Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in パウル　デロング's LiveJournal:

Monday, November 8th, 2010
10:34 pm	do we need religion? A thought I've been tossing around lately is whether religion is one of those things that's an integral part of human nature. I don't consider myself to be a religious person at all.  I was once Catholic, but I've thoroughly rejected that set of beliefs (though some of them probably survived in subtle ways that are hard to pin-down).  These days I consider myself an agnostic.  Though I'll sometimes tell people that I'm an atheist, a) to project the image that I'm a hopeless cause and I'm not worth the effort to bother trying to convert; and b) I feel like agnostics are perceived as wishy-washy and weak, while atheists are at-least a notch higher on the totem pole and get slightly more respect.  So I tell people that to avoid most of the tedious bullshit, but I still consider myself an agnostic (because "knowing" there isn't a god is just as much hubris as knowing that there is one - that's why atheism counts as just another bona-fide religion in my book). But anyway, I didn't start this post to get on the soap-box about atheism and agnosticism.  I just wanted to make it clear where I'm coming from before I proceed. I've started wondering if, in the absence of religion, something else fills the void.  Is there some compartment of the typical human mind where religion comes from?  If I don't subscribe to some sort of religion, or mysticism, or set of spiritual beliefs, then does that part of my mind latch onto something else?  I've flirted with Buddhism a bit in college, but it didn't really stick (though I still find it interesting).  When I tell myself that I don't have religion, am I just kidding myself?  Do I start to treat science as though it is a religion?  Do I have a blind spot for some irrational beliefs that I'm not even aware of?  (Probably.  I mean, I still have some irrational belief that if I don't tell Jess to drive safe before she leaves for work, the likelihood of it happening will be higher.  No-wonder crap like "The Secret" sells so well.) Going beyond myself, what happens when we try to suppress religion in a population?  What do people replace it with?  (Personality cults?)  I'd be curious to know what studies have been done of this in states which have outlawed some or all religions.  And are there outliers - people with different brain structures which lack the "religion ganglion"?  (Yeah, that's a gross oversimplification of how the brain works, I know.) I'm not advocating that religious groups be given a free pass or anything like that.  Very few things piss me off more than members of a religion trying to legislate their beliefs onto the rest of the public.  But the opposite is also something I don't condone - a ban on religion is just as bad (because I would be equally guilty for legislating my lack-of-belief onto others). Because if something like that were to ever happen, would we be denying people of some basic need?  What other channels would that need seek in order to satisfy itself, and what would that look like?  Thought experiment: if we could do brain surgery to remove a person's need for religion, would it be a bad idea?  Besides the obvious, what else would be lost?  What would be gained?  Did religious impulses evolve as a survival strategy?  (I'm almost certain they did, but the specifics elude me.)  Do we still need it? Yeah, I need to read Jung.  I know.  He's been on my list since college. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
12:04 am	calculus of variations This is aimed at a couple of fellow math-geeks I have in mind.  But if anyone else is interested, feel free to tune-in as well (and if you're not interested, feel free to tune-out). So, I've been trying to teach myself the calculus of variations lately, but I feel like I'm in a bit over my head.  I get the feeling I need a better grounding than I currently have in either real analysis or partial differential equations (or both). It also doesn't help that I've gotten stuck in both books I've been consulting on the subject - either there are errors in some of the major examples, or I'm really rusty at basic calculus, and this has been a major roadblock.  When I hit a roadblock of this variety, I want to tell myself that it's just an example, and it's not crucial to the overall understanding of the subject.  But at the same time, I feel like if I'm not learning the lesson from the example, then I'm missing-out on something conceptually that's going to be an impediment later on in the text. Fortunately, I can actually show you online the pages of the books where I'm stuck, thanks to Google Books (it may occupy a big controvertial grey area in copyright law, but it's useful for me at the moment). In the first book (Fomin and Gelfand), I'm stuck on page 19.  I'm unable to verify the equality of the equation at the top of the page.  The easiest way to verify it (I'm assuming) is to differentiate through on the right side of the equation, but it stubbornly refuses to resolve to an equality. Also on that same page, in Case 4, I'm unable to arrive at the same answer as the authors do for the evaluation of the Euler-Lagrange equation for the given F.  Something happens between the first and second lines that I'm not able to reproduce (I can't figure-out how the second line was arrived at from the first line). In the second book (Sagan), I'm stuck on page 6.  In the time calculation integral, the integrand gets expanded into an expression for F, in terms of variables that variational calculus is concerned with.  The author seems to imply that an expression can be found by solving for c*cos(alpha) in the equation relating the speeds (y' and v) and the angle (alpha).  But when I do that, I get a quadratic in c*cos(alpha), which would seem to imply that there are two answers, unless they are both the same, or one of them makes no sense because it results in a negative time.  But in any case, I get an expression which does not resemble the one the author arrives at (though it has some similar elements). Anyone else feel like taking a stab at it? Alternately, can anyone recommend a decent book on the subject?  One which does a better job than the two I've tried so far? (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
