Timmyson

There is an idea that in order to understand something, an entity must be as complicated as the object being understood. This idea is frequently used in intelligent design theory (I use the term loosely), and was most recently brought to mind by this comic that Bogdan shared on Google Reader (I interpreted this as "As a product of my code, I cannot understand it).

However, I would suggest that understanding may be simplified through abstraction, whereas designing requires access to all the details, and thus, it is not impossible that the sum of parts may come to understand why it is. Complexity may be handled piecemeal, and is thus resolvable. The only problem which remains is storage of the knowledge, a problem which can be helped with the compression that comes with abstraction (i.e. the details can be reconstructed from a more limited knowledge set) or archived outside the entity in references (including other entities).

I'm going back through some notes that I've kept of stuff that I may want to blog about. I haven't been terribly motivated lately, so I figure I need to do something to get the juices flowing.

How Plagiarism Software Found a New Shakespeare Play
To me, this is a fascinating example of positive technological subversion. I consider Plagiarism-detection software mildly odious. It is a capitulation to the fact that teachers are insufficiently smarter than their students to be able to catch them cheating, or engineer their curricula in such a way that cheating is more difficult or impossible. I also believe it is an ultimately futile battle. At best, only the low-hanging fruit will be caught (chool becomes an education in cheating well?).

However research (and the money for it) being poured into it, and is opening up new ways for scholars to characterize work. It is important to note that while the title is "How Plagiarism Software Found...", the guy is also a Shakespeare scholar and also used "his own expertise". Stuff like this opens up our understanding of how we perceive and use language. I suspect anti-plagiarism stuff, and other anti-cheating work (like Captchas) will contribute heavily to the field of cognitive science.

The obvious question which was not addressed in the article though, is this: How do they know that it isn't a Shakespeare plagiarist? They're relying on occurance of signature phrases, which seems like an intuitive thing to copy pay homage to.

I had an extremely productive day at work today, but that was because a tonne of things went horribly wrong, and I successfully dealt with most of them. They went wrong due to the carelessness of other people, which made me especially frustrated (didn't discover this until the end of the day, so the middle of my workday was unblemished by this), and the latter half of my day was spent working in a 27 degree environment which was so much fun. So now the company is treating me to a really nice restaurant (the next time certain people come to Granby, I'm totally bringing them here, also, my waitress speaks literally no English, so I'm apparently improving at this French thing). What I'm trying to do is convey the grumpiness with which I left work.

So I'm biking home, feeling grumpy, on relatively back roads. I'm cognisant of a mild, after-dark sketchiness, which is accentuated by the loitering youths all over the place in this town after dark. In this case, I'm passing a pair, one on roller-blades with a hockey stick, one on a bike, who seem to turn just ahead of me, as if to anticipate my path (also interfering with traffic). I started contemplating whether I was riding too quickly to be intercepted, what I might have by way of weapons, and how to comport myself if I am accosted. It's not so much that I actually believed something would happen, but I have a strong tendency to fantasize tangential futures, and when I'm feeling grumpy, I fantasize bad futures in which I kick lots of ass, literally.

So I'm riding along, my mind is elsewhere, and my water bottle slips out of my bag. It's from lemonade, so it's not a big deal but a)I have a strong aversion to littering, b)it's heavy plastic, and I like it, c)it's been really valuable for me, as I've had a very mild throat cold since the weekend. So I pull over and stop, with a sigh, while part of me goes, "Yeah, that's a great idea with sketchiness around, you're increasing your odds of being a target of opportunity." and another part goes, "Don't be stupid. And besides, you're a 6' adult male."

As I turn around, the kid on roller blades crosses the street towards my fallen bottle, and glides up to hand it to me. I said, "Merci beaucoup." He said a more elaborate version of "De rien." And I rode away in a much better mood, with my bottle tucked more firmly into my bag.

Driving back from Montreal last night, I listened to As It Happens. It's a great show, with the right mix of light and serious stories, and usually decent depth of coverage. It seems like they're doing a little more of the comedic side of things, but I don't mind when they produce gems like this from here (audio versions available too).

SC: SWINE FLU ELECTION Duration: 00:01:25


You can say this about elections in Canada. They are frequent. They are costly. And lately, they've had the odd effect of having almost no effect on the make-up of Parliament. Yes, there are good reasons for Canadians to sniff at the looming possibility of another election. And here's another one: They're downright bad for your health.

