Overthinking Things

I could care less.

But I don't. I care more.

So Dave's IR LED arrays arrived today. He was using them for similar work, way back when. He also graciously threw in a couple of webcams that have already had their IR filters removed.

I tested them out with my laptop's AC adaptor (at a hefty 3.42 amps), and, sure enough, they light the area right up in the IR spectrum when connected.

Before:

and After:

that's the back of my left hand on the right, and the array itself on the bottom. You can see my right hand on the mouse in the background.

What startles me is, even though you can't help be wince at the brightness of the lights in the photos, my own naked eyes can't see anything different. That's kind of unsettling. What you see is just the view through the camera. I've also verified that the wiimote can see them pretty clearly, as well.

I am debating what kind of connecting plugs to build for these, since they're just raw wires. USB ports, perhaps? Could I wire them in parallel onto one AC adaptor?

Sleep is for the week.

There's been considerable debate on the Senate health care bill where it belongs: among democrats.

Some progressives want to scrap the bill - and start over, I guess. There's a sense that it reall is worse than nothing, since the mandate in the absence of some form of public option or other cost controls amounts to rewarding the industry's bad behavior, not only with taxpayer subsidies, but with citizens' own earnings.

I'm starting to get the idea that people simply can't get anything they actually want without carving it out as a compromise from the plutarchy. And really, once I look at it in that light, I become less concerned about whether the health insurance industry is getting something it doesn't deserve. It's (mostly) not my money, after all.

But I have to admit that we are getting something in return. It's not WORTH it, and it's not just, but it's something.

The more interesting discussions have to do with the political tactics involved in the debate of whether to reject the bill. How are voters going to react? If progressives kill this bill, and nothing passes in its place, will progressive voters really stay home rather than voting in the midterms, scuttling the (non-) majority they barely held together to pass this turd of a bill?

I have to admit this claim sounds absurd. Reid has been whining about not having 60 votes for years, bringing into sharp focus that the quality of legislation turns on the number of good legislators you can get in the Senate. If it's becoming apparent that we can't get what we want with as many votes as we have (and it sure as hell isn't 60), why in the world would people not continue voting for more and better Democrats? Wouldn't the first thing to cross people's minds in explaining such a failure be the same thing we've been told for years?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that conventional wisdom holds that Reid has his magical 60 votes when he obviously DOES NOT. Despite the fact that Lieberman and Nelson are "in the caucus" (ever seen a liberal Republican?), they are clearly not constituting your hallowed 60 vote majority if you strip out the entire centerpiece of meaningful legislation just to get them to ALLOW A VOTE on the bill. Nonetheless, voters have been hearing this magical "we finally have a filibuster-proof majority", and still wonder why the fuck nothing worth a damn can get done.

Regardless, everybody is pretty much coming to terms that nobody is going to get what they want, and the debate has moved to the consequences for "fixing it in post". The discussion is about which outcome will get more left-wing voters to the polls in the next election, because the Senators we have are obviously not enough. One must compare estimates of base voters demoralized away from voting by the Senate's paralysis against estimates of those energized by the fact that, well, we got a bill, which is more than we've had in decades, even if it's worse than nothing.

Will more voters be demoralized if the current bill passes, or if it doesn't? THEN, compare to how many voters will be ENERGIZED by the argument (presuming this message, "more and BETTER Democrats", is pushed competently) that we still need more votes in the Senate, if the current bill passes, or not.

It's a complicated calculation. I have no damn idea.

I want to have friends
that I can trust,
that love me for the man I've become
not the man that I was.

And I want to have friends
That let me be
all alone, when being alone
is all that I need.

I want to fit in
to the perfect space,
feel natural, and safe
in a volatile place

And I want to grow old
without the pain,
give my body back to the Earth
and not complain.

Will you understand
when I am too old of a man?
Will you forget,
When we have paid our debt?
Who did we borrow from?
Who did we borrow from?

-

Okay part two, now clear the house.
the party's over, take the shouting and the people,
GET OUT!
I have some business, and a promise that I have to hold to
I do not care what you assume, or what the people
TOLD YOU!

-

Will you understand
when I am too old of a man?
Will you forget,
When we have paid our debt?
who did we borrow from?
who did we borrow from?

I want to have pride
like my mother has
and not like the kind in the bible
that turns you bad.

I want to have friends
that I can trust,
that love me for the man I've become
not the man that I was.

--The Avett Brothers - The Perfect Space

I whipped up a little demo in python and libsfml, wherein the waving the wiimote around controls the angle of a lightsaber sprite on screen. Cute. I tried to add sound, too, but it doesn't playback right.

Ha! Fun. :)

If the eyes are the windows to the soul,

tear down the wall.

Facebook is like Magic: The Gathering.

