typography == hot

Take that, MovableType wankers! WordPress now supports LaTeX math mode.

You like that? You want some more of that?

Eat it, bitches, I could do this all day.

That last one was for Adrian. It’s Ampere’s Circuital Law, and all Maxell did was add the displacement current term. And then he named all four equations after himself! What a rip for Gauss, Ampere, Faraday, and especially Heaviside, who is the first one to put the equations in sexy modern vector notation and not Maxwell’s coordinate-system-dependent, point-integral form.

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sakuracon 2007

MoreSakuracon Photosat Flickr

If you like Japanese culture, by which I mean giant robots and big-eyed vampire princesses, it would greatly behoove you to attend the largest con in the country, here in Seattle on the weekend of April 6th-8th. Pre-register before February 28 to save money. The rave on Friday and Saturday nights are worth the price of admission alone, at which I will most likely be dancing with LEDs on my shoes, whenever I am not slaving over a mixer. Or playing go (hangs head in shame). They are still looking for staff volunteers, if you are interested in free admission, going behind the scenes, and maybe a free T-shirt too, who really knows, anything can happen. Cosplay is encouraged but not required, although you should definitely bring a camera.

ignite seattle 2007

Apparently these people are arsonists? Each talk is 20 slides long, 15 seconds per slide, just enough to piss you off or in the case of PowerPoint, make your eyes bleed. The topics which interest me the most are helping kids, transhuman morality, identity, applied privacy, and electric power, but every Seattle geek should be able to find something in the 21 talks. Admission is free, drinks will be readily available but probably not free.

The event starts at 6:30pm next Tuesday, February 13th, the day before the next official Hallmark holiday, located at the Capitol Hill Arts Center on the corner of 12th Ave and E. Pine St. Remember, when the city is a smoldering ruin, you’ll wish it had been you, and not these other yahoos, who’d done it.

an economy of games

At MIT, there is a winter fantasy month called IAP, between the fall and spring semesters, which just ended. When I was an undergrad, I ran (into the ground) this programming competition during IAP for the local ACM/IEEE chapter called 6.370 (in Tech-speak, everything has a number). For reasons I’ll explain below, I did this gig for three years. But it was only after I turned it over to David+Aaron+super_allstar_team that the contest gained this cinematic quality that still packs the largest lecture hall at MIT (10-250) for the live final round. Not to watch people play a video game (like some Halo LAN party), but to watch computer programs play against each other.

It also bring in thousands in filthy lucre from sponsor companies. In 2002, we brought in $7,000 and spent about half that; the first place prize was $500. This year, they brought in at least $18,000 assuming they kept the old sponsorship structure; the first place prize is not posted yet, but last year’s was $5,000. $5,000 to one person, for 3.5 weeks of a contest, and you are allowed to participate every year that you are a registered student. I’m not saying it’s wrong to motivate student contestants with traditional software license money. If you’re going to work for the software barons after graduation, you’d just be getting a head start. I’m not even strongly suggesting that it’s highly suspect.

Assuming you weren’t some kind of pinko, hippie, un-American non-profit, imagine how much money you could make from running a professional competition and pimping out the winners to big companies. TopCoder is still around, so I guess they’re doing pretty well. They tend to draw their problem writers from the same pool as their contest winners, and their primary clients want enterprise .NET web service beanlets… or something. Say you’re given this feedback loop and a corporate aristocracy which is 99% upper-middle class white males. You might imagine your contest format will exclude a lot of people, who go home thinking that the software industry is all about high-speed, individual problem solving or engineering generic widgets. Just to be snarky, how many women do you think are at the top of TopCoder’s ladder? How many women do you think are the richest online citizens in Second Life?

Maybe you never thought of Second Life as a contest, or TopCoder as a virtual world, but the difference between them isn’t just a label. A virtual economy is a contest for profit, a contest ladder is an economy of high scores. Linden dollars aren’t real currency, but a language arts teacher in China can still use them to turn 95 USD into 1 million in less than 3 years, and hire 17 real-life employees. It turns out you don’t need a central authority or corporate sponsorship to create skill or wealth. Linden Labs gets the wisdom of crowds to condense value out of thin air for them, but this is never presented as a viable career option to the budding student programmer. This collaborative approach simply follows hundreds of days of socialist Internet tradition.