Or they could be. The Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada is concerned that politicians could be spreading a lot more than catchy slogans if they hit the hustings this gall: they could spread the flu. The problem is, when you shake hands with politicians, you're shaking hands with every person they've shaken hands with before. Same goes for baby-kissing. In fact, H-1-N-1 has this in common with most political diseases: it can be easily spread orally. And forget meetings in church basements and bingo halls. They are more likely to promote high fevers than partisan fervor.

What is a poor -- and possibly infected -- politician to do? You can't turn your nose up at your opponent if it's dripping all the time. Maybe the time is ripe to try a new way of doing politics. A different style of campaigning. Maybe politicians could try gaining support from a distance. Perhaps less time in their ridings and a little more time at the office. And to reduce the risk of spreading anything unpleasant they could all vow to stick together, in one place, for awhile. Like say Parliament Hill. Who knows? New ideas like this are sometimes contagious.

[Cue the usual excuses about not posting as frequently as I would like]

I read Neurologica on a regular basis, but this one is especially fascinating. It's not a terribly large study, but it's an interesting idea, and has explanatory power, with respect to differences I'd noticed with Asian vs. Western emoticons.

Somehow I missed the spinning girl illusion, up to this point. I came across it in an interesting article on the neurology of out-of-body experiences.

This illusion is unusual for me because, usually with two-image types of illusion, I can force myself to switch back and forth, but this one is totally involuntary. I can stare at the image and try to convince myself that she's rotating one way or another, but it doesn't work. The first time it switched, I was reading "counter-clockwise", but no amount of reading the word clockwise would reverse it for me, and then suddenly she was spinning the other way.

I think this is awesome.

A couple people have referred to Liberal-biased media recently (and other people have been chafing at it a little bit). Here's an idea I've been throwing around for a while:

Preamble

Bias is impossible to perfectly separate from the objective facts, because reporters are always making judgements about what facts to report. This isn't necessarily serious, and it isn't necessarily bad, but should be guarded against.

Pervasive bias is a much more serious problem, for all the obvious reasons (see my post about CHCH).

Theory

There seems to be a pervasive left-bias because journalists (and the journalism consuming public) fundamentally find the story of the underdog more compelling.

The story of Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation while starving to death, is more compelling than the story of Western-ish Israelis trying to stamp out terrorists who have little by way of weapons, but no discrimination about targets.

The story of some rag-tag protesters taking on whalers, or loggers, or smoke-manufacturers is more compelling than the story of some rag-tag protesters interfering with the functioning of one large company or another.

It's more compelling to talk of poor, sick people being denied medical care than the diminishment of economic agency through greater taxation of a large number of people.

And thus, a left-wing bias is born, not from a philosophical stance, or irresponsible journalism (though this contributes), but because it's much harder to have a right-wing bias (CTV tries sometimes, but Fox takes the cake, and then tells everyone that the Democrats did it).

This week's Superstore flyer, page 11. "Tylenol easy to open" is on sale. Once upon a time, being hard to open was a selling point.

Well, I don't take it all back, but I feel considerably friendlier towards Linux tonight. And less friendly towards Excel. Think of this as the LJ equivalent of "which do you want first?":
( Good Linux Experience )
( Bad Excel Experience )

I enjoy playing in Linux quite a bit, and it's my preferred operating system for doing programming. I like VIM, and the control it affords when I'm programming. However it (at least Ubuntu) has a number of serious shortcomings that need to be addressed before it can become an alternative even for a fairly sophisticated user like myself, much less a mainstream alternative.

• It needs to be able to handle more than a handful of audio streams at once, like music, IM notifications, and game noises, without that bubbling sound effect or just muting one of them


• For that matter, it would be nice if apps controlled their own sound levels, rather than relying on a global mixer slider, so one program isn't pegged to five times the volume of another. And having a smaller constant for the logarithmic sound would be nice too, so five percent of the slider isn't the difference between "can't hear" and "can't ever hear again".


• Graphics drivers need to work all the time. 95% of the time isn't good enough. They need to be bulletproof. And they need to not conflict with the window decorator, precluding playing any OpenGL games, ever.


• The GUI needs to work all the time. 95% of the time isn't good enough. It is unacceptable that every twentieth startup, you need to restart the X session because the desktop didn't load (even if it is a cool Star Trek sort of scrambled-screen effect.


