Please fill out my polls: LJ Vices Poll, Austin Powers Poll, Beard Poll, Heinlein Poll, San Francisco Poll, Sea Shanty Poll, Tango Excuses Poll.

Women today, cutting throats like men. In my day, women knew their place and kept to girly crimes, like arson.

Local strawberries are in, and have been since Folklife. Word is they'll be in for about another two weeks or so. You can get them at most farmer's markets, and also Larry's Market in Queen Anne.

If there is someone on your friends list who keeps posting memes, quiz results, and other random crap, post this same exact sentence in your journal.

Stinky. I had this cheese out on the cutting board for about half an hour before packing it away in the fridge while I went to a friend's house. I come back more than three hours later, and I can still smell it in my kitchen.

Of the people on LJ who admit an interest in Haskell, meaning the computer language (rather than someone or someplace named Haskell), an unusual proportion of them seem to be Russian. More strangely, of the five who appear to be female, three claim some kind of gender dysphoria or interest in transsexuality:

• 36: declared interests include genderblenders, genderqueer, identityqueer, trannies etc.

• catamorphism: interested in being dynamically gendered. Uninterested in binary gender system.

• soltice: spends a lot of time considering matters of Gender Dysphoric depression. Interested in transgenderism and transsexualism.

(The other two are compilerbitch and flippac.)

Is there anything useful about the class of functors which ∀s can move across? In other words, functors f, for which for any function g there is this isomorphism

f (∀a. g a) ⇔ ∀a. f (g a)

In this Haskell snippet I've called the class Hoistable and the isomorphism is (hoist,unhoist):

newtype All g = MkAll (forall a. g a);

class (Functor f) => Hoistable f where
{
    hoist :: forall g. (f (All g) -> (forall a. f (g a)));
    hoist = fmap (\(MkAll ga) -> ga);

    unhoist :: forall g. ((forall a. f (g a)) -> f (All g));
};

Functors that can be made instances of Hoistable:

data Singleton a = MkSingleton
newtype Identity a = MkIdentity a
(->) p -- forall p.
data Pair a = MkPair a a
data Extra p a = MkExtra p a -- forall p.
data Compose p q a = MkCompose (p (q a)) -- forall p q. (Hoistable p,Hoistable q) =>

On the other hand, Maybe and Either cannot. The key seems to be in only having one "form", i.e. no "|"s in the definition. Does this class actually have a use, or is it merely a curiosity?

So I arrived at Sea-Tac ten years and two days ago. I think I should celebrate somehow...

Pluck your Twanger

For those of you who didn't grow up in Britain in the late 70's, Rainbow was a popular television programme for children of about age five.

Update: better version (6Mb download)

Happy Birthday kyriani!

Visiting Oliver in Salt Lake City, the rental company has given me a white PT Cruiser.

I believe the thing is technically a truck.

Just in case stonemirror hasn't seen this one: Britney Spears gets a Kabbalistic Tattoo. Um.

The English hawthorn tree in Volunteer Park is in bloom, traditionally for England but unusually early for such a tree here. The species is known as the May tree because of this, and perhaps also because the blossom smells like sex: fall asleep under one and you'll be transported to fairyland like Queen Heroudis.

I picked some of its blossom early May morning before going to Gasworks Park to see the morris dancers dance the sun up, as they do every year, and I put some of it in the May crown of the woman who the Mossybacks had chosen for their "Queen" for their signature dance Glorishears. This year the sun rose to a clear sky.

Whatever one may accuse the Mossybacks of, and there are many things one could, poor taste in women is not one of them.

After that, I slept as much as I could.

The rest of the blossom Teresa and I wove into our own May crowns at the afternoon maypole dance in Woodland Park...

"a splendid event, but very silly" — Ian Martindale

Happy May!!!

"The workshop's first achievement was to devise emoticons for the four medieval humours (see Dobson's Leech Mishap, 16th March) as shown here:

"(-/. = melancholic

;&![] = choleric

v|-)( = sanguine

::}%; = phlegmatic

Did you know the English are one of the few people the majority of whom are ignorant of their own national day? Now if that's not something to be proud of, I don't know what is. I'm celebrating by quietly drinking a glass of mead, myself.

