dots and loops

The Brain Science Podcast had an interesting episode devoted to the subject of free will and I think it helped clarify for me some of the concepts. The variant of free will in question is a traditional and spiritually informed one, whereby our actions originate in some unassailable kernel of the self. Some people consider the workings of the frontal lobes to be free will, but that is a weaker notion.

The podcast helped me to conceptualize the issue in terms of causation. I’ll outline two different stances, one spiritual and the other materialistic. I won’t pretend to get either right. It’s interesting to note up front that historically there have been theological stances which do not believe in free will, Calvinism being one example. I think the issue partly being the difficulty in reconciling individual free will with the idea of God’s omnipotence. continue reading

This morning on the way to work I listened to a Planet Money podcast about ex-drug dealer Freeway Rick Ross. The planet money team wanted to get his responses and opinions regarding the economics of drug dealing, to test how well they match up with economists predictions. All of this was very interesting, of course, but while listening to Freeway Rick describe the life and times of a L.A. crack dealer I suddenly realized that for Rick, dealing drugs put him in the highly desirable state called flow by positive psychologists. Rick, who spent a while in jail and is now out on parole, says there is nothing else he would rather do than be a drug dealer, and while I can’t help thinking this betrays a shortcoming of imagination, it is hardly surprising considering how much flow he achieved in his former job, where he was essentially CEO of a thriving business.

Anyway, I haven’t read much about flow but I imagine it’s an idea that is not typically called upon to illuminate the motivations and psychology of those striving for goals that don’t match up with societies.

This is a very nifty tool I forgot about and then rediscovered. It is capable of handling all sorts of input formats, letting you view html, pdf, ps, dvi, and even word files. continue reading

Backing up your data is fun and profitable! For my main data drives I use either rsync or Dantz Retrospect to simply mirror them to external USB drives (powered on only for this express purpose). This has me about 80% covered, but my system files and home directories are not backed up. The following script is meant to pick up the missing pieces. continue reading

I think guestbooks are kind of neat. Sometimes you want to leave a general comment on somebodies blog, but you don’t know exactly where. You don’t feel right leaving your comment on any of the posts, because you just want to say “cool blog!” or whatever, and it doesn’t really apply. continue reading

I’ve been using putty/SSH to access my home box for years now. I have things set up at work so all my internet traffic is tunneled home first, then off to the wild blue yonder. This allows me to fuck around and do everything from surf, read e-mail, download music on soulseek (via Radmin), read news groups, chat on IRC, etc… and the boss man is none the wiser. continue reading

I use a simple comment validation hack on my site as a first defense against spam. The system uses what’s known as a Turing number, named after the mathematician Alan Turing. If you have ever signed up for an e-mail account at yahoo or gone to e-gold’s website, you know what I’m talking about. Here’s how I did it. continue reading