Web Bookmarks

It's a shame how poorly web browsers handle bookmarks. In Firefox, for example, there is the ability to tag bookmarks and even a feature that suggests previously created tags to cut down on duplicates. However, they lack two features which I see as vital. First, they don't allow for convenient viewing of bookmarks on the basis of tags. The only way to see all of the tags is to open the bookmark manager. From the Bookmarks menu, the only tags shown are those most recently modified. Second of their problems, is that there isn't any recursion in the presentation of tagged bookmarks, even in the bookmark manager. Only a single tag can be used to specify the bookmark view at once, but what if the user wanted to limit the the display to bookmarks with two or more tags?

Often these don't pose a problem for users, because they only visit a few different sites which they either have opened in tabs all the time or available in a "quicklist" auto-sorted by the browser according to recent usage. However, when a user needs more access to his past reading, it can become difficult to pick out the data he is looking for from a large list of tags with titles that may not reflect the particular data he's searching for. When doing actual research, having to rely on searching by page titles (which sometimes don't have the pertinent relation to the contents) can be disastrous. While there may only be a few cases where a user runs afoul of the poor organizational structure, the times when he does will irk him and probably cost a lot of time both in the auxiliary work of finding data and in the time taken to get back in "the zone" to work efficiently---and this can even ruin a whole day's work if the distraction is sufficiently upsetting.

Still, there remains the fact that many people won't bother with bookmarks at all. They rely entirely on their browser history and web searches, probably never clearing their history to prevent the loss of their fragile knowledge network. While I would always encourage more active management of information, I tend to see that as the most natural approach. Organizing bookmarks takes time, and even if it's only a little, it's still valuable. Ideally, everything we read would be automatically organized into a well-structured web of information, that we could run through at will with the ease of accessing our own memories---the web would be an extension of our memories. However, science has not yet fulfilled this desire, and we are forced to make do with the tools at hand. I can, however, hope that there is data to be gleaned from user habits while surfing the web, and that those data might help to structure the information we view for later re-view.
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TagFS Release 1

It looks like the first version of TagFS is ready to be released. About all of the features you would expect right off the bat are in there.

Zip Archive
Project Page
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NiceFuckingGraphics

I found this graphic design blog called NiceFuckingGraphics. It looks pretty cool, so I thought I'd share:
Main page
Page that got me there   pretty cool artist with a hip-hop style (DA)

TagFS Alpha 1

My first release of TagFS, a filesystem based on tags instead of directories, is out: https://github.com/mwatts15/TagFS

You still can't make your own tags intuitively (heh.), but the generate_testdb.pl script lets you demo it.

Blender in cool places

I found blender in another cool place today!
National Resource for Biomedical Supercomputing workshop

Deja Vu

(x-post from my old blog)

Deja vu, the phenomenon of feeling that events occuring have occured before in exactly the same fashion, can be explained very simply as a matter of timing in the brain's processing of events. It's not hard to imagine that some aspects of a stimulus are processed faster than others. Have you ever raised your head before you "heard" the telephone ring--before your frontal lobes perceived and recognized a sound? Hearing a sudden, unexpected noise will cause an almost reflexive reaction in most humans. They jump and look towards the origin of the sound. It isn't necessary to fully perceive sounds like that prior to responding to them, and because such noises could signal danger, it could be a deadly mistake to rely on the much slower frontal lobes to finish up before a response is coordinated.

A similar system is likely in play during deja vu. A stimulus is perceived and processing begins on it. However, the memory storage process encodes the stimulus just a fraction of a second before the frontal lobes. The frontal lobes, in processing the stimulus, refer to memory, including the memory just encoded for the same stimulus, and therefore recognize the stimulus as something _that already happened_. This out-of-step-processing hypothesis also explains the decay of deja vu. As an episode of deja vu progresses, the two processes of conscious perception and memory gradually return to their proper order, closing the time gap until conscious processing overtakes memory processing. This closing gap agrees with the experience of the deja vu memory becoming progressively less certain until events no longer appear to have happened before.

It's still not clear what causes deja vu or why episodes tend to stick out in a person's memory. Memories are more concrete when the stimulus is very strong or traumatic to the observer, but that doesn't imply that the processing is *faster*, and furthermore the events that surround episodes of deja vu are typically very mundane and in no way emotionally charged. Possibly, deja vu merely shows evidence of the brain's imperfect powers of perception and time gaps result from a race condition in our brain software. The more common explanation, that deja vu arises from the association of long passed or familiar memory traces with present stimuli could provide part of the answer. Assuming that the memory process must precede the conscious proces we have to assume that either the conscious process slows or the memory process accelerates prior to an episode. If the prior-memory-association hypothesis is correct, then it's possible the memory of a past event is substituted into evolving memory and thereby speeds up the process.

My hypothesis comes from a conceptualization of the brain as a sort of neurochemical computer. I assume that certain processes are distinct, identifiable, and observable. I may be wrong and the brain may be organized in ways that I did not anticipate and cannot understand. Even so, my explanation is at least as good as any other I've heard and I beleive it can be tested with in a drug trial.

Remote access tip with Firefox

I discovered today that if firefox can detect a firefox session running on a remote X server, it will connect to it. This can be disabled by the no-remote option on the command line (as per the man page).