inthehut

Tomorrow I leave for a short trip to the United States - staying in Dayton, Ohio - for a deliberative democracy workshop put on by the Kettering Foundation.

I went in 2007 and this time I have a better idea of what to expect. Basically the workshops promote a specific methodology for working through problems that face communities. It involves getting people with different opinions to gather and talk things through from their perspectives before working towards solutions, but they teach the workshop participants a particular way to go about the whole process.

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I got the train to lewisham but ended up in charlton because i was too preoccupied about missing the opportunity to level the two french guys: running bad
I ran close to shortest path back on the way back home: variance
I passed Zin’s the mythical ridiculuously good chinese shop in greenwich: running good (perpendicular to maze hill road 98x for future reference)

Imagine if you had a giant map of some place made of paper. The paper weighs more or less depending on how many people live in the place that that piece of paper represents. Then if you balance this map on your finger, the balance point would be the centre of population.

It’s akin to the mean of a one-dimensional distribution and apparently it’s a good measure of where to put things like schools, hospitals and places where you want everyone to have a easy time getting there. It’d probably be more useful if it used a metric other than distance. How long it takes to get there, for instance.

Data from the ABS and US Census Bureau. I used this site to find the QLD centroid.

The Mathematics of Poker
- I reckon using poker to teach probability/statistics would be a good way to get kids interested in math. I could see kids working on problems from their textbook like: determine the probability of flopping three of a kind or better when holding a pair and given Bobby is 2BB/100 winner over 10,000 hands how likely is it he is a winning player using both bayesian and classical normal distribution methods. Also, I saw a very cool bayesian reasoning problem on the xkcd blag.
The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
- Arrgghh! Makes the case that economic pressures forced pirates to adopt constitutional democratic government, work cover and progressive race relations.
The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive
- I bought this because I saw an awesome quote. Not sure what to think of it.

This post and comment section looks like a conversation between a group of savages that have found an umbrella by accident, and are complaining that it makes a lousy club.

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS
- Sticks it to everyone. Very good imo.
The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness
- Trashes sexual selection (haven’t read very far). Interesting to see peacocks and their tails referenced in Invisible Hook then trashed here.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

So I checked my db to try and find the biggest loser I’ve played with. It appears someone has lost almost $USD 40k in 6 months. That’s pretty gross. You have to wonder where they get the money from especially since he plays like he is clinically braindead. Probably more evidence that people act wildly different in different contexts.

In other news I worked out where my missing post disappeared to. Wordpress in all it’s brilliance has a link at the top of the page named ‘Post’ and two buttons to the right named ‘Save’ and ‘Publish’.

I saw a story on the ABC this week about some restoration work that’s being done on the East Side Gallery in Berlin, and it inspired me to share a few more holiday snaps here. (I also need to remind myself that while the weather is getting cooler, at least it isn’t snowing.)

Stretching 1.3km along the River Spree, the East Side Gallery is apparently the world’s longest open air gallery, made up of murals painted onto part of the original Berlin wall. In the 1980s there was graffiti all along the western side of the Berlin Wall, but in East Berlin the concrete was apparently always painted grey and white.

After Berlin was reunified, artists gathered at a remaining section of the wall at Mühlenstrasse to take advantage of the blank canvas. The gallery’s website explains the philosophy behind it:

After the Wall came down in 1989, hundreds of artists from all over the world gathered and transformed the eastside of the Wall that had been untouchable up to now, with their paintings, giving the Wall a new face in a new time.

This new face is the East Side Gallery.  The paintings at the East Side Gallery document that time of change and express the euphoria and great hopes for a better and different future that characterized the time of when the Wall came down.  The project developed to an enormous picture wall with its over 100 paintings, that unfortunately now, 10 years later, is in such a bad condition that you can hardly see the old paintings and the colorful strength they expressed.

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I was walking home today and passed a bus stop. The seat had a lady’s handbag and a shawl on it. There wasn’t another person in sight. I thought to myself, “Maybe there is something of value in the handbag”. Then I thought, “If there was something of value in the handbag it would be already taken”. This story is more funny if you are familiar with EMH.

Meta: Hopefully, this post gets through. My last piece of drunken insight about how to game the Geithner plan was stolen by Wordpress.

image: binaryape

I noticed something like this outside QCA at southbank then stumbled upon the blog yarnbombing. It has been related to graffiti, even dubbed ‘knit graffiti’ but is non-permanent and full of sunshine. Knitted socks for trees, rubbish bin cozies and bench warmers are the kind of crazy that appeals to me. Craftivists aiming for “world yarn domination”!

It reminds me of the knitted apple jackets on etsy.

I think apart from the brightening and love associated with knitting what interests me most about it is it highlights my lack of a hobby. I can’t knit, I made a scarf once using plain garter stitch and it ended up wider at one end. I need a hobby besides making ice cream (since making ice cream also involves eating ice cream, which will eventually have side effects) but not necessarily one that involves street art.

Games Prisoners Play: The Tragicomic Worlds of Polish Prison
The Professor, the Banker, and the Suicide King: Inside the Richest Poker Game of All Time
Undercover Economist
Shock Doctrine
The Gambler
I Am a Strange Loop
The Myth of the Rational Voter
Godel, Escher, Bach
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive
Off the Books
The Wisdom of Crowds
Gang Leader for a Day
Predictably Irrational
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Today I was trying to track down a memory leak at work. We got an out of perm gen space after the application was running for a day. I checked for duplicate classes in the heap dump and was surprised to find we had a bucket load of classes loaded with the name ‘GregorSamsa’. The XSL Transformer we use compiles style sheets to classes with the name ‘GregorSamsa’ by default.

From the documentation:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his hard, as it were armour plated, back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his big, brown belly divided into stiff, arched segments, on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes. “What has happened to me?”, he thought. It was no dream….