random links
I am randomly scouring the net. You’d think that using del.icio.us would satisfy my need to bookmark random sites that I will likely never visit again (a technology that I wish had been available when Netscape had first come out—you should’ve seen the madness of my humongous bookmark file.) Alas, that is not to be. Of course, a sideblog would probably work better, but, I’m too lazy to write code right now.
In any case: someone else agrees with me about trusting flatfiles more than databases. Sure, I think that Wordpress renders my blog more efficiently than Blosxom does, but then again, the code the runs Wordpress is completely opaque to me, while Blosxom is (relatively) more transparent. I am sort of itching to try a Ruby-based equivalent to Blosxom, namely Blosxonomy, but it appears that Blosxonomy is also moving into the RDBMS direction, although maintaining backward-compatibility with Blosxom-like flatfiles.
And when exactly am I going to do this kind of hacking? Probably never.
Another link: Gregory Chaitin discusses the incomputability of Omega (also called Chaitin’s number) which connects to the ideas of Alan Turing’s unsolvable Halting Problem[wikipedia][Turing’s original paper] and Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness[wikipedia][miskatonic.org], all of which basically say that there is no system of mathematics that can encompass all truth.
The philosophical implications are that even math, which hitherto had been considered pure, as close as to Platonic idealism as we are likely to get, has gray areas that are unknowable and essentially incomprehensible. And if this is the case, how can physics—which is, in many ways, applied mathematics—how can it hope to accurately describe the universe?
In any case, quantum mechanics is another layer of obfuscation that boggles my simple mind.
To put it simply, the Mind of God will forever remain beyond the ken of creatures of this universe.
To put it more atheistically, you’ll never know if there is an end to the Matrix. Who knows how many levels, how many supersets and subsets exist above and below us? How many times do you need to escape the Black Iron Prison before you actually surface in “reality”? If you believe Gödel, Turing, and Chaitin, the answer is, you can’t.
I am reminded of a random reverie I had today. I was, for some obscure reason, pondering glycolysis and the Krebs Cycle and I remembered an insane diagram containing hundreds of thousands chemical reactions that occurred in the average cell which my biochemistry professor showed us, and these were only the ones we understood. I then quailed at the idea that we may never be able to enumerate every single chemical reaction that occurs in the average cell, never mind the interactions between the trillion or so cells that make up the human body. Think about it, evolution has had billions of years to screw around with different processes, create new processes de novo, experiment and tweak, copy and recopy. Surely it will take us at least just as long to decode everything. In other words, I doubt that life is a reducible algorithm.
Psychology Today has an article on the different reasons for procrastination, and it wasn’t until I started reading Undoing Depression that I realized that my insane habits were a cardinal manifestation of my depression. Basically, this about sums it up:
Because depressed people can’t feel much pleasure, all options seem equally bleak, which makes getting started difficult and pointless.