“If you wish to make the gods laugh”, the saying goes, “tell them your plans.”

But plans must be made. Without a plan, you’re left with wishful thinking, and look what that gets you: A halfwit frat boy and his evil homunculus veep running the country into the ground; 50+% losses in your 401K; unemployment heading north to double digits. Not pretty.

Here at the Renaissance, we believe in setting our global policies locally. So far the 2009 resolutions are:

- No New Books. I’ve got a bad jones for books and now have far more piled around my office unloved and unread than can be good for my karma. The resolution is to buy no new books this year, with the exception of any title needed to stay in good graces with my Book Club. Anything I read will come from what’s already here. I’d make the goal that of getting through what I do have piled up, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. This might be a multi-year resolution.

- One Book at a Time. Well, let’s say two. Somerset Maugham observed that the problem with reading wasn’t what to read, but figuring out what you’d be in the mood for when you had time to read. From my parents I inherit a wide range of interests, which translates into having many books going at once. I must have six going right now. Like any human multitasking, it is ultimately illusory … you get less out of any given read by failing to give it sufficient focus. Two at a time … that will be the max.

- One Thousand Miles. In 2008 I finally spent real time with a personal trainer and managed to lose some weight. In 2009 the resolution is to run 1,000 miles (not all at once!) That will mean averaging 20+ miles per week, easy in the summer and fall, not so easy now when New England seems to get about 4 hours of light in the daytime, and the snow and ice are real obstacles.

There will be others. Add yours in the comments … we’ll all keep track!

UPDATE: Sorry, stuff like this cracks me up: I resolve to stop buying books in 2009 as a minor step to simplify my life. Today, there’s a press release for this book, urging me to buy this book about how to simplify my life. Combining my resolution with the press release, I heartily recommend the book and will demonstrate this by NOT buying it.

We really saw it in the recent presidential election, and here is another example of how the Web Changes Everything. Although I am not so green as to believe we will ever fully shake small time politics and economic divides in my lifetime, the ability to see, communicate, and work with each other like this means, to me, that we are starting to get the means to remove a lot of the old barriers. In particular the fictions used to divide us into “Us” and “Them”.

As Voltaire said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Our ability to talk and work together easily is a good prescription for dispelling some of the absurdity.

Robert Alsing is a clever fellow. Mike S. sent along this link to Robert’s blog entry about his genetic program to render a passable picture of the Mona Lisa by the overlaying of just 50 translucent polygons (he calls them ‘transparent’, but that’s a no-win proposition).

Besides well-deserved “That’s cool!” and “Let’s see the source code!” commentary to the post, there is also some sort of nerd-battle raging about whether this is an example of Genetic Programming (GP) or a working genetic algorithm (GA) or a hill-climbing algorithm (H-C A?). All of which is fairly well beside the point. It’s a very clever hack, whatever you call it.

Since the algorithm’s fitness function is a pixel-by-pixel compare of a digital image of the actual Mona Lisa, it’s got a big leg up over conventional evolutionary models, which understand the nature of “relatively better” but (depending on which holy books you do or do not subscribe to) it usually isn’t the case that you know the ideal state that you are working towards, and the ideal state tends to be a moving target anyway.

But wow, just 50 polygons! That’s a tall order for a complex image. Read the post and the FAQ he provides as well. And marvel at the images that document the progress of the evolution.

Bring on the early returns!