Decisions, decisions

Decision-making is a critical procedure to perform with care and attention to detail.  Well-made decisions lead to optimal outcomes.  A given decision involves analyzation of the situation at hand and value-assigning of desires and goals in aspects of the choices involved.  This comparison between choices available can become the dominant phase of decision-making, in terms of time consumed.

It is essential to be aware of the time involved in making any given decision, as time is precious and scarce.  A relative value of the decision as a whole on the scale of importance across one's entire life could be determined.  This could be used to assess how much time should be spent, at most, in making the decision.  This self-imposed time limit will prevent one from spending an inordinate amount of time making any given decision.

However, one can argue a great deal of conscious thought is spent making decisions at any time, and so the amount of time spent simply assessing the importance of a given decision is also something to consider.  Perhaps an initial time counter or alarm can be used to trigger further assessment of how much time is spent making a decision.

Indeed, a certain amount of self-awareness, when it comes to decision making, is crucial.

Thought train

I was reading through some older blog posts and saw the use of the term "thought train" and realized this is probably not recognized by a random reader as it was understood when I wrote it.  This is a metaphor, quite visual.  It immediately conjures in my mind, a vision of being inside a train that's rolling along a landscape.

I am inside the train.  The landscape is actually the renderings of my mind.  The back of the train is passing things I was thinking about previously, and the front of the train is passing things I am thinking about just now.

The train can go forward or backward along the track.  I can fast-forward or rewind the "tape" - that is, we can quickly have the train travel to any point along a winding track along all the things I had been thinking about.

Additionally, I can travel within the train, so I can take in a wide view of everything that was thought of for some time.

It's interesting when you realize the track is part of a mental visualization, and it can be re-laid in another manner.  So instead of the track traveling along a train of thought, it can be run along a path that connects various ideas or concepts.

The track may be rearranged as a series of ideas are reorganized, or parts of a sequence are changed.  Then we can run the train along the new track, and we can look around at how the new idea plays out.

It's a cool, visual metaphor for clearly thinking about complex, creative concepts in the mind.

Viral social constructs

I wonder what makes some social constructs perpetuate..  I've heard people who are molested as children are more likely to become child molesters.  Such an evil act, I wonder what causes that.  The same can't be said for victims of other crimes, like rape or robbery.

I suppose whether the victim enjoys the act determines the likelihood of performing it themselves.  Just as a drug addict enjoys the high and then seeks the experience again.  Very simple logic.

With such insight (arrived at through uncomfortable means, but found nonetheless) it makes me wonder if the victims of less enjoyable acts, such as rape or robbery, are more likely to become perpetrators if they found the experience somehow pleasurable, e.g. if they were high at the time.

I'm probably giving such a simple notion too much credence.  This is simple Pavlovian behavior analysis.

FreeBSD RAID

I just finished reconfiguring my network file server - a long process.  I'm running FreeBSD, and the geom utilities for RAID configuration.

I have four disks - 3x 320GB, 1x 1TB.  I placed the 3 matching disks into a stripe, or RAID0.  This RAID0 disk is then in a mirror/RAID1 with the 1TB drive.

Configuring the stripe & mirror is done with the gstripe and gmirror commands.  Since the array is also a boot/root disk, I have entries in /boot/loader.conf:

geom_stripe_load="YES"
geom_mirror_load="YES"

These instantiate the stripe & mirror prior to reading fstab and completing boot.  Also /etc/fstab is set to the array device:

/dev/mirror/gm0b        none            swap    sw           0       0
/dev/mirror/gm0a        /               ufs     rw           1       1
/dev/mirror/gm0e        /tmp            ufs     rw           2       2
/dev/mirror/gm0f        /usr            ufs     rw           2       2
/dev/mirror/gm0d        /var            ufs     rw           2       2

The 1TB drive, ad7, contains 1 slice ad7s1.  The gm0 mirror is between the stripe, st0, and that slice.  I suppose I could have added the entire ad7 to the mirror instead.  ad7 is larger than st0, so in that situation gm0 would have been created with st0, and then ad7 would be inserted.

gmirror bases the size of the mirror on the first device it is created with:

gmirror label -v -b prefer gm0 /dev/ad7s1

In this case, I built gm0 with ad7s1, then inserted the stripe:

gmirror insert gm0 stripe/st0

One caveat is, when building a mirror on a slice (like ad7s1) it must be mounted read-only or not at all.  If you build it on a device (like ad7) then you can simply use

sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=17

The system will then let you write to the disk metadata.
To build on the root slice, I rebooted into single user mode, which mounts root as read-only.

I like this setup.  I've got RAID1 redundancy, and the 3-disk stripe is quite peppy.  Lastly, to take advantage of the speed of the stripe, I set the priority of the stripe in gm0 higher than ad7s1.  Since gm0 uses a 'prefer' balance mode, it will read from the stripe first.  I believe writes complete on the stripe as well, but I'm not certain.  I'm getting decent write speeds with dd commands.  I'll have to do a more thorough performance test some time in the future.

judgin'

alot of judgements that are made by judges are controversial;  some say you find the right judge, and you can have whatever ruling you desire.

how about we replace the judge with some crowdsourcing.  take the facts of the case, and devise them into a test.  present the facts on a website as they are to the judge, and allow potential "judges" to take the test.  if they pass, proving understanding of the case, then they can submit their judgement.

multiple judgements can be statistically combined to arrive at a final judgement.  of course these "judges" would have to have equal familiarity with case law to make comparable judgements.  the system could be applied to non-technical judgements.. or only basic, straight-forward questions can be asked.

this could work well for something like patent processing.

now that i think about it, crowd-sourcing has so many applications.  it seems ripe for an open architecture to be developed for specific applications to build on.  wonder if such a thing already exists.

barriers to entry

there are many barriers to entry in any sector of the economy, and those hinder competition.

a universal barrier is money, and its availability in most cases is dependent on lenders.  someone with an idea must make a proposal to a lender, and the odds of lending to a legitimate prospect depends on the risk and potential return in the lender's view.

an accurate prediction of the involved risk requires a comprehensive analysis of factors in both the involved sector and the proposed idea.  perhaps a NDA (non disclosure agreement) is utilized at this juncture to secure the entrepreneur's intellectual capital, but the lender has to agree to be bound to secrecy of whatever is revealed.  some lenders may not be willing to take that risk, as then they can't utilize any of that information in making future decisions (i think, though i don't know the legal intricacies)

plus, the entrepreneur has to trust the lender to abide by the NDA.  who's monitoring the lender?  perhaps if the government facilitated these exact exchanges, it would foster confidence in approaching lenders and encourage more innovation in the economy.

pizza and tires

katie & i shared our 5 year anniversary yesterday.  we went to pizza hut last night.  mm pizza.

i also had pizza yesterday for lunch at the pizza palace with my parents.  checking out the place before deciding to use it for a wedding rehearsal dinner.

i also had pizza the day before yesterday for dinner.  with my parents, since i was in smyrna picking up a package.  lots of pizza.

that package was a camber kit for my civic.  im going to correct the excessive stock camber in the hopes of achieving proper wear on my next set of tires.  the current set is incredibly, horribly loud at highway speeds.  quality engineering, honda.

the next set of tires are sitting in my truck currently.  the camber kit will be installed tomorrow, then i'll get the new tires mounted & balanced, and get an alignment.. so we should have a nice quiet ride to virginia for our honeymoon next month.