Matt Heard

There's a funny scene in John Wick 4 where Wick is climbing a staircase, only to have to fight his way up against assailants. He gets kicked all the way back down, and has to repeat the ascent.

As he climbed those stairs, the music rang familiar. Listening closely, I realized it was a remix, but this was Justice! Justice is one of my favorite French electronic bands, and it made perfect sense since the scene was set in Paris.

The pulsing music of Justice is in line with the film's electronic vibe, and I was just totally loving it.

Related links

• Berghain, Wikipedia (EN)
• "Mr. Manager", clip from Arrested Development, YouTube. ("It's up to me now. I'm Mr. Manager")

Look closer. The right side of South America once snuggled into the left side of Africa. For hundreds of years, since the development of good global maps, we suspected it but didn't know it.

A century ago, geologists too were in a process of upheaval. In 1915, Alfred Wegener outlined this theory in The Origins of Continents and Oceans. But Wegener had more than a map: he had fossils.

Mesosaurus was too little of a croc to swim across oceans, but lived on both sides.

And Glossopteris was a seed fern whose seeds were too fat to blow so far.

Related links

• The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science, by Naomi Oreskes
• Robert Falcon Scott, Last march, Wikipedia (EN), “Next to their bodies lay 35 pounds of Glossopteris tree fossils which they had dragged on hand sledges.”

I'm tired. It's not so bad. Others have it worse. But I'm tired.

Last year was quite a year, but my close friends and family didn't get COVID-19. My relationships have strengthened despite the stress. Worrying about elderly neighbours and isolating with bored children didn't wear me down.

But it wore me out.

Every day is on autopilot with dozens of easy 5-minute tasks left undone for days. A brain fog smothers me from morning til night.

The thing about walking through a fog is that you don't know where it ends. How much further do we have to go?

Free will has a problem. Either one chooses for a reason or for no reason. Either it's not a choice but an effect or it's not a choice but a dice roll. Either way, it's hard to blame someone like that.

The Sixth Extinction surveys human irruption and decimation of other species. It doesn't lay blame. At a species level, the course of human history seems to be a mix of mere causality and being lucky. There's no call-to-action at the end of the book, because it's not clear there is an action anyone can take to reverse human nature.

Related links

• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert, Wikipedia (EN)
• “Baruch Spinoza”, by Steven Nadler, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• “Last Sumatran rhino in Malaysia dies”, by Jason Bittel, National Geographic

Climate change is likely to cause hundreds of millions of extra people to die this century. Billions more will suffer. It cannot be “stopped”. In the face of this, grief is reasonable.

But preventing climate change is not binary: not only success or only failure. It is a matter of degree. With every degree increased, millions more suffer. 6° is worse than 5° and 4°.

In turn, 4° is better than 5° and 6°. With every degree averted, millions more avoid suffering. So, even small actions have tremendous impacts. Choosing to avoid meat, or cycle, or catch a train helps.

Related links

• Ecological grief, Wikipedia (EN)
• Elizabeth Kolbert and David Roberts: Covering Catastrophe

Modularisation in software design is about breaking down simple collections of complicated components into complex collections of simple components. A complicated component acts incorrectly when you cannot understand its internal behavior. A complex collection acts unexpectedly when you cannot understand their external interactions.

All non-trivial software is both complicated and complex, and we can refactor to trade-off between complicated and complex designs. Object-oriented programmers explored these trade-offs for the last few decades and now microservice architects are exploring them too.

Since working with a few microservice designs, I'm starting to see some trade-offs, especially with tracing interactions and serialisation overhead.

Related links

• “1500 microservices at @monzo…”, @JackKleeman
• “How to break a Monolith into Microservices”, by Zhamak Dehghani

I missed the deadline to register to vote in Germany for the European Union elections. I am very proud of having voted in every national and local election I could, until now. I’m not proud of every vote, but proud that I voted.

I have lots of excuses for missing the registration deadline:

• Brexit
• Taking a working holiday in New Zealand
• The deadline being on a Sunday
• Not having a printer for my form

But they’re all bad excuses.

I knew that I could have been eligible, and should have sorted out my registration well in advance. I’m ashamed now.

