Dear UofCS, it's really too late to be talking about light bulbs

Union of Concerned Scientists asked:

> Choose the one that best describes how you spend your free time:

  Working in my garden and tending to my lawn.
  Lying on a beach or teeing it up on the golf course.
  Playing in the snow or reading a book by the fireplace.
  Playing video games or watching the latest blockbuster.
  Enjoying a book on my e-reader.

Hi UofCS, I love your work. However, this particular question misses the mark.

You see, as I matter of fact, I do not spend my free time in any of the activities you have suggested. I spend my free time advocating for bold climate change mitigation policies. I spend my free time teaching the science of global warming, or writing articles describing the science of global warming that draw hundreds of thousands of views. Such as this one:

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/reo35/the_discussion_of_climate_change_is_so_poisoned/c45ciej

Your current messaging suggests that this problem can be solved via individual actions. You and I both know that is not the case.

China will build enough coal-fired power plants this year to relegate all our lightbulb changes to a footnote. There are powerful interests at work who are bent on burning every pound of fossil fuel available on this great Earth, in the name of their own profit. Turning down our living room's thermostat will do naught to stop them. We have to consider the stark reality and ask, what will it take to stop these people from destroying humanity, from destroying themselves?

We need to teach the science of global warming which such conviction in our voice, and with such unbearable clarity, that our fellow Americans will join us in Washington the next time. They will have to courageously stand to be arrested in the mist civil disobedience actions, along with me, my friends, and McKibben and Hansen.

How does talking about light-bulbs-talks helps this? I don't think it does.

I would invite you to consider pivoting to a different messaging frame for your next cycle.

Teach people the science. Teach them the true extent of the dangers of the A1B scenario we are tracking at the moment. Then teach people how to teach the science and find them stages and audiences. Teach them how to defend those who teach against the brutal slanderous attacks of our opponents. But above all, teach them that if we are to you get out of this crisis, they will have to be more implicated in the politics of their country than a mere vote every two years.

Me, Dragon NaturallySpeaking at 70 WPM

This is a video of me dictating the text of this blog post.

I posted a longform article on how to use Dragon on my blog, which you can find here:

http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2010/09/dictate-to-your-computer-like-pro.html

The short story is, modern dictation software works out-of-the-box. Forget about training, there is no training anymore.

With a fast CPU, lots of memory, a solid-state hard drive, a good microphone, and good pronunciation, you can effortlessly hit 100 words per minutes, or more if you happen to be the kind of person who talks quickly. I even know a number of people who have discovered themselves as authors thanks to the productivity-boost of dictation.

It does not take a crazy machine. I have a HP EliteBook, a i7 M620 2.67 GHz CPU, four gigs of RAM, and a Intel SSD. Perhaps the most important piece is the microphone. I used to have a Sennheiser headset microphone, which was great at cutting off the voices of people talking around me in the office. But then I switched to a self-standing USB microphone because I would rather not have something on my head all day. You can find it on Amazon.

The point is, the dictation is great.

In the video, I'm giving you a sense of how quickly I correct the recognition mistakes as I go along. I don't bother with "scratch that" or Dragon's other correction commands. You can see how I use the mouse liberally and I jump in with the keyboard when I know Dragon won't hear the word I'm about to type. The only words Dragon did not know about were i7, M620, and EliteBook (which I added to its dictionary beforehand). Everything else is built-in.

After dictating, I quickly scan the text correcting the mistakes, missing one ("it" instead of "hit").

All-in-all, it took 3 minutes to dictate about 200 words, including all the fiddling, which adds up to 66 WPM.

Here's what a real liberal solution looks like.

Create a nation-wide network of government-run daycare. This cost $100 million. Net result, lots of competent, talented women who wished to get a job but couldn't because they couldn't afford daycare now get jobs. These women pay $147 million in taxes from their new job, which pays back the $100 million the government started with, and let it lower taxes by $47 millions. Everybody wins.

A Libertarian would never think of trying this.

But in Quebec, it's the first thing you try.

So, you want to learn how to program and build a website

Generic advice for non-technical people who are contemplating starting a website project. It's generic advice, but it's important.