I started playing the collectible trading-card game not long after Wizards of the Coast invented (popularized?) the genre. Over the years, I settled into a cycle: I'd start buying and collecting cards, I'd play, I'd get bored, I'd get rid of my cards. Months, or years later, I'd feel like playing again, and curse the fact that I got rid of all my old cards. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This last time, in 2008, I made two changes: first, I refused to buy more cards. I made due with gifts. I didn't build any real winner of a deck, but I did okay for a while. Sure enough, I lost interest. This lead to my second change: I kept my cards. They are faithfully gathering dust in a box below my desk. I expect that I will never play again, if for no other reason than to feed the irony of never returning to a game I have cards for after several cycles of "damn, I wish I had kept my MTG cards!"

I'm mulling over deactivating my Facebook account for the second time, and I suspect that the situation is similar. I don't think I'm going to actually deactivate it, but I will probably start paying less attention to my stream. I've already removed the stream from my newsreader, and accepted it as ephemeral. I'm still culling my friends lists, not accepting many new invites, suggestions, friend requests... and the like. I still want the stream available, occasionally, but, really, it's a horrible medium for the kinds of interactions I'd really prefer.

I know I'm going to regret, however mildly, deactivating it and cutting ties, but there's no real reason to kill it entirely. It's fine as background radiation.

Dear Senator,

I would like to eat at the cafeteria during my lunch break every day, but all they have on the menu are shit sandwiches. I could go for a plain hamburger or even a BLT, if I could. Can you guys do anything about this? I know it's a stretch, and I don't expect much, but I figured I'd at least ask.

Thanks,
Joe Constituent

--

Dear Joe,

Yeah, I brought up the lunch menu issue at the last staff meeting. Turns out we got a smokin' deal out of the bargain! As part of a sweeping new lunch program, we got the cafeteria to drop their prices on shit sandwiches by 50%! They're going to call them "Freedom Burgers", now. We made the program mandatory for everyone, so we'll be taking the meal costs out of your paycheck from now on. You won't notice a thing.

Bon Appetit!

Your Senator

--

Dear Senator,

Thanks...
/deadpan

The next time I have a problem, I'll be sure to keep it a secret from you.

Joe Constituent

My friend Dave is being kind enough to send me the infrared lamp arrays he used to tinker with in art school to use with the wiimote's IR camera. In the mean time, I was able to get the Wii's pointer functionality working with a more fundamental source of Infrared light: candles.

I find it intriguing that such a high-tech thing works so well something so... primordial. I see strange hi/lo tech rituals involving the wiimote and... candle-strewn circles used in arcane rights used to summon demons. Magic wand, indeed! ;p

A cool part, of course, is that the device simply reports X and Y coordinates it detects of source points of IR light - you don't have to run video through some kind of image processor on your PC. It's all done on the device; the coordinate data it reports is ready to be translated into a pointing device's cursor.

AND, as if that weren't enough, it's "multitouch". If the wiimote's camera detects multiple light sources, it tells you about ALL of them. I don't know how many it can track at once (there must be a limit), but I've seen at least three at a time so far.

This thing beats the hell out of the $600 they want for a Nokia N900. It's got a lot of cool peripherals, but, cripes, it's not multitouch.

Prediction: If scientists discover and reveal, in the next twenty years, an imminent significant asteroid strike with Earth ( 5+ on the Torino Scale, someone will get significant "front-page" media attention by denying it, insisting that it is the deliberate fabrication of a scientific conspiracy.

This is meant to be less a critique of conspiracy theorists and more one of media.

The public option is out.
Medicare Buy-in is out.

All we have left is a Medicaid subsidy expansion, and an alleged ban on rescission (except in cases of "fraud" and "willful misrepresentation", which is what most rescissions are based on currently),

in exchange for:

A personal mandate that people buy crappy private insurance, without any regulation to control costs or pricing.

Tough choice. It seems socialism is perfectly acceptable, as long as we are not just subsidizing, but mandating the purchase of a lobbyist's client's services.

The Singularity has already happened. Now we are merely discovering the consequences.

We are surviving serial crises in the growing shadows of slowly falling giants.

Science and reason don't persuade anyone,
except in so far as they enable us
to build weapons that do.

The Wiimote I ordered (sans Wii) works pretty well, no hacking required.

All I had to do was install the drivers and diagnostic software to test it out, and they all work dandy, with the exception of the ones that use the wiimote's infrared camera. Alas, I don't have an infrared light source, so that will have to wait. No big deal.

I'm able to use it to control the mouse cursor with pitch and roll (what? no yaw?), and to fire off arbitrary commands and scripts with all the buttons. Once I get an infrared LED near the screen (like the wii's "sensor bar"), I can presumably use the wiimote's embedded IR camera as a more mouse-like pointer device.

The diagnostic program was able to find the rumble vibe in it, and the writable data storage area in the EEPROM. I read somewhere that there was a speaker in it, as well; it would be neat to figure out how to play sounds through it.

That's a lot of utility for little $25 device. Not bad.

Onto reproducing Johnny Lee's perspective tracking hack.

I have received a Wii-Mote with which to do interface hacking via bluetooth.

It was cheap.

In my pokery-jiggery-tinkery-hackery activities with Google Wave, I've started creating a side blog, which I've entitled Wavers Progress, within Wave itself. It's coming along, even if there are a few things that are proving kludgy stopgaps for the time being.

