Comments for sardonick

Comment on Saving Command Line History by sardonick / Visualizing Command Line History

sardonick / Visualizing Command Line History — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 07:12:38 +0000

[…] after documenting how I save a timestamped log of my bash file, I got curious about what kind of analyses I could pull out of […]

Comment on Authority, Influence in Social Networks [tentative thoughts] by Tweets that mention sardonick / Authority, Influence in Social Networks [tentative thoughts] -- Topsy.com

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 09:03:45 +0000

[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Dave John Garrish, nickmote. nickmote said: New blog entry: Tentative thoughts on measuring authority/influence in social networks — http://bit.ly/i5FadN […]

Comment on Authority, Influence in Social Networks [tentative thoughts] by mcgees.org

mcgees.org — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 05:06:44 +0000

This is intriguing. A couple thoughts:

Are any relationships or relationship-metrics bidirectional? (is friendship itself?)

I’d argue “yes”, but the arrows can be weighted differently (and usually are, I expect).

num_followers_in_foaf_network / (1 + log(num_followers_globally)

This, intuitively, seems better — but I’d love to see a histogram of the Twitter population’s number of followers/follows. I wonder how normal the distribution is. I would expect “not at all”: a bunch of peaks, out-of-scale at the very bottom, and I would not be surprised to see a dearth of users with number of followers between, say, 50k and 500k.

I should probably also eliminate the “celebrities” of the network

Maybe, but that’d be pretty hard. And also misleading for the celebs who use their big account as their personal account. It’s maybe along the lines of “I hope I don’t become famous. It’d be a pain to change all my avatars on sites that don’t allow one to use pictures of famous people.” It seems by this consideration that celebs couldn’t have real friends — or, at the very least, information about friendship would be discarded by your model. It’s a small population, but “celebrities are people too”. ;-)

Add on a minimum reply threshold (say, 3), and there’s a good proxy for friendship.

Ah, I see you are unacquainted with the concept of “flame war”. Welcome to the Internet, it’s a fine place. ;-)

Comment on Wrapped Up In Books by mote

mote — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:18:51 +0000

No, “overall” was just one other metric that I ranked over. Sometimes books can be horrible in all measurable dimensions yet inexplicably awesome. And sometimes (Stephenson’s Quicksilver, for instance) it’s the inverse =).

Comment on Wrapped Up In Books by louise

louise — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:02:28 +0000

Based on your graphs, looks like you need to adjust your curve =P

But I do like that you rank different facets of books you read. Do you then add them together and give each book an overall score to see which book was better than others?

Comment on Quantum Mechanical Effects in the Brain? by Joshua McGee

Joshua McGee — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:40:18 +0000

I'm way late commenting on your post, but we are fairly aligned in our doubts. I stopped following Penrose after Emperor's New Mind, partially because I thought it was nonsense, but largely because I found it infuriating. It was like reading a Steven Pinker book (wrote "novel" accidentally the first time - hmm): the modus seems to be to propose an idea, wank around for ten to twenty pages, and then pretend like you've made your case. I would page back and read -- more carefully -- until I convinced myself that, no, I was not just being dense, their logic didn't follow (The Far Side, "Then a miracle occurs?) Penrose's "quantum mind" bothers me for a couple of reasons. One is your objection, and is how I fell about Daniel Dennett, who wrote (embarrassingly recently) that brains had to be computational systems because, and I paraphrase, "there is nothing else in the world that could do what a brain does." And the rejoinder has to be something like, "do you mean nothing you personally have thought of?" Aren't we back to muscles being pneumatic, then, because "nothing else" could move limbs? Chalmers likely infurates me. When I was studing metaphysics at college (math/philosophy double major who designed a "cognitive science" degree program that got faculty approval and that I never actually did -- long story) I was much more in line with the Churchlands, and recently have become enamored of Susan Blackmore, way late to the party. My second objection is more visceral, and basically boils down to, if consciousness is, in some way, quantum amplification of some sort, is that really what we'd want anyway? I mean, does that do anything for a desire for agency that a mechanistic argument doesn't? It seems we've swung all the way around. If we don't like determinacy, why would we want mega-scale inderterminacy? I'm saying "want", because I think a lot of consciousness thought cycles are spent chasing desires. OK, I'm going to go back composing an email to you, but I thought I'd post this part publically. :-)

Comment on A Caveat About the Brain by sardonick / Quantum Mechanical Effects in the Brain?

sardonick / Quantum Mechanical Effects in the Brain? — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 04:55:16 +0000

[…] 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 […]

Comment on Rhythmbox, iTunes, and mp3 organization by anon

anon — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:26:20 +0000

i found this via google, both your links are dead, but here’s one that works: http://www.mail-archive.com/rhythmbox-devel@gnome.org/msg04279/itunes2rhythm.py

i’ve also modded this itunes to rhythmbox library converter so it’ll produce readable rhythmbox (v0.11.5) libraries even if there are special characters in the file names. it doesn’t copy data except for the rating/play count/last played parts, but rhythmbox will scan the rest from the file’s metadata anyway.
here’s the mod: http://pastebin.com/f26b33118 – no warranties and so on though.

Comment on I can has consciousness? by batman

batman — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:08:09 +0000

in my social psych class, we read an article that discussed a couple of relevant ideas. the first is that of transitive memory-that often humans don’t remember information so much as where information is stored, particularly stored in other humans. E.G. I don’t remember what the process for getting a purchase reimbursement is, but Mel over in accounting does. The other important point is that, on average, humans can maintain relationships with about 150 people (actually it might have been 300, but it think 150). If a group grows beyond that size, it is no longer possible for everyone to know each other. Interestingly, when Amish communities (which, to my knowledge, have little exposure to social psychology publications) grow beyond that size, they split. And some company was mentioned in the article, I think it was Columbia sportswear, operates as lots of micro-companies, in close proximity to each other, say with a parking lot between them, but each smaller than the 150 person limit. Conventional wisdom is that would make for a very ineffecient management model, but they find it increases productivity dramatically. You end up with a small-world graph. Lots of tightly interconnected cliques, with a few connections between cliques, but the graph width is still very low: probably 2, maybe 3.

Comment on The Windhover by wil

wil — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 22:07:26 +0000

always in support of “manley” poetry.

(in reference to above pun: i am a master of the written language.)