HomoZapiens

Missiles, fyi

2011-03-20T17:15:00.000-07:00

Cost of a Tomahawk cruise missile: approximately $756,000 in 2011-dollars.

Cost of an AGM-86B cruise missile: $1,000,000.

Cost of a Harpoon cruise missile: $1,200,000.

Cost of an AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile: $4.0 million.

But there are other options. Maybe I'd feel better our defense budget if I had some reason to believe that we were paying reasonable prices for the hardware.

Stoopid++

2009-11-28T03:27:00.000-08:00

There is stupid. There is stoopid. And there is David Brooks.

UPDATE: Read this, ye Mighty, and despair: "The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed."

Simple answers...

2009-05-21T18:29:00.000-07:00

...to simple questions:

If rational, non-sociopathic people can argue about whether it's torture, then it is torture.

No one has ever seen a black person before.

2009-05-10T09:06:00.000-07:00

So it would seem. "How do I get Michelle Obama arms?" they ask. One answer: "By being a black woman." There are other ways, obviously, but it helps.

Word.

2008-03-15T13:10:00.000-07:00

Greeks

2007-12-12T20:52:00.000-08:00

Lifting from Christopher Hitchens' ridiculous column in Slate, one Rabbi Michael Lerner said the following:

Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.

I have no comment at the moment on Hitchen's chattering. But let's have something clear. Platonism in antiquity was not in any proper sense "rational." I will grant you "axiomatic" or "logical" or "mathematical", but all of those are crazy stretches. Plato's school was a mystery cult, and Plato's "philosopher" was more like a Buddha crossed with a Sufi mystic than what might reasonably be called a philosopher in the sense of a rational investigator.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

That, or he's talking theology, which is not intrinsically nonsense as far as I'm concerned. The point being, it is not possible to rationally argue your way into knowing what God is like.

Ahem

2007-08-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

It's already been noted, but I feel it may be worth restating, that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a man.

7. The primary meaning of “Islam” is submission. Islam requires everybody to submit to some written rules, which are final and cannot be discussed. Peace, in its Western usage, means a (written) treaty with the enemy, to which both sides submit. However, Pacifism is not as much about some specific peace treaty with any particular enemy, as it is for some abstract Peace, without even a specified enemy. So, it calls for submission to some implied treaty with unspecified enemy. Since that enemy is not named, the treaty actually requires only our submission.

That is all.

Well, there you go.

2007-07-28T20:19:00.000-07:00

The sorting hat says that I belong in Ravenclaw!

Said Ravenclaw, "We'll teach those whose intelligence is surest."

Ravenclaw students tend to be clever, witty, intelligent, and knowledgeable.
Notable residents include Cho Chang and Padma Patil (objects of Harry and Ron's affections), and Luna Lovegood (daughter of The Quibbler magazine's editor).

Take the most scientific Harry Potter
Quiz ever created.

Get Sorted Now!

Yucca Mountain

2007-05-26T14:12:00.000-07:00

Before I begin, I want to ask, does anyone else remember GWB promising to review and probably thwart the Yucca mountain installation during his first and/or second campaign(s)?

Anyway (via), I got to thinking about this problem of warning the people of the distant future (say 40,000 years from now, as the radioactive waste is expected to be toxic for like 100,000 years) about the terrible mess beneath their feet. The proposal right now, as I understand it, is to seed the area with angry-ish-looking conical monoliths inscribed with warnings in the six official UN languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish) along with several "information center" monuments which have more detailed explanations of things like dating via star positions and such. There's lots of use of the international symbol for radiation hazard. I have some comments/proposals.

First of all, the languages they've selected are kind of arbitrary. There are more than a billion Indians in the world at this moment--that's a sixth of the world's population--so we should probably expect there to a commensurably large number of people descended from Indians or who speak a language descended from an Indian language. Why are Hindi and/or Urdu not included? Meanwhile, there are about 300 million French speakers worldwide. Also, if we're taking Russian as somehow a reference for Future Slavic, it would be appropriate to remember that many Slavic languages are not rendered in Cyrillic, and the world is saturated with Latin keyboards--if Slavic survives for 5,000 years, I'm guessing it won't be in Cyrillic. Really, if we want our languages to be decipherable to people in the distant future, we should really start seeding the world with Rosetta stones (not on paper and not in electronic media) and documentation of language changes every 20 years or something for as long as our civilization holds together. I would say the Catholic Church and other longlived religious instituitions are the most reasonable conduits for this, as they/we build lots of stony permanent structures all over the world and are known to have a bit of staying power. There's also the problem of really saturating the world with this information, so that my great^n grand-niece is at least aware that such knowledge exists in the world.

The next two issues have to do with the problem that "hermeneutic transparency" is a property of an interpretation, not an interpreted text. Honestly, I think this an insurmountable problem, and we have no hope helping future peoples to avoid this danger other than telling them explicitly what the danger (see above). We'd be better off trying to preserve a way for them to access Wikipedia (in some form) than trying to mark the site itself in any more or less spectacular way. (On the other hand, just making the site hard to inhabit would probably be enough to limit the damage; if the first few settlers or explorers die of a horrible pestilence, it would probably be a better warning than anything else we could provide. But, I don't know how you could do that for thousands of years)

Second, I don't see that vaguely phallic monolith's are a great way to go. Sitting next to phallic-looking things is time-honored fertility magic. Sitting 2000 feet above the sealed waste vault is probably not an issue, but it would certainly take the edge off the "Danger: Horrible Pestilence Here" message. Third, looking at this of message goals troubles me. I can imagine "myself" looking at such a monument and thinking, "This is a monument about the worst battle/thing that ever happened by this civilization's hand; we'd better investigate, so we don't do the same thing." In any case, we have no reason to think that our exhortations of danger will hold any water with future peoples. The ancient Egyptians, for example, probably believed that the gods and various curses would keep their tombs relatively safe (if not the treasures, then at least the bodies), but maliciously or not, we certainly do not respect that belief now. We may think that we're a rational and powerful society, but so does every other society. Why should we expect future peoples to take our beliefs as factually true, whether or not they are, in fact, true?

Well, at least, I can say that it's nice that "serious people" can address problems on timescales of hundreds and thousands of years. As a not-very-serious person who has thought about this a little bit, though, I'm pretty sure that all we can really do is try preserve some of things we know--enough and in such a way that the really-clever people of those civilization could start at least where we were in, say, the 1950s.

The joy of counting

2007-05-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

For anyone who's counting, $95 billion dollars amounts to a $30,000 bonus for every single teacher (elementary, middle and secondary school) in the United States, with some left over for about 150,000 new hires.

Oh, but we already spent that money on killing brown people.

Daemon

2007-05-05T22:49:00.000-07:00

If you cause my daemon to be a spider, I will cut you.

2007-04-07T16:11:00.000-07:00

Now, I have no use myself for SDI (anti-ballistic missile defense), but this criticism is sort of ridiculous:

Torrential rains wiped out a quarter of the U.S.’ intercontinental ballistic missile interceptors in Ft. Greely, Alaska last summer — right when North Korea was preparing to carry out an advanced missile launch, according to documents obtained by the Project On Government Oversight.

“The flooding occurred during a three-week period between the end of June and early July 2006,” POGO notes, in a statement. “The flooding damaged 25% of the U.S. interceptor missiles’ launch capability. These silos house the interceptor missiles that would be used to attempt to intercept a missile aimed at the United States. No interceptors were in the flooded silos.”

This surely makes the designers look dumb (your missile silos aren’t water proof!?!?), but it’s not a criticism of the proposed system at all. The basic problem with SDI is not that its expensive or that the designers are dumb (they’re probably not). The problems, as I see them, are (a) SDI is basically untestable, so you won’t know if you actually have a missile shield, and (b) its probably easy to defeat the SDI system by using stealthy warheads or (more likely) just using a whole frakking lot of warheads. I’m willing to go out on limb here and guess that your standard ICBM is a lot cheaper than an anti-missile missile.

Does anyone know if the DoD has a office for “How do I defeat that ridiculously expensive platform on the cheap?” I would sign up for that. Having read about Rumsfeld’s tenures as secretary, I won’t hold my breath.

Porphyrogenitus

2007-03-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

I am Antoninus Pius!

Which Roman Emperor Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com

Accent

2006-11-14T19:05:00.000-08:00

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
North Central
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

Philosophizin'

2006-11-02T23:25:00.000-08:00

As a wise man once said, "Behold! I am full of post!"

So, while grading a midterm this afternoon/evening, one of the other GSIs and I had a brief cconversation on this notion of mathematical platonism. It turns out I am something of platonist--that is, I tend to believe that mathematical objects are real in some sense--but the reason I feel this is almost worth reporting to you, my esteemed public, is that I think the "mathematical objects are real" characterization is not the right way to think about this. Obviously, the natural numbers, \NN, (the counting numbers or nonnegative whole numbers) don't exist in the same way that my shirt exists--I can't, for example, spill food on the natural numbers. But if they don't exist in some obvious way, in what way can they be said to exist at all? Well, I think it may not be correct to think of the structure \NN as existing. Rather, I think that \NN is somehow the canonical or inevitable construction that beings need for reasoning about counting; that is to say, counting exists, and if we want to reason about this notion, then the construction of \NN is imposed on us. As far as I've thought it through (not very far), this is not identical to supposing that \NN has some kind of obscure or spiritual existence--in other words, I've made a quite mundane notion of transcendence to allow for the existence of certain transcendental objects as "natural ways of thinking about things." In a similar vein, then, I can allow for the real numbers \RR to exist as the canonical structure for thinking about a continuum (as for example, in the motion of an object through space).

Further back, I went to a logic colloquium talk on the structure "knowing an implication." Now, I'm not expert enough to really comment on the quality of the presenter's notions. Naturally, "belief" figured into this construction, but what really bothered me is that I'm not sure that I believe that people ever actually believe in implication in the mathematical/logical sense. I'm almost sure that people actually believe only in causation, and implication is formal way to talk about causation without making a mess. For example, I realize that theorems are generally stated as implications, but we generally follow the statement of a theorem with a proof, wherein we show how the hypotheses cause the conclusion to be true. Indeed, we often aren't particularly satisfied with a proof that has no intuitive (read: causative) content. A better toy model maybe is that of street lights at intersections. Certainly, one could be said to believe the implication "If my light is green, then the opposing light is red"; and certainly, it sounds silly to say, "my light being green causes the opposing light to be red." However, I'm prepared to claim that what a person really "believes" is that there is an agent causing the situation to be as it is. I think that worrying about belief in or knowledge of an implication is beside the point because implication is not the sort of thing that people can believe in--people know and believe in causative relationships and only subsequently hedge their bets or admit to ignorance of the nature of the cause by stating these beliefs as implications. Hence, as I'm not necessarily that interested in the properties of an ideal rational agent, I'm not sure why we are discussing knowledge of implication as such.

Ciao.

No kidding

2006-09-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

Also

2006-09-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

I'm sad that I don't appear on ratemyprofessor.com.

:-(

2006-08-31T23:44:00.000-07:00

Not sure what it means, but this kind of thing makes me so sad I feel like I could vomit.

Why do I wish I knew more Finns?

2006-08-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

'German ground troops ... had given it the nicknames Schwarzer Tod (Black Death) and Eiserner Gustav (Iron Gustav). The Finnish nickname Maatalouskone (The Agricultural Machine) derived from the habitual low attack pattern of the Il-2 (a WWII Soviet anti-tank aircraft).'

More truisms

2006-08-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

I haven't really posted anything specifically about the Lebanon-Israel crisis so far because I don't really have anything specific to say, and I can't claim to be completely familiar with the specifics. In the general context the mistakes (and seriously, it's mistakes all the way down) are the same as they always are. A little while ago, I posted a list of, among other things, facts that policy-makers seem to be largely unaware of. I think I'd just like to expand upon that a little more.

(3-5) I think people in the west retain a sort of vestigial cultural memory of empire that has become completely obsolete in the modern world. Whether it's the Roman empire, the British empire, the Russian empire, the Austrian empire, even the Akkaddian empire, one thing all of these had in common is that their expansion was directed into areas which (1) were already amenable to being part of an empire and/or (2) lacked the historical precedent of being a nation-state.

Examples:
The Russian empire did not conquer Kazakhstan but the land and a people whose political loyalties were much more local than the conquerors' own; in 1991, when Kazakhstan had a choice, it went it's own way. By contrast, Polish nationalists rarely missed an opportunity to blow up something Russian, even when there wasn't actually a broader uprising. Reaching back even further, Kievan Rus, a fairly motley collection of little principalities, fell to the Horde ridiculously quickly, who didn't even attempt to administer the territory directly, while two hundred years later, a unified Muscovy (not a remarkably potent military power) could stare them down.

When Hungary became part of the Austrian empire, it wasn't Hungary but the Lands of the Crown of St. Stephen, including what is now Croatia, some of Slovakia and Slovenia, and it came as a concession from the Ottoman empire, and could be seen as an improvement on the rule of the Infidel. On the other hand, the Ottomans managed to maintain their European empire only tenuously and through grossly vicious, even genocidal, methods--the boy tax in Bulgaria, for example--which at no point finished off the resistance in those areas.