12:41 am	yay, I suck My gmail account got hacked today. So I'm not really trying to sell you cheap pills, in case you got a weird email from me. And I thought I had a fairly strong password too. I guess I just got complacent, and should have changed it more often.  I got lucky too, because Google does a good job at blocking most outbound spam as well, and locked my account due to suspicious activity. From what I can see, 200 spam emails got sent from my account, and most of them either bounced (the recipient no longer exists) or were blocked before they ever left gmail's servers.  Still, it's going to be embarrassing explaining this to the people to whom delivery was successful. The account is now unlocked, and I've changed the password to something stronger. Google's page for changing your password checks the strength of your password as you type it. So if you have a gmail account, go check/change your password now. If you don't use gmail, then check to see if your email provider does something similar (and take advantage of it). I can't stress this enough: use a strong password.  Pet names and birthdays are a big no-no, for example.  Mine was stronger than that, but I still got hacked (apparently it wasn't strong enough).  I've seen this happen before to people I know, but this is the first time I've been bitten by it.  Yes, I'm wearing the dunce hat for the remainder of the day. If you don't know where to start, then this is probably a good place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_strength It probably goes into too much technical detail for most people, but the section on Guidelines For Strong Passwords is probably readable by most people. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, August 27th, 2010
5:27 pm	I swear I didn't concurrently read these two books on-purpose I'm currently in the middle of reading Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, and Connections, by James Burke. The parallels are uncanny.  And it's really spooky to read in Quicksilver a casual reference to developments in 17th century shipping or finance that I had just read about in Connections. It's like Stephenson mined Burke for his background research, at least for the specific spans of time for which he's telling his story. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 7th, 2010
1:25 pm	Reading is un-natural! Well, the title is just meant to grab your attention, and be gratuitously inflamatory. I hope it worked. But it's probably true anyway. The recent growth in e-reader usage got me thinking about how technology can improve the activity of reading. Actually, it's something I've thought about from time to time even before e-readers got popular. To me, e-readers are useless if they perpetuate old ways of reading. For example, I see no reason to have page boundaries if I'm reading something on a screen. It makes sense for a book to have pages, due to the limitations in that particular technology. But nothing annoys me faster than a web page that is split up by pages, and restricted to fixed margins, for the simple reason that its publishers couldn't think outside the box, and couldn't take advantage of the absence of old restrictions. My latest thought along these lines is to go even further. Line-breaks really disrupt the flow, interrupt concentration, and cause distraction. Additional distraction is caused by the text in the lines immediately above and below the one I'm reading. How many times have you been reading something, and had to correct yourself because a word crept-into the sentence you were reading - a word that wasn't even there. Then you discover that it was on the next line. So, why not omit line-breaks altogether? I know, it sounds crazy, but don't dismiss it just yet. Imagine an e-reader which only displays one line of text, which scrolls past as you read it. Yeah, I basically just re-invented an old idea: the marquee. But what makes this different from a marquee is that it also has eye-tracking. It uses the eye tracking to control the speed with which the text scrolls by (from right to left) as you read it (from left to right). Maybe this has already been thought of (it probably has). Maybe we have to jump through some intermediate steps to get there (like, oh, cheap and ubiquitous e-readers). Or maybe it's a bad idea. I'll admit, there is something to be said for seeing a whole page laid-out before you, so you have the option to skip around, and look at diagrams. Maybe a hybrid approach is called-for (e.g., each paragraph is its own marquee, which places black bars above and below the point you're focusing on as you read it, to block out distractions from other paragraphs/marquees). In related news, I'm totally slacking on the book reviews. I know this. Not that anyone's pushing me (other than myself). I've been dragging my feet on reviewing "The Blank Slate", because it's going to be a hard one to do. Not only does it cover a lot of ground - my review could easily get too long (like this post) - but it's also one of those politically charged subject areas, which I'll have to tiptoe around. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 27th, 2010
