The first page of my notebook

About a week ago I started using a new notebook. I had it for quite some time, but did not keep any notes in it.  PocketMods keep me happy most of the time, and I just fold the paper, not even print anything special on them.

But when it is a “real” notebook, the first page, the first line to be precise, is always hard. It has to be meaningful and with nice letters. I am not sure why, others are:

So when you see a white person with one of these notebooks, you should always ask them about what sort of projects they are working on their free time.  But you should never ask to actually see the notebook lest you ask the question “how are you going to make a novel out of five phone numbers and a grocery list?”

This time the first line reads computational theory of mind.

notebook
first page

The next pages were more like the grocery list :) BTW, this page was written with a Moleskine Classic Roller Pen Plus 0.7.

on car ownership

[ mostly preserving a Facebook comment that I made ]

Old pal Themos, retweeted:

RT @SirKneeland: Silicon Valley, last month: “car ownership is dead”
Silicon Valley, now: “I just pre-ordered my new Tesla”

To which I responded:

Car ownership will be like horse ownership: Irrelevant for the most of us. That is the point. Pre-ordering a new Tesla and bragging about it is like bragging about new horse of the “right” ancestry.

But as a general transportation means (as opposed to recreation and vanity) it is going to wear off.

Just like a horse, most of the time a car is idle and when moving it mostly carries its own weightmass.

That does not mean that we’re going to have a population of cars equal to the population of horses bread for racing and games, but more of how we’re going to treat them, especially the ones with decidedly less AI support.

Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody

I have to admit, I bought Rock Breaks Scissors: A Practical Guide to Outguessing and Outwitting Almost Everybody because of the title. I was between this and Fortune’s formula.  I thought how can one write a book about rock-paper-scissors strategies? Would that include lizard and Spock also?

It turns out there’s only one chapter about the game. The book starts really strong, with Claude Shannon’s outguessing machine and how it worked. It then continues with a bit of Benford’s Law and Nigrini‘s work (and I am both a fan of the Law and of Nigrini’s book). Next is some excursion in Madoff‘s scheme and how it could have been detected had someone paid more attention to the numbers.

Afterwards the book becomes increasingly boring to me as it offers some advise on how to outguess office pools on bets I am not really interested in (like American football, NCAA and picking the Oscar winners). With that comes a so much dumbed down treatise on randomness that is becomes annoying to the point that I sometimes wonder whether Poundstone himself understands it.  And all that just to disprove the hot hand feeling that sometimes players feel. Yes, there is no hot hand. No, let them believe it there is. You cannot beat the belief by serving a dumbed down treatise on randomness. You’re making it worse.

Finally, the book finished with some work on the stock market. After several pages with a particular long-term investment example the author finally admits that “nobody invests for 132 years” and then proceeds to offer some advise that fits a lifespan better. Well, I do not like fillers like this when this is supposed to be an advise book.

A US audience might be happier with the book. What is damaging to me though, is that I need to look elsewhere for the history of the Kelly criterion (which is the subject of the other book from the same author that I was thinking about buying).

So now we get spammed via Github :)

So the following popped up in my mailbox:

It is nice and joyful to see your profile on https://github.com and i thought is beautiful to make you a friend,looking for a good friendship, mail me to my box, because i am not often here on xxx@yyy.zzz for more introduction and i will send you my picture.

I guess it was bound to happen. Anywhere you allow messaging to occur, spam will follow. I only wonder why it took so long to happen via a popular service like this.

a pencil hack

This post about the Grip Matic pencil was the start of a friendship. So when my Grip Matic’s rubber band tore and I could not use it properly I kind of did not like it. That is, until another friend mentioned Sugru. I had some cables to go through with Sugru and some stuff was left over and was put to use with the pencil:

Αρχείο_000
Some Sugru makes a Grip Matic usable again

Now of course the cost of a plastic mechanical pencil is far from prohibitive and normally I should have bought a new one. But I would have smiled less.

The Mathematics of Love

A friend passed me his copy of “The Mathematics of Love“, a book that uses mathematics in order to help you choose your strategies in the quest of finding love. Years ago I had stumbled upon this blog post by Mike Trick on finding love optimally. The same subject is covered in Hannah Fry’s book also.Things like the Drake equation, one night stands and online dating strategies get the spotlight too.

