to have problems building relationships worth keeping, even without that particular safety net.

I had an IM conversation with ariata today where she asked me to explain ... well, here's the relevant part of that conversation:

( fascinating drivel )

These "definitions" aren't all that nifty, or even overly special. It came up in a discussion of polyamorous relationships. They're not even definitions, really, but names that emphasize some aspect of a relationship. They're certainly not exclusive: think overlapping circles, or Venn Diagrams, or even signal networks, if your'e into that kind of thing. The big R is something you can't really pin down with a single definition.

A relationship, in essence, to me, is a continued interaction between two people. (I understand that, for some people, it's "two or more people". For me, it's "two people". I'll explain that in a bit.) That's the basic framework, and from there it goes in all sorts of directions. The bit about "continued interaction" is generic enough that it's hard to distort much, but "people" can be molded to include pets, computers, cars, whatever -- anything that interacts. So really, I suppose a relationship is a continued interaction between two entities, but that doesn't sound nearly as good, and it doesn't emphasize the people aspect as much as I'd like.

There are so many variations of relationships, on so many axes, that it's really hard even to group them. I mean, society at large has done a pretty good job of coming up with names of the most common varieties such as friends, lovers, and spouses. Thing is, as I wrote to ariata above, these words don't "label" so much as "emphasize" certain aspects of a relationship. It's a difference very similar to the difference between sorting your pictures into various folders versus tagging them with a number of keywords. This journal entry, for instance, doesn't exactly fit into "psychology", "rants", "philosophy", or "introspection", but any of those words would emphasize certain aspects of this entry, so I tag it with all of them -- but not "poetry", or "tech", or "politics" (okay, maybe that one, but I don't want to go there). I would be hard pressed to decide which one tag I wanted to group it by.

To make matters even more difficult, a lot of the words we do have tag things as not there: "fuckbuddy" means there are elements of friendship and lustful activities, but emphasize an exclusion of lifetime partnership; "bedwarmer" and "sex toy" mean there are elements of lustful activities, but emphasize an exclusion of commitment or even friendship. What makes matters extremely difficult is that these terms don't actually, literally mean that those elements aren't present: The negative emphasis comes from the fact that there are other words you would use that do emphasize the commitment, or the friendship, if it were there ... and using the term that doesn't emphasize them gives an implicit emphasis on its opposite. Someone calls their girlfriend (emphasis on the commitment, lustful/romantic acitvities, and friendship) a bedwarmer (emphasis on the lustful activities), the fact that there are words that do emphasize commitment and friendship implicitly gives emphasis to a lack of commitment and friendship -- unless you override it with other terms nearby that do, in fact, emphasize those qualities, in which case the implicit emphasis isn't there anymore. If you say your girlfriend is also an excellent bedwarmer, you're emphasizing everything girlfriend-like with an added, extra emphasis on how she is in bed.

Given all this, it is any wonder that people are eternally confused about what to call their relationships? What do you do when you don't have any convenient words that will emphasize what you'd like to emphasize? Perhaps you have a relationship that's extremely committed, with no lustful activities, but you're sharing your lives with each other economically? What do you call that? You'd have to say something weird like "platonic life mate", because there are no terms I can think of that emphasize shared life with a friend without sex.

The part I don't really understand is the drive to actually categorize relationships, to group them, like putting photos into folders. Is that photo of your beach trip with your ex where you ran into an old friend under "photos of my ex" or under "trips" or under "photos of my old friend"? It seems the same with categorizing relationships. Seems to me it would be simplest to just look at the relationship and emphasize the aspects that are relevent to the conversation at hand, hopefully avoiding any implicit emphases that happen to be false.

This is why, when people ask me what my relationship with someone is, I usually just describe what we do with our time together, instead of trying to find a label. I can use the labels to emphasize certain qualities of a relationship, so if someone asks me "is so-and-so your girlfriend" I can usually answer "yes", "no", or "kind of", depending on if those qualities happen to be present in my relationship with so-and-so, but even then I usually just enumerate which girlfriend-ish things we do and which ones we don't. It's also why I explicitly mention the open nature of my relationships, as there's no common word I know of that means "friends, lovers, partners, and open" (although "primary" comes close, it's not exactly in common usage). Closest I can get, using common words with their common emphases, is phrases like "girlfriend number one". I would often introduce ariata to others as my "partner", because although I have other relationships where I'm friends, lustful, and committed, she was the only one I had partnered with in life (and it was usually immediately apparent that she was also my girlfriend).

So, describing relationships, due to the large number of simple attributes and the much larger number of combinations of those attributes, seems like it often has to be done in a soft, fuzzy fashion. This is all fine and good, because we have ways of doing that, and we even have ways that are easily understood. Still, many people act like they think the label defines what you're supposed to do in the relationship: the label defining the relationship, instead of the relationship specifying the label. What the hell? Someone explain this to me. It's like they took the words -- which were, of course, invented for the purpose of describing actual relationships -- and turned them into cookie-cutters, completely obviating their original purpose. Perhaps the relationships were so standard for so long that people started thinking that the causality went the other way? That the words defined the relationships, instead of describing what the relationships themselves defined? I hear all the time that if someone is your "girlfriend" you should act a certain way toward them. Similar with "friend".

Someone please tell me how this makes sense. Enough people act this way that I'm sure it makes sense somehow; I just don't see it.

I think there's a huge rift between what people think causality is, and what it really is. For instance, we're trained to think that the entire world consists of sequences of "cause and effect"-type scenarios: A causes B which causes C which cases D, etc. But, that's really the exception, and not the norm -- really, it's "everying in the world" causes "everything else in the world". Causality is just a temporal correlation between something that happens before, and something that happens after; and when you start talking about A "causing" B, what you're actually saying is that B always follows A. Or, usually follows A. And that A doesn't happen unless B happens first. Or, usually doesn't happen unless B happens first. But, this is just an approximation, and not actually how the world works.

I'm pretty sure that most physicists will scream when I say there's no such thing as causality. There is such thing as causality, of course, it's just not what people usually mean when they say that something caused something else. What people seem to mean is something more akin to responsibility: If A caused B, then you can blame B on A. The causality that actually exists in the physical world, as far as I can figure out, is the kind where everything about now effects everything about later. Things about now have varying amounts of effect on the things about later, so you can usually safely ignore the things that have very small amounts of effect and just concentrate on the big things, and still get a pretty good picture of what's going on. I think the physicists call that effect "locality", but I'm not a physicist, so you'll have to ask them about that. Still, I'm pretty sure that the way most people think of cause and effect, in little chains of causes and effects, is just so much malarky. The chains just don't happen.

Well, they happen. They're just the exception, and not the rule. When something bad happens, thinking "What caused this?" seems silly to me. There just aren't many scenarios where the cause is clear-cut. What caused your friend to stand you up? What caused your romantic partner leave you? What caused it get so cold last night? What causes us to die at around age 80? What causes us to ask such silly questions?

