November 2013 archive
I wonder if most people's dreams make as much use of allegory as mine do.
I've had any number of dreams that cast aspects of my
waking life in allegorical form. When this happens, it's usually related
to some difficulty I'm dealing with—something that's been weighing
on my mind. Such a dream can be helpful just by calling my attention
to how much something has been getting to me. Being aware of the fact
of preoccupation is often the first step to resolving it.
I wonder if dogs' dreams are allegorical too and I wonder whether they ever decode the symbolism once they wake up. And maybe dogs watch us while we sleep and wonder why we don't bark when we dream. Testimony from last Friday, in a patent infringement trial:
The jury reached a verdict today, and I'm disappointed. But I give the losing party (Newegg, the retailer I bought the computer I'm composing this on from) a lot of credit for fighting back. And they intend to appeal.
update: a defector says Russia did it. From today's NPR interview with espionage historian Nigel West about the Gareth Williams case:
This pic, like most images of my snake that I post, has had the color saturation reduced a little. His color looks artificial if I post them as is (although this may be at least partly due to characteristics of the camera). Happy nineteenth, everyone.
I don't usually follow chess matches (nor do I have much truck with
spectator sports in general), but the current championship
(Anand-Carlsen) has my interest.
Time control is more demanding this time than it was in the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match: 40 moves in 2 hours instead of 2½. And in 1972, computers couldn't beat Fischer or Spassky. Real-time analysis of the match came from masters who weren't as good as the players; now we not only have human analysis but also what various engines tell us. It's not like playing chess became futile once machines got good at it, but following top-level chess has a different feel than it used to. Maybe, just maybe, computer superiority in chess will spur interest in games like Go and Hex that have combinatorial unwieldiness beyond that of chess. It's not just that humans can take pride in being the top Go and Hex engines on the planet; the complexity of the games allows for richly varied strategies and personal style. And not that this has anything to do with chess or Go or Hex, but I simply must quote this phone conversation from Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog:
Keeping watch
in all directions.
The value of a fiat currency depends on its supply. There may not always be consensus on what central bank policy should be at any moment, but there's little dispute that it matters a lot. Copyright is a can of worms worth several blog postings. Religious orders that keep secrets—especially those with hierarchies and grades, with more secrets revealed at each level—have all kinds of rationales for their secrecy, most of them beside the point that keeping knowledge scarce is a ploy to make people value it. The diamond industry in the twentieth century created artificial scarcity of a physical commodity (and created a demand for diamond engagement rings pretty much out of nothing). Last but not least, I submit that artificial scarcity is essential to the appeal of playing Scrabble. A keyboard lets you type any word you want at any time of day—and that is precisely why typing freely at a keyboard will never, ever give the particular type of satisfaction that accrues from getting the tiles to play a word like obloquy in a game of Scrabble. |