Butcher's block

2002-08-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

Tasteless, but still kinda cool. Always wanted to fuck while in church, myself. Must be all those missed opportunities with the pastor back when I was an altar boy.

On a similar note: Scientists discover that being drunk makes other people look better. Scientists are always the last ones to know, I guess.

2002-08-19T16:24:00.000-07:00

Euroweenies threaten Nigerians face "isolation" if they stone a woman to death for having non-islamic sex. That about sums EU foriegn policy up: diplomacy about irrelevancies (sure it is barbaric, but let's face it; pretty much irrelevant) through "peer pressure." I'll take my big stick, thank you very nice.

2002-08-16T21:06:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on the Semiotic implications of certain kinds of terrorism.

2002-08-16T01:01:00.000-07:00

Stupid, but predictable.

Apparently, Americanos are now being blamed for the weather in the EU.

2002-08-14T23:26:00.000-07:00

It's tough being a rich princess.
"there is to be no testing oneself against the best, with the possibility, even the likelihood, of failure: instead, one is perpetually to immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congratulation, and benevolence toward all."

2002-08-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Old Rocks Stars never die, they just Do weird things.... Oh well, it could be worse; he could be on a comeback tour.

2002-08-12T23:10:00.000-07:00

Here is a good article about the split between the EU and the US. Probably the best thing written since the Kagan Essay.
Most important realization:

"To
put it rather schematically and over-simply, Americans tend not to
see any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the constitutional
democratic nation-state. To the extent that any international organisation
has legitimacy, it is because duly constituted democratic majorities
have handed that legitimacy up to them in a negotiated, contractual
process. Such legitimacy can be withdrawn at any time by the contracting
parties; international law and organisation has no existence independent
of this type of voluntary agreement between sovereign nation-states.
Europeans,
by contrast, tend to believe that democratic legitimacy flows from
the will of an international community much larger than any individual
nation-state. This international community is not embodied concretely
in a single, global democratic constitutional order. Yet it hands
down legitimacy to existing international institutions, which are
seen as partially embodying it. Thus, peacekeeping forces in the former
Yugoslavia are not merely ad hoc intergovernmental arrangements, but
rather moral expressions of the will and norms of the larger international
community."

This is something that has confused me a bit for a while now. I've been reading the guardian for their take on things for a while now. Trying to look at the German News as well, in the various places it can be found. Both groups seem obsessed with the unpopularity of W and his policies in their nations. As if W were running for office in their nations. The point bein, to their minds, Bush is somehow underneath their European Project, rather than the POTUS. Slick Willlie was apparently good at applying the vaseline to the Eurocrats, and so he was seen as "one of them." Bush doesn't bother. And, perhaps he shouldn't. The very idea of a poll testing the popularity of an allied or neutral national leader, like, say, Schroeder or Putin, is ludicrous. Nobody in America gives a damn who they are; most don't know who they are: for they are foriegners. Were I a sniffley internationalist type who prides himself on his NYT or UKG subscription, I would probably take a moment to decry the ignorance of the average norto americano. I'm not that foolish. Americans have the right idea. The leaders of other nations, so long as they do not specifically attempt to impost their wills on our citizens, or pose a specific threat, are irrelevant to the Average American. This isn't mere jingoism; it is true. Nobody here cares who the Germans have in office, because he's in charge of a country which has no real effect on us. Their armies are negligible, and we still pay for a sizeable portion of their defense -and, in fact, we still occupy their nation (personally, I am looking forward to Lederhosen in the Reichstag). We care about the Rooskies because they matter. They are our old nemesis, they are still mightily dangerous, and they are our potential boon allies in our latest foriegn policy projects. We care a lot about Saddam Hussain, for obvious reasons. Fundamentally, Europeans shouldn't much care about who is in office here either. The fact that they do is a symptom not only of their powerlessness, but also of their busibodiness.

2002-08-11T16:56:00.000-07:00

Life imitates the Onion, again.

Does anyone remember George Michael from the 1980s? I had always figured he was off somewhere with Boy George until he got caught manning a "glory hole" in a Beverly Hills toilet stall. Water finds its own level, I suppose. His attempt at being a "shock rocker" seems to have met with unqualified failure. I wonder what demographic he was trying to appeal to? Stupid cocksuckers who hate americanos and limeys? Perhaps he overestimated his demographic. I figure, between his relatives and employees of the UK Guardian, he's pretty much saturated his potential fanbase.

