A Little Night Music

Oy ve, I keep thinking I'm not going to do this anymore, but I started The Great Refactoring of '04 on March 12 -- basically converting 1 million lines of code from a 2-tier to a 3-tier architecture. So, proceeded to work, with the exception of a Saturday afternoon when I went back to the old family homestead to divvy up stuff before the house was sold, 24 12-hour days. The code totally took over my mind. I think I was left with about 10% of my brain to run my personality, so I dare say I was even more charming than usual. I was working til 7:30, coming home, having 3-4 beers or glasses of wine to shut myself down enough to sleep, going to sleep at 10 thinking about the code, waking up at 4-6 am thinking about the code. The record was when I got into the office at 5:15am one morning and worked til 7 in the evening. One other developer who's worked with me at two other companies was there 3 straight weekends as well. The last weekend, we drafted 3 other developers and slogged away, without a source libriarian (barbarism!). Anyway, mostly done, all but one program linking, painful but it had to be done. Glad I was there to do it, I do believe I am one of the world's great software rewrite men.

So, I've been attempting to regain my humanity for the last two weeks. Of course, the best way to start is with some good SF. I reread for the 1st time "Distraction" by Bruce Sterling. This is a great book. The ending, where the female protagonist who now has a bicameral mind teaches herself to focus on a different thing with each eye, and her bicameral boyfriend says, "That is so cool -- do it again." -- I don't know, a great moment modern science fiction.

My son and his girlfriend were down from Indianapolis and spend Thursday and Friday night here. Friday night we went out to Tomo's with my youngest daughter and her boyfriend and did some serious damage to mass quantities of sushi. Ran into some old soccer friends there, their youngest's 18th birthday -- unbelievable. My son and his girlfriend hadn't seen "Kill Bill, Vol I", so we borrowed a copy from the boyfriend's roommate and watched it. What an art film! I am not that big a Tarentino fan (he wants to be Elmore Leonard so badly), but this movie definitely has its momemts.

My youngest daughter had initiated a memetic first strike on me earlier in the day when she called me and started whistling "Twisted Nerve" from the movie. Interesting google info, written in 1968 by Bernard Herrmann (1901-1975), known for doing the scores to Hitchcock movies, including Psycho. Damn, what a catchy tune, you can't get it out of your head. My son and I were taking turns inflicting it on each other at 20 minute intervals the next morning. I actually achieved a moment of lucidity Saturday morning and hung out with my son and his charming girlfriend that morning instead of going to work -- and got a free lunch at Gumbo Ya-Ya too! (Cheap, good, fast-food Cajun is back in Lexington!).

In talking to my son's girlfriend, I revisited an old theme: how can music have the impact on our brains it does? It surely doesn't seem evolutionary. I have read a couple of books on it: "Music and the Mind", by Anthony Storr, and "Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy", by Robert Jourdain, and neither of them had anything compelling to say. My current vague working idea is that, we are primarily visual creatures. Vision accounts for 10 of the 11 megabits/second that we take in. Hearing is the only other sense that has any bandwith to speak of (1 megabit/second), and is somewhat orthogonal to vision. Taste, smell and touch are all too analog and too specific (exact receptors for 50,000? different smells) to encode anything. So, that leaves hearing/music as the available channel for information that isn't totally "us" like vision is.

Finally, to music. I have picked up 6 cds lately, all very listenable:

• Norah Jones, "feels like home" -- very easy to listen to, pretty much like her 1st.
• Dido, "life for rent" -- a good bit duller than her 1st, not horrible tho.
• Death Cab for Cutie, "Transatlanticism" -- very nice emo tunes, kind of an Eliot Smith sound.
• John Mayer, "Heavier Things" -- the 1st of his I have tried, very nice.
• Stereolab, "Margerine Eclipse" -- some of their stuff is so upbeat and peppy, it has a kind of infectious happiness about it. Another very good cd, their prior "Sounddust" was also very good.
• Air, "Talkie Walkie" -- their prior cd "10000 hz legend" was bad -- lots of talking in French??? -- I gave it to my oldest daughter to try. This one is much more listenable, more like "Moon Safari".

BTW, I can be reached here.

Insert Snappy Title Here

Had a very nice vacation 2/16-2/23. We were in St. Martin, French West Indies, at the Grand Case Beach Club. Mid 80's, light rain twice for 10 minutes, color and life, surf crashing 15 feet from the door of our room. It was a 10 minute walk to Boulevard de Grand Case, "the Gourmet Capital of the Caribean". Restaurant after restaurant, mostly French, some Italian, Indian, Creole -- no Chinese or Sushi. Every meal we had was excellent, but, man, after the 3rd rich French meal, I had to give it a rest. The Lolo was also fantastic -- sidewalk cafes, half oil drums charcoal grilling ribs, chicken, fish, shrimp, lobster -- sides of red beans and rice, curry rice, cole slaw, potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, johnny cake, fantastic conch chowder -- and $10 for a slab of ribs, 1/4 chicken, and 3 sides, and Carib beer for $1.50. The money was weird, they would take dollars straight up for euros. I couldn't figure out that model.

My wife got to water-ski twice (no-hands, rope between the legs and everything, cheers from the watching boats) so she was happy. We also took a speed boat to the reef north of Anguilla and snorkeled. My 1st time, it was OK but I swallowed about a pint too much seawater, and looking at the pretty fishies got kind of dull after a while. I got to speak some French, I love the way it tickles my brain to get that 2nd language thread running. Had a fun evening our last night there. Had a very nice dinner at Il Neptune (Italian). They had a guy playing guitar and singing. I sang harmony to "Happy Birthday" at the next table (family tradition), so he came over after and I sang harmony with him on "Ai, Yi Yi Yi (I am the frito bandito)" and "Santa Lucia". At the end of both, he held a note a long time and bent it down to the step below. I had a good column of air going so I stayed right with him -- boo-ya! Then we found another place with a singer and we finally got to do some dancing.

