Awesome web tools: tributary

Today I found another awesome web tool: tributary.io. Tributary describes itself thusly:

Tributary is an experimental environment for rapidly prototyping visualization code. The environment provides several useful libraries, as well as a simple interface for live code editing

That bunch of words that don't begin to reveal its awesomeness (neither do these, either.) And even using it doesn't reveal it, though it gives a hint.

To see how awesome it is you've got to watch these videos where the person behind Tributary: +Ian Johnson aka @enjalot who uses it to help you understand 3d.js, another really awesome web tool.

Here's his site: http://enja.org/ where he's posted some of the other cool things that he's done.

He's not alone in building Tributary:

Tributary is @enjalot's digital laboratory. Much of the design is@mrejfox's vision. Contributors include bollig, ejfox, roundrobin, andgeorules. Power users that shape the projects direction include @syntagmatic, @bausofthenauf, @ptvan, @poezn and @zeffii

Duolingo and the Italian wedding

I'm heading to Italy in May for a wedding. So Italy, and I don't know Italian. Well, I'm gonna fix that.

Why? I mean it's not like you have to learn Italian to go to Italy. Or Japanese to go to Japan; or Arabic to go to Egypt or Morocco; or Spanish to go to Mexico; or Greek to go to Greece; or Turkish to go to Turkey; or Hungarian to go to Hungary, all of which I have done at one time or another. Going to these places has been an excuse to learn a bit of a new language and I like learning bits of things. And I like languages.

And besides, learning a new language is supposed to be one of the best ways to challenge your brain and keep it from deteriorating. I very much like keeping my brain from deteriorating So Italian it is.

Now how to go about it? A while back I'd joined Duolingo, a very cool web site that helps people learn languages. I used it to practice my my rudimentary Spanish, and found it enjoyable but not compelling. But then I didn't have a wedding in Mexico to go to, and I had lots of other things that I was doing to keep my brain from deteriorating. Now had a compelling reason. A reminder from Duolingo sent me back to sign up for Italian.

Duolingo has several things going for it. First, it's on the web, so it's everywhere. On my phone. On my tablet. On my computer. Even on my watch (though only for notifications). I'm just guessing, but it probably runs on your gear, too.

Second, it's free. So the price is right.

Third, it's effective. According to a study referenced on their web site, 34 hours of Duolingo is effective as an 11 week university course. Of course, they commissioned this study, so I take it with a grain of salt. But this one from the Economist's blogger on language is more credible.

It’s a joy to use Duolingo, in part because its phone app is not only convenient to use but full of new content. ...its lessons are deep—I haven’t even spotted the end-mark of my French lessons...

On the downside, he says it's not ideal for building conversation skills. For that, the Economist's blogger recommends Babbel, which costs money--the price depends on your term of commitment. The costs could goo go as high as $13.00 a month if you pay month-to-month. But we'll come back to Babbel later. Right now, let's start for cheap with Duolingo.

Fourth, it's fun. It's been gamified, nicely. It gives you lots of practice and feedback. It's colorful and all that kind of stuff.

Fifth, it's thorough. You won't get your PhD in Italian, but you'll get a pretty good education. There are exercises to help you listen and translate in both directions, read and translate in both directions. Exercises are interactive and use all the capabilities of modern devices. Some exercises have you point to things, using mouse or touch. Some ask you to speak a response and it will be uploaded to their servers for "sounds right" correctness.

Sixth, it's smart and helpful. It's got big data behind it and knows how people learn and how you are learning and what it needs to do to keep you working at an ideal pace. For example it knows that people start to forget things if they don't practice, knows when you last practiced certain words, and offers refreshers to make sure you don't forget.

Seventh, it's challenging. Duolingo dares you to translate text that is well beyond your ability. Its "Immersion"
feature lets you try to translate from the language that you are learning into English. You can point it to any web page web, and Duolingo will create a translation page for it. Once you're on that page you can point to any word, and Duolingo will translate it. You can take those words, apply your growing knowledge of grammar and language structure and idiom, and produce a complete translation.