Science does all of these experiements to figure out what causes what. Except, they don't, really. The really key things about science don't have anything to do with causing things. Take, for example, inertia. What causes things to continue moving if they're moving, or to remain still if they're still? No one knows. We do know, however, that they do -- and this is what we call "inertia". The law of inertia is merely descriptive, and includes no mention of causes. Maxwells equations, used to describe the interactions of electricity and magnetism (and used to calculate the speed of light), are the same way -- there's nothing in them that needs a cause, they just are. Descriptive, even predictive, but not causal.

Then there are all those experiments about what "causes" cancer. Notice how too much of just about anything has been proven to cause cancer in lab animals? What's that mean, to "cause" cancer? It certainly doesn't mean that if you eat too many bananas (or whatever) that you'll get cancer, because chances are you won't. Really, it means that if you eat too many bananas (or whatever) you have a higher chance of developing cancer. Does that suffice for "cause" of cancer? We're talking about slight increases of risk, here, nothing even close to a majority. Like experiments of inertia and Maxwell's equations, the results of the experiments show a correlation between something and the chance of something else happening shortly afterwards ... and that's about it. Once again, all we have is something descriptive, and this time it's not even usefully predictive.

Logically, people tell me, there's a difference between correlation and causality. Science is the art of isolating changes and seeing what happens. When you find a correlation between event A happening and event B happening -- which really means that they happen close together -- it could be one of three things: A caused B, B caused A, or some other "confounding variable" event(s) C caused both A and B. It could also be blind chance, but that's why we only look for what are called "significant" correlations, and we like it if the correlations show up again when we repeat the experiment.

Further, I'm often told that, because of these three (four) options, it's a logical fallacy to deduce causality from correlation. It even has a fancy latin name: "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" (roughly, "with this, therefore because of this"). A common example is the (verified) claim that there is a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates: when there are more ice cream sales in an area, there's also more murder in the area. It's a little absurd to claim that ice cream sales cause people to murder, or even that acts of murder causes ice cream sales. (There's also a correlation between murder rates and the temperature, and when it's hot people buy more ice cream.)

So, then, when is it warranted to deduce causality?

Taking the same ice cream and murder example, the "answer" to the "puzzle" is that higher temperatures cause both the murders and the ice cream sales. That makes sense, right? Except that heat doesn't cause people to buy more ice cream. It may make it more likely, but it certainly doesn't cause it. Heat doesn't make you more violent or criminal, either. It may make it more likely, due to irritation and what not. So, let's re-word it slightly, to be more accurate: Heat causes an increased likelyhood of homocide, as well as an increased likelihood of buying ice cream. But, it's not a direct cause, is it? The heat really causes perspiration, which causes discomfort, which causes irritation, which causes the increased likelihood of murder. The heat really causes perspiration, which causes discomfort, which causes you to want cold things, which causes the increased likelihood of buying ice cream. Oh, hey, look at that -- the "chain" is similar for the first two items. Perhaps it's the discomfort that causes both? But no, you won't buy ice cream due to being uncomfortably cold. Perhaps the perspiration? This seems to make sense, but you still won't buy ice cream because you're perspiring due to fear. Really, you need the lot of them: You need the heat, you need the perspiration, you need the discomfort, and you need the desire for cold things. Any one of those goes missing (perhaps you're unaware that ice cream will cool you down, for instance, or perhaps you're unaware that heat get more uncomfortable over time), and you don't have any particularly strong urge to buy ice cream. The heat doesn't really cause the perspiration, either -- that's a really complex bodily function that happens when certain parts of your body get warmer.

Factors, factors, factors. Lots of factors. Lots and lots of little things that add up to buying ice cream. Lots and lots of little things that add up to killing someone. Any correlation to the event, large or small.

So, what do we have to work with? Well, we know that there's a correlation between hot days and sweating. We know that there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder. We know that there's a correlation between hot days and buying ice cream. We know that there's a correlation between sweating and discomfort. We know there's a correlation between discomfort and irritation. We know there's a correlation between irritation and violence. We know there's a correlation between violence and murder. We know there's a correlation between heat+discomfort and wanting to cool down. We know there's a correlation between eating ice cream and cooling down.

All of this is obvious, right? I mean, it really is, if you've ever been angry, ever had ice cream, and ever sweated on a hot day. It's also pretty easy to get all of it from common experience and the statement, "there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates." Here's the million-dollar question: What do we get from the statement, "Heat causes increased murder rates and increased ice cream sales"? It's really just trivia, without much understanding or pattern to it. You certainly can't get hard causality, because there are exceptions to this "rule". You might get that there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates, which would in turn tell you that there are a number of factors in common between buying ice cream and killing someone. Now that's interesting.

Not all factors are equal, of course. Well, perhaps they are, but they have unequal effects on particular things. Sometimes there are "necessary" factors (the event wouldn't happen withat that factor), sometimes there are "sufficient" factors (the event will definitely happen with just this factor), and there's almost always a lot of meta-factors (factors that are combinations of other factors, such as two things happening at once). That's just the way it is. Anything I do, anything I see, is affected by such a large multitude of factors that it just seems silly to try to find "a cause" for it. I could find a cause, but that cause is almost always something like "the factors all added up to make it that way", which doesn't really seem all that helpful.

It seems, then, that it's useful to identify which factors are more important than others, or in other words, which factors contributed the most. Some people consider this type of reasoning to be "cause". For instance, auto insurance companies will often attribute fractions of cause to the different people in an accident, saying things like "the person turning left was 80% at fault, but the person going straight was speeding, making them 20% at fault." That certainly seems useful for things like determining insurance payouts, but the math doesn't work very well for those things that have a long, long list of factors, where all of them contribute just a little. Examples: Breaking up with your lover. Trusting someone (distrust is usually easy to find large factors for, but actually trusting someone is another story). Deciding what to put in a picture you're drawing. There are also things that seem right on the edge of that border, where there's a lot of factors, but you can still enumerate them all -- like deciding which house to buy, for instance.

Before thnking about the long, long lists of small factors, think a bit more about the cases where you can find a cause, or at least a few factors that stand out and can act like a cause. Let's take the "hot days increase both ice cream sales and murder rates" scenario. Let's say you've noticed that there's a correlation between ice cream sales and murder rates (why would you look for something like that, anyway?). This is interesting. This causes you to look for that something else that would explain the correlation. Even if you don't know what that confounding variable is, you can still use the information: If you see long lines at the ice cream stand, you might do well to take brightly lit paths if you're walking home at night. You don't need to know the cause. Now, let's say someone just tells you that hot days increase both ice cream sales and murder rates. That's nifty trivia and all -- and if someone mentions that both ice cream sales and murder rates are way up, you can look smart and say "that's because the weather is hot outside" -- but it's nothing useful. It's kind of like a mental masturbation, knowing the answer to a question you've asked yourself. How are you going to use that information? The usefulness of knowing the cause is the ability to figure out the correlations involved. If you already know the correlations, you've already found the useful information. Just like intertia: You don't need to know the cause of intertia in order to use the correlation between an objects current speed and its speed a moment from now. That's a good thing, too, because no one actually knows the cause of inertia, and the inertia effect is pretty darned useful to know.