I just created okcupid. Tell your friends! Tell your >70% matches!

I have, faithfully I think, placed otherkin at the bottom of my pagan hierarchy. But I am no longer willing to be catty or disparaging about them, unless they attempt to use their otherkin identities to avoid the obligations of human society, or claim to be incapable of some human behaviour.

Nevertheless, consider three beings. Being A looks like a human, and claims to be a dragon. B looks like a human, and claims to be an otter. C looks like an otter, but makes no claim. Nevertheless, many other beings claim that C is an otter. Which of these claims is credible?

Taken April 3rd. Click for larger.

...while walking, or rather running, into work. Doctor gave me an ankle-thingy and told me to use frozen bags of peas to keep it iced. It should be OK after a few days.

And right before Norwescon too (grumble)...

Jew (for stonemirror), failure, miserable failure, french military victories, Buffone, Googlebomb, brightsexy

Daylight Savings Time is basically a kind of lie.

12 noon means the sun is overhead. Now I'm willing to allow for mean time, and even for one-hour graduated time-zones, but offsetting the time-scale to adjust everyone's work hours (or whatever) is nothing more than lying about what time it is.

Happy Equinox!

I don't much like this one and won't be turning it into an icon.

Cupcake?

You know, I probably should actually read the mailing list I moderate. I just noticed it seems to have been down for the past three days.

( So very goff... )

P.S. God hates the scene.

LJ's acting up and my comments are only intermittently showing up.

So apparently I had my fifteen minutes of fame without noticing. Annoying, as I get the RSS feed, but sometimes I miss stuff. But it would explain that flurry of emails I got about a week or so ago. It looks like it "did the Blogs" for a day or two anyway.

I've come to the conclusion that I dream in continuation-passing style.

Rather than being a narrative flow in time, a dream is, timelessly, simply an immediate meaning and a continuation. By applying the continuation to the meaning, the dream happens. I suspect this partly because my dreams violate the Aristotelian Unity of Time as thoroughly as they do those of Place and Action, and partly because sometimes I remember these continuations and follow them again later with different meanings, sometimes even on a different night.

I think this is why self-referential ideas are so difficult to consider in dreams. There simply isn't any fixed-point mechanism with which one can construct them.

OK, I've decided I won't be voting for Kerry in November.

( This is who I'll be writing in... )

So um yeah apparently the Pentagon thinks the world's going to end.

I'm not liking this Kerry chap at all, and I'm not sure I can vote for him in November. What I need from a candidate is

• a clear statement that the decision to invade Iraq was a bad one;

• a clear statement that authority over Iraq should be transferred to the UN until it can be transferred to an Iraqi government;

• unambiguous opposition to the Patriot Act.

I'm just not seeing any of that from John Kerry.

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

I hope you all had a happy Valentine's Day!

This is my personal journal.

It's been two years since my first entry. This is entry #617.

I deleted my Friendster account because FOAF services suck.

IMO, such a thing could work if friending were allowed to be done non-reciprocally, one could browse the network without an arbitrary proximity limit, connections could be made on interests, one could reveal different aspects to different sets of people, and perhaps most importantly, the friends network were not the central focus of the service. Which is pretty much LiveJournal.

The custom of choosing sweethearts on Valentine's Day arose in court circles in France and England during the 14th century, supposedly because birds began mating on this date, write Simpson and Roud in A Dictionary of English Folklore. Valentine's Day is tomorrow, February 14th.

Poll #248192 Valentine's Day Attitudes
Open to: Friends, results viewable to: Friends

Looking over your own personal history, how do you feel about Valentine's Day?

Beautiful day yesterday, beautiful day today. I witness that Spring has arrived, though doubtless there will be wintry days also before Summer.

Back from visiting Oliver. The new camera is working out.

( My Son )

So I set my alarm, but forgot to switch it on...

