Meta Yada

insuring insurance

2008-12-26T14:19:00.001-08:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/business/03insure.html?_r=2&hp

to trade or not to trade

2008-12-26T14:18:00.001-08:00

Intrade is a prediction market, where people can bet on things like “who will win the presidential election?” or “which film will win the best picture award?”. Recently intrade is becoming the subject of speculation since its sportsbetting arm tradesports recently closed shop.

Hence this market:
https://www.intrade.com/index.jsp?request_operation=trade&request_type=action&selConID=659099

2008-10-06T19:58:00.001-07:00

see more pwn and owned pictures

CS 101

2008-10-04T12:33:00.001-07:00

http://semanticvector.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-mess-with-comp-sci-students.html

Meta Patent

2008-09-29T12:33:00.000-07:00

A Meta Patent

Really?!

Meta posts considered harmful...

2007-11-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

Enjoy!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000982.html

From this it naturally follows:
http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html

various mailing lists

2007-08-30T15:45:00.000-07:00

We have an event notification mailing list that people can subscribe to. People have been abusing this list (sending non-eventlike information). A debate ensued.

And of course, someone suggested Meta

"I was thinking that we create a "MetaList" list where everyone who wants to debate the importance of the various lists and they're true purpose could spam each other."

meta performance art

2007-08-02T20:02:00.001-07:00

Courtesy of pwei--

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/07/meta-performanc.html

Harold Bloom

2007-08-02T19:58:00.000-07:00

Harold Bloom wrote "How to read a why" (according to publisher's comments,

Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.

My roommate's brother came up with a brilliant idea of writing an essay entitled "How to read 'How to read and why' and why".

Workshops

2007-08-02T19:57:00.000-07:00

It finally happened. At work, we lead weekly sessions on interesting cool new technologies. Last week I got an email with a request I dreaded since the inception of the program:

"We need a workshop on how to give a workshop."

Alive and well

2007-08-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contracts/uk/sql%20server%20reporting%20services.do

Look at all those pretty graphs and tables... too bad whoever made that page didn't know SSRS...

"Namespaces" namespace

2007-06-28T19:45:00.000-07:00

If you own a lot of computers, you will sooner or later come across a problem of having to give them names. Pretty quickly you should realize that there isn't any "logical" naming scheme and that you might just as well have fun naming them.

I think it's good practice for the computers' names to belong to certain namespaces. For example, a "Presidents" namespace could provide names such as "Reagan" or "Washington". A "fruit" namespace could contain names such as "Apple" or "Wildberry".

Of course, once you are out of ideas, you can always use the "Namespaces" namespace: name your computers "Presidents", "Fruit", "SimpsonsCharacters", etc. You get the idea

ESPN's self-referentialism

2007-06-28T19:44:00.000-07:00

From Ed,

Incidentally, there was a pleasant self-referential commentary on the radio. Frank Deford, from ESPN, was lamenting that baseball pitchers were being yanked from the game by their managers after throwing an arbitrary number of pitches. They stopped his own commentary after 350 words and replaced him w/ some woman talking about Italian soccer.

Log this as an Issue

2007-05-27T08:17:00.001-07:00

We have a system for logging issues (error, mistakes, problems we've encountered). One day, Phil was talking with someone about some procedure. He says, "wow, this is a pain". Phil encourages him to put this in the issue log. He hesitates, not wanting to bother.

Phil considered putting an entry in the log regarding his colleague's inability to log issues.

Sensitive Information

2007-05-01T18:03:00.000-07:00

We got a message about sending sensitive information in an email. I won't quote the email (since that might be sensitive) but the excerpt is:

Subject: Emails vs face to face communication

[...]

When a sensitive business issue comes up [...] go and talk to the person(s) that
you might have otherwise emailed. [...]

I am happy to answer questions -- face to face if they are sensitive!

The $32,000 question is: if this email is sensitive (to the point of me not being able to quote it here), shouldn't the author of this email have talked to us about it instead of emailing us?