Then there are the cases where you just can't find a single cause, or even a small list of them. Why do you trust your best friend? It's not because they've never broken your trust, because strangers haven't either. It's a culmination of lots and lots of small things, things that remind you of other people that haven't broken your trust, things you've trusted them with in the past that remained unbroken, all the ways you know they'd have to deal with you if they broke trust, all the things they've trusted you with, and more. So, what's the cause? Well, it's "they're trustworthy". What does that mean? Well, although you won't find it listed that way in the dictionary, it means "a culmination of lots and lots of small things, things that remind you of other people that haven't broken your trust, things you've trusted them with in the past that remained unbroken, all the ways you know they'd have to deal with you if they broke trust, all the things they've trusted you with, and more." Here's some more: Why are you depressed? Why are you sad? Why are you angry? (Okay, people can usually give an answer to that one -- but they're usually wrong, it seems.) Why are you happy? It's rarely possible to actually come up with discrete causes for these things. You can understand them, though, if you stop bothering to try to find reasons for them.

The most damning thing about looking for causes: You'll find them, and when you find something you consider to be "the cause", you stop looking for causes. Your focus is then on that cause, and not the effect itself. This is especially damning if, like in most circumstances, that "cause" is nowhere near the whole story.

When you let go of cause, and just think in terms of the connections or correlations between things, entire worlds of understanding become available that weren't available before. Instead of looking for a cause for your anger right now (or whenever y ou happen to get angry), look at the things that happen whenever you get angry. Find the correlations between them. Then, even though you may not know why those things are correlated with your anger, you'll know they're correlated, and you can use that information even without knowing the cause. You can do the same with happiness, or any emotion, or any of those things scientists just can't come up with causes for.

To further support the abnegation of causal relationships, consider this: You can consider any "cause" to be a very strong correlation between "event that happens before" and "event that happens after". Really, even for the things where we just know that A caused B, we really have no way of testing that it's not actually some unknown thing causing first A and then B. It's not testable. It's not verifiable. What if you just haven't found an exception yet? "Knowing" the cause of anything is just a matter of deciding you're convinced.

There's really nothing wrong with the idea of cause and effect. Just bear in mind that the "cause" is "everything" and the "effect" is "anything". The particulars are in the correlations themselves.

I originally posted this on the Freedom To Tinker blog article titled Nuts and Bolts of Net Discrimination, Part 2, but I figured some of you guys might want to read it as well. It's referring to the currently big hullabaloo regarding some ISP's wanting to discriminate levels of quality for different types of network traffic -- that is, make service worse for some, and better for others. A large issue has sprung up regarding motivations for voice data companies (anyone who does phone service) to severely degrade the quality of VoIP traffic -- better yet, only other people's VoIP traffic, and not their own service's VoIP traffic.

Anyway, here is my response to the article (which you can also find as a comment on the article itself):

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Something that I haven't seen yet in all these talks about "net neutrality" is how the upcoming IPv6+IPSec technologies will make it almost irrelevant. At a point "Really Soon Now" (somewhere less than 10 years from now, I'd guess), nearly all traffic will be encrypted using some combination of IPSec or SSL-like technology (private, authenticated network streams). With the advent of IPv6 routing headers, or anonymous routing protocols like TOR (The Onion Router), even the final destination may be hidden from the intervening links, including the ISP's. When no one can tell what service the packets are destined for, there will be no way of doing service-type discrimination.

You could still discriminate based upon traffic patterns, of course -- like keeping track of how much data has come from which hosts for the past certain amount of time, or a smart traffic-pattern-matching algorithm yet to be developed. Right now, that would take more compute power (per packet) than the high-end routers are capable of. It would also require developing a new matching algorithm for every new P2P system that came out, which turns into a race. When P2P designers start mimicking "legitimate" high-bandwidth services like (paid) streaming radio, and the ISP's can no longer differentiate the "good" users from the "bad" ones, the system would fall apart.

Of course, there isn't really anything anyone (or anything short of world-wide cooperation, for that matter) can do to stop it from happening; it can only be slowed down. Secured streams will become more and more common, and unencrypted network traffic will go the way of telnet, rsh, and plaintext passwords. To make things go even more quickly, so far as adoption is concerned, I hear rumors (and read articles) saying that Microsoft is shipping Vista with IPSec authentication enabled by default -- in a "best effort" fashion -- on all local network traffic. It's not encrypted, and I don't expect the world will convert overnight, but it's still a huge jump-start.

Additionally, if ISP's start trying to discriminate based upon type of service, it's just one more incentive for bandwidth-using companies to set up secure, anonymous streams. Any sort of discrimination based on anything other then pure bandwidth usage is certain to be short-lived. I don't see what the hoopla is all about.

So, before I go on, let me just say that I really, truly love my job. I get paid lots of money to do the things I enjoy, which includes researching new technologies. The VP of Engineering at this company, who is my boss, was actually an engineer himself, and not just one of those managerial types. That, combined with the fact that I'm the head of my department (IT), means that I don't have to deal with much political bullshit, which is very nice. My boss rules, and that just makes the job worthwhile. The following rant is an exception, not the rule.

This one guy, though, is just amazingly horrid to work with. I'll call him Tom, for the obvious reason. Tom is a middle manager type, one of the only ones in the company. He doesn't really have a set place in the hierarchy, so I can understand his frustration at having the responsibility for getting things done without the authority to back it up. I can understand that he needs to bully people around a bit, to get things done. But ... wow. I've dealt with people who were incredibly inept, but he's the first one I've met that covered that up by attacking the people helping him.

( this is where he calls me in on a Saturday to "fix" a network problem that turns out to be not plugging it in, and insults me at the same time )

Okay, now we get to the interesting. I'm a little peeved, because all of my dealing with Tom have been somewhat rough around the edges. It's been on my todo list for a while now to actually sit down with him and explain that I don't like how he treats me. I hear a lot of other people have similar issues with him, but that's not my bag. So, I've just missed a significant amount of a seminar I paid good money for, gotten yelled at, and gotten accused of negligence -- when the actual problem was one of his own incompetence. I'm used to incompetence, and I don't expect people to know the strangeness of SOHO networking (simple as it is). I really think he should have sent in some notice that he would be working over the weekend and would need connectivity in the conference room for seven laptops, especially if he didn't know how to set things up himself, but even that is a bit much to expect. What I really, really don't like is the yelling and the accusations. So, I mention that I don't want to talk about it now, because I'm a little angry, and he's a little rushed, but I do feel mistreated and I want to talk about it at some point. I say this very politely. Very politely. See, I have to work with this man. I want to continue liking my job. I also like being on amicable terms with all of my coworkers, even the ones that I share a mutual dislike with, because that really makes things easier for everyone. So, my goal in this is to actually, you know, address things in our professional relationship with each other, and hopefully make things better. Very politely, even though it's hard.