Eighth, it's collaborative. Any document that you've pointed to can be worked on by anyone on Duolingo. They can help translate it, can proofread what you've done, can correct your errors. And you can help them with their pages.

For example, I found the home page, in Italian, here, for the wedding venue. I pointed it out to Duolingo, and within an hour, while I was writing this, five people had worked on it, and produced a good translation. You can see it here, and if you signed up, you could improve the translation or proofread it.

Ninth, it's social. Let's suppose you're going to the wedding in Italy that I'm going to. Let's suppose you think it might be fun to learn a little Italian and you have some friends who think so, too. Let's suppose that you all think it might be fun to do it together. Because it's free, and it's fun, and it's collaborative, and social, you can all join up and learn together.

If you're on Facebook, Duolingo has a way to let you authorize Facebook to send Duolingo your friend list; then Duolingo will show you the Facebook friends who are using Duolingo, and you can invite them if they aren't using it, and follow them on Duolingo if they are. You can also invite non-Facebook friends to join you on Duolingo.

(If you're on FB and friended to me, you're welcome to follow me. If you join up, I'll see you. Right now only one of my FB friends uses Duolingo, and he's not going to the wedding.)

Tenth, for those who benefit from competition, you can play the Duolingo competitively. You can compete with your friends for points earned per day. Or you can tell Duolingo to email you when someone that you're following passes you. Whatever challenges you to learn more Italian.

If you're going to the wedding that I'm going to, and if you are interested in having some fun learning Italian between now and then, let me know, and we can learn together. If you don't know my email address, send email to the bride- or groom-to-be and ask them to pass it on.

If you decide to get serious about conversational Italian I might be up to doing Babbel with a buddy.

WyTF am I writing this blog?

Really? Wy?

Fact is, I don't know. What I do know, or seem to know is that when I write I feel happy and when I don't I feel miserable. I mean really, really miserable.

Feeling miserable is different from being miserable, I will point out. Whether I write or don't write does not change the fact that I am a happy guy. My emotional baseline is in the happy region. No, I don't smile that much. Yes, I don't always look happy. But trust me, I am happy. Almost always.

But.

When I don't write--and by "write" I don't mean scribbling in my notebook, I mean producing something visible in a public place--then I'm miserable. Awful feelings overlay my baseline happiness. I whine and complain and moan. And then I don't write.

Why?

And why does it have to be public?

Every day I write three pages, longhand, as advised in Julia Cameron's book The Artist's Way. I have a stack of these notebooks two feet high. I never look at them. Yet I keep them. Why? I like writing my pages. I'd be even worse if I didn't do that. But writing my pages is not enough for me. For some reason it's got to be public. Private does not work.

Bobbi thinks that I'm looking for an audience. Maybe. But I'm not sure that I am. Writing for an audience seems like a lot of work. Or that's the impression I get from my favorite blog, SlateStarCodex or my favorite social network poster Yonatan Zunger on G+. Not only do these guys write great stuff, they moderate the comments. And get in conversations. I don't know how they do it. I'm pretty sure that I don't have the energy.

So why am I writing this? I don't know.

I guess it's because I don't like being miserable.

For today, I'll leave it at that.

WTF? Is there really an emoji for poop?

Yes, poop lovers, there is an emoji for poop.

Yes emoji lovers, there really is an emoji for poop.

And especially, yes, poop emoji lovers there really, really is an emoji for poop.

Check it out -> 

That's not really it. Emoji appear in chat applications, not in web posts. This is a pseudo emoji animation (technically a pseudomojination) which I got from this article, "How Google Broght Poop to America", h/t to FastCompany.com

Here's what led me to it.

It started when my daughter Alyssa chat-messaged me:

Alyssa: Happy Birthday!

<Animated gift box slides up into my chat window. It opens with an explosion of confetti and a little emoji wearing a birthday hat pops out. Then the whole thing slides down and away>

Me: How did you do that?!

Alyssa: Credit Google emoji!

Until that moment my knowledge of emoji was a linear superposition of two ideas:

• It had something to do with the little graphics sometimes appeared instead of text in some chat windows when you typed something like :), which I believed were called emoticons
• It was the plural of emojum.

