Last week I read Accelerando, a set of short stories by British science fiction author Charlie Stross. The stories start from the near future (almost the present) and extend to a distant post-Singularity future where humanity lives among the stars, but in the shadows of godlike intellects. Though the entire collection is worth reading (and available for free), the first few stories about a world not too different from our own were particularly interesting. At one point one of the main characters, a very intelligent serial entrepreneur (and “venture altruist”) name Manfred Macx claims to consume a megabyte of text and several gigabytes of multimedia a day just to keep current.

That’s a lot of information for any person to consume in a day – a megabyte is roughly half a million English words. Though this is science fiction, I think we’re quickly getting to the point where people who want to stay current with the pace of science and technology will be required to consume enormous amounts of information regularly. Half a million words a day may be too much for an unaugmented human (Macx has an array of cybernetic implants and software agents forming a “exocortex” for information processing) but I think tens of thousands of words a day will soon become par for the course. And that’s just text. I’m not including understanding diagrams, source code, operations manuals or even video or audio. If we’re supposed to be assimilating such huge quantities of information on a regular basis how are we supposed to make sense of it all?

That brings me to a piece on The Atlantic website dramatically titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“. It’s about how the use of search engines and similar fast information retrieval systems is supposedly rewiring our brains. While some parts of the piece are overly sentimental and melodramatic, the core point is sound: the tools we have access to and the way we use them plays a role in shaping the functionality of our brains. I also sympathize that a habit of continually sampling little bites of information can be deeply unsatisfying. It’s easy to get hooked on to a Facebook or Twitter stream but as you stay hooked you can feel your brainpower wither as you lose the ability to concentrate longer than 140 characters. When I get stuck on Hacker News or Reddit for hours I feel terrible by the end of the day. Though I love good stories and movies it’s easy to get hooked on Netflix, passively consuming information but not really doing anything. But I’d like to believe that we can train our brains to be not quite so helpless in the face of endless streams of juicy tidbits.

A growing body of research is showing that the human brain is an incredibly flexible organ. Neuroplasticity is the norm, not the exception. As the amount of information we need to process increases (and our tools to do so get better) our brains change to accomodate it all. That of course begs the question: how far can we push ourselves? Can we train our brains to not just flit from hyperlink to hyperlink but actually digest and understand large amounts of interconnected material with greater efficiency and accuracy? Can we ensure that Google makes us smarter and wiser, not stupider?

Though our reading habits (and by extension our general thought patterns) might be changing, the change is not accidental nor is it inevitable. Instead of bemoaning the loss of the slow reading habits of yesteryear I think we should be trying to embrace the information-dense world around us. In particular, we need to stop thinking of deep reading and skimming as antagonistic to each other. Perhaps what we need to do is not to read slower, but rather separate the physical act of reading from the mental act of comprehending what we have read. I would love to be able to read text fast, look up links and references and then let the mass of information “ferment” in my brain. I’d like to be able to train my brain to think of what I’ve read after I’m done looking at the text forming connection betweens concepts and ideas while I’m walking down the street or taking a shower.

Perhaps this is an exceedingly computer-science centric way of thinking about the brain and thought processes. To be honest, I’ve been writing code and processing data algorithmically far longer than I’ve been learning about how the brain works. I do tend to think of the brain primarily as an information processor. Unlike the author of The Atlantic article I’m not nearly as attached to the so-called “human” aspect of my intelligence (but that’s a matter for another blog post). I like settling down with a cup of coffee and a good book in a nice armchair as much as the next guy, but only on the weekends. During the week I’d like to come up with six impossible things before breakfast and figure out how to make them possible through the course of the day. To do that I need to keep the information machine fed, creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I’d love to know how to do that better.

When I was taking my creative writing class last semester I used LaTeX to output nicely formatted PDFs to submit and I wrote directly in LaTeX. Though PDFs are great for class submissions and printing I’m very much an HTML fanboy when it comes to publishing online. Unfortunately LaTeX doesn’t seem to export directly to HTML. That’s understandable, HTML still has a way to go before it supports all the beautiful typographic nuances that LaTeX is capable of. There are some LaTeX-to-HTML converters out there, but I couldn’t them to compile on my Macbook. Instead of trying to debug the compile process I threw some regexes at the existing LaTeX source and turned it into fairly semantic hypertext.

HTML is a flexible markup language, but there was some abuse of existing HTML elements involved in coming up with a structure that worked for screenplays. Each piece of dialog becomes a section tag and I’ve really abused the header and paragraph tags. If you can come up with a more semantically “correct” interpretation, I’d love to see it. Anyways, the translation went quickly and with some CSS the result isn’t bad, in my opinion. I converted one of my shorter pieces and put it on my website, if you care to take a look. The whole process took about half an hour including fiddling with regexes and CSS.