So, on the trip I read:

• "Dune: Butlerian Jihad" -- guilty as charged. I read the other three Dune followups, they are competently done. But, I realized that they are lacking the thing I really liked about a lot of Herbert, which was stories that really are about evolution. The followups seem mostly concerned with checking off "that was in Dune, now we've done the secret origin".
• "The Other Wind" and "The Telling" by Ursula K. LeGuin. She still writes very well, simple tales with a lot of heart. But, no surprises, kind of dull.
• "Black Cherry Blues" by James Lee Burke. A David Robichaux Cajun detective novel. I saw a new one of his books and decided I'd try him -- this was the oldest David Robichaux book I could find. I was reading the jacket material and was afraid I'd already read these. But, starting it, I realized that this was the character from the movie "Heaven's Prisoners", with Alec Baldwin and the Teri Hatcher fully-nekkid scene. It was OK, I may try some others.
• "Picoverse", by Robert A. Metzger. Nothing new, creating pocket universes with particle accelerators. like the one by Steven Gould and lots of others.
• "Vectors" by Michael Kube-McDowell. Ugh. I thought I had liked some of his stuff in the past, this was really crap. Scientist takes pictures of brainwaves, unique as fingertips, discovers identical ones from an old man and a kid born after the old man's death. His Wiccan, video game genius new girlfriend is killed by gang-bangers after he has scoffed at her suggestion that this is proof of reincarnation, so he goes on a mission to prove her theory. After a bunch of plot, he kills himself so he can be reincarnated soon after she is, so he can hook up with her again -- good plan.

The "mind is magic" crowd just won't go away. They just don't get it. I go see my dad who now has basically no short-term memory, and it is recognizably my dad, but at about a 60% level. On the snorkeling trip, there was another couple with us. The guy was a 6th grade teacher and I had thought it was odd that he would search for words or form odd malapropisms. Then both he and his wife told us how he had had 5 brain surgeries and gamma-ray treatment for brain tumors, the largest of which was cue ball size. Ahh, now it makes sense. One of the contentions of Descartes, the pappy of Dualism, was that the mind/spirit was indivisible. But, it just ain't. You can lose one or more of thousands of pieces, or just degrade horizontally, vertically, diagonally, or however. But, are you still yourself? What self? There is no self.

Before the trip, I read "The Crystal City", by Orson Scott Card, the 6th Alvin Maker book. Card writes well, but he lost all edge years ago. Still, I empathize with the guy, he has 5 kids to try to feed and raise. His stories are always strong because they are about the moral decisions the characters must make. In this one tho, they build "The Crystal City", actually "The Crystal Building", where you can go and get weird visions and reflect on them -- and the women decide they should call it "the Tabernacle" rather than "the Observatory". Card seems to be downward spiraling into his Mormon roots -- ugh. Well, at least we probably don't have to worry about him getting DOM (Dirty Old Man) syndrome in his declining years.

No links to any of the above books. Not enough edge to really recommend any of them.

Belated or Belittled Insight

I did get some insight from "You Just Don't ..." in the last blog that I didn't mention.

1st, on the contention that men verbally spar to establish a dominance heirarchy, protect their feeling of independence, and thumb their noses at authority, I agree. I have always been a smartass, and it has definitely been about saying "I'm smarter than you, I don't care if you are the boss or whatever". Serious nose-thumbing.

2nd, on the contention that men mostly exchange information in conversation. I have (sadly) always only pursued friendships where I feel that I learn from the other person. My friend David, for example, always has something new on business, technology, wine or food.

This is one reason that I really hope that I can stay close to my children throughout our lives. I have learned great things from all of them.

I remember, about 8 years ago, my oldest daughter had gone to the grocery and had not accomplished the mission exactly as I wanted, so I was giving her shit about it. My son then totally busted my chops for it. He was totally right, I was being my dad, who never missed an opportunity to criticize meaningless "failures". I sure wouldn't have thought I was running my dad's software, but I was, and my son pointedly pointed it out to me. Children that help you grow, how bizarre yet great.

The Book I Read for my Wife

Today I finished reading You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation", by Deborah Tannen, Ph.D. Basic premise, women want love and intimacy, men want respect and authority. Women have "rapport" talk, men have "report" talk. I pretty much agree, I guess. She doesn't go much into any of the evolutionary reasons for this. I think men are always verbally sparring and establishing dominance heirarchies because at heart they are still the race's warriors, and as such are always trying to have a military structure ready to go, just in case. Men are taught to repress emotions because they are seen as luxuries that may get in the way of survival. Particularly as young men develop testosterone-fueled tempers, they must learn to supress and control them. So, you wind up with an overall structure of supressed emotions. And, guess what? You don't care that your emotions are suppressed, because you have been taught that they are not important to survival, and, in general, you don't care about trivialities. So, maybe the follow-up book can be "I Do Understand, but I Really Just Don't Care".

The book also did a lot of quoting from novels, movies, and plays. This somewhat put me off. I find most modern literature unreadable and totally irrelevant -- it's not somewhere I would go to look for insight.

As Hilary Clinton said, "It takes a village to raise a child" -- probably true, but it only takes one man to impregnate all the women of the village. That is why men are the natural warriors, genetically we are expendable. The growth and survival of a population is determined solely by the number of fertile females. I think this is discussed in "The Lucifer Principle", by Howard Bloom.

I had forgotten, I e-mailed Howard Bloom in November of 2002 after reading that book. It's a good read, a lot of good stuff on the instinctive nature of human behavior, particularly pecking order. Here's what I sent:

Having had 4 children go through high school, I didn't need much convincing as to the instinctive nature of much of human behavior, particularly in matters of breeding. If you want to observe heirarchies of pecking order, any high school is the perfect place to start.

Some other thoughts:

1. Columbine as "revenge of the betas". I think that video games, where betas get to be the heroes (alphas) and kill the bad guys, undermine the normal pecking order, which is strongly reinforced by physical interaction. The betas play video games long enough and say "to hell with a bunch of alphas, I'm not taking it anymore".
2. Someone recently told me that they thought that there was a continuum between alphas and betas. Probably somewhat true, but I would bet that there is a statistical survey that could draw a pretty clear line to distinguish alphas: "Have you deflowered more than n virgins?", where n = 0 or 1. "Droit de signeur" was the institutionalized version of this.
3. Another difference: when women say "no" to betas, they mean "no". When women say no to alphas, they mean "yes" and the alphas know it.

I, of course, am a beta all the way. But, geeks rule!

