The temptation to fill this post with bad grammar and misspellings, all while claiming wonderful results, was nearly overwhelming.

After my days of big doses, I changed to one 800 mg pill per day for a week. The early results are in! I didn’t notice any change.

On experiment-days 9 and 10, I missed my doses. I guess that attests to memory changes better than unmeasured assertions does.

I’ll continue for another few weeks.

12 Jun 2009, 12:52 #

I feel a little guilty about using “experiment” in the title, since I value science so much. This brings me to a problem: How do I really know if it makes a difference?

I thought about trying to solve the same kind of puzzle each day, and measuring the time it takes me. The flaw in that is that I learn. I’d be practicing continually, and it would be astonishing if I didn’t get better at it.

It is important to quantify any changes piracetam evokes. The drug is not free. How worthwhile is it, for an unquantifiable gain? Is 40 cents per pill an acceptable cost to pay, when you can’t know what you’re getting in exchange?

For me, instead of taking tests, I’m going to try to behave as normally as I can, and instead of looking for improvement in amount that I am able to do, I will watch how easy it is for me to do my normal work. I think I will notice if my normal work-flow becomes less of a burden. This doesn’t really count as a real measurement because of two reasons: It’s subjective. My work is not limited by another means; my brain is already the rate-limiter so it’s entirely possible that I feel the same amount of stress and drain, even though my throughput changes.

If that is the case, that I don’t feel better about my work, then I consider piracetam a failure. I do value producing more, but what I’m really after is the “hack mode” feeling that my work becomes easier.

So, I’m totally cheating on the quantification question by saying “it will have to make me feel like I’m working easier.” I know. Bad scientist, bad!

Day 2 was pretty normal. I did have a breakthrough in something, but that is normal. I just started a new job last week, and there are plenty of roadblocks that only seem harder because I’m still finding my footing.

I did spend nearly 12 hours at my desk that day. My wife was out of town for the afternoon and evening, and I didn’t feel like stopping until she returned home. So, day 2 was a little weird, and I want to be careful, so my verdict is that it was too strange to be evaluated.

Day 3 is starting out normal. It’s the weekend and I’ll have a baby in my lap all day, so I won’t work today. So far, I do not feel a change.

Sleep is normal. Diet is unchanged. Emotional states are about average.

30 May 2009, 07:53 #

It’s pretty well-known that getting older and settling down dulls the brain. Aging past 25 years or so, or getting married, tends to kill productivity in many brainy disciplines, the most obvious and well-studied being mathematics. With almost no exceptions, if you haven’t done interesting things in maths before your early-30s, you never will.

I’m 33, and I now have a kid and wife. I work in software, where we crave a delicate state of deep, intense concentration (which we call hack mode), which is getting harder and harder for me to find as I age. Fortunately for me, these productive states are not as elusive and ephemeral as it is for mathematicians. Still, my capacity drains away with time.

Lately, I’ve heard about chemicals (I hesitate to call them “drugs”, with all the connotations that brings about efficacy, legality, and such) that affect the thinking meats for the better. A guy coined the name “nootropic” in 1964, and I’ll use that name from now on to refer to them. In particular, some people claim that piracetam, 2-(2-oxopyrrolidin-1-yl)acetamide, aids cognition and memory. There are plenty of studies of piracetam’s effects on sick people, with generally good results and few or no bad side effects. The scientific results for healthy people are still out, but the anecdotes are generally good.

“Good” is a bit vague here. Most are self-administered one-patient “studies” with no control and no good metrics for cognition. Science, it ain’t. But, with no known side-effects and enough people taking it, it can’t hurt to try it, I thought. At worst, I’m out a small amount of money (and enriched a charlatan somewhere in the world). At least it’s not amphetamines, I suppose.

Piracetam is available only as prescribed in many places, but in the US and Canada, the drug authorities have so far taken no position on it, and so it’s available by mail-order or occasionally at vitamin shops.

I bought a bottle of 60 pills off of Amazon with some retailer that has good reviews and a brand that doesn’t have any complaining web pages about them. The pills are 800mg each.

I read that one should take a large dose at first, to ramp the levels to something useful, and then fall back to a smaller dose. At night, with water on an empty stomach I took two pills, to make 1.6 grams. My sleep was normal, and I felt no change.

The following morning, no change also, and I again took 1.6g, at 9AM. I’ll continue this twice-daily two-pill dosage for another two days, then drop back to one 800mg pill, once per day.

28 May 2009, 12:02 #

I read a lot. I buy most of the books I read. Yesterday, I decided to partcipate in the ongoing experiment of commercial e-books. The book industry should love me.