His response: "You talk down to people, and if you keep talking down to people you'll be angry a lot." Me: "Again, I don't want to talk about this now." (I raise my index finger in front of my face in the universal "hold on" gesture as I say this.) Him: "You know what? You need to take your job more seriously, or you'll REALLY get in trouble." Me: "Again, I don't want to talk about this now, but I do want to talk about this later. Monday. What are you doing Monday? Could we get lunch on Monday?" Him: "Not a chance." (At this point I remember that we're actually showing customers things on Monday, and so although he's being an ass about it, he probably really doesn't have the time on Monday.) Me: "Well, I'd really like to talk about this. When do you have time?" Him: "I don't think we need to talk about this, I think you need to--" At this point I cut him off and say: "I'd REALLY like to talk about this. When do you have time?" Him: (pauses) "It will have to be after next week. We have deliveries all next week." Me: "Okay, I'll send you an email later," and I start to walk away. Him: "These deliveries are really important. For the people who care about their job, anyway." I"m actually out of his sight at this point, and I know what's going on -- he's trying to get me to explode, so he can claim I verbally jumped him. Really, at this point I want to walk back up and DECK the motherfucker. Still, I somehow hold my cool and just reply, "Please stop insulting me."

The rest is rather uneventful. I find the Dev's that are still there, ask if there's anything else I can do to help before I leave. There isn't, so I go back up to Tom and ask him if everything is working. He says he doesn't know if everything is working, but the network is working again. ("Again." Heh.) At this point -- and bear in mind, less than five minutes ago he was insulting my work ethics, my intelligence, and my communication skills, not to mention threatening me with some sort of ambiguous "trouble" -- he says, "Thank you very much for coming in and fixing that. I really appreciate it." Perfectly straight-faced. I would have had no reason to question his sincerity if he hadn't been insulting me five minutes prior, including lambasting me for it having been broken in the first place. I don't get it. I mean, we're talking either the most pathological man alive, or just plain crazy to switch like that so readily.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it, but this is not going to stand. I refuse to put myself in a position to be treated this badly.

My friend Joseph took me out to lunch the other day, because he was doing some reading about people that aren't fazed by much of anything, and (as he put it) "recognized" me as being such a person. The lunch was so I could describe to him how that worked, so he could do it too.

From that particular vantage point of his, I'm rarely confused by people and their actions and reactions. I explained to him that this was really because, although I had no idea which way things would go, I didn't really care about which way it went. Didn't depend on it going one way or another. I suppose that's often the case, but there are things that do really surprise me.

Ironically, I am the person that surprises me the most often. I'll look at my own actions and think, "What the hell was I thinking? That makes no sense!" I'm also the only person to make me angry in quite a long time. It's kinda funny: I don't get really angry at other people much at all, but I get downright bloody pissed at myself fairly regularly. It's usually for believing something is true, just because I wanted it to be true. When I find out I'm wrong, I look at myself and start yelling, internally, rejecting that I'm wrong, rejecting that I could possibly think such stupid things when I had no basis for it. I can't stand such baseless rationalization, coming from myself.

I think that's why Joseph sees me as "unfazed" by actions that would confuse him. While he (from what I see) attributes the other person's "incorrect" actions as their own stupidity and is angry that people around him are stupid -- which may be what's actually going on -- I instead turn my anger toward myself, and attribute it to my own stupidity for making baseless assumptions about their motivations. Over time, as I make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake, I make stupid, baseless assumptions less and less. I still make lots of them, but they're usually small, by this point, because I don't particularly like being angry at myself.

I still get angry at myself sometimes.

Has anyone else been following the SonyBMG DRM fiasco(s)? The rootkit that is XCP, the spyware that is MediaMax?

So, I have yet to come across a web filter I couldn't simply bypass in some simple fashion. Does anyone know of a challenge? I've heard that BESS and SmartFilter, from N2H2, are really hard to get around ... but they aren't. Of course, I heard this from the programmer implementing the security for them -- he's my exfiance's father, and one helluva programmer, but apparently he doesn't know enough about networking. Comes from being a windows programmer, I suppose. (When I say he's a helluva programmer, I mean he's REALLY GOOD at what he does -- the man wrote a word processor in assembly, and was responsible for the LapLink product that oldschoolers know so well. So, although I'm kinda glib about his networking knowledge -- which is good, but not at Does It For A Living(tm) level -- please don't think I'm insulting the guy.)

You know, I've been getting inside of "locked boxes" for so long, I can't imagine a windows box being secure enough to actually prevent me from running a program I want to run on it, as long as I have physical access to it. A long time ago, I created and memorized a way to remove registry restrictions using ... any program with an "open file" windows dialog. So, I suppose, if an admin actually locked out all programs with an open file dialog box, I couldn't do anything. (Or, you know, if it was off and not bootable for whatever reason, like a password on the hard drive, or some BIOS's.) Of course, a computer locked down to that extent is no longer a computer so much as an appliance, like a POS system is -- that's "Point Of Sale", and not (necessarily) "Piece Of Shit". I have to admit that I can't get into all of those. If a computer can no longer open any user-specified files, then it's not very useful as a computer, you know?

Now, I know how to lock myself out of things. In general, I know how to make things zanfur-proof. There are API's I exploit that you can disable. You can take it off the network, make sure it can't boot from anything but the internal hard drive, and lock me out of the physical box. Unless I feel like taking the bitch apart, I'm out of luck. So, library computers? Yeah, not gonna break out the tools right there, unless they're paying me to do it. (I can't count the number of times I've been hired just to break into a box that someone forgot the password of -- windows, linux, bsd, hpux, irix, cisco routers, managed switches, whatever. Haven't failed yet. Honestly, if you know where to look for the information, it's not hard, and really quite unimpressive, as skills go.) Thing is, if you lock a box down to that point, it's ... useless. If there's any computer, supposed to be used as a computer, for work or research or schooling or whatever, sit me in front of it and I'll have admin access inside of five minutes. Of course, once I have admin access, it's a small matter to find and rip out the components that are in my way.

This isn't just talk, either. Once, I was called in as a guest speaker to a class for the CAC people at the UW (that's the computer admin staff for the University of Washington), to talk on the topic of UNIX security. The instructor spoke about how they had spent the last week securing the test machine. During the time it took him to explain this, and who I was and why I was there, I sat down at the machine and got myself a root prompt. This took about thirty seconds. Not preplanned in any way, shape, or form -- but it was a very nice intro into my lecture. (I also went to jail for breaking into the UW university-wide staff and student server clusters, and the Computer Science department's server clusters, under circumstances that were somewhat less than legit. Don't be stupid; jail sucks. So does a criminal record. And the whole trial process, which I've ranted about elsewhere. Even if I am the only person I know who can honestly say he's a convicted hacker, all it means is that I was a stupid hacker.)

