For the benefit of anyone who's interested and who hasn't already had me talk their ears off about this, here's a discussion of the techniques I used to design the music font I've been talking about recently.

( this gets long, and also mathematical )

In case anyone has the energy to try to think up names based on what the font actually looks like: a couple of small sample images showing the difference between my font and standard Lilypond are visible in the comments to last week's post.

Bah. Onion-chopping incompetence last night has left me trying to type without using my left index finger, at least for a day or so until I'm sure healing is well under way.

Most of my typing style has adapted reasonably well (I often think this sort of flexibility is an advantage of having learned to type simply by typing a lot instead of doing one of those formal home-keys courses), though it's slowing me down noticeably so I have more of an incentive to engage brain before putting fingers to keyboard.

The really hard thing, though, is passwords. Everything else I can think about how to type if in doubt, but passwords are mostly stored in my brain as muscle memory, which isn't directly applicable so I have to painstakingly translate the stored muscle movements back into characters.

Hmm, I seem not to have posted anything in here for months. I'm not quite sure whether my life has been more boring recently, or whether it's just that my interestingness threshold for bothering to post in this diary has gone up.

I've had a new silly project preoccupying me since I last posted, which is to arrange a means of computer-typesetting music that doesn't irritate me. Until now I've been using a program I wrote myself when I was 15 and have stuck with on the grounds that I already knew how to use it and it's just about good enough, but it shows definite signs of having been written by a 15-year-old, and in particular the copyright status on its font of musical symbols was uncertain so I couldn't distribute it. Every alternative I've looked at since then has irritated me for at least one reason, and in particular I haven't found any replacement set of symbols that were both to my taste and copyright-unproblematic. So in the last couple of months I decided enough was enough and drew a new set from scratch, and then dropped that into the least irritating of the existing typesetting software. As of the weekend just past, the result is passing its stress test collection and I think I prefer its output to everything else I've seen including my own program. I can witter on about this at much greater length if anyone is interested and hasn't already been subjected to two months of said witter in the pub :-)

Last week I finally got round to dealing with the fact that nobody is currently selling acceptably nice gluten-free pizza bases, by experimenting with my breadmaker's pizza dough setting. This was successful after a couple of attempts (and even the first attempt wasn't too bad), so I now have a sudden urge to feed pizza to everyone I know.

Other unexpected things that have happened to me in the last couple of months include unexpectedly being called on to help catch a young woman jumping off a roof (she'd apparently climbed up there for a laugh and then found getting down was harder than getting up; I was walking past at the time), accidentally re-proving a theorem of Erdős in conjunction with drswirly (it struck me as an interesting question and we managed to prove the answer before finding out who'd already done it), accidentally finding the inverse cosine of 0.9 (a number I picked completely at random was so close to it that it completely confused a test program I was running) and having a cold while on holiday (bah).

At aiwendel's birthday party on Saturday there was a considerable amount of impromptu music-making. In particular, there were spare violins lying around, and I picked one up and had a go on it.

The next morning, however, all the embarrassment came back. I don't often get that ‘oh god, what did I do last night?’ feeling after parties, but yesterday morning I suddenly felt as if I'd made a huge, attention-seeking prat of myself for the entire evening by pretending to violin-playing skill in public.

On the other hand, curiously, my left wrist felt fine this time (though my right shoulder was killing me for most of yesterday, but that seems less likely to be caused by violin-playing – I probably just slept funny). So now yesterday's retrospective embarrassment has worn off a bit, I feel almost tempted to scrounge a cheap violin from somewhere and have another try at it in the privacy of my own home (and then perhaps risk exposing other people to it again after I've practised a bit).

I suspect it's probably still a bad idea, on balance: just because I didn't manage to hurt my wrist noticeably in one evening doesn't mean I wouldn't still do it cumulative damage if I kept it up for longer, and really, I do depend on my wrists…

An Amazon Marketplace seller just managed to deliver a book to me so quickly that the Amazon website won't let me leave my seller feedback (‘This order is not yet eligible’).

I had taken a chance with this order, by buying from a seller which Amazon reported as ‘just launched’, and hence who had no previous feedback at all. Perhaps that's why – perhaps they're not actually that new, they just deliver so quickly that it confuses people!

