Primate Brow Flash

this might be the most important thing I’ve ever read:

It might be assumed that we are always aware of the present, but this is a mirage. Only seldom do we become aware of the present in the precise way required by the practice of mindfulness. In ordinary consciousness the mind begins a cognitive process with some impression given in the present, but it does not stay with it. Instead it uses the immediate impression as a springboard for building blocks of mental constructs which remove it from the sheer facticity of the datum. The cognitive process is generally interpretative. The mind perceives its object free from conceptualization only briefly. Then, immediately after grasping the initial impression, it launches on a course of ideation by which it seeks to interpret the object to itself, to make it intelligible in terms of its own categories and assumptions. To bring this about the mind posits concepts, joins the concepts into constructs — sets of mutually corroborative concepts — then weaves the constructs together into complex interpretative schemes. In the end the original direct experience has been overrun by ideation and the presented object appears only dimly through dense layers of ideas and views, like the moon through a layer of clouds.

link

This describes me every minute of every day. I can’t just eat a carrot. If I eat a fresh carrot, I barely experience the carrot. Instead, I instantly become “Carrot Man” raising and eating his own carrots and spreading the doctrine of home grown food and eventually solving the world’s energy crisis through victory gardens. It would be quite a feat, I think, to eat a carrot and do nothing else.
Right Mindfulness, one of the tenets of Buddhism, is practicing seeing the present. Probably it has the most to do with meditation.

I read in a review that Synecdoche, NY was like Being John Malkovich, only more so. It was the movie I most wanted to blow my quarterly movie budget on. I’m very sorry. It isn’t entertaining or rewarding in any way. Add to that that it is completely indecipherable. Add to THAT that the parts I did understand were depressing. Not funny-depressing in that “haha he’s a loser and life sucks” kind of way, but in that “I took a wrong fork in the road and now I can never fix it” kind of way. The film did this thing which I hope never to experience again: Mess with the timeline so that things you think are just a week are actually years and short trips end up with you missing your kids growing up. And it NEVER ended. This thing must be five hours long. By the end, I felt the sting of lost time much more than the sting of lost money. It still isn’t over, it seems, little time bombs left by the dialog keep going off. The acting was fantastic.

All, ALL the reviewers just adore this film and I guess it is a film and theater buff’s movie. They can stick it.

Since then, I’ve been emotionally able to offer my attention to a movie. It’s as if I broke something important

The coming new world of Burp Proxy:

I often talk to people about their experience with web scanning products, and these are the complaints I hear:

* They are too slow, and provide little feedback or control over what they are doing during scans.
* They try to perform checks that can’t be reliably automated, resulting in too many false positives.
* Even with the core input-based bugs that should be their bread-and-butter, they miss too much low hanging fruit.
* Their issue reporting is often vague and generic, requiring a lot of manual work to confirm issues and produce write-ups that you can give to a customer.
* They are too expensive.

If you would like to see a web scanner that addresses some of these issues, then watch this space. If you would like to see one that addresses all of them, then experience a pleasurable quickening of the heart rate. And still watch this space.

link

Burp employs various techniques to identify blind server-side injection issues, by inducing time delays, changing boolean conditions and performing fuzzy response diffing, etc. These techniques are inherently more error prone than the methods that are available in category #1. Nevertheless, Burp Scanner achieves a high success rate in this area. In fact, based on our pre-release testing, I’m willing to make a bold claim: Burp Scanner performs markedly better than the big commercial scanners that you have heard of.

Portswigger is making lots of outrageous claims about the upcomming version of Burp Suite and I join a lot of others in looking forward to this tool. I generally like the way Rational Appscan does its job, but I also like the inversion of the scanning procedure that it promises. With Burp Suite, you first find requests by hand using the burp proxy that interest you and only then turn the scanner loose. Probably there is a way to do this with Appscan to. I’ll have to check.
<Sound of Burp Proxy landing on heap of other software to test>

I wrote last week about helpful tools for getting rid of unwholesome mind states. The tools require some practice, of course, but they work… except when they don’t.

When I wrote those down last week, I didn’t fully understand the idea. This week’s Common Ground lecture helped me realize the profound change one might bring with those tools. You struggle with the mental states because they never just stay as mental states; they eventually get born into speech and actions. They eventually have effects on your health and surroundings. Your mind creates the world you live in. Apparently this is central to Buddhist thought, but its the first time I really considered it.

I think this goes beyond the pop psychology notion that attitude is everything because Buddhism actually provides these tools to make it happen. In my experience our culture generally expects us to just make it work via slogans and exhortations, without any tools. Press those nails into wood with your fingertips. Tools help. Meditation is the first and most useful tool. More follow.

