Call it vacation: away for a bit
A few things have come up that demand my attention. Will be back later this week with the complete explication of Coscience, and the usual other fare as well.
Archive for July, 2007
links for 2007-07-22
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Bought a woodcut print of his, a dynamics visualization of emergent flocking at Art Fairs yesterday: “Solstice Flockmap”. If you want to buy us a present, get us “Speaking in order to create” or “Ripple effect”
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Seen at Art Fairs. Doesn’t reproduce well online: a nice engraving. Note especially the Escherism, the ships in the aerial passage, the multiple levels of scale, the workaday look on the people’s faces.
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Nice decorative artwork, with good burnishing texture (not obvious in online images) and tempering color.
links for 2007-07-18
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Just musing about a fun genetic programming project
What I want today: financial tick aggregation
Anybody who’s done any trading or investing is familiar with the standard financial HLOC time-series chart. Even Excel has ‘em. You take an underlying time-series of price data (sometimes recording in sub-second time-frames) and you just bin those raw numbers. The “1-minute” HLOC stock chart, for example, shows you the high, low, open and close prices aggregated over every discrete 1-minute period. The “30-minute” HLOC chart divides the same underlying data into 30-minute blocks. Same data, different views. These are daily workhorses for anybody who deals with equity prices.
What I want is the same functionality for my portfolio’s total value. Multiply each price tick by my holding of that security, combine them into a single time-series, and add them up over time.
You’d think that would be obvious. Not so! I can’t find a single online vendor—Google Finance included—who can do the simple arithmetic. Actually, they do the arithmetic, because there’s always a line-item on the values table showing total portfolio value. But they never chart it.
How hard is it to make that mental leap, people? Graph it. Show, don’t tell.
links for 2007-07-16
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Matthew Berryman is citing some of what we should see.
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Thom LaBean and Erik Schultes start a science thing the three of us know lots about: directed combinatorial molecular design. Looking forward to seeing how they monetize expertise.
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“Charlie calls this not the end of history, but the dawn of history. The idea being that history to this point is an incomplete, imperfect process full of guesswork and implication. We’re now at a point where we can record everything.”
links for 2007-07-15
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On the road to ad hoc p2p telephony. Just you watch
Noted while proofreading
From The Contemporary Review Vol 36 No 3, in “On Freedom”, being digitized at Distributed Proofreaders:
Freethinkers, and I use that name as a title of honour for all who, like Mill, claim for every individual the fullest freedom in thought, word, or deed, compatible with the freedom of others, are apt to make one mistake. Conscious of their own honest intentions, they cannot bear to be mistrusted or slighted. They expect society to submit to their often very painful operations as a patient submits to the knife of the surgeon. That is not in human nature. The enemy of abuses is always abused by his enemies. Society will never yield one inch without resistance, and few reformers live long enough to receive the thanks of those whom they have reformed.
Notional Slurry and Coscience
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m starting a seven-year project called Coscience. While this is “my work”, it’s an unusual kind of work in that it’s intentionally not all-consuming.
So I’ll be gradually splitting off blog posts, links and other material that would normally be here — specifically those regarding research methodologies, standards and practices in computational science, and thoughtful worklife — to Coscience and its subsidiary web presences (more about that last bit soon). And keeping Notional Slurry as my main personal blog.
I’ll cross-post as needed.
links for 2007-07-14
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Rediscovered for Ron Jeffries, who is driving to Omaha today.
My new job
“New” in the sense of starting today, of beginning here, now.
Right now. When this post is uploaded.
“New” in the sense of being unprecedented. Unlike anything else I’ve done, and as far as my friends and colleagues have seen it, unlike what’s been done before.
“New” also in the sense of renewal, of becoming better.
I make it sound hard to explain. It’s not complicated. But better if I show, not tell, in the next few days. And I’ve given myself seven years to get my story straight.
A year ago I found that I could answer the question, “What would the ideal workplace be for computational science and engineering?” It would be like a conference. Like an Extreme Programming workshop. Like a glass-walled online laboratory knitted together by deep and wide-ranging collaborations.
It would leave room for generalists, adapt dynamically to permit enthusiasts their passions, and foster productive exploration and innovation. It would somehow balance exploration and exploitation. It would be some kind of “agile research”, reducing the risk of planning and fostering rapid, small releases of useful progress.
Something new, in many ways. Not the Academy. Not Industry. And definitely not consulting. Researchers don’t have customers, after all: we have patrons.
But more than anything else, I realized that we might be able to corral and limit “work” to what we have always imagined it should be: to thinking, exploration, explanation, modeling, simulation, writing, and only the most fulfilling form of collaboration.
Those of us who have worked in industry, in the Academy, we should learn how to keep work from eating our real lives. Those of us who have been consultants—proper highly-paid consultants, like I have been—well, we need to keep our work from eating our customers’ lives.
My ideal workplace is the one that integrates into my real life, seamlessly and innocuously. It’s the place that allows me to do what I can and should do, with grace and style and balance.
It needs to reward me with more than just financial capital, in other words.
So that was a year ago. 13 July, 2006. I stared out an airplane window, and wrote some notes on a yellow pad. I spent the next three months trying to tear the core ideas apart, undermine them, find their weak spots… and it changed deeply and improved. I spent three months in turmoil caring for a dying relative, realizing that our normal lives cannot survive “leaves of absence” and the bureaucratic infrastructure that we’ve built… and it changed deeply and improved. I spent six more months talking, and writing, and throwing away as much as I could… and it becomes simpler all the time.
And for no better reason than anniversaries are easy to remember, today it begins. It’s called Coscience. From 13 July 2007 through 5:30pm 12 July 2014, my job is to change the world and see what happens.
Now I suppose you’ll want to know what it is.
But I’m going to go out on this lovely sunny evening, and spend it with my wife and friends in town. The world will change as easily tomorrow… most of the work’s already done.
Keep that in mind. And go out and enjoy your time as well.
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