Seed starting

Wonder if I have enough pots? This is round 2. We planted out 18 flats yesterday of peppers and tomatoes but I forgot to take pictures. I also found a great big fat worm out in the garden yesterday when I was working on the pond!

-Fin

Are You Writing Anonymously? Well, Maybe.

I've pondered running another blog with a more direct relation to my real name. This other blog would cover strictly professional / technical matters. Valuing privacy, not many bloggers write under real names. Over the years, I've written under many different pseudonyms on various forums and social media sites. Anyone seriously research me online would find this blog, but could they identify this blog from writing excerpts? How easily could someone associate my new technology blog to crazy political rants here?



There's been some significant research on analyzing text to match writing patterns. The general idea is that every person has unique linguistic patterns and turns of phrase. Fin can pick out my writing (or her sisters) almost immediately.

At some point, I read about some researchers using compression to identify authors of text excerpts. Compression algorithms create new encoding schemes based on pattern recognition. In theory, we can recognize an author's style by seeing which piece of writing results in the best compression. Does it work?

The idea seems too simple to work - at least with any meaningful accuracy. Still, finding it fascinating, I decided to run an experiment. Searching my google reader, I found 2 blogs covering similar topics to mine, and a third wildly different blog covering technical posts. Scouring these blogs, I worked at creating a text collection for each author. Excerpts were selected based on covering similar subject matter.

My 'test' subjects included a blog post written 3 years ago by myself, a work email sent roughly 3 weeks ago, and a collection of Google+ posts over the past few months. In addition, I grabbed 2 posts from the selected blogs. The work email and technical blog use extremely similar terminology throughout. In theory, the compression technique should fail in this case - picking up technology idioms instead of language usage.

To form a baseline, an unrelated text excerpt is added to each text collection. The collection is compressed using "Zip" and the final size recorded. After forming the baseline, I replace the additional text with each excerpt to identify.

Running the tests, I expected the results to be poor at a minimum. I'd purposefully selected difficult scenarios for the test, hoping to prod it into failure. In the end, all 5 tests resulted in a correct identification of the author. I'd suspected a few to hit on chance, but not a 100% positive identification rate. For those curious, my work email scored first with my personal blog here, and second with the technical blog.

The strongest match? Identifying the social media posts.

I'd guess that increasing the number of authors would decrease the positive ID rate. Still, we could improve that situation by adding to the baseline and test data sets. Obviously, a short test using a common sentence( eg: I'm hungry ) won't work well. Conspiracy theory thought: isn't social media providing an ever growing baseline data set?

The idea of social media building the strongest matches has interesting implications for this technique and author identification in general. While we write on social media with our real names, are we working against our interest in remaining anonymous elsewhere? In any security scenario, the weakest element tends to be the humans running the show. While we research technologies such as "Tor" for privacy and protection of political dissidents - the very published speech points right back at the author. Could a child's grammar school paper condemn them as an adult?

In general, the take away here is that writing on social media, or blogs, or English papers can be used to identify people in other contexts. Could I write this post and publish it truly anonymously?

Not as much as I'd like to think.

-- Fate

Planning out the Garden and Shovels

This weekend was a super busy weekend but a whole lot of stuff got done!

I broke what I thought was my last shovel on Friday trying to get that tree stump out of the ground, which sucks, because I have a whole lot more stuff to do with a shovel before the season even begins this year. We went to several estate sales yesterday trying to find a new shovel with absolutely NO luck. Isn't it usually the case that every time you're not looking for something that they are all over the place but as soon as you go looking for it there is none to be found? That was the case with shovels yesterday. The only one we found was a really crappy short handled one and I really wanted a long handled shovel. I did end up getting a couple new large sized tomato cages tho, and when we opened the trunk of the car to stick the cages in there we found a shovel! Go figure. It must have been in my car when I hit the deer and gotten stuck in Fates car without me realizing it. Unfortunately it was a short handled one, which wasn't what I wanted.

We went to Ace Hardware on the way home thinking to maybe pick up a new handle so I could replace the handle that I broke. Man, those things are expensive! They wanted like $15 for a new one. I started looking at the shovels on the wall and saw a all steel one for $29, with a lifetime warranty! Considering I've broken about 5 shovels or more in the last 3 years I figured the lifetime warranty was the way to go. I ended up getting this Fiskars long handled shovel. The wider base for stepping on and the life time warranty were the major attractions for me. Its a bit heavier then the other shovels I have used but I guess that works out well in the goal of I have of building more muscle! I haven't had a chance to use it yet, but will be sure to post a review when I do.

Today was spent sorting out our massive seed order. 172 different varieties! I think we might be a bit insane. We have 4 different places we are planting. My parents house, my brothers girlfriends friends farm (in three different places), my brothers house, and my house. Seeing the amount of seeds we have I am having trouble believing that we have ENOUGH seeds. Then the other part of me wonders where in the hell we are going to even put everything. Its crazy.

We started a google document that listed out all the starting times for getting things started indoors, transplanting, and direct seeding for both the spring and fall time. I am super excited to get everything going. We should be starting out the first of our seeds here very soon as our last expected frost date is April 15th. I'm really wondering how that is going to go this year since we don't seem to have had a winter around here. Knowing this area tho, even tho the winter has been super mild, I can see our last frost happening the end of May. A freak June snow storm isn't out of the question either.

My brother took a bunch of the salvaged wood I brought home and made out quite a few of the boxes for the garden for me. I'm happy about that as it will save me a ton of work. There are quite a few to go, but he made a whole lot of progress on them today. I will be concentrating on getting those into the garden this week along with getting the rest of the hugelkulture beds in the front yard dug out and filled up. I have the wood now to get those going, and the new shovel to get them dug out! I need to get that little tree moved and then I am in business.