A bit of correlation analysis between the questions in my recent LJ poll said that, slightly to my surprise, the number of people who thought they were better at remembering to do things compared to the general standard they ascribe to other people was exactly the same as the number who thought they were worse. I was expecting this to be the sort of question where most people think they're above average (as is often claimed about driving), but failing that I'd at least have expected some sort of correlation. Gosh.

I managed to cut a finger last night on a plastic saucepan handle while washing up. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened. However, I've learned a new respect for my left ring finger; trying to avoid using it for the rest of the evening made computer use very awkward. It seems to do all the nearly-unconscious parts of my typing style.

One morning years ago I happened to wake up half an hour early and then realised it was election day, so I got up and went to vote on the basis that it was something useful to do with the extra half-hour in my day and then I wouldn't have to remember to do it later. My subconscious must have thought that was a good idea, because I've woken up early on election days more often than not since.

The polling station this morning handed me an EU ballot paper literally as long as my arm. Might have been nicer if they'd also provided voting booths containing tables big enough to hold it!

‘UPS hereby notifies you that we have received electronic information about this package we're supposed to be sending to you. We may or may not have received the actual package, but we know we've got the electronic information. For more details, see the following tracking URL which will still tell you we don't know if we've got the package or not. P.S. The colour brown is a vigorously defended trademark of United Parcel Service.’

Looks to me as if someone's been putting more effort into IP land grabs than into the sanity of their tracking system…

Having just ranted about problems that I forget about as soon as they're fixed, I thought I'd balance things out by mentioning a problem which has surprised me by not having this property.

In 2000 I moved out of a shared house to live on my own in a first-floor maisonette flat, i.e. the upstairs half of a semi-detached house. In 2003 I moved from that flat into another (nicer) first-floor maisonette flat. So by late 2007, when I bought a proper house, I had been living exclusively on the first floor (apart from tiny entrance halls on the ground floor) for just over seven years.

I was a bit nervous about that, to begin with. I had an irrational worry that I might have – in some unspecified sense – forgotten how to deal with having a ground floor. Perhaps I'd accidentally leave windows open and get burgled. Or perhaps I'd have forgotten how to stop Jehovah's Witnesses from getting a foot in the door (which is very easy in a first-floor flat – you just shout down at them from the window above the front door, and never open the door at all). Or perhaps I just wouldn't feel right without those eight feet of vertical distance separating me from the ground: an Englishman's home is his castle, after all, and castles are more convincingly defensible when situated high up.

But my worries were unfounded. Pretty much as soon as I moved in, it was immediately clear that I had in fact missed having a ground floor – I just hadn't realised it before I got one back. I felt a great sense of rightness at being able to walk around downstairs and not hear the creaking of dodgy floorboards beneath my feet. (And even walking around upstairs, where the floorboards still do creak, became more pleasant once I knew the noise wasn't disturbing a downstairs neighbour.) It's important to me to have a properly solid floor at the bottom of my home, it turns out; and although I had apparently been suppressing that need so well that I hadn't realised I had it, it was there, and suddenly it was fulfilled.

I was fairly sure, back in 2007, that this would turn out to be one of those ex-problems quickly forgotten about: that the delight of not having creaky floorboards under me was a passing thing, and that after a week or so of feeling relieved I would thereafter just feel neutral about it.

But no. Rather to my surprise, I didn't get over it that quickly, and in fact after over a year and a half living here I still haven't. Every day or two I still get up from the sofa, take a few steps, and feel real pleasure at the fact that I'm walking on a real solid surface, there's no give in it beyond the carpet pile, and the only sound I'm making is the whisper of socks on carpet. Quite often I find myself gratuitously pacing back and forth just so I can enjoy it for longer.

(Good job, too: given how much money I spent on acquiring a ground floor, it would seem particularly irritating if I'd forgotten about it immediately!)

As I said in my previous post, it feels to me as if ideally one ought to be able to derive enjoyment from the absence of an irritation for about as long as the irritation persisted to begin with. By that measure, I hope not to get over this one before 2014. I wonder if I will.

Something I've always found annoying about the fixing of certain kinds of problem – particularly those around the house – is that it's very hard to take pleasure in having done it, because my brain quickly forgets the problem was ever there.

For instance, many years ago I lived in a house where the door handle kept falling off one of the kitchen cupboards. Every time I tried to use the cupboard, the handle would come off in my hand, and in order to get the cupboard open I'd have to reinsert it and then twist it at an angle so that the loose screw would apply friction to the inside of the screw hole. Eventually I lost my patience and filled the screw hole with superglue, and then it was fine.

