Why We Can't Have Nice Things

"And that's why we can't have nice things", a statement that csawyer uses very often. More often than not, she was referring in a nearly tongue-in-cheek manner, but sad to say, this can be the truth in the real world.

The fundamental problem that contributes to this perspective is the tendency of people to "game" the system. Of course, when I say "game", I mean "treating the system in question as an optimisation problem and trying to solve it". There're many examples of this: the "grade inflation" problem as shown by the increasing number of students who are doing increasingly well in classes, the number of people who are actually in middle class now compared to 20 years ago, and even the gradual increase in wealth of the countries in general.

While I'm not advocating that "gaming" the system is a purely "bad" thing, what I'm trying to say here is that such behaviour is almost expected of us under any situation. It is an instinct that is strongly tied to the concept of survival; the one who can produce the most "optimal" outcome will be the one who has the highest chance of survival.

Which is why we cannot have nice things. Because the moment something nice is put in place, some unscrupulous people will start to "game" the system and then cause the infamous Pareto distribution to occur.

Okay, starting to be rather incoherent. I shall stop here.

Nerdy Girls, Sexy?

D'oh. Read this first.

First off, notice the use of the semantic phrase of "X 2.0". It is so clichéd just to label things as "2.0" just because people want something to sound more "hip" and "new". And since when it is fashionable to be associated with the "geek" stereotype?

Since the media pounced upon it of course.

So the infamous media is converting the concept of a "geek" into one that oozes sexiness and savviness that is unlike other "in" social groups that they had identified in the past. The question to ask is, at the end of the day, will we end up with a situation where there are just many poseurs of "geeks" and that the real "geeks" become completely and horribly misunderstood and ostracised?

Take the case of the "hacker", a term that has been so blatantly corrupted by the media. Hackers used to be folks who were brilliant at hacking things related to computers, i.e. be able to come up with novel solutions to problems that exist on the computer system. But all thanks to the media, the term "hackers" are now associated with people who break into systems for fun or for profit, and because of the mass infiltration of the mass media, it made everyone think of "hackers" in that sense.

Yet another example of a not-so-intelligent media corrupting words and definitions. "Anonymous" has been termed as being an "internet hate/hacker group bent on bringing down the Church of Scientology". Sure it sounds impressive, except that "Anonymous" isn't even a group—it is a term given to the faceless people who lurk around a bunch of picture board websites. And here's the really silly part: there exists a "leader" for "Anonymous". Wow, can't those newspeople/media people think for a second on what they just said?

Finally, it is the attitude of the media people that makes my blood boil. Newsanchors and reporters tend to have that "oh gee, I'm holier than thou art" feel about them, and sometimes the way in which they interview people leaves much to be desired. "Hard-hitting" reporter you say? I think a more appropriate term is "aggressive". Some of the questions that they ask... can be really uncalled for. And yet the public devours all these bullshit greedily. This is yet another reason why I refuse to read newspapers and watch television—traditional media companies have been to staid in their positions to change their ways. At the end of the day for these folks, it is the profit margins and market share that matters, not the accuracy and impartiality of the news.

Again I think I've gone on yet another tangent. So, nerdy girls, sexy? Hell yes. Ida is one helluva sexy geek girl/nerd girl, and she always makes me happy whenever I see her. I can literally spend the whole day looking at her without feeling bored.

I shall end on the cliff-hanger.

Eh, Update?

I must admit that I feel only slightly bad that I've not really updated anything here over the last 11 to 12 days. The thing is, there's so much to do over that period of time that it is starting to become really hard to "get into the mood" of writing rants of some sort.

In theory of course, this is supposed to be my summer break. But in reality, this summer break is just a thinly disguised self-exploration/recreation period where I'm supposed to make use of to learn the stuff that I had always wanted to do but never did have the time for during the academic year. Already I'm writing a Forth implementation, and simultaneously to that, I'm writing a really small stack machine implementation to test out some of the concepts of effective compilation of code, so as to make better use of the Forth dictionary when I start to implement that. There is also the issue of deriving the "smallest" working set of primitive operations, and the little stack language that I designed seems to be performing a decent enough job in helping me in that. Hopefully something really interesting will come out of it.