2002-08-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

This may be the beginnings of a Manhatten project of the War on Terrorism. Factoring is incredibly important in breaking cryptographic codes used by terrorists (and, admittedly, regular people) to hide their emails from snooping NSA types. Testing primality is an important part of the problem. here you can obtain the paper yourself. I suppose it is more akin to the work of Turing and other Allied codebreakers in WW-2, but "Manhatten project" is something more people have heard of. It is a considerable and helpful intellectual achievement in any case.

2002-08-09T15:49:00.000-07:00

Analogy to operator overloading in OO programming languages:
" it's sort of like using ambiguous punning to describe a
recipe for rasberry flan. Sure, if you're clever you can do it
properly; but it's not the ideal mode of expression."

2002-08-08T22:08:00.000-07:00

An email exchange with a friend today:

Out West, the famously left-of-center voters in Seattle, Washington, and
Berkeley, California, will consider citizen initiatives this November aimed
at improving society by targeting ... coffee drinkers. Seattle voters will
consider a 10-cent tax on espresso drinks. The money will go toward child
care programs. In Berkeley, a ballot proposal calls for a ban on the sale of
any coffee that is not organic, shade grown or purchased at a minimum market
price.

It's probably going to pass and have absolutely no effect on anything.

Berkeley excells in such imbecelic political gestures. Berkeley, for
example, is a prominently labeled a "nuclear free zone" despite the presence
of U.C. Berkeley (you know, where they invented nuclear weapons among other
things) and Lawrence-Berkeley National Labs (you know, where they discovered
the antiproton, and where I torment innocent atoms with ... well ...
radioactive shit). I quite enjoy their regular issuings of foriegn policy
statements to places like, the EU, the Whitehouse and the Japanese peace
party (who feel an affection for the pinkoes whose town helped nuke them in
the '40s thus turning them into a nation of pacifists). My former town of
Amherst used to do the same thing; I think I live in these places to raise
my bloodpressure to normal levels from its usually sleepy level. Amusingly,
my classical mechanics professor in Amherst was filmed last September 10th
(and rebroadcast on the 11th) at a town meeting decrying the americano flag
as a symbol of evil that shouldn't be flown over the oh-so moral and just
Amherst city hall. She couldn't understand why so many people were so pissed
off at her.

Occasionally the Berkeley maroons enact something which has an actual effect
on things. Some nincompoop with a calculator realized that he got better gas
mileage when he was on the highway, or didn't stop for stopsigns. So this
ninny and a couple hundred of his 'enviromentalist' (emphasis on the
"mentalist" part) regularly petition the city council to remove stoplights
and stopsigns, using impressive sounding arguments about the amounts of
saved greenhouse gasses. As such, my formerly pleasant residential street
has turned into a drag strip where people try to get their Volvos and BMW's up to, oh,
say 80 or so. I think my next door neighbor has offset any greenhouse savings
the lack of stoplight may have engendered. He bought himself a 440 max wedge
drag racer with 4.88 gears and dual-quad carbs that does an 11 second
quarter mile. I think his Ducatti gets like 5mpg as well. I won't even get
into what I drive.

Another one which makes me cackle: since the people here are pinko nimrods,
they regularly stroll out in front of hurtling automobiles and trucks. It's
typical of that lot, thinking the self-righteous laws of man are soemhow more
powerful than the laws of nature (which they probably figure are social
constructs). Anyway, with the lack of stopsigns and red lights, such people
tend to get spectacularly darwinned (particularly on a corner near my house
and the drag strip). I mean, these people make vast bloody *SPLATS* in front
of this French restaurant at the corner. I have literally slipped and slided on
human gore on this corner on more than one occasion. It's pretty ooky, I
have to say. You'd think they'd do a better job of cleaning it up, but
perhaps they are going for that third world ambiance. Anyway, you'd think
the city council would do something sensible, like install extra traffic
control lights and signs, or put up signs warning the space cadets to look
all ways before crossing the street. Nope. Instead, they put up baskets of
little orange flaggies to wave indignantly at the hurtling Peterbuilts who
can't see them in their crusty brown natural fabrics.

2002-08-08T21:35:00.000-07:00

I went to the following seminar today, given by Ken Moody.