But they don’t. Evidently HarperCollins hates me and wants to make me mad.

The book I bought, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, is wrapped in “DRM”, so-called Digital Rights Management. The publisher ostensibly wants to prevent unlimited use of its books, and to do so they wrap the text in cryptographic mumbo-jumbo so that only some devices can decipher them and show the contents to a reader.

What do I get for my money? Something I couldn’t use. I use my Nokia 770 to read when traveling and space is precious. My portable book-device can’t read the book I bought because the file they sold me is locked with DRM that my book-device doesn’t understand.

DRM doesn’t stop people who are insistent on breaking off the locks and then copying and redistributing the contents. Those people can never be defeated. DRM only affects people like me—honest people who didn’t get their book/music/movie from a dark alley, but walked into a bright, official store and slapped money down on the counter and walked away with an approved version of the book. If I had downloaded a cracked book, I wouldn’t have a problem.

Essentially, the publisher thinks annoying a significant fraction of its customers is the best way to prop up their business model. It’s worth it to frustrate some of us, in order to prevent everyday people from loaning books like we could do with physical books, they think. Well, I’m never buying another e-book until I know the DRM fad is dead.

I want to read this book on my trip, and I’ve already bought it, and I’m smarter than the average bear, so I spent some time late last night and I broke the locks off the file HarperCollins sold me. If you bought Anathem also and want unencumbered text to read on any device, let me know.

11 Sep 2008, 08:55 #

On Saturday, I participated in Orlando’s Barcamp, dev-day. I spoke early in the day, and I knew from listening to others who talked about the previous Barcamp that my topic would be unusual. Here’s the gist of my talk:

The title is from the philosopher Hippocrates, who lived in Greece, around 400BCE. He was observing that life is brief compared to what we can make and do. How do we know Hippocrates said these words? We have records from that time.

400BCE is relatively young, as “ancient civilizations” go. I gave examples of other civilizations, spanning back to the oldest, of Sumer, 8000 years ago. We know a lot of the Sumerians, and we know a lot of most every literate ancient civilization, but not a lot about one specific civilization. The Egyptian empire lasted from 3100BCE to 50BCE, and though we know a lot about the civilizations before it and the ones after it — we know very little of Egypt. All because of something the Egyptians invented: Paper.

Egyptians put their art on stone, which lasts even until now. They wrote their information on their new technology, which didn’t last more than a generation or so. The civilization that made the African pyramids are much more of a mystery to us than they should be. That’s the cautionary tale, and we should worry about how we are in the same danger.

What will the people of a thousand years from now know of us? Will we be the group that consumed a huge fraction of resources, poisoned the environment, and left behind only a mystery about who, how, why? How long will information about you and me last? 10,000 years? 1000? 100? Even 50? Does that 50 sound preposterous?

Consider: We, in the 21st century are in a much worse predicament than the Egyptians were. We store a large portion of our data on something that is so ephemeral that we’re usually startled to find a device still operational after 10 years. In 2002, we created 5 exabytes of new information. For too much of it, we have no real control over how it’s stored, either because it’s too massive or often because it’s beyond our reach.

Contrast what a budding biographer of now and 80 years in the future would do to publish her grandfather’s letters from war? A child of today would dig up dusty letters out of an attic, but the child of the future will have to ask Yahoo for copies of archived e-mail. Can you imagine what they’re likely to say? “404!”

So, what can we do?

I propose and dismiss “Hope for the Singularity to save it.” Also, “stop making so much.”

Two ideas that may have merit are: Label our data with how unique and important it is likely to be. Make our own version of stone tablets.

Neither of these are particularly hard problems. All we have to do is put a little effort into it, and we’d have a solution to 90% of the problem. This the fun part, and I’ll leave most of it for you, dear reader to think about.

Here are a few of my ideas: 3-D printing of information bricks. Quaternary bits of DNA, in some durable container. Knots are an encoding of a series of hand movements.

06 Apr 2008, 21:37 #

“Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.” — Winston Churchill

Today, the remaining states finalize their intra-party choices for the Presidential candidacy. We Floridians do not vote today, so there’s probably not a lot that this message could do, but I think I should say it loudly because I’m unusually happy with what I have to say:

If B. Obama is an option on my ballot in November, then I’m voting for him.

I’m usually sick at the idea of making a choice for the high office. No one is good enough. I’ve tried voting for the principled underdog. I’ve tried voting against the evil popular bastard. I’ve cursed the polling ruleset that forced terrible choices upon me.

Finally, with Barack Obama, I’m happy with someone who also happens to be popular.