The reason I bring all this up is to point out that, in order to actually lock down a computer in any hard, meaningful way, you have to destroy what makes it useful in the first place. I may not be a representative slice of the population, but I happen to know a representative slice of the population. And, they know me. See where this is going? Now, SONY is attempting to lock you out of your own computer's CD copying functionality. What in the world for? It won't even stop grandma from copying a CD, because she'll just ask me to do it for her, and I can copy any CD you can play in a CD audio player. So can any linux user, and there are plenty enough of us around that almost everyone knows one of us, and knows that we're "good with those computer things". The people who actually program these protections can't honestly believe it will stop the majority, technobabble or no.

Still, DRM is a Big Thing(tm) right now. Someone explain to me how this makes sense, from a practical standpoint.

I've found that I have a hard time thinking in Microsoft. I can think in C, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Bourne, BASIC, Perl, LISP, and any kind of scripting you could care to name. But, hand me C#, VB, J, or any of the other language Microsoft has designed in the last ten years, and I just can't hack it. Well, I can, but it just seems ... the long way around. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a "Microsft is Teh Evil" thing -- the things they do well, they do quite well, and deserve credit for. I just don't get it when it comes to the .NET platform.

( general wankery regarding computer language design, probably only interesting to computer programming nerds )

Internal representations of the world: We all have them. Really, it's all we have, when it comes to knowing what's going on in the universe, when we can't directly perceive it. It's what we manipulate, when we try to affect the world around us. It's what gives us the ideas of what will happen next, and the ideas of how to alter that course.

So, I have a theory of anger.

Many people have noticed that I don't get angry much. When I get angry, it's not all that extreme. I do get angry, though, and when I do, the same thing usually happens: I spend some time thinking about why I got angry, and I find out that my internal representation of the world didn't match reality, didn't match my continued perceptions. I remain angry until I come to accept that the world is the way it is, and update my internal representations to account for the anomaly. Other people seem to work the same way, though they'll often emphasize the "talk" or the "apology", and not the consistency between their own representations and what they see around them.

I have a theory on thought, as well. Thought organization, is more like it. I think of them as little balls that can light up, arranged in network of wires connecting thoughts to many other thoughts, and each of those wires can light up, and there are wires connecting the wires to each other and to other concepts, and those can light up as well. Each of these thought-wires has a certain volatility, a certain probability that they will light up if a connecting thought has been lit, depending on how brightly that connecting though is triggered. All of these thought-wires slowly lose brightness over time. New wires are placed between balls and wires that light up simultaneously, and old wires that don't ever light up eventually decompose and sigh away. The more often and a wire is lit, the easier it is to light in the future, and the less often a wire is lit, the harder it is to light in the future.

This is a pretty fractal picture of thoughts, because you can consider any collection of connected balls and wires as a single ball, with connections to other balls and wires, giving thoughts a "locality" in the network, and making them somewhat "fuzzy". These larger balls get lit when certain balls and wires inside them get lit, even if not all of them are lit, giving us concepts like "chairs" that can have any number of legs, perhaps a back, usually associated with a table, raised from the ground, with the purpose of being sat upon. A lot of the larger balls actually overlap other large balls, giving us things like "stools" and "booths" and "chairs" all being related, with one concept triggering the other. Similarly, you can see how language itself can create connections, such as the word "

This large set of overlapping, ever-firing signals is what gives rise to learning (making new connections, laying new wires), preoccupations that self-perpetuate (every time you think of X close to thinking about X, Y, or Z you strengthen the linking wire), memory (the existence of a particular set of wires), forgetfulness (never firing those wires lets them decay into nothingness), humor (taking a strange route between two concepts), and internal approximate representations of the world (links between cause and effect).

I have a theory on the general effects of a rate of change as well, although that's not my theory, so much as some simple math you can do for yourself. Google for "bifurcation diagrams", and notice that things get chaotic very quickly as you increase the rate of change of the otherwise simple system.

So, anger. When I'm angry, I think faster. Much faster. My chess game improves dramatically, I'm aware of much more, I reach (sometimes bad) conclusions much more quickly. My anger goes away after I've incorporated the differences between my own predictions and what I see of the world outside. I don't get angry unless I see something that doesn't fit with what I think the world is intended to do (what it "should" do, perhaps?), when the world doesn't match my expectations. All of these things seem to be pretty general. What is anger? Why do we experience it? Why us, the thinking beings, when it doesn't affect the nonthinking beings nearly so much? Why was it selected for? What purpose does it have?

It increases the rate of change of the thought system. The wires light up brighter, they decay faster, they're placed more easily, and they get destroyed more easily. It just takes the system like it's a bunch of ping-pong balls in a box with an uneven bottom, and shakes the bejeezus out of it, letting things fall where they may. The angrier you are, the harder things are shaken.

There's a process called annealing. It's used for making metals crystalize. The way it works is that you heat up the piece of metal, very very hot, making the atoms inside jump around like nothing else. Then, you cool it. SLOWLY. If you cool it too quickly, i doesn't work, and will actually even crack. Temperature, as any physicist knows, is the average of the energy of the kinetic energy (average speed, essentially) of the individual particles. Using the uneven-bottomed box of ping-pong balls as an example, you shake it really hard to get things moving, but that will make balls at the lower elevations jump to higher nooks as well as jostling the balls in the higher nooks out to send them down. But, if you decrease the "temperature" slowly, you'll end up with the vast, vast majority of balls at the lowest elevation possible, because the "temperature" will pass through the point just energetic enough to kick a ball out of a high nook but not high enough to put it back from a lower elevation. Annealing again, slightly less rigorously to start, can make it even better.

So, anger. Ever notice that you do things while angry you'd never consider doing while calm? Then, when you calm down, your thoughts on the world will have changed slightly, but nearly all of the core beliefs and memories remain the same as they were before you became angry? Things you would do if your system of htought balls got jostled heavily, and then settled back down into roughly the same pattern? Why does anger have that effect?

It performs an annealing process on the box of connected thoughts in your brain. The "uneven-bottom" is consistency with your perceptions. It takes the thoughts that are too high, in their own nook and out of sync, separated from the rest by some blocking mental wall, and jostles them out and into the mesh to find a spot where they can be useful, connected to other things.

So, why anger? Because, if we don't have a good internal representation of the world around us, we will die out. Compared to people who have better predictions, we will make stupider choices, leading to more danger and less opportunity. Anger is the way, physiologically, we jostle our own thoughts and let them settle into a more reasonable pattern. The higher the blocking mental walls, the angrier you must become for it to be useful -- and if you have an extraordinarily stong and high mental block, and the balls don't get jostled enough to bounce out into the larger fray, it will merely happen again, but more extreme. Just like we observe all around us.

We all know that denial is the first step, then anger. Without denial, there isn't much anger. Block it out, then shake things up.