Related links

• The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells. (“Each of us imposes some suffering on our future selves every time we flip on a light switch, buy a plane ticket, or fail to vote.”)
• “WOW, you have a beard”, by Michael Henry. (“Too busy to have your voice heard, I see.”)

Benjamin Franklin said that time was money. You could have earned ten shillings today, but you spent half of it sitting idle. You only got five shillings for the half-day you did work. To Franklin, you spent (or threw away) the other five shillings in front of the television. Suppose we talk about ten thousand dollars instead. You would likely save a child’s life by donating ten thousand dollars worth of mosquito nets. Have you spent (or thrown away) that child’s life by not fighting for a raise? Or upgrading a good car for a newer model?

Related links

• Against Malaria Foundation

1. What single thing could you do differently that will have the biggest positive impact?
2. When was the last time you should have admitted you were wrong, but didn’t?
3. Did you discover a hobby that you need to make more time for?
4. Are there any books you wish you had read earlier?
5. Any books you wish you had never read?
6. Is there anybody you keep meaning to catch up with?
7. Do you have any good habits that you are struggling to make stick?
8. Do you have any bad habits that you are struggling to drop?
9. Are you happy?

Our daughter is almost two, and we now also have a two-month old son. As I settled him back to sleep after his night feeds, I watched the original series of Star Trek on mute with subtitles. After a great first season I ordered some wireless headphones and continued watching. When they arrived I excitedly set them up, but the sound was jarring; I felt like somebody had taken Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and dubbed over their original voices. Of course I knew these were their voices, but I couldn’t continue watching without feeling like the show had become corrupted.

My favourite Star Trek episodes so far:

• "The City on the Edge of Forever" (season 1, episode 28)
• "The Deadly Years" (season 2, episode 12)
• "The Trouble with Tribbles" (season 2, episode 15)
• "A Private Little War" (season 2, episode 19)

There are three categories of moral actions: forbidden, required, and permitted. Forbidden actions are those which one must not do. Required actions are those which one must do. Permitted actions are those which one may or may not do. When searching for a moral code to guide their lives, people look for a system of principles, justifications, and directions for how to act. This makes restrictive religious standards popular and powerful. Alternatively, if a moral code primarily consists of only permitted actions, people can't use the moral code to make decisive choices because they are given too much wiggle room.

Related links

• Moral Theory: An Introduction, by Mark Timmons
• “Metaethics” by Geoff Sayre-McCord, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

If we assume that the Islamic State coordinated the November 2015 attacks on Paris, it should be quickly obvious that such an attack intended to encourage a backlash against Islamic refugees. The cynic in me entertains the possibility that the Syrian passport found by one killer’s body was a prop to brew distrust of all Syrian refugees. It is unknown whether it belonged to the killer. All of the other suspects or identified killers appear to be Belgian or French. To retaliate against refugees who are fleeing these killers would compound the tragedy. I hope for a calm, measured response.

Related links

• “Paris Attacks Prompt Geopolitical Shift in West” by Stephen Fidler and Julian E. Barnes, The Wall Street Journal
• “There Is Only One Way to Defeat ISIS” by Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
• “Fear and Friends” by Paul Krugman, The New York Times
• “Why ISIS would attack Paris, according to an expert” by Zack Beauchamp, Vox

My daughter Evelyn turns one today. It's a celebration for my wife and I as much as it is for our daughter, so I made cupcakes. I did the mixing with Evelyn. (She kept eating the flour.) I want to show my daughter that baking is not a "mum" activity, and cupcakes have little chance of error. They turned out slightly dry, but still great.

The only party hats the Warehouse had were "princess" themed. I was wanting something more gender-neutral, so I grabbed some gold wrapping paper and covered one. Another day in the life of a feminist dad.

Related links

• Cupcakes, Nigella.com

The second trailer to Jurassic World shows Beth (Bryce Dallas Howard) telling Owen (Chris Pratt) that the scientists have genetically modified a dinosaur to keep the park audiences interested. Owen scoffs that dinosaurs are already interesting. "Corporate felt genetic modification would up the 'wow factor'." "They're dinosaurs. 'Wow' enough." I reacted similarly and rolled my eyes when they mentioned genetic modification in the first trailer, but now think that maybe the filmmakers are commenting on the nature of the Jurassic Park film franchise. The filmmakers clearly thought that the new film also needed something extra to keep their audiences interested.

