Udacity

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking online classes from Udacity. They offered an introductory CS class and a class on programming a robotic car beginning in February, and these two have recently ended. Four new classes have begun, and I decided to take them all.

So far, I’ve completed this week’s unit for CS262, “Programming Languages”, taught by Westley Weimer. It’s a fantastic class, so far, and I heartily recommend it to everyone with an interest in computer science.

I’ve still a few classes to finish by the end of the week, but I anticipate the others being great fun as well.

Why I Read Books Aimed at Children

Because they’re amazing. The Golden Book of Facts and Figures by Bertha Morris Parker, in a section on money, has a heading for “Pacific Islands (New Britain, San Cristobel)”. The table below, describing items used as money and their relative value, reads (emphasis mine):

10 coconuts = 1 string white whales’ teeth.

10 strings of white teeth = 1 string of red whales’ teeth or 1 dog’s tooth.

10 strings of red teeth = 50 porpoise teeth.

500 porpoise teeth = 1 wife of good quality.

1 “marble” (shell) ring = 1 good pig.

Stunning. Also, I like that the order implies that “1 good pig” is more valuable than “1 wife of good quality.”

General Chemisty by H. G. Deming

As I was looking through my library, searching for a reference on chemistry, I came across this book: General Chemistry, 5th ed., by Horace G. Deming. The first edition was copyrighted in 1923, and this edition is copyrighted 1944 (though this particular book is from the fifth printing–October 1945). I skimmed through it a bit, and it seems like a really excellent book–better, anyway, than the chemistry books I had in school.

I’ve since read the first chapter, and I’m reminded why I like old books so well–the language used in modern books is so boring by comparison. For instance, Deming defines’ metallurgy as “the art or science of winning metals from their ores.” Of course, much of the ‘interesting’ word choice is due to simple shifts in language, and wouldn’t have been especially unusual at the time, but even so, older books often had some character not present in modern books; authors often wrote rather poetically, compared to the much simpler prose of modern books, devoid of ‘needless’ complexity of language. And, I find that language aside, there are many times interesting comments from the authors. For example, at the end of the first chapter (of fifty), “What Chemistry Is About”, Deming writes:

Thus, for those of us who make only a brief study of chemistry, the benefits to be expected are of an indirect nature. Increased capacity for enjoyment, a livelier interest in the world in which we live, a more intelligent attitude toward the great questions of the day–these are the by-products of a well-balanced education, including chemistry in its proper relation to other studies.

I would not expect such an aside in any modern chemistry textbook. Perhaps, for most students, it would not be a useful thing to say, but I would hope that some would have their fires of interest stoked by this comment. It’s a very optimistic view of the value of education, but I do not think optimism is a vice. And, of course, if I did not agree with the sentiment, I certainly wouldn’t have begun such an ambitious project as I have, to read many of the more important works of the Western canon. Naturally, ensuring I have a solid grounding in the sciences goes hand in hand with that.

So, I’ve set out a plan to read this within the next few months. Even reading quite slowly, at should finish the book in at most 90 days, and I don’t expect to actually take that long–the book is not quite 700 pages, counting the appendix. Of course, I shan’t be reading at quite the pace I might read some random novel, so I don’t expect to finish in a day or two, either; I must take care to read the book thoroughly, and not merely let the words pass from the pages to my eyes without continuing on to my brain.

On Morality and Atheism

A post on Daylight Atheism regarding a religion reporter who had deconverted brought atheism to my mind, once again. I have thought, in the past, on what would be necessary for people to feel comfortable identifying as atheists, and not to feel that they are missing out by rejecting the false claims of religion. For, I fear, there are those who would rather profess to believe a lie than to accept a truth they find uncomfortable.

Lately, as I have written elsewhere, I have been reading Plato, as part of my project to read a good portion of the western canon, and so to be ‘well-read’. I have said it before, though not here, but I feel that reading, be the literature fiction or non-fiction, and of really any sort, confers moral benefits on the reader. For, if the literature be fiction, the situations and the themes expressed by the work should communicate some moral knowledge to the reader, either directly, as of a fable with a moral, or indirectly, as the reader considers (even if only briefly and in no great depth!) what he has read. The same applies, I would say, to narrative nonfiction–biography, history, or such–for I do not conceive of any essential difference between the fictional and true, from the perspective of the reader. As for the non-fictional, non-narrative works, such as science textbooks, or indeed repair manuals or any other thing, where these books instruct truly, the reader is enriched by learning more of the world, and where falsely, the reader is given the opportunity to discover the falsehood. Learning more of the world is of necessity beneficial, in my opinion–for all moral decisions are made in the context of the world, and particularly of the moral agent’s knowledge of the world. The opportunity to discover falsehood is beneficial insofar as men are likely to encounter falsehood at many points in life, and to be better able to recognize falsehood is to be better able to recognize truth.