This also reminds me of a zen lesson I gave my middle daughter when she was in high school. She was upset because one of the magnet program girls was dissing Revelers (sorority-girls-in-training high school club that mostly just throws parties). I told her that this was an incredibly boring topic. She was incensed and wanted to why I thought it was boring. I told her, her high school (2000 kids) was too big for pecking order to be established between all the individuals. So, cliques were needed to establish a pecking order heirarchy. The various cliques can have their place in the heirarchy, and then the individuals can establish pecking order within their clique. Everything with a backbone establishes pecking order (per The Lucifer Principle), backbones are 250 million years old. So, if 250 million year old software is not boring, I don't know what is. I don't remember if she bought it or not.

I guess this is something else that didn't ring true to me with "You Just Don't Understand". The claim seems to be that women are less heirarchical than men, that they stress equality rather than superiority. I don't know, the female cliques at Dunbar seemed to be stronger than the male ones. Does the fact that they are about who is liked vs who is respected really make a difference?

Before "You Just ...", I read "Chindi" by Jack McDevitt. He writes great space operas, with lots of astro-archeology. Seems very plausible, particularly if advanced civilizations do have short, 10,000 year life spans, that you're going to find a lot more dead alien civilizations than live ones. A good read, but I think he is getting in a bit of a rut.

Blog jam?

From 5 weeks to 9 weeks -- must have seriously run out of things to say. I guess the common perception of me as an inexhaustible source of bullshit is slightly inaccurate. Anyway ...

Did read Charles Stross's debut hardback novel "Singularity Sky". Somewhat disappointing. The basic plot, of a feudal interplanetary culture meeting a posthuman one, seemed a little bogus. Feudal interplanetary culture??? Whatever.

Had an amazing vacation to Manzanillo Mexico. On the west coast, due west of Mexico City. Two adjoining bays, the southern the largest commercial seaport on Mexico's west coast, the northern, the Bay of Santiago, the tourist one. We were in an open-air, hillside villa on the point (La Punta) between the bays, looking out on Santiago Bay. The place, Casa Suenos was fantastic. Staff of 4, 2 live-in, cooking great fresh food -- Mexican for lunch, fresh caught seafood or other stuff for supper. My friend David of the 4,000 bottle wine collection brought 2 cases. With the magic refridgerator (unending supply of Corona) and Carlos making margueritas, etc, two swimming pools, it was very mellow.

Read most of Neal Stephenson's "Quicksilver" there. 1670 to 1730, the founding of the royal society, Newton, Leibnitz, Hooke, Boyle. Drags occasionally (900+ pages), but when Half-Cocked Jack rescues a harem girl from the Turk attack on Vienna, his smart-ass repartee is as good as ever.

Covering some similar themes (early scientists) but in a world where 90% of Europe died in the 14th century plagues, is Kim Stanley Robinson's "Years of Rice and Salt". An OK read, not fantastic.

Just finished Feb Scientific American. Four cosmology articles. Dark energy is just too weird. Had one thought, re the big bang was decelerating until 5 billion years ago, but is now accelerating. Maybe the expansion has a 1st harmonic vibration, the expansion alternating between accelerating and decelerating. Basically, the echo of the inflationary period. Articles also had a new term, inflatons: the field that caused inflation. Wonder when they're going to directly detect some of those (sarcasm). Interesting concept, tho, that big bang is accelerating because gravity is leaking away to other dimensions or branes. Seems like that would violate conservation of something tho. Also, talking about virtual gravitons -- that seems odd. The metric is space itself, gravitons are ripples in the metric carrying gravity and information, what do you need virtual gravitons for?

Working like a crazy man again -- 137 hrs Jan 2-15. One day off. But, having fun. Had trouble getting to sleep night before last, came up with designs for three new add-on products. Software, the infinitely expandable medium. You gotta love it!

Writer's Blogck?

5 weeks since last post. Guess I really don't have much to say. Another version in the can, defect counts very low, spending a week in Manzillo, Mexico in a couple of weeks -- life is good I guess.

I read the 4th of my boss's books, "Elegant Universe", by Brian Greene. Superstring theory. So, to combine the standard model of elementary particles, quantum, and general relativity, you need 11 dimensions? I guess you can make it work. 4 dimensions for spacetime, 7 for the rest. Plus, your smallest components are strings that can't get smaller than the Planck length. So, not having to deal with anything smaller than the Planck length gets rid of the infinities you normally get in renormalizing the quantum wave functions -- duh. Seems like you should be able to get the very hairy math to work, but, is that really how it works? I guess if you are a positivist like Hawking, you don't care -- if the math works, use it. But, maybe the three strong forces (em, strong nuclear, weak) are fundamentally different from gravity -- they weren't meant to be unified.

Read some sci-fi from the library -- standard escapist fare: "Crescent City Rhapsody", by Kathleen Ann Goonan, "Crossfire" by Nancy Kress. Both OK, the Kress a little disappointing, she's normally better than that. My to-read sci-fi stack is great right now: short story collections by Simmons and Jablokov, a Kim Stanley Robinson, Charles Stross's debut hardback novel "Singularity Sky" (I have really been looking forward to that, his short stories in Year's Best have been fantastic), a new John Barnes, and "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson. Life is good.

I would suspect part of the reason I have been blogging less is that I have been drinking a lot more. I seem to have gone from weekend drinking to 5 days a week drinking. With an alcoholic father and brother, that's not good. The death of my wife's brother (51 yrs old, motorcycle accident, no helmet, what an incredibly stupid fucking waste) did not help. I'm not really that worried. I'll try to have two good sober weeks before Mexico.

Finally, Some Non-Fiction

Well, my boss lent me 4 non-fiction books after I lent him the Wolfram, and I've felt compelled to read them so I can get them back into his book collection.

The 1st was a pretty astonomy picture book -- but no pictures I hadn't seen already.

I read the 2nd, "The Universe in a Nutshell", by Stephen Hawking in a couple of hours. Pretty pictures, more stuff on brane cosmological theories. The Theory of Everything (TOE) will have to involve multiple universes cause ours just doesn't balance by itself. Two interesting non-physics ideas:

1. People like Star Trek because the people are so much like us -- not very likely for 400 years in the future.
2. When we can grow infinks in artifical wombs, we can give them great big heads with great big brains. All the sci-fi I have read, I don't remember this one. I guess Hawking definitely values mind over body more than most, who I think would find this somewhat gross.