On a separate note, I've been somewhat confirmed for the concert to be held in December next year. This time round, I'll be solo-ing 《今昔》 by 陆春龄. It is a rather complicated piece, not because of its technical content, but because of the need for a certain level of musical maturity in order to understand and re-create the emotions that are involved in the piece. I'm rather amazed at the fact that I am actually up to the task in performing this piece, but then again it has been a good 15+ years that I've been playing on my 笛子. Sometimes it is just a little hard to remember that I had been playing for that long already.

On yet another note, there were a whole plethora of meetings that occurred over the last week. It was great to be able to meet up with some old friends just to catch up and see how things are going along. It was a pretty decent experience, and I'm sure most of the folks whom I've met up with would tend to agree with what I have said.

Alright, it's getting late and the old man feels old. Until next time.

Random Ramble

Recently, I rewatched the Matrix trilogy, and realised that this second viewing makes more sense than the previous one. There's something about the vagueness of the Matrix trilogy and the vagueness of life that makes me draw various parallels between the two circumstances.

"You've already made the choice; you are now here to understand it." Isn't that a sufficiently vague statement that means nothing more than the words that comprise it? Yet at the same time, the concept of this statement is prevalent in the Matrix mythos. The underlying assumption here is that life, at the end of it all, does not truly contain "free will", if "free will" means having the ability to decide what action one wants to perform. Perhaps this is true in the real world, and that all of us are just playing out the parts that fate/destiny has given us. But like all abstractions, perhaps "free will" is our answer to justifying actions using Occam's razor.

Air-Conditioners

On a completely unrelated note (as usual), I suddenly realised that air-conditioners are more efficient in cooling a room down if the external weather condition is much cooler. This means that for places like sunny Singapore, the air-conditioner is actually working a lot harder to pump out the thermal energy from the room than say an air-conditioner in the middle of Alaska.

The principle of the air-conditioner is based on the heat pump, which in turn is based on the expansion and compression of the coolant fluid to transfer the thermal energy. A heat pump takes in thermal energy from one region and dumps it into another region. So, in the case of Singapore, the heat pump will take the excess thermal energy inside the room and dump it into the outside world. Except that when dumping the excess thermal energy, the Newton's law of cooling tells us that if the temperature gradient between the outside region and the coolant fluid is too low, the rate of transfer of the excess thermal energy will be lower. Now, taking that into consideration, it is clear that the heat pump is most efficient if the outside is cooler than the inside.

But if the outside is cooler than the inside, isn't it cheaper energy-wise to just open the bloody windows?

Also, I'm not a physicist. So don't lambast me when I use Newton's law of cooling as part of my explanation.

Life

Ah, life. Full of interesting things to think about, wonderful people to hang out with and that special someone to hold close and just curl up with. Am I less of a pessimist now? Perhaps, since my temperament has changed somewhat given that my life circumstances are slowly getting better.

It is strange to note that this time last year, I was in a situation that was pretty sitheremilar. Except that the feeling was somewhat forced. I'm grateful for what I have now, and especially who I have now.

I used to think that life was all about logic and axioms. But as time went by, I realised that it was just impossible—there's more to life than just a deterministic outcome. It pains me to see people who think that life is all about logic and just fail to comprehend that life is more than that. There's this side of life that involves feeling, that involves rational thought, that involves empathy. Empathy and feeling are things that are uniquely human; these are what separates us from any other logical system. I'm sure that some purists might argue that it is possible to codify all these feelings and empathy into some logic framework; I'm positive that it would probably work out provided one uses a good encoding scheme. But we're not computers, so why should we reduce ourselves to just logic processing machines? What kind of life it is for a human if we live it out like a machine?