When Britain conquered India, it did so in pieces, picking off individual rulers one by one; later, when the concept of India as the nation of Indians became coherent, Britain couldn't hold it.

The Roman empire conquered two kinds of peoples: those that were already part of Alexandrine successor states--whose lives would not be altered significantly by a change of Hellenistic overlords--and those with relatively parochial political structures like the Gauls or the Iberian Celts, who lacked a central authority or central principle to organize resistance. Notably, the Romans never had any serious chance at conquering and annexing the Parthian kingdom.

I bring up these examples because in the modern world, there aren't really any peoples who satisfy (1) or (2), and my thesis is that a people who do not satisfy (1) or (2) are essentially unconquerable even in the medium term. Moreover, I tend to believe that this fact extends to most threats to a people's sovereignty or collective pride from an outside power. People in the modern world will not be beaten down. And this spawns any number of bloody responses, state-organized or not, sometimes fairly noble resistance to an occupying power, sometimes seemingly inexplicable civil wars--the actual response is conditioned on a ridiculously complex array factors, and only a fool would try to make a specific prediction before the fact. From the standpoint of the occupier, though, the high-level prediction that the engagement will lead to disaster is almost certain bet: the target will not yield, and then something horrible will happen.

Israel and the U.S. should know better by now. We should know better than to think that even elements of backwardness belie some fundamental weakness or vulnerability to persuasion by force. The Lebanese, or specifically Hezbollah, were never going to yield. We would all be safest assuming that no one will ever yield. It's not a terribly heroic conclusion--epics of iron-willed nations who stand against all odds are off the table--everyone stands, or if they fall, the get back up. When they get back up, they do it with righteous fury. The question "Is this nation strong, or will they yield?" can always be answered: they are strong. All nations are sufficiently heroic.

I'm wandering now, so let me try to summarize. For myself, I am a pacifist for non-pragmatic reasons, but I think even the pragmatist really has to look at pacifism seriously now. Only idiots fight wars when they are not obviously compelled or when they cannot guarantee the victory. In the modern world, we can never guarantee or even seriously expect anything but a terribly pyrrhic victory or a genocidal mess. Any serious international agenda has to begin with something like the following: "The people over there are going to do what they want, or if threatened, they are going to do what none of us want."

Bwaaaaaaa-ha-ha

2006-08-08T17:00:00.000-07:00

I passed! I passed my qual! God is great!

Tidbits of deep wisdom

2006-07-30T15:05:00.000-07:00

from a bizarrely ancient person:

1. Nature will kick your ass every single time. (If you don't believe me, consider, for example, the energy released in the Tunguska event relative to the largest-ever man-made detonation of about 60 megatons. Or just think about how much it takes to deal with one wildfire.)

2. The enemy of your enemy is not likely to be a very good friend.

3. People want revenge, and people will not lightly accept humiliation.

4. Hitting someone harder will probably not make him want revenge any less.

4.5. Conquered people almost never give in.

5. When you've run out of reasonable ideas, it's time to seriously consider the ridiculous ideas.

(For example, with regard to the Israel-Lebanon crisis, if diplomacy and conventional military action aren't going to work--the first because the sides aren't speaking, the second because you can't possibly achieve your objective--you have to look at other options. Say, spraying aerosol sedatives over southern Lebanon or something.)

6. If you assert God has agency in the same way that we do, you are making things up.

(I'm not talking about the Incarnation, which totally changes the question--which is kind of the point.)

7. If you assert that a non-human intelligence would be more or less like us, you are completely crazy. (Even O.S. Card didn't really live up to his premise.)

8. A person with a dark aspect should be portrayed differently from someone who doesn't.

(Angelina Jolie has a very pretty smile, but photographing her as if she were Jessica Simpson, with a big All-American smile, just looks like a comment on the desperation of existence--not ideal for the cover of People magazine.)

9. If people don't really believe you when you say you want to engage in diplomacy, you have done something ridiculously wrong.

10. If you have to announce the beginning of diplomatic engagement, you have already screwed up.

11. Withdrawing your diplomatic mission from a country you're upset with is obviously stupid and should never be done.

12. Things will work out better in the Middle east if official Europe can admit publicly that the Jewish state is where it is (i.e. not in Europe) partly because of anti-Semiticism continuing after the Holocaust.

In other news

2006-07-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

I have just discovered that one can obtain recordings of the Red Army Chorus singing White Christmas and O Tannenbaum.

On the colored races

2006-07-09T13:10:00.000-07:00

As I often do, I listened to NPR news yesterday morning while puttering around in the general direction of taking shower and having a day. A big story, then, was the field trip of members of the US Senate to a border town in Texas, where they held hearings on the horrors of illegal immigration from the south. Thankfully, the Democrats tagging along were pretty handy about pointing out the craziness of the whole scene, but I wanted to point out something that I found especially disturbing.

One of the speakers at the hearing mentioned--in trying to justify the claim that illegal immigration and "global terrorism" are nontrivially linked--that Mexicans are regularly mistaken for Arabs (swarthy, you know), and therefore, Arab terrorists could infiltrate Mexico, learn Spanish and blend in with a cohort of people making their way north, carrying along whatever diabolical equipment may be needed for the mission. (Incidentally, the reporter found it necessary to say that border guards had found, at various times, most of the makings of a "dirty bomb." I don't know why she would make such a bizarre claim--or maybe she just didn't understand that "dirty" means radioactive in this context. Anyway, seemed irresponsible to me.) Now, how preposterous is this notion?--let me count the ways:

(0) Timothy McVeigh.

(1) I hear that many Arabic* people speak languages that are not much like Spanish. I also understand that people speak second languages with accents. The brilliant tactical response in this case might be: "Ask a native speaker, 'Is that person a native Spanish-speaker?'" This is why they pay me the big bucks.

(2) In my experience, two groups of people only look the same to other groups of people. For example, I'm taken for an Arab fairly often--but exactly one Arab has ever made this mistake in my case. (I have been taken as a Turk by several Arabic people at various times.) I think we have a solution in this case, too: "Ask a Latino person, 'Is that person Latino?'" I'm earning my money today.

(3) Oh screw it, this is dull.

Anyway, I bring this up because it seems to me that this would not even be a question if it occurred to the speaker, and the presiding Senators, that a white guy's inability to distinguish ethnicities among darker people or accents in Spanish
might be their own personal predicament. I, for one, could never pick out different accents among Russian speakers with any accuracy, and that was a language I half-way claimed to understand (at the time). I was going to say something like, "Nice to see that we're back to overt racism again," but I think this is more depressing than outrageous now.

*What is the correct term? Do you use Arab as an adjective? I'm just running with "English people speak English"->"Arabic people speak Arabic."

Natural

2006-05-25T20:11:00.000-07:00

Could we just get something straight? Nothing that happens in the universe at any time, except for miracles, is unnatural. If the universe is not shoddily made, then nothing happens in contradiction to nature. Unless you're possessed, your behavior is not unnatural. 'Kay?

Ergo:

If there is an "order," and I changed it or broke it, then it was not the "natural" order.

Ergo:

If you think something is a sin precisely because it is "against the natural order," then you are wrong.

As you were.

Paranoia

2006-05-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Has anyone else noticed that we are, in the form of sending National guardsmen to the southern border, about to experience a long term deployment of military assets within the United States? Maybe I'm the only one paranoid enough to be disturbed by this. However, I recall the initial deployment to South Vietnam being pretty small--and when you already have forces deployed, we've learned, you don't have to talk about deployment anymore if you want to increase the force size; you probably won't have to have any consultation about to speak of. Brilliant.

Poor Attila

2006-04-28T20:33:00.000-07:00

Take a look:

Feder’s proud of his bigotry. Take a look at this from his bio:

I’m to the right of Sharon on Zionism, to the right of Pat Buchanan on immigration and Americanism, to the right of Mother Angelica on abortion, to the right of Chuck Heston on Second-Amendment rights, and generally make the legendary Atilla look like a limousine liberal.

These people are sick. They have no idea what family values are.

Why does everyone claim that Atilla the Hun was conservative? I haven't really got a problem with day-to-day anachronisms, in general, but this one is awfully common and remarkably wrongheaded. I have no idea what "I'm too the right of Atilla the Hun" should mean if it's something different from "I'm too the right of [pre-modern person select uniformly at random]." I think I must have missed the meeting where conservatives started identifying conservatism with conquest and merciless slaughter and pillage.

A little more on Iran

2006-04-15T14:41:00.000-07:00

One of my very first blog posts ever (so that would be like 9 posts ago or something, and 2 years--me being really on top things, as usual) ran something like, "it's not that big a deal if Iran develops nuclear weapons." My next post rescinded it (in fairly pompous style).

Neither one of those posts matters because Iran will or won't produce a nuclear weapon regardless of what the West wants. We can't stop them.

Suppose that the U.S. or Israel launches a preemptive assault, conventional or otherwise, against Iranian nuclear technology infrastructure. Even better(!), suppose that this operation is successful, in the sense that Esfahan and other such places are actually destroyed or rendered inaccessible. Suppose, finally, that there is no subsequent occupation of Iran.

Have we eliminated Iran's capability to make nuclear technologies?

The answer depends somewhat on the strictness of your definition of nuclear technologies. I would speculate, however, that the answer is yes only if you assume (1) that the nuclear physics establishment in Iran is ridiculously incompetent at record keeping and/or (2) that most or all of the qualified scientists and engineers will be killed in the attack. As the population of Iran is about 70,000,000, I would not plan for (2). Then, without (1), resurrecting the nuclear technology program is a question of resources not research, and to my knowledge, the resources are not the complicating factor; for example, one could expect the large part of any fissionable material that Iran might obtain in the future to be enriched successfully and actually used for something.

That is, the question "Is our... family of... nations justified in law and morality in failing to incapacitate this monster?" is not relevant because it is not actually within our means to incapacitate this monster except in the very short term. Like or not, we will have to deal with some kind of brinksmanship in the future, and the reasonable thing to do now is to decide how that will work. In particular, we need to fully assess the possibility of Iran handing over some fraction of its arsenal to terrorist groups and develop a threat of force that can handle the possibility that the national origin of a weapon is not instantaneously clear.
We need to find a way, through intelligence or diplomacy, to inventory Iran's arsenal with some accuracy. We need to know whether or not Ahmadinejad's threats are actually backed by the Guardians.

I don't see that fretting now about Iran obtaining nuclear weapons at all is very useful except in frightening people. A reasonable and well-publicized plan of response to the new situation (which we can't avoid with any amount of ruthlessness short of erasing Iran) is the correct answer.

Carry on.

Note

2006-04-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

I think this

Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.

is called menacing in the real world. It can be a felony.

Costumes

2006-04-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

One of the things I noticed in my recent travels (noticed again, I should say) is that there is no ridiculousness upper bound for female flight-attendent uniforms while the male flight-attendent uniform almost uniformly comprises a navy blue suit, possibly with some braiding or tracery. For example, the ladies of KLM wear bright teal/powder blue skirts with matching waistcoats--quite a display, and all quite form fitting. The gentlemen wear navy blue suits. To my knowledge, there are no male flight-attendents with the Korean airline.

Distressing

Quotes to note

2006-04-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

From a wikipedia article on Florida tornado in the 1930s:

When the death toll of 216 was set, over 100 people had been hospitalized in three states. The final death toll was set at 233 (not necessarily including African-American deaths, who were frequently excluded from death tolls until the 1950s).

Regarding the war on drugs (from a retiring district attorney, no less):

Letang said he does not know what the solution is, but added, "If we can take away from your need to pay for a $500-a-day or $200-a-day habit, if we can reduce that to 10 bucks, then you'd hit a lot less people over the head or steal a lot fewer cars than you are now."

13 hours

2006-03-27T23:34:00.000-08:00

I just finished and submitted the slides for talk in Venice. 13 hours of work because, apparently, chalk has gone out of style. Anyway, I'm rather of the opinion that conferences are not actually a very good way to share information, at least not when they're organized the way I've seen them done.

Anyhoo, if anyone wants to know how to make slick slides in LaTeX, I'm your guy.

Things that probably make me a bad Catholic

2006-03-26T15:29:00.000-08:00

(It being Lent and all...)

I have no problem with abortion.

Specifically, I do not believe that "life" begins at conception. I give it quotes because, obviously, every cell is alive.

I favor contraception.

I'm not altogether clear in my mind on the meaning of eternal life. In fact, the notion of living forever as the being that I am--living for even, say, three hundred years--sounds unspeakably tortuous.

I think God has no problem with homosexuality whatever.

I think it is a sin to condemn people for being and/or living as homosexuals.

I think that God is sometimes cruel and is not actually being kind in some mysterious way. God loves us, but when a new mother dies painfully of breast cancer, there is no mercy hidden in it.

I think God created evil. I do not think he makes mistakes, however.

I think God is also the god of hate and pain.

I think that Hell will be empty. (Maybe I actually think that Heaven and Hell are the same place, and being a certain kind of person makes it what it "is.")

