Archive for April, 2010

An Insight into the mind of a former deviant

April 30th, 2010

The title is scraped from the link text I used to describe an article I wrote in 2004, during my first semester of college. I think I did it to satisfy a creative writing class assignment, only it wasn’t particularly creative since it was true. Reading it now, I take particular pleasure in the bits about “violently opposing” government intrusions into the internet. (I miss youthful indignation, self-righteousness, and the joys of masquerading as a rebel.)

It is also poetic in a semi-tragic way that, within a few weeks after writing this and resolving to “make a lot of money while doing something truly worthwhile,” I was diagnosed with cancer. It’s been nearly six years, but it looks like I might soon start making good on that promise.

The following is copied verbatim from the internet archives of that article.

Understanding the spammer

By A Former Spammer

As a spammer, I never gave much thought as to what I was actually doing. My world was filled with statistics describing my latest spam campaign and the zeros to be inscribed on my check. I did not consider the work I was doing to be damaging to anyone because as a spammer you do not see the human aspect of things.

My average day would begin around 1:00pm. I would lazily wake up and stumble to my computer to determine what I had earned overnight. This startling effort on my part was followed by breakfast while watching the afternoon presentation of Law and Order and the occasional shower.

Eventually, after my lethargy subsided, I would get to work. Contrary to the popular perception, spammers do work hard. My goal was to make money by deceiving internet service providers who have a bigger bankroll than I did. I had do be both clever and unethical. Luckily, I had every advantage. Receiving a few messages about enlarging your respective body parts is considered a far lesser evil than not delivering that message from your stockbroker about shorting AOL Time Warner.

After coding for a few hours and trying a few minor changes on my messages, the message would eventually get through and I would exploit it until my computers would groan from exhaustion. After that, it would be time to reboot, load another mailing list, and spam some more.

While the computers continued to churn out my utterly misleading messages, I had the delight of dealing with other spammers so I can keep propagating my unsolicited and generally useless product. At first glance, spammers seem to have an innate friendliness towards each other but it is completely superficial. You have to manage to get the resource you are seeking from someone who perceives you as a further source of cash. Spammers will mislead spammers just as the mislead the Send To recipient. There is no honor among thieves.

Eventually, I would get my new mailing or proxy list and the whole process would start again. I had a routine and my bank account went up in cartoonist intervals.

If it is not already apparent, this is quite a job of a seventeen year old to have. My friends were all slaving away at the local McDonalds while I was sitting in my air-conditioned bedroom eating grapes in my boxer shorts. They were making minimum wage, I was making thousands a week. Also something to keep in mind, I was a mediocre spammer.

Understand, the majority of spammers enter the industry because it is so simple and for a decent programmer the entry cost is near zero. One of my first spam exploits utilized a popular web-based messaging service and twenty free http proxies resulting in $7,000 profit in a mere two weeks. What incentive did I have to stop?

Well, I am nineteen now and I no longer spam but I can tell you I still had no real incentive to stop other than my maturation. I no longer want to make money; instead, I want to make a lot of money while doing something truly worthwhile. Something ethical. This is by no means a message of hope to the internet community. No one should be so ignorant to state the spam problem will just work its way out or reach some type of equilibrium. Spam will not go away until one important criterion is reached; reduce the profit margin made by spam. Government regulation is not the answer. The internet started as a great democracy and I will violently oppose any attempt to remove this system. This is important to keep in mind considering the recent legislations passed by the United States government. The internet community coupled with good programmers and willing consumers can prevail in the war on spam. Ironically, I am now fighting on the side of the white hats.

Signing my name to something for the first time,
John B Nelson

Getting Konqueror to Work with Facebook

April 29th, 2010

Facebook redirects Konqueror to Facebook mobile; I assume it sees WebKit and thinks IPhone. Until facebook corrects the identification error, you can use Konqueror’s settings to fix the mistake.

Navigate to http://www.facebook.com/facebook?ref=pf.1

Go to Tools > Change Browser Identification > Safari > and click the highest non-IPhone version you see. (On my computer, this was 3.2.)

Konqueror Facebook Screenshot

Konqueror Facebook Screenshot

Enjoy lightweight browsing.