The preceding is, perhaps, a very optimistic view of reading. I feel that /some/ benefit is conferred upon the reader, however small, but I do not claim that the benefit will be larger than might be obtained by otherwise employing one’s time. In some cases, I think it will, but in other cases almost certainly it will not. So: I say that reading is a beneficial activity, and that, furthermore, the degree of benefit depends on how wisely chosen are the books read.

So my project of reading the western canon is not merely a project to satisfy my ego, that I may pridefully boast of being well-read. Rather, it is a project of self-improvement, both moral and of my knowledge and other wisdom. How, then, precisely, does this relate to my earlier statements regarding atheism and religion? For though the link between morality and these matters is not hidden, there must certainly be more to it for me to discourse at such length on the subject. And so there is.

I thought, earlier today, that one benefit (or, one perceived benefit, for I do not accept without question that it is truly beneficial) that religion has over atheism is that a religion tends to provide a body of moral teachings that can be readily referred to. I do not claim (nor do I agree!) that these moral teachings are consistent, or even in all cases good, but they do nonetheless exist. If a Christian parent wishes to instruct his child not to steal, he may say, “do not steal, for the bible commands we do not.” If he wishes to instruct his child not to lie, he may say, “do not lie, for the bible commands we not bear false witness.” If he wishes to obtain obedience from his child, he may say, “do as I say, for the bible commands you honor your father and mother.” Whether these teachings are good moral teachings is in some ways immaterial–they are convenient. The Christian can refer to the bible or other teachings of the church for, if not guidance on any question, at least rhetorical support of his words.

Of course, I do not hold that atheists are without morals, nor that Christians are especially moral. But, atheists have no single, unifying body of moral teachings that they may refer to. For, an atheist is merely not a Christian, and also not a Muslim, nor a Buddhist, nor a believer in any gods–no other creed joins atheists together, generally.

Naturally, sources of moral guidance (or merely rhetorical support) do exists for atheists. An atheist may even refer to religious texts, accepting those teachings he agrees with and calling upon the authority of the text with those who believe in those teachings. And otherwise, there have been millennia of philosophical writings on all manner of moral questions. Even Plato wrote of such questions, over 2400 years ago, and he was surely not the first.

What work or works should atheists all look to, though, as unifying them and guiding them morally? If one were in the occident, and willing to read a great deal, one might indeed point to such a list of books as I have made of the western canon, and say that these, taken together, form a basis for moral understanding, representing the thoughts of thousands of years of wise men. But this is too much to ask. Even if I read quite quickly indeed, I am some years from completing even the list I have compiled, and I cannot expect others to read as much or as quickly as I do. A moral guide which is read and understood by no one is not useful.

I am conscious of the fact that books have been written, particularly to set out an atheist moral philosophy. I have never read one of these, so I do not know if perhaps one of them is a worthy work that all may benefit from and that may serve the purpose I have described. But, even if such a work may exist, no one work has in fact come to fill that place as a moral reference that the bible serves for Christians.

What then do I propose? Nothing. I have no answer to give. I know of no one who could be said to be qualified to write a moral guide to serve the whole world and every atheist or theist in it adequately, nor am I arrogant enough to believe that I may fill that role–nor that I may ever be wise enough to do so. It may not be possible. But, even if that one, excellent work does not now exist, nor may ever come to exist, still I think it could be beneficial to our cause–to promoting truth and thereby ending religion–if some approximation of such a book were written or chosen, and agreed upon broadly, if not (for I suppose it may be impossible) universally, so that when asked on what, then, we base our morality, we may say at least “though our beliefs are many and varied, here you may find much of that which many of us believe, in common with one another.” And I guess that such a work would in many particulars also agree with the moral sensibilities of religious people, and perhaps, if they do not use it to instruct themselves how better to make moral decisions, at least they may say (if my Latin is not too offensively incorrect) “do not lie, my child, for the Summa Ethica indicates that it is immoral.”

750 Words to org-mode converter

The past few days, I’ve been using a site called 750 Words. The concept is simple: each day (preferably in the morning), write at least 750 words (preferably all at once). It’s just a simple writing exercise, but it’s really a nice way to start the day–750 words is enough to force you to think of some things to write; you can’t just write 750 words about your morning coffee, at least not without working at it. Coming up with and writing down some ideas at a burst in the morning helps to get you started making progress on your mental tasks, and helps you get your thoughts organized, too.