I do not particularly respect Benedict XVI.

I think it is a sin to argue that women should be barred from the priesthood.

I don't think that Jesus enjoyed being Jesus. I don't think it was kind to Lazarus to raise him from the dead. I don't necessarily think he usually understood what he was doing or what he was in real time. I don't think he especially enjoyed rising from the dead--actually, that was probably really awful.

I don't think that the powers of the time particularly cared about Jesus.

I think atheism should have the status of a religion.

I don't think it's a sin to ask God for an apology.

I'll let you know if come up with anymore.

Sectarian

2006-03-07T11:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, even your friend and humble narrator can't help himself:
evangelicals. But obviously, the writer at slactivist proves that I'm being a dick.

For your consideration

2006-02-11T18:05:00.000-08:00

Thesis: The most self-destructive problem with the Soviet economy (and Soviet-style economies) was its tendency to propagate managerial ridiculousness across the system because of its very hierarchical structure, and this was more destructive than the so-called 'lack of incentive' which is often cited.

Corollary: A highly consolidated capitalism will suffer effects similar to those found in the Soviet economy, despite the presence of financial incentive.

Discuss.

Holy shit!

2006-02-08T23:39:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is ridiculously awesome.

Turns out, I'm two people.

2005-12-09T18:32:00.000-08:00

I am both the One and his girlfriend:

Androgynous
You scored 63 masculinity and 60 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 55% on masculinity
You scored higher than 46% on femininity

Link: The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

A criterion

2005-10-31T11:01:00.000-08:00

for judging of writing in a math textbook. Assume all of the arguments in the textbook are correctly stated.

If, reading only the definitions and statements of theorems, lemmas, etc., (stuff typeset in a theorem environment) along with the material that is not any of those or contained in a proof, one is then able to accurately characterize the goals and meta-arguments of the text, then the textbook is well written.

Carry on.

It's all about continuity

2005-10-29T19:23:00.000-07:00

You are a Tortured Conceptual Artist. Your fellow
postmodernists call you an anachronism, but
you've never cared much about the opinions of
others. After all, most of them are far too
simple-minded to appreciate the nuances of your
work. They talk, while you are part of a lived
tradition.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

you'll be pleased to know

2005-10-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

a book review

2005-10-23T17:35:00.000-07:00

Lord of the Flies (1955)

Author: William Golding

“I am obsessed with Survivor, so I thought it would be fun. WRONG!!! It is incredibly boring and disgusting. I was very much disturbed when I found young children killing each other. I think that anyone with a conscience would agree with me.”

(via Morning News)

Adventures in Mathspeak

2005-10-03T22:51:00.000-07:00

Suppose you are a time traveller--and specifically, you travel like the folks in the Terminator, so you don't get to bring anything back with you. When you arrive in 2006 (I'll start this business on 01 January, let's say), how do you prove that you are, in fact, from the future?

Well, this one's easy. It's just a formalization of checking the newspapers before you leave. Anyway, keep in mind that I keep a permutation H of the integers in my back pocket at all times (everyone should do this, I think; I have some hash functions and a few large primes back there, too), but it's a special permutation because no one knows how this permutation actually works. Meaning, if I give you a number n, H(n) just pops out, but knowing n, you can't predict what H(n) will be unless you try it.

Now, suppose that we take 01Jan2006 to be day 1, and on day x, we compute H(x) and publish the answer, doing this on each day of the year 2006. In particular, only one number is produced each day. And suppose your departure was on day n of 2007, arriving sometime earlier than day n-2. Then to prove you are from the future, in fact that you departed sometime after day n-1, all you need do is correctly tell us all what H(n-1) is going to be--you couldn't know that unless you'd seen it happen already, so you must be from the future. Note especially, that you only have to remember one number, assuming you're efficient about proving yourself when you get here.
---

Suppose you have a friend, Milton, who is blind, and you want to prove to him that the two marbles you are holding (let's assume you have a great love of marbles, for some reason, and for a sufficiently weak definition of "reason") are actually different colors, though they are in every other respect identical. Milton, however, knows that you are something of a fibber, and, apparently, kind of a dick, so he won't just believe you when you demand that they are blue and red, respectively, even when you hop around like a tyrant gnome and shout crazily. Assuming also that Milton actually wants to know if you're lying, whatever shall Milton do?

Well, first you have to give him the marbles. Sorry, no way around it, but assume he's more honest than he credits you for. You sit yourself down at the table, and there you will sit for the rest of the game. (Milton can hear you, so don't try to get away with anything.) Milton puts one marble in his pocket and the other on the table, and he asks you, "What color is this marble?" Naturally, you answer. He then takes that marble with him as he leaves the room, closing the door behind him. While he's out there, he flips a coin to decide whether or not to switch the marbles roles. He then returns and places the appropriate marble on the table, with the same query. And you answer.

If the marbles are actually different colors, then you'll have no trouble determining if he's switched them or not. You'll get it right unless something's wrong with you. On the other hand, suppose the marbles were actually the same color. Then, when the marble was placed on the table the second time, you could only guess randomly about whether or not the marbles had been switched. Hence, the probability that you get the answer right is only 0.5; in other words, with probability 0.5, he's caught you in the lie. That means, that if you guess correctly (so that he must believe that the colors are really different), the probability that he's been fooled is only 0.5. Of course, if you go through this game n times independently, the probability that Milton gets fooled every time is only (0.5)^n. When n is 10, the chance that he's been fooled is only about 1 in a 1000. He'd probably believe you then.

--

Coming soon: How to flip a coin over the telephone.

War

2005-09-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

This shit has got to stop. I don't think I'm listening to "just war" claims anymore.

I'll be damned

2005-09-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

You are a
Social Liberal
(75% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(20% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Matthew 25:31-46

2005-09-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

When the Son of Man comes... he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory... and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

Then the King will say to those on his right, "Come, you who are blessed by the Father, take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you invited me in; I needed clothes, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you looked after me; I was in prison, and you came to visit me."

Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?"

The King will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me."

Then he will say to those on his left, "Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry, and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite me in; I needed clothes, and you did not clothe me; I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me."

They also will answer, "Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?"

He will reply, "I tell you the truth, whatever you failed to do for one of the least of these, you failed to do for me."

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

Oh, no...

2005-08-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

...so horrible, worst thing... worse than turning into tree.

Syncretism

2005-08-08T14:26:00.000-07:00

For example, I am familiar, by this point in my life, with too much of Hinduism and Buddhism to believe that the tenets of those traditions have not taken root in my own faith. Maybe it's my own idiosyncrasy--I can't read most things dispassionately; I can't not try to imagine what it would be like to be enlightened; I have to try to imagine an enlightened (in the Buddhist sense) Christian. (I don't claim any expertise here, not enough expertise anyway to suppose that my imaginings are worth anything.) I know, for example, that my understanding of eternal life is grossly heterodox--in the credo, I'm with it completely except (and exactly so) for the words "We look for the resurrection of the dead." I'm quite sure that when I die, the creature Cameron will be annihilated, and that's probably the best thing for Cameron; there is a reward that doesn't really include "Cameron lives forever" as such. The difficulty lies in the fact that this "one" aberration extends more or less naturally into almost everything about my faith--sin, hell, reward, sainthood, and so forth. (If you're curious about what I'm talking about, I'm happy to share, but it probably shouldn't be posted on a blog, at least not now.) For now, I'm sharing this as an illustration of how small perturbations can change the whole nature of a belief system.

From the perspective of protecting the true doctrines of faith, syncretism is terribly dangerous, even in the most miniscule doses. If you've wondered how to get from the Beatitudes to horrors like the auto de fe without invoking cynicism and realpolitik among religious leaders, I think this is your answer. It is possible to believe that a minor alteration of the truth is as completely wrong as anything else, and believing that, it is a small step to rooting out heresy at any cost--no need for cynicism. Most of those reading this post are not religious people, so I imagine that this little discussion hasn't been terribly interesting. It's a useful exercise, even so, to examine what you believe, especially the things you believe based on some source, canonized or not, and determine what parts of that belief don't really come from that source. Well, it's useful for me.

Okay, Imma stop now.

Imaginary Books (4)

2005-08-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

Here's some more, and some of them were gifts. You should take a look at Tyson's offerings in the comments to the last imaginary books post; at least one of them almost made me fall out of my chair.

Mickey Mouse is a Rat: Disney and the Mob

Operators Manual for the Motorola 83V, Digital Phallus Modulator for Male Creatures

A Study of Links Between Asthmatic Symptoms and Uncontrolled Cuticle Growth from the J. of Statistical Holistic Medicine, 1977.

Rectilinear Approximations to Female Libido Outperform Maximum Likelihood Models from the Bulletin of the Psychistorical Modeling, 2007.

The Deeper Meaning of =

When I was on Fire

Set a Man on Fire, and He'll be Warm for the Rest of His Life

Freud,

2005-08-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

what a dick.

People like to say nasty things about all sorts of intellectual people--Derrida and Foucault come to mind, Darwin, Marx, etc. I am of the opinion, however, that Freud was, at least, one of the most corrupting, corrosive influences on reasonable discourse in the history of history. I'm not much of a Freud scholar; I've read two or three books of his essays, but on the whole, very little of it sticks in my head because, I think, it's so contrived that my mind has nothing to hang on to. (On the other hand, I'm not even sure it's Freud himself that I have a problem with.)

Why does this come up today? Well, I'll tell ya. Yesterday, I got myself involved in an argument about atheism. (I do this unfortunately often, and in my circles it's usually just me against quite a mob of folks.) When this happens I am frequently subjected to claims like the following:

To the religious mind, the payoff is the imagined safety from the existential struggle, especially the fear of death and eternal oblivion. All religion evolves from overwhelming fear -- fundamental, all-consuming, visceral fear -- so devastating that it will sacrifice reason, honor, children, cultures and nations just to placate an imaginary placebo god. If you believe, it matters not how silly the belief is, nor what price you have to pay -- it gets you through the night of existence.

It's like there wasn't ever a man named Kierkegaard or something. That aside, I'm not sure why one would expect that so precise an indictment of "all religion" would turn out even half correct, given how many different forms religion takes, even among the adherents to a single story. When I hear this sort of thing from a person, I hear in it the little snippets of half-learned, half-remembered, half-imagined psychoanalysis that have burrowed so deeply into our minds. There was a time when one could happily assume that other people were conscious agents.

Carry on.

Someone probably already said this

2005-08-01T17:49:00.000-07:00

All sorts of people are freaking out about racial/ethnic profiling in "randomly" searching bags in subway stations. Now, I'm sure it's true that most of the likely terrorists are from the Muslim world (not that Afghans, say, are easily identifiable as "middle-easterners," and brown people can un-brown quite a bit if they stay out of the sun), but does no one remember that the second most deadly terrorist attack in American history was committed by guy named McVeigh?

That said, here's something I haven't heard any one else say. Suppose we are successful in suppressing terrorist attacks of the London Underground scale. Suppose we stymie attacks intended to kill even 5-15 people. Then we've limited the body count of a successful terrorist attack to 1-2 people at most. Living in America, that isn't terribly frightening. An illin' heroin addict is probably just as likely to get you as a terrorist. But the point of terrorism is to scare the shit out of you--so how are they going to frighten you? I draw your attention, then, to the possibility of random acts of torture. It's easy to make a good approximation to napalm in bottle, squirt it all over an arbitrary white guy, and set him on fire. What do you do to stop that?

I'm just taking the long view here.

Imaginary Books (3)

2005-07-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

Here you go:

A Study of Depressive Symptoms among Men Living without Pretty Girls

Rock Bottom

If you loved Requiem for a Dream, this a book for you. In chapter one, the author shares what sounds like "rock bottom": searching his wrecked body for a vein, he breaks his glass syringe, spilling his precious fix on the cement floor of the warehouse he's made a haven of; he finds himself frantically licking up glass shards and rat feces. And it gets better. There are nineteen chapters.

Tristan Sandy

The Mystery of Hatred

The Science of Ridicule and Belittlement

Eating for Six

I was born in the Court of the King of the Four Winds: An Autobiography

"I was born, the child of a scribe and slave girl in the court of the King of the Four Winds, Shar-Kali-Shari," runs the opening sentence. As we all know, Shar-Kali-Shari was the last dynamic ruler of the Akkadian empire. That was the first of all empires. The author has been around for a while, and he has nothing kind to say about empire building.

Very Old Things

A Photo-catalogue of Books Inscribed on Human Skin

My favorite is the guy who has Isaiah tattooed on his body in 4 point type.

How to Avoid Traveling with a Salmon

---

In the comments to my previous post, Cary presented a neat idea: turn this imaginary books thing into an installation of some sort. Well, I like that idea (probably because I'm a pompous ass), but it will require thousands of titles. If you've got any special imaginary books you'd like to share, you can send them to me, either in the comments here or at the following email address: chill807 (at) juno (dot) com. (Please include in the subject line "Imaginary Books.") If the titles you send are articles from imaginary magazines or journals, you must send those titles as well. I will see to cataloging them according the Dewey Decimal System and everything, then we'll see about getting us a place. Hit me!