I used to be a logic machine of sorts, trying to hide my feelings and humanity away from it all, and survive on a cold, intellectual exterior. But as time went by, all these hidden away emotions and humanity started manifesting themselves as uncontrollable manic/depressive episodes. But of course, the terms "manic" and "depressive" are nothing more than placeholders for the extreme mood swings that I'm referring to—they probably do not correspond to the standard clinical definitions.

But after some help from several people, I start to realise that there is more to life than just solving equations/problems using logic—one must look beyond the logic framework to understand more about the world. Last semester, I took courses in technical consulting, ethics and economics, and the truth is, I actually enjoyed the lessons that they teach. Granted, they are mostly not too relevant to my core of Computer Science and Machine Learning, but they provide a rather interesting way of viewing the world at large. Technical consulting taught me how to apply my problem solving ability to the outside world where there's more than just the best technical solution there is; there is a need to consider the human aspects of technology as well. Ethics brought up more viewpoints that I can take, other than the "cold and intellectual" utilitarian perspective that I tend to adopt in real life. And economics just proved that many of the activities that humans engage in can still be analysed from the perspective of some semi-universal law or hypothesis.

So, what's all this rant about? I actually have no clue... perhaps this is one of those "memory purge" things that I engage in to sort of put my life into perspective of sorts, and perhaps to act as some non-subtle commentary of some people's lives that I know.

Till next time.

A Class Meet-Up

Right. So yesterday was a class reunion of sorts, where all the misfits who made up my old class were supposed to meet. It was an interesting meet up, to say the least, because all the misfits of old are now fledging members of normal society with little of the misfit-ness that was the driving characteristic of our class.

Well actually, not all the misfits are fledging members of normal society. I'm still pretty much a misfit given my geekiness.

Heh. I still can silence the whole table with one sentence of network communications protocol, which shows pretty much that I still have that "oh my god I have no clue what you just said" property, which is probably no different from the old days. Not that I don't like it much, but it is just one of those things that sometimes it might be good to not have. Most of the folks are on their way to actually making real money, which is good, while I'd still be cash-strapped for at least another 6 years, and even then, when I'm actually ready to make "some money", my pay would still be lower than the rest of the folks who had already started working earlier than me.

Strange how time has changed most of us. Most of the folks characters haven't changed much; good friends of old are still good friends now, but sometimes I cannot help but think about how everyone's lives have deviated from everyone else's. I guess my feelings on all these gravitate to the neutral side, because let's face it, it is increasingly unlikely that our paths will cross again in the future under normal circumstances due to the divergence in what we are all doing.

Implicit Memory Manager for Forth

And so it is another one of those gee-I-ought-to-be-asleep-but-I'm-not kind of writing. Previously, I was talking about having to write a memory manager for my forth interpreter. The memory manager is actually done, and I think that it probably works. I'll probably write a stronger series of tests to ensure that it really works correctly, but at this point, I'm satisfied with what it can do.

The design for the memory manager is simple. It uses an implicit list to keep track of blocks of memory that exist in the forth virtual machine (fVM). Since all memory locations are allocated by cells, where each cell is 32-bits wide, there are no real alignment issues to worry about. I avoided an explicit list to reduce roughly three cells worth of memory that is required by that more advanced data structure. What this means is that the memory allocation and freeing are both linear in time with respect to the number of memory blocks that are in the fVM. Freeing uses coalescing, and the linear traversal required means that we can perform consistency checks in the fVM heap to prevent silly things from happening.

The memory manager is deliberately separated from the main code, thus allowing me to implement other versions should the need arise. The only thing that is still missing is the realloc() function, which might be useful in the case of trying to FORGET a word in forth.

The next step in the interpreter code, it seems, is to define the dictionary and some primitive instructions. Once these are done, I can start to compile the default dictionary and actually have a working forth implementation running.

Who knows, I might just put up the code once I have it all done.

Can't Run Away From malloc()

And I thought that this was the last time I needed to write a memory manager. Turns out I was wrong. What happened was that I finally decided to sit down and write that forth interpreter that I've been meaning to. While I was happily writing the code for the interpreter, I suddenly realised that I needed to handle memory for variables as well as words for the interpreter.

