The Occasional Recurring LabKitty Phone Browsing Announcement

This is a public service announcement. With guitars! Okay, no guitars. Let's focus on the first part.

Those of you visiting LabKitty on your phone (approximately 60%, according to Google analytics) while pooping (94%, ibid.) likely do not experience the full LabKitty website blog experience. In short, LabKitty on mobile is mostly awful. (Update: LabKitty on mobile is now somewhat less awful, because I spent the last month hand-tweaking the CSS in all the posts. Yay me.) One would think a fancy Internet company like Google would be able to get their auto-formatting on better terms with your eyeballs, especially given the amount of uninvited HTML Blogger inserts into your posts behind the scenes, which makes a Trump NDA positively spartan by comparison.

Famous First Words #16: The Dawn of Resting State fMRI -- Biswal et al.

Famous First Words is a recurring LabKitty feature wherein we have a look at the opening line of a famous scientific article.

Scientists' view of the brain tends to track the popular tech of the day. Descartes, for example, knew about horses so he concluded the soul was riding the brain horse-wise and even identified an anatomical rein from which the habenula gets its name. Fast forward many years and birth of the computer got everyone certain the brain trafficked in the ones and zeros of these marvels. At various other times the brain was a state machine, or a control system, or an associative net, or a Hebbian steam engine. Who knows what models tomorrow will bring, perhaps something about dark matter or quantum foam or "rap" (I once overheard a student argue we should study the brains of "rappers" because -- and I quote -- they are the intellectuals of society.)

More to today's point, somewhere between the equine and the Boolean, psychology got enamored with operant conditioning, popularized by BF Skinner and namesake of the box that bears his name. You go in the box. You do something good and a reward (sugar pellet, whiskey, tenure) appears. You do something bad and a punishment (electrical shock, 1040, "rap") appears instead.

The effect was we came to view the brain as a passive lump existing in a kind of sensory miasma, waiting for and then responding to a never-ending parade of stimuli called life. Anyone in possession of this device might find such a description overly simplistic. If you are like LabKitty, and why wouldn't you be, your mental existence isn't a grey fog punctuated by external interruptions, but rather a rich internal tapestry of hopes, dreams, and revenge fantasies.

Git Scenarios #3: OS-X Case Sensitivity (or lack thereof)

Git Scenarios #3: OS-X Case Sensitivity

Git Scenarios is a recurring LabKitty feature wherein we examine weird / badly-documented git behaviors that may vex the git n00b (and the not-so n00b).

The OS-X filesystem is not case sensitive. That means, for example, it cannot tell the difference between a file named foobar.txt and FOOBAR.txt. You can easily verify this. Open Terminal and do:

  $ touch foobar
  $ ls foobar
  $ rm FOOBAR
  $ ls foobar

The first ls will list the file and the second will not.

Unfortunately, this can create git weirdness. Read on.

LabKitty Recommends: CORTEX: Statistics and Geometry of Neuronal Connectivity

Anatomy is the handmaid of physiology. From aardvarks to zyzzyva, if you seek to understand how something works, you must first tally its parts. Those who would take on physiology of the neural kind face a particularly uphill battle. First, brains are not built from the kind of detailed bauplan that applies to the body writ large. The shinbone may be connected to the knee-bone, but no such explicit instruction set exists for placing billions of neurons and trillions of synapses amongst them. There simply isn't enough information in the genome. Instead, we make do with statistics. Nature sketched some rules -- more what you call guidelines than actual rules -- threw us into the stew, and then washed her hands. The statistics clearly work (else you not reading this would be) but that does not mean sussing them is an easy task.

Second, even though we desire statistics writ large, it must be arduously written from the small. Neurons = tiny. You can't even see the pesky things without a microscope and even then not without preparation. Leeuwenhoek would have to wait a hundred years for the histological stains that make neurons appear in his invention, and a further hundred years for the electron microscope necessary to visualize synapses. Functional neuroanatomy is a Herculean census not of citizens but of invisible specks. No wonder protoscientists settled on the various lumps and gobbets as the fundamental units. Had you informed Descartes that it is not the pineal itself but a vast winking population of invisible animalcules within that comprise the soul you would have blown his mind.

Git Scenarios #2: Personal Access Tokens

Our scenario today is less a scenario and more a cautionary tale, for it contains no objective and brokers no recourse. Today, we are wholly at the mercy of GitHub (...it will hurt less if you don't struggle, the voice behind you whispers).

If you have been using GitHub for any time, you probably recall the Big Announcement that passwords -- those stalwart digital sentinels generations of coders have relied upon -- would no longer be accepted as the lingua franca for transmitting fingerbarfings to and fro the site. Beginning in August, a new mandatory security widget would go into effect: the Personal Access Token.

Now, instead of typing a password to do any git-dangerous op, you have to type an entirely different password.

A new password. A better password.

A password GitHub creates for you.

Introducing: Git Scenarios (also Git Scenarios #1: Revert one file)

Working with git is an infinite loop of small victories followed by crushing defeats. Just when you think you understand the tool's design philosophy, just when you think you get git, just when you let your guard down and attempt the smallest operation outside your comfort zone, disaster strikes. Git-fu simply doesn't extrapolate. The command with the obvious name isn't the one you want, and the command you want doesn't do what you want without including some cryptic option. At best, your attempt does nothing. At worst, it leaves you with a corrupt repo and a missed deadline.

Git is so horrid one can't help but suspect Torvalds released it as a joke. The bad design, the obtuse syntax, the nonsensical command modifiers. I'm here reminded of Richard Feynman lashing out during an interview when a reporter insisted on using buzzwords and machinations to explain QED. You're taking something simple and beautiful and making it ugly and complicated! Once git escaped the lab, rational Software Version Control was forever put out of reach. Programming was no longer about solving problems, it was about sitting at the cool kids table.

What's that, young pup? You disagree? You say git is a paragon of SVC, an exemplar of UX, and if someone doesn't see that, well, they're, like, stupid.

Fine, simple test: Would you be using GitHub if it wasn't free?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

Mathematics \m/