There is a level of complexity that cannot be built without learning about the technology, not at any price. Technology is a funny thing, there is a point where throwing money at the problem cannot substitute for actually knowing the technology. I would say in the last 10 years, this effect has become even more powerful than it was before.

It's pretty common for people to try to start technology-based businesses by hiring programmers, but that fails because if you don't understand the technology, you can't control the programmer's work. Programming is a peculiar craft. There are no discipline where the information asymmetry is larger. When a programmer tells you "I promise I'll be ready next week", you have no way to verify whatsoever, unless you have significant technology training yourself.

If you have trusted technology friends on board, then you are good to go. So long as you don't need to hire programmers, you're golden.

But look at how many people it took to build kickstarter. I guarantee you most people on this page are elite technologists. Building website gets real hard, real quick, knock-your-socks-off quick even. Or look at Padmapper. At first view it might appear to be a rather simple website. But the guy who built it is MIT Computer Science '07. He lists as programming languages: Objective-C (iPhone/iPod Touch), SQL, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, JQuery, Java, C, HTML, CSS, Google Maps (see PadMapper), Microcontrollers. Again, not someone who spent the last week reading a web page on how to program. We're talking about top-of-top-line, world class programmers. These people cost $100'000 to $200'000 a year, but you probably can't hire them because they are too busy starting their own thing, and even if they weren't, people like that don't work for people who don't know tech. That's how hard this stuff gets.

There are three paths forward for non-techies:

1. Associate yourself with trusted techie friends who believe in you and will work alongside of you (you can't be their boss.)
2. Start brainstorming ideas for businesses that aren't so tech-heavy.
3. Learn a lot of tech.

And of course, the more of #3 you do, the more techie your #2 can be. Otherwise, Wordpress goes a long way, even in the hand of someone with limited tech knowledge. And if you take a short course on web technologies, it should empower you to make Wordpress sing with all its got.

The good news is, as a 2nd reason for why programming is a peculiar craft, it is actually possible to learn how to program at a professional-level without taking classes. But not everyone can pull it off. So, if you are going to take a course, get the most out of your money. Which means, try to learn as much programming as possible on your own before starting the course.

Good resources:

• Try Ruby
• Code Academy
• How can I learn to program in Python (at Quora)
• Khan Academy's programming course

There is no need to spread wide. Pick one teacher (a single book, etc) and follow them for a while. The first task in front of you is to learn how to program. Once you know how to program, you can pick up 10-20 languages easily. Learning a new programming language is super easy, learning how to program is hard.

If you are in for the long term, and you want a principled, in-depth, Computer-Science-y approach, then learn with Racket as a starter language, then transfer to a popular pro language.

•   This is the Racket book, and this is WeScheme, the tool to write your programs with. 

Instant run-away-from-this voting system

The rumor is that the Liberal Party of Canada has just voted in caucus to support a switch to instant runoff voting (IRV). With IRV, you rank the candidates. Once all the votes are in, candidates are eliminated one-by-one from the bottom, until someone wins.
That's good news, IRV is a vast improvement over first-past-the-post. Except it is not the best system. It is too complicated -- enough that the UK's tentative to switch to IRV failed, in part because the pro camp couldn't explain it --, it has some trouble spots, and a simpler system performs better.

Check out this fantastic visualization of the differences between the different voting systems. IRV, like first-past-the-post, will sometimes elect someone nobody really wants.

Approval Voting

Instant Runoff Voting

In the images, the dots are candidates, and the colored regions around the dot label the range of pooling results which leads to that candidate winning. Under IRV (right-most image), the red, the yellow and the blue candidates all intrude on pooling space that ought to belong to the green candidate.
A better alternative is approval voting: people vote for as many candidates as they want, then the candidates with the most votes wins. It is simpler at the pooling box -- no need to tediously order the candidates -- and vastly simpler to explain.
Here's how things went when I found myself describing these two voting systems (at different times, in different working groups):

---

Approval Voting

-- Vote for however many candidates you want. You can vote for one, for two, for some of them, or for all of them. However you want. The person with the most votes wins.

-- Ok.