Things are really coming along around here!

-Fin

Current chick pics!

-Fin

The War On Masculinity - Part I

This post comes after Fin encouraged me to write it here - mostly, I think, because she was curious to read it. In formulating my ideas, I've discovered there is too much for a single post. This will be a running series and theme. For a while, I've termed myself as a "male feminist" - strongly believing that women should be afforded equal rights to men in society. When I talk about the war on the masculine - I'm not directly talking about the "Battle of the Sexes".

I'm still looking for good terms and definitions that are not overly loaded on all this. When getting out on my own and developing an internal code of conduct, I've struggled constantly with how to be a man. The church defined things very narrowly and leaving left a gaping void in my personal philosophy. On some deep level, I wasn't comfortable with the church's definitions of gender rolls. Mostly, I found myself repulsed by "the good wife" described by the church. Fin, in a lot of ways, is the polar opposite. As I worked at growing personal, and especially after developing my relationship with Fin, I began noticing an odd trend. "Men" are under attack. Now, I don't men as in male. I say "men" as a people - male or female - at the moment expressing a masculine quality. In this case, the English language is somewhat lacking in expressing ideas.

In explaining difficult abstract concepts, sometimes mythology helps.

Photo Credit

Meet "The Green Man". He exists in many different religious traditions and provides a base-type for multiple fictional characters and myths. He's generally portrayed as grown from vegetation, or made with stone. Much of Robin Hood's image and mythology points toward the Green Man symbol. I pick the green man as being a very specific symbol of masculinity without too much extreme baggage. Many religious traditions use the masculine in their figures such as Jesus in Christianity, the Horned God in Wicca, or Hercules in Greco Roman mythology.

Looking at the Green Man and related figures, we find a general set of values represented by the Masculine - strength, courage, ingenuity, sexual prowess, independence, protection, and sacrifice. While termed "masculine", there is nothing male specific here. Indeed, on rare occasions the green man could be depicted as female. The importance of the myth is a reminder of masculine values in ourselves.

While some would say feminism has done a lot to "push-back" masculine values, I would disagree. To understand why, let's start with how I see masculinity being attacked:

1. Preventing children from expressing masculine energies when they are inclined to do so. Young children need healthy outlets for masculine energies - including competition and physical activity. EVERY child (boy and girl) should be doing something they enjoy that at some point will cause them physical and/or mental pain. Another way of putting this: kids should be kids.
2. An insistence that everyone be constantly "in touch" with their emotions. Dr. Phil is probably the worst offender here. A stoic countenance requires extreme emotional control - not a lack of depth.
3. The idea that all problems can be solved without use of force, or that the use of force to solve a problem is a failure.
4. Forcing men to act feminine, and not accepting women acting masculine. There are naturally feminine men. There are naturally masculine women. This has nothing to do with gender identity or sexual orientation.
5. A generalized view of the "intellectual" as superior to the "laborer". I say laborer for lack of better term. I'm speaking of the skilled trades here - electricians, farmers, janitors - as opposed to the banker or software engineer. There's definitely intellectual aspects to wood working and so on. I must admit, I'd find it more difficult to speak for the physical aspects of software programming...
6. A lack of respect for the warrior. We "support our troops", right? We support them yes, but we don't give them anywhere near the respect they deserve. This is really somewhat contained in the previous item, but it's important enough it needs added again.
7. A pervasive sense of entitlement. I don't think our perception here matches the reality, this cuts a lot of ways and across all demographics - from "trust fund kids" to the stereotypical abusers of social programs.
8. A constant desire for safety, and freedom from pain or consequences. This beyond anything else, is perhaps the most damaging to masculinity.

As an aside, these are societal pressures against masculinity. There's been various mentions in news sources and documentaries about environmental impacts as well. Our growing mastery of chemistry exposes bodies to a whole range of newly created concoctions. Why are young girls entering puberty earlier? Do these environmental impacts also hurt male development? I have a feeling they do, but without knowing the exact causes, there's no telling. This aspect is interesting, but I'm not going to go too much into depth here.

In parting my list of the current attacks on masculinity, only a few are directly associated with "female" centric values. The observant might note that several items on the prior list are rooted in feminine values not being expressed. In these cases, a furtherance of feminism would help restore masculinity.

I hesitate to name a single "enemy" collecting troops to fight, but at least two weapons are clear: fear and wealth. Combined, these weapons have driven us to drive away the Green Man, pushing him back into the forest as a lowly creature worthy of no respect or honor, and removing all but a dim shadow of his vitality.

I think there's a lot of questions I've introduced here: Are the above attacks on masculinity valid, important, or real? What exactly is causing them? Is there anything to be done? I hope I've at least introduced a new viewpoint for anyone reading. Phrased simply, this viewpoint is - Masculinity is under attack and Feminism has little to do with it.

-- Fate

Ding dong the tree is gone!

Or at least the tree stump is gone now! We took the tree down about 3 years ago and I've been waiting for the stump to rot enough to get out since. I decided to take it out this week so I wouldn't have to now around it anymore. Instead I will have to now around the new tree I am putting in there.

The tree we took out was some kind of pine tree that died about 5 years ago due to some kind of bug infestation. Mine was one of the first in the area to go, but it seems to be attacking pretty much every other pine I see these days. It was a hard loss, since that provided late day shade to my biggest windows in the house. It has made a real difference on how hot the living room gets in the summer.

I already have the tree I am planning on putting in there, I just need to move it from where I decided to put it last year. Hopefully moving it doesn't kill it, I grew it from a seedling.

- Fin

Hugelkulture

These beds are the ones that I put in recently in the front yard.  One finished, one started, and one to go!  Need to move a tree before I can do the last one. 

-Fin