Immersive virtual reality experiences may be only years, if not months, away. Despite enthusiasts' suspicion and hostility to the announcement, Facebook's acquisition of Oculus gives it a prime position for hosting the Street-like public hub. However, the majority of social interactions will be in private rooms like the Black Sun and Hiro Protagonist's office in Snow Crash. A federated social network could allow a heavy user to self-host and a casual user to connect through Facebook and both share the same virtual space. Rooms could establish realism standards and exclude avatars which break the immersion, encouraging investment in new designs.

If World War III ended with a few scrappy scavengers in a desolate, nuclear wasteland, I can imagine several technologies being easy to rebuild. A wheel is simple and could be crudely constructed by anyone. With some engineering experience, you could likely find the scraps and basic tools needed to build something like a water pump. But could even the greatest engineer in electronics rebuild or repair a CPU? Blunt tools would be insufficient for the nano-scale precision required. Some materials, such as rare earth metals, might be impossible to find. Some technology production clearly relies on multibillion dollar infrastructure.

Emily St. James claimed that Gone Girl is a feminist film, but her article seems more interested in shocking up page views than in making a convincing argument. While I can see Gone Girl as a favourite of MRAs and red-pillers, I see it as a film advancing feminism too. Gone Girl presents a strong female villain which almost never exists. If actresses need better roles to prove they are as talented as men, better roles need to be written. No matter how you feel about the character, it is clear that Gone Girl's Amy is such a role.

I was thinking about victim-blaming and consequentialism as I walked home yesterday and as I crossed a pedestrian crossing, a cyclist was coming quickly down the road. The cyclist stopped to let me cross, and then pedalled hard to regain his lost momentum after I was across. This isn’t very sensible. Cyclists have a much harder time decelerating and accelerating than pedestrians and drivers. Pedestrians should give way to cyclists so that they can maintain their momentum and use rolling stops instead of actual stops. It’s arguably safer, too. Accidents might happen if a pedestrian assumes cyclists can stop quickly.

A student wishes to take a shortcut through a dark alleyway and knows they risk being attacked. They take the shortcut anyway, and get mugged. Deontologists blame the aggressor entirely: the victim had a right to not be harmed. Consequentialists might argue that the student knew the risks and is partially responsible for the consequences of their choice. This is uncomfortable logic. In response we can either (1) reject consequentialism, (2) accept that we should blame victims (at least privately), or (3) refine the consequentialist calculus to stop victim-blaming. Maybe we could argue that optimal consequences require systems of rights?

I try to eat lots of vegan food. The livestock industry produces somewhere between 18% and 51% of global greenhouse gas emissions and eating less meat and dairy is the easiest way to reduce the pollution you cause. Pure veganism, though, can be a chore when you are pelted with advertising for beef and milk. Applying the Pareto principle, 80% of the reduction could probably be done for 20% of the effort, and vice versa. Convince others that 80% veganism is easy and more emissions will be reduced than trying and failing to convince people to go straight to 100%.

Yesterday, I heard that Benoit Mandelbrot had died and I heard the news in a peculiar way. Jonathan Coulton plays an excellent song called "Mandelbrot Set" and I really liked the line

Mandelbrot's in heaven, at least he will be when he's dead.
Right now he's still alive and teaching math at Yale.

I listened to a recent album where Coulton played the song to an audience in Dallas. When he reached the line, he sang "Mandelbrot's in heaven" and then didn't sing any of the rest of the line. It reminded me of my former teachers who had died.

I'm not convinced that divestment from fossil fuel companies is effective. I think the financial arguments being put forth are very convincing: fossil fuel companies likely have a lot of reserves which are going to be stranded as people take climate change more seriously and investment funds which have a long-term focus should be calculating this into their investment strategies. But if the purpose is to starve fossil fuel companies of investment, can it ever succeed? Part of my scepticism comes from a worry that other investors will happily buy the divested shares because their price-to-earnings ratio is slightly lower.

