Alex Pooley's Blog

I only happened to come across the <canvas> tag by chance. It’s an attempt to create a better graphics environment for the web. It’s already supported by Firefox, Safari, Opera 9, and Internet Explorer!

There’s a tutorial here. There’s a nifty example here. You interact with the canvas through Javascript.
I’ve grown very fond of Javascript over the last few months. Lately I’ve been playing with Javascript inside Rhino for unit testing purposes. Rhino lets me run Javascript in a shell. It’s even possible to extend the Javascript environment using Java. This means you can read/write files on the system system, etc.

technorati tags:javascript

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Have you ever found that when you’ve procrastinated, something happens, and you’re pleased that you did procrastinate?

This has happened to me countless times! However, since moving out of home I’ve tried not to procrastinate. After three years I’ve achieved varying degrees of success. Anyway, this morning I should have procrastinated but I didn’t. Shame on me!

I turned my PC on, warmed up the espresso machine, and then went back to the PC. Through bleary eyes I read the date on the PC: Fri … 7. “Hrm… time really flies these days“, I thought. Back in the kitchen to make the coffee, I noticed some turkish bread I bought yesterday, 50 cents off, had a use by date of 4 August. Those bastards! No wonder it was discounted, still they just shouldn’t sell out of date stuff…right? Here’s the crucial, non-procrastinating moment. Normally I dump larger rubbish at the end of the kitchen counter rather than in the small kitchen bin, “To be disposed of properly.. later“. But this morning there was already a small pile of rubbish on the counter that I had planned on disposing of.. later. So I collected all the pre-rubbish rubbish sitting on the counter and threw it in a plastic bag, which I then put back on the counter, “To be disposed of properly.. later“.

After making my coffee, I went back to the PC and realised that my Internet connection wasn’t working. It turns out that my ADSL connection was down and NTP had not synchronised my PC’s clock. I restarted the modem/router and then resynched my time. Damn my do-good non-procrastinating self! It’s the 4 August today, which means the turkish bread is still edible and time hasn’t moved that fast!

Thankfully it was possible to revive the turkish bread from it’s semi-binned state.

The moral of the story is that you should put everything off for as long as you can! The longer you can put something off, the more information you will be able to accrue. Some day, it might save you your dough (Ha…).

“We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.”

– LarryWall, ProgrammingPerl (1st edition), O’Reilly & Associates

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I’m a bit of a freak when it comes to self improvement. Not the type of self improvement where you practice yoga, or an obsessive compulsive squeeky clean presentation (far from it these days actually!), but the type of self improvement where you try not to make a mistake twice, or where you passively aim to attain enlightenment without incense, or a religious affilliation.

If I only had a sentence to describe my life principle, it’s to try and see things as they really are. I think people who live this way are more likely to dose up on anti-depressants, alcohol, and cynicism.

Anyway, that’s me. Below you will find a few ideas that have defined my thinking over the last couple of years. If you are anything like me then you will find the stuff below incredibly useful and interesting. If you are nothing like me, then I envy your ignorant bliss but still think you will find the stuff below really useful - consider it homework that I’ve done on your behalf.

Attribution Bias

This describes when success is attributed to skill, and failure is blamed on bad luck. We are generally less skillful than we believe (this is apparantly well studied). 80%-90% of a class of students will rank themselves in the top 50% of the class.



Hindsight Bias

We all know what this is. The problem with hindsight though, is that we can forget that it was obvious after the fact. It is tempting to go on and predict the future, given how obvious it was to “predict” the past.

Survivorship Bias

Say you play a game of heads or tails with 10,000 people. Heads you win and stay in, tails you lose and are out of the game. On average, even after 10 coin tosses, there will still be 9 people left in the game out of pure luck (or skill, if you have missed my earlier point).

Falsification

It can be argued that Karl Popper defined science. He said that something is science provided it can be proven false. A typical example is astrology Vs astronomy. The bit that does my head in though, is it’s relation to the problem of induction. The anecdote typically cited is of the white swan/black swan. Before Australia was discovered (200+ years ago), you could partly define a swan as a white bird. But along comes the discovery of Australia and along with it, black swans! This makes me more humble and understanding of my limited abilities.

One thing that I find extremely interesting out of all of this is that we appear to live in a probalistic and imprecise world. On top of that, we are hindered by natural bias that amplifies all of that.

My thinking is still very muddy. But the above points (and others that
will come to me over time) have influenced my thinking greatly so far. I hope they are useful to you also.

Here’s a couple of entertaining podcasts that touch on the above points and others:

Robert Trivers

Nassim Taleb

technorati tags:philosophy, popper, bias, trading

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