Japanese Puzzle #1

Cool puzzle over at RocketNews24. My answer is after the jump.

My Current Obsessions

These are occupying my mind at the moment.

The Noob's Guide to Flipping

I want to Learn how to Construct a Mind Palace

Beginner's Guide to Language Learning

The Art of Hand-Pulled Noodles

Question: Are these good examples of Construal Level Theory?

This is the Wikipedia entry on Construal Level Theory.

Exhibit A:
Hungarian Camerawoman Fired for Kicking and Tripping Migrants Running from Police

Exhibit B:
Police Tackle Cyclist for Riding without a Helmet

My guess is, these people were so in the moment their thinking was at the level of the concrete - like, "Something that I consider wrong is being done; so I have to stop it." I guess basic human decency would have been too abstract?

Continuing the Art

My martial arts teacher and I had a discussion a month ago. It was about what would happen if there were no one to take on a martial school and the reigning masters all died. He was of the opinion that the skills could still be recreated from the writings and videos of those who came before. Plus, there would be those born with a natural aptitude for these skills, and then they could help bring about the evolution of a style that's similar to, if not greater than, the extinct school's.

I had the opinion that in the Chinese martial arts, there is a lot that depends on training and learning from others. Push hands, sparring, drills, all these have to be taught by a teacher; applications have to be practiced against cooperative and resisting partners alike. We can't rely on the chance that some Messiah will come who will resurrect the art - he might never come. Because of the curse of knowledge we can't be sure if the masters' writings will be able to give us a proper education beyond the absolute basics. Pictures of stances don't show the progression between those stances. Videos may not be able to properly display the angle, distancing, and relative position of the body parts; clothes would obscure the movement of the muscles; and videos definitely do not display the intention that must be behind every movement. And that's all without taking into account that the Chinese martial artists are notoriously deceptive about their practices. 

There is so much you don't know you learn while training with your teacher. If these things are not passed on physically, through interaction, it's doubtful that your skill won't get into a rut. This is another reason why I've come to distrust distance learning programs for the martial arts. You can learn some postures and drills, but eventually one will need to seek real-time correction and testing to progress.

But this begs the question, once one has become a master, how does one advance his skills? My teacher told me, the master must raise students of his own, who will then practice with him. This is another reason keeping secrets is detrimental - if you never help anyone to equal you, you'll have no one to practice the most advanced drills with.

Boundaries

It's a difficult concept. There's the defining of things that you absolutely will not tolerate: the lines you will not cross, the lines you will not let others cross. But there's also the active enforcement of these lines; the very instant (or somewhat close to it) that these lines are crossed you must act to uphold them. And then there's also how and when you uphold the line - how hard do you push back? How do you make the other person not want to push back again? How do you make it so you avoid others pushing? How do you even accurately determine that the line was crossed?

Right now you also have to worry about the digital boundaries. I honestly haven't been keeping up, which is why this article I found was a godsend. It details some good software to secure my browser; it also educates quite well on the nature of the problem plaguing online privacy. I suppose it's strange that a web developer isn't more up-to-date with these things - but since I have not had to work on the analytics side tracking user information isn't that a big thing in my mind. This is a bad headspace to be in, so I highly recommend the article as a way to get started for everyone.

Self-Delusion

Experts are especially prone to claiming they know more than they do. Because it benefits them more for others' perception of their expertise to continue. Because being ignorant is socially undesirable, and may lead to all sorts of bad consequences. Because for many things in modern life faking it is sufficient to get through.

Believing the lie, though, is something else entirely. Because it can lead you to not paying more attention to the stakes of what you're trying to bullshit. A professional does his assigned job, and asks for help when he needs it. The product is the point, and compromising it because your personal stuff got in the way is inexcusable.

This is something I try to keep in mind, because the self-delusion has been mine. Hindsight has been painful, and I have had made many mistakes. In the field that I work in now, I have to focus on making sure that I communicate correct information or the project can get derailed.

For examples, take every episode of Kitchen Nightmares. At my work there's the guy in a supervisory position who brags that his job is to "plan things," but who had to do nine hours of overtime for a presentation the next day. And there's the woman who keeps arguing over the usage of "If I were..." and "If I was..." She keeps talking about present progressive tense and whatnot - but the correct grammar has to do with past/present tense indicative versus subjunctive; the way she was BSing makes me think she didn't look it up, even though we're all in the age where looking up the correct answer only takes minutes.