I rode my bike to meditation last night. I caught a few snowflakes on my tongue. My cotton clothes betrayed me. After I passed through a dark Langford Park, a car came screaming around the curve as I crossed the street. It was clear she did not intend to stop at the stop sign but slammed on the brakes when she saw me. “Slow the fuck down!!”, I screamed. She rolled down her window and said, between sobs, “I’m sorry, but my husband just kidnapped my child and I have to catch him!” and sped off.

I came upon her again a mile later, standing next to her husband’s car, arguing with him. He opened his car door into her face and she stepped back while he got out of the car. I approached them groaning, “ohhhh noooo” as gravity pulled me into this curbside dispute. He opened the back door of his car to reveal a bewildered looking baby in a car seat.
“Say goodbye” he said to the baby.
“Can I help in any way?, ” I offered as if one of their cars needed a push. I kind of wanted to remind them that their actions affected more than just them.
“You certainly can”, said the man, “by moving along”.
I don’t know what I expected him to say. “I need you to punch me really hard in the side of the head and then ride away like the wind?”
The woman waved me along.

I left. People were driving crazy everywhere last night.

Robert Baer, ex CIA agent and the inspiration for George Clooney’s character in Syriana, gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club of California about Iran. Have a listen. It bent some of my understandings about the middle east.

Iran holds many cards: Ability to remove 55% of world’s oil supply from availability. De facto state in Lebanon as they have veto power in the government and control the most powerful military there. They also have 30 years of training in asymmetrical warfare against Israel. We helped by removing their Sunni enemies on either border. 30 years of expansion through religious schools and Islamic humanitarian helped. And street cred in the middle east for being an Islamic republic, for delivering defeats to U.S. and Israel in Lebanon.

With those cards in hand, Iran is preparing for the day we leave Iraq. In the meantime they are building up Hezbollah.

This is a state we should be enlisting as a partner in middle eastern issues, Baer argues, because they are pragmatic and disciplined.

Believing in Iran’s usefulness and pragmatism would involve seeing the murder of Lebanese civil society in the 1980’s as all part of some disciplined Iranian master plan. The crimes of Iran cannot be ignored, but I guess I believe him about Iran being a regional power broker that we can negotiate with. The most interesting part of his presentation was the contrast between the takfiri batshit Sunni militants in Pakistan and the centrally controlled batshit Shia militants in Iran and Hezbollah .

Other points:
Armanidinnerjacket is a nutcase. The man’s simply not rational. He also isn’t in charge.

I guess the takfiri element of the Sunni militants is a symbol of someone who put their beliefs before pragmatism, before the good of their communities and countries. This “my belief” over all else is egotism gone malignant.

I see the same thing in the crash of the Republican party. The Christianists have elevated their beliefs above the good of the party and the country. This is nothing but egotism. They aren’t blowing people up, but the takfiri belief system is strong in them, willingness to be destructive in the pursuit of pushing the self (in the guise of a religion) forward.

That is Jimi Hendrix playing backup on the far left.

My cousin Andy reminded me of a visit he made to our house, probably in 1977 or so:

We were visiting you at Chatham Rd. I was sharing your room. As a bed, your family put a box spring in the room for me.
We arrived late and had only enough time to go to bed.
You were already in bed and the lights were out.

As a joke, you had turned the box spring up side down and tried to convince me that was the way I had to sleep on it.
This of course was impossible since the bottom of a box spring is just a couple of slats.

I turned the bed over and got into bed. We were talking about something and I mentioned some measurement. Like “2 ft.”
I don’t remember the context. You then asked me what I meant and what was “a foot.”

You then tried to convince me that you didn’t know anything about feet or inches. Kids in Massachusetts were only taught the metric system.

I of course didn’t buy it for a second.

This reminded me of when a neighbor kid offered me an orange and I claimed that I had never seen or heard of one before and suspected it to be poison because of the bright color and bitter taste of the skin.

I also apparently told my brother Mike, when he was very small, that dragonflies would sew his lips together. This one was a little more destructive, I admit, but mostly my lies were only destructive to other people’s estimate of my sanity.

Reminded of these things, I am sitting here wondering where the hell I got this rotten habit from. I think it is passed from the McGuire side as there is a story about my grandfather going hunting up in Maine. He didn’t get a deer, so he and his hunting buddies bought and shot a goat and tied it to the trunk of their car. In every small town and gas station they stopped in on their way home to Connecticut, they showed off their “deer” despite everyone telling them that they had shot some poor guy’s goat.

Then there is the story that my dad, while he was in the service, told a bunch of Germans that chipmunks were imaginary animals.