Silly me. Now I know better. And so can you.

I couldn't credit Google emoji without searching for "Google emoji." Which, of course, I did.

And that led me to the article referred to above and the beginning of short course in one of the many things that I really don't care that much about but can't resist finding out about.

Just as :) produces graphical smiley-faces in some chat applications, ~@~ produces poop in others. Not all. but some.

And when poop appears, what it looks like depends on the particular app. Although poop has been standardized, the actual images of poop are up to the platform vendor. So Google Hangouts poop on on Android can be different from what I'm calling iPoop when it appears on a different, nameless, mobile platform.

If you are interested in knowing more about Google's emoji, you can read this article.

Or you can just type /ponies in Hangouts Chat. Or woot.

Or you can just wish someone happy birthday.

If you are interested in knowing more about iPoop, contact me. I've registered the name and I will licence it for a small fee.

Thank Google for time travel

FAIL!

Plan A was to start the New Year right by posting every day.

Plan B was to gain some momentum by starting on my birthday, December 30th, and starting the Birth Year right.

And so I posted on December 30th. Then Failed.

So back to Plan A.

FAIL!!

Today is January 2, and I've failed.

But Google lets me time travel. 

Since this post is dated December 31, 2014 it must be that Google has let me go back in time, write this and post it.

Then it must be that I time traveled forward to January 1, 2015, and posted this there.

Either that, or it's still January 2, 2015 and Google has let me backdate my posts.

I'm not saying which.

But I am saying:

SUCCESS!

Thank you Google.

I'm the sum of the eighth row of Lozanić's triangle years old! Yay?

Yes, it's true. I'm 72.

Besides being the sum of the eighth row of Lozanić's triangle, 72, my age, is:

• the product of two consecutive numbers, 8 and 9.
• the sum of four consecutive primes:  (13 + 17 + 19 + 23). 
• the sum of six consecutive primes (5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19).

And a bunch of other stuff besides. Thanks Wikipedia. And that reminded me to make my annual donation, and then to write a G+ post, which I'll quote below and then link to. 

Why? 

Because I just spent a bunch of time writing my G+ post, and then wondered if I could render it, and then spent a bunch more time actually rendering it and making it look the way that I wanted to.

And because I'm the sum of the eighth row of Lozanić's triangle years old, and when you're that old, and it's your blog, then you get to do what you want--providing Blogger lets you do it. 

And it does. So I did. So there.

How many Wikipedia pages a year do you read? What's each page worth to you? Well, yeah, not that particular page. But on the average? And in aggregate?

For me, a lot, and I hope for you, as well.

It's worth a lot to have a fairly trustworthy resource for information that you care about? Yes, I know it's not always accurate. It's not absolutely trustworthy. And sometimes it's downright lame. And no matter what attempts are made for objectivity there are issues that are so charged that edit wars have broken out, and sanctions threatened against people who misbehave.

For example: Climate Change (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change) and (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Climate_change) "The Arbitration Committee has permitted Wikipedia administrators to impose discretionary sanctions on any editor editing this page or associated pages." Meaning: "Be nice, or we'll cut you off."

Wikipedia is not an anarchy, but a community with rational government based on clearly stated principles. The principles are spelled out as clearly as possible, and evolve as the community learns more. What's it worth having a transparent governance model for a site you rely on?  

Yes, there are politics involved. If there are people there will be politics. But the politics are (mostly) polite, and even though I am sure there are some bad actors the ethos of the community is to produce information that is written from a neutral point of view, with  verifiable accuracy, citing reliable, authoritative sources:" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars) And that community standard, along with the ability to enforce the standard keeps the politics (mostly) healthy.

The ability to enforce the community standards--that is, to exercise the power of government--is granted to people based on their contribution and the contribution of any Wikipedian can be objectively measured. What's it worth having a government where power is given to people who have objectively demonstrated their commitment and contribution to the community--rather than people whose primary skill is their ability to convince people of their good intentions and to convince people of others' bad intentions?

What's it worth having a laboratory in which his sort of new governance model can be explored and can evolve?