Sidestepping what is or is not taught at universities, it was never about the money for me. I never touched 6.370’s surplus cash, because I didn’t need to. The second year was magic. The mailing list, the zephyr instance, both devs and contestants staying up all night. I’m the first to admit, there was epic suckage, watching the webcast still makes baby Jesus cry, but people actually wrote to thank me at the end. They could tell that I had a nervous breakdown and that I finished it anyway, mostly, sort of. There was a sense of community that I never got back, and I was even organizing the contest remotely from England at the time. Anyone who cuts themselves a check at the end of January never felt that.

I always wanted to make 6.370 massively multiplayer and 3D, on an open source platform, so that anyone could have their own currency, backed by virtual resources on their servers. That would be my ideal first prize, 22 virtual acres (or hectares), in perpetuity, in an economy where digital data can finally create resources that are truly scarce, not like software licenses. I definitely wouldn’t settle for $5,000. But then I thought I had to do something more rigorous, go to grad school, solve fundamental problems, etc. It will take me a long time to overcome this prejudice.

verse for evil done to a friend

Free and kind, she was open to me.
Summer dreamed only when holding hands.
Winter met in New York where we wrote
Postcards to future selves, never sent.

Innocence on her side bred in mine
That evolved, sicking beast, desire bent
Called not love, except in idleness,
My intent to possess a shapeless shade.

Shame and pride made me then pull away
Then she asked in my loft, early once,
Talk to me, what is wrong, is it me.

When she cried it was done to a stone
Emptied out, and I walked pity gone.

She forgave so I could hurt again.
Until years yielded one silent break.

Free and kind, but now closed off from me.
Though polite, seeming yet insincere.

Every time I came back she had changed,
And I mourned a lost friend long before
She was gone, until now I was lost.

This is what lonely boys always want.
Evil done to a friend is a cut
Deepening and mortal as a soul.

billmonk, startup, upstart

You may have heard about the fabu-fabu Seattle startup Billmonk that makes mooching from your friends and embezzling from your housemates so easy and enjoyable. You may have wondered how they expect to make money. Well, consider your curiosity satisfied.

I think they are also hiring, what? Gaurav and Chuck are awesome guys, so if you are Ruby-rific you should drop them a line. And while we’re on the subject of exciting Seattle startups, you can start rubbing elbows now with the soon-to-be rich and famous, who may or may not want to give you a job or help you with your startup idea. Y Combinator is also having a free startup school in Stanford on March 24th, which you should apply for now, and the next round of applications for seed funding is due around the same time.

I will start posting my own startup ideas to publicly mock the economy of secrecy. They won’t be good ideas, mind you. But they will be using Adrian’s surplus band names, which will lend them a certain awesomeness that will quite overcome your skepticism. Because the language of mergers and acquisitions is already confused with the language of human relationships, my startup ideas will be couched in erotic financial fiction.

darkling days

I originally wrote this after a late night epiphany in Hanoi. You know, like when Saul on the road from Antioch to Damascus heard a disembodied voice and fell off his horse with scales over his eyes. Now, I won’t pretend I had better hallucinations. Saul had some serious face-melting going on. But the glass veil did lift, and my life up to now was revealed to be a shallow fable. Imagine it in Vietnamese, as I outline to my mother my gross mental defects and why she really shouldn’t be pushing for grandkids.

“Chapter the first, in which our hero lives a morality play of unrealistic expectations, self-hatred, and misguided ambition, all ending in psychotic depression.” The moral of this particular fable is that you should not look to others for your success or self-worth. I found it really hard to lead a stable, satisfying life because I kept comparing myself to everyone I met and thrashed around trying to be someone I’m not.

This seemed like a pretty plausible revelation, yeah? Nobody was taking, though, the weight in my head still pinned me to the pillow every morning. After that, it would turn into a bargaining chip. I would schedule an epiphany after breakfast and then peer around to see if some invisible 3-in-1 male Christian God was ready to reward my enlightenment. Maybe He felt the simultaneous use of meds was cheating, or it was demeaning to concede the assist to Pfizer.

