It feels strange and vulnerable. I can talk as much as I want about my code, but uploading to internet is something else entirely. It’s a crazy thing to let people peek inside the sausage factory.

A nice side effect, though, is that internet starts fixing my bugs for me. Nice.

So, for starters:

• A wrapper around truecrypt, with a bruteforcing script
• A motley collection of scripts I use to passively track my life. Including how many emails I write, how many mp3s I own, how many lines of code I write, how many tweets and buzzes I consume and produce, how many visitors this website gets, etc. (yes, this is an addiction of mine).
• Aport of the wonderful Readability to python

2. 10y aged Taiwanese oolong: quite sweet flavored and salivatory-making. Very smooth and drinkable, though a little too simple and un-nuanced for my tastes.

3. 2009 loose-leaf black puerh (puerh leaves, but fully oxidized like a black tea). Interesting! The dry and wet leaves smell like a black tea, but the liquor smells and drinks like a puerh. Fruit notes.

4-8: A series of plantation and wild puerhs, drunk in progression from younger to older (2009 down to 2005). These ran the gamut of smokey to mild, sweet to bitter (though none of that bile lincong, thank God). Part of the motivation for this series was to differentiate between plantation and wild tree, and also the effects of aging (however, I felt there was enough variation between the individual teas of each type that they outweighed any inter-type variation we might have seen).

9-11: Older puerhs (2001, 1994, 1988 in succession). The 2001 tiebing puerh, wild tree, from a mountain (near yiwu) I didn’t get the name of. Smooth and bitter (in a good way). It was a nice break from the younger puerhs we’d been having. The biggest improvement was in the mouthfeel rather than the taste (full and thick, whereas the younger stuff had been closer to water).

The 1994 had an improved mouthfeel, and a good earthy flavor. The 1988 (Qiwu) continued this trend with a sweeter, smoother earthiness. It was slightly faded tasting.

With these finished, we moved to the final two teas of the day…

12. 1975 7572 Orchid-scent: Sweet and full, but in an indirect way. Subtle on the tongue. A sweet huigan (most of the character of this tea doesn’t come in the taste, but in the aftertaste, which I absolutely love). The mouthfeel is thick and smooth, with a menthol coolness after swallowing. Brimming with qi.

13. 1960s hong yin
Even more depth of character. Deep earthiness and menthol. Louder and direct, while the 7572 was more indirect (though just as strong, in its own right). While this is a wonderful, wonderful tea (and the “better” one, if you count by price alone), the subtlety of the 7572 was by far my favorite of the day.

(Sorry, my last two teas I was too busy to enjoying to take any real notes…).

Random tea notes:
* My uncle’s Chinese is heavily-Taiwanese-accented, so it’s sometimes hard to follow. He doesn’t say lu cha but li cha. It’s not guoyu he speaks, but goyi.

* There’s a distinction between hand-picked and machine-clipped when harvesting leaves, and you can tell pretty easily by the edge of the leaf’s stem. Not sure how much effect this has on taste (other than the manually-harvested being perhaps of better quality).

* The puerh bubble started peaking in earnest in 2007. So teas especially in 2007 (and, to a lesser extend, from following years), are overharvested (and some fake). It you can (and if you can afford it) it’s best to buy teas before then.

* Ugh. Was up until 4am the night after, from all the caffeine. But very, very worth it.

If it had been any other page, I would have been complacent about the state of things. But… Friendster? Really?

Wow. Just wow. I think I’m going to need to pick things up a bit.

New Years’ resolution: blog at least 2x/month. I have no dearth of fun side projects I’ve hacked on over the years, maybe I can github some of them too…

I’ve been seeing евтини мебелиPenrose’s quantum mind theory gain more and more traction lately. Every time I turn around there’s a new discussion about it, a new paper published, or a new blog entry… all proposed by intelligent people that I respect.

It brings to mind a theory that I heard a long while ago, that throughout history we’ve always used the latest technology and science to talk about the brain.