Adam Grant wrote about the scepticism that men face when exploring feminism. ("Was he trying to ingratiate himself with women to improve his dating prospects?") I worry about this myself. What I found most interesting in what he wrote, though, was the effect of inclusive group names and labels. Labelling an organisation "Princeton Men and Women Opposed to Proposition 174" encouraged more advocacy for other genders than "Princeton Opponents of Proposition 174". Feminism is a label used to describe advocacy for women's rights. But it also extends to the promotion of gender equality for everyone. Is the label "feminist" exclusive?

I was sitting by a pool in a sunny resort in Fiji. Next to me there was a piña colada with condensation beading on the glass. And I couldn’t put down The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The pain and poverty of its heroes was jarring against the luxurious, tropical backdrop. After adjusting for inflation, someone in 1937 would need to have picked over half a US ton of peaches to pay for the piña colada I had. Nonetheless, the novel has unrelenting optimism about perserverence through hardship. Meanwhile, Benjamin Graham made 14.7% per annum during the Great Depression.

We are all jacks of many trades and experts of only a few, if any. Despite this, opinions about everything are easy to develop and even easier to publicise. We encounter difficult questions about subjects unknown to us, such as climate science. In these situations, it is unreasonable to expect us to find our own answers. Instead, we rely on experts and we trust their judgment about their topics of study. Suppose that you cannot trust experts; they might be colluding to mislead you. Can you trust yourself to understand the complex topics more than you can trust the experts?

Yashar Ali wrote a good summary of how dismissing women's negative reactions to sexism can make women feel like they are being irrational. There is an unfair stereotype that women are crazy, so if a woman responds to sexism in a negative way, she must be 'overreacting'. Saying "you're so sensitive!" undermines her perspective. Some people see this rejection of women's opinions as inconsiderate, most don't notice it at all. But it fuels a cruel stereotype by muting women's viewpoints, as it seeds self-doubt and self-censoring. If this causes women to be hesitant to speak up, communities lose valuable voices.

I was reading the newly-launched FiveThirtyEight blog today (it's not difficult to notice my nerd crush on Nate Silver) and he used his bookcase as an example of the "trade-off between vividness and scalability". My wife and I have our main bookcase sorted by colour as well, but its size is not quite as impressive. I have been curious about "objective" algorithms for sorting by spine colour because some multi-colour books, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile, just refuse to be cleanly categorised. What about fitting spine rectangles into a 2-dimensional bookcase rectangle, optimising for minimal distance between similarly coloured pixels?

I met my wife playing Dungeons & Dragons. The world-building, improv, and camaraderie made it feel like the perfect hobby for me, but a few factors have caused me to drop it. I'm geographically further away from my D&D group than I was during university (albeit most players still live in the same city as me) and I don't have as much free time to waste on map-making, which was one of the best parts. Finally, the stress from juggling increasingly powerful players alongside expanding permutations of game-breaking abilities burned me out. Even so, I'm feeling drawn to DMing again.

I was scrolling through my friends’ Instagram photos and noticed that most were of girls wearing Black Milk leggings. I rolled my eyes and thought about how overrated they were, but then felt bad. The patterned leggings actually look pretty cool, and I reckon that Instagram has worked well as a word-of-mouth platform. I don’t wear them myself, but I think I might be the kind of person to post photos of how they looked if I did. I don’t particularly care about leggings, but I just thought it was interesting how I reacted negatively to a stream of photos.

One of the sexiest things I've ever seen was one of my best friends impressing a girl by reciting Lewis Caroll's "Jabberwocky" to her from memory. The poem shows why Alice's pair of books are incredibly insightful into the puzzles of language. Half of the words (like "vorpal" and "chortle") are made up, but the words still have meanings (even if Alice doesn't "exactly know what they are"). We derive meanings from context, allowing us to learn new vocabulary. Even when half of the words are made up, we can understand them from how they reflect off of known words.