Now, I have used the embedding APIs to embed the Wavers Progress wave into a web page on Makers Progress. This is not only convenient, as it makes my Wave blog accessible to the web, but it serves as a demonstration of Wave's capabilities. If you have a Wave account, you can log in, interact, and edit the wave RIGHT THERE on the web page. That's pretty neat.

I've made the page publicly readable, but at present, Google requires that you log into your wave account before seeing it, unfortunately. That's a big problem separating it from the web, not unlike the ubiquitous "you must be logged into Facebook to view this page" bullshit Facebook demands. Unlike Facehook, however, Wave is still in limited preview, and Google has a far better reputation for opening things up. We'll see what they do with this. Prediction: this is going to kick Facebook's ASS.

While there are no syndication feeds available OF waves (there are tools to embed syndication feeds IN waves), you can use the wave email bot I've embedded in the wave to be emailed about updates to it. Check the post "Wave Email Notifications" in the wave itself for details. (Hm, I can't seem to link directly to it. Lame.)

If you need a wave account, I still have lots of invites; just send me your email.

I can't seem to say what I originally set out to say in a long-form post, anymore.

I have become a very strong ego identity. My empathy still functions and speaks to me; I'm not psycho or sociopathic. It's just that that my interpretation and implementation of mutual respect is to leave people alone, and to ask to be left alone in turn; moreso than is average for people. That's not exactly what most people want.

There's the world, and then there's my world. I like mine better.

Make me an offer.

Six months ago, I was telling myself I was ready for and seeking out an ego dissolution. Today, I don't know why. As I approached, it wasn't fear that set in to resist - it was just not making any sense.

Identity isn't nothing - it's all I have. It's all I am. The unified, universal consciousness already exists, whether I am aware of it or identify with or as it or not. Indeed, the motives that are served and gratified by the success of any quest to find it find their origins in the fragile, vulnerable individual that undertakes the journey. New prospective motives can only be evaluated in terms of one's existing motives.

I imagine that the desire to pursue the cessation of suffering causes suffering itself. This sounds like it would be a fairly obvious problem in Buddhism, but I have yet to read anything that addresses it (comments welcome).

Except death, of course. Why Buddhism isn't considered a suicide cult, I'm not sure. Of course, the same thing can be said of heaven-bound Christianity. Of course, it's easy to see that suicidal cults don't endure for reasons of natural selection, but that doesn't solve the paradox.

My attachment to life may vary here and there, but I'm sure not done living yet. I tend to think that the focus on suffering in Buddhism tends to overwhelm the real point. Suffering is undesirable because it gets in the way of other terminal motives, not because mitigating it is one.

-

After a few years studying the ape, of becoming the subconscious, instinctive, ancestral man I am, I was surprised to discover, suddenly, that I was actually back in a more conscious mode. After all that embrace of the id, "I" am still somewhere ahead of the impulses, analyzing, filtering, recreating, taking them in, just like the things that come to me from outside the body, as well as from inside. The sudden surprise of the observation was the most notable thing; I had to deliberately - consciously! - submerge to quest for my instinctive, ancestral identity, but, while I was distracted, my "I" simply bobbed back to the conscious surface, un-dislodged, un-displaced.

I have learned much about the ape's care and feeding. I'd say he's more of a partner, than a subject. Some days you're the batter, some days you're the ball. He gives me satisfaction, and the basic impulses that my conscious filters can shape into something to do. Things to live for; things to live at. He understands nothing about the industrial environment; that's my job.

-

But this conscious strategy analyst has really not found many adaptive advantages in industrialization. Like a protist that never quite made it into the structure of a multi-cellular organism, cities, nations, companies and communities have never quite closed the deal with me, to reel me into the system. All I see are these great corporate beasts prowling the waters, devouring all they must. My only advantages are luck (for which I'm grateful), a tiny footprint (less is more), and safety in numbers (I don't have to outrun the bear).

-

I doubt that "Friendly AI" can be "invented". The problem of motive and power is not a problem of insights, or beliefs, or facts - it's a problem of will, choice, and politics. The problem isn't that we don't know HOW to reconcile our conflicts. We know how - we don't WANT to. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our warez, but in ourselves. And the only way you're going to resolve that tension in humans is to deliberately violate our personal sovereignty, liberty, and autonomy. At that point, I don't see how it matters how slick your code is.

Darwinism is not being transcended.

Garage revolutions,
rocket science,
walking to the beat of your own drum,
freedom of the press,
and the tide that lifts all boats
all have one thing in common:

They're only available to those who own one.

Sometimes, I still get concerned that I'm taking too much time than is healthy away from the pursuit of intimate relationships.

And then, now more often, I'm realizing just how tough it's going to be for anyone to make me happier than I make myself.

I may not always be looking out for number one, but I'll be damned if number one ain't always looking out for me. That makes me feel safe and secure. Take care of yourself - nobody else can do it better.

I do wonder, though, how to take the enormous comfort I generate in my own house, and share it with others.