So much for taking a LaTeX screenplay and translating it to HTML. But what about writing a screenplay for the web first? By way of inspiration, Stories and Novels is a beautiful site that features complete stories and novels in a beautiful web format (as well as Kindle editions). I’d love to see something similar for screenplays. Now admittedly, people don’t usually read screenplays the same way they read novels or stories, but who’s to say that once the trend starts it won’t pick up (and it would be a interesting experiment regardless)?

Of course, writing HTML (or any form of XML) by hand is not something I would wish on my worst enemy. It’s ok when working on a design and layout but I’d rather not write entire screenplays (or stories or novels or even blog posts) in HTML by hand. Recently, lightweight markup languages such as Markdown and Textile have become popular. They’re designed to be easily converted to HTML and they feel natural to write in. Maybe we could come up with something similar for screenplays? Sounds like an interesting weekend project, I’ll let you know how it goes on Monday.

I’ve never really wanted to be a full-time blogger, not even a technology blogger. I’ve always preferred to be someone who wrote code (or at least studied writing code) and wrote about those experiences on the side. By and large, that’s been true. However the thing is that I really like writing. It’s a good break from coding and thinking about computer science research and I enjoy communicating directly with people instead of machines for a change (which is why I refuse to pander to search engines and write SEO-directed stuff). Anyways, despite my not being a very regular writer this blog has been moving along nicely. I get around 400 hits on an average weekday and that number has been going up steadily. I’ve been on Hacker News more than once and that’s always generated a good burst of traffic.

I’ve also been discovering technologists and scientist writing interesting and very useful blogs. These are people like danah boyd (Senior Researcher at Microsoft), Matt Might (CS Professor at the University of Utah) and Andrea Kuszewski (a researcher at the George Greenstein Institute). I admire their blogs and their writing but I also admire them for being dedicated scientists and researchers. These blogs reaffirm my belief that writing on a regular basis is important (and healthy) for everyone especially if you’re involved in research and development of new technologies.

All that is a way of saying that I would like to blog more. Looking over my archives for last year I’ve only made about one post a week. Ideally I would like to increase that to two or three a week, not including the Sunday Selection link posts (I doubt I could keep up quality for anything more than that). I also want to start tackling more technical subjects. I’ve been talking a lot about the intersection of technology and productivity for a while now, but I’m starting to get a tired of the productivity aspect. Long story short, I’ve found the small set of everyday tools and environments that I need to get work done. For the foreseeable future it’s more a question of being able to stick to habits and schedules than of using the right tools. When I do speak of tools I want to give concrete examples (like my post on showing Git information in your Bash prompt) rather than handwavey suggestions.

On a related note I’ve been considering moving off WordPress.com. WordPress is great if you’re using their web-based interface but is harder to use if you live in Emacs. I’m starting to itch for a writing system that integrates well with Emacs. I’d like to be able to include my own HTML, CSS and JavaScript in my posts and be able to customize things a bit more than WordPress.com allows. I haven’t given much thought to this matter, but I’m looking at alternate systems such as Jekyll and Octopress. Whatever I decide to do I’ll probably test it out at my personal website before doing anything over here.

While this blog is definitely my most serious writing project, it’s not the only one. I took a few creative writing classes in college and enjoyed them immensely. I would like to be able to continue writing fiction (and maybe even get in shape for NaNoWriMo 2012). But for I’ll be content with just regular blogging output. Glad to have you all along for the ride.

While the devices in our pockets might be increasingly powerful general purpose computers I feel like we use them more for communication than for computation. That’s not to say that communication does not require computation (it does, lots of it), but we’re not using our devices with the goal of solving problems via computation.

This is perhaps a very programmer-centric viewpoint of mobile technology, but one that is important to consider. Even someone like me, who writes code on a regular basis to solve a variety of both personal and research problems, does very little computation on mobile devices. In fact, the most I’ve been using my Nexus for is email, RSS reading, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. While all those services definitely have good uses, they are all cases where most of the computation happens far away on massive third-party datacenters. The devices themselves act as terminals (or portals if you prefer a more modern-sounding term) onto the worlds these services offer.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that I want to write programs on these devices. Though that would certainly be neat, I can’t see myself giving up a more traditional computing environment for the purposes of programming anytime soon. However, I do want my device to do more than help me keep in touch with my friends (again, that’s a worthy goal but just the beginning). So the question is, what kind of computation do we want our mobile devices to do?

Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure. One way to go is to have our phones become capable personal assistants. For example, I would like to be able to launch an app when I walk into a meeting (or better yet, have it launch itself based on my calendar and geolocation). The app would listen in on the conversation, apply natural language processing and generate a list of todos, reminders and calendar items automatically based on what was said in the meeting. Of course there are various issues (privacy, technology, politics, corporations playing nicely with each other) but I think it’s a logical step forward.

As payment systems in phones become more popular, I’d like my phone to become my banker too (and I’m not just talking about budgeting and paying bills on time). For example if I walk into a coffee shop my phone should check if I’m on budget as far as coffee shops go and check coffee shops around the area to suggest a cheaper (or better, for some definition of better) alternative. And it doesn’t just have to be limited to coffee shops.