There is a black market in illicit nuclear materials. By destructive and
non-destructive analysis of small samples of plutonium and uranium, it is
possible to develop a set of signatures that can identify the methods used
in the preparation of the sample and the location where the sample was
fabricated. The isotopic content of the material defines the type of
reactor or enrichment process used in its preparation; the ingrowth of
daughter and granddaughter activities define when the material was last
purified; the presence of contaminant species is indicative of the chemical
techniques used in purification or reprocessing. Once the source of a
particular sample is known, it may be possible to determine where legitimate
control of the material was lost, and the flow of materials can be stopped.
Some real-world nuclear forensics cases will be discussed.

"So what?" you might say. "So you're a friggin science nerd, and you get paid to go to such things," you might point out.
Well, the interesting thing was a sample of a small amount of weapons grade uranium interdicted a couple of years ago (as in, around 2-3 years ago). Via various clues in the chemical and isotopic composition of the sample and its projected date of manufacture (which indicated it was home-purified stuff from a research reactor), there is almost certainly a 20-30kg chunk of this stuff floating around the black market somewhere. Yes, that is enough. Pleasant dreams.
Ready to unleash the dogs of war yet? Or will this have to go off in Manhatten first?

2002-08-07T22:21:00.000-07:00

Speaking of the Great Game, here's an example of scientists discovering the painfully obvious.

I suppose the "self-esteem movement" needs a cuff up the moosh once in a while, but it's not like such people are going to listen anyway. They're too busy bleeding for all the cruelties they experienced in high school.

2002-08-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

Love offerings of the ancients included fruits like Oranges and Pomegranites, spiced warm wine, sweet things like honey... Now a days, the hip dinner might be a potato

Figures. I hate friggin potatoes. Maybee I can get them to put that stuff in a canteloupe or something.

2002-08-07T21:36:00.000-07:00

Would the pilot of the Enola Gay nuke the terrorists? It's one of those questions like, "could Godzilla beat up the jolly green giant?" But, Studs Turkel asks the question, and gets the answer.

2002-08-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

Mark Steyn points out reason #121 that the INS are a bunch of degenerate fiends.

While everyone is shuffling chairs over the new Heimatland securitat departmento, such pencil pushers are protecting us against the dire threat posed by the widow of a Sept 11 victim and mother of american children. I feel safer already. Maybee I'll move to Prague after all...

2002-08-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

Words of wisdom for today:

"Once we had taken clothes from a homeless girl, there were no taboos. I
even tried to fuck Tommy Lee's mother."
-- Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx on his journey through the pits of
heavy-metal depravity

2002-08-04T05:46:00.000-07:00

A European pacifist gets it right. An incredibly sensible essay; right on nearly every count.

2002-08-04T03:26:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how people so quickly decided that Muhommed Atta was the ringleader of the WTC bombing? I had. Here are some answers. In fact, that link contains about everything you could know about Atta.

2002-07-29T21:41:00.000-07:00

Is "fuck" a dirty word? Not according to a certain australian barrister.

2002-07-26T03:28:00.000-07:00

Here's some funny blubbering about how W. has it all wrong, and should be sucking up to Iran, like the Eurocrats.

I seem to remember some dim euro-bulbs wagging their fingers at Ronnie
Raygun for denouncing the Soviets as "an evil empire" a couple of decades
ago. At least the Soviets were communists, and so, theoretically
humanistic. One could construct an argument for tacitly supporting or
appeasing them; maybee they weren't so bad in principle. I don't see how
one could construct an argument for the present theocratic government of
Iran.
And why does Iran, one of the world's largest oil producers, need
a "nuclear power program?" Global warming fears?

As for the fearsome combined legions of Iran and Iraq (as if!), I seem to
recall that they kept each other busy for almost a decade; pretty much an
even match. Took 100 hours to squish Iraq the last time; you do the math.

2002-07-25T18:21:00.000-07:00

The EU may remain a Western European Club. Poland is probably economically speaking the strongest of the Eastern European nations. I wonder if Poland and other such countries might form a common market of their own in response to the EU.