Almost an apologetic

2005-07-13T22:39:00.000-07:00

The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused.
John E. Remsburg- [Author] {1910}

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
[Robert Ingersoll, "Some Reasons Why"]

Where horrendous evils are concerned, not only do we not know God's actual reason for permitting them; we cannot even conceive of any plausible candidate sort of reason consistent with worthwhile lives for human participants in them.
Marilyn McCord Adams, "Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God" http://www.faithquest.com/philosophers/Adams/horevil.html

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
[John Morley]

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.
Benjamin Disraeli

Where the cross has been planted only superstitions have grown.
[Lemuel K. Washburn, Is The Bible Worth Reading And Other Essays]

Whenever I think of how religion started, I picture some frustrated old man making out a list of all the ways he could gain power, until he finally came up with the great solution of constant fear and guilt, then he leaped up and started planning a new wardrobe.
[Steve Blake]

---

Lately, I've been reading a lot of blogs (an awful lot blogs, and I should be doing something much more mathy), basically all of the liberal or progressive in a European sort of way. For the most part, I agree with almost all of the concrete policy positions the author propound (with some exceptions), even if I don't always think terribly highly of their analyses (or their timbre). Religious life in the left-blogosphere is largely agnostic, and there are a great many vocal atheists. Now, I think I once expressed here that I accept atheism as a religion--and I stand by that--but I have to gripe some about the barrage of indictments laid on Christianity. The quotes given above outline a few of the more common accusations. I have no reason to deny that many, many awful crimes were and are perpetrated in the name of the Cross, and I can't deny that the Church has been friendly to free thought.

Obviously, to claim that humanity, or Europe, say, would have been a kinder, gentler place without Christianity is a ridiculous counterfactual. On the other hand, it's also a counterfactual to suppose that humanity without Christianity would have been just as cruel and bloodthirsty. My own sense of it (which I offer without proof) is that all those crimes of Christianity are human crimes, born of the human organism and its pathologies. Christians are judgmental because people are judgmental. Christians are violent because people are violent. Christians are hypocrites because people are hypocrites. Without Christianity, we would find another excuse, and presumably, we would gnash our teeth about that excuse. I'm not sure I believe that it's terribly productive to fling oneself against an excuse if one wants to root out those evils--it's easy enough to find a new excuse. In fact, many of the attackers have found their excuse. Maybe I have, too.

---

Now, I want to talk about something completely different: I've read some large number of science fiction stories in my life, and some large number of those stories involved a powerful ancient race of beings, sometimes wise and gentle, sometimes not, compared to whom humanity is a child race--the extremes of our technology savagely primitive by comparison, the extent of our intelligence equally primitive. There have been quite a few New Age groups and cults founded on the notion of wise, ancient aliens who will soon come to help us on our way. Today, I found this picture. Apparently, it is a young solar system, something like 5% of the age of our own. I've decided that I like the idea that we will the ancient wise aliens someday, and that we might be the first ones. When we teach the younger ones from the wisdom born of all our pain, we can hope that no other species will have to bare it. That sounds like the White Man's Burden. I'll have to keep thinking about it.

Public Service Announcement

2005-07-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

You know... for television.

SHOT 1 (SPLIT SCREEN):
On the left, an Olympic high-jumper prepares to sprint towards the bar.
On the right, a kitty-cat, eyeing the edge of the dinner table.

SHOT 2 (SINGLE SCREEN):
The high-jumper, from behind. A dotted white line skitters onto the screen so that we can see just how high the bar is compared to the athlete.

SHOT 3:
The kitty-cat. Again, a white line demonstrates the height of the table edge above the cat's head. Cat and man have the same distance to jump, relative their heights.

SHOT 4:
The athlete makes his run, muscles straining, eyes focused like a warrior's. His pounding steps. Arching dangerously over the bar.

SHOT 5:
The kitty-cat hops up on the table, jumping from a stationary position, showing no particular exertion. As the kitty examines the odds and ends on the table, the tagline appears:

You call yourself an athlete?

I'm convinced that human beings, by and large, do not understand that we are not a physically impressive species, and moreover, the world would be a better place if we did. Among other things, I think this explains why people think that a chimpanzee won't beat the living crap out of you if you wrestle with it, or that somehow you could defeat a mountain lion (they don't look so big... ) One could probably make a connection between our society's mania for athletic games--instead of, say, speed chess--and this bizarre misconception that successful athletes are physically extraordinary. Thy're not. Did you know that a female gorilla can rip your arm off your body? Can Shaq? No. I'd like to make a connection between this and our species' love of violence, but that's harder. In America in particular, we put a ridiculous emphasis on athletic prowess in schools, at the expense of education. Maybe if people understood that being fast and strong is not what we're good at, we could move on. Maybe it would be harder to read so much crazytalk into being the the stonger and faster half of feeble species.

Eh.

[Update: If you're reading this, please, comment. I'd like to know what you think.]

Monkeysphere

2005-07-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

Here is one of the most important articles ever written.

Business plan

2005-07-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

In some other electronic venue which demanded a succinct characterization of the author, I was once said of myself, "I study mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, but I haven't made my peace with not being rich." I've also described myself as a theoretical entrepreneur. Along those lines, I thought I would share one of my most successful imaginary business plan to date: Obsolete Solutions. I can provide devastatingly efficient solutions to problems that have already been solved or have long since been rendered obsolete. For example,

The solar-powered emergency car battery: Driving a car manufactured before, say, 1995, you must have encountered this problem. In the morning, when you were driving to work, it was raining, so you turned your headlights on, like any safe driver, but arriving at work, it was daytime of course, so it didn't occur to you turn your headlights off again. And returning to the parking lot, where your car sits lonely (because you're such a diligent professional, everyone else has gone home long ago), and now impotent, there's no one around to curse you, let alone give you a jump. Do you call AAA? Nah, you go to the trunk to get your solar-charged emergency batter, which you were clever enough to have charged over the weekend, cost-free. Problem solved... as long as you don't fuck it up somehow.

(Actually, I thought this device would be an interesting way to introduce solar-powered devices into the mainstream, as a reasonable technology, as opposed to futuristic pie in the sky. I think that's one of the big difficulties in shifting patterns of energy consumption.)

Reducing the World War I era salient: Next time you're a WWI general faced with an inconvenient bump in your trenchworks, I'm your guy. I can smooth out the line with minimal loss of life, preferably with tanks, but I can do without.

More to come... Big, big money...

Imaginary Books (2)

2005-06-30T20:18:00.000-07:00

As promised, here are a few more entries. The first two are actually articles appearing the Journal of Applied Psychomathematics and Psychohistory, which you can find in the imaginary section of any adequate academic library.

The Computational Complexity of Making Shit Up: The Dark Friendship of Mathematics and Politics in America.

Capriciousness: Knowledge of Other Minds Modulo a Random Variable.

The Unocal Bid: China's First Open Feint in the Struggle for Energy.

Feudalism in America.

This tract is an intriguing (if somewhat dry) chronicle of the United States in the early twenty-first century. As we all know by now, while liberals tried valiantly to rally against creeping reactionary fascism, the elements of the modern feudal state took root. This is that story, in awe-inspiring detail. Like many historians, the author demonstrates a truly perverse interest in unrelated statistics, particularly annual grain yields.

Ass Consciousness.

Simultaneously criticized as both prurient and anti-feminist, this little book was based on the author's many years as an educator. He spends much of his effort describing in some detail the denuded state of his female students, reflecting particularly on the skin-tight fashions, which inspired the "fear and trembling of a poor teacher, striving desperately, and not always successfully, not to be 'creepy.'" I had some trouble gleaning just what wisdom he wanted to bestow on us all, but my sense of it is that he wanted to say something like the following: "sexual liberation by all means, self expression by all means, but at some point, you do look like a fool." He does seem to lack sympathy for his female students situation, but I hesitate to place him in the same category with those 'conservative' commentators responsible for such gems as "Girls: If it's not for sale, don't advertise." Indeed, I think his basic desire was for a notion of professionalism among his students, and this interpretation is born out in his short but blistering chapter on his male students fashion sense. The descriptions are nice.

The Quest for True Statements

A dithering assault on the timeless and noble quest for truth: the author dismisses this notion as essentialist and incoherent, and submits as an alternative program a more pedestrian "quest for true statements." I don't feel qualified to critique this work, but the thesis does seem to limit one's vision. On the other hand, "vision," unfortunately, is both susceptible to illusion and easy to fake.

Imaginary Books (1)

2005-06-29T17:30:00.000-07:00

Here is part I of a list of imaginary books that I have found particularly illuminating. (Imaginary books that have impacted me greatly--or, if I really wanted to come down a few pegs: imaginary books that have been very impactful.) As you surely know, reading of imaginary books is a much faster process than reading of real ones. Some of these may, perhaps, be written one day--you might guess which I think those might be. In the 19th century and before, books, at least non-fiction, tended to have long, minutely descriptive titles; I wonder if it was quite as easy to get away with publishing totally ridiculous musings then as it seems now. In time, I plan both to extend the list and provide synopses and short commentary on some of them. (Note: Some of these might be real books :)

Ass Consciousness.

The Bizarre Madman at the Table.

That Grandeur and Servitude of Arms.

Sweating Through Dry Skin Itches Terribly.

"I'll Give You My Virginity" and Other Preposterous Aquisitive Metaphors for Living.

Ice.

Youth is the Time of Life When Hot Pink Boots Seem Like a Reasonable Thing to Wear to School: the Joy of Defining Things Precisely.

Score One for the 'Bot: A Memoir.

Despair: The "Anxiety" of the Twenty-First Century.

Yesterday We Hated You, Today We Don't. The Lies We Live With.

The Quest for True Statements.

Future = Conan the Barbarian * Thunderdome.

Everyone is dumb

2005-06-28T10:52:00.000-07:00

...even some atheists. Since the two verdicts on the 10 Commandments, there has naturally been all sorts of derisive commentary in the "progressive" blogosphere. (I write "progressive" because I think that turn of phrase is preposterous. In fact, I think progress is a slightly goofy notion, but that's another issue.) I followed a link to the American Atheists website to find an essay on, of course, the 10 Commandments, which is well-enough researched, in the sense that the author is capable of including more than one book of the Bible in his analysis. The author takes a particular joy in rendering every biblical phrase in the most profoundly archaic way possible--always "thou," "wast," "hath"--which I find somehow disingenuous; no one claims that Shakespeare was out-to-lunch on the basis of his archaic usage. Anyway, to save the reader some time--the essay boils down to the observation that the Decalogue, in its several forms, is largely a cultic mission statement, rather than genuinely moral code.

Well, yeah. That's not exactly news. You may notice that the statements 10 Commandments do not include an injunction of the form, "You shall have no other gods before me because I'm the only one there is." What would be the point of divine jealousy in a fully monotheistic context? None. The first four commandments delineate a novel relationship between the Hebrews and thier god (with a little g)--the novelty being that it's actually exclusive. I'm not aware of any reports of Marduke, or Osiris, handing down commands not to talk with anyone else's gods. That's an awfully bold step for a people who do believe that there are other gods. (I will say, by the way, that the evil-eye presupposes some class of small godlings, at least, unless you have a very modern notion of mental powers.) Similarly, what's the big deal about graven images? From the perspective of a propagandist, if you want to set yourself up as the mega-super-ultra-lightning dude of all dudes, it's a good idea let yourself be seen in your splendor, especially if the competitors are showing up to the party as ultra-mega dudes made of gold. My own interpretation is the following: this commandment is a demonstration that a god is just nothing like a human being. If you could can render something as a lion-eagle-man-with-a-beard, you can more-or-less wrap your mind around it, but this god says, "you insult me by trying." Which is a little petulant, admitted. I'm going to claim (without further argument), that this is a great departure.

The 10 Commandments represent a moment in the development of monotheism. I might call it the point of no return along that road. Is the Decalogue moral? A little bit, yeah. Hammurabi had a code, and he was sort of a god-king. The Egyptians must have had some kind of ethics--I don't know if the weighing-your-heart-for-sin-content model antedates the Hebrew exodus. Be that as it may, attaching even a few ethical maxims to divine commandment is terribly important if you believe that morality is essenitally divine. (Two points of digression. (1) You will note that I did not specify the nature of that morality; don't even think about confusing what I've said with any flavor of "wingnuttery." (2) If you are an atheist and claim that you are a "moral" person in the sense that a religious person (hopefully) is "moral," you have not understood what religious people mean by that word. This is not to say that atheism need be immoral or even amoral. This is a broader issue.)