In my ideal world, I would have liked this action to be followed by an active sense of satisfaction at a job well done every time I used the cupboard and didn't have to fiddle with the door handle. This ongoing sense of satisfaction ought properly, it seems to me, to have lasted for a length of time commensurate with the length of time for which I'd had to put up with the problem.

But in fact, in only a day or so I had almost completely forgotten the problem had ever existed. I think this is because I'd always been bad at remembering about it anyway: it was rare that I'd go to that cupboard and remember to twist the handle at the angle that made it not fall off, and more usually I'd pull the handle in the normal way, swear, put it back on and then try again more carefully. So I very quickly reached the point where I'd reflexively yank the door open as if its handle had always worked fine, and not think twice about it. So that sense of satisfaction at having fixed the problem was completely gone.

(None of my housemates commented on the door handle having started working either, which I guessed was for the same reason.)

Of course, that doesn't mean it wasn't worth fixing the problem. It had previously irritated me every time, and afterwards it didn't. Clearly that bit of work with superglue did improve my life. But it didn't feel as if it had made my life better, since to know your life is better you have to remember that it was previously worse.

There's a whole class of household (and other) irritations that have this same property for me: as long as they're unfixed, they annoy me, but as soon as they're fixed I forget about them too quickly to derive any real satisfaction. It's as if such problems find one last way, with their metaphorical dying breath, to annoy me again.

Newcomb's Cat: There's an opaque box containing a cat and some poison gas. There's also a transparent box, which you can see contains a live kitten. Depending on how you're about to decide, the poison gas might or might not have been released in the opaque box, and as a result you're in a superposition of states, mysteriously all of which involve cleaning up one sort of cat-related mess or another.

Pascal's Dilemma: There are two heretics imprisoned by the Inquisition, and they separately have to decide whether or not to recant and believe in God. The terms of the problem are set up so that it's invariably in each prisoner's selfish interest to believe in God, and yet for some reason they both turn out to decide it's all a load of rubbish.

The Chinese Demon: There's a room in which people are shuffling pieces of paper in the execution of a complex algorithm that answers questions in Chinese. However, the door to the room is guarded by an infinitesimal demon that only lets the most difficult questions through, and as a result the contents of the room become more and more disordered until nobody can find the pieces of paper they want any more.

(I accidentally invented one of these in the pub just now, and thought it was fun enough that I should add a couple more and post it.)

Privileged misinformation. Because you have inside knowledge of a situation, you're confident you understand it better than someone without that special knowledge. So you feel free to do things which would look utterly silly to that outsider, because you know why they're not such silly things to do after all, and the outsider doesn't.

Only, every so often, your inside knowledge turns out to be wrong. Then you have not only caused something bad to happen, but you've also made yourself look an utter fool to any watching outsiders. ‘I would have known,’ they think, ‘not to do that. What was he thinking?!’

If your inside knowledge had been right, then the results would have spoken for themselves: the outsider might have wondered what you were doing to start with, but when something obviously desirable happened in response, they would have understood that somehow you'd known it would and they hadn't. But if you try that and get it wrong, you'll never convince the watching outsiders that you weren't simply stupid.

If you're used to seeing an actor playing a particular character, it can be hard to put that character out of your mind when you see the same actor in a different role.

It's recently come to my attention that this goes at least triple if the character you're used to seeing them play is a master of disguise. Suddenly it doesn't even seem incongruous that they're not dressed the same way as usual!

I just got out of bed, and was slightly startled to find myself unshaven. That is of course the normal state in which I get out of bed, but this time it was surprising, because I was sure I could remember having done it already for some reason.

It was, of course, in one of my dreams.

I think that's the most irritating dream I've had in weeks. Shaving's an annoying chore at the best of times, and it seems particularly unfair to have done it already and still have to do it again. Bah!

‘A woman of wisdom,’ Brennan said, ‘once told me that it is wisest to regard our past selves as fools beyond redemption – to see the people we once were as idiots entire. I do not necessarily say this myself; but it is what she said to me, and there is more than a grain of truth in it. As long as we are making excuses for the past, trying to make it look better, respecting it, we cannot make a clean break.’

– http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/eld-science.html

I stumbled across the above quotation the other day when chasing links from another blog, and it inspired me to get round to writing up something I've been thinking about for a while.