Food for thought: groups against anger (such as religions), changes you effect in another's brain simply by triggering concepts in close proximity (by communicating), cynicism and the lack of anger, head-in-the-sands philosphy and lack of anger, idealism and the presence of anger, belief that the world is not as it is intended to be and the presence of anger, strength of denial and strength of anger.

On halloween, while I was at the Mercury Lounge night (goths swing dancing, it's kinda neat), a friend of mine tagged me, yelled at me to come immediately, and started running. Now, he's never done that before, so I figured it was serious and ran after him. I stopped at his car, where I could see a guy on the ground and the feet of a woman. My first thought was, "Gee, someone got drunk and fell down, now she needs help." As I walked closer to see how I could help, I heard my friend say "let her breathe, throwing her drink in your face isn't worth it". I'm still thinking this is just a drunkenness scenario, and that my friend was telling the guy to forget about the worthless girl.

I was very, very wrong.

The guy was on top of the girl, with his elbow and forearm on her throat, leaning into it, crushing her throat against the ground. This guy must have weighed around 200lbs, and the girl's face was changing color.

Interesting things happened in my head. I immediately went through scenarios, all of them starting with removing him from her throat. I considered the possibility that she had come at him with a knife or something, and that after I got him off of her I might have to defend him from her. Still, she was dying as far as I could tell, with a crushed larynx, and I just couldn't let that slide. In a tenth of a second, I considered at least three different ways of accomplishing what I wanted, and settled upon throwing him against the wall with sheer strength, dropping him to the ground if he didn't head there on his own, and put him into a come-along hold -- mainly because that's what I could do from where I was standing, and it ended up with me between the two of them. I touched him on the shoulder, and he released her and stepped back. I did nothing.

Well, I didn't just do nothing: I remained present, at ready, with an air of sheer, untainted confidence that I was obviously capable of thrashing this guy if he started anything further. Honestly, I'm not sure I was capable -- he looked pretty buff, and only slightly smaller than I was, and the hold he had on her looked like he might have some combat training himself. Still, I think he believed it, simply by how I was carrying myself, and I certainly believed it at the time...though I would have acted the same even if I thought I would be the one getting thrashed.

It took her over a full minute to catch her breath. Her windpipe had been crushed closed. She was incredibly shaken, but managed to stammer out that she had never been assaulted before, and that they had gotten married a month and a week ago. I'm not sure how much I believe, but after she got her coat and refused offers of an escort, she told the guy she was going home and started walking. The guy, intelligently, didn't follow.

Then she turned around and told him to come with her.

I don't think I've ever felt more impotent in my life. Here is a guy that just caused lasting damage to your ability to breathe, and it will only happen again. The chance for me to actually act had passed, as he let off as soon as he was aware of my presence. I can't shake the woman and tell her to get a grip, because it wouldn't change anything as I'm not someone she trusts. There's nothing I can tell the guy that will shake him from his belief that she deserved it, though I did mention that jail sucks. Had I called the police, they would just leave, and I didn't even know their names (neither did the bouncer; I checked). Anything I did now wouldn't have much effect on what happened later. I was incapable of even marginally protecting her from this happening again.

Here I am, trained, capable, and fully sober, completely unable to affect the world in a meaningful manner. That eats at me, and has been eating at me since this happened. Thing is, I can't reasonably hold myself responsible for what happens outside of my presence, outside of my influence. After struggling with this internally for a bit, I've decided to be at peace with the fact that while I am there, people are safer for it. It's the only thing that makes sense.

Another snapshot of my mental state.

I remember having a friend, great guy, named Agnus, while I was a student at UW (in CSE) four years ago. He always seemed just a little like he didn't belong. An older gent, married with kids and a house, and just not so frolicky and volatile as the rest of us. He got his stuff done on time, without staying up all night doing it. All responsible-like.

Now, here I am at school again, and while I'm still kinda frolicky, I'm much less volatile (much much much much...) and actually find myself strongly empathising with how Agnus must have felt. Just ... a bit ... out of place.

I had my graduation appointment with my department advisor last week, and it was a case of old friends meeting. I've known her for going on six years now, though we didn't talk much (a few times a year) during the time I was out of school. We spent half an hour gossiping about people come and gone, and current departmental events, and about three minutes on the actual graduation paperwork. It was strange, given my status as something of a departmental pariah.

To explain that: I was kicked out of school, in May of 2002, for hacking into the departmental and university-wide student and staff servers, to read my exfiancee's email. Stupid, yes? Yes. Very stupid. I was kicked out of school for it, went to jail on hacking charges ("Computer Trespass" is what it's called in this state), had my housemates kick me out of my house, lost my job, and in general had an absolutely shitty time for quite a while. Worst part, in terms of effect on my life: I was 30 days (days!) away from graduating when this all happened. I've waited my three years (court orders preventing me from setting foot on the UW lasted that long), now I'm back in school, and after jumping through a number of hoops I am, once again, in my last quarter. And I'm disappointed.

The classes are easy. Sometimes time-consuming, but easy. I'm not learning anything.

Of course, if I would spend a bit of time remembering what things were like when I was last in CSE, it was the same way: I learned a lot, but none of it from classes. I knew all the math coming in, and already had a decade (a full fucking decade, and that's an underexaggeration) of programming experience in a variety of languages already under my belt. What I learned, I learned tangential to class: I got jobs around campus where I had to become much more familiar with Unix, in a very small amount of time. I started dealing with Oracle DBA skills when I had to write PL/SQL scripts for a job I had, that I got through contacts at school. In general, I just made sure I got exposed to as much as possible, and that involved skipping nearly all my classes, and by all the gods I got sooooo much more out of that than attending lectures would have given me.

History apparently repeats itself, because here I am, finding other things to spice up my life, because I just can't stand not to learn as much as I possibly can. My AI class is somewhat boring (clueless prof), so I'm keeping things interesting by teaching myself common-lisp and doing all my projects in that. My poor TA. I'm taking the schema in my Databases class and completely refactoring it, making it massively extensible without requiring future schema changes ('cause I just know the prof is gonna throw something in, to "emulate a working environment" -- and it's more fun that way). My poor TA. I'm also completely refactoring the language grammar in my Compilers course, making it easily extensible if I ever feel like it (and correct, unlike the "sample solution"), which involves rewriting most of the skeletal code they gave us. My poor TA.

It's funny. All of those things all have the concept of "making it more general". Seems to be a theme of mine -- I can't stand writing "special case" code. Most of my projects are very flexible ... because they usually need to change, and often.

The part that gets to me the most, though, is the people in the department. CSE majors (... and professors) now are no different than four years ago: lots of arrogant bastards who are scared that people might find out that they're not as smart as they think they are. I can smell the fear, now. I couldn't smell it before. And ... I remember it. I was one of those people, just as scared, and just as blind to the fact that it doesn't matter. Reminds me of my own shortcomings. Though, I think it was useful: because I was so scared that people would find out that I didn't know something or other, I made damn sure to go learn it, and learn it cold. I have to wonder how many people are the same way, and wonder if my current level of "enlightenment" is actually having a negative effect on how well I learn new things. Makes me think twice about condemning others for their silly fears and arrogant behavior. It seems that, no matter how much I dislike it, everything people do makes sense on some level.