The 10 Commandments ad literam are not the moral foundation of western civilization--probably not more than, say, Roman Law or Germanic tribal customs--but as a historical document, they are a moment of Genesis for moral monotheism. That's why they're important--not because we thought killing and adultery were just fine before them

But onto dumbness: What is the mistake that Fundamentalists make when they talk about the Ten Commandments, or most anything else? (Well, actually, I think most of these folks are not really monotheists in any sense of the word that affiliate myself with. For the most part, they are actually engaged in cultic worship of the sort that is discussed in the commandments. Witness the folks who come out to lay hands on the 10 Commandments monument as it travels around the Bible belt on a flatbed truck. (beam in my eye...)) They are convinced that the Bible has no engagement with history, that the truth of a given passage has nothing to do with the audience to which it was initially adressed. (Incidently, you don't hear Fundamentalists mention Hosea so often. Funny thing that.) Well, that's goofy, and we all know it, including most religious folks I associate with. Then why, in attacks like the one from the American Atheists, do the attackers insist on taking the same bizarre assumption as the point of departure? Why would you assume that a modern reader of the Bible must read the thing the same way that a sadducee living in 200BCE? Why would you assume that a sadducee read it the same way that one of Moses' contemporaries would have? You wouldn't, if it were any other book in the history mankind.

Blah. For all that, this is what really got my ire up:

Readers of the third set might also be astute enough to note that although Yahweh is represented as promising to write the Decalogue on stone tablets provided by Moses, in the end it is Moses who is indicated as having done the writing - even though nowhere in the text does it indicate he took with him a chisel. It merely says, "And Yahweh said unto Moses, write thou these words: for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel." For all anyone might suppose, Moses was taking dictation with pen and papyrus!

This post of mine, did I write it? Or did I type it? Is it an essay or a blog-post? The time-stamp at the bottom, is it true? It's important to be absolutely perfectly clear on these things at all times, always.

Power and might

2005-05-01T23:24:00.000-07:00

I want to say, before I begin, that I write this note under a certain duress. I have no business taking up time writing this just now, but it's something I have to get off my chest. It's something I've been thinking about a lot recently, but I just read an article on the "religious right" in Harper's and just got home from mass, where even we Newman Hall Catholics sing songs about the God of power and might.

My God is the God of power and might only as a trivial corollary. A glance at the Psalms will reveal that I'm on doctrinal thin ice in this opinion. On the other hand, I think this realization is one of the great lessons of our age. Shortly, I'll share two illustrations that I have had in mind for a while. First, though, I submit the question, why don't we sing about the God of fineness and elegance and delicacy? When we come to understand that tremendous power is really not all that interesting in itself, we will have made a real step. If I were to have a teaching, I think that one would be my first choice. There are a great many painfully banal "spiritual paradoxes" that slouch around out there. Excuse me--they're not really banal; but like various other paradoxes (take Russell's paradox, say), they should teach us to think harder and more creatively about the question, rather than just accept them sheepishly as paradoxes. One of these, I think, is the contrast of a God of horrifying power who is also the God of love. Leaving this question in the land of paradox allows people to do such silly things as pick one and not the other--the way a certain sect seems to have settled on power as the central description of God. (As rebuttal to the evangelical thesis, I would point out that we humans are pretty adept with fire and brimstone ourselves at this point, so that "My ways are not your ways" really should suggest that kicking-ass is not really worthy of admiration in itself, even when it's the Lord's Own Can of Whup-Ass. Even if you insist on taking Revelation as prophecy of the end of creation, one needn't be particularly impressed.)

Let me give you my illustrations. First, a relatively large number of people I know like to characterize God as "the infinite." Well, infinity is, indeed, really, really big--much bigger than any finite number, so in some sense, I guess this is not unreasonable. The problem is that we will only ever have experience with very small numbers. There are finite numbers so big that it would be impossible to represent them even using every single particle in the universe to represent one of them. Still, infinity is a whole lot bigger than any one of those monsters. So, you get to "effectively infinite" without getting any closer, at all, to the infinite (\omega is not a successor ordinal, I guess you'd say). Second, let's think about big things. Take big men, say. Shaq, for example, is enormous. Elephants are also very big. But galaxies are so big. When we say something is "big" we're talking out of our collective ass.

The same goes for power. Let's simplify the question to explosions. We can make pretty big explosions. They kill lots of people, and last as long as a few minutes sometimes. But a star is a tremendous explosion that lasts for billions of years. One can say, then, that God's power is so great that it dribbles out stars, but that's beside the point. Being a huge exploding massive body is really not the most interesting aspect of the sun in human life, for example. The "God of power and might" is a terribly coarse filter, so coarse, in fact, that it allows people to ignore most of the wonderful things about God that we are able to perceive or conceive. Moreover, I think the underlying murk of the "power v. love" paradox is identical with the coarseness of the filter--I don't see any paradox in "elegance v. love," for example.

A few words on magic

2005-01-06T21:03:00.000-08:00

The following is something I wrote soon after my vacation--it's something I'd been sitting on for a long time and never had the time to write down, but by the time I got to it, the gist had mostly left me. Consequently, I make no claims about its coherence, but here it is, in the interest of getting back into writing.

---

I haven't written a blog post in a ridiculously long time-actually, I haven't written anything at all without recourse to"mathematical grammar" for an awfully long time--so you will have to forgive me for the sad state of my prose. Probably I should start with an easier topic, but I've been sitting on this for a while. And so, on to magic.

I've never met anyone--or a respectable anyone--who would claim to have seen actual magic occur, although people do like to describe things with more-or-less magical terminology. Films and TV shows and such do tend to be "magical"or "marvelous"or "amazing," and all sorts of things are "weird"and "fantastic." But what do these mean? It seems to me that none of the things these words are used to describe are particularly magical or mysterious. For example, I've been called weird a few times, but I'm certainly not unearthly. I can think of any number of technological marvels which I understand so little that I have to call them magical, but I don't in fact call them magical in real life. The computer I'm using right now is a good example; the important parts of it probably weren't designed by humans at all, but rather by another machine, so in principle one could figure out how the millions of circuit gates work together but certainly not in a human life time--we may as well call the thing a mystery. I have no reasonable picture of what Advil or Sudafed actually do in my body, even if I can construct an image to match whatever chemical explanation you want to give me. A friend of mine recently described the training jet he was using as some sort of gizmo with "just an old F-something radar slung on the nose." Okay. I get this notion of bouncing light rays off of things and putting that information back together in some clever way; I can probably even hack through the math involved. But it still sounds like crazytalk to me. You'll find that the whole gadget lives inside a metal dome; the light rays, which are sometimes particles, too, just make it through metal most of the time because they're so teenie-weenie. And what the hell does it mean to "sling" something like that onto something else? It sounds like magic to me, but none of it is called magic. I think that's because we have a set of ridiculously superficial explanations between us and the more-or-less magical truth of the matter.

There are three gargantuan stories that take Magic as the starting point, these being the Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), Harry Potter (Rowling), and Discworld (Pratchett). You might be able to guess which one of these is my favorite. It's not Potter.

What's the difference?

All three have to claim that magic is embedded deeply in the world, although only Tolkien and Pratchett make a special effort to demonstrate just how so. Tolkien wrote a whole mythology of Middle Earth that bleeds through into the Lord of the Rings and the heroic, as in an "Age of Heros," tone that codes the story beyond the Shire convince you that the Otherworld (sorry) is just beyond your site. There's straight-up magic around from time to time (more so in the movies), but for the most part no spells are cast. The wizards and others have a dim memory of the future, but they're not diviners. It's not really even clear what the Ring does for the most part except scare the shit out of people and make little folks invisible. Pratchett gets to detail the goofy all-magical world of his story and forces his reader to replace himself to a world in which there is no explanation for anything expect magic. Even light moves sort of lethargically. Rowling, in contrast, calls non-magical people "muggles," which, I suppose, means that magic is something the world is imbued with while not everyone is sensitive enough to realize it. But the feeling of the story is really that magic is just something that sits on top of the world like an after thought. Knowing about it is, to my mind, just a way to get around the need for technology. Consider the need for a wand. (She does note the similarity between magic and technology by way of Mr. Weasley's fetish for muggle stuff in her second book.) Rowling's Magic says nothing at all about the nature of the world, and her characters (at least in the first three installments) don't put much effort into understanding how magic and, say, physics are related in their world.

So why do I like Tolkien and Pratchett better?

Rowling seems to allow that ignoring the actual construction of the world is completely acceptable. You can use stuff without having any idea how it works. Of course, I'm doing that right now, like I said, but I think I have a better idea of how this gizmo works than, say, Harry knows how his invisibility cloak works. (Come to think of it, I probably have a better idea of how the computing part works than of how the chassis was fabricated.) But doesn't this sound dangerous? Paranoid as I am, I have to point out that our gross ignorance makes us terribly easy to take advantage of. Does my computer broadcast my identity? I can't really say it doesn't. On the other hand, there is obviously no way a person could expect to understand even a nontrivial fraction of the technology that s/he uses. He can try though. Which is the important thing. Accepted ignorance allows us to accept highly simplified, even wrong, explanations of things-the sorts of ludicrous explanations that Pratchett has so much fun with. For example: the CPU is the brains of the computer. Okay. This allows us to rip the real mystery from things. If just the CPU is the brain, then what the hell is the rest of it? (Those folks who like to study computation as a model of mental processes are not really just wankers-there's something to it: the running computation can interact with its own program in some way, and blah blah blah--that's profound.)

My point is that highly simplified explanations are basically the same as Pratchett's brand of ironical magic-and the same as Rowling's brand of unquestioned magic. Both present a kind of magic that is essentially mundane, so mundane in the lives of their characters that no additional explanation of it is necessary. (In each of these, it is very easy to see what is magical, when magic is happening, and in each the actual workings of magic are largely ignored. In Tolkien, in contrast, it's often difficult to determine when magic is in play, but you can usually interrogate the magic and figure something out, if not the whole thing.) To me, this sounds just like the way we deal with cellphones and chemistry and global positioning systems--they just work.

It seems to me, it would be hard to pull an "Intelligent Design" claim if you had really considered what goes into building a communications satellite. You can't make one work without a theory of general relativity. If you've got one of those, though, you've also got a theory of the way the universe is shaped, how it's changing, and how old it probably is. You also get to see firsthand that if the universe is intelligently designed, it was designed by an intelligence that is, basically, nothing at all like ours, so that the "intelligent design" discussion is basically vacuous. But instead of forcing people at least to look at (and probably fail to understand) general relativity, we break the idea into morsels so bite-sized and mundane that the bizarreness of the truth is obscured--a communications satellite is just a gussied-up watch on top of a firecracker, something I could sling together in my garage.

I guess my point is that we should allow ourselves to fail to understand more readily. (To toot my own horn, I fail to understand something almost everyday.) If we face up to just how dark the universe is to us... well, I don't know what happens then, but I think it's better.

(A friend of mine recently spent a day asking all the other folks in the math department for 5 minute spiels on what exactly they study; this turns out to be a non-trivial exercise. It does make one feel just how small one's powers really are. Math seemed a bit a more magical thereafter. On the subject of math and magic, I have an ongoing fantasy that some of the professors may have actual magical powers--like, if you understand algebraic geometry completely, then you can also levitate or something.)

Language games

2004-10-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of perfecting non-timeliness, a discourse on the nature of human language.

Good idea Tyson, I think I just might...

Unfortunately, I have to disagree with Tyson's post. In reality, my own view is that language is indeed personal, based mainly on the fact that denying that language is personal, at least to some degree, requires one to deny the experience of being human--much like asking whether or not there is free-will, the question is essentially vacant. (Incidently, my view doesn't require unmediated access to concepts but that's another issue.) But let us suppose that language is radically social in the sense that Tyson proposes, which, if I correctly interpret it, holds that Society (note the big S) radically constrains the discourse through determining for any concept the array of concepts that may be considered connected to it.For example, Ugolin has no relationship to the word "Tetris-y" because in the network of concepts available to him, "Tetris-y" has no neighbors. Similarly, the sentence "Rock music expresses radical potential today" is senseless because it cannot be fitted into the network of concepts available to a modern American language user, or rather, it is contradicted by some large number of concepts in the network. An immediate counter to this claim is the following: Many people define "Rock music" to be, definitively, in the class of musics that express radical sentiment; subsequently, if this music does not do so, it is not Rock music. One can then say, naturally, that we must then live in a world bereft of Rock music utterly. I wonder. From here we enter into an argument of fact, which is not my desire for now. But I defy the big S. No, in fact, I deny the big S, at least, for anyone who does not watch MTV all the time. To start with, I would say that there is a vast number of sources, or nodes, or poles, or whatever, that articulate the social totality, each of which can be said to neighbor only a (strictly contained) part of the whole network. Moreover, the interaction of individuals with these poles is extremely idiosyncratic. Consequently, any given utterance must be considered relative to the semantic contexts of the utterer and the listener, which,if you like, are socially imposed (but which does not make them homogeneous). If the listener and speaker are both, in some way, bounded away from those poles which disembowel the sentence "Rock music expresses radical potential today," there is no reason to say that sentence actually lacks sense. The same argument relativizes and preserves the sense of the claim "I'm proud to be an American." On the other hand, I think Tyson had/has no issue with what I've claimed so far, so let me make one further claim. While the machinery of language may indeed be social, or socially determined, it is still the tool of individual humans, who surely retain the ability to try to understand a speaker's intended meaning and the right to hope/expect that a listener will do that. It doesn't matter what "Americanness" generally means. As a personal example, consider speaking with me; if I use a word in an apparently strange way--I might refer to "an algebra," or say something is "universal," or more subtly, I might use the word "structure" with a odd flavor--and if you cared to understand me, you would have to consider the fact that I study mathematics and ignore some alternative definitions. In the other direction, when a non-mathematician refers to "algebra" or "structure" or "universality," I'm (for the most part) able to put aside the mathematical notions. These are the sorts of things people really do...