Other problems: it was always obvious that countries like Portugal would present problems when linked up to the currency of more modern economies like Germany. As for Germany, they're apparently experiencing inflation for the first time since the 1930s. Of course, it isn't phrased as being inflation; the EU claims almost no inflation: I guess it's being measured against the Yen, Pound and Dollar, but, for the amount of work done in Germany, they now are able to purchase less goods and services; a 20% inflation rate on coffee, for example. Sure, they don't have to fiddle with exchange rates any more. Now their economy is jacked into Portugal's.
I wonder how it will all end. Presently, the EU looks great. Keynsian psychological economics is presently at work on the dollar versus the euro (amusingly, the Pound and the London exchange seems to track American markets more closely than European). In the longer term, is the EU in better shape than the US? Their ageing population might be eventual cause for alarm.

2002-07-23T20:26:00.000-07:00

Apparently, bad reviews of bilgey material are so rare as to create a storm of controversy. At least so says Salon Magazine.

Personally, I found it pretty pedestrian stuff, compared to, say, Mencken.

Here's an example, " You could call it an ever-widening gap between signifier and signified, or you could call it lies. Or you could just call it what it is, which is bullshit."

Of course, I find all this a refreshing break from the backslapping of men of letters in the "republic of nice" (tm Florence King).

2002-07-23T17:53:00.000-07:00

Redheads drive Romanians to not drink

2002-07-23T02:03:00.000-07:00

Another example of why both the music industry and John Cage are fundamentally evil and worthless.

2002-07-22T18:13:00.000-07:00

A man after my own heart! It's nice to know such people exist.

2002-07-20T01:20:00.000-07:00

Something I noticed upon flirting with Czech waitresses in my eastern european travels. Eastern Europeans are smart. Apparently, some people in Britain are realizing this.

Thirty-four per cent of Hungarian year- two pupils can factorise x2 – 3x, compared with just 8 per cent in England, 4 per cent in Scotland and 0 per cent in Norway; tests in arithmetic, geometry, physics and chemistry reveal similar results. Despite 40 years of communism, the Visegrad Four were never foolish enough to experiment with comprehensive education and progressive teaching methods, the net result being a general level of erudition unsurpassed in the whole of the Continent. Consequently, although the Visegrad Four do, of course, have their social problems, all have so far avoided the production of a large, snarling, uneducated underclass, now sadly the norm in most Western nations, particularly in its ‘first slum’, Britain.

2002-07-19T00:44:00.000-07:00
Does this update work? Friggin blogger.

2002-07-19T00:39:00.000-07:00
An egregious example of horrible, blockheaded and wrong science reporting. I found it via Denbeste's webpage.

The author of the article completely misses the point of the experiment. The experiment was decidedly not a refutation of the second law. It merely pointed out that, for many trajectories of small particles in a colloid (i.e. for nanomachines, or biological machines) the second law will not hold for suprisingly long time scales. Overall, the laws of thermodynamics will hold; we just have to wait around long enough.

Imagine a clear box filled with bouncing colored superballs (i.e. balls that bounce without "slowing down"). If you take a time-lapse photograph of the box, the balls will be all over the place, more or less with equal probability. They will look like smeared out streaks, averaged all over the volume of the box. This is thermodynamics.
If we take very fast movies of the superballs and slow the movie down, during some part of the movie, the balls will appear to be "orderly." Maybee they will all bounce into one spot for a brief moment. maybee they will all fall into an orderly pattern on one side of the box. If you just look at the movie for this brief moment, the entropy will appear to be decreasing. But if you run the movie for longer, the entropy will increase again and balance it all out.
Effectively, this experiment slowed down the movie of the bouncing balls and watched the entropy locally increasing in various areas of the box. The point of the experiment was that, for suprisingly small balls (which were in a colloid, effectively "goo" which slowed everything down) the entropy can increase for a suprisingly long period of time (seconds).
This was an excellent physical demonstration of a fundamental thesis of mine: Drexler and his drones are low-forheaded idiots. Most nanotech ideas seem to be along the lines of scaling down a Chrysler Max-Wedge engine to be the size of a skinflake. A Max-wedge works thermodynamically because the pistons (aka the aformentioned box) are a lot bigger than the gas molecules (aka the ping-pong balls) that make the engine go. If you scale the engine down, you can't scale down the molecules that make it work, so it won't work. The point of the article is a demonstration of this, to my mind banal, but still important (since Drexlerism continues to attract favorable attention) point. It's also important for people who are trying to figure out how life works. Since life is basically a colloid, the conditions in this experiment more or less approximate some of the structures which make us up.