Now, writing my 750 words on the site is nice and all, and I appreciate the push to actually do it that the site provides, but I like to have all my writings kept locally, too. I usually use emacs org-mode to keep track of… basically, everything. I’m a big fan of it. So, I wrote a little python script to take the exported files containing a month’s writing that you can get from 750 Words and convert them into a simple structured org-mode file. It creates files that look like this:

* 2011
** 2011-06 June
*** 2011-06-14 Tuesday
  ROPERTIES:
:WORD_COUNT: 771
:MINUTES: 13.3774
:END:
Today I've been looking...
*** 2011-06-15 Wednesday
  ROPERTIES:
...

It currently just appends whatever entries are in the file ’750′ to the file ’750.org’, so you’ll want to process the export files in order. It’ll create the year heading if it’s processing a January dump, or if the file ’750.org’ doesn’t yet exist. Otherwise, it just makes a new month heading and populates it with the entries in the file, with one entry per day.  I have only tested it against my own exports, of course, so I can’t guarantee it’ll work in all cases. In particular, if 750 Words sticks metadata lines at the top of entries like it does with the word count and time, then my script won’t insert those into the properties drawer like it does with the other two. It will probably just ignore them and proceed as though they didn’t exist, though. I’ll have to try using some metadata in an entry and see how (and if) it affects the export file, but for now, caveat emptor.

If this sounds useful to you, you can get it from the bitbucket repository. I’d be happy to hear any comments, suggestions, or bug reports.

Mushroom Season

It’s early in April, which means tasty mushrooms are making an appearance.

We’ve found the first mushrooms of the year today; may we find many more.

Mid-Week State of the Studies Post

On Sunday, I made a post discussing briefly what had gone wrong with my Japanese studies and what I was currently doing to fix these problems. Today is a good day I think to discuss what’s gone right over the past few months–what I’ve learned and how I’ve improved.

I mentioned that I learned very little, but I guess that’s only partly true. I learned very few new kanji or words, but I did get much more familiar with the ones I already knew and saw often. As a result, I’ve found that I’m now able to understand quite a few of the definitions given by goo, and so I’m trying to use Japanese definitions now instead of English ones, wherever possible. It does take me quite a bit longer to decode (‘read’ would be too strong a word, in most cases) the Japanese definitions, but it’s good practice and I learn a fair bit doing it.

Which brings me to a related point: the EDICT, excellent and valuable resource though it is, is in fact somewhat incomplete. Of course, I knew it wasn’t complete, but I imagined that its incompleteness lay in missing words entirely. In the brief time I’ve been using goo’s dictionary, I’ve revised that opinion. Actually, even those words that are present in the EDICT are often lacking senses given by goo (and, I guess, other Japanese dictionaries). I have read very little Japanese, so I can’t say how commonly used the missing senses are, but it’s a little troubling. For example, I was adding a flashcard for “話し手” to my deck the other day. The EDICT lists (or listed, rather, since I’ve submitted a correction) the definition as simply “speaker” (as in, one who speaks). However, goo includes an additional sense of “one who is skilled at speaking”.

In addition to becoming more familiar with what I already knew, I collected lots of words and kanji to learn. This is perhaps more of a neutral thing, but I’m still happy to have a list of words I’ve actually seen to learn. Sometimes when I’m just looking at vocabulary lists full of words I’ve never encountered, I feel like I’ll never come across something like “共産” in reality–how often am I discussing communism? Of course I do need to learn it, and now doubt I’ll see it more often than I think, but it’s more fun and more obviously useful to learn words I’ve actually encountered. So, I’ve got a nice big stack of words queued up to be turned into flashcards at my leisure.

Briefly, on current status: I continue to re-enable the cards I suspended while clearing my backlog, and I’ve been enabling new sentences and creating kakitori cards from them. I’ve also been adding a few vocabulary cards from the aforementioned queue. Progress continues apace.

Software I Want: A Good Feed Reader

Since I’m trying to avoid doing any of the real work I’ve got queued up, I thought I’d put to words something I’ve been thinking about for a while now.

I subscribe to a lot of feeds. My feed reader has 163 right now, and I tend to find more regularly. These feeds serve a variety of purposes: some keep me up to date with news in areas I’m interested in; some contain opinions of people I’m interested in; some list updates to websites I read; some list updates to software I use; a few are comics; some are podcasts or other the-attachment-is-what-counts feeds; some others don’t fall in any of these categories.