• When upgrading distros (like, say from Feisty to Gutsy, or Hardy to Intrepid, for completely random examples), your upgrader needs to be fucking invincible. When trying to get additional functionality, the fact that with no user involvement at all (like while the user sleeps), your system can catastrophically ruin itself presents a really strong demotivator for continued use of the operating system in question. I watched a movie (mplayer) only while the packages were downloading, and then quit before they were done. That was all I did during the upgrade progress, but when I got up this morning, there was a message that the graphics driver had failed, and the system was completely locked up. The first time I did this, I made the mistake of clicking the wrong button, effectively aborting the upgrade, except that was a capitol offence.


• And the recovery tools that are supposed to help, should do so, at least some of the time.

It's not like my Windows XP partition is flawless. Stuff crashes from time to time, I need to unplug and reattach my wireless mouse at 90% of boot-ups, and the % downloaded indicator for Windows Update doesn't work. Also, a lot of the tools that I have for it (like anything to do with PDF's) have fewer features and are less useful than Linux. But Windows is the OS I can rely on. It's very difficult to cause any significant damage (recovering from sabotage was really easy, where it would have been terminal for Linux).

So I signed up for a really cheap internet provider for my new place, because, well, they're cheaper than everyone else, and certainly much less so than Bell or Rogers. Related to this (I'm pretty sure it was because of them, there's some dry-loop magic that needs to be done), a Bell technician was sent over (without any warning, so I couldn't leave the door unlocked or anything) while I was at work and couldn't get in. So I called him back (as per directions on the slip in my door), and he said to call 310-BELL, because he didn't have access to the ticket any more, and so couldn't help me. I did (from my cell phone, my only phone), and got channelled into mobility (not my fault, it was automatic). The (Indian?) lady explained my mistake, and promised to transfer me to the right number. I went through the menu again, again with no option to choose landline or cell, and got another (French?) guy, who explained MY mistake, and gave me a 1-800 number. I called the 1-800 number, and actually got a menu from which I selected "related to home phone" (and that was confirmed), and got another guy (Anglo-Canadian?) who said I had reached the mobility department, and I needed the landline department, and promised to transfer me. The last (I've stopped caring) guy tells me that "over here" they don't have access to the technical database, and he can't help me, but that I should call 310-2355 (go ahead, look up the letters that correspond to those numbers, this page isn't going anywhere). At least I feel vindicated in eschewing Bell.

And, for the second day in a row, I carried a set of plates/bowls etc home from the store (1km), only to find one broken (certainly not cause of me, I didn't drop them or bang them or anything). Certain parties will be swooning over my muscular arms this weekend.

At least my pierogies turned out well, so the night's not a total write-off.

I came across a number of captchas in a Slashdot post about a file sharing site giving up user information to German authorities. There were several interesting comments there, including one which sounds very much like valacosa's voice toward the end.

Later on in the comments, there's one with a few screen captures of captchas. The first of which I found amusingly hard. The other is well beyond my mathematical understanding/patience, these days. The final link was to a little rant about captchas. Which got me thinking about other forms of captcha.

I read a while ago that often the "accessible" captchas, based on audio or other low-vision clues were actually easier to solve. It made me wonder about other more human types of captcha.

"Select the most attractive face" - Maybe not, beauty has a lot to do with symmetry, right? So a computer might have an easy time of that (though the lopsided grin/smirk seems to contradict that).

A quick succession of shiny/slimey choices? That should be relatively easy for a human to figure out, based on their knowledge of the world, but they often get mixed up by visual clues (people expect snakes to be slimy). But, how many people have actually touched shiny bugs or snakes? kait_the_great has some work to do before that one's feasible (can't find pictures on kait_the_great's or valacosa's blog.

I very recently watched When Harry Met Sally, so I'm not going to make that suggestion.

A two-stage "accessible" one: You type in your name or a minimum length of text, and a sound is played with a lot of random conversational noise, and you click when you hear the clip with your name. Might be a bit complicated, but capitalizes on the human ability to pick out key speech.

Maybe something to do with emotional content, like images of crying children, dying fuzzy animals, cats adopting rabbits, tearful reunions, and you're asked to select the happiest, cutest, saddest, whatever image. I suppose that's still vulnerable to bots one fifth or so of the time, because beyond that, it would get difficult to get a consistent human answer.

Just throwing some ideas out there.

EDIT: Should have mentioned, Theory of Constraint was developed by Eliyahu Goldratt, and is part of the Theory of Constraints. He lays out a lot of this stuff in The Goal, but I'm also drawing on his other books, company training, and, most recently, Synchronous Management by Mokshagundam Srikanth and Michael Umble.