Mobile technology is sufficiently new that most of us don’t have a very clear idea of what to do with it (or a vision of what it should do). Most so-called “future vision” videos focus more on interfaces than actual capabilities. However this technology is evolving fast enough that I think we’re going to see the situation improving quickly. With geolocation-based services, NFC and voice commands becoming more ubiquitous and useful the stage is becoming set for us to make more impactful uses of the processors in our pockets. As a programmer I would love to be able to hook up my phone to any cloud services or private servers I’m using and be able to interact with them. The mobile future promises to be interesting and I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Around the Internet

How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense and 6+ peer-review papers and finishes by 5:30. One of the best and worst things about being in a PhD program is that it is opened: it can take as long as you want it. Though being at a world class research university like MIT or Cornell is certainly a wonderful experience, I’m not at the point in the life where I want to spend more than a few years in one place. I want to do good work, do it in a focused manner without killing myself and hopefully have a life and get done in a reasonable amount of time.

Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect Managing your time goes hand in hand with managing your energy and your activities. In the software world there’s a claim that the best engineers are often ten times as productive as mediocre ones. This article aims to give you some tools to help you on your way toward being ten times as productive.

Why Emacs? I make no secret of the fact that I think Emacs is the best text-editing environment on the planet. This post gives a very straightforward but informative introduction to the question of “Why Emacs?”

Video

Derek Sivers’ Speech to Berklee College of Music I have a tremendous amount of admiration for Derek Sivers. While this speech is geared towards music majors, most of his lessons and advice can be generalized to your profession and life in general. There’s a lot of wisdom packed into a few minutes.

Software

Readability is an awesome tool in the fight for a reading-focused, cleanly designed web experience. They started as a browser plugin that strips a page of unnecessary clutter and presents just the text in a clean, visually pleasing format. They’ve released upped their game with a payment model for publishers, a rich web application and a review-pending iOS app. If you read a lot on the web you probably want Readability in your toolbar.

Steve Jobs in 1982

I was hoping to meet him in person one day. But now I’m going to get back to work. Life is short.

Org-mode is a helpful plain text mode for organizing notes, todos, agendas and even writing in general. I use it for taking notes about academic papers and meetings I go to. org2blog mainly uses the plain-text org format for setting up the metadata for the post — title, date, tags etc. But org-mode also makes inserting links easy and I’m much faster writing with all my Emacs editing shortcuts than I am in a text box in a browser. Org2blog then posts the org-file as draft (or published post) with a single command. I personally just save as drafts and then look at the preview before hitting publish. By writing in org-mode on a single I can also keep local backups of all my posts. Currently each post is just saved to a ByteBaker folder as a separate plain text file but I might put it all under version control at some point.

I have been toying with the idea of moving this blog off WordPress to a more home-brewed setup, but I haven’t been able to justify the time and effort it would take. Might be a winter project to get through the upstate New York winters. Personally as long as I have a trustable backup of all my code and add new things easily I’m fairly ambivalent about how the HTML actually gets generated and presented (especially if it’s done by open source software made by people I like). For the time being I’d rather invest in writing the blog than hacking it.

Society

It’s not gender warfare, it’s math Being a computer science graduate student I’m regularly confronted by the fact that there are not enough women in our field (and that doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon). Here’s a look at why and that needs to change and some work in the right direction.

The Fraying of a Nation’s Decency Sometimes we just need a reminder that we’re all human after all.

Web Technology

10 best @font-face fonts I think embeddable web fonts are one of the best things to have happened to the web in recent years. Think of this article as a good “getting started” guide if you’re trying to figure out what fonts to use for your own projects.

How to make a simple HTML5 Canvas game The canvas element is an even bigger improvement than web fonts. Like the name suggests, it gives you a general purpose drawing element on a web page. Combine that with fast JavaScript engines and you have a pretty decent game engine on your hands.

Video

QuakeCon 2011 John Carmack keynote If you’re interested in gaming engines or high-performance, down-and-dirty programming then you should take the hour and half to listen to John Carmack — the brains behind the Doom and Quake game engines.

Over the weekend I took a few hours to set up a simple webpage on the Cornell CS department servers. While doing that I realized that I didn’t have a template in store for the occasions where I needed to throw together a page without fiddling for hours. I cobbled together a simple design for my page based on my personal website.

The result is Bluebot: a simple template designed for creating HTML5 webpages. It provides a set of CSS styles and web fonts along with some example HTML for writing clean, decent-looking webpages. It’s designed to be used for standalone pages, i.e. single webpages that are complete in and of themselves. That’s not to say it couldn’t be used or adapted for full websites.

Though the template is mostly black and white, there is a little bit of blue used for the borders and blockquotes, hence the blue. It also makes use of the Droid family of fonts provided via Google Web Fonts, hence the bot.

You can see what Bluebot looks like on the Bluebot project page. You can clone the Git repo or download a tarball from the Github page. I plan on continuing to add styling for the remaining HTML5 elements gradually. Feel free to fork, edit and send me a pull request.