What’s important to take away here is that these feeds represent not only a variety of subjects, but also a variety of usage scenarios. I don’t usually need to read the text that accompanies podcasts. I don’t care whether I’m up to date on a comic I’m reading, but I need to keep up with news items. Software updates are usually followed by downloads, and website updates are often followed by opening the website, but news items might be totally self-contained, and I rarely open the original page for comics. Other types of feeds get other types of interactions.

It’s also important to say that feeds play a much bigger part in my online life now than they did a few years ago. Many things that once would have generated emails (software updates, for example) now just add an item to a feed, which is much less intrusive and more appropriate, in my opinion. Too, many sites have update feeds that would have had no email updates, or poorly maintained ones. The ease of providing a feed pretty nearly matches the ease of consuming one, these days.

With the importance of feeds increasing, my requirements for a feed reader have increased, too. I used to use some desktop feed reader that time has forgotten (or at least I have), then I used Bloglines, and then Google Reader. These were fine when I read only a dozen or two dozen feeds, but I don’t feel they scale very well for me. Lately (for the last year, perhaps), I’ve been trying to find a good desktop feed reader. Ideally, a feed reader should (in no particular order):

1. Store items indefinitely.
2. Allow tagging of items.
3. Provide a good way to organize feeds.
4. Provide good ‘saved searches’ or other ways to pull out desired sets of posts dynamically.
5. Allow notes to be written about an item.
6. Download attachments/enclosures/whatever-they’re-called automatically and in a customizable fashion.
7. Allow feeds to be filtered.
8. Provide a scrolling multi-item view like Google Reader.
9. Save embedded images in a cache.
10. Allow me to open multiple items in a browser at once.
11. Allow some feeds to be set to show the linked page rather than the summary.
12. Automatically download the aforementioned pages in advance so I don’t have to wait.
13. Allow feeds to be hidden, so their posts only show in e.g. searches.
14. Allow custom actions to be performed on items, either automatically or manually.

There are more things I’d like, but a feed reader that has most of the above features and isn’t otherwise horribly broken would cover most of my needs. Some of these requirements probably merit a little more explanation.

Items should be stored indefinitely

I guess that a lot of people think of feeds as a way of notifying people about the Real Content, which is located on a web page somewhere, so of course there’s no reason for anyone to want to save a feed item. However, for me, in many cases, the feed is the Real Content. And I’d often like to be able to refer back to items I’ve read in the past. Many feed readers don’t really support this very well, if at all. Google Reader starts throwing away items once you’ve got a thousand in a feed, and FeedDemon (which I’m using on the desktop) will only keep 2500. It sounds like a lot, but for certain kinds of feeds it is only a couple of weeks worth of items. I can understand that you don’t want to store a billion items, for performance reasons, but I should be the one to choose if and when a feed gets pruned.

To complement this, it’d be nice if the embedded images in an item were saved somewhere. An item reading “This image explains the meaning of life.” isn’t going to be much good in five years when flybynightimagehoster.com has long since vanished.

Organization matters

It goes without saying, but if I’m going to be storing a few thousand items or more, from dozens or hundreds of feeds, keeping things organized is very important. Several of the features I listed above are just specific ways of organizing things. I really like using tags to organize items: when well implemented, tags are quick, easy, and effective. A good tagging interface is often all you need, though the ability to perform more detailed searches is vital for those times when the tags aren’t enough by themselves.

Saved searches are very valuable, too. A well-crafted saved search will let you track a topic in multiple feeds without having to check each item in each feed individually, and can also make up for shortcomings in the program’s interface.

Not all feeds are created equal

Some feeds are used very differently from others. Podcasts should be downloaded. Comics are usually read in place. Some feeds only provide a very brief summary and function more as links to the full content. A feed reader needs to recognize this and support different modes of interaction. I don’t want to have to manually download podcasts. I’d like it if, for the feeds that only provide a brief summary, the reader would instead present to me the page that’s linked to, so I don’t have to leave the feed reader to read the article. For some feeds, I want to do more complicated things. I can imagine writing a python script which, when passed an item, does some magic and returns a more useful replacement item, or else perhaps extracts and downloads links from the item. Endless possibilities, there.