Drug addictions have never been my problem, but sertraline (what the kids call Zoloft) comes close. I tried to stop cold turkey in Saigon, and at first the waves of incipient vertigo were fun and trippy. Then I started to get lost, and needed to lie down, and thought I was going to black out. It is an awful hallucinogen, because I had to ramp up over 4 weeks to get any interesting anxiety attacks. Then I had to keep fiddling with the dose, because I only felt the derivatives of the serotonin, not the actual amounts. I’m down from 150 mg to 12.5 mg, which is basically me biting off an eighth of a tablet. The accounts on Erowid are not encouraging, especially the person who said that it lessened his enjoyment of black metal and that he trusted ecstasy more. Really, when you have to stop listening to Ulver, the cure is worse than the disease.

Buproprion (Wellbutrin) counteracted the lethargy about 5 days after 75 mg a day, and after that upping to 150 mg daily just made me feel jittery and nervous. Imagine amphetamines, but not being to think straight, and with lethargy returning quickly. This may be due to interactions with the sertaline, so once I’m off that bitter pill, I might try buproprion by itself, just to scare you guys away from self-medication for the mentally ill.

All things considered, taking drugs for depression without finding causes is like stabbing yourself in the side and bandaging over the knife. If you or someone close to you is depressed, I would recommend Productive and Unproductive Depression by Emmy Gut. She describes depression as the body’s mental immune response with well-defined evolutionary purposes, along with ways that one can help or hinder the necessary work of depression. The more popular Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon is a well-written and entertaining account of depression in other cultures and disciplines, but it’s not particularly helpful if you want to get better. Best solution of all is the Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tse, with the Project Gutenberg translation by James Legge, and playing lots of go. I won’t link to the new Stephen Mitchell version, because I don’t want to endorse it. It is needlessly modernized, he doesn’t even read Mandarin, and he changed wives in between the first and second editions.

And if you’re already sane and happy and don’t even think goths are that hot anyway, good for you, let’s keep it on the up and up, shall we.

mûmakil

Dắk Lắk Photoset at Flickr

The Roman name elephas descends to English by way of French, whereas the Vietnamese name is simply voi. Historically, Asiatic elephants were given a certain measure of respect and affection as symbols of good fortune, religious gods, and most notoriously animal soldiers. As explained by revisionist historian Peter Jackson, ancient elephants could carry up to a hundred archers of the Haradrim and sweep aside Eorlingas with their tusks. Tragically, the bonemass of an adult elephant skull was still vulnerable to arrows, elven magic, and blonde pretty boys from Mirkwood. However, today all elephant species are usually given a 4-gauge shell to the head in order to recover the piano keys growing out of their mouths or as revenge for the Man-Elephant Wars.

But if your childhood was anything like mine, you may have gone to the zoo, watched Dumbo, or read Dinotopia. Then you may also have entertained this fantasy that prehistorically-large, anthropomorphized creatures could live in harmony with man, much as you would entertain Babar in your drawing room for a spot of tea. However, it turns out that elephants are wild animals and can never be fully domesticated. Bulls are notoriously homicidal during musth, cows trained for tourist rides can still accidentally kill their mahouts, and even 2-year-old calves can arrange a brief stop in the emergency room on the way to a closed-coffin funeral. In order to perform adorable tricks like wearing a tutu, standing on its front legs, and spraying water with its prehensile strangling apparatus, voi need to be chained, starved, and beaten so that they fear hairless, fetal apes.

However, now I’ve been educated by a whole genre of live-action movies made for grown-ups. A talking monkey can tease the underlying gentleness and cinematic loyalty from a baby elephant using only love and a field full of sugar cane. In Việt Nam, I began searching in earnest for such a living siege engine with which to crush and shell mine enemies (who are mostly peanuts). I found one in Dắk Lắk, near the Laos border, but it would have cost me 10,000 USD not including bribes to bypass animal export laws, so I’ll come back for it in a few years when it can wade out to international waters. They remember these sorts of promises.

verse for a shallow fable

Fallen from the dreaming tower
wand’ring in my sleep into that
jungle where an idle hour
teaches more than sightless years awake.

Errant captains lose their mark on
shores of distant stellar beaches,
wracking solar winds from crowns gone
cold and still, forgetting youthful wrake.

Be the theory of my conscience.
I am past distracted missing
gentling hands, and freezing instance
slips through fingers of the grief I make.

Should I roam the wondrous waste, still
you the shadows hold in rev’rent
breath. And in far spaces I will
keep you close and cannot bear to break.

To endark in spir’s supernal,
molds of mid-Americana
never there to want. Infernal
wanting emptiness I now forsake.