The realisation that I needed a memory manager was almost immediate.

So I guess it is time to roll up my sleeves and write that memory manager all over again. This time, hopefully it is much simpler due to the way the alignment works in my virtual machine for forth (alignment is by cells, which is different from bytes).

Late Post

I promised an exposition here, and here it is.

The basic thing that I sort of realised while walking around was that of change. The overall climate here seems to be rather different from 2 years ago, and I almost feel like I am some outsider, in comparison to before. The subtlety of the changes are not readily apparent, but upon further thought, things start to fall into place.

The main idea that floated around in my head with regards to change, is the fact that there is this slow dissociation on my part to various organisations in general. Inasmuch as I would like to remain anonymous, there are many times where the association is enforced to a certain degree, and because of that, I do not have that opportunity all the time. Apart from my reticence in wanting to be easily recognised, there is also the tacit acknowledgement on my part on the relative lack of viable options that I can pursue to ensure my chosen actions.

Again, I digress due to the lateness of the night. I shall try to remain on topic once more. The core tenet of the change that I have noticed, is that the people that I once thought I knew have changed much. In general, there is this trend where people seem to be taking me a little more seriously and treating me in a more "adult" manner than before, even though I am practically a similar person as I am today as I was 2 years ago. And by this statement, I'm really implying also that many of my friends have already started to treat me thus. Not that this is a bad thing, but as I said earlier, these are part of the changes that I seem to have perceived.

And the million-dollar question (literally): why am I working my butt off for a PhD? I'd be lying through my teeth if I didn't say that I want to do it because I actually want to contribute a little back to the society that I sort of grew up in. It sounds cheesy, I know, but that is the feeling that I truly get whenever I step back to examine what I have been doing and the choices that I am making. But sometimes, I just feel a little sad at the way with which I'm supposed to contribute back to the society—I feel as though I'm no more than a high-cost worker who is doing things that 90% of the populace have no idea about.

I'm probably fine with being an anonymous contributor, but I think the more important thing that I need to worry about is keeping that little spark within me alive so that I can touch more people's lives in ways that they'd never known, without me ever having to show that I was the person who was behind the idea.

Change

I realised something rather interesting. A common theme that keeps running through my mind these days is that of change. Everywhere that I look, I see change. Of course, not all of the change is good or bad too, for that matter, but the mere fact that change is so pervasive and obvious to me today strikes me as being rather odd. That and also the weird feeling of why I'm doing what I'm doing, working my butt off to get a PhD.

I'll expound on these more when I have the time.

Summer Redux Week One

So, let me be a little honest here. It has been a while since I last wrote anything of substance here, ever since the day that Edythe decided to take a holiday. Now that Elyse is online and working, I guess that some life updates are in order of some sort.

By now, I'm already back in sunny Singapore. What I forgot to mention is that Singapore is this really hot and humid place, and that's probably the only reason why I might not really like it here, after all these years. Since this summer, I'm not doing any internships/attachments whatsoever, I don't have the luxury of hiding away in air-conditioned rooms. Running around trying to avoid the heat is one of those "black art" things—there's no real foolproof way of doing it without expending more effort.

In the week (roughly) that I've been back, I've not managed to see what has changed throughout the land. Part of the reason was as above, and the part of the reason is that I don't seem to find the impetus to actually travel out of my house these days. After being away from home for so long, I suddenly realise that hanging out at home is one of the things that I kinda missed, hot weather notwithstanding. The sheer familiarity of it all evokes a certain nostalgia that I cannot quite explain with words, despite the fact that the apartment is as messy and cramped as before, considering the fact that it houses four adults now (as opposed to the two adults and two kids before).

I sit here at yet another coffee house, and just watch the world go by as I pen all these thoughts here. I maintain that one of the more interesting things to take part in is the art of people watching. Sitting quietly in a corner to observe the surroundings have proven to unearth more interesting sights than anything that I have done, and I could have sworn that I actually recognise some of the people who are currently here (I'm probably suffering from a case of mistaken identity, but I guess that as long as I do not make an ass of myself by calling out their names in public, I'd be fine).