3nd book I really enjoyed: "Genome" by Matt Ridley, 1999. The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters (one per chromosome). He picks a gene or two off of each chromosome and uses it to explore many aspects of current genetic and evolutionary theory. Dozens of FFTKAT. Examples:

• Continous evolutionary war in the genome itself. Junk DNA full of deprecated sequences, sequences inserted by viruses, sequences designed to fight specific diseases.
• Only a few percent of the genome actually codes proteins. Large percent of junk DNA.
• Warfare between X and Y chromosome. 3 times as many X's as Y's, they're winning: Y chromosome has only 1 gene.
• Genome can change rapidly. All infinks loose their ability to digest lactose when weaned, i.e., lactose intolerance is the default condition in adults. Herding milk-producing domestic animals in the last 10,000 years has provided 70% of some human populations with the ability to digest lactose as adults.
• Nature vs nurture: heredity is 50%, peer groups 50%, parents 0% ?!?!?
• AB blood type provides immunity against cholera.
• Imprinted genes in which the mother or father dominates: maternal genes grow the cortex, paternal genes grow the limbic region. The placenta comes mostly from paternal genes -- it helps the baby successfully invade the mother's body, suppresses her immune system, moderates her hormone levels.
• Prions seem to be non-digital -- basically different from the rest of life.

and many, may others. I was only sorry when I read this that it is 4 years old. A 2e published more recently would probably have lots of things corrected and lots of new things right. My wife the pharmacist was actively disagreeing with lots of these, she's supposed to read and give me the overall FOS (full of shit) rating. Still, a really fun book to read.

Also read the 2nd Dan Simmons hard-boiled detective novel "Hard Freeze". I liked it a lot better than the 1st ("Hardcase"). The 1st had this annoying return to a minor subplot after the main plot had concluded -- kind of like the trite "no the monster isn't dead" at the end of a scary movie.

Book Reviews

I was excited to hear that Dan Simmons had written a new sci-fi -- except for short stories, his 1st since the 4 Hyperion books. Simmons writes really well. After winning all the SF prizes for Hyperion, he moved on to write horror, mystery, hard-boiled detective, spy stories, and straight fiction. My favorite book of his after Hyperion is probably Phases of Gravity, about a former astronaut who walked on the moon trying to cope with the fact that nothing in his existence would ever measure up to moonwalking. Gravity is used throughout as a metaphor for existential angst, it worked for me.

So, I read Ilium weekend before last. A great read, but a little disappointing. It looks like it is going to be "our literary and mythical figures really exist in alternative universes" -- which has been done before and doesn't do much for me. Still, hard to not enjoy Odysseus in the 24th century. You can't go wrong with Ulysses, the 1st great humanist, who trusted his wits and defied the gods.

It seems to me that reusing literary figures is a kind of a cheap ploy, and I usually interpret it as a lack of imagination. I read lots of Heinlein in my teen years, then gave up on him as he descended into DOM (dirty old man) syndrome. After the one with the old guy coinhabiting the body of a young woman, I said enough. Then his "The Number of the Beast" made the best-seller list and I thought, I should give it a try. Ach, it was painful -- and it did the "let's borrow other fictional characters" thing.

Herbert also seemed headed into DOMdom -- like the last two Dune novels with the tantric Bene Geserit. Seems like, some of these authors hit 60, maybe sexual powers fading, they start obsessing on sex -- and you can almost see the lears.

Last weekend I read Greg Bear's new one Darwin's Children, sequel to Darwin's Radio. Ten years ago, Bear really had edge -- good physics and good mind science. Forge of God and Anvil of Stars were great, as were Eon and Eternity, and the overall idea of City of Angels, that we figure out how minds work and fix them when there are problems, really appealled to me. Lately, tho, I think Bear has lost the edge -- I think Greg Egan may have stole it from him. For the amount of research Bear seems to have done into evolution, genetics and virology, the end result -- that entirely new and completely different features develop in homo sapiens novus -- seems highly unlikely and non-Darwinian to me. If he wasn't working so hard at the science, it might be easier to take. I have enjoyed many tales of mutated, more advanced humans (X-man, Slan by A.E. Van Vogt) -- that just kind of said, it happened.

Another really weird thing in the novel is that Bear has one of the main characters get a mental visit from God -- according to his afterword, based on many descriptions by people to whom this has happened?!?!? His father-in-law, Poul Anderson, died last year, maybe he found religion then? Anderson was one of my favorite SF authors throughout his career. Always a good read, hard SF and norse mythology based stuff, no DOM syndrome in his declining years. I periodically go though my SF and "evolve" it -- remove stuff that hasn't aged well and take it to the used book store. I could never bring myself to remove any Anderson. Anyway, I don't know, when my mother died, if anything it made me even more hostile to religion. The priest is up there selling his snake oil, "your mother's not dead" -- bullshit, she was dead, we all had to deal with it, and here the asshole is, pushing his product, eternal life.

I also recently reread "Vacuum Flowers", blogged earlier, Michael Swanwich, 1987. One thing I noticed that I had forgotten about, when the commando team is going down to earth, they have a librarian who can load them up with any specialty skills they need. Shades of "The Matrix", but 15 years earlier.

Lean and Mean

Modern business runs totally on the "lean and mean" model, JIT manufacturing as an example. This reduces inventories and maximizes profits -- a good thing. But, when it comes to infrastructrure, it may not be the right thing to do. The power outage in the north-east is a good example. The system is running right at capacity, no redundancy, a couple of stations go down and the whole thing dominoes. Following which, gas prices go up 20%, because a half dozen refineries in the blacked-out areas missed a day of production. The wild fluctuation we see in gas prices says the same thing to me, too lean and mean -- no resiliency against minor perturbations.

Vernor Vinge wrote two great sci-fi novels recently, "A Fire on the Deep" and "A Deepness in the Sky". I preferred the second one. One compelling idea he presented was that advanced planetary civilizations never make it more than around 10,000 years. They reach a point of precarious complexity such that a single event causes all the systems to come crashing down, with an ensuing mass die-off. When you see the brittleness of the majority of the computing systems that increasingly run our world, it definitely makes you think.

So, what to do? Certainly government regulation of infrastructure systems is one way to go, but government systems are surely about as far opposite of "lean and mean" as you can go. ("Fat and dumb" maybe?). Maybe a more Darwinian approach would be to slap massive fines (prefiled class action suits) on infrastructure companies in the event of outages or major or persistent SLA violations.