This actually isn't an example of what I like to call the "refrigerator paradox" (i.e. that order can increase locally in an open system: causing, for example, refrigeration). It is an example of the above described bouncing ball paradox.

2002-07-18T20:20:00.000-07:00
An egregious example of horrible, blockheaded and wrong science reporting. I found it via Denbeste's webpage.

The author of the article completely misses the point of the experiment. The experiment was decidedly not a refutation of the second law. It merely pointed out that, for many trajectories of small particles in a colloid (i.e. for nanomachines, or biological machines) the second law will not hold for suprisingly long time scales. Overall, the laws of thermodynamics will hold; we just have to wait around long enough.

Imagine a clear box filled with bouncing colored superballs (i.e. balls that bounce without "slowing down"). If you take a time-lapse photograph of the box, the balls will be all over the place, more or less with equal probability. They will look like smeared out streaks, averaged all over the volume of the box. This is thermodynamics.
If we take very fast movies of the superballs and slow the movie down, during some part of the movie, the balls will appear to be "orderly." Maybee they will all bounce into one spot for a brief moment. maybee they will all fall into an orderly pattern on one side of the box. If you just look at the movie for this brief moment, the entropy will appear to be decreasing. But if you run the movie for longer, the entropy will increase again and balance it all out.
Effectively, this experiment slowed down the movie of the bouncing balls and watched the entropy locally increasing in various areas of the box. The point of the experiment was that, for suprisingly small balls (which were in a colloid, effectively "goo" which slowed everything down) the entropy can increase for a suprisingly long period of time (seconds).
This was an excellent physical demonstration of a fundamental thesis of mine: Drexler and his drones are low-forheaded idiots. Most nanotech ideas seem to be along the lines of scaling down a Chrysler Max-Wedge engine to be the size of a skinflake. A Max-wedge works thermodynamically because the pistons (aka the aformentioned box) are a lot bigger than the gas molecules (aka the ping-pong balls) that make the engine go. If you scale the engine down, you can't scale down the molecules that make it work, so it won't work. The point of the article is a demonstration of this, to my mind banal, but still important (since Drexlerism continues to attract favorable attention) point. It's also important for people who are trying to figure out how life works. Since life is basically a colloid, the conditions in this experiment more or less approximate some of the structures which make us up.

This actually isn't an example of what I like to call the "refrigerator paradox" (i.e. that order can increase locally in an open system: causing, for example, refrigeration). It is an example of the above described bouncing ball paradox.

2002-07-17T20:27:00.000-07:00

Here is something little commented upon. Air conditioning. It allows people in the south to pretend they are in a nice coastal town. Perhaps that is why everything is slowly being California-ized: everyone pretty much lives in an artificial Californian climate.

2002-07-17T19:58:00.000-07:00
Because I am a bozo and I will never graduate, and because I'm thinking
about computers anyway, I thought of this today:

If the human brain is a irreversible computer (a fair guess: otherwise you
could tell every thought I have ever had simply by the thoughts I am
presently having, or by taking a CAT scan) which can be emulated on a Von
Neumann architectured digital computer, there is a fundamental law -a
generalization of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, in fact, that each bit
of information processed must dissipate
(1/2)*k*T*ln(2) = 1.5 * 10**-21 Joules/bit
For a 64 bit computer, 9.5 * 10**-20 Joules/byte

Assuming a human dissipates 2000kCal/day, and assuming the brain accounts
for 10% of this, it dissipates 200kCal/day = 9.5 Joules/sec

That means, if the brain was a dissipative, 100% efficient computer, it
would be performing the equivalent of 10**20 operations/sec of 64 bit
calculation.

A top of the line workstation does about 2 * 10**9 ops/sec of calculation.
There are teraflop computers: ASCI White is apparently up to 12 * 10**12
ops/sec and some Japanese behemoth is up to 38 * 10**12; still about 2.5
million times less powerful than the maximum possible calculational
capabilities of a human brain.

Moore's law states that computational power doubles every 18 months.
Therefore it will be possible to build a computer as smart as a human
in 32 years. It will be possible to buy one as a consumer item in 53 years.

Assuming that the human brain is not 100% efficient, the time of course
grows much shorter. It's probably not a bad assumption that your noggin is
only 1/10,000 or 1/100,000 or even less efficient (a transistor digital logic is something like 1/billion efficient, DNA logic 1/100 efficient -for comparison) . Assuming 10**15 ops/sec
for a brain, Moore's law gives 7 years until an artificial brain can be
built, 28 until one can be bought as a consumer item.