For me it's worth enough to make a substantial money donation every year, and this coming year I intend to back that up with a time contribution.

This is a project I believe is important. This is a community that I believe is earnestly attempting to help us all become more knowledgeable. This an endeavor that I support. It's worth a lot to me.
I hope it is to you as well, and that you will find a way to show your support, financially or otherwise.

Dysfunction in the society of mind

Today I suffered an episode of mental decompensation. Decompensation is an eight dollar word for a breakdown. Mental decompensation sounds better than mental breakdown, but a breakdown is what it was.

I found myself crying, for no reason that I could discern. Part of my mind was thinking: “Wow! This is kind of interesting. I’m crying. I’m really feeling sad. And I have no idea why.” Another part, the part attached to my lungs and tear ducts and related apparatus was causing my body to sob. Wailing. It was pathetic. And at the same time it was kind of funny.

1.
I've gotten into a daily routine the past few weeks that’s kept me on track and productive. It’s one of the reasons that I’m actually getting shit written, from time to time, rather than having it all stuck in my head. The routine is: wake up; weigh myself; take my ADD pill; get dressed and shaved; have breakfast with Bobbi, drink water and coffee. We go over my rolling to-do list, and then I do my Daily Pages along with my first tDCS session. Then I do stuff on the list for the rest of the day.

Sometimes my Daily Pages will turn into a post. Other times my daily pages will be something that I try to turn into a post and haven’t yet done. Kind of like compost. But I’m making progress on that front. Posts are better than drafts; drafts are better than Pages; and Pages are better than nothing.

Today I didn't do my Pages. Instead, I wrote emails and made a few stabs at writing a few different things, and I found myself unable to focus. I’d start one thing, then jump to another, and another. In between I did a lot of getting up and pacing around. Then the Great Decompensation.

Daily Pages have served two purposes in my life—albeit inconsistently. One is as a morning ritual, a way to get the day started and get my mind focused. The other is when I’m working on a knotty problem, personal or technical. I sit down, pull out my notebook, and I write myself out of the ditch I’ve gotten into. This almost always works.

So, tearfully, I started writing. I tried to give the sad part of my mind a place to express itself: to tell me what it was feeling and why. I alternated between my normal handwriting, for my sane self, and ALL CAPS for the part of my mind that was so very miserable. The ALL CAPS voice expressed sadness, and anger. It wrote that it wanted to die or at least go unconscious, and it could do neither. I told it that death was off the table, but I’d help it (but not the rest of me) go unconscious if that was what it wanted. But, I suggested, we might find a better solution, and I was willing to help.

It ranted: I'M NOT GETTING THE SHIT DONE THAT I WANT TO. Then the sadness went away and the all-caps stopped and I wrote some fairly constructive things about a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about, and that segued into a tDCS session, a fast walk up and down my driveway, and this, which I’m pretty happy with as I write, and which I’m right now thinking I’ll post after fixing grammar and typos in this first draft.

2.
What I wrote about and what I've been thinking about is how the mind works and, in particular, I've been thinking about how my mind works, and how I could organize my mental processes differently to do a better job of meeting my own goals.

The framework for my thinking comes from Marvin Minsky’s book The Society of Mind (Wikipedia summary here, full text here and MIT Open Courseware lecture here). Minsky was one of the pioneers in AI, back in the 60s when computers first came on the scene and AI was not seen as the hard problem that it’s turned out to be.

The early thinking was that the mind was a computer and that creating artificial intelligence was just a matter of writing the right program. That’s true to the extent that any computational problem can be carried out by any computer or system that’s Turing Complete. But more modern thinking about AI and about cognition in general views a mind not as a single computer, but as a collection of individually simple processes that Minsky called “agents.” The agents cooperate, collaborate, and sometimes compete. They operate in different ways, pursue different objectives and produce different solutions. Action is taken when some process, possibly involving other agents, intermediates between agents that solve problems and agents that control motor areas. And shit gets done.

Minsky’s contribution was to think about mind not as a computer, but as a society. Since we understand the way that human societies work, we can use his metaphor to think about the way minds work and how artificial intelligences might be made to work.