Dropped off a bunch of stuff at the Stuff Swap, including about 40 pornographic VHS tapes that have been taking up space ever since I discovered the joys of KaZaA LiTe. I then immediately drove off to collect Hazel, and when I got back they were all snarfed. I suspect Lily and/or tonyawinter. I picked up three books, including Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture — quite a find — and I'm very curious to know who left all the amusing and intelligent annotations therein.

I took some pictures, too, but mostly out of focus. Focus is much trickier with a digital camera, you can't really do it manually, and the AF needs a fair amount of light to work properly it seems. Nevertheless I got an in-focus snapshot of ssatva, and to a fuzzier extent of Hazel, valasia and singingnettle posing without her shirt. The other problem (in comparison to my 35mm SLR) is light: the lens only opens up to F/4 F/2.8, and the film speed equivalent is ISO 50 (though you can raise that to 400 if you don't mind image noise). And flash is simply brutal to flesh tones.

Clicky thing arrived yesterday. ( Clicky )

I'm interested in invariants. For instance, what if the Matrix were true? I still perceive. I still have relationships. I still have values. What has actually changed?

So I've decided that the world is best understood as being made out of relationships.

I think it would be nice if it were easier to pass information around. For instance: two agents are interested in sharing information. So one contacts the other, and says, "what's new since we last talked?". The other replies with a list of IDs (MD5 hashes) of new assertions. The first examines the list to see what it hasn't already heard, and then requests the full record for each one (simply asking the other: what are the bytes for this hash?). And then it offers its own list of updates.

So what's an assertion? It's a signed dated statement ID or withdrawal. A withdrawal is of the form "withdrawal of [some statement ID]". A statement is probably an RDF statement, and IDs are again just MD5 hashes.

So I've been thinking about it for awhile, though this is the first time I've written it down. I want this to be capable of synchronising PDA information. I also want to be able to use it to automatically update all my friends' address books when my phone number changes. I also want three-way synchronisation to work without trouble. I want it to be general.

I've never met the woman but I've come to the conclusion that she has a narcissistic personality disorder. Or else she's just plain nuts.

Someone emailed me last Thursday wanting to be my apprentice, in connection with HScheme. I told him I learnt by working on my own ideas and couldn't deal with any other model of learning.

I've fixed my implementation of letrec. It doesn't find lazy fixed-points anymore, I now have a macro called letfix that does that, as well as a function called call-with-result. Actually, it's more complicated than that: I have a pluggable "binder" that deals both with letrec and collections of define bindings at a particular scope. The standard binder behaves according to R5RS, and no more, while the fixed-point binder allows such things as (define xs (cons 'x xs)). The fixed-point binder is more appropriate for the "pure" flavour of Scheme, that doesn't include I/O or set! and friends.

This is just one example of an interesting pattern I was able to abstract over. Ever since I started writing a Scheme interpreter with next to no knowledge of programming language implementation, I've been finding a lot of these.

OK, I have to say I don't really care about Dean's screech, Bush's ribs, Clark's salute, or Bush's "pretty face". These are what is known as "candid moments". None are any more bizarre than any number of moments in the average person's week. None of them have the slightest bearing on suitability to hold public office. If you're going to punish candidates for normal human behaviour, they're only going to act even more "managed" in public. A democracy gets all the politicians it deserves, after all.

Useful thing to do with a toddler. I don't know about yours, but Oliver loves the phone...

...from the French Auvergne mountains. $6.69/lb at Trader Joe's.

Stinkiest. Cheese. Ever. Man, is it ripe...

I'm glad at least someone else thinks there's such a thing as too much explicit communication in a relationship.

"There is a culture in France of the 'non-dit,' the not-spoken. What you don't say in France is as important as what is said. There are boundaries in language that create tensions. Even sexual tensions. The simple act of saying "tu" or "vous" is a boundary that invites intimacy or precludes it. We learn that we have more power when we keep things to ourselves than when we give things away. We learn that the art of seduction is based on innuendo and silences."

Maybe it's a matter of "cultural context": America is said to have a low-context culture compared to that of most European countries. Certainly it makes me very uncomfortable sometimes.