10.24.08
Posted in thoughts at 00:03 by Arkham
Assume a very strange lighthouse signaling system consisting of three lighthouses located on isolated rocks out of sight of each other, around a harbor. The lighthouses can signal red and blue colors and the colors combinations are used to signal to the ships approaching the harbor. If the first lighthouse is red, the second blue and the third, ships loaded with bananas are allowed to enter the harbor. One can also let a lighthouse to be turned off and thus creating more combination; off-off-off has for example been used to signal that the harbour is closed.
The lighthouses are operated by the reliable keepers that will set up the sequence of the colors for the night. A color schedule will determine which color (if any) that should be turned on for each hour of the night. Everything is prepared during the day and as soon as the sun sets the sequence is turned on automatically. Light houses have clocks that will accurately count hours during the night until the sun rises (assume ten hours to keep things simple). The lights will never fail to operate during the night.
To communicate with the lighthouses the shipping houses in the harbour have trained seals that will swim to a lighthouse and back during the day. Seals are quite good swimmers and it never takes them more than ten minutes to swim to a lighthouse. A seal can easily make 40 turns during a day and each shipping house has a trained seal for each lighthouse. The limitation is that a seal can only swim to one lighthouse, not in-between lighthouses.
The shipping houses in the harbour, each one specialized in a different cargo, are expecting one ship each night. Since the capacity of the harbor is limited it can only unload one ship in any given hour. The shipping houses compete for the best slots (not too late) during the night and will try to reserve during the night for ships holding cargo that it can unload. The shipping houses will not communicate with each other since they would probably just lie anyway to get a competitive advantage.
The protocol used by the shipping houses is quite chaotic. Each one will in the morning go down to the harbor and send three seals away with a request to set a specified color at a specified hour. The banana company would for example send the message “please set the colour red in the third hour” to the first and the third lighthouse and the same message for the color blue for the second light house. Most of the time it works but too often strange things happened; the banana and orange companies could arrive at the harbour in the middle of the night only to see a ship loaded with potatoes enter the harbor.
Design a better protocol that will allow as many shipping houses as possible to order the lighthouses to set their respective colors (include the color “off” in the color code) during the night. The protocol should avoid problems with unexpected potato ships.
Another harbor down the cost have heard about your successful protocol and they decide to adopt it. However, trained seals are hard to come by so they had to settle for almost reliable seals that will deliver their messages but without any guarantees on delivery time. How should you change the protocol so that chaos is prevented? How many color codes can you use?
When you travel trough the harbour down the cost a year later, everyone is pleased with your solution. However, sometimes they are prepared to receive a ship but no ship arrives. They know that that this could happen, since you told them, but they would like a more predictable solution. It turns out that the seals are quite reliable; in average there is only one hour every night where ships fail to show up. Having everyone prepared cost money but if they could be warned that ships might not arrive they could let half of the work force work with other things. A false warning is OK if there are not too many. Modify the protocol to make it more predictable. How many false warnings will in average occur?
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10.15.08
Posted in psychology, thoughts at 12:50 by Arkham
Neutral point of view
Articles, including reader-facing templates, categories and portals, should be written from a Neutral Point of View.
Now, I don’t know how it is possible to have a neutral point of view, for me it’s like asking you to look without with your eyes. It could also explain why Wikipedia is so damn good in science-related topics, while it sucks pretty badly in anything that involves any kind of interpretation. Just look at the articles talking about paintings, books or lps, most of them barely have a slight hint about what these art pieces mean; they just tell you how high, long or big they are, who made ‘em, when they were made and that’s it. I can agree that this kind of approach is safer, since we can not argue about those “facts”, but let’s think at what an encyclopedia should be (quoting from Wikipedia):
An encyclopedia (or encyclopædia) is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.
So, it contains knowledge.
But knowledge about “Guernica” means to know how long and tall it is, but also what that painting could mean to us, since each interpretation of it add more “knowledge” to the object; when we look at it we will never be able to see it from an “objective/neutral” point of view again, and we will see it through all the opaque, distorting and multicolor walls of the previous interpretations.
This brings me to Gadamer and hermeneutics.
Hermeneutics may be described as the development and study of theories of the interpretation and understanding of texts. It is more broadly used in contemporary philosophy to denote the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of all texts and systems of meaning. The concept of “text” is here extended beyond written documents to any number of objects subject to interpretation, such as experiences.
Gadamer’s most famous book, “Truth and Method”:
Even from its historical beginnings, the problem of hermeneutics goes beyond the limits of the concept of method as set by modern science.The understanding and the interpretation of texts is not merely a concern of science, but obviously belongs to human experience of the world in general. The hermeneutic phenomenon is basically not a problem of method at all. It is not concerned with a method of understanding by means of which texts are subjected to scientific investigation like all other objects of experience. It is not concerned primarily with amassing verified knowledge, such as would satisfy the methodological ideal of science — yet it too is concerned with knowledge and with truth. In understanding tradition not only are texts understood, but insights are acquired and truths known. But what kind of knowledge and what kind of truth?
What distinguished Gadamer from other authors like Schleiermacher and Dilthey is that the latter believed that correctly interpreting a text meant to recover the original intention of the author who wrote it. Gadamer argued instead that people have a ‘historically effected consciousness’ and that they are embedded in the particular history and culture that shaped them. Thus interpreting a text involves a “fusion of horizons” where the scholar finds the ways that the text’s history articulates with their own background.
Person A and person B exchange their ideas and opinions within a conversation. People come from different places have different opinions and this difference in background creates a set of prejudice and bias which provides various intrinsic values and meanings while the conversation are carrying on. By receiving the information from person A, a fusion of person B’s vision limitation are taking place and consequently, it broadens person B’s range of horizon. In other words, the totality of all that can be realized or thought about by a person at a given time in history and in a particular culture widens and enriches.
What can I say, Wikipedia FTL.
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10.10.08
Posted in thoughts at 18:56 by Arkham
Smells of victory.
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10.09.08
Posted in thoughts at 01:04 by Arkham
- Apple’s yet-to-release MacBook “Brick”
- A Nikon/Canon photocamera (maybe even DSLR?)
- A cheap mp3 player for jogging (Taiwan FTW!)
- 1G RAM for my old & faithful friend, acerus
- A pair of heavy winter boots
- Some new sweaters
- A windcheater
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10.03.08
Posted in thoughts at 12:41 by Arkham
I finally got so bored of my typos to start learning to touch type.
For now it’s like trying a new way to walk, when you are used to do it in a different way for like 20 years. Pretty painful.
P.S. This post was touch typed.
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