Of course, this assumes that someone can figure out how to program it.
Considering how often Windows crashes, I figure we're about 10,000 years
away from being able to write the code for such a machine. IMO, while the
growth in computational power is exponential, the growth in software
sophistication is linear at best.

And, if the brain is a reversible calculator, as Penrose asserts (he claims
we have quantum computers in our nerve cells), it could be a lot more
powerful than 10**20 64-bit ops/sec.

All of this is intensely silly, but, assuming Moore's law, and assuming
brains don't use an architecture which is exponentially inherently more
powerful than a von Nuemann computer (some people think that analogue
computers might be, but there is no proof), it's more or less accurate.

2002-07-12T21:47:00.000-07:00
This rivals the mosaic humans for weirdness. I had to send this to my Singaporean friend. In a blinding moment of inspiration, it made me realize why they have outlawed chewing gum in Singapore.

2002-07-12T21:28:00.000-07:00
More on the goings on in Iran.

2002-07-12T15:48:00.000-07:00
Hanson weighs in on a good use for the ICC. Again, as I have pointed out numerous times, most moral crusaders are attempting to assuage their own guilt. They attempt to remedy the egregious sins and atrocities of communards and fascists in europe by seeking the power of indictment over the americano gendarmes whose predicessors eventually made it all stop.
Never trust a moral crusader.

Amusingly, this sort of thing regularly comes up in Teddy Roosevelt's autobiographny: an account of the politics of exactly 100 years ago reveals that the "world government" and "peace at any price" crowd was, if anything, even more powerful in American politics in the 1900s than it is in the 2000s. Though it appears that the Europeans are doing exactly the same things they were doing in preparation for WW-1. Plenty of high minded alliances made to outdate war. Plenty of "trade will make peace" type activities were going on. Plenty of "one world" type thinking was going on. Plenty of colonial interventionism. Plenty of messes in the Balkans. The main difference is that, until 1917, America didn't have anything to do with the continent of Europe. Makes me wonder if 2014 will be the same mess that 1914 was.

2002-07-12T01:27:00.000-07:00
Ah lovely Canada.

Canada's UN Ambassador Paul Heinbecker showed still little sympathy for the American position. He said: "We have just emerged from a century that witnessed the evils of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, and the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia."
"Surely we have all learned the fundamental lesson of this bloodiest of centres, which is that impunity from prosecution for grievous crimes must end."

As if Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and so on would blithely roll over on their backs for some bloatocratic play-court which wasn't backed up by the legions of democracy. And as if Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin have or are likely to ever be emanating from the North American Continent. Sometimes, I wish the U.S. were the "bully" we are made out to be by the irrelevantocracies of the world.

2002-07-11T21:50:00.000-07:00
As subject matter for my blog, I try to put amusing links, scientific commentary, and occasionally news that has been blacked out in the mass media. According to several reports now Iran's theocracy is falling. That sounds like news to me, if true. It isn't reported in the overseas papers. it isn't reported in the american mass media, except for a few right-wing sites, and a few hyperbolic mentions in ordinary media. This either indicates some kind of spooky operation behind it, where we aren't supposed to notice until it is a fait accomplis or people are being dumb.

2002-07-10T21:12:00.000-07:00
"The US constitution is a uniquely powerful document, but whether it has really done anything for the cause of freedom is open to debate."

Dada ain't dead.

2002-07-10T19:41:00.000-07:00
One of the first sensible European answers to European hand-wringing I have yet read. Power is.

On reading this week’s headlines about America’s refusal to be part of the International Criminal Court I suffered a sustained and dizzying spell of seeing it from Washington’s point of view. Why should the Americans join the ICC if they do not want to? Are they not a sovereign nation with some reason to distrust progressive internationalists? America is not preventing other countries setting up whatever international courts we choose; she is simply declining to take part. Any claims we make to jurisdiction over non-participants are preposterous, and if we cannot assure Washington that US peacekeeping troops are safe from being dragged before this court, then — obviously again — her troops will come home.

2002-07-10T19:32:00.000-07:00
Is the special woman in your life unhappy? Well, have I got a cure for her! Er, you'll have to leave the room first.