More Random Foo

Interesting article in this months Scientific American on the cerebellum. Its surface area is just over that of one of the cerebral hemispheres. The cerebrum has 10^11 neurons (interesting large number coincidence, also the number of stars in a large spiral galaxy like ours and the number of galaxies in the universe), each with an average of 10,000 (10^4) connections to axions. So, that makes 10^15 total synapses in the brain. Say you can model synapse state in 10 bytes, that gives 10^16 bytes for the neural state of the brain at any instant. That is, what, 10,000 terabytes? Pretty serious storage for a snapshot.

Anyway, returning to the cerebellum, the main point was that it seems to play a role in integrating sensory input as well as in balance and motor skills ("riding a bike"). What I thought was interesting, a lot of the cells in the cerebellum (they had a name) have 100,000 or more axion connections. So, a basically different wiring model. Made me think, this was "brain v1.0", and the cerebrum is "brain v2.0". Also interesting, you can lose your cerebellum and still mostly function, except for balance problems. Seems like that would have been a way to switch models, to have two brains and gradually switch from the older to the newer. Then, find something minor to do with the old model -- like when you take your former main server and make at Linux based DNS server or some such thing.

Returning to wailing on indigenous peoples (prior post), it's like, yes, let's preserve this stuff, but don't make people live by it. We don't need "museum Fremen". We don't need "4:00, must be time for the rain dance." Dancing is always good for the "soul", but as technology, it doesn't work.

So, I'm like 75% German (the largest U.S. ethnic group). So, should I go out in the back yard and do a blood sacrifice to Odin? I loved Norse mythology as a kid, but I also loved Greek, Welsh, and pretty much every other mythology I have ever read. Great stories, but don't ascribe any more meaning to them than that.

Random Reviews

Three CDs I have gotten recently, based on recommendations from my 18 yr old nephew in Maine: The Coral, The Libertines, and Interpol. Took a few listens, but I like them all. The Coral the most, I think -- kind of Zappa-esque in places. All three have a retro, 80's punk feel.

I also got the new Audioslave CD. I broke the rules and only listened to 4 tracks or so before I gave up. Not much new there at all, way to much fuzz. I sold it to one of my youngest daughter's male friends for $1.

At the library a couple of weeks ago, I picked up two recent Multiverse/Elric based novels by Michael Moorcock, "The Dreamthief's Daughter" and "The Skrayling Tree". We really liked the Elric/Corum/Multiverse stuff in college. Moorcock's writing then was very much at a comic book level, pretty sketchy. Lately, I have seen reviews of him as getting general literary notice. I guess his writing is better, but these novels throw so much stuff together, it's hard to get much out of them. When pretty much anything goes, I don't know, it's just kind of hard to respect or see any principles.

I dutifully (since in college I had ~1000 Marvel comics) saw the latest Marvel comic movie, "Daredevil". I guess it was pretty well done, but it never quite sucked you in. I thought the two X-Men movies were very good, and Spiderman was also good. Still have to see "The Hulk".

Went to the Kentucky with meine frau last night and saw "The Whale Rider". Nice story, well done, and I love Maori tattoos. The indigenous people thing is a hard one for me tho. I mean, the point of this was that they had to break their sacred traditions to let a girl become a chief -- #1 strike against indigenous cultures, their women's rights views pretty much universally suck. OK, you get past that, they are practicing stick fighting, tongue-sticking-out to frighten your enemies, and the other warrior stuff. So, what next, get in the canoes and raid Australia? I read something recently (Sci Am?) where pretty much every study they do shows that the "noble savage" stuff if a total myth. In most of these cultures, tribal warfare is a major cultural activity, with murder rates rivaling Detroit or DC. On the "living in harmony with nature" thing, it's only because they don't have the tech to dominate. I think it's generally recognized that the big mammals of North America were hunted into extinction when the 1st humans came here. I guess that these cultures have beauty that needs to be preserved, but their primitive world views are just that, primitive. Maybe they, like a lot of modern people seem to want to be, are more satisfied and happy being ignorant of 99.9% of current human knowledge. But, who has the right to sentence them to this ignorance, and the 40 year life spans that go with it? In the name of what?

I should have had my bumper stickers printed up: "Embrace Complexity".

The Universe is Information

Read an interesting article in the latest Scientific American last night, on the universe as a hologram. Main theme, it's all about information. (Correction to an earlier blog: the Planck length is 10^-33 cm). I read Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" a few weeks after it came out, pretty much the same thing. The base substance of universe is information, and all physical processes are computations. The universe is a Turing machine running itself -- and for lots of things, all you can do is wait and see how it comes out.

It seems odd, I started out as a physicist, then became a Servant of the Great Machines, and now they seem to be coming together. One gut-level feel I have from working in software: there is no limit to the amount of software that can be written. It's like derivative investments, but much worse. I think Bruce Sterling said, one particularly dysfunctional future we may have to look forward to is one where we all work at help desks trying to help each other figure out how to use everyone's buggy software packages.

On vacation a few weeks ago, we were watching glass blowing at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning NY. I'm watching them make a glass bowl with one furnace running at 2300 degrees, one at 2100, and an annealling furnace at 1200, and I'm basically stuck thinking, "Damn, that's sure a lot of energy for not a lot of information".

A comment on the last blog re AE and using the model of "The Cognitive Structure of Emotion". It doesn't seem to address basic "drives". Most of these are tied to the four F's (fight, flight, feed, procreate). What do you replace these with in AE?

More AI Foo

One of the best new science fiction authors is Greg Egan. His physics and computer science are both great, and his website is way cool. I'm definitely jealous. My favorite is "Diaspora". It opens with a very believable account of the birth and development of a new artificial intelligence in a civilization of artificial intelligences.

Another brand new author who really "gets it" with directions on computing and AI is Charles Stross. His stories have been by far the best in the last three Dozois "Year's Best Science Fiction" -- the best place I have found to keep an eye out for new sf talent. Stross's 1st paper novel is due out soon.

One theme that seems to be taking firm hold in AI and cognitive science is that AI will have to be built on AE -- Artificial Emotion. I think that a lot of geeks have Star Trek's Mr. Spock as a role model. But, in Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat", which is a great look into a number of the subagents and routines that compose the mind, there is one patient whose damage caused him to lose his emotions -- i.e., he became Mr. Spock. Problem was, he couldn't make any decisions. He could debate himself for hours on what to have for breakfast. The emotions are the raw drive that puts the mind in motion.