Let's say you're a one product company. You have extremely predictable and reliable sales (1,000,000 widgets/year, $1 each), material costs (50c/widget) and overhead (total $400k/year). Your production process has only one stage, and that stage is used to 50% capacity (you are limited by the market). It should be fairly obvious that your company is making $100,000/year.

By Cost Accounting (the way companies usually assess products), take your total operating costs, divide by the number of items produced, and add the result to the material costs per widget to get the cost of producing an item, i.e. 40c+50c=90c, the total cost of producing a widget. Salespeople believe that selling widgets for anything over 90c is profitable.

However, all the operating expenses are fixed, and will not vary significantly with the number of widgets produced, so in fact, selling another 1,000,000 widgets at 60c apiece, a "loss" results in double profits.

($1-$0.50) * 1,000,000 + ($0.60-$0.50) * 1,000,000 - $400,000 = $200,000

Throughput Accounting does not include fixed costs in the price per item. Only those costs which vary strictly with the number of items produced (called "Total Variable Costs" (TVC)) are included.

Throughput = Sales - TVC

Throughput/Widget = $0.50 for the first contract, and $0.10 for the second.

Net Profit = Throughput - Operating Expenses

So you make sure that your Throughput covers your Operating Expenses, and you're profitable, with the only additional constraint (in the mathematical sense) that your Throughput must be positive.

This is a vastly simplified example. The problems which arise from sales and cost variability, multiple products, and complicated processes are dealt with by other aspects of the Theory Of Constraints.

So long as a company is producing a single type of item at a single cost (not different prices for different customers), Cost Accounting and Throughput Accounting give the same information and result in the same sorts of management decisions. Additionally, it makes for easier decisions to assign a single "marginal" number to gauge the relative value to the company of different products. TOC has a number of different metrics which try to provide better guidance (though so far, they seem to be less cut-and-dried).

In an attempt to fix this, other cost models have been put forward, dividing the operating expenses up on different bases. Instead of dividing by the number of widgets, divide by production time required for each widget, the worker-hours, the machine-hours, certain parts of the cost etc. This is called Activity Based Costing (imagine a consultant saying, "It's easy as ABC!"; oh those silly consultants). However well one of these systems might model a specific production process, they all fall into the same trap of dividing up a cost that isn't really divisible.

In order for Cost Accounting to work, any proposed change can only be evaluated by A)recalculating the costs for each product for the whole system (and reevaluating profitability in that new context), or B)assume that operating expenses are negligibly small compared to totally variable costs. A) removes the ease-of-decision advantage of cost accounting, rendering the Cost and Throughput Accounting models just as tedious. Though I would question the degree to which B was ever true, I have no data to back that up (Synchronous Management agrees, also without citing data), nor do I know how to look it up. At least nowadays, Operating Expenses are a huge part of the business model, and must be considered if the accounting system is to give reasonable guidance.

As usual, I welcome feedback, criticism, and especially flattery.

From Synchronous Management, a book I'm reading for (and at) work:

Every time a significant gap begins to form, the commanders in charge of the column can prompt the soldiers to close ranks by running. ... [T]he soldiers in the first row have to compensate only for their own actions. This accounts for the desire of all experienced soldiers to be in the front of a column when required to participate in extended marches. (Of course, in a war situation, there are different priorities, and the optimal position within the column changes.) (pp.78)

I've got several posts mostly written, and I think I might be able to polish one of them sufficiently tonight. I've really been letting my posting slide lately.

I also saw a bit of a rerun of This Hour Has 22 Minutes yesterday morning, a rerun, which I found rather amusing. A middle aged lady dressed up in red leather like Xena, and ambushed Prime Minister Harper coming out of a meeting. She called him hard and stiff, and said she doesn't normally object to that in men. She wondered if he had a wild side (he responded awkwardly that his wife wondered the same thing). She ran her fingers through his hair, and tugged his tie (whereupon he tried to fix his hair and tighten his tie). The whole time his body language was telegraphing that he didn't expect this, and was not comfortable with what she was doing (though he checked her out a couple of times with a vaguely disgusted look).

Can you imagine a comedic reporter making lewd remarks to the US President? Ambushing him outside a meeting, and being allowed to conduct a 5 minute interview? Laying their hands on his person and altering his dress?

We live in a funny country.

There a problem with the environmentalist movement. Actually there are several, but this one in particular is bothering me at the moment: Environmentalist means are confused with the ends.