And you will laugh a lot. Knowledge of Mathematics is not a prerequisite.

Βαρέθηκα ρε

Την ώρα που ο Κασπάροφ στο Facebook γράφει:

“I’m enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.”

ένας απίθανος τύπος που ξέρει απέξω όλη την Μαρξιστική γραμματεία, θαυμάζει την Μενεγάκη και θεωρεί την 11η Σεπτεμβρίου κάτι σαν πολεοδομική παρέμβαση, χωρίς καμία εργασιακή εμπειρία διορίζεται μετακλητός στην Γραμματεία Στρατηγικού Σχεδιασμού του Πρωθυπουργού με μισθό που δεν είχα φτάσει ούτε με 15 χρόνια υπηρεσίας με MSc, έγγαμος, με τρία παιδιά εκ των οποίων το ένα ΑΜΕΑ.

Ο υπουργός για θέματα μετανάστευσης, που μας φάνηκε υπερδραστήριος συγκρινόμενος με την προκάτοχο του, μας λέει πως τα σύνορα πρέπει να τα θεωρήσουμε κλειστά. “Είναι μάχιμος”, μου έλεγε πρόσφατα ένας φίλος, “ήταν στους Γιατρούς του Κόσμου και το ξέρει το θέμα”. Και σκέφτομαι πως και τα ΟΥΚ είναι μάχιμα, αλλά δεν τους κάνουμε και Στρατηγούς στο τέλος.

Δύο μεγάλες ομάδες παίζουν αγώνα και ο κόσμος παίζει ξύλο για μια από τις πιο υποβαθμισμένες διοργανώσεις στην Ευρώπη και πρακτικά κανείς δε νοιάζεται. Σκέφτομαι πως στον OTE TV σε άλλα δυο κανάλια έχει ματσάρες να δεις να το φχριστηθείς, αλλά όχι μάλλον δεν μας ενδιαφέρει τίποτε άλλο από το αποτέλεσμα με οποιοδήποτε τρόπο. Και τους Ολυμπιακούς και τους αντιολυμπιακούς. Και μέσα σε όλα αυτά έχεις και ένα εκπρόσωπο τύπου με συμπεριφορά επί χρόνια που μας προσβάλλει. Θα το καταλάβει ίσως δυστυχώς χρόνια μετά, όταν δεν θα μπορεί να κάνει κάτι για αυτό.  Όταν οι επόμενοι, για να τον “κερδίσουν” θα είναι χειρότεροι.

Μπλε χάπια τώρα.

Particle Fever

Last night I could not sleep, so I got to watch Particle Fever that documents building the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and the search for the Higgs boson. An impressive depiction on a 20 year old project to test theories about the origin of the Universe. And it also portrays the agony of scientists that have served them theories, since this experiment alone could invalidate their 30 of 40 years of research.  I mean how would you feel if you had to work for 40 years on a subject and all this was just an illusion?

To all my engineering friends: You need to see this. It may be a toy for experimental and theoretical physicists, but it is an engineering marvel.

PS: On a more “down to earth” note, two of the physicists that Particle Fever follows are refugees, a Greek and an Iranian.

The Martian

I first heard about The Martian at the Engineering Commons podcast. Mark Watney, a Botanist / Mechanical Engineer is presumed dead from his mission crew on Mars while they evacuate base during a sandstorm.  But as luck has it he survives and finds himself in the most hostile environment a human has ever endured.

Compared to what he has to face just to stay barely alive, any “survivor” reality show that you may have watched on TV is like a walk in the park. Science and Engineering save his life, even though sometimes he is lucky to stay alive in the series of hardships that face him.

Science and Engineering I get, but the sheer mental power and focus that is needed in order to stay alive in the most extreme environment for who knows how many days in an effort to just make contact back home and wait for who knows how long before a rescue mission reaches you, this is for me the dominating element of the novel.

Time to watch the movie now to get a better visual on some of the contraptions Watney devised during his reign on Mars.