  1. The setting we are changing will be applied to a domain. Since you cant get to facebook.com otherwise, you visit this page so that the modification is applied correctly.

Why I Blog

April 29th, 2010

Sometime last year, I had started maintaining email correspondence with a number of people from a diverse set of professions. Whenever I had an idea or a question that I was unable to fully flesh out or answer myself, I would find someone who was an “expert” on the topic and email them. Initially, I received replies, but they were terse. Courtesy dictated that they answer — especially those at academic institutions – but they felt no obligation to continue the conversation.1

As time progressed, my messages became more finely crafted. My questions were more specific and the background material was assembled with more clarity. I learned to write better.2 The act of writing diligently was in and of itself helpful, and writing with a critical reader in mind imposed diligence. I now offered value to the recipient, whereas before I was at best a nuisance. My ideas and alleged insights were at least well-formed, albeit not always novel. The recipients began to answer out of interest instead of obligation. The correspondence ceased to be one-sided — now, I had conversations and debates. At the point when I started BCC’ing people, I realized it would simply be easier to continue in blog format. Instead of updating a few people with a follow up email, they could just revisit the post and look for edits or comments; instead of emailing the same group of people every time I had a new idea, they could just add me to their Google Reader.

Like many nerds, I have attempted to create many blogs. (A small set, limited only by those I can recall instantly, includes: JustLikeJesseChasingSparksjbn, and JohnBNelson.) Previously, I started blogging motivated by either AdSense or vanity — I wanted either money or attention or both. My interest in blogging waned shortly after the ubiquitous “Hello, World!” post and immediately before I found anything interesting to say. This blog, PathDependent, is the only blog of mine that has not floundered after one week — and it’s the only one where money and fame were never motivators.

Assuming I write reasonably well, my blog posts get attention. Attention by itself is useless at best while attention with comments is very valuable. There are limits to what I see in my own writing and thought processes. An idea may have such appeal to me that I completely ignore very relevant, seemingly tangential details — or major mistakes. Commenters — especially those that I do not know and thus have no requirement of politeness given anonymous commenting — have become unit testers for my ideas. Without commenters — private or public — I would not maintain this blog.

I blog because it helps me learn.

Notes:

  1. Looking back, many of the emails resembled a parent handling a child who persisted in recursive “but why?” conversations. I’m almost embarrased by some of the messages.
  2. HackerNews is probably more responsible for improving my writing than anything else. Conversation threads with karma acts like a unit test framework for ideas expressed in English.
  3. I am defining success in terms of how it helps me explore ideas. The metric I use to judge success is the number of email messages elicited by each post.  I usually get a handful per-post now. While my traffic stats are beyond my expectations, traffic is valuable only insofar as it improves the odds of good feedback.

Who is missing from this disease?

April 26th, 2010

Edit: Josh Sommer directed my attention to How a Healthcare Company Can Accelerate Translation of Scientific Knowledge to Practice, which was mostly what I had in mind.

The mainstay of drug discovery is automated molecular screening, dose-escalating response curves, and clinical trials. It works, but it’s painfully slow and expensive. Meanwhile, patients with both chronic and acute diseases are continually given drugs with known efficacy. This has been going on for a very long time. Certain cost conscious elements of the health care system — health insurance companies — keep detailed records of this information on a per-person basis. I called up my prescription benefits provider last week and they provided me a copy of my historical prescriptions without a problem. I assume this is true of most, if not all, providers. I think these data could be very valuable.

For instance, I have (although there is no evidence yet of recurrence) a rare disease called Chordoma. If a sample of the Chordoma population’s drug histories were collected, certain inferences could potentially be drawn. Given known incidence rates for diseases, you have certain expectations. If you know 1:100 people taken should have had rheumatoid arthritis1 but they are under-represented or missing, two things are possible2: people with Chordoma do not get rheumatoid arthritis, or people with rheumatoid arthritis take drugs that might incidentally treat Chordoma.

Does the sample of patients’ drug histories conform with expectations? If not, why? Considering the cost of clinical trials, this seems like it might be a low-hanging fruit, especially for patient-led non-profit research/advocacy organizations. I recognize that a straight-forward pre-existing drugs regiments are unlikely to be curative, but they may hint at promising avenues of exploration. (For example, does the group taking a drug for RA seem to have slower disease progression.) Such hints might not be possible to derive from in vitro and animal models.