2:00 pm	humanity as a parallel process So lately, the more I learn about the history of science, the more I'm coming around to thinking of humanity as the embodiment of some massively distributed computational process.  Individuals often solve a certain problem at approximately the same time in history.  And this happens a lot.  It's almost as though those discoveries "needed" to happen, as though there was some pressure or force pushing them into being.  But to put it in less prosaic terms, the best explanation I can come up with so far is that multiple people, working with (presumably - for simplicity of explanation) the same prior knowledge, arrive at the same conclusions on the "next steps" to extend the body of knowledge.  Nobody is special in this scheme, and any two people of roughly equal intelligence should arrive at the same conclusions (controlling for circumstances).  It's like we naturally tend to behave as independent nodes in the same distributed computer, working on the same data set. I'm not saying this is a revelation or anything - it may be plainly obvious to lots of people already.  Or it may be complete crap.  As usual, I make no claims as to its coherence or the validity of its claims.  It's just a transcription of one of the thoughts that's been bouncing around my head lately, and I felt the need to get it in writing before it gets forgotten. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
4:42 pm	make that SMS text work for you...  I don't believe in "short" text-messages.  Use all 160 characters at your disposal - don't abbreviate a thing!  The phone company is bilking you, so bilk them right back (do the math: compare price-per-byte of a text-message vs. price-per-byte of a data plan or a voice plan).  After all, you're not paying by the keystroke, you're paying per text-message. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, June 17th, 2010
11:46 pm	Oh yeah, forgot one...  Another one to add to the list: "Heart of Darkness", by Joseph Conrad (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
10:04 pm	"The Science of Radio" by Paul Nahin This was mostly review of lots of concepts I learned as an undergrad in electrical engineering, but it was really nice to have a refresher, and also nice to know I haven't completely forgotten all of it. In a way, the book is one big reminder of how beautiful a concept the Fourier transform is. Now I really want to go and play with circuits again, but for real this time (my heart wasn't really in it as an undergrad). The book only covered AM radio (sorry, no FM, but some minor coverage of QAM). That's fine though, because AM by itself is a lot of ground to cover. Besides math and electronics, there's also a fair bit of history behind the development of radio. Some of his explanations could have been a little better. And there were a handful of errors which really bugged me. Hopefully they'll be corrected in a later printing, but I'm not sure how likely it is that the book will see another printing run. I skipped a lot of the end-chapter exercises that I couldn't get right away, because this was a pleasure read. I'll go back to them eventually when I'm feeling motivated. The biggest gripe I had with the book is that there was no solutions manual. There was supposedly a PDF of one available on the Springer-Verlag website, if you're a teacher with a site registration (which I'm not). But even if I could log-in to the site, I have little faith that such a link would still work after all this time. I wonder if Paul Nahin would send me a copy if I sent him an email asking him nicely. On the whole a good book. Makes me wish I wasn't such a slacker in college. (Comment on this)
9:58 pm	some books I've read recently... I've been meaning to do book reviews here, but haven't found the time.  And now that months have passed, I don't know how fresh my memories will be.  So these will probably be short blurbs (or will start-out that way at-least).  Here's the "to do" list, of stuff I've read and intend to write reviews on: "The Science of Radio" by Paul Nahin "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut "The Copernican Revolution" by Thomas Kuhn Let's see if I can even get past the first one... (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
2:05 pm	I want some figgy pudding... So, has anyone reading this actually ever *had* figgy pudding?  Or let's go one better: have you actually *seen* any?  If you have, can you tell me where I can snag some? Is it one of those confections that is made by the likes of EU/UK confection conglomerates such as Nestle or Cadbury, and never really made it big here StateSide?  Or is it forever lost to the mists of time, only to be found in archaic Christmas carols? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
1:51 pm	*tap* *tap* Is this thing on? I'm making an attempt to be more active here again, mostly because of some ideas buzzing around my head that I'd like to post about (mostly of a technical nature, so tune out if that's not what you're into, of course), and partly because there are some people who I regret having lost-touch with. I'm going to avoid the temptation to treat this like a religion.  That's what sort of drove me away in the first place - the perception of an obligation to keep up with everyone else, if I expected them to read my drivel in return.  If I keep-up with people on here, cool.  But if I don't, then there's always face time (hey, remember that?).  I don't even know if half the people on my friendslist still actively use this, or have since moved on to the next flavor-of-the-day in social networking.  I'm still resisting the Facebook craze - one social neworking site is hard enough to manage.  I live vicariously through Jess' Facebook... Definitely not posting personal stuff on here.  Not this time around.  I mean, I want to actually have a career. ;-)  No, really, I would post that stuff non-public anyhow.  But if I want to talk personal stuff, I've got a wife and a close circle of friends for that nowadays.  I figure the best policy is to keep personal stuff to people who I see in-person.  Call it a scalability limitation if you like. So let's see how it goes... (9 Comments |Comment on this)