I’ve been saying “memcache-D” so much in the past week that I’ve worn the word round, but realized that I don’t know exactly what it does.
It is an open source program used and enhanced by people at some of the busiest websites. Facebook reportedly has 200 servers dedicated to memcached. It keeps “objects” alive in memory so that the application doesn’t have to go all the way to the database to get information. It is different from database caching solutions I’ve run across in the past, which are functions of the database and vary in their effectiveness. At its most useful, memcached seems to relegate the database to a background storage device while memcached itself becomes the real database, handling a large percentage of the load that the database would otherwise handle.

On a high performance site, the database is going to be a bottleneck and queries will block and the users will wait. Memcached is meant to solve this by storing some of the things going to and from the database as objects in memory. “Memcache never locks” says the website.

Memcached was originally written to help Livejournal’s performance. Thanks to its adoption and further development by others, notably Steven Grimm of Facebook, Memcache has advanced to become an open source star powering many high profile web sites. It now features such as multi-threading and “slabbed” memory allocation.

How does it work?
Here is an inspiring story

The main feature of memcached is how simple it is. It takes as much ram as you want to give it and holds as many of most popular database queries as it can. When a request is made, it checks expiration date on the material. If it is expired, it goes back to the db for fresh information. Otherwise, it delivers the information in memory.

Google Group for memcached users. There you will see basic questions answered as well as people doing advanced things such as forcibly updating the cache with database commands. They also have a good discussion about how a cluster of memcache servers will adjust to one of the servers going down.

As this php example shows, you don’t even really need a database. You can just throw an object (it is serialized first) into the cache and catch it later.

Great article in the New Yorker titled “Suffering Souls” by John Seabrook

In January of 2007, Kiehl arranged to have a portable functional magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner brought into Western—the first fMRI ever installed in a prison. So far, he has recruited hundreds of volunteers from among the inmates. The data from these scans, Kiehl hopes, will confirm his theory, published in Psychiatry Research, in 2006, that psychopathy is caused by a defect in what he calls “the paralimbic system,” a network of brain regions, stretching from the orbital frontal cortex to the posterior cingulate cortex, that are involved in processing emotion, inhibition, and attentional control.

Researchers have been watching the brains of psychopaths as they struggle to answer moral and ethical questions. I believe they can see that the afflicted person is working extra hard to calculate what a normal person would say in response to some of the words and images they are presented with. This extra work shows up in the fMRI.

The inmate was being shown a series of words and phrases, and was supposed to rate each as morally offensive or not. There were three kinds of phrases: some were intended as obvious moral violations, like “having sex with your mother”; some were ambiguous, like “abortion”; and some were morally neutral, like “listening to others.” The computer software captured not only the inmate’s response but also the speed with which he made his judgment. The imaging technology recorded which part of the brain was involved in making the decision and how active the neurons there were.

Neurons in the brain consume oxygen when they are “firing,” and the oxygen is replenished by iron-laden hemoglobin cells in the blood. The scanner’s magnet temporarily aligns these iron molecules in the hemoglobin cells, while the imaging technology captures a rapid series of “slices”—tiny cross-sections of the brain.

I wonder what a psychopath would experience during meditation.

The lecture last night at common ground was about Right Effort.
Buddhist teaching comes suspiciously well suited for bulleted lists in a blog. It was passed on orally for many generations and lists were easier to remember. They didn’t write down his stuff until hundreds of years later.

The Four Exertions that make up Right Effort are:

• Prevent unwholesome mind states from arising
• Get rid of unwholesome mind states
• Encourage wholesome mind states
• Maintain wholesome mind states

“Mind states” just means what is dominating your thoughts. Perhaps you are dwelling on positive things and want a strategy for maintaining them. Perhaps you are caught up in some destructive or circular things, like lust, jealousy, anger, lust or greed … or lust. I think depression, as I have experienced it, can be labeled as an unwholesome mind state.

The Buddha was from a military caste and spoke in military terms sometimes. As a major strategy for the first Exertion, he used the phrase “guarding the sense gates” This includes using good judgment about what you expose your senses to, but you can’t always control what comes at you. Someone might resolve to become a non-sensitive instrument, train their mind to disregard sensory input. The Buddha encountered people who had come up with this very solution and told them they were wrong. The right approach is instead to develop the art of bare attention. This means tuning into the raw sensory data coming in while avoiding attaching meaning to it. This means looking at incoming sensory data as a series of ones and zeros. And instead of thinking “Oh how I hate this sound, or this smell, or this back pain, you think instead, “There’s a One and it is followed by several Zeros” and then you might even start to say, “and Lo! there is a mind right here having reactions to that sound.” This skill develops with meditation.