3.
In a normal individual, under normal circumstances, the society of mind works cooperatively. Competing goals and solutions are evaluated against each other. Compromises are considered. Substantial consensus is reached. Individual agents in the society of mind may not be satisfied with the consensus, but the degree of their dissatisfaction and the power that they can muster is usually insufficient to disrupt the action undertaken by the majority.

But in some cases things don’t work so well. Sometimes a vocal and disruptive minority rails against the majority decision. Sometimes a vocal minority can create enough internal disruption to block the majority’s choice, forcing either inaction or a less desirable option on the rest of the society.

Think of that as the Tea Party of the mind.

This happens to me. When my own society of mind is working effectively, I think through the options and choose the one that seems best. But sometimes deciding to act on the choice that seems right fills me with sadness or with anger. I may feel so much upset that I’m unwilling to follow my own orders. Or I feel so much mental turmoil that I’m unable to. I find that my ability to control my own behavior is impaired.

4.
That’s what happened to me this morning. There are agents in my society of mind that control my fingers and produce typing when my fingers are touching a keyboard. There are others that translate thoughts into words, and others that translate the words into finger motions, and so on. At the top of my society’s hierarchy are agents that have stuff that they want written. There are some that want to write about politics. Some want to write about technology. Others have ideas about economics. They compete with one another to control or influence the agents that do the actual writing.

And they’re not just competing with one another. There are agents other agents with other intentions. Some will have their way, sooner or later, which is a good thing because if some of them didn’t make me eat, I’d starve, and if others didn't have me go to the toilet, I’d explode.

Perhaps the parts of my mind that want to produce writing are organized a little differently than my earlier description. Perhaps I've got a bunch of agents that want to think about economics, politics, and so on, but don’t give a shit about writing, and I've got another bunch that want to produce writing, and don’t care a bit what the writing’s about. And then there are agents that like editing—that can always find a way to make a sentence clearer or to reorganize words differently.

Whatever. There are agents. They need to cooperate to get things done.

Getting all these agents to work together in a way that provides the greatest satisfaction to the most powerful coalition of agents—or alternatively in a way that forms a coalition with dominant power—is a tough bit of social engineering or mental politicking. Fortunately I have agents that are more-or-less up to the task. They do the job without “me” (whatever I am) having to intervene. And that’s why I seem to be a moderately capable, functioning human being.

Sometimes things go awry, and that’s what happened today. While most of me has been satisfied with most of what I've been doing the past week or so, some part of me was getting increasingly upset, and finally, today, the meltdown.

5.
Because I’d been thinking about the Society of Mind, once I did my Pages and got the disconnected parts of myself reconnected and communicating, I convened a committee to study the problem and make recommendations. Well, no, that’s not really what I did. No committee was convened. Rather an ad-hoc collection of agents got together, attended to the problem and without much effort, the moving hand on the Page produced the following analysis

Organizations get work done when individuals and departments are focused on a defined task, when communication between and among them is effective and supports the task and when disruptive forces and obstacles are removed—sometimes by parts of the organization that specialize in disruption removal and obstacle removal.

When I write, I decided, a set of agents naturally form around that task, and the fact that my writing process is often dysfunctional (from the perspective of agents that want to get actual writing done and completed and posted, or whatever) is because the usual team of agents are incomplete, or include disruptive agents, or because power is not being allocated properly to agents.

Specifically, when I write, the agents include those that have ideas and care about expressing them, those that translate the ideas into words and keystrokes and so on, but also agents that want to edit, and who are given too much power. And most time there is no agent that actually cares to finish the thing and get it posted. Or if such an agent is present, it does not have enough power to accomplish its end.

So having had that insight, and having a fundamentally healthy society of mind, I sat down and ripped this draft out, creating word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, a process that delights the agents that love the act of writing.

I finished it in one pass. Reviewed it in another, making only a very few changes (editing agent under control). I had Bobbi check it for typos and for obvious stupidity.

And now, I will move my mouse over to the Publish button and….

Update: You can find the Society of Mind in pdf form here.

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