I recently read “Why Being Certain Means Being Wrong” (a brillant blogpost by Ted Cadsby) and started to wonder how the urge to avoid uncertainty influences communication and meme replication.

Once the mental wave function of uncertainty collapses the person who made the decision will likely explain his choice to himself (these rationalisations are made up ex post) and perhaps talk to his friends about it, i.e. he creates a meme about his decision.

If we assume a larger group of people facing the same uncertainty concerning some relevant issue, I’d guess that the meme which reduces the uncertainty most effectively will spread fastest und widest within the group.

digital oil

I grew quite fond of the oil colours within painter. The mixture of applying colour and mixing the colour while keeping the brush on the canvas feels quite organic. I am still looking for a convenient way to change the blending parameter – perhaps I’ll map them on the tablet keys …

Befriending The Wacom Tablet

Where tools are a hindrance investing in better solutions may actually improve the situation – coming from the intuos 2 the investment in an intuos 4 tablet is a _huge_ leap forward.

The haptic qualities of the new tablet are remarkably close to the real thing and though I still need much (*10^10) more time drawing this way to be able to totally forget about the tool and focusing on the image itself, this is much much better than before

A Bigger Apple

After writing a little program that generates a simple HTML-presentation from a folder of JPG-Files, I’ve been searching for a way to enable my colleagues to use it – without the need to learn how to handle a command line interface.

Making a Perl program executable via doubleclick in the graphical user inteface of Mac OS X is ridiculously easy: just change the suffix to “.command”, set the rights of the file to executable and Mac OS X will do your bidding.

There is, however, a little obstacle in case you to work with relative paths – Mac OS X will run this program with the current working directory set to your home folder. But this can be overcome with a little shell command:

my $basepath = `dirname "$0"`;
chomp($basepath);

(Yes, I am using backticks – sue me! )

With the capacity of the human memory and patience being limited and with every website, electronic device and service asking for authentication, lots of people are reusing the excact same password for each and every one of their accounts. The implications of this kind of behaviour in terms of security have been discussed ad nauseam, hence I won’t bore you with warnings concerning identity theft, etc.
Nevertheless there is perhaps another effect, which hasn’t been given this much attention (at least I haven’t read or heard about any serious research on this phenomenon yet):

Unless the chosen password is purely random and truly void of meaning, reusing the same word or phrase over and over again may have a psychological effect.

Let’s say someone chose to use 4poCalYps3! as his or her standard password (with the idea of an apocalypse being very memorable, chances are good that this has indeed been used by some kind of half-geek out there). Thus everytime he or she logs into a (password protected) computer or website, the word or rather the idea of an apocalypse shows up in this persons mind.

If this person is digitally very active, he or she actually thinks of the apocalypse several times during a common workday. This could lead to an awkward kind of self-conditioning, perhaps even with a negative effect on that persons mental health.

Perhaps choosing a password embedded within positive semantic context could have favorable effects … ?

4llY0urMoN3yw1llbeM1ne