I've been increasingly of the notion that I'm somewhat severely screwed up in the head. It doesn't bother me much. As galith has put it a number of times, my parents did a great job with my self esteem. I can count the number of times I can recall feeling bad about who I was on the fingers of one hand. Interesting stories, if you want to hear them. Long, though, so ask me in person.

So, I think I'm a bit screwy, and it doesn't bother me. Much, that is. It bothers me a little; my emotions aren't completely immune to societal expectations. Funny thing is, I don't really know what "screwed up in the head" means. I just know that a lot of people around me believe it, and that's usually a good reason to ponder. Lots of people can all be wrong, but they can be right, too.

Way I figure it, if I'm screwy in the head, well, that's the way I am. In general, I like my head: the way I think, the patterns I see, the communication styles, and the line of my jaw. Okay, the jaw bit isn't really related to what I'm talking about. But if I'm screwed up in the head, I'm okay with that. It's just another way of saying that I don't do what people expect me to do, and that's never really bothered me. The reactions I get bother me, sometimes, but being unpredictable hasn't ever bothered me. Being predictable doesn't generally bother me, either ... I think that's called "trust", in a nutshell. Huh. I'll have to think on that one.

Oh yeah -- the subject line is a joke.

I was talking about this the other night with a friend of mine -- actually, probably my closest friend outside of ariata, now that galith is so far away. (This statement left intentionally ambiguous. I love the English language.) So I said to him, "I've been thinking, and I think I'm really screwed up." This was one of those four-in-the-morning, I'm-too-tired-to-watch-what-I'm-saying talks. Those are the best. He told me that I wasn't screwed up, although he could see how people would think so. He says I'm not ruled by my emotions, that I'll feel the same thing everyone else feels, and might even be slightly swayed by those emotions, but they don't determine my decisions -- I'll make the same decision I would have made minus the mind-clouding emotions, unless it was borderline to begin with.

I think that's called sociopath. I'm not sure, really -- it might be that a sociopath doesn't feel it at all, as opposed to feeling it and denying it. Whatever "it" happens to be. Even if sociopath isn't the right word, I can certainly see how people would think me a sociopath. (Noone has admitted to me that they think so, but I figure some people do.)

I also have this urge that people realize that I'm smart. I really want people to know what I'm capable of. Why? Screwed in the head. My friend says it's just wanting recognition for what I am, and that I'm doing nothing special to show it, and that the urge to be recognized for your achievements is perfectly natural, and that it just looks weird because not many people are as smart as I am (although I might argue that). I respect this guys take on things, but I think it's a bit more than that. I'm an arrogant bastard. Sometimes, for a laugh, I'll try to be as arrogant as possible. That usually takes me down a notch or two. But usually I'm just your regular-old full-of-himself junkie who wants to be the center of attention.

For the longest time, I figured that my upbringing was devoid of downsides. I still think that I received a lot more good than bad (my parents were awesome), but one thing I did deal with was a very manipulative mother. She still is, she's just either not as good at it anymore, or so good that she's trying to look clumsy at it, or I'm just more sensitive to it. And boy, am I sensitive to it. Borderline violently sensitive. The violence is within, though, in my head -- it feels like I'm ripping a train of its tracks with sheer force of will. Not pleasant, and it makes me sweat.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm actually glad of this. I'm still pretty easy to manipulate (everyone is), but I'm more aware of when it happens than the average Joe. I really think this helps me, in the long run. I'm also less swayed by emotions (see? it's all connected), because I'm so used to thinking about where they came from and then making my decisions based on that, instead of on my emotions. To put it another way, I was so over-manipulated that the only way for me to function was to dullen my responses to my raw emotions -- raw emotions that aren't dampened themselves, unfortunately, or things would be a lot easier. Just my reactions to them. It's HARD. But I do it, I think because I believe it's easier than not doing it, in the long run.

So, things like my girlfriend demanding that I shower her with attention. I like my girlfriend (or she wouldn't be my girlfriend, yadda yadda), and I want her to be happy, and giving her the attention would make her happy, and my immediate emotional response urges me to do what she asks. But then, I think, where does this urging come from? Well, two major places: the desire for her to be happy, and the fear of losing her. Once I figure that out, it's not too terribly difficult to realize that showering her with attention, too much, just sets up an expectation that I can't maintain, leading to even more unhappiness in the long run, and that showering her with attention, too much, is almost a sure-fire way of losing her, for a variety of reasons. (Bor-ing!) This just begs the question of how much is "too much", and I really don't have an answer for that except "I know it when I feel it".

This is -- as many people have pointed out -- quite manipulative. I see nothing negative about this, as it leads (I believe) to better things not only for me, but for everyone else involved, as well. I can't really argue that I'm not manipulative. I'll argue deceptive, because I really don't think I am, but if you want to call what I do manipulative, then by george it's manipulative. But whatever you call it, what I actually do is attempt to guide. Kind of like leading in a dance, or steering a friend as you're walking around town, you apply gentle force in the direction you want to go and then release when it becomes apparent they aren't going that way. It's not a shove, and I'm not insisting: it's just a suggestion. It's not like I step up the force when I see resistance. I usually just walk away.

So, I do this a lot, just kinda subconsciously, although I can look back later at how I've behaved and realize what I was doing. Thing is, I often see others doing it. I could name names, but it would be a very long list, which is actually an interesting point in itself. I see the pressure, I feel the pressure, and often, I ignore the pressure. As if it wasn't there. Because I don't want to go where they're pressing, so I don't. Sometimes I point at the pressure and laugh, if it's particularly absurd. Sometimes I push back.

People don't mind when I push back. Well, they mind, because when I actually decide to push things I push them really far, but they're not scared. It's expected. It fits with the norms. This is how arguments are started, how fights are started, and how tension is resolved (eventually). People mind IMMENSELY when I don't even acknowledge that the pressure is there. Why is that? Further, they don't mind when they think I'm oblivious to it (they just make it more obvious, usually), but mind rather terribly when they think I'm ignoring it. I can't get into people's minds, of course, but it seems to soothe people when they find out I was really just oblivious, and not actively ignoring their leads.

Sociopath. To observers, when I realize what's going on, and then don't do what's expected of "someone who knows what's going on", it's like I don't feel it at all. Realize it, sure, but not "feel" the rightness or wrongness of things. A number of words come to mind: Machiavellian, sociopathic, psychopathic, immoral, amoral (is that worse?), the like.