I’m sad that it took a backlash against jingos to get here. I’m sad that it took weariness of two counterproductive wars to waken us. I’m sad that it took scrapping parts of our fundamental founding documents, like habeas corpus and the first and fourth Amendments. I’m sad that, to frighten us, it took crippling our economy and borrowing many trillions of dollars of money that we can’t pay back in our lifetime. I’m sad that it took looking like gullable morons to the rest of the world for years to embarrass us enough. And more. Much more. I’m sad that we had to burn ourselves on the stove again and again and again and again in order to learn not to touch it. (Though some still haven’t learned. Some never learn.) I’m so sad about the cost we had to pay to finally come to push someone worthwhile onto the stage.

The watchword of this election is “change.” Every candidate claims to want change. (Even if some want the change to be to hold their hands on the stove even longer next time.) I’m weary of the corrupt and the idiotic. I want someone who is moral and smart with whom I may not always agree, over the legion of corrupt puppets who know how to polarize the electorate. The only credible agent of change for the better that I can see is Barack Obama.

Decide for yourself. See:

Obama’s 2004 DNC keynote speech. Part one. Part two.

My hero, L Lessig, details why Obama is his choice and recommendation.

A music video that plays to our emotions more than to intellect, but is still pretty good.

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Old post: 2008 US Presidency Outlook .

05 Feb 2008, 16:00 #

At our Heidelberg dev-meeting a few months ago, Mårten announced that the entire company would meet in mid-January in my town, Orlando, Florida. I was blinded by the thought of coming to the City of Cement and Glitter, after meetings in beautiful places all over the world, like Budapest, Malta, Sorrento, Stockholm, Cancún, Seattle, Helsinki, Budapest, New York — and then coming to where I live. Ugh. How embarassed would I be?

Well once I recovered and gave it thought, I was certain that there would be an announcement of IPO at the meeting. MySQL has been preparing for publicly offering stock for a while. It made so much sense.

Today, the third day of the meeting (for me), I was late to the start. I walked in and it took me 15 full minutes to realize that right then was The Big Event, and it was not what I was expecting.

Instead, Sun Microsystems (ticker JAVA, née SUNW) decided to pay one billion dollars for MySQL. I am shocked and dizzy.

It might not be a complete disaster. Sun has behaved lately like it understands Free software: See GPL Java and OpenSolaris . They seem to understand working at home. They seem to like what MySQL employees are doing. I am cautiously optimistic.

So, I’ll have a “sun.com” email address soon. I don’t know if I’ll have to give up chad at mysql dot com. I hope not. I’ll get new business cards. I’ll get access to lots of good hardware.

Maybe it’s not awful. We’ll see.

16 Jan 2008, 22:37 #

Our vacation was fantastic. I loved Heidelberg and what I saw of Munich. Ireland wasn’t as great, but had its charm.

But, in our plans to move, money is a big factor. As it is, we can’t afford to live there.

I expect to be paid in US dollars by the “Inc.” company. (I could perhaps move to a European corporation, but that raises other tax-related problems. “Inc.” exists to avoid those, actually.) But, the dollar is tanking. Today, one US dollar trades at less than 0.70 euro. Or, 1 EUR = 1.41US$. That was 1:1 when the euro was introduced, a few years ago.

Compounded on that, Ireland is expensive. If we were moving to Germany, the dollar:euro ratio may be tolerable, but Ireland is expensive even by European standards.

So, our plans to move in three months are postponed, perhaps indefinitely. Sad, sad, sad.

06 Oct 2007, 15:45 #

It’s kind of strange, but as a free-software programmer, I work in the world of copyright. Instead of selling wafers of plastic that happen to have instructions embedded in them, I rely on copyright to make sure that what comes out of the tapping of my keyboard is used in ways that I want. I give away the source code to be used all alike by Fortune 100 companies and basement hackers and school kids in the heart of Africa, but everything I write is copyrighted.

Property rights are pretty obvious and are as such well understood in most places. If you grow a pear tree, the tree and its fruit are yours. Property rights exist only in the context of other people; it makes no sense to assert rights if you’re the only person on a desert island. Property is a societal contract that attempts to keep use of something in the hands of the one who fabricated it. We may trade it for time or we may shift it in and out of symbols like money, but the use and value is still (for the most part) preserved.

But, what about ideas? If I invent a recipe for pear pies and teach you how to make them, I lose nothing (except exclusivity). There’s (almost) no cost to sharing an idea. Free flow of ideas immeasurably helps our tribes grow.

The US’s patent system and its copyright system are separate, but similar. In the patent system, society makes the deal that if an inventor creates something new, then in exchange for detailing it in public form, society will guarantee exclusive usage of it for some limited number of years. After the term expires, anyone at all may take the details and use them. Ownership of that idea falls from the domain of the inventor into the domain of the public. Copyright is similar. A writer gets exclusive ownership over the contents of the work for some number of years. These terms are supposed to be incentive for creators to produce new work.