Bottom line: Only some proper subclass of the Social Totality actually bears on any given utterrance.

Response for Greg

2004-09-18T13:47:00.000-07:00

"We":

As far as the election is concerned, I suppose I more or less agree with you, although I see very little complexity in the whole sha-bang, and there was a time when it made sense for candidates to travel around the country in the same train and debate each other before assembled audiences in various cities. On the other hand, the tendency to universalize one's sentiments is, I think, a contrary process to that of picking a brand-name shoe. The latter process is in form of joining a social formation, while the former is an act of declaring one. Moreover, the latter is, in some sense, possible to do--you can indeed "join" the in-crowd. You cannot read other people's thoughts. I think the question remains open.

Still unjustifiable:

I have never had the chance to read this Orwell piece on Ghandi, so I hope you can provide it to me. I wonder, however, if drawing a distinction between one's morality and one's "humanity" is actually reasonable; almost, certainly this distinction is not constructive, except in case you propose that moral behavior is equivalent to adherence to a certain body of rules. Without this proposition, I think this divide is simply an invitation to obfuscate in questions of moral (or humane, if you prefer) behavior. Certainly, a particular rule can turn out to run counter to warm-blooded concerns, but it seems to me, that in order to make this distinction one, in fact, shifts the usual (canonical?) sense of "morality" onto the word "humanity" and then makes an equivalence of "morality" with "law." I can't see how this shifting process is useful. (As far as Ghandi is concerned, I have some difficulty believing that a man who valued Life so much that he would allow his own children to suffer for its sake would then prescribe mass killing of any kind. Like I said, I would like to see the article. A more relevant form of resistance, I think, would have been non-cooperation with Nazi "resettlement" policies: what do you do to 10,000 people, in a peace-time urban setting, when they don't show up when and where they're told to? If you kill 10,000 people in their urban homes, how do you dispose of the bodies in a sanitized fashion?)

All of this, I believe, rather misses my point however. To illustrate, let's return to the World War, Act II, example. If the war was strictly inevitable, then the moral question I posed is not at issue--I think, at base, your position requires that the World War, Act II, was inevitable, more or less, from Hitler's acquisition of power. You will have to decide independently whether it is morally acceptable to kill people, like Germans, who are fighting for the Dark in hopes of preserving your own people or, more tenuously, your own way of life. (I hold that it is not.) Supposing the war is unavoidable, the moral questions lay only in the fighting of it.

I do not suppose this. I reject this. In the example, my hope was to show that even the "good war" was not inevitable, in the sense that means were available to avoid it in the early 1930s. Now, if you are in a position to eliminate the occurrence of a period of "violence and strife," it is obviously incumbent upon you to do so. Moreover, I can't think of a modern war off the top of my head for which there were no signs of the impending conflict at least several years preceding, and it is here that the philosophical justification of the war should be considered. Taken together, we can say that if a war is philosophically justified, it most also justify the (strictly) needless murder of all of its victims--where "needless" is considered relative to a time of peace, rather than in the balance of horrors that is seen in "inevitable war." I can not imagine such a justification--short of, say, extermination by alien invaders from a distant galaxy.

So back to you on this one, Greg.

Back in the Blogosphere

2004-09-11T15:20:00.000-07:00

To follow the dorkiest title this side of... I would like to welcome myself, cordially, back to this excellent use of my time. And it's good to be back after a month plus of silence, although if you've met me or observed me in my natural habitat, you'll know that I'm rarely silent even when there is no one else around. (By the way, Tom Ridge is now speaking to the National Press Club on KQED; oh neat. Not surprisingly, in the first 30 seconds he's managed to say Resolve, Freedom, Coming-together, Unity, Mission, Nation blah blah blah, several times each without bothering to embed them in any content-bearing structure.) I'm not really in practice in the writing arena just now, so expect this to be a little halting.

My life today: I have killed the Big-ass Test, and having done this, I have earned the right to embark into areas that are almost completely new to me. Haven't necessarily gotten there yet in two out of three courses, Combinatorial Game Theory being the exception. I think most of the people in that class are approaching it somewhat dismissively, as something lesser than the more mainstream areas like Number Theory, Algebraic Geometry, etc. Maybe they're right--mostly, they're all smarter than I am, and the professor is approaching the material from a "understanding games by playing/analyzing games" which renders the whole scene a little goofy. He's also prone to say ridiculous but, in context, completely reasonable things like "this one is a half, and so is this one, but the second one is a tiny bit bigger than the other one." But I think the Conway/Berlekamp approach to Games is an example of the most extraordinary audacity. The first step toward solving this class of problems is to reconsider exactly what you mean by a number, then develop a generalisation of the notion to include things that are, for example, too small to be numbers in the usual sense (but aren't zero) and figure out how to do arithmetic in some reasonable way that also describes the (some?) world accurately. Maybe this Game theory stuff really is just a toy--I'm impressed just by the amount of mind stretching involved in pulling it up from the murk.

In a distantly related and (this being my blog afterall) political vein, I would like to remark on the pressing need people seem to have to speak for everyone, i.e. all men, all Americans, all humans, etc. I'm not sure what the biological or social imperative for this impulse is, but it's definitely omnipresent, among people of almost every stripe, Liberal or Conservative (whatever either of those mean), religious or not, whatever. And it's especially common when we're pretending to elect "leaders." I'll stop short of claiming it's especially evident of among white men. Now, I'm biased on this account, keep in mind, but I can't think of any group of people that has any right to speak for everyone, except possibly for scientists/scholars who may be able to do so in their own little area of expertise, where they can say "We know the answer to this question" or "We don't know the answer to this question." Other than this exception, you must run up against the most obvious epistemological barriers pretty quickly, the ones that have been identified for so long, by 2004, that they're part of the common lexicon (a la "Well, that's just your opinion, man") Why do we do this? I guess it's just lonely. Let's us pretend that life might be something other than waiting for its end.

Someone who can make the tough decisions...

I'm going to let lie these goofy notions that John Kerry has failed to (1) make himself known personally to voters, (2) expound a clear, cogent policy agenda for the country. Okay, I lied, but I'll try to keep it short. With regard to (1), no one has ever gotten to know a presidential candidate, or for that matter a president, from the standpoint of an average voter; the demand itself is nonsense, and the claim that people know "what kind of man" Bush is, based on his public persona and the course of his administration, is either stupid or corrupt. As for (2), does anyone remember January through June? Now on to my far less relevant spiel about tough decisions.

Point of fact: Making the decision to go to war is the easy decision. Any monkey can determine to go kick ass in the defense whatever Just Cause you want, and humans are pretty much the only animal capable of brooking an insult. I point this at the usual suspects. Conclusion: GWB has proven that he is pretty good at taking the path of least resistance.

Point of fact 2: Making the decision to oppose war in the short term is only slightly less easy. It's not personally very trying (except in certain obvious cases) to gainsay what is more or less inevitable. I point this at all of us, including myself, who got political circa 2002. Moreover, in my own mind, the position of denouncing one war while allowing that some other war may have been justifiable (if not justified) is pragmatically and philosophically untenable, but I'd like to hear other opinions on the matter.

The tough decision is to make great sacrifices in order to avert war in the medium and long term. In the political venue: taking profoundly unpopular actions to prevent a war that most people don't see on the horizon--so that when no war comes, no one is thankful. That's hard. You can decide how this point develops in other ethical questions. With regard to war, however, I can take the World War, Act II, as an example: Hitler's plans, in some detail, were available well before he actually came to power, so that when he did become Chancellor, there was no good reason to think he would act any differently than he said he would. Involving oneself in the internal politics of another sovereign nation is (for most folks) a grossly unpopular thing to do, but it is certainly something that can be done without violence. In my example, I think it would have made a significant difference in the course of events if France and Britain had put some effort into something so small as pointing out to Germans that it's a little weird to say things like "Heil Hitler! I would like to buy some bread." Of course, this might have caused some serious diplomatic controversy and such. So that's a thought.

I don't think this approach requires any special insight. To the contrary, if the majority of political figures, with normal human prescience, did what they thought might really avoid wars over the horizon, that would really be progress. Important to note, though, that "giving peace a chance" is crazy talk, as war is the default condition.

Grrr...

2004-08-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today, I guess, I'm going to write about my own self--just as soon as I've put in a short remark about Lynndie England. As you have probably realized, these are two extremely controversial subjects, so I hope you will bear my opinions. These opinions deserve a hearing, as I am an expert on at least one of these topics.

As you might imagine, I am not a great fan of Pfc. Lynndie England, the charming young dominatrix of Abu Ghraib. (Interestingly, though not surprising, she does have at least one fan website of which I am aware; I'll leave it to the reader to do the Google invocation that will transport him/her to this hideous thing.) By the way, as I write, I am enduring a lecture by former DCI James Woolsey--there is a demonic creature, if you're a casting one for a movie. Back to Lynndie. Her case is now before whatever is the military equivalent of a grand jury to determine what crimes she eventually stand trial for. At this moment, she's getting a good look at a 38 year prison sentence. You probably knew all of this stuff. You have probably also heard that 21-year-old Lynndie was... oh, a little slutty... in the last couple of years. She had a sexual relationship with one her fellow MPs; she appeared in all sorts of pawh-no-graffik pictures (in addition to the pictures of her committing war crimes); that sort of thing. Now, most of the people reading this were college students recently and are, hence, already aware of this, but I think most people have heard the word on the street: college students, not infrequently, tend be... oh, kinda skanky. You yourself might even have been a skank. I can't be certain, as I went to college, but I believe that other 18- to 22-year-olds of all genders and blends may tend to behave this way--that is, like... oh, raving hoochies. Anyway, so let's say that England's behavior in this sphere--i.e. being a raving hoochie-skank-slut, as it were--was profoundly unacceptable in the circumstances; and I suppose that should be punished somehow. On the other hand, this behavior has made millions of dollars for the guys publishing the "Girls Gone Wild" series of videos, so no one is claiming that this sort of crime is crippling American society. Why do I bring this up? Because, it seems, she's looking at some significant amount of jail time for "the creation and possession of sexually explicit photographs." Because, "the six additional specifications double her maximum possible sentence from about 15 years to 30 years" (Army Times). So we consider "indecent acts" and war crimes to be more or less equally heinous and prosecutable? Great message. I have to say also, that this does look suspiciously like killing a scapegoat.

Wow. I'm not sure I could have found a wordier way to say that.

Now, about me: I am so, so tired of thinking about political crap. I am tired of feeling bad that I haven't been sufficiently vigilant. I'm tired of feeling like a conspiracy theorist half way through my shower in the morning then learning that I was more or less right to have been that paranoid by lunch time. (By the way, I usually shower at approximately 10am, so the turn around is, like, two hours. That's so sad.) I want to be able to allow myself to concentrate on something else without feeling like I've got my head in... the sand. I have better things to do with my time than ponder what sort of life we can maintain once the shit has hit the fan. It's not unreasonable to imagine that something slightly finer could come from me than intricate contingency plans. Just let me do math, and let me paint, and let me write my crazy stories without worrying about whether there will be air to breathe next Thursday. I have established that there is a subspecies of humans that are genuinely political. These are not the same as those people who get themselves in trouble, though there is obviously some overlap. These are people who carry a biological imperative to get everybody in trouble along with themselves. These people would actually be an independent species except that their procreative process--similar to that of pod-people, a related but distinct organism--is parasitic in nature, whence they remain capable of breeding with less noxious homosapiens forms. They can often be identified by their desire to where suits and ties (sadly, they also come many other forms, including 35-years-late-hippies and people who enjoy putting -nik at the ends of things, a la "peaceniks") and a tendency to pretend that obvious and simple questions are wildly complex, thereby opening a space for pointless and often destructive maneuvering. Do not play with these people.

Creationists

2004-08-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

Creation science, a/k/a Intelligent-design, and the folks who are laboring--really laboring--to somehow debunk the theory of evolution make me feel really bad. I feel so sorry for these people. If you take a look at some of their material (which is not hard 'cause they're happy to give you an ear-full, or an eye-full, as it were), it's not a very difficult to task to jab holes in pretty much all of their proposals. If I were a more cruel person than I am, it might even be a fun little game if you don't have something better to do (like study for a big-ass exam that constitutes one of the major hurdles of your young life... but that's me). The sad thing about most of the creationist arguments is not that they're stupid--in fact, I don't think most of them are stupid really--it's how grotesquely limited they are. No, no, let me try again. Their arguments demonstrate a real desire to limit their own minds. There are an awful lot of things, in science and philosophy, surely, but really wherever you look, that just have nothing at all to do with common sense. Physics has an awful lot of good examples of this phenomenon ("What was going on the moment before the Big Bang?" Answer: The question isn't sensible; there was no Time to talk about.) But I think evolutionary biology has a least one really good one. For one, even ridiculously improbable things become likely when you allow, say, a billion years for them to occur. This fact pretty much annihilates the majority of creationist arguments, by the way; in particular, the ones that claim that biology must provide a specific explanation of the origin of life, other than certain chemicals being near each other in some abundance. Just like "a point when there was no Time," the idea of billion years is really just goofy unless you're willing to do some real mental stretching. Okay, physics is hard. But surely, a billion years is much less hard.