Where does the line get drawn about what can be said? Dissent? Ignorant hatred? Inciting imminent violence? Trolling religious zealots? I generally believe that the better response to hate speech is more speech, presented in a civil manner, to expose the ignorance of the haters. But how does that protect the victims of hate speech? When racial slurs are aimed at children, how should a liberal respond? A hedonistic liberal would say that liberty is virtuous only for the sake of making people happier. Freedom of speech almost always does that, but I can imagine situations when it does not.

As I hope you have noticed, I put at least as much effort into visually laying out my blog posts as I do into writing them. I carefully use Markdown to format my text and GIMP to shoop my decorative images maybe obsessively. So, when the Tumblr app on my phone strips my drafts of their formatting, it frustrates me. Back when I was a teenager, I would evangelise OpenOffice.org as a reasonable alternative to Microsoft Office, but it was difficult to justify making my documents look nice if exporting to Word was just going to butcher the layout.

Sucker Punch suffers from problems like poor pacing and shallow character depth, but while the form has obscured the message, the message is much more interesting than the story or visual effects. On one side of the coin, you are presented with a criticism of modern female exploitation: these animated exaggerations are not real women -- they are geek fantasies. But on the other side, the film is shamelessly indulging in the very fetishes it criticises. The sucker punch is thrown at the audience, drawing them in to see a video game fantasy, and then reprimanding them by breaking their toys.

A month ago we put an avocado stone and some spring onion stumps in water and placed them on the window sill. They are growing faster than I thought and my delusions of grandeur are giving me dreams of an indoor vegetable farm. My girlfriend bet me that the avocado stone would sprout within four weeks and I bet that it wouldn't. It sprouted a week later. Because I lost the bet, I'll have to run up to the top of the street in my underwear, and I don't know when she will make me do it. Dumb, over-achieving avocado!

When someone is criminally punished only for driving while intoxicated, they are not being punished for an action which caused harm but because they performed a combination of actions which are statistically significantly linked with harm being caused. Due to an element of moral “luck”, it is certainly possible for a drunk or high driver to drive somewhere without causing harm but we still consider that criminal. How does the act consequentialist reconcile this? Argue that driving drunk is not intrinsically wrong? Or develop a possibly convoluted argument for how each individual action of driving drunk somehow causes harm indirectly?

I was arguing/discussing with my future wife about what is considered "art". I believe that the artist's intentions are irrelevant and that whether something is "art" is determined by how the viewer observes it. Looking for counterexamples and illustrations, I asked her: would you consider it possible for a computer program to be "art"? I would, but she wasn't sure. Undoubtedly, almost all computer programs are primarily functional, but there is elegant code and there is inelegant code. Does elegance make code artistic? If it does, I should start a gallery of clips of elegant code from open-source software.

I attended a dawn memorial service for ANZAC veterans this morning and thought about how annual commemoration for military personnel serves as a type of intangible compensation for their unusually sacrificial employment. A soldier going to war risks much more than I do when I go to work, but I do not believe they get a "heroism" bonus in their paycheck. Instead, our social contract teaches us to "pay" them our respect. A similar honour is bestowed upon public servants with life-threatening careers such as firefighting and law enforcement. Do we have a duty to remember and enshrine our valiant?

In "Why I Love You", Jay-Z plays a rapper at the top of the game, frustrated by former followers rooting for his downfall:

Didn’t I spoil you?
Me or the money, who you loyal to?

He alludes to crucifixion

They want me dead

and resurrection

When the grief is over
Beef is over
I’ll be fly when Easter’s over

but admits that

Truth be told
After all that said
N****, I still got love for you.

Jay-Z (and Kanye) conclude by crudely paraphrasing Jesus:

Please Lord
Forgive ‘em
For these n*****
Not know
What they
Do, ooh.

My understanding of compassion in free market economics is that reducing the prices of goods and services through increasing market efficiency will help poor consumers more than government intervention will help poor workers. But there are barriers to entry which are avoidable and are not caused by government intervention. Does aversion to multiculturalism act as a barrier to entry? When a fat, white woman yells "Speak English!" at a Chinese shopkeeper, the shopkeeper pays a hidden cost to continue working. In a maximally competitive market, where race shouldn't affect labour, neither should foreign cultural expression. More tolerance brings more competition.

