The Chase is On

There is no point in live where one should feel content with one's growth, in power and ability generally, in mind and control particularly. While contriving, expressing ideas and moving are just the beginnings, the rate will likely determine everything.

first snow

It's that time of the year again...

remove duplicate paths from $PATH in BASH

Here is one that I came up with:
PATH=`awk -F: '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if(!($i in a)){a[$i];printf s$i;s=":"}}}'<<<$PATH`

torque, rsync, and selinux

Somehow, rsync dies quietly when run inside a qsub script if selinux is enabled (on a Fedora 7 system). I can by-pass this by changing the security context inside the script. However, this should be the job of torque. Anyway, make selinux permissive is the simplest way of dealing with it.

Beneficial

Addiction is about giving up the freedom of will to instinctive impulses. What to gain are usually biological comforts. But, what to lose is the very reason for being in this world.

Source of Information

The insight of Bennett on Maxwell's daemon shows that the information can not be easily erased. By the time symmetry of physical laws, the information can not be easily created, either.
There is this ad hoc observer in quantum mechanics that can collapse the state of a system and create information. And there is also this black hole of Hawking that seems to erase information. How are they connected?

Define Science

Science is a consistent and compressed description of our experiences. It's easier to have consistency since unrelated things are always consistent with each other. But, it's much harder to have compression since compressibility hinges on relationship.