The ancient romans said the brain was like a catapult. Later, people have compared the brain to a hydrolics system, a telephone switchboard, or a calculator. And, now we say it’s like a computer, Turing-complete with a Von-Neumann architecture.

This is by no means evidence that there aren’t quantum effects, entanglement, what not, going on in the brain… but it does increase my skepticism whenever I hear “Oh, the brain is just a system that can be represented by $theory_du_jour “.

</delurks>

Jetlag did a number on me (going to sleep at West Coast Time, then waking up in time for 8am EST talks…). Feh. Talks were worth it, though.

Met a bunch of really interesting people. It was great to talk to other folks that are doing classification at Google (including taxonomic classification like I’m doing!). Learned a lot (note to self: read up more on gibbs sampling, latent dirichlet allocation, and the RCV1 corpus). Also got to hang out with Chih-Jen Lin a bit, had great discussions about academia, publications (quality versus quantity of publications in China/Taiwan), and how to reform the academic publication system to give better signals as to what is readworthy. Right now, reviewers and conference organizers are the gatekeepers, and that doesn’t scale well. When you think of how many smart people read academic publications, the only way that they can give feedback is to publish something themselves. That’s such a high cost to communicate, it leads to stagnation and monoculturality in the community (echo chamber!). I wish I could easily see, for the profs I respect, a “Papers I read last year that I found really influential” list. Aggregate these and you get great, quantitative metrics of a paper’s worth. Also, “best in conference” awards for papers are so short-sighted; we really don’t know what’s good for a couple years. It would be great to have a “best 2 years ago” retrospective award for conferences and journals. компютриCiteULike starts to address these issues, but it isn’t in wide use and it’s not perfect.

The city itself

• So nice to be somewhere that prioritizes pedestrians over cars. By contrast, Santa Monica issues tickets if you start to walk in a crosswalk when the “walk” sign turns into a blnking red hand. Sigh.
• I’m reminded of Taipei every time I visit NY. There’s a semi-tangible energy in the air of both, lots of people crammed into a small area, everything walkable, and alive, all hours of the day and night. I would love to live here, at least before I have kids. Probably not going to happen, but it would be fun.
• One night, instead of going out, spent a chill 3 hours out on Google’s 8th story balcony overlooking the cityline, admiring the view and talking to co-workers. Amazing.
• Ate some good food there, but I have three regrets: (1) didn’t order any morning street bagels, (2) didn’t get any late-night pizza, (3) likewise for late-night street-gyros. Sigh, will have to come back again.
• Also, damnit, this is twice I’ve been to the city and haven’t yet heard any good jazz!

A bullet-point braindump:

• As background, remember that short story in Godel Escher Bach, where the ant-eater communicated with the colony of ants (not the ants themselves, but the colony), and ate certain individual ants as a way to shape the colony into something that’s more intelligently connected?
• It’s a cliche’d remark that groups of humans begin to resemble organisms in their own right. Corporations seek after the good of the corporation rather than the good of any of its individuals. Cultures grow, intermingle, reproduce spawning new cultures. OK, so these macro-groups of humans are animals, that’s for sure. But are they self-aware Conscious? Would we recognize it if they were?
• It’s interesting when a group of people who’ve been meeting for a while realize that they are in fact behaving as a group, and in turn have a group identity. Is this awareness of group identity the same as self-awareness in the group? (answer: I don’t think so, this is something different).
• To extend the brain metaphor, imagine humans to be the neurons in a larger collective brain. Urgh, the speed of signal transition along axon-dendrite gap is horribly slow. What effect does this slowness have? Also, humans are damn intelligent signal processors compared to neurons. What effect would our individual intelligences have on the larger structure?
• Would such a self-aware “organism” think thoughts that are entirely separate and entirely transcendent above the thoughts of its constituents?
• Scale? Seems to be the general belief that intelligence is the emergent result of massive amounts of highly, highly interconnected neurons. How many people do you need in a group before it can be considered an organism? A self-aware organism? Is the interconnectedness of humans even on a large enough order of magnitude to support a functionally processing organism? What are such an organism’s inputs, outputs? Would human sub-organizations specialize into computational functional tools, similar to how neurons in the brain are specialized into groups like the PFC, the amygdala, etc?
• I imagine an extraterrestrial coming to the earth, and conversing with society as opposed to individuals. That would be an interesting story. But not the kind of sci-fi that would entertain a puny human mind, though, that’s for sure.