In a way, this summer is meant to be a period of R&R, a way of ensuring that my mind is relatively relaxed in order to take on the challenges that the next year will bring. I'm not that vocal these days, preferring to hide away from the crowd and stay hidden, waiting till people seek me out. For too long I have been the prime motivator of things; I guess that the time has come for me to truly take a step back and observe all that is happening, and to wonder if anyone is still interested enough in me to actually take that step to want to meet me.

Is this wishful thinking? I doubt it. Reciprocation is one of those things that is really hard to quantify, yet it is one of those really important values with which one measures the strength of the relationship that one has with another person. To reciprocate𔃀is to acknowledge that another person is as important to one as one is to that person. I used to treat all these really seriously, and be the person who goes round trying to reciprocate to people. But then time has steeled my mindset, and I figured that if I'm the only one doing all these... social things, then what manner of reciprocation is this?

And so I sit there, hidden away in the corner, wondering about things on my own, looking on as the world passes me by. It is interesting how a year can change one's mindset on matters relating to human relationships. This time last year, I was all hyper-enthusiastic in trying to organise meetings between groups of friends—now I just adopt a completely wait-and-see attitude. So much other things to do, most of which have to do with self-betterment.

Ah, writing. My salvation from the complications of the world. It is a known fact that I'm a verbose writer; my professor and teaching assistants for the technical consulting class have grumbled time and again about the level of verbosity. The final consulting report underwent a good 3-4 iterations of edits before settling down to the form that was handed in.

Writing succinctly—I used to know how to do that. Except that these days, where people demand a "minimum number of words" for essays, I tend to bloat up my text such that they read more easily, albeit in a more verbose way. As a mentor once said, my writing reads like a novel, which is good if I am writing a novel, but it sucks if I'm writing something like a business report or even a technical report.

I have found a simple way of dealing with this though. Since my mind thinks in such convoluted ways, it is probably best to leave it as is, and to write the first draft in the most convoluted way that mind envisions it. After that, I will pull out my editor persona and start slicing and dicing the words such that they are the most concise form that I can get away with. I like the fact that I like writing, and so I'm not going to try and kill that innate verbosity just to conform to one of the many standards of writing there are. Prune will be the word of the day now, I guess.

So I've rambled on and on and on without much coherence in my thoughts. Not that it matters much, really. At this stage, I'm just happy that I can sit here in the nice air-conditioned room writing about things that I sort of care about. Maybe one day, at the end of it all, I can look back at myself and think fondly of the times that I had while sitting at the coffee house.

Also, when I'm sufficiently acclimatised to the weather here, I might just jot down random bits of information here and there about the things that I see. And now, time to write yet another article on one of the other blogs.

Future Post?

If you happen to be able to read this at the time of 2359hrs (SGT), then it means that the experiment worked. So blogger recently rolled out their future post system, which allows a more controlled way towards publishing posts at a specific time in the future. It is high time that they had such a feature too, considering the fact that this is something that was likely to be supported by other systems elsewhere.

That's all I'm going to mutter for now. Till next time.

Elyse

And so the time had come when I bring on a newer machine to take Edythe's place. After a rather tumultuous two to three years, her fan gave way and I had to seek out another to stand in her place. Today, I proclaim that Elyse is my new consort for the projects to come.

Elyse is a Fujitsu S6410, a real beauty and quite the workhorse with 4GiB of RAM and a decent Core 2 Duo processor. Armed with an additional modular battery, Elyse will be there to do all the hard computations when the time arises. She's a pretty machine, and maintains almost the same sexy demeanour as her sister Edythe. A pity that Edythe's fan had decided to throw in the towel—it'd be interesting to see the two of them interacting with each other. Edythe's "mini-me" (dubbed Edythe-EEE) will still be around, performing the light computations that are necessary when Elyse is busy working on some computation problem.