I can understand and agree with Brennan's observation that there is some truth in the quoted proposition; but where he says he doesn't ‘necessarily’ agree with it completely, I'd go further than that and say that I strongly disagree with it as a universal premise. One of the things I'm most pleased with about my own mind is my ability to trust my past self, when it's appropriate.

This typically occurs when you've previously given some thought to a situation, and decided – dispassionately, carefully, and in a calm and collected fashion – what would be the best thing to do in that situation. But suppose the nature of the situation is … I want to say ‘emotionally loud’, by which I mean that it evokes some sort of strong concentration-disrupting emotions, possibly conflicting ones, when you're in it for real. Now your emotions are screaming at you to do something other than what you previously thought you should do, or perhaps even several contradictory other things. Worse still, they corrupt and seduce your rational thought processes, so that the wrong courses of action are not merely emotionally desirable, but now even seem sensible to you because your brain has got into a state where it's wilfully forgotten all the reasons why they're not.

At this sort of moment, the only thing arguing in favour of your pre-prepared choice is the memory that it's what you decided when you were thinking straight. To let that small quiet voice of memory, shorn of all its supporting reasoning and arguments, overrule all the reasons why the other courses of action seem obviously right to you right now takes a certain measure of stubbornness, a certain measure of self-control, but even more than both it takes something that I tend to think of as self-trust to motivate you in the first place to exercise that self-control and stubbornness: one is trusting one's past self to know better than one's current self, and consciously abdicating the attempt to decide on a course of action in favour of letting it decide for you.

It's even more difficult if you haven't considered the exact situation before, but have merely thought about things distantly related to it and worked out some general and extremely vague principles of wisdom (of the general level of vagueness of, say, ‘don't overreach’). To act on one of those principles when your emotions have seduced your rational thought processes into being convinced that the details of the current situation render the principle inapplicable requires considerable self-trust.

I don't claim to be outstanding at displaying this quality. But I manage it on a reasonably regular basis, and it's one of the things that makes me feel most pleased with myself afterwards: when my head is once again clear I'm able to look back on what I did in the middle of the chaos, remember all the reasons why it really was the right thing to do, and take pride in having managed to do it in spite of having forgotten all those reasons at the time I made the choice.

Science fiction occasionally writes about super-rational beings – whether AIs, aliens, superevolved humans or merely highly trained actual humans – which are capable of making the right decision for the right reasons by means of having their reasoning processes actually be unaffected by emotional pressure (except in that they can note the existence of those emotions and dispassionately treat them as another datum to reason with). In the absence of that highly desirable but frankly unrealistic capability, I tend to think that self-trust of this nature is the closest we poor mortals can come to achieving the same effects. The sage Brennan quotes above would have us throw out, with the bathwater of closed-minded unwillingness to revise an entrenched but wrong opinion, that not inconsiderable baby.

Normally I don't mind being got out of bed by a parcel delivery. It may lose me half an hour of sleep, but I get cool stuff to compensate, and in particular it means I don't have to find my way to some random parcel-company depot in Bar Hill a day or two later to get my cool stuff.

However, when the parcel turns out to contain the wrong item, I think I'm justified in being annoyed. I want my half hour of sleep back! (And my cool stuff, this time in the UK version.)

ThinkGeek has sold, for many years, a T-shirt reading ‘Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script’.

I've said a number of times to friends, but never got round to actually writing down anywhere, that I've always thought that shirt would be improved by a backprint reading:

#!/bin/bash
case $((RANDOM % 3)) in
  0) echo "What?" ;;
  1) echo "I don't understand." ;;
  2) echo "Where's the tea?" ;;
esac

It just occurred to me this morning to wonder if ThinkGeek might like to hear that idea themselves. I looked around their website, and found they have a web form for submitting T-shirt ideas – and will even pay you if they use yours. Aha!

… not aha. It turns out that the terms and conditions for that programme require you to certify that you're in the USA or Canada. Apparently nobody anywhere else is capable of having worthwhile ideas.

It's common in problem-solving disciplines to find that once a problem is correctly stated, the solution can often become obvious.

On which basis: the trouble with snow is that it's white, cold, solid, and contains no caffeine.

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought…

It's just occurred to me to wonder: did the protagonist of ‘Jabberwocky’ perhaps take a few chocolate bars with him for sustenance during his long search?

He might well, after all, have anticipated the need for a Snickers snack.