Another book I have read recently on this is "The Private Life of the Brain" by Susan Greenfield. Don't remember too many fun facts from this one, except the contention that mind is built on top of emotion.

I think anyone wanting to start coding in the area will want to use the model defined in "The Cognitive Structure of Emotion" by Ortony, Clore and Collins. Their model seems very workable. Some aspects are surprising -- for example, they define all emotions as polar -- if it can't have an opposite (love/hate), it ain't an emotion. So "surprise" isn't an emotion. What they have tho seems very workable. I have seen only one other model of emotions, by some Australian company, and it seemed a lot more arbitrary.

Hard AI

Hard AI (Artificial Intelligence) posits that mind can be instantiated in hardware other than the human brain. If you can do hard AI, then presumably truly intelligent machines can be created or evolved.

The other side of the Cybernetic Singularity is humans being able to migrate their intelligence to silicon -- kind of like "The Matrix", but then throw the body away. In some science fiction, the supposition had been that you have to do a deep, destructive scan of the brain to make such a transfer -- which may not be too far off of the mark. To a computer geek like myself, the hardware/software <=> brain/mind analogy has been intuitively compelling for many years, but as I have studied brain and mind science more, the implementation of the human mind, particularly memory, is seriously intertwined with the neurological hardware -- not the nice layers that we like to do in software.

One of the 1st sci fi novels that was way ahead of the curve on this stuff was "Vacuum Flowers" by Michael Swanwick (1987, now out of print). About when this came out, some of my colleagues and I were talking about the analogies between computer and human design and maintenance:

• Hardware maintenance engineer <=> doctor
• Hardware designer <=> genetic engineer (future)
• Software maintainer <=> psychiatrist
• Software developer <=> prophet??? self-help guru???

As part of the discussion, we wanted a term for programs that humans could load into their brains and run and couldn't come up with a word we liked -- then out comes "Vacuum Flowers" with "wetware", which is perfect. Other good concepts in the book:

• Loadable personalities, available at your local book/music/video store. No doubt in my mind, if the average teen could "be" Brittany or whoever the latest is instead of just dressing like them and idolizing them, they would.
• Designed personalities. One of the main characters has a personality built from four archetypes: trickster, warrior, leader, fool (I think).
• The earth is a hive mind. The rest of the solar system is very careful to avoid "being assimilated".

All in all, a fantastic read for 1987. I am going to do a reread soon. Swanwick has been very prolific since then, but nothing else quite in this memespace. Some of his stuff tho has a misogynistic streak I've never understood.

Back to hard AI, I think that the machines will far be able to far surpass humans. Human/machine interfaces or outboard processors for minds will probably be de rigeur for competitive survival. There was an interesting rebuttal of the Cybernetic Singularity last year by Jaron Lanier, I think at The Edge. His point was, he wasn't too worried about it as current software was way too buggy to ever get as sophisticated as the mind. Two points against that argument:

1. The human mind is buggy. If it weren't, we wouldn't need mental hospitals. And even sane minds are subject to many cognitive illusions (see "Inevitable Illusions", Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, 1994). You can also find many references to how overrated human intuition is. Physicians who don't follow strict protocols but rather trust their instincts and intuitions are wrong more often than they are right.
2. Software is still very young. For instance, basic protocols for component communication have never been stable long enough for any kind of organic growth. The DCOM-CORBA rivaly is now Web Services; early ontology exchange models are now being replaced by DAML-OIL. Interestingly, Lanier has recently invented "Phenotropic Computing" -- current hard defined interfaces are replaced by fuzzy pattern recognition between software components. Very interesting, much more brain-like, much less brittle and thus with much more potential to evolve.

Enough for now. Next up, Greg Egan, AE (Artificial Emotion).

Where was I?

Well, June wasn't quite as bad as May. Only 240 hours of work as opposed to 270. I pretty much worked all last weekend. We had 8 people in at 1am Sunday morning. I left at 2:15, a couple worked until 6 am. Still, had our 1st install of our new product, of which I was one of the principal designers, on Monday, at an 800 pound gorilla financial services corp, and it seems to be going OK. I have worked a full day Saturday 90% of the weekends for the last two years -- I'm trying to quit that. I hate working Sunday too. When you don't take at least one day off on the weekend, you spend the next week with no sense of what day it is. They all kind of seem like Friday. Luckily, things look good enough that everyone can enjoy this 3 day weekend.

I got the new Radiohead CD, "Hail to the Thief". They continue their journey from being a standard grunge band to painting on a blank canvas and doing whatever they feel like. "OK Computer" is still my favorite (duh). Driving to New York, we listened to "Pablo Honey" and "The Bends", their 1st two. The jump from there to "OK Computer" is unbelievable.

Other CDs I got for my birthday from my oldest daughter:

• Day One, "Ordinary Man". I think I like this one the best. Tasty urban lyrics, popish background.
• The Incredible Doctor Cyclops, "Invasion". Tres bizarre. Speed ska spy movie themes? Totally campy lead singer? Erica's friend Kelly, who graduated from Dunbar the year before her, is the trumpet player.
• Chemical Brothers, "Surrender". The 1st Chemical Brothers CD I have, very tasty, great aural textures.
• Rjd2, "Deadringer". This one isn't clicking much, I need to listen to it a few more times.

My youngest daughter gave me a copy of Outloud Dreamer, "Drink the Sky". Nice tunes, good chick lead singer.

I finished the 3rd George R. R. Martin, "A Storm of Swords" and passed on to my son. I was wondering when he would find time to read it and then I remembered: he reads 300-400 pages an hour, with good retention. So, he can consume this 1100 page time in 4 hours or so. These books are definitely well done -- you can never guess who he's going to kill off next.

A Trip to the Met

I drove my oldest daughter back to New York City last Saturday. She has moved from Williamsburg, Brooklyn to the East Village in Manhattan and has more room than before and wanted to take some stuff back. We had a high-speed blowout just west of Allentown, PA, with her driving. She did great, got us off the road, then I got to change the tire with semis whizzing by 10 inches away.

Sunday, we had a nice outdoor brunch and then went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had not been there (nor ridden the NYC subways) for 30 years. I had forgotten what a fantastic museum that is.

