Metablog

I got a message from an OKCupid user today, one I hadn’t contacted. It’s nice to get something out of the blue like this:

Hello dear, how are you doing today, hope great, let me introduce myself, my name is merry william , 29 years female from chicago. I searched your profile, read it and I was amazed with the content of your words…

Doesn’t she sound intelligent?

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It’s been two months since my last post. The post before that was a few days earlier, and the post before that two months earlier. I kept a diary for maybe three or four years before I switched to this blog, and I noticed that I tended to have four or so months of pretty consistent posting followed by a few months with almost nothing. Cyclical. Well, I guess we’ll see if the cycle has reached its bloggy springtime again, or if I won’t feel up to posting for another long time.

Here’s what I’ve been up to: Continue reading »

For a long time, I’ve thought that there’s been a hole in the computer chess world—there are no chess engines that play weak games with human-like mistakes (that I’m aware of). It’s easy to make a chess engine that plays a 2000+ strength game, but weakening these engines by limiting their search depth or time always seems to produce games with many strong moves and a few blunders. I can’t be completely sure—it could just be paranoia—but it seems like real weak players (i.e. most casual players) make mistakes that are quite different, and more fun to compete against. Are there any engines that play good weak chess, that accurately mimic the style of a human weak player? Am I crazy for thinking that existing engines don’t?

Wow, I’ve been blogging a lot today. It’s the second day since I started my free-ranging sleep schedule, and I feel so much better. It would be amazing if my ADHD was actually just symptoms of sleep deprivation from severe delayed sleep phase syndrome. (And suck that I’ve been wasting time with ADHD meds.)

But being out of synch isn’t going to be easy. First of all, I have to be able to predict my sleep schedule in advance so I can make appointments at times when I won’t be sleeping. Second, I have to deal with the lack of daylight during my productive hours. I think for the latter, a couple things are in order. First, I need a new watch, that I’ll set to 8 AM every time I get out of bed. That way I can see what time it should feel like relative to my sleep schedule, and I can try to modulate my level of activity (and my focus) accordingly. Otherwise, if I wake up at 2 PM, I’d be prone to spend a few hours working and then goof off until 11 PM and then do random stuff until I go to bed at 4 or 5 AM. And that’s not a way to get anything done.

Second, I need to get more organized. I need to have a plan about what I need to get done, and follow the plan. Because if I just did what I felt like doing, I would leave a lot of important things undone, since a lot of the meager productivity I have nowadays is tied to habits that are based on my daily routine, which is going to become much more sporadic. So I got a book today (at 3 PM subjective time, 7 PM real time) called “Getting Things Done”, by David Allen. You might have heard of it. We’ll see if it helps.

I just went out and bought some +1.00 reading glasses. I’m wearing them on top of my -1.5 or so normal glasses (to correct myopia) and find that I can focus on my computer screen with less effort. I’m wondering if making a habit of this could slow down or reverse my vision deterioration. I do know that pretty much the only inevitable deterioration experienced by everyone is a decrease in range you can focus through, which leads to needing bi- or tri-focals later in life. I remember when I was very young being able to bring things to within a half or even quarter inch of my eye to inspect them closely. I can’t do that anymore—the closest I can focus is about an inch and a half. But that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t be able to focus on distant objects without correction.

With both glasses on, I can see clearly up to about two feet, and with neither on, I can see up to about a foot. If I can increase the latter distance to a foot and a half, I could comfortable work at a computer without any correction, which would be ideal. We’ll see how it goes.

Late just this November, the world champion chess player Vladimir Kramnik played the leading chess software, Deep Fritz. In his second match, he allowed the computer to win with a mate in one. He said,

It was actually not only about the last move. I was calculating this line very long in advance, and then recalculating. It was very strange, some kind of blackout. I was feeling well, I was playing well, I think I was pretty much better. I calculated the line many, many times, rechecking myself. I already calculated this line when I played 29…Qa7, and after each move I was recalculating, again, and again, and finally I blundered mate in one.

Is this confirmation bias? Looking for evidence that the line he was calculating was the correct line, but not looking for evidence that it was the incorrect line? If so, it means that, the best current player of chess in the world has not been able to completely rid himself of this bias, even in the limited field of his area of expertise.

I just stepped into the bathroom and experienced a moment of vertigo. Our workplace (quite small) has two identical unisex bathrooms right next to each other, and I was paying so little attention that after I closed the door I couldn’t figure out which one I was in. It felt like my inner ear was going crazy for a second. Weird.

I think a lot of Anime series are pretty cool. I even think a few are really cool. And many Japanese movies are very enjoyable. But most Anime? Not so much.

Now, it’s not that the plots aren’t enjoyable, and the animation is generally really good. It’s simply that, for most series, the dubbing is just terrible. (Notable exceptions: most Miyazaki stuff, though even there there’s room for improvement.) Characters almost always have a monotonous cadence, like the translators are trying to fit too much English into each line of dialogue. The phrasing tends to be complex and awkward—stuff that probably sounds OK written on paper, but that sounds weird coming from people’s lips. The monotony is only intermittantly broken, by strange gutteral noises corresponding to some body language completely foreign and nonsensical to Americans.

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Wow, this is a really interesting resource, for parents and writers. It confirms that it’s really possible to place many people into an age group by their first name, which is something you hardly ever think about. But people tend to be really good at abstracting stereotypes based on visible qualities, and stereotyping someone’s age from their name is one example of that.

My name is the second most common for my decade. First is Michael, third is Matthew. It’s funny how so many people think they’re naming their kid something unusual, only for it to be in the top ten.

Isn’t life wonderful?