I think about Shakespeare, where it was said he turned in his plays with hardly any blot in them. I somehow do not believe that. I think he revised endlessly, and then made a new clean copy to turn in. And that if other playwrights turn in plays with blots in them, they are likely lazy with rewriting and stingy with paper. I do believe in rewriting and revising. Getting to the "white heat" is about refining the ore until it cannot be refined anymore. White heat could also refer to the inspiration that leads you to just write your first draft without self-criticism, but you must still look back, and you must revise. Even Dickinson's prose is refined.

Then again, it may say more about me than about how these writers actually worked. I am not that kind of person to revise what I have written. I usually write, and leave the first draft unchanged. But, maybe the ideal I've made of prior writers is what I'm striving toward, that after I obtain the ores--the important step--I must edit and edit until it shines with the white heat.

Kubrick probably posited this idea too. He might have broken down the screenplays to their essential elements reflecting him, then he filmed many takes, then he edits for years until the movie repudiates the forge.

To explain, the previous post was not an advertisement. It was trying out the Email feature of the New York Times page, having it sent to post on this blog. But, the New York Times always try to advertise.

Tamim Ansary's Textbook Publishing Controversy

I remember having to carry heavy textbooks, and it made little sense as teachers don't rely on the entire book. Instead, they picked certain chapters, and it would be nice if we had many publishing houses than oligarchic conglomerates. That way, teachers could use a small textbook or several focusing on exactly what they want to teach--everything could be read piecemeal without me having to lug home the meat as well as the fat.

Even last quarter, I bought a textbook called "Principles of Instrumental Analysis" and we only studied 12 chapters out of 34 in the book. Granted, the quarter system had only 10 weeks, but then the textbook should be personalizable to precisely that 10 weeks and what the subject entails. It may be narrower in scope than what a 16-week semester could cover, but that can get its own personal textbook as well.

The Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications textbook is from McGraw Hill, which makes me think of Texas, like Phil McGraw, a very Texan name. Only a fraction of the book were devoted to teaching the said subject in class. It is its own terrible waste of paper, especially in conjunction with needing to "update" textbooks with a new edition every year.

It is the idea to make a profit by updating a weighty tome with only minute changes and jiggling the end-of-chapter questions in order to prevent the teachers from being able to assign problem numbers based on a canonical set. To me, a large textbook should be fairly stable and because it attempts to be comprehensive, it can only be generic. Then there are small books that can be used instead.

(via PZ Mysers)

backward charges

I have been trying to understand how Franklin got the charges wrong,
and I have repeatedly told myself to try to understand how if he had
named it the other way, things would have been much easier. I think I
am beginning to understand.

When Benjamin Franklin was studying electricity, he thought that there
was this "electrical fluid" that existed on the surface of an object.
When rubbing glass with silk, the glass acquired a charge that was
opposite of that obtained by rubbing amber with fur. This were easily
observed when putting two silk-rubbed glasses together--they repel
each other. The same effect was seen with fur-rubbed amber. However,
putting amber and glass together resulted in attraction.

Franklin decided arbitrarily that the glass obtained a positive
charge, that is, it was thought to that the silk conferred electrical
fluid onto the glass. And the fur, in contrast, removed the electrical
fluid.

It was a 50/50 chance, and he guessed it wrong.

In reality, silk actually removed the electrical fluid from the glass,
and fur added it onto the amber. The amber should have been the one
receiving the positive charge, for positive would have been like a
positive number, it gained something. The glass then received a
negative charge, it lost something.

Unfortunately, we have been living with Franklin's choice for over 200
years since his discovery, and there is no practical way to change it.
We say a glass has positive charge because electrons have been taken
away from--and not added to--it.

Imagine if we instead live in a world where the convention wasn't
backward. A world of electricity in which electrons move to a negative
charge because negative would mean that it has less electrons.

Imagine if we wrote a sodium ion as having a negative charge, meaning
it lacks one electron that would make it neutral. Imagine if we saw
sulfate ion as SO4 2+, with a positive charge, meaning that it holds
two electrons, it is positive of electrons. And we could be talking
about electropositivity rather than electronegativity when referring
to the tendency of an ion to be electron-greedy. So, looking at a
water molecule, H20, we can say that the oxygen side is more delta-
positive and the hydrogen side is more delta-negative because the
oxygen loves electrons and is taking them away from the hydrogen.

The confusion over reducing a compound meaning to add electrons to it
could have been eliminated, since it is instead negative, and we add
electrons, which are positive. We could have called it incrementation,
not reduction. Redox reaction would have been called something else.
Indox, perhaps.

But alas, that is not the way of this world. And with each passing
day, the scientists are dead-set on this inefficient path and will not
change.

On the other hand, the counterintuitive labeling could be helpful to
programmers who need to understand the concept of abstraction, the
idea that a variable can be separate from its meaning. So for example,
we can say a bobcat is a dog as long as we redefine dog contradict its
current Anglo-Saxon meaning. Naturally, this could be unambiguously
used in the local namespace, but not the global.

My thoughts on Milk on LiveJournal.

Sun’s VirtualBox

Maybe Sun needs to start working from a profit motive again, rather than giving stuff away, charge for them and their improvements.

 

 

Sent to you by Alan via Google Reader:

 

 

Sun’s VirtualBox

via Daring Fireball by John Gruber on 4/8/09

VirtualBox is: "a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL)."

I need to use this for a certain project I'm working on. Admittedly, I'm not using it in any "enterprise" sense, whatever that means. I'm just using it as a desktop virtualization system. But from that perspective it strikes me as inferior to VMware Fusion in every way. An inferior product given away for free — is it any wonder that Sun is in trouble?

 ★ 

 

 

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