More emailmeta

2007-05-01T18:00:00.000-07:00

From: Phillip Wei
To: Colleague 2
CC: Lukasz Strozek
Subject: RE: SQL Standards

> I don’t think enforcing rules is necessary

As a rule, neither do I.

From: Colleague 2
To: Colleague 1; Phillip Wei
Subject: RE: SQL Standards

Colleague 2: There are no company-wide standards. I don’t think enforcing rules is necessary, but common convention is
...
(defines some naming scheme)

From: Colleague 1
To: Colleague 2; Phillip Wei
Subject: SQL Standards

Are their any naming standards for adding constraints on a table?

Contronyms

2007-05-01T17:59:00.001-07:00

http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2007/04/23/contronymns/

It would be great if contronyms were also words which were not their own antonyms.

Phil didn't get it.

Emailmeta

2007-05-01T17:47:00.000-07:00

(don't confuse with metaemail).

It has become customary for me to paste an excerpt from an email chain Phil, Nick and I were having at work. This is a good part of metayada -- it shouldn't be the only thing I do, but it helps keep the meta going!

P.S. This one below serves a double purpose -- the original message contains a link to a piracy case. Definitely check it out!

P.P.S. It was challenging to write it up -- I had to escape all the brackets and ampersands like this:

<NoCloseTag>
<Tag Value ="&lt;Amazed Quantifier='Speechlessly'/&gt;">

(you get the joke)

From: Lukasz Strozek
To: Nicholas Elprin; Phillip Wei
Subject: RE: wow

<NoCloseTag>
<Tag Value ="<Amazed Quantifier='Speechlessly'/>">

unless that was deliberate? i don’t know anymore?

From: Nicholas Elprin
To: Lukasz Strozek; Phillip Wei
Subject: RE: wow

<NoCloseTag>
<Tag Value =">Amazed Quantifier='Speechlessly'/<">

From: Lukasz Strozek
To: Nicholas Elprin; Phillip Wei
Subject: RE: wow

<NoCloseTag>
<Amazed Quantifier=”Speechlessly”/>

From: Nicholas Elprin
To: Phillip Wei; Lukasz Strozek
Subject: RE: wow

that's invalid. i think you mean:

< NoCloseTag >
<speechlessly amazed />

From: Phillip Wei
To: Lukasz Strozek; Nicholas Elprin
Subject: RE: wow

<speechlessly amazed>
(no close tag)
...

From: Lukasz Strozek
To: Nicholas Elprin; Phillip Wei
Subject: wow

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070430-consultant-antipiracy-group-pirated-my-data.html

meta in programming languages

2007-04-29T20:00:00.000-07:00

Just one word. quine.

I remembered quines after reading this article.

IT Request system trouble

2007-04-18T20:51:00.000-07:00

Meta is all over us; we don't even need to look too hard.

Yesterday at work we were notified that our IT Request tracking system has a problem: no notification is going out after a request is submitted (as a result, it wasn't clear whether the requests were being processed or not).

I wondered whether someone submitted an IT request asking why no IT requests are being processed. And, once the issue is solved, should IT close this ticket first, or all the ones on which the users didn't get a notification?

metalinguistics

2007-04-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

"...we practice metalanguage without realizing the metalingual character of our operations. Whenever the addresser and/or the
addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused on the code: it performs a METALINGUAL (ie, glossing) function. "I don't follow you - what do you mean?" asks the addressee, or in Shakesperaen diction, "What is't thou say'st?" And the addresser in anticipation of usch recapturing question inquires: "Do you know what I mean?" Imagine such an exasperating dialogue: "The sophomore was plucked." "But what is plucked?" "Plucked means the same as flunked." "And flunked?" "To be flunked is to faile an exam." "And what is sophomore?" persists the interrogator innocent of school vocabulary. "A sophomore is a second-year student." All these equational sentences voney information merely about the lexical code
of English; their function is strictly metalingual. Any process of language lerning, in particular child acquisition of the mother tongue, makes wide use of such metalingual operations; and aphasia may often be defined as a loss of ability for metalingual operations."