Note: I am neither a medical researcher nor a medical doctor. I am just a guy whose reach exceeds his grasp. I took a cursory glance at PubMed and asked around to a few researcher friends of mine to see if they knew of anyone who tried what I suggested. So far, I found no evidence that this has been attempted. If someone wants to correct me, please leave a comment. If you know someone who might be able to correct me, please forward them this blog post. Thanks.

1. Adjusted for Age, Ethnicity, Sex, etc.
2. Well, several things, but two relevant to my argumen
t.

Intelligence is NOT Normally Distributed

April 20th, 2010

At first glance, it seems as though a person’s IQ would be a reasonable proxy for intelligence. The faculties tested – pattern matching, logic, spatial recognition, etc – are strong tools for grasping truths, relationships, facts, and meanings. However, viewing them as tools illuminates an important caveat: tools must be used, properly wielded, and maintained.

Now, assume that the genes and biologically relevant environmental factors that are responsible for innate intellectual capacity are effectively independent. I am neither an expert in biology nor genetics, but this seems like a reasonable assumption (see note below). Elementary statistic will show that the distribution of the product (or sum) of n normally distributed variables is normally distributed. Hello, bell curve.

However, it is one thing to assume the biological factors responsible for innate intellectual capacity are independent. It is an entirely different matter to assume that the non-biological factors of intelligence are dependent on neither the biological factors nor time, effort and accumulated knowledge!

Employing reductio ad absurdum and the Einstein as the poster-child cliché: what would Einstein have been if he was isolated at birth with no social interactions or mental exercise offered? Again, I am not an expert psychologist, but I think it is reasonable to think that he would not have amounted to much – and would probably have been insane.

Without stimulation, your mind will atrophy. With a predominance of erroneous information feeding your mind, it becomes diseased (in the abstract sense.) Having strong biological machinery may be a necessary precondition for being “very smart,” but it is certainly not a sufficient condition. I do not think I am conflating knowledge with intelligence. The ability to learn — to grasp truths, relationships, facts, and meanings — is conditioned upon an individuals existing knowledge. If things that are taken as given are erroneous, errors ensue. Errors have a tendency not only to accumulate unculled, but given intellectual path dependency, results in a higher probability of accepting more falsehoods as truths.

As intelligence is conditional upon many factors chained together, it is more gamma than Gaussian. There are far more dumb people than polite company cares to admit; there are also very few very intelligent people. Contrary to what I often prefer to think there are intellectual giants. They exist at the intersection of favorable enviroment, genetics, motivations, and opportunities. Feynman was not only smarter than I am now; he was smarter than I could potentially ever be.

Note: Some prominent geneticists have suggested that intelligence may be geographically and racially dependent. These people are usually lambasted — promptly.  Even if this was found to be true, I don’t think the deviation between means would be large enough to matter.

P.S. This post was not me saying IQ tests are useless. My IQ is big. Ladies, you’ll love it.

P.P.S. I started writing this a while ago in response to a friends politically charged assertion, “Democrats are Smarter than Republicans.” Initially, this was a private email response to him. However, I became more interested in the non-political part of my response (i.e. IQ is not normally distributed.) I made my politically-oriented part — Democrats are Smarter Than Republicans — into a seperate post in an attempt to maintain the integrity of my central thesis while lessing the probabilty of Goodwin’s law asserting itself.

Hacking Women and the Delusion of the Ethical Pickup Artist

April 7th, 2010

The self-declared ‘Mystery‘ treats courtship as an interaction between a man and a finite automata, the woman. His eponymous method — the Mystery Method in promotional materials and MM to its adherents — essentially instructs adopters on how to crack a woman’s instinctual suitable-mate, pattern matching machinery to elicit (false-) positives.  The ad copy proclaims it to be a brilliant self-help book and it is often billed as a way for shy, nice guys to get girlfriends. Ostensibly it is — in practice it’s not. This book is not about getting girlfriends. It’s about substituting sexual frustrations caused by lack of sex with sexual gluttony.