It is really great going to museums with Erica, who is an artist. She had wanted to see an exhibit of photography by Charles Sheeler. Lots of urban and industrial shots, but focusing on small parts rather than the whole. I learned from this, that doing that, focusing on a small part rather than what we would normally perceive as the whole image, is a flavor of found art. There was also a series of nudes of his 50ish, somewhat overweight wife -- but 6" by 10" sections or very odd angles. Some of them looked like dunes on Mars -- they could have been anything.

We next looked at the statuary court, with the Rodin Burghers bronze. Unbelievable, bronze with eyes that seem to be looking back at you.

Next stop, Oceania and Asmat (New Guinea) ancestor poles. These things were really scary. They are beautifully complex, with human figures one atop the other. From the top person, this thing projects -- the soul, phallus, you couldn't tell what -- a web with a person at the apex. The cards said, the Asmat did not believe in natural death, except in the very young or old. All other death was caused by rival tribes headhunting or sorcerers. When you got down a few tribe members, you would have a big ceremony and carve one of these. If you were down three tribe members, then you left three alcoves or spaces in the carving for the shrunken heads of the enemy tribes you would take to even the score. These things really were haunting -- these people were not running the same software that I am.

We then hit the Impressionists -- unbelievable, a room of Cezanne's, 2 rooms of Renoirs, etc. Then we headed for the modern section. We weren't there long before I knew it was time to go. My brain was starting to hurt. Two hours is about all I can do -- good art really is capable of delivering a psychic shock.

I was somewhat relieved that the next day my mind seemed to be working fine. When I first saw the movie "Brazil", my mind didn't work right for the next couple of days. After I got back from 5 days in France in late March, the French language thread I was running also made my mind feel distinctly different. It really seems like there should be techniques to tweak our software, far more effectively than drugs, meditation, or the other techniques we have. What would those be?

Matrix Reloaded

Saw "Matrix Reloaded" yesterday on my birthday. I had heard some bad reviews from my kids, I was pleasantly suprised. Some of the scenes seem to drag out, but I really enjoyed the software land aspects of it -- that's where I live a lot of the time. So, the Matrix is on version 6.n, and it is time for v7.0, and they have to do a fairly complete reboot for each version. I liked the software only entities -- the Oracle, the Merovingian and his pals -- self-modifying or code-creating utilities from v2 or 3 of the matrix who had escaped deletion.

I believe in strong AI, which posits that mind can be instantiated in hardware other than the human brain (More on this in the future.) Matrix Reloaded takes that for granted, and is a major step past Matrix 1, which was more that humans could plug into VR (Virtual Reality).

I had intended to have more reviews of AI and cognitive science books here as I read them -- but -- haven't read that many lately. Overwork is the main factor, plus my son got me reading the George R.R. Martin "A Game of Thrones" and "A Clash of Kings". I don't read much fantasy anymore, but these are good escapist fare, and are written for adults. But -- 9 narrative threads, 1800 pages, no way he can wrap this in a third (fourth? fifth? ...) book.

Rule of thumb for the standard modern novel: minimum 100 pages per narrative thread. A couple of William Gibson's mid-career books violate this (too short by 100 pages are so) -- I formulated this when I noticed that the novels seemed "sketchy".

My Three Best Blasphemies

Whew, code is frozen or at least slushy. I worked 270 hours in May. I'm getting too old for this shit. Still, lots of good code in the can is always satifying.

I feel like I've lost my "train of blog", so, now for something completely different.

I was raised religious (Catholic altar boy, but no molestations that I remember) and was really into it. At about 14, I decided it didn't work and quit going to church, etc. In my college years, I read up a lot on other religions, mysticism, etc. I'm now a militant atheist. I didn't used to be so militant, but it seems like the christians are trying so hard to ram their crap down everyone else's throat that we've got to fight back. "Creation Science" (an oxymoron) in the schools, legislated morality, annoying blue laws (no buying beer on Sunday) here in Lexington. You're not supposed to discuss religion and politics, screw it. The only thing bad about arguing with christians is that they don't have any good arguments.

My kids are all (but one) pretty much atheist. They have remarked about how in discussions with theistic friends, how sad it is when that person's religious beliefs kick in and part of their minds shut down. My youngest told me a couple of months ago, trying to believe in god for her would be like trying to believe in Santa Claus -- very silly.

Anyway, on to my three best blasphemies. The first two are from around 10 years ago, the latest just a couple of months ago.

1. Around Easter, someone in the office was espousing the power of prayer, miracles happen, blah, blah, blah. My response was "Well, I have been fairly lucky, no major tragedies, maybe if something serious were to happen to one of my kids, I'd be down on my knees trying to suck god's dick like you are." Hopefully at this point, I don't think I would be.
2. A few weeks after that, someone else was talking about the power of god, jehovah in particular. I told him "I have it on reliable authority that jehovah is being butt-fucked by the easter bunny anytime the bunny feels like it." There was some serious scattering for cover to avoid the lightning after that one.
3. This past Easter (seems like a good time for blasphemy ;->) I don't remember what triggered it or who I delivered this to, but I came up with: "They discovered the Lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene. It's a tell-all, and one of the things she reveals is that Jesus only had a 4 inch dick."

I knock on wood against the jinx, I loved the Greek tragedies where one of the major character flaws was hubris before the gods, but give me Ulysses every time. Ten years of sailing is worth telling the gods off.

I wonder about the future of religion. Will the race outgrow the need? In the US, the megachurches are more like country or social clubs than religions. Religion as a behavior control mechanism is pretty dead in the US (but thriving in Islamic countries!). Yah, it's harder to live without someone telling you there are easy answers and that you don't have to die. But, to use religion as an opiate for the masses goes way beyond my level of cynicism. Engineering religions like the Bene Gesserit in Dune seems evil. The right thing to do is, make everyone smarter and fix the bad stuff in their heads.

Two More Interesting Books on Consciousness

I mentioned these last time.

"The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size" by Tor Norretranders, who's a Danish science writer. Lots of good stuff in this. He talks about the conscious mind ("I") vs the unconscious mind ("me"). One great figure: what is the baud rate of the human consciousness? The human sensorium takes in 11 megabits a second: 10 Mb visual, .5Mb audio, the rest taste, smell, touch and proprioception. So what is the baud rate of human consciousness? 20 baud per second! It's why movies work at 24 frames a second. The mind cannot discern any time intervals less than 50 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). It pissed me off, the last world cup they would show slo-mo of offsides calls missed by linesmen by 2-3 inches. In 50 milliseconds, a fast human running at full speed can go about 18 inches. So, anything better than that is just luck. Humans don't have slo-mo eyes or consciousness.