Section 8 of first Article of the US Constitution says what congress has the power to do:

… To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

It’s because of this that we can print the complete writings of Thomas Paine, and put on plays of William Shakespeare, and play piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff — all without finding who owns them and begging for permission. Such works were guaranteed legal protection for some number of years, and then they fall into the public domain. No one owns “Macbeth”.

But, unfortunately, the words “limited time” has lately failed to mean anything. Enter stage left: Disney.

In the US, the term of copyright protection was 56 years until the 1976 Copyright Act, whereupon it was extended to the remaining lifetime of the author plus 50 years. Then, as Mickey Mouse’s copyright was due to expire in the year 2000, Disney paired with congressman Sonny Bono and passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which makes the new terms lifetime plus 70 years (or total of 95 years for a corporation). Quoting Wikipedia,

Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still copyrighted in 1998 will not enter the public domain until 2019 or afterwards (depending on the date of the product) unless the owner of the copyright releases them into the public domain prior to that or if the copyright gets extended again.

The public domain is now effectively strangled. The tail that followed us in time, marking where works become usable by all of us, suddenly grew much longer. Those works, that could go into the public domain and serve as inspiration and fertiliser for new works, are now locked up for even more time. Managers of estates of long-dead creators are the major lobbyists to keep the public domain from growing. Mary Bono, spoke about her husband after his death:

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by [Congressional staff] that such a change would violate the Constitution. … As you know, there is also [Motion Picture Association of America president] Jack Valenti’s proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

This is especially shameful and ironic considering how much of those very same people relied on a rich and vibrant public domain. Disney, for example, didn’t invent “Cinderella” or “Snow White” — those came from the public domain. The copyright to the book “The Jungle Book” expired and Disney could then make the book into a movie.

Works of art that are woven deep in to the fabric of our lives from long ago should fall into the public domain so they can be performed, and used, and extended or rebuilt any way we like. The wellspring of the public domain feeds new arts, and we should never staunch its flow. The public domain should kept rich and replenished with works that fall out of contemporary attention and into history — if it’s not then we face the prospect of a barren landscape with no materials to use to build new art. By locking up our past, we sterilize our future.

Millions of works from the last century are integral to our lives and culture, but descendents of the authors unnaturally extend their legal control. The next time you’re in a restaurant and you hear some stupid tune instead of “Happy Birthday to You”, think long and hard about why the copyright on that song now isn’t due to expire until the year 2030 (and can’t be performed in public without a license). Consider that when you want to show your grandchildren or great-grandchildren “Song of the South”, even though it will be ancient by then, you probably won’t be able to. Our culture should not be locked away by people or organizations whose only virtue or claim on it is ancestoral.

10 Sep 2007, 18:28 #

Apple Computer Inc pioneered the modern computer interface. It took the ideas originally germinated at Xerox PARC and ran with them, and in doing so changed how we interact with machines. The original Finder was a marvel. The typefaces were a fantastic (something MSFT Windows still fails at). The mouse was elegant, and the designers understood UI design, including that every mouse action should have an equivalent keyboard action. The Mac was the perfect interface for blind people to use, even.

No more. Apple has gone astray. Fast, capable graphics have made it easy to create lifelike and better-than-lifelike imagery. Material sciences and computer advancement have made it easy to make the hardware look and behave almost any way one can imagine.

When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT, he declared a new fashion of the exterior of computers: Beige was boring, and Black was cool.

Steve brought that ethos back to Apple when Apple acquired NeXT, and instead of black, Steve wanted computers we’d “want to lick”. Colors were suddenly vitally important. You could get a rainbow of workstations. Windows are brushed metal or transparent or hopping around.

Apple’s OS X built atop NeXTstep. The two operating systems were similar, but had some major differences in UI design. The consistency and beauty of each operating system disappeared when Apple merged them, and the resulting mongrel lacks almost all of the beauty that each independently had. OS X is quirky and annoying and unpredictable. The several GUI toolkits’ behaviors are inconsistent and confusing.

But, OS X is pretty. At any given moment, as long as you don’t have to do anything, it’s pleasant to look at. Apple’s environment is evidently designed to be passively viewed. The buttons may look like gumdrops or glistening bubbles of water, but you’re not supposed to do anything with them. The depth of Apple’s new design regime ignores your ten fingers and mousing hand, and extends only to what an idiot child might like to do with its tongue.

29 Aug 2007, 13:26 #