If you are, or at least believe yourself to be, a good man, acquiring the tools to overcome your own social phobias and a woman’s strong, evolutionarily-endowed defences is both self-improvement and mutually advantageous. Unfortunately, I doubt that this group dominates his readers. Instead, I assume the majority of his customers are men lured into reading his books because doing so offers the promise of getting laid by any attractive woman that falls under their gaze. (Even in Neil Strause’s best-seller, The Game, some of the PUAs seemed border-line sociopathic.) The subtitle of the book is devoid the ethical girlfriend pretence: “How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed.” The language used between the covers is more telling: women are (Hot Babe) HB7’s, HB8’s, HB9’s, and HB10’s. People buy it because they want to turn the fantasy world of pornography into their reality.

I am not saying this book is without value. On the contrary, I find no fault in the efficacy of his methods in the context of cracking women nor do I think his ideas on “social dynamics” are erroneous. From an evolutionary perspective, his narrative is plausible, even probable. After years of what appears to be meticulous study, he impressively reverse-engineered women. Unfortunately, the few good, albeit shy, men admitted into his realm, if they are astute readers, are probably perverted by their education. The original goal of finding a girlfriend turns to an addiction of cracking women — to “The Game.”

Mystery might counter that this is justified because it is natural. It is merely the product of evolution. If it wasn’t his readers, it would be the guy who is naturally manipulative or happened to accidentally posses or learn social procedures that get him laid. However, something viewed as natural or an artifact of evolution (or history) is neither moral nor beyond morality. Society enforces certain protocols to correct some of our biological quirks and inadequacies. As Mystery says, “the human being is an out-dated model.” Thankfully, our ability to share knowledge and socialize has supplemented our operating systems. Cracking our biological systems violates our socially constructed protocols. It is blatant manipulation. He admits his theories are based on a woman’s evolutionary drive to find a man that ensures her survival, while in the next breath he explains how this can help you get between her legs. ”Hacking” (i.e. in the colloquial sense that pisses off proper hackers) was cool at age 13; hacking is not cool at age 25 — it’s criminal.

I find no fault in youthful promiscuity. Oscar Wilde could have written a novel about my college years. It was part of my development as a person and I have (almost) no regrets. However, I always had some recognition as to the vapid nature of what I was doing. Mystery and his pickup hucksters want to nullify that socialized feeling, feeling themselves justified by our selfish genes and tribal heritage. Do there techniques work? Sure, but at a heavy cost. Years later, you might finding yourself watching The Blue Lagoon on Starz at 3:00am, realizing that you haven’t felt the feelings that the movie depicted — intimacy with consequence — since before “correcting” yourself.

…And you’ll realize you made a mistake.

P.S. I suppose it seems hypocritical of me to lambast Mystery and his cohorts. I have obviously read their material. However, I consider myself to be a hacker: I enjoy learning for the sake of learning. Whether it be an exposition on syntax-directed translation or pre-Raphaelite painters, I am curious. It could be correctly observed that understanding leads to, or is tangled with, exploration and exploration can lead to exploitation and corruption. I offer no counter-argument. In my case, I only hope that the temptation is attenuated due to previous experiences (i.e. college promiscuity) and increasing maturity.

P.P.S. I should also point out that I think Mystery — the media superstar of the pick-up artists — actually seems like a good guy. Sadly, I think he may be condemning himself to the second circle of hell, figuratively speaking. I think he genuinely believes that he is helping shy but good men in his workshops. I just think his readers — and best students — are probably predominately horny assholes turned oversexed assholes. Adverse selection is a bitch.

Nigerian Scam with a Haitian Context and a Dash of Medical Sympathy

April 6th, 2010

I just read the following from my gmail inbox. It’s probably one of the most offensive scam messages I have seen in a while.

Dear Beloved,

Please treat this mail with utmost sympathy and the fear of God. i write this mail with tears and sorrow; I am not asking for self pity, but love to my only surviving son. This mail may seem very painful and sorrowful, but there is more you can do in my request than to pity me, which is to show LOVE to my son. I am the only issue of my dead parents, i am 54 years of age.