On the way to work (or the GO station, in today's case) I listen to Classical FM. They've got two mildly inane hosts on (Mike and Jean) but occasionally they're diverting. They've got a "Classical Commuter Quiz" every morning, with prizes of medium value, but I'm not about to call in while I'm on the road.

Today's was "There is a special event coming up this Saturday March 28 in the evening. What is it?" This one was unusually easy. Of course the answer is Earth Hour, the stupid event in which people turn off their lights (no mention of other electronic equipment in the other publicity I've read) for an hour. The caller got it right and won ballet tickets or something. Mike said, "Yeah, it's kinda fun. We've done it for a few years now, we turn off all the lights and light some candles." What an idiot.

This is symbolic of much of the movement for me. A groundswell of people around a particular issue (recycling, CF bulbs, reducing grocery bag use) and the issue the end, rather than the means. People seldom question the efficacy of these projects in achieving the ultimate goal of environmental harm reduction, even when there are significant harms to the issues. Recycling: litter caused by wind and many items are too dirty, improperly sorted, or uneconomical to recycle. CF bulbs: Mercury inside should be disposed of carefully (i.e. not chucked in trash). Grocery bags: Grocery bags, which are relatively light (break down more easily) will be replaced with bought (at expense) other types of bags for garbage disposal and other purposes. I'm not saying any of these problems are insurmountable, just that they should be considered, but they're not.

Environmentalists are like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, they build a groundswell to take the action they want, and then can't stop it from going to the extreme.

Went cycling for the first time this year. It was awesome, even if I did have to walk 1.5km after the only free air pump I could find in fact let all the air out of the tire.

The pre-Empire Roman Calendar was really, really messed up.

J. Michael Straczynski, the mind behind Babylon 5 (you know, the show with the horrendous acting, but with a great science fiction and political-science fiction setting), has had a really interesting life.

Hmmm, there was a related set of other really brief things I wanted to mention, and now I can't for the life of me recall. Ah well. Goodnight.

I've been going to three-day workshops for training in the company philosophy. There are 17 people in my group (which stays almost the same from week to week), some from my office, and some from as far away as Quebec, New England, and Indiana. There are cool effects I'm seeing from such a broad range of backgrounds and locales coming together, which I'm going to post about in the future.

I still don't really know a lot of the people who are there (though I did better this week than last). Tonight, one of those who I don't know well just friended me on Facebook.I'm kind of a loudmouth in the class, so I think people might know me better than I know them. I suspect valacosa can sympathize with this situation.

There's a significant level of ... discomfort, I guess, associated with this for me. I have no problem with this guy; he seems intelligent, polite and friendly. There are other people who I've friended who I don't know particularly well; that's not the issue either, though it does contribute. I'm also sanguine with my social spheres overlapping. I tend to be pretty friendly at work, and plan to invite several of my coworkers to my housewarming party (there aren't many big beefy guys at work, so I don't think I'll invite any of them to help me move, unless we become better friends quickly).

The problem is that I strongly associate Facebook with childish attitudes. I think through most of my childhood, I've perceived keeping track of other people's friends to be a juvenile practice, often associated with the petty politics of the schoolyard. Even though Facebook has lots of practical "adult" (I'll explain my use of the term in a moment) uses, like mail, event co-ordination, and distribution of contact information, the lack of privacy has always made it feel like a kid thing. When I decide not to attend Video Games Live! everyone knows it, with the assumption that people will make decisions based on this information (i.e. "I really wanted to go, but my really good friend hates him, now that I know he's not going, it's safe for us to go."). The third-party transparency of it seems to stray into other people's business, and that sort of thinking belongs firmly in the "childish" category for me.

That doesn't entirely mean I eschew it. After all, I'm still on Facebook. I have issues with using it for mail (realistically, it's got all the functionality of 90's era e-mail, but with so busy an interface as to be frequently unusable on a spotty or slow internet connection), but I have been in who's-got-more-friends contests, and I do send pokes from time to time. I've got a real dissonance between the kid and adult parts of my life. On the one hand, I build popsicle-stick bombs, bring Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day to my office, whisper in class, and think about what I'm going to do when I grow up. On the other hand, I work basically a Nine-To-Five job, think wearing a tie to work is important, plan how to fit grocery shopping and laundry into my weekly schedule, and watch for the best opportunity to take advantage of the stock market.