What saddens me, I guess, is that these folks put so much effort into avoiding any mental stretching, to the point that they impose their own inflexibility on God. Why would you do that? It's not like God doesn't have the time to spend on a 12 billion year project. Actually, I think that if God managed to make a universe that actually builds itself by means of a handful of simple processes--well, that sounds particularly elegant to me. It saddens me because they put so much effort into hiding from the fact that the universe is just so finely wrought. And so strange that it might as well be heaven, or hell, or whatever you want.

While I'm gushing, here's my favorite quote of the moment:
"Love your friends like your own soul, protect them like the pupil of your eye."

A Letter

2004-07-24T21:32:00.000-07:00

Below is the body of a letter that I wrote in response to an email, which I received recently from a group calling itself the Christian Family Coalition. I'm not entirely certain how I found my way onto their mailing list. In fact, this could be one those scams like the Nigerian dealio for all I know. But as I have determined to speak truth to power, I thought I should get started. Next, I will write a letter to the Holy Father regarding his position on the book of Revelation and the current of apocalypticism in America. I post that here, too, when it's written. At some point I will put up a website for my teaching this fall, and I'll post CFC's original email there, for completeness' sake, I guess. There you go.

---

I received your organization’s email entitled “You can help Protect Marriage!” As I am a Christian, your message was suitably placed, and I do understand the fervency that you bring to this issue. I do not intend to address the actual question of Same-sex Marriage herein, and I hope, if you have read this far, you will do me the honor of proceeding to the end. I wish to bring to your attention certain flaws in your exhortation. I will try to be brief.

In explaining that America may not survive the introduction of legal same-sex marriage, you write, “Young boys and girls will be taught how to perform ‘safe sodomy’ on each other in sex education classes.” First of all, to my knowledge, most sex education classes advise abstinence first and, failing that, the use of condoms to prevent disease transmission and pregnancy. Notably, condom use is prescribed for any and all sexual contacts which involve an exchange of bodily fluid. Clearly, this advice already treats the circumstances of homosexual sex, so it is not reasonable to expect any significant change in sex education curriculum due to legalization of Same-sex marriage. Moreover, safe-sex, or as you prefer “safe sodomy,” practices are surely not necessary in the context of a monogamous relationship, especially, as there is no possibility of conception (barring those cases wherein one partner, and not the other, carries a disease). Again, you can see there would be no need to alter sex education guidelines. Your claim, in my opinion, is essentially inflammatory, and it does no good service for your cause.

You also write, “YOUR CHURCH will have to abandon Scripture and ‘marry’ homosexuals or lose their tax exempt status or worse yet - BE SHUT DOWN if they refuse to marry two men or two women.” I believe this statement is false. Churches are not enjoined to share sacraments with people who do not share their beliefs. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, which places Marriage among the sacraments of Baptism, Communion, Holy Orders and others, a priest is not required by law to share the Eucharist with non-believers, even with Christians who are not Catholic. As Marriage is a sacrament, the priest is not enjoined to marry same-sex couples. If I am in error, I ask you to correct me. However, I believe that if I am correct, you would do well to retract this claim or modify it.

Finally, I would ask you, please, to clarify your meaning in the statements, “the SURVIVAL OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE” and “AMERICA WILL NOT SURVIVE...” Do you mean to say that the United States will be extinguished as a sovereign state? If not, what do you believe will be the state of American society a generation after the proposed legalization of Same-sex marriage? Please provide specific examples, if you would.

Stuff

2004-07-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a bit about leadership, but then I felt like I would be writing a business school application, or a campaign spiel. I was going to remark that leaders are supposed to more than act decisively--specifically, if you’re at the top of the pyramid and everyone is handing up whatever they know to you, then you’re the one with the obligation to make something of it all, see the big picture, etc. you can’t excuse yourself with the claim that the pyramid below didn’t tell you what you needed to know because you’re the only one who really ought to know. Whatever it is.

I bought the 9/11 Commission Report just today, so I’ll save that rant for a later day. The Report, by the way, is another ridiculous bit of presidential theatre. It was published and available in book stores earlier this week, in huge bestseller-scale quantities, with the nice velvety cover, though the pages are newsprint. W.W. Norton published the thing, and I defy you to print and bind millions of copies, crate them, and ship them in a morning. It would be reasonable, then, to claim that the report must have been “final” in manuscript form for at least two weeks, in the public domain (in the publishers hands) for at least a week. But the President, in all his affable-earthy-blah-blah-blah, said to reporters that he looked forward to reading it. This is the report was, simultaneously, about the single most important event of his tenure and the centerpiece of his “re”-election campaign. But he hasn’t gotten around to reading it yet. Well, it is 428 pages long, plus endnotes. By the way, the chapter titles are pretty catchy.

I was going to write a bit about the unbelievably bad idea of creating a cabinet-level intelligence director, but I think, maybe, it’s been done to death. I’ll get to clever concluding thought for that bit: This is a country that once went to war under flags reading “Don’t Tread on Me” and “Liberty or Death” and “Live Free or Die.” Its Constitution is riddled with provisions for preserving the minority from the mercy of the majority. Still, people “debate” giving up “some” civil rights for security. Everyone knows the Ben Franklin quote. I’d be interested to know why people, after all the indoctrination their subjected to, even look down the road to hobbling their inalienable rights. Why do defenders, like the ACLU (I’m a card carrying member) even bother/need to prophecy horrors or cite Huxley and Orwell? If we’re going to call ourselves Americans, with all the City on a Hill stuff, then we just don’t yield on the basic freedoms. We just don’t. There you go.

Now I’m going to state that Republicans are Fascists, just to get it off my chest.

Republicans are Fascists.

I used to assume that the folks who vote Republican aren’t really bad people afterall--it’s just the Party leadership and their soldiers (like FNC, check out “Outfoxed” if you can) that have fallen into darkness. But now I hear that 40,000 Michigan Republicans signed petitions to get Nader on the ballot, and similar shit went down (re: cursing here; in fact “shit went down” is, in my view, the optimal turn of phrase) in Oregon. Seems to me the Party rank-and-file has gotten itself infected with this win-or-die attitude, this drive toward a single party government. I can’t think of another reason why you’d need to divide and conquer.

Race

2004-07-15T23:42:00.000-07:00

I have an image in my mind that I think works fairly well as an analogy/allegory of racial history in this country:
Imagine two men. One of them is on the ground, while the other beats him and stamps on him. One day, for whatever reason, the assailant quits the attack, and, I suppose, he goes about his business, whatever it is that assailants do at leisure. Meanwhile, the other man is, naturally, bleeding and wretching on the ground where he's left. A few days hence, perhaps the next day, the two men meet again. In the interval, the victim has gotten some medical attention. The cuts are closed with stitches and covered with some gauze, and probably he's not actually bleeding anymore; he has plaster casts, maybe, and crutches; his eyes are still swollen mostly closed. Obviously, he's not about to run any races or lay down a nasty dunk. When they meet, the victim is basically cowed and has little ability to articulate anything meaningful. The other man doesn't particularly notice the injuries, though he doesn't resume the attack or anything. He says to the other, "Glad see you're back on top things."

This is the picture I have in my mind when I hear arguments about affirmative action, etc. For example, discussions on the radio between four middle-aged educated white (sounding) people and a twenty-year-old black/latino/etc college student, talking about how the new GPA requirements will "impact" minority enrollment.

Now we have this little spat between Kerry and Bush about making speeches before the NAACP. In summary, Kerry made a speech before an NAACP gathering, and in that speech, he made sure to point out that Bush has not spoken to this (I think, venerable and prestigious are appropriate) group at any time during his presidency. When questioned about this neglect, the administration claimed that the NAACP is a partisan organization and not interested in constructive dialog (I'm paraphrasing). Anyone with ears probably will agree with me in thinking these words don't sit very comfortably in Bush-administration mouths. That aside, I have a theory (actually, it's more like a belief, without the fallback of hypothesis or "conjecture") about this neglect. Along with Martin Luther King Jr. and others, the NAACP is one of the images of the Civil rights movement. Afterall, these are the folks who finally a got shoulder up against the cork that was sealing up the bottle. When MLK came on the scene, Thurgood Marshall felt that the time for his kind of work was coming to end. Nowadays, there are all sorts of nasty words that can't be said in polite or public conversation, including such horrifying epithets as "coloreds" and "negroes." Instead, we have a whole dictionary and rhetoric of euphemisms; instead, we say, "a certain element in society..."--that sort of thing, meaning the guy in the bandages. Folks like Trent Lott, the rules at Bob Jones University are, I think, a good indication of how shallow this is really buried. Why "ignore" the NAACP? In an administration in which every screenshot is storyboarded meticulously? This is a nod to those "elements in society" that have not made their peace with MLK and unsegregated restrooms. Are there a lot of those people? Enough to get a nod from a sitting president.

Response for Anonymous' comment

2004-07-07T23:16:00.000-07:00

I guess I'm not completely sure of which part of my post your comment was directed to, but let me make an attempt at an answer.

In fact, I favor removing "under God" and "In God We Trust", etc., from any and all government productions. You can see that a person's belief in a God, even an anthropomorphic one, does not imply that s/he wants the country to be explicitly godly? First of all, genuine faith must be derived from a genuine freedom to choose it, so embedding religiosity in government is, actually, not in the interest of a religious person--anyway, someone who wants other people to have real faith. I don't claim to be in the mainstream (among the religious) in this view. So it goes. In a previous post, I commented on the religious rights of atheists (though I gave a rather strict definition of an "atheist" in that case). So second, these references to God are not acceptable constitutionally speaking. So here I agree with you.

However, I have to contradict your claim that an anthropomorphic god is implied by phrases of the "God and country" sort. That particular turn actually goes back to the Roman Empire, where new legionaries took an oath of loyalty before "God"--this God being a substitute for "whatever gods you may happen to believe in." With the Christian era, this placeholder turned easily into the Christian God. But even noting this transition, I'm not ready to admit that Jefferson and his ilk, Deists I mean, and raving classicists, would have been thinking of an old bearded guy. Maybe this historical junk isn't relevant. I think it fits in though.

Finally, I don't believe that "contemplating the seeming need for a prime cause" is so easily distinguishable from more detailed (or flamboyant?) beliefs. Surely, the presumption that a Prime Mover is basically uninterested in the universe It created is itself an unverifiable "mythological" story, hence really in the same category, rationally speaking, as any religious story. (If you read some Plotinus, you can see how religious reason can be.) That said, I don't believe that a person who is willing to permit a Prime Mover is really an atheist, unless s/he posits that such a being is somehow sub-divine, which would be a difficult argument, I think.

I hope this does not offend you. And I hope I’ve given you some kind of worthwhile answer.

Theatre

2004-07-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

"'Mr. President, Iraq is sovereign.'

With a simple handwritten note, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice made her bid to author one of the biggest and most brazen lies of our lifetimes. No, Iraq is not sovereign, far from it."

These are the openning sentences of a column by Marc Ash, who isn't a big fan of G. Bush, as you can see. You can read his column here. I will probably do that as soon as I finish with this. I just wanted to remark on the theatricality of this "exchange," which I haven't heard anyone note yet.

(1) Why should so august a personage as C. Rice be required for the delivery of a little piece of paper? When the second plane hit the WTC, it was just some staffer that delivered the message. Now, though, we need the National Security Advisor.

(2) Why would a person start a little note with "Mr. President" in (I think) the vocative mood? Who does that? If you're leaving a note for someone--leaving it behind as you go somewhere else--you might open with the name of the intended recipient, but I don't think Condi was planning to leave the note on the kitched table if she couldn't find George. So the rhetoric must have been planned out to last historically, in a way that notes usually don't do.

(3) I don't recall what George was up to at the time this note was delivered, but presumably the supposed End of the occupation of a foreign country, and probably the single most contraversial and divisive issue on his plate, would warrant a five minute break--more than the "Let freedom reign!" which he scrawled on the note and returned. Does George talk like this? Maybe. Was it planned out in advance that he should write just these words? I have no doubt.

(4) A photgraph of the actual note itself was published in several newspapers. Um... what? They'll go to the mat, balls out, over any and every request for documents or transcripts, but they'll publish even the principals handwriting in this case?

So this mini-event was staged, if not meticulously staged. I don't think I understand why they would want to instill the impression that, while it touched his heart, the Iraq thing was not at the top of the President's agenda today. This is some weird shit, man. I am formally requesting explanations.

Conspiracy

2004-06-30T08:59:00.000-07:00

I sense that if I were to publish this stuff in code and then neglect to diseminate the key, my audience would not decrease substantially, but screw it. Here we go.