I took some photos of actors I like when I visited the red carpet today for the premiere of the first Hobbit film. When I was in high school, I rushed with my friends down Kent Terrace towards the Embassy Theatre to see if we could get a good spot to see Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellan, Elijah Wood and others at the premiere of The Return of the King. It was good fun: I remember yelling "Viggo! Viggo! Viggo!" in adoration at the top of my lungs. My reaction was more subdued today, but I enjoyed seeing glamourous actors again.

My future wife and I took were given a free scenic rafting trip down the Rangitikei River for Christmas last year and earlier this year we picked a random weekend to take the trip. That random weekend turned out to be warm and sunny, and perfect for a relaxing drift down a river a few hours away from home. As expected, the escape from the city made us consider quitting our day jobs, even though I haven't even properly started mine yet. I'm definitely more at home where there are paved roads and cellphone service, but I need adventures too.

Whether their leaders admit it or not, Republican losses across the board in US elections of legislative and executive branches indicate a shift away from the Tea Party. But considering the issues needing immediate attention, the Democrat gains are not enough to deserve substantial celebration: the election doesn't solve the problems with the ongoing political stalemate. But there was one clear winner: Nate Silver, who stood at the foreground of the battle between statisticians and pundits, led the number-crunchers to an overwhelming victory. I feel more vindicated as long-time reader of Silver's blog than as an Obama supporter.

After closely following the US presidential election for at least the last year, I am actively avoiding reading any news about the results today. I am attending an "election party" this evening where we will watch the news and tally electoral votes ourselves as the states report their results. Unfortunately, because I live in New Zealand, the party is effectively time-shifted several hours after the actual election. Our party starts at 6pm, when the election will actually be wrapping up (waiting only for inconsequential results from a few West Coast states, Alaska and Hawaii). Thank god for the DVR!

As I showered this morning, I imagined how I would act as police chief in charge of maintaining law and order during an "Occupy Wall Street"-style protest. Balancing the goals of prosecuting trespassers and keeping the peace is undeniably a difficult task, but I think that *perception* of police brutality against protesters creates a Streisand effect by rallying more support for the protesters and encouraging rioters and violent opportunists. Wouldn't it be better to videotape any non-violent crimes (like trespassing) and not evict protesters, waiting for them leave out of boredom? The police can then prosecute peacefully later.

Reading Joseph Romm's Language Intelligence has led me to pick up my previously put-aside interest in practicing effective rhetoric. With my background in philosophy and computer science, I have overvalued the role that unemotional logic has to play in crafting convincing speech. Just as I repeated my lines again and again and again when learning to play Friar Lawrence in school, I have been repeating the lines of Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream". Starting with anaphora and alliteration, I am keeping a keen eye on figures of speech that focus my future approaches to effective arguing.

This Arctic summer has broken records for the least sea ice in recent history. Lots of that melted ice will return this winter, but the total thick ice is decreasing. There are two issues to note. First, this melting trend exemplifies the clarity of the physical evidence for global warming. While Arctic sea ice levels alone do not establish human attribution, they identify much-needed climatic research. Second, the distinction between single- and multi-year ice highlights feedback loops. As more ice thaws and refreezes, less remains thick enough to maintain the albedo needed to prevent extra absorption of sunlight, accelerating warming.

Wouldn't only a narcissist create a website about themselves? I benefit and suffer from an inflated ego, of course. I wouldn't consider my opinions worth blogging about if I didn't. But I don't think that my blog was intended as a soapbox for me to grab attention. 21st century identities are forged much more so on the internet than 20th century identities, and with a blog and a Twitter handle and a Facebook wall and a Google+ profile, I can manage the definition of "Matt Heard" more effectively. If I don't, computers will deduce my personality from my search terms.

I have a habit of reading in sprints, consuming several books in one month and then not picking up any for the next several months. My future wife and I challenged each other to read more by starting from one end of our bookcase and reading each book one at a time. I just finished my second book: Introducing Political Philosophy. I was cheating, though, because it is short and each page has a large picture. But it's interesting and seems to be a good summary of the history of political thought. My next is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.