It is hard to explain this to someone who doesn't quite understand, but when one's work is based on the efficacy and efficiency of one's tools, there is this sense of attachment that I cannot seem to be able to shake away easily. Is this some kind of strange fetish? I don't believe so, unfortunately. I just like the thought that the tools that I use are somewhat sentient, and that they are indeed my friends—the silent friends who are always there to help without complaint, to be able to ensure that things work out as well as they can without thinking too much about whether it will cost them dearly or not.

All right, I think I've probably ranted enough for the day. In other news, I'm finally home (good grief), and am paying the price for a rather hot and muggy weather. I think that it'd probably be a while before I'm completely used to the hot and humid feel, but in the meantime, I'm never too far off the wash basin, since the rapid relief of cool water on a hot and muggy skin is much too tempting to resist.

Cheerio.

End of Semester

Again, it is the end of the semester, and more importantly, it is the end of the second year of college for me. Lots of things have happened thus far, both good and bad, throughout these semesters. A quick recap of this year I guess, before I fly back home once more for the summer.

I was ditched by one, and found by another. My grades climbed, and hopefully will continue to do so. Life is good, life is bad; there is much to be happy, yet there are times to be sad.

So after the final final exam, I was basically packing the whole dang day. And the switch from the extra large packing boxes to large boxes meant that I had to basically pack more in terms of number of boxes, but less in terms of the individual mass. This all meant that it was practically possible for a single person to actually move each individual box, as opposed to the 25 inch ones that required at least 2. Also, this year, KK's basement seemed to unavailable, so it was also a good thing of sorts that the box was on the small side as it could then fit into those narrow stairways.

At this stage, my brain is kinda tired and so I will not attempt to write more. All that I will add is that I will be on radio silence for a few days, possibly weeks. Till then, take care.

Intermezzo

So marks yet another day of writing my ethics essays. They don't seem to be really hard, and seem more of being summaries than anything else, but it is really hard to tell at this stage. Things are starting to get crazy here, and soon I'll need to do my packing (probably a little on Thursday evening and a lot more on Friday afternoon).

So much to do, so little to do them all. And I'll probably end up missing Ida a whole bunch over summer.

*sigh* Back to the grindstone.

Peace out.

EEE PC

As you'd know by now, I have one dead CPU fan on Edythe, which meant that I didn't really have a computer with which I can work on easily. Thanks to the wonders of technology and money, I have a relatively cheap machine called the ASUS EEE PC. With this, hopefully I can survive the coming fortnight more easily.

Also, I need a new computer when I return. Grr...

Management of Life

Again I've not been saying anything here for a while. Part of the reason is due to the fact that Edythe's CPU fan is pretty much dead, part of the reason is also due to the fact that there so much that needs to be done during this "death march" week. Life is not as bad as it seems though; I'm feeling rather good of myself and am in control despite the fact that everything is starting to crunch down for me.

I had been sick since last Friday—I had a bad-ass fever for the whole of Friday evening up to Saturday. But after 10 doses of Dayquil, lots of water, cough drops and trying to catch as much sleep as possible while keeping a good hold on my schedule and thus plan on dealing with the work, I think that I'm in really good shape to proceed well.

Life is bad; life is good. It is all a matter of perspective I guess. Adopting the right attitude and mind-set seems to be the best possible start that one can take towards maintaining an overall positive experience.

Alright, so much for now. I need to get back to editing the final revision of the full consulting report for class.

Edythe is Disabled

So, another hardware failure today. Edythe's fan wasn't working after a 24-hour computation-intensive run.

I think it could be due in part to my room mate closing my window, but since I have no proof, I will not say more.

Time to burn yet more $$$...

*sigh*

Death March

And the death march begins once more. There's just too much to be accomplished even before the end of the semester, and it does not help that I was pretty much deathly ill over the last week, probably from influenza or something. And must I add that there's so many reports that need to be completed, as well as a whole bunch of tests that I need to study for.

Man, this week sucks badly. And I hope that I can live on to tell the tale in time to come.

Meanwhile, I'm going to try and gather the remaining strength that I have and charge on for as hard as I can.