Answer quickly: Who's in charge of the World Bank? Where does he make decisions? Whom does he consult? Do they have meeting agendas, or do they just sit and spit until the deadline?

You can replace World Bank with "G7" or "the Fed" or "the Vice President's Energy commission," and unless you have some special acquaintence with the issue, you probably can't answer quickly. I'd have to check wikipedia or something. Maybe that's my fault. On the other hand, the Fed evidently holds its meetings behind closed doors, leaving the world to snivel outside the door waiting for the official news of a .25% interest rate increase. According to news sources, most folks with some expertise knew what Greenspan was about to hold forth with, to the extent that no one expected "markets" to react much because they'd already done it. But why does the whole spectacle need to be arranged like the College of Cardinals picking the a new Pope? At least the Cardinals can claim that they need the peace and quiet to hear God's choice. Why is the discussion not public? I've listened to public radio an awful lot in the last few days; to my knowledge, no one at all asked why the public doesn't have access to the discussion. Would this be dangerous somehow? (In comparison, the situation surrounding WTO, IMF, World Bank, G7 meetings is worse, in part because of the wash of folk protesting, principally I think, the acts of these organizations, "impact of globalization," that sort of thing.) Perhaps transcripts or some other general records of these meetings exist in the public domain, but even then it's a far cry from, say, orations in the forum. I drift towards conspiracy theories sometimes, but there's no need to drift in this case. These are people, in fact, conspiring behind closed doors, even if the conspirators believe they're doing this for our benefit. I don't know if we, the public, accept this situation. If so, I suppose that says something bad about us. I'm sure that if activists of various and sundry kinds want to effect some real change in the behavior of these bad guys, the best tactic must be to subject the decision making process to public scrutiny.

Uh... "Judgment" maybe?

2004-06-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

I guess this one's going to be serious (he said, as if he was ever funny).

I'm going to demonstrate that, in the context of a religion that predicts a final reckoning before the Almighty, the sin of killing is basically equivalent to the sin of the fallen angels. Those religions include, obviously and in particular, Christianity and Islam, both of which, I believe, have a notion of Satan as a fallen angel. (If I'm wrong in this, please, correct me.) Notice also that I wrote "sin of killing" rather than "sin of murder"; that's exactly what I mean. I include in "killing" every act that causes a persons death and is at least as intentional as "a depraved indifference to human life."

Here we go.

Nowadays, we don't, as rule, consider (small?) blasphemies to be particular evil, or even evil at all. Most people, when they hear someone use an infix-type-thing like "Oh, Jesus-fucking-Christ..." are likely to be as put out by the "Fucking" part itself as by the blasphemy. At the same time, I think most Christian people, presumably Muslims as well, still think of blasphemy as a sin in itself, even if they're hesitant to actually label a given utterance as blasphemy. The one act that (I, as a Christian person, would hope) everyone would call blasphemous is inserting oneself in God's place, or trying to. This is the fallen angels' sin, after all. It's also Eve's. I'm not going to discuss why this turns out to be so loathsome--in fact, I'm not perfectly satisfied that it is--but within doctrine, this is the supreme sin. Let's take this as given.

We also have to remark that both Christianity and Islam assume that a person's moral resume becomes Read-only material upon his death. Even with Purgatory, there is no notion of undoing or counter-balancing the sins of one's life--it is a severe mercy, but the judgment is laid upon the soul that life made. We will take this as given as well: Death is the end of the game.

Now, suppose that Adam acts to cause Brian's death, in the sense indicated above. In fact, Adam has made two decisions. First of all, he has decided to end a life. In general, the moral question in this decision is something of a muddle, but it's not really germane here. Second, Adam has decided that the story of Brian's soul is complete. The judgment Brian will face is, I believe, determined by Adam in that he has implicitly judged that Brian was, by that moment, as good as he was ever going to get. Hence, Adam has taken a chair among some Ultimate Tribunal--but the judgment is supposed to be God's alone (last I checked). You can get pitchforks at Walmart, I think.

So what do we have? If you kill someone, you are committing a fully diabolical crime, The Crime. You get two mortal sins for the price of one.

I'm tired now, so I'm not going to try to treat ramifications. By the way, I don't think Predestination gets you out of this. I haven't read this argument before, but I don't claim that it hasn't already been made. In fact, if you've seen it before, I would like to know. Thanks.

There exist smart bad people.

2004-06-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that the "War on Terror" is actually appopriately classified as a war--or maybe more generally, a tactical confrontation, or a game that happens to have horrifying consequences. This is a very nontrivial supposition, but, like I said, "for the sake of argument..." I will now demonstrate that "winning" this war, for the non-terrorist side of the conflict, is a painfully remote prospect.

Let's make a definition: a person is to be called smart if s/he is (1) good at learning things and (2) creative in inventing, possibly novel, solutions to problems. It's a limited definition, but I think it will serve.

Has this beginning been dry enough? Hopefully, it will get better from here.

I've been listening to news radio an awful lot these days (as I don't have a television, and in silence, I tend to talk to myself a bit more than is probably healthy), so I've heard a number of government officials, from the FAA, NORAD, etc., make claims that, I think, boil down to the following: For any situation, in order to expect an adequate response, the situation must be trained for. I obtain this from statements like "No one ever told us about the possibility of..."; presumably, one could interpret this differently... but fug 'dat. Now, "training" an organization the size of the FAA or The Air Force is not something you do over a weekend. Then, even if you, the Anti-Terrorist, have a cabal of smart people at your disposal predicting vulnerabilities and inventing countermeasures, it's not feasible to counter every member of the class of vulnerabilities. For example, I, alone, not a smart person, can probably think of, say, ten independent attacks based on my knowledge of the situation; even if the Anti-Terrorist realizes all ten of these, how fast can he actually implement the countermeasures for, say, five of them? So, the Anti-Terrorist has to deal with a pretty gross disadvantage. Unfortunately, there probably exist smart terrorists, so this disadvantage is, in fact, very likely to be exploited at some time in the future, regardless of the resources the Anti-Terrorist commits to the game and even if every countermeasure is appropriately and adequately implemented. (As Anti-Terrorist=President, the "even if..." is off the table; for example, morbidly screening passenger IDs is not actually countermeasure to anything.) You may also have heard that humans have solved some very hard problems--say harder than computer voting machines and less hard than contructing the regular n-gon, for definiteness. Blowing stuff up is probably between those.

In this game, the Terrorist can't actually lose so long as he's alive and free, and the Anti-Terrorist wins only if s/he prevents every attack, forever. The only winning strategy for Anti-Terrorist is to capture/kill every single terrorist for all time. This is preposterous. If you think it's not preposterous, you're dumb. Example: human beings (every terrorist, by the way, is assumed to be a human being) are born in large numbers everyday; some of these people may be both smart and mean; it follows, the supply of terrorists is inexhaustible. Thus, Anti-Terrorist loses the game.

So, if you=Anti-Terrorist, and you decide to play this game, at least one of two things must be true. You haven't thought this all the way through, or you're not particularly interested in the consequences. (One might say that it's necessary, regardless, to maintain preparedness to whatever degree you're capable. Well, sure. But if that's all you plan to do to deal the existence of Smart Terrorist, you should know what's coming.) Assuming that you are in possession of a collection of smart people of your own, maybe their efforts would be better spent in imagining novel ways of getting out of the game; so that when smart, mean people do mean things it's apparent that the only motivation is the fact of being mean. It's possible that there is a solution that is not the same as capitulation.

So this post is a little embarrassing, but i'll post it anyway. I should, in the future, spend some time thinking before I start typing.

News

2004-06-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, my ISP (that is, Juno/NetZero) provided limited access to the New York Times online on the the prefab homepage they provide to their users. (I think this homepage somehow, presumably through advertising revenues, enables them to charge their customers half as much as other ISPs do.) I suppose NYT has its flaws, but I was pretty happy with this arrangement. Then, a few months ago, NYT was suddenly replaced by USA Today; nobody asked me about this, and I can't find any where to send a complaint. As you may already be aware, USA Today is just a shitty newspaper. A shitty newspaper. They *might* even have a political agenda of some kind.

So why bring this up now? Because they seem to be pissing themselves over the glory of Reagan, the Fallen God. Now, I admit, I don't miss Reagan even a little bit, and I count him one of the poorer presidents of the 20th century, etc. But even if he was the awesomest of the awesome, how does his funeral, the preparations for his funeral, the ETA of the plane carrying his carcass, what Nancy was planning to wear, what she actually did wear--how is any of this NEWS? As I write this, Juno's "News" (as opposed to Sports, Money, Life and Travel) headlines provided by USA Today are
"Reagan praised as 'enduring symbol of our country.'"
"Reagan family, supporters gather for funeral."
Even NPR and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer are in on this. Perhaps this is all some kind of national self-congradulations for "winning" the Cold "War," which we're expressing through blithering elegies for the Gipper?

Whatever the case, I expect Sunday will see a short segment of On the Media treating just this little episode. The folks pounding out Media of all kinds, it seems to me, know that something bizarre is happening, know that real news, events of real consequence, are not being covered because of this. And in a week or so they'll probably spend some time remarking on just this interesting trend in American media.

Suppose you are ill; you know precisely the nature of your illness, and you have the remedy in your possession. But you decide not to take the medication, instead choosing to discuss some weeks later the fact of having neglected to take it.

In this case, "talking about it some weeks later" would actually be another inflamation of the same sickness. If the disease were sufficiently serious and you behaving this way, the Catholic Church wouldn't allow you to be buried in consecrated earth. I'm guessing that most of the people involved in "media" have enough foresight that they could have written all the words I've just disgorged; they're not exactly penetrating insights after all.

I'm sure some with the full complement of verbiage for Spectacle and that could provide a more interesting discussion. My point is that a problem arises; an easy and obvious solution presents itself, and no one bothers to actually implement the solution.

Thinking shit through

2004-06-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Maybe that's what I should have called my weblog because, well damnit, that's probably what's closest to my heart. And, well, damnit, the folks that get payed to do that just aren't.

Point the first: "If our commission invests in that as a solution, then we set ourselves up for the printer version of the hanging chad," [DeForest Soaries] said. This august figure is the Elections Assistance Commission Chairman. I do not believe this. First of all, printers are not terribly complicated technology at this point in human developement. At this very moment, I have beside me an HP LaserJet 1100, which I purchased in 1999, the second semester of my freshman year in college. As you can imagine, this little bugger has been called upon to spit out thousands of sheets of paper over the years, and in that time I have replaced the toner exactly once--not rocket surgery this processs, incidently. I have no doubt that my pal the HP LaserJet 1100, or perhaps one of his big brothers, could easily rise to the challenge of printing out several hundred ballots on a blustery autumn Tuesday. A printer server, moreover, is not so hard a thing to put together in an evening, and the world is equipped with envelopes, which can be used to provide a measure of secrecy. My point being, that printing shit out is extraordinarily well-tested technology--and tested in the real damn world--assuming that you don't have your heart set on cute little custom-made ballot printers. If you were already thinking "Voting+Computers," it's not a great leap to think about the fact that a great many computers in use in the world, in fact, have printers connected to them, maybe even the one you're using right now.

Point the second: Reagan? He dead. Also, I do not believe that he had any real intention of "winning" the Cold "War," so let's try not to wet ourselves about his profound legacy. Alternatively, if he did, I say, he was criminally negligent about dealing with the consequences. Again, try not to peepee. If I am wrong about the following, please tell me, because it would really interest me: I have never heard of any meaningful preparations made by the U.S. or NATO in the 1980s for dealing with post-Communist economies. There was no "Institute for the Prevention of Economic Chaos and Profiteering in Post-Soviet Bulgaria" for example, at least to my knowledge. Only five year's later, or so, did the IMF stormtroopers descend on these poor slouches. Nobody knew what kind of chaos would follow? Bullshit. I could figure that out, and I was 10 years old at the time. If the Reagan administration really thought they could "win" the Cold "War," where was the preparation for victory? Alternatively, if they really did know, wouldn't it have been a reasonable thing, and probably lucrative for American interests, to make Eastern Europe into a livable place and pronto, rather than letting things get to the point where we now have to wonder where the enriched uranium that the USSR once controlled has gotten to? But there are so many variables to consider, boo hoo hoo, whine whine whine... How many supercomputers does NSA have that rival EarthSimulator? Well... I bet economic models only have, like, half as many variables to worry about as the Earth. That last part might be nonsense.

Point the third: Can you imagine what happens to a person's body if a 500lb bomb falls on someone's house and he lives, say, three doors down? We seem to freak out when American bodies are "mutilated" by mobs of angry brown people. And we should freak out 'cause people shouldn't be mutilated ever ever ever. Do you suppose, though, that when Ahmed arrives at what used to be his cousin Mahmoud's house to gather up the limbs and giblets of his family that have been tossed about so playfully by said ordinance, that Ahmed sees the state of his family as something different from mutilation? If mutilation is going knot up our panties so much, maybe we should think a little harder before we start dropping bombs on people.

Okay, I'm done for now.