I'm okay with who I am. Whatever you want to call me is fine, because what you call me doesn't really change who I am, and whatever I did you could call me something damaging. Truth comes out over time, so I'm not too worried about transient rumors. By and large, the people that know me well really like me, too. Even when I frustrate the hell out of them, as I do fairly often, or they don't approve of my decisions, which happens a lot. Perhaps "like me" isn't what I meant so much as "trust that my heart is in the right place". I think my heart is in the right place, too, but I'm kinda biased, and I think that (perhaps barring extremely rare exceptions) everyone's heart is in the right place -- just moronically wrong on occasion regarding the effectxs their actions will have on things. I'm moronically wrong like this a lot. Kinda sucks, but each time it happens, I can learn from it.

Ah, see, there's a bit more of why I think I'm screwed in the head. Guilt? I don't feel it.

I. Don't. Feel. Guilt.

What the hell? Why not? I don't know. I know it freaks the shit out of people when they find out, though, which is usually after they try to guilt trip me on something or other and it has no noticeable effect. I know what guilt is; I used to feel it. It's that constricting feeling in your chest, plus a heady feeling, plus remorse over something you believe you're the cause of. This isn't a case of me just calling it by another name; I really don't feel guilty about anything I do. Even the things I regret (and there are plenty of those). I odn't even think it's a case of me suppressing it -- I really just don't even feel twinges of guilt.

Here's what goes on in my head, best I can figure: I do something, thinking it's the best thing (of course I think it's the best thing -- I did it, didn't I?). Stuff happens that I don't like, and I realize (or at least believe) that these things are a result of what I did. I regret the action, and would do it again differently if I could reload a saved game and go through the level again. But no remorse. I did what was the best known option (to me) at the time, and I learned from the results that there were better options. Thinking back, if I had to go though it again, with the same knowledge I had the last time (which means without the new knowledge I gained from going through it the first time), I'd do the same, stupid thing. I didn't make a bad decision, I made the best decision I could at the time, and I can't bring myself to feel bad about that, no matter what the effects were. Perhaps if the effects were drastic enough I'd feel bad, but I can't see myself making a mistake of such epic proportions.

Naturalistic Fallacy. I've been accused of it numerous times. You know, the one where you think things should be the way they are, because that's the way they are? That's not quite what the Naturalistic Fallacy is, although it's very close in wording (and perhaps in concept). I really strongly believe that if things are the way they are, then that's the way they should be, because they are the results of the environment being the way it is, which is the result of the environment being the way it was. It's a shame there's a very similar thought with the word "fallacy" attached to it. In short, the Naturalistic Fallacy is the logical fallacy where you believe that things should continue to be how they are now, because that's the way they are now. That's just silly -- things change all the time, as they should. Of course.

I've been playing with the idea of superrationality. Basically, what that means is that if I reach a conclusion, other people will probably reach the same conclusion, so it makes sense for me to choose the thing that's best if everyone chooses it. It's a pet Hofstadter theory. I think it's bunk, really. But, as I was pondering exactly why it was bunk, it got me to thinking -- people do tend to think similarly, and by "think similarly" I mean make decisions using the same type of mental processes. There are large swaths of people who use religion to decide things, and (smaller) large swaths of people who use ethics, a smaller group who is machiavellian, and not many people who use the method I use. Certain minds are just more suited for ethics calculations ("calculations" being a loose term, here), and other minds are more suited to religious dogma calculations, and certain minds are more suited to machiavellian calculations. I do something different, and actually find those methods pretty hard (not to mention error-prone), so I figure my mind is better suited for the types of calculations I make (which are essentially convergence calculations, if anyone can take a gander at what that means). I'm in a decently high strata in terms of IQ, and I do see correlations between intelligence and which swath you happen to be in, and intelligence does become more rare as you get farther away from the average, but that might just be my intense desire to be smart making me lie to myself. In any case, I don't think my mind is suited for using religion, morals, or ethics as a basis for decisions, and I think most minds are unsuited to do the calculations I do. Why? Hell if I know.

This is, of course, all related. I don't feel guilt, I think the world should be exactly as it is, and I'm unpredictable. Exactly how I should be, of course, although there's still room for improvement. Why would I feel guilt if the world is exactly as it should be? Why would I be predictable, if I didn't feel guilt? Why should the world be other than it is, if things can't be otherwise? (They can't, you know -- things are the way they are and the most you can do is change how they'll be in the future.)

All in all, though, I haven't met very many people with similar mindsets. Perhaps two. I discuss philosphy with a lot of people, too, so I think I would have found more if it was at all a common mindset. I've noticed that whenever I bother thinking about how I was thinking three years ago, I figure I was really screwed up. Three years from now, I figure I'll look back at this and think I was screwed up now. So, I think I'm just screwed in the head. Not that I'm gonna do much about it. It works for me. And for God's sake, keep your damn religion away from me -- I don't want it. (I love the English language.)

You know, we're not taught in school how to reason. We're taught how to read, we're taught how to do various things with numbers. We're even taught grammar and spelling, if we're lucky, and we're taught some ways of writing useful papers. But, we're not taught how to learn. Some of us are taught about logic, if we're lucky, but not about the basic things like "if it happens a lot, it's likely to happen again, and now it's your job to figure out why" or "should is very different than reality, so never assume that a thing is the way people say it should be". Some of the most lucky of us are taught the scientific method, which is essentially a long-winded way of saying "guess-and-check until you find it", which some more specific instructions on the "check", but not really any instruction on how to pick a good "guess".

Troubleshooting. How to isolate a problem, or any other phenomenon. The way of understanding the connecdtions between things, and then tweaking those connections to see what changes in the overall scheme of things. How do you pick a good hypothesis? How do you learn methods of choosing a good hypothesis, that you can apply to any sort of issue, problem, situation, or system? How do you learn how to learn?

People make fun of me, or at least look down at me, for how I choose to perceive the life around me. Well, those that actually bother to find out, anyway. I don't really have any defense of my arts, such as they are (and they are arts to me, as are most things I do), except that they work better than any other ways I've tried, and I've tried many. There is something elegant and appealing about being able to use similar systems for thinking about just about everything, from math to martial arts to music to computers to dance to puzzles to games to psychology to geology to leading to craftsmanship to finances and to life in general, and have it all work.

I look at the political situation, as much of it as I've seen, and marvel at the things people are convinced of. I'm not too worried about it, because the media is going the way of no longer being controlled by corporations and instead being controlled by large, interested groups of people (yay internet!), but it's amazing to me that so many people don't even know how to tell fact from fiction. No, that's not right: More importantly, they don't know how to tell whether something is actually relevant. There's a very large list of ways you can convince someone of something without actually convincing them of anything except your "right"-ness: misdirection, misrepresentation, outright lies, misleading statistics, appeals to authority or fame, and other orator conjurer's tricks like over- or under-simplifying a situation. Nearly all of these aren't questions of "fact" versus "fiction" so much as "relevant" versus "irrelevant". Have you ever taken a class in not getting duped? Not in the public school system, I'd wager. Why not?

Seems that there is a large, vast, sweeping misconception about things that aren't as people claim they should be. See, people connive and cheat. They take advantage o