I would like to blame my tools: quite simply I’m turned off framing any thoughts in this weblog engine. Too cluttered, with templates I prefer to avoid.

I report back to Sarah and ask the fellow in front of her

—Excuse me, what are you waiting in line for?
—I don’t know, he says.

How did this queue form? It looked like people waiting in line, so we joined it habitually. It probably started as a few people waiting at the entrance or having a smoke; after a dozen or so people joined, the group self-organized into a queue to point where those at the end had no idea they were not waiting for anything.

At the Omaha Zoo by John Sypal

I sympathize with the figure in the center. They survey the seen cooly, disinterestedly, neither for nor against the motion parading towards them.

We used to posit that animals ran around randomly before we conceived that they have an internal life. The children carry on this randomness exactly, super-heated particles at odds with the order framed in this picture. I don’t see any of the humans’ faces but I am excited by their pounding fists—a mimicry of how we see other apes behave.

I am off to study what knowing each of these creatures tells us about the other.

After a year of working with fruit flies, from hereon out I will work only with cute organisms.

Because the Folding @ Home project assigns credit to people who donate computer cycles to the project, there is a competition to see who can complete the most work units. This has turned the project into a hobby for some. If you like building computer systems Folding @ Home gives you an outlet for all of that processing power.

Folding Farmer caters to people who, for whatever reason (space, time, energy^*, ability) cannot set up their own clusters yet still want to donate to the Folding @ Home project. With Folding Farmer, you can subscribe to a highly-optimized node (consisting of a dual core, 64-bit processor) that will run the @Home client 24/7.

While services like Amazon EC2 or the Sun Grid provide on-demand computing for businesses and scientific research, this is utility computing for hobbyists.

Cultures rooted in Christianity are versed in this myth. We became conscious, self-aware humans through the Fall. Nietzsche felt it. Freud saw it, too. In a critique of de Waal’s views on the origins of morality, Christine Korsgaard writes

human beings seem psychologically damaged, in ways that suggest some deep break with nature. (emaphsis mine)

Why do we have this perception of being broken? Does it only come out as we attempt many a metaphysical backflip, swamped in our own self-evaluation and -doubt? Or is it a daily habit?

Why do we see consciousness as such a burden?

I am concerned that in our zeal to move on to the “next paradigm” we may be missing a tremendous opportunity to extend and deepen the current paradigm. We have only scratched the surface of what would be possible if end users could freely program their own applications… In fact, such an ability would itself constitute a new paradigm. (Bonnie Nardi, quoted by _why)

I have been writing about programming recently instead of on my more usual (albiet infrequent) topics on evolution, photography, and Japan. I have finally found programming to be a compelling leisure time activity and a creative outlet as rewarding as photography.

Programming is too utilitarian

Programming is not more widely adopted not because of its obtuseness or difficulty. Programming is too utilitarian. If you do not have an itch to scratch there is little incentive to learn how to program. The problem with introductory excercises is that they are not relevant to any other part of your life. Unless you got an extraordinary kick from writing infinite loops in BASIC on your elementary school’s computers, you probably did not continue with programming until forced to while in college or on the job.

Hackety Hack is one attempt to address this deficiency by making common tasks (making a blog or downloading an MP3) easy to code. This is great. Programming should be fun, relevant, and creative.

My first programming langauge was Lingo, part of Macromedia Director, the forerunner to Flash. I used it to make games with my brother. Since that time, I haven’t used programming to do anything for fun*. For profit yes, but not for fun. Learning web application programming introduced me to a new creative outlet: programming using web service APIs.

Web services

Websites are no longer just destinations but also services that you exchange data with. Twitter is my current, favorite example. Even blogs offer their content through RSS, which you can parse and repurpose to your heart’s content.

Web services are a great place to get started with programming. You immediately have information that is important to you. There is no problem to solve, only one to devise. You can be creative and express something about the information that isn’t obvious given the way it is already presented on the source website.