My name is Mrs. Cynthia Rice, married to the late James Rice, who died with our two daughters in Haiti on 13th of January 2010 during the Haiti Earthquake, Please go to website:http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/01/13/haiti.updates/index.html,Since after this painful and sorrowful incident, my illness, Pericaditis (inflammation of the tissue layers surrounding the heart) and Uremia (kidney failure) aggravated which resulted to heart failure.I was ignored by my friends due to my present health predicament. Presently, my only means of communicating with people around me is through body language and writing as instructed by the medical specialist.

I, my husband and our children have been in United Kingdom for a long time due to my medical treatment. My husband and 2 kids decided to travel to Haiti on 29th December 2009 for a 2 weeks end of year vacation, but my doctor did not permit me to travel with them, which made I and my son to stay behind while my husband and our two daughters traveled. If not, all of us would have perished in the disaster.

The reason i write this mail is due to my deteriorating ill health. After my last diagnosis result, it was reported by the doctors that I may not live for more than one month ahead, due to the damage this ill health have caused in my system unless I undergo an urgent surgical heart and kidney transplant which my chance of survival is less than 10% according to the medical experts. As it stands, I have given to fate and have found God on my sick bed. But I have a more pressing problem, which is why I have to Contact you.

Please, this is about my son, his name is Jeffrey. Since it is now obvious that I will die, my son’s future have been the greatest problem I have. I want you to take care of my son please. He is only 10years old and we have no one here to take care of him if I die today.My friends deserted me a long time due to my health condition .
My Husband left some money (About US$8.5Million) in a deposit house at United Kingdom at Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which we have been using for my medical treatment. I am the next of kin / Beneficiary but according to the prediction of the doctors, if i pass on, I will want you to use the balance of this money to take very good care of my son as i would have done if i am alive and build a business empire which my son Jeffrey will inherit 50% of the investment on his 25th birthday. I will like you to take Jeffrey as your own son, give him the love we the parents would have given him.

Do not let him feel the pains of being an orphan, give him good education, bring him up into a responsible man. Make him have the fear of God. Please do not refuse this task for I have no one else to help me out on this issue.
As soon as I receive your reply and personal details, that is:

(1) YOUR FULL NAME
(2) RESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
(3) AGE
(4) SEX

Consenting to my proposition, I will authorize my bank to transfer the money to your account directly and I will also draw up my WILL in your favor indicating that 50% of the dividends and profits made from the future investment with this money will be handed over to my only son Jeffrey on his 25th birthday. This will be made with the assistance of my late husband’s  attorney.

You do not have to pay any fees to the Attorney for that I will take care of. Also, I will give the bank all the documents that are covering the deposit with the bank, I will transfer every power and right of ownership to you stating at my Will to enable you claim the deposit from the bank. It will be also included in the Will that you are the only person my son should be released to, if i die. All I need is your acceptance and assurance that you will not treat my son badly.

I am writing you this mail with great tears and I pray you will be kind & honest with the fear of God concerning this mail to you today.

Please reply this mail immediately if you have the love and care of God to: mrscynthia.rice@hotmail.com

Thank you.
Mrs. Cynthia Rice
All about my only son Jeffrey

On Fiction

April 4th, 2010

Yesterday, in a leisurely scotch drinking session at my neighbors house, the conversation shifted to recent reads. Both husband and wife are avid readers, the former exclusively non-fiction, the latter mostly fiction. I asked him why he only read non-fiction, and he suggested that fiction was a waste of his time — he read to learn, not for “mere” entertainment. I used to think this way; I no longer do. If anything, my time spent reading fiction now exceeds time spent reading non-fiction. (Although, admittedly, I read less non-fiction now because in certain areas, I have achieved a semblance of expertise. Consequently, experimentation dominates my learning method.)

Obviously, fiction can inspire. Reading a good book with a plot that is relatable is not only entertaining, but often is motivating. Granting motivation, fiction can be a useful productivity tool. However, more importantly, fiction guides your personality. In the process of identifying with characters, fiction moves from a passive medium to an active one. You actively speculate as to what you would do in an identical situation and compare it against the character’s actions. The comparison is a process of judgement; it’s supervised learning, with a dead tree as the teacher.

Fiction allows you to be part of situations that are unlikely to happen otherwise. You can experience thousands of years worth of events by reading fiction. Yes, it is true that what happens to you in real-life — with it’s finality and incompariably richer stimulation – out-weighs that of a book. However, the course altering moments in life are infrequent. Fiction provides a means of accelerating your “personal growth.”