The most serious post I've authored so far

2007-04-11T20:56:00.001-07:00

Check this one out:

http://xkcd.com/c244.html

It's interesting in that it refers to itself. But it's not meta -- it's self-referential. And this prompted me to reflect upon the various terms that are used to describe events that refer to themselves or describe themselves, and attempt to disambiguate them.

meta

One can think of meta as a function that takes an object and returns an object that describes the input object using the technique characeristic of the object itself. MP3 metadata, for example, is data about the mp3 file, but not the audio itself (for example, artist information, album cover picture, etc.). It's meta because, just like the mp3 file is described by data (sets of bits), the metadata is described by the same means.

In real-life meta is shorthand for a situation in which instead of the object, the focus is on the description of the object that shares the same characteristics as the object itself. For example, suppose we are documenting the goals of our projects. One project's goal could be to understand the relationships between customers' preferences and their purchasing power. Another project's goal could be to determine all players in the currency exchange market. If we step back, we might want to determine what's the goal of us documenting all those goals. This is a meta goal. It doesn't refer to the object itself (documenting the goals) but it describes it, and uses the same technique (determining the goal).

It is crucial to understand that sharing the characteristic of the underlying object is a necessary condition. In the example above, for example, we could do many things with the given collection of goals to describe it -- we could determine their number, for example, or figure out that they all take just one sentence. But it's the fact that we're determining the goal of writing up those goals that makes the situation meta.

Not everything can be metafied, but I claim that once it's been metafied, it can then be metafied ad infinitum.

self-reference

This is most often confused with meta. If something refers to an instance of itself (either a different instance or the same), then it's self-referential. For example, if you're playing an RPG game and your character instantiates an RPG game, then you're using self-reference. Self-reference is often used to provide paradoxes: for example, take the following statement: "There are two misteaks in this sentence." There is only one mistake in this sentence, but the fact that the sentence failed to provide an accurate count of the number of mistakes is a mistake in itself -- so there are two mistakes in the sentence. Which means that the sentence only contains one mistake. But then... (ad inf.) The sentence is self-referential. Self-referential statements can cause infinite loops (but iterative, not recursive infinite loops), like in the example above.

recursion

Recursion is a special case of self-reference when the object invokes a new instance of itself rather than refer to itself. The sentence in the above case is not recursive because it does not invoke a new instance. Similarly, a piece of code that does recursion is itself not recursive: it's, however, still self-referential. An example of a recursive statement is "n factorial is n times larger than n-1 factorial". This is recursive: to determine what 5 factorial is, you have to instantiate this sentence multiple times. In the mistakes example above, you don't need to instantiate multiple copies of the sentence.

reflection

Reflection is the ability to inspect one's own definition. Reflection is a special case of meta.

reflexivity

An operation is reflexive if it operates on itself. This is not really self-referential (is the statement "my dog is cleaning himself" self-referential?).

self-relativity

It seems to be that self-relativity is the ability to relate to oneself. A simplest example of self-relativity is the word "I". If something is self-relative, it is capable of producing self-referential statements.

deep

A lot of things in the world are just deep. They're not meta or self-referential. We like talking about them because they seem complex. That doesn't make them any less sophisticated or interesting, but a distinction must be made. An example of something that's not really meta or self-referential is the barber paradox:

"There's a barber in the town that shaves everyone who doesn't shave himself. Who shaves the barber?". This is paradoxical because if the barber shaves himself, then by the first statement, the barber cannot does not shave himself. If the barber doesn't shave himself, then by the first statement he shaves himself.

Actually, this is not really a paradox -- there is a flaw in how the first statement is constructed. Let S(i) be a function that assigns to every person i a person that shaves them. Then S(i)=b ^ S(i)=i encodes the first statement. It is meant to be a tautology (since the statement describes something about this hypothetical world that's supposed to be true for everyone in the town). But if we substitute b for i, we get S(b)=b ^ S(b)=b which is false. Hence the first statement cannot be a description of the world. In other words, it is impossible for the barber to shave everyone who doesn't shave himself. It's a little like saying, "The square root of every integer is an integer. What is the square root of 2?" and claiming it's a paradox. In actuality, the first statement is simply false.