Graduating from Delinquency

In the midst of browsing the great funland that is the Internet I once again came across information regarding Japan's 1970's-era female gangs, called sukeban. They're precisely what one would think they are; but in this informative post it was explained why these delinquents weren't all just caged in some government-run institution: the police were of the opinion that the members of these gangs would just one day grow up and walk away from "the life."

That gave me pause. This attitude is probably from the same mindset that birthed the concept of chuunibyou. Japan isn't the only country with this concept, South Korea knows it too. My country though, doesn't have a term like this.

In the West, there's "It's just a phase." It's an acknowledgement that at some point early in our lives we will do sketchy shit - and as we grow older and more experienced in navigating the world, we choose more and more to forego the sketchiness and tread the straight, narrow and stony. It's an assurance that our past bad decisions won't be held against us, provided those bad decisions weren't egregiously bad.

I think part of what makes a great society is that it is forgiving to the people that make it up. Over here my countrymen always harp on about discipline and stricter punishments and shaming over the smallest infraction. In America things are even more draconian for those who have the misfortune of being caught. 

I'm not trying to say that punishments are unwarranted, far from it. I guess what I'm trying to say is - I hope we all keep in mind what we have had the luxury to forget.

Found a character to like in SFIV

It's Dan Hibiki. I still have yet to play him mind you, but he's definitely caught my interest. I feel like if you win with him it's undoubtedly due to skill and not because of character choice. And he's fun:

The round I liked was at 4:56.

Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson Teaches Humility

Expensive != Quality.

I learned this recently. Price is a signal of how much one party values something. Spending money can be a signal of how committed someone is, a way of showing that he knows he'll make the money back. Or it could be that the cost he's paying right now is peanuts to him. A high cost doesn't automatically mean you're getting what you pay for.

Free personality tests are more reliable and efficient than the paid variety

A “Chef” Fools Diners Into Preferring Inferior Food

DIY at an AWS presentation

Last Saturday I attended an event for Amazon Web Services. It was really informative and interesting, but the one that left a lasting impression was the DIY seismograph one of the presenters debuted. It was a dinky little thing, an accelerometer connected to a toothpick needle and handwritten dial. The whole thing relied on an Arduino to send data into AWS, and can send push notifications to a cellphone or turn on an alarm over the Internet.

The kit for portable seismographs will cost into the thousands of dollars. The DIY device showcased at that talk will cost much less, and can be tuned for different functions and greater/lesser sensitivity. It can be distributed to different areas, and AWS provides the analytics tools. The push notification capability alone exponentially increases the speed of info dissemination. 

This device is revolutionary because it transfers potential into the hands of the regular people. It has the ability to outperform bloated institutions that are more concerned with perpetuating themselves than actually performing the purpose they were created for. Where I am for example the weather services are a joke. But what if instead of a motion sensor we attach to the Arduino thermometers and hygrometers and anemometers and rain gauges and tide gauges? What if we didn't have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for advisories, and we could depend instead on a message on our phones?

IoT is here, and it is amazing.

Dom Giuca: Thief vs. AAA Gaming

There's a lot of keen insights here, some that mirror my own views and also a lot that escaped me the first time I played the old Thief games.

 

Actor-observer bias in the wild

Overheard how one bro lost respect for his brother because the latter pronounced sauce as sows (as in, He sows corn in his field everyday.). This same bro later characterizes someone as "matured," and another as a "dooshbug."

Need to remember this.

Was This Louisiana Cop Accused of Being in the KKK Actually Fired for Objecting to Police Corruption?

It's a pretty cut-and-dried story. Except it turns out the bigot detective was actually an informant for the FBI.

We all lose battles. It's fine if he loses this one - he's already done more than anyone in his lifetime. People are going to live more peaceful lives in Louisiana because of what he did.

Biology

Exciting stuff like this sometimes makes me regret not working harder for my Biology degree.

Humble Plants that Hide Surprising Secrets
How Quantum Biology Might Explain Life's Biggest Questions

A friendly reminder

This made me remember that for all the integrity media trumpets it has, the bottom line is they get paid to have people tune in. Their incentives are not my incentives.

.NET Excel File Download

This was a cool trick I learned from a co-worker, which he in turn found from StackOverflow. I'm putting it here as a reference, because it's so simple and useful. So, let's say you want to have the browser download an Excel file instantly without using plugins or Interop. You put the following lines in your controller method:

Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + [filename]);
Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel";

Then you have the method return a PartialView. The PartialView will have an IEnumerable of your view model:

@model IEnumerable<[view_model_here]>

Then you can just add the markup and styling for the data. When you run the application and use the controller method, it will cause a download attachment to occur.

Like I said, cool.

How to Age Well

Huh.

Puppies and Complexity Theory