I read this a few years ago, I was going to refer to it for some more FFTKAT (fun facts to know and tell), but it seems to not be on my bookshelves. Another meme that wanted to be spread, I guess.

"The Meme Machine" by Susan Blackmore. I read a couple of years ago. It is a fairly good books on memetics. She had a summary article on it in Scientific American shortly after that. They had some critical responses. One of her contentions is that humans are the only species to practice imitation, which lead to memetics and the runaway evolution of our big brains. Other biologists questioned that, pointing out other species that practice imitation, including some birds, I think.

Blackmore talks about memeplexes -- groups of memes that come as a package. For example, when you're infected with a religious meme, you get belief in a god, belief in life after death, belief in the power of prayer, etc. One of the strongest memeplexes is the selfplex. It is the "take credit for it all" conscious part of our mind that really doesn't do that much, but is constantly reinforcing its own importance.

Blackmore at the end advocates learning to ignore the incessant demands of the selfplex. Kind of a Buddhist attitude.

I really, really don't believe that everything is an illusion. I have been observing reality closely for many, many years, and it never once has slipped. (No deja vu cats like in The Matrix). So, I think Buddhism/Hinduism is wrong, everything is not illusion -- but I think I do buy into the idea that the self is.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

I mentioned Julian Jaynes last post. He was a Yale psychology professor who published "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" in 1986. I bought a copy 8-9 years ago, got around to reading it 3-4 years ago. It is an incredibly fun book.

The basic premise is that, prior to around 1300 BC, the human mind worked radically differently than what it does now. The mind was bicameral (we had two minds). The left brain could execute simple programs (plant the crops, harvest, etc), reinforced by a view of a central tower or pyramid. When the left brain stressed out, the right brain woke up and chanted instructions in the Voice of God. The god-priest-king who spoke from central tower helped set the directions with his right brain pronunciations. So, god actually did talk to people, from their right hemispheres. But, as cities got larger (you couldn't see the central tower) and society got more complex, this model broke down, and consciousness as we know it evolved to take its place.

From references to this in Dennett and other cognitive scientists, I think that pretty much nobody working in the field buys into this. But, everyone seems a bit awed by the concept, and I think that psychoarcheology is recognized as a legitimate endeavor, largely invented by Jaynes. It is highly doubtful that our consciousness as is sprang into being all at once. There are clearly levels of intelligence. We have a dog. I am not a dog person, but our dog has really impressed me with the level of intelligence of dogs. He clearly forms and executes plans, i.e., displays intentional behavior. He knows when he has been bad, exhibits remorse, lots of other things. I am sure I am preaching to the choir of dog-lovers.

A more detailed review of TOOCITBOTBM. I would refer to the book, but I am currently without a copy. I believe I have bought three. This is clearly a meme that I have been compelled to spread.

The book starts with asking what consciousness is. First, lots of things it is not: problem-solving and many other activities considered "conscious" are examined and found to actually be mostly unconscious. One of the main things the conscious mind is good at is taking credit for things it does not do, reinforcing its importance (to be examined in more detail in a later post on "The User Illusion" and "The Meme Machine"). Jaynes says consiousness has two main components: short term memory (the focus of attention), and the narrative I (each of us is constantly telling ourself "the story of me").

He then has a fairly incomprehensible chapter on metaphrors and metaphrands (don't worry, skim or skip it), followed by an in depth examination of the concept of self in "The Iliad", down to the Greek nouns used. His contention is that no one in The Iliad ever really has an idea. Zeus says do it, they do it. Aphrodite says do it, they do it. I reread about 1/3 of The Iliad looking for this (the Lattimore translation, I still read a bit occasionally) and didn't feel like I particularly saw it -- except for one scene where Paris is getting his butt kicked by Meneleaus and is suddenly transported to his chambers inside the city by Aphrodite (i.e., his right brain woke up and, in the voice of Aphrodite, told him to run like hell.)

He then recounts how, when the bicameral mind started to breakdown, there were many religous writings asking "Why won't god talk to us anymore?" As they tried to find replacements for the voice of god, they tried lots of odd stuff. He talks about a Sumerian? book of omens, with 20,000 rules of behavior ("if a scorpion comes out from under your house, your mother-in-law will die.") -- pretty cool, they were trying to use rule-based expert systems (a brittle AI tool popular in the mid-80s).

The archtypal example of the new, conscious human mind is the hero of "The Odyssey", Odysseus or Ulysses, who has always been a favorite of mine. He is an archytypal trickster -- he is wonderful at deception and lying. And, as one of the features of the bicameral mind was YOU COULD NOT LIE, he was at a huge advantage.

Once the theory is presented, Jaynes then has a great time reinterpreting all of human history in its light. This is really great fun. Among the high points:

• A history of oracularism (e.g., the Delphic Oracle). The oracles were normally recruited from shepherds or other isolated people, where you could occasionally find someone still running the old software. Originally, they spoke in the voice of god, then they required interpretation by priests, finally, around the 4th century AD, they quit working altogether.
  
• A discussion of the casting of lots (rolling dice). There was no probability theory until the 17th century -- people thought god determined the outcome of dice throws.
  
• A history of hypnotism. Invented by Mesmer in 1870(?), it is a totally plastic phenomenom. Originally you rolled around on the floor and twitched when hypnotized. That being too undignified, it was dropped after around 30 years. The deal with not being able to remember what happens while you are in a trance was only added 30 or so years ago. And, the more religious you are, the more easily you are hypnotized. Jaynes says that is well known that the best subjects for studies on hypnotism come from seminaries.
  
• How did 100 Spaniards conquer the millions of Incas and Aztecs? Jayne posits that the Incas and Aztecs were still running the old software, so, when they asked the Spaniards if they were gods and the Spaniards said yes, they believed them.

So, I thought of this after my "almost religious" experience because, when 'Something Is" started rolling around in my head, it was clearly dominantly in the left internal aural field -- i.e., being generated by my right brain. Oops, Jaynes says the only time you run into the old software currently is in schizophrenics. Well, at least I'm sane (or as sane as the next guy) most of the time ;->