In any case, this is not really self-referential; it's just deep. The fact that the barber shaves himself isn't self-referential, but "shaving" becomes reflexive when it's applied to the barber.

Social Networking Sites

2007-04-10T20:55:00.000-07:00

There has been an abundance of social networking sites. I'm thinking of creating an application that allows you to create your own social networking site. You'd specify a few parameters, and out pops a social networking site!

Exception handling

2007-04-08T20:55:00.000-07:00

System.OutOfMemoryException: Exception of type
'System.OutOfMemoryException' was thrown. at: throw new
System.OutOfMemoryException(...

google 411

2007-04-07T20:52:00.000-07:00

http://labs.google.com/goog411/

You can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 to get information on local businesses. Dial from any phone anywhere in the US (yes, the service is nationwide). So if you call them and ask them what the number is of a free Google information service on local businesses, I guess they won't be able to help you since Google 411 only lists local listings and not nationwide services...

It's been awhile...

2007-04-04T21:53:00.000-07:00

At first I thought I'd Just drop a quick post mentioning that I have some pretty awesome meta things to post in the next few days or so and then realized that this post is also meta.

Man I love meta.

metatwork, part III

2007-03-14T13:59:00.000-07:00

Happy pi day. At first I thought it's strange that we nerds don't celebrate e days but then I realized I'm stupid.

From: Lukasz Strozek
To: Nick Elprin
Subject: RE: I'm very proud of myself

Well, it's quite sim... WAIT A MINUTE!

From: Nicholas Elprin
To: Lukasz Strozek
Subject: RE: I'm very proud of myself

why do you think that made you feel good?

From: Lukasz Strozek
To: Nicholas Elprin
Subject: I'm very proud of myself

Today at the interview I did the Nick thing: stop and ask the candidate to be introspective. It feels good, like a sudden wave of cool.

metatwork, part II

2007-03-13T19:00:00.000-07:00

Today Hassan rolled out a fix to a standard include file used for builds. In the Tech Notification he wrote

This is rolled out. I created a build file to deploy common.include and used that to deploy.

2007-03-12T19:00:00.000-07:00

I am always excited to see another blog take on the subject of meta.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/03/basics_going_meta_1.php

[the statement above is a lie; this is the first time I saw that and I was somewhat excited.]

metatwork, part I

2007-03-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

Nick sent me this email today.

Today in the research meeting, steve was complaining that john wasn't
giving him accurate estimates on when steve's tickets would be
completed. John told steve he should open a ticket for the tickets with
bad completion estimates.

The Onion

2007-03-06T20:01:00.000-08:00

Nick found this in the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/59345?utm_source=onion_rss_daily

I nominate it for the metaAward of the year.

Google Desktop vulnerability

2007-02-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

Nick sent me this link

http://download.watchfire.com/googledesktopdemo/index.htm

Now, if Nick was a little less lazy (or I smarter), we could engineer this very link to exploit that vulnerability. So if you clicked on the link, you'd learn about the vulnerability, but only after falling prey to it.

MetaSniffing

2007-02-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

Occasionally I'll post articles or blogs that -- subconsciously or deliberately -- do something meta. Like this one:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070220-8887.html

(To clarify, the link above is for an article that talks about a journal that does something meta, but it's shorter than the original link and features detailed analysis of the meta-ness of the journal, so I chose it instead).

Blog entries versus comments

2007-02-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

Welcome to metayada, a blog devoted to rambles on all things meta.

Marc suggested this as the first blog entry, and I like it. So here we go.

"What kinds of things should be posted as blog entries vs posted as comments?"

[As a side note, you might wonder why I'm posting Marc's question. Well, for one, I want to start generating some content, but also, suffering most likely from a mild form of OCD I meticulously keep every email in my inbox until it has been "processed". An email with Marc's idea has been sitting very comfortably in my inbox for more than three weeks now, causing me major sleeplessness, headaches and fatigue. Until now. There, it's gone. In Trash. Not a to-do anymore.]

Back to Marc's question. I'm not sure whether I should answer it here in the entry or in the comment. Am I allowed to comment on my own entry?