What follows is a list of characters that have become integrated as part of my self. I am not a summation of them; I have pieced together certain traits from them. Most of which were selected because I already had such a quality; many of which were selected because I found them admirable. (The later being more important.) Yes, my family, friends, and experiences have contributed more to who I am, but the following contributions were not negligible.

I am Morpheus.
I am Drago.
I am Lord Finkle-McGraw.
I am Hardin.
I am Francisco; I am Galt; I am Rearden.
I am Roark. I am Wynand.
I am Will Parry; I am Lord Asreil.
I am Ender.
I am Gray.
I am Guy Montag.
I am Mustapha Mond.
I am Simon.
I am Winston Smith.
I am Bruce Wayne.
I am Adrian Veidt; I am the Comedian.

I am the product of my parents, my friends, my life, my experiences…and my teachers.

Mortality and Dating

April 3rd, 2010

For most of my life, I have avoided dating and relationships. In high school, this was a consequence of my inability to play the necessary games. (Although, I attributed it to hopeless romanticism, the justification of choice for most awkward teenagers.) In college, I learned to play the games — very well. However, I continued to not date. The adage, “why buy the cow if the milk is for free” applied. I enjoyed college.

Towards the end of college, I started to think differently. I wanted to form relationships of the non-casual variety. Many people I know date merely to be in a relationship. They are not necessarily wild about their partner, they just prefer not to be alone. This doesn’t interest me. In my case, I would date only if I found someone great. I think (very) highly of myself; I would have to think highly of the girl I would date as well. And that is just the beginning of the criteria. Physical attraction and emotional compatibility are not minor issues. Such girls are rare, but they have graced my path before.

As mentioned previously on my blog, I had a rare type of cancer for which there is still no cure. I was treated surgically to remove the macro-tumor, but microscopic remnants undoubtedly remain and, after enough doubling, it will reassert a claim on my health. Things are not likely to end well. Given this, I arrived at my dating conundrum. If I was to find a girl that I respected; a girl that I was attracted to; a girl whose company I enjoyed; a girl that I wanted to invest my time and emotions in…what happens when I get sick again? I initiated steps to nullify the Chordoma threat, and others subsequently (greatly) exceeded my efforts, but as of right now, I think the probability of tragedy exceeds that of happily ever after. This introduces my paradox, my Catch-22. The purpose of dating such a girl as the one sketched above is to allow myself to be swept along the currents, hoping to arrive at a place of deep love. (I wasn’t trying to be poetic; the preceding statement was as precise a summary on the progression of relationships as I could give.) If this point came — if I grew to love her deeply — I would want to protect her from harm and suffering. However, given Chordoma, her suffering would likely be a result of my sickness and death. Her suffering would be deeply emotional. Furthermore, as it is in a woman’s best interest to find a man in her youth — for obvious reasons — it would continue to weigh on her for a long time. Ergo, the best way to protect my as of yet unidentified and pursued love, is to never pursue her.

I realized this years ago but it is growing more difficult to maintain my restraint. For one, it’s easy to not pursue women romantically when you are young, dumb, and…in college. I might have justified my Dorian Gray phase as a consequence of this realization, but truthfully it wasn’t. I was enjoying myself in the way that a geek turned college man-whore would. Now, however, I am less interested in the simple pleasures (in isolation, at least.) Over the past year or so, I’ve started dating a few women, only to realize I was being selfish. I think I wanted the intimacy of a relationship, without the woman’s investment. This was stupid because it’s not a possibility.

To a small degree, I’m writing this hoping that someone will point out an obvious flaw. I’ve thought of some, but they are weak. I assume people smarter than myself have offered similar arguments; I’d like to read them. However, for the most part, I wrote it to solidify my resolve and understanding. That’s why I write most of my blog posts and accounts for my readership of about six people.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to do what I consider the rational course of action: try to fund a cure.

P.S. I have previously  discussed my dating catch-22 with other people who had/have Chordoma; it was not pleasant. Most are deeply offended so I no longer bring it up with them. If someone from that world happens to read this post and is offended or saddened, I’m sorry. It’s not my intention.