It is worthwhile to note that I don't consider an "adult" life to be superior to a "kid" life. When I talk about childish behaviour here, I'm talking about stuff that kids do, rather than stuff they should grow out of. I plan to hold on to both of these sides of my life, to some extent. And even the stuff they should grow out of often serves a purpose at some point in development, I'm sure.

The dissonance comes out of the overlap of these two perspectives on the world which I have not yet been able to justify with each other. I get the same thing every time I refer to my coworkers as men and women. Referring to them as such means that, since I'm more or less their equals, I too am an adult, even though I very much think of myself as a kid. It's not as bad as it was a year ago, but it's still a source of awkwardness for me. When I'm at work, I often feel like an impostor, like people will describe me as "precocious".

---

I just noticed the "Adult Content" drop down, when I spell checked this. I feel an urge to select "Adult Content" for the perversity of it.

I learned how to print bar codes, and printed off a quick example for my boss on Monday morning. I got a "Whoa, already?" response, which was pretty darn satisfying. That left me with little to do for the rest of the day (I had flow charts for the plant I was going to tour Tuesday, but nobody expected me to do anything more than glance at them).

My cubicle faces onto a block of accounting cubicles, so I've developed a bit of a rapport with a few of the ladies there. They've been swamped all week, trying to tie up loose ends for the month end. On Monday, one of the ladies' sons was with her (he'd been sick, didn't go to school, but was basically fine) because she couldn't afford to take the day off work. So I took him off her hands for the afternoon.

We had a great time. Hot chocolate and popsicle-stick bombs (well, coffee-stirrer bombs) for the most part, then I was showing him how to play flash games on my computer. To his mother's (I suspect) relief, he didn't really get the hang of the bombs, and was more keen on me building them so he could blow them up. He was very polite as well. There was a really cute moment when he pointed out (on our way back from obtaining coffee-stirrers) that he was walking with his hands behind his back just like me.

The superlative moment, of course, was this morning when his mother related a conversation they'd had, about his best friend, Tim.

So how do you top that, really?

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I'm no longer the newest hire (by two or three at least, I think), and since the average company service is so low, I've been in a real jump-right-in sort of situation. I did an integral for my boss today, I've been contacting a company to get a machine parsable version of some information, and I've been trying to set up an Enterprise Resource Planning system. Not bad progress on all fronts for the first real work week.

And people are incredibly friendly. A guy I met for the first time on Monday or Wednesday made a friendly crack as I walked by today about my popsicle stick bombs, so I tossed him one on the way back to my desk (worked perfectly). Back to training next week.

In looking for a plastic bag yesterday evening, and finding my grandmother's large stockpile, a thought occurred to me: The driving force in my grandmother's life is fear. Not necessarily, terrifying sorts of fear, but it ranges from mild anxiety to panic. She's heard that grocery stores in Toronto are being legislated to charge for bags, and fears that this will come to pass in Oakville too, so she stockpiles. She fears running out of dishwasher space, or it not having enough soap, so she runs it often, and with way too much detergent. Fear of financial loss, fear of incapability, fear of imposition on others. This sometimes leads to a very secure position, financially for example. A big part of our dynamic these days is me trying to allay those fears which I think are unreasonable (i.e. all of them, either categorically, or by degree).

Which got me thinking about the driving force in my life. I think it's rationality. I find it very difficult to settle on a course of action where I cannot demonstrate a better or poorer option (house hunting, eesh), and I put very little value on emotional factors in decision-making. I regard emotions as apetites, which can rationally be satisfied (damn you Aristotle, or was it Plato?), but must be assessed as such in a rational process. And I second-guess everything, which some of my friends find extremely irritating (which I can understand, and have tried to limit). However I feel that the virtues outweigh the negatives of this outlook, and though I often fail to be strictly rational, it is the rubrick against which I judge myself.

And I think I've known others (though I think I've known few well enough to form an opinion) who define themselves, knowingly or not by these or other principles, and there are very few characters for whom this is not true. Anger. Revenge. Sensualism. Public-service.

Which begs the question whether this is remotely reasonable. Is it accurate for a real human being to be thematically pigeon-holed like this, or am I looking through too thick a filter, and taking a driving force to be qualititatively different from one of driving forces. (For that matter, is my self-perception of rationality in fact a tendency towards hypocritical rationalization?)

I welcome all thoughts on the matter.

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I have had little internet at home, so I've been somewhat limited in my communication activities. I'm trying to fix the problem on a long term basis. However like some other fix-attempts you hear about these days, it's not going quickly.