When the unwholesome mind state already exists, then you are at the second Exertion.
The strategies for getting rid of unwholesome mind states are:

1. Mindfulness. This is really the most powerful and long lasting of the strategies. Mindfulness allows you to see the mind states as temporary. It lets you watch them impassively. Just like the first Exertion, where the direction was to observe raw sensory data, the direction here is to observe the data output by the mind at anger or the mind at depression. But, our powers of mindfulness are not always at hand, so we have a series of blunter instruments that follow.
2. Substitution: Consciously call up another mind state by associating with a person or place or thing that will call up that mind state.
3. Interrogation. This is where psychology might take us. Examine the underlying causes of the unwholesome mind states.
4. Distraction. Go see a movie. take a cold shower. get yourself out of the environment for a time. The Simpsons have saved my ass several times.
5. Pure force of will. Mind Crushes Mind. I’m normally against mind-on-mind violence, but this one, this last resort appeals to me because of the Crushing part. Besides, it is the only one of these I am certified in via cultural tradition.

This was a drug ad aimed at physicians. I found it in book I call “The Tome”. It is a compendium of clippings from alternative newspapers and other sources from the 60s and early 70s.

I am doing penance today for letting the garbage man ( or some lucky thief) take my bike rack. What a freaking waste. I walked by it every day this week thinking I’d better put it away.

Penance meaning finding ways to reduce waste. First, since my printer died and I have some relatively full ink cartridges, I’m giving them away on freecycle.

Second, I just found a link to a service that will contact the phone book publishers to tell them to stop delivering unsolicited phone books:
http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org
Their Caveat:

There is no national no-delivery organization like the National Do Not Call Registry. Individual Yellow and White Page organizations state that you can call them and they will put you on a list to not deliver books. But they are not held liable or accountable if the book shows up anyway. www.YellowPagesGoesGreen .org will contact the publishers with the sign up forms to have them “opt out” the individual or business that signs up. It will be the responsibility of the publishers to act in accordance to the consumer’s demands.

Meanwhile, I’m flogging myself for not taking better care of my shit. Ow.

I had tears in my eyes while I listened to Obama’s press conference today. Everything seems new again, like the first few moves in a chess game.

I’m fascinated by all the choices the president-elect has before him.

I listened to an economist who knows what everyone should do on Fresh Air last night. Some of his ideas are insane. For instance, we should honor the elderly by doubling the wages of the people who care for them. Others weren’t so bad. For example, we have an opportunity now to blow our national budget on massive infrastructure projects such as sewage and mass transit that will create jobs, chip away at oil dependency and create valuable infrastructure that allows our economy to grow. He argued that huge budget deficits and government debts weren’t all that bad and that we should make sure not a single state or local employee loses their jobs.

Won’t we have massive inflation if we just deficit-spend our way out of recession?

He wants to put a floor under falling home prices. He wants a government agency to refinance troubled home owners at the government’s interest rate. That would mean that investors who were sold these packaged mortgages will lose out. He noted that since mortgages were packaged and sold off to other investors, it is impossible to know who is the end holder (end loser) of the debt. A solution like this would require additional laws that prevent those investors from suing to recoup their losses. The whole thing boggles my mind. It seems like he is saying that we have no trail between the home owner and we’d need some kind of general ban on investors suing for losses related to mortgages refinanced by government decree?

He weighed in on possibilities for Treasury Secretary, a very important position in this crisis. Larry Summers was a big deregulator and apparently carries some kind of baggage, Shiela Bair, head of the FDIC and a Republican. Tim Geitner, President of the New York Fed is a tough regulator and enjoys broad support, including noted anti-entitlement campaigner Pete Peterson. If Pete Peterson likes him, then he must be OK. Entitlements are kind of like the opposite of investing in infrastructure. They are like investing in votes. Tough regulator, widely respected, no baggage?, I’m for Tim G.

Kate: ***** uh. what time is it.
TIm: exactly 7:00
Kate: …but we gain an hour today! It is a gift!
Tim: Yup
Kate: I thought that fancy clock was supposed to automatically change itself. I wonder why it didn’t.
–several seconds pass–
Tim: Maybe it did.
Kate: Awwwwwww. I just lost an hour.
Tim: It took all of our combined brain power to figure that out.

I took Maggie on a marathon bike ride today. We rode through the good smells of a grill in Mendota and she started complaining that her stomach was growling. I had various samples of nutritional spooge from the 24 Hours of Seven Oaks trip. “How about some Hammer Gel?” I asked. She began asking me questions about it. “What does it taste like? Why is it in a tube? Why is the tube shaped like a hammer? Why is it called fuel? She finally agreed to try it and found it appetizing. I asked her to tell me when she felt the energy boost kick in. On a long downhill, she yells, “I feel it!”

She got really smart this year and hid her halloween candy in her room. She spend much of the afternoon “reading” in there.