Don’t waste the user’s time

Time is a limited commodity, so a good feed reader should to all it can to keep from wasting it. If there are embedded images, download them in advance so I don’t have to wait. Don’t make me jump through hoops to tag an item or mark it read. Let me view groups of feeds together. I really like the view of items Google Reader uses (I think FeedDemon calls it a ‘newspaper view’. Is that a standard term?) because it lets me scroll through many items pretty quickly. If I have a feed with a thousand unread items (and I have several), I don’t want to have to click on every item individually to see what it’s about.

Really, this one should be the major item on any list of proposed features. All the others spring from this. I can manually save items. I can just look through a feed in reverse chronological order until I find the item I want. I can manually download podcasts. But I shouldn’t have to, because it’s a waste of time. Any feature that wastes a user’s time is a bad feature. Any feature that saves a user’s time is (probably) a good feature.

Interaction doesn’t always end with reading an item

We don’t just read feeds. We save recipes (or music recommendations, or whatever) for later, so we need to be able to organize effectively to find them when we want them. We write blog posts about blog posts that we read. We comment on news stories. We download software updates.

This is related to “Not all feeds are created equal”, above. I’d like to be able to attach a note to an item. I’d like to record my thoughts about a recipe or a song that an item mentions. I’d like to be able to save a link related to an item. Ideally, I’d like to be able to do things like add appointments to my calendar with links back to items, or save comments I’ve made on a blog post, or link two posts together, or a hundred other things.

This one might have the most potential for increasing the value of a feed reader, but it might also be the hardest problem to solve. It won’t do anyone any good to have bloated software that can do everything poorly. Probably, substantial progress on this one would require many programs to work together. There’s been some work on this front in recent years, but there’s still a long way to go.

Where we are now

I’ve yet to find a feed reader that really does what I want. The one I’m using currently, FeedDemon, is fairly unsatisfactory because it’s Windows only, ad supported, and (as I mentioned above) only saves up to 2500 items per feed, which is a pretty grave sin. Unfortunately, it’s also the best one I’ve come across, so far. Thunderbird’s feed support is unusably horrible. RSSOwl crashes if I so much as look at it wrong. Many feed readers don’t have a newspaper view, which I can’t easily do without. Many feed readers are old, unmaintained, and short on features besides.

I would desperately like to find a good, open source, and ideally cross-platform feed reader to replace FeedDemon, but so far I’ve had no luck. I can’t make a decent GUI to save my life, so I guess I’ll just have to keep looking.

Bourbon Chicken

I made a delicious bourbon chicken a few hours ago.

2 lbs. boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into pieces
olive oil
1 clove of garlic, crushed
1/4 teaspoon ginger
3/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 cup apple juice
1/3 cup light brown sugar
2 tablespoons ketchup
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup soy sauce

First brown the chicken in the olive oil, then remove and set aside the chiken. Add the rest of the ingredients and heat through. Add the chicken, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer about 20 minutes. Serve over rice.

I actually used a little less soy sauce, having heard this recipe comes out a little salty. I thickened the sauce with a bit of corn starch, too. The results were excellent–one caution, though: the sauce is quite strong, so you don’t want to put too much with each serving.

Tabs and Windows

I’ve thought a little over the last few months about user interface design, specifically as relating to browser interfaces. Over the last several years, we’ve seen tabbed browsing become the norm–I remember that more than a decade ago I used NetCaptor with Internet Explorer to achieve this, and now we can all enjoy it.

But, just supporting tabs isn’t enough. There are numerous Firefox extensions to help manage tabs. Some of their features have made their way back into Firefox itself, and others remain exclusive to users of the appropriate extensions. I’ve just seen a page about Tab Candy, which looks like it may be a nice way to organize the many tabs that so many of us use. My current solution to that problem is a little more all-encompasing: I use several desktops, and put windows containing related groups of tabs on desktops depending on their purpose. So, browser tabs related to studying Japanese go in browser windows on desktop 2, along with Tagaini Jisho, Anki, and any other related stuff.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t just how to deal with many tabs. The problem is how to deal with many independent–but possibly related–items, be they browser tabs, applications, directories full of files, or whatsoever else we may envision. Which leads me to my conclusion: all these tab-extensions, and even the fact that browsers support tabs at all, are just making up for a failure of the window manager. On Windows, of course, there’s no choice of window manager, so this must be done if you want to provide a nice interface to your users. But, Linux allows you to use whatever window manager you like. The taskbar in windows and others is more or less the same as the tab bar in firefox. You get some nice bit of continuity in the interface by letting the application handle the tabs, but that shouldn’t be necessary.

Well, I don’t have a solution. Are there any window managers that offer a multi-level tab like functionality? My current desktop/window/tab system works well enough, but I can’t help imagining there’s a better way.