Hmm, I’ll have to think more about this… so many premature thoughts… And most of them the result of only 4 hours of sleep for the last couple days. My apologies, dear anonymous reader, for the unpolished words, the undeveloped concepts, the flaws. “Time past and time future / Allow but a little consciousness.”

[1] (In any case, I love Ben Goertzel‘s take on the situation, which, to paraphrase: “When the time comes, and you’re actually arguing with the computer whether it is self-aware or not, then the point is already moot, isn’t it?”)

• Port/migration/(possible downgrade) of my personal wiki to an earlier version of MoinMoin. I kept on getting a “CacheNeedsUpdating” error. Source diving and hack patching was no help. Fix was to go to “data/pages” directory, and run

  find . | grep "/cache$" | xargs rm -rf

  . Basically removed the outdated cache. Not sure if it was internal file format thing due to different version, or timestamp thing or what. But, it works now.

• Installed dd-wrt on my router (Belkin F5D7230-4, version 1010). There were a few bumps (the tftp copy wouldn’t take very well, I had to do it a couple times, and the router took a long while to reboot, which I mis-diagnosed as a crash). However, it all worked in the end, and I’m pretty happy with the results. Even the micro version of dd-wrt is pretty featureful, with traffic shaping, static IP address asignees for DHCP via MAC address identifiers, and other tasty bits. And a wonderful interface, compared with the factory-shipped firmware (this is, perhaps, the first instance in the history of the world when Free software has a better UI than closed software). Open source is a wonderful thing.

Also, this morning, via conversation with Hao-Chuan:
I need to think more about intellectual foraging. Metaphor of information tracking/consumption, based on food tracking/consumption.

• What are internal mental model & goal structures, instinctual to finding food gathering that we’ve now operator-overloaded to deal with information gathering, esp on the net?
• Peter Pirolli (PARK) : http://sigchi.org/chi2003/docs/t23.pdf, http://www.amazon.com/Information-Foraging-Theory-Interaction-Human-Technology/dp/0195173325
• How can we design information architecture, and web page architecture, to make information foraging more intuitive, more productive? (i.e. how can I format my stuff to be more tasty, digestible)
• Tangentially, what if we compare the “tastiness vs healthiness” of information. How do different sites (digg vs metafilter vs reddit vs slashdot vs my delicious feed vs my blog vs my reading habits) fit on this cartesian plot? Pages that are “naturally desirable” are not necessarily the best way to spend our foraging time.

(aside: It’s now August, last post in April… where has time gone? I think I was a lot more motivated to blog when i was back in Academia. The atmosphere back then was a bit… stagnating intellectually, so the internets became my vent. Now, here at Google, I’m in general more intellectually fulfilled, work around great people every day. This is so strange, I thought it was supposed to be the opposite (academia being the haven and nurturer of free thinking, and industry being the great pit of stagnation). Both, at least in my own microcosm, are anything but).

My email, too. It’s now nick-at-motespacedotcom. Hosting everything myself, away from university hardware. The old email addresses I had will remain indefinitely, but I’m phasing them out. I suppose it’s good to change things up, but I’m going to miss fairuz, my old server that was sitting on a fat pipe out where ARPANET was birthed and, coincidentally, a couple floors below ICANN.

I suppose this is all a roundabout way of saying that my academic life is unfortunately on a bit of hiatus right now. I’m taking a one- or two-year leave of absence from USC, and am working for Google in the interim. When I come back, I’ll likely be transitioning away from Computer Aided Language Learning (that half-written thesis will be good for kindling next time I go camping, perhaps), and into the Ontology depths of Natural Language Processing.