---

Instant Runoff Voting

-- Don't worry what IRV means, just list your three favorites candidates. Spot 1 is for your most-favorite candidate (don't be confused, it doesn't mean 'Spot 1 receives 1, points Spot 3 receives 3 points.') When all the votes are in, your vote will go to your #1 candidates. If s/he doesn't win, s/he's out of the race, then we count again, but your vote now goes to your #2 candidates. And so forth, until there is only one candidate left. That person is the winner.

-- What do you mean "And so forth?"

-- I mean it's an algorithm and we had a programmer code it into a computer because the old people who volunteer at poling places sometime don't understand it.

-- confused look. I don't understand. Can you explain it again?

---

That's why I would rather advocate for approval voting. IRV is near impossible to explain to a non-algorithmically-inclined mind. Its opaque name echoes its complicated procedure. And it for all its trouble, it has worse mathematical properties than approval voting.

How to turn a Python loop into a Clojure 'reduce'

This is my answer to this Stack Overflow question.

I wrote a simple stack-based virtual machine in Python, and now I'm trying to rewrite it in Clojure, which is proving difficult as I don't have much experience with Lisp. This Python snippet processes the bytecode, which is represented as a list of tuples like so:

[("label", "entry"),  ("load", 0),  ("load", 1),  ("add",),  ("store", 0)]

pc = 0
for inst in code:
  if inst[0] == "label":
    label = inst[1]
    self.labels[label] = pc
  else:
    self.code.insert(pc, inst)
    pc += 1

I'm going to give you a general solution for these kind of problems.

Most loops can be done effortlessly with a strait forward map, filter or reduce, and if your data structure is recursive, naturally the loop will be a recursion.

Your loop, however, is a different kind of loop. Your loop accumulates a result -- which would suggests using reduce -- but the loop also carries a local variable along (pc), so it's not a strait reduce.

It's a reasonably common kind of loop. If this was Racket, I would use for/fold1, but since it's not, we will have to shoehorn your loop onto reduce.

Let's define a function called load which returns two things, the processed code and the processed labels. I will also use a helper function called is-label?.

(defn load [asm]
  (defn is-label? [x] (= (first x) :label))
  {:code <<< CODE GOES HERE >>>

   :labels
   <<< CODE GOES HERE >>>
  })

Right now, your loop does two things, it processes the code, and it processes the labels. As much as possible, I try to keep loops to a single task. It makes them easier to understand, and it often reveals opportunities for using the simpler loop constructs.

To get the code, we simply need to remove the labels. That's a call to filter.

  {:code (filter (complement is-label?) asm)

   :labels
   <<< CODE GOES HERE >>>
  }

Reduce normally has only one accumulator, but your loop needs two: the result, and the local variablepc. I will package these two into a vector which will be immediately deconstructed by the body of the loop. The two slots of the vector will be my two local variables.

The initial values for these two variables appear as the 2nd argument to reduce.

   (first
    (reduce
     (fn [[result, pc] inst]

        << MORE CODE >>

     [{} 0] asm))

(Note how the initial values for the variables are placed far from their declaration. If the body is long this can be hard to read. That's the problem Racket's for/fold1 solves.)

Once reduce returns, I call first to discard to the local variable pc and keep just the result.

Filling the body of the loop is straight forward. If the instruction is a label, assoc into the result, otherwise increase pc by one. In either case, I construct a vector containing new values for all the local variables.

     (fn [[result, pc] [_ arg :as inst]]
       (if (is-label? inst)
         [(assoc result arg pc) pc]
         [result (inc pc)]))

This technique can be used to convert any accumulator-with-locals loop into a reduce. Here's the full code.

(defn load [asm]
  (defn is-label? [x] (= (first x) :label))
  {:code (filter (complement is-label?) asm)

   :labels
   (first
    (reduce
     (fn [[result, pc] [_ arg :as inst]]
       (if (is-label? inst)
         [(assoc result arg pc) pc]
         [result (inc pc)]))
     [{} 0] asm))})

(println
  (load
   [[:label :entry]
    [:load 0]
    [:load 1]
    [:label :exit]
    [:add]
    [:store 0]]))