2002-07-02T23:41:00.000-07:00
The Guardian proves that ignorance is strength. It is occasionally difficult for me to accept that such stupidity exists and is actually enshrined in the power structure of academia, the media and so on. But it is and it does.

2002-06-29T16:44:00.000-07:00
People often wonder at my skepticism about "global warming." This confuses me, as it is much akin to being skeptical about the immortality of the human soul. Both are phenomena for which there is absolutely no evidence, but which cater to various human neuroses. In being a doubting Thomas, I'm looked upon as some kind of apologist for Ayn Randian smokestack industry; much like an atheist was looked upon as being in league with Lucifer himself, back in a coughs less enlightened age. There is simply no evidence for any of it, though it seems that all "right minded" people are supposed to believe in it anyway. There is no evidence of any greenhouse effect caused by CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Cloud formation is a lot more important, and from the looks of things, sunlight is the dominant factor in Earth's climate. There is no evidence that human CO2 releases are any more important than marine "burping," termite shit and volcanoes (in fact, it is easily demonstrable that human activity is a lot less likely to influence CO2 levels than the vagueries of termite shit, among other things). Feel free to cite peer reviewed journal articles proving the contrary to any of these things; you can't, because they do not exist.

Here is an article which explores the issues.

2002-06-27T20:53:00.000-07:00
There are some interesting articles recently posted to the Arab News. This one by a former Libyan prime minister calling for reform all over the arab world.

"while the nations of Western civilization... deal with their problems one by one, and while we monitor their ceaseless efforts to come up with solutions and remove the obstacles blocking their progress while unhesitatingly exposing their flaws and problems - we, [always], continue to distort our problems and hide our flaws."

"Have we not been quarrelling with Israel for 50 years or more, with burning tongues and throats of fire? [We do this] without considering that what we are doing is, in effect, [preoccupation] with the 'other,' and that it would be better for us to persevere in, first of all, dealing with our [own] flaws and defects and trying to obtain the capabilities that will make us an equal rival, capable of confronting [Israel]."

In another article

"It is thus necessary to ask ourselves in which camp we want to be: a Kandahar-Taleban camp that relies on UN handouts or a New York camp that, right now, has the upper hand and is ready to give others part of its surplus?"

Interesting that the liberal view is coming to the forefront now. I guess Bush's speech went over well.

2002-06-27T20:25:00.000-07:00
It is about friggin time. The Pledge in it's original conception was "One Nation, Indivisible..." No god was mentioned until the godless communists were recognized as the enemy. I'd be perfectly happy going back to the godless version, considering the theocratic maniacs who are making war on my country.

It's a minor beef, though puffed up by politicians as if Ozzy pissed on the Alamo again. It would be wonderful if the Supremes did the right thing, ridding us of this silliness forever, and perhaps removing it from the money as well. In god you trust: in Heckler, Koch and my bare knuckles, I trust.

2002-06-24T01:08:00.000-07:00
The Nation is pretty much the ideological antithesis of the National Review. It serves the intellectual elite of the left wing, just as the latter journal serves the elite of the right wing. Sometimes the articles in it are excellent, whether you agree with them or not.

Unfortunately, oftentimes, lately anyway, the writing is atrocious mutton-headed gibbering.
Consider, for example, this whining by Arundhati Roy. Try as I might, I cannot discern a point to her article. It seems to be a mere pastiche of leftoid blubbering about Ms. Roy's discovery that, in fact, nuclear war is bad, even when it is fought by brown skinned races. She goes on a lot about, er, "wub" (the puerile emotional asterisk, rather than the actual emotion). Take a pound of moral outrage, add two cups of self-righteous moral certitude, one excuse for not writing anything worthwhile since her first book (if you consider it worthwhile), a can of feeling smugly superior to the little people of her country, and sprinkle with references to "wub" and you have the article by Ms. Roy.

It gets worse; they have something by a former member of the Doors, on how they never sold out maaaaaan. Marvellous! We're in the middle of a war, religious fascists are attempting to blow the country to smithereens, or infect it with disease, troops are massing in the middle east, Pakistan and India are getting ready to play a live action game of duke-nukem, and I'm supposed to give a shit about the artistic integrity of a pretentious rock band that has been defunct for the last 30 years? OK, granted, the Doors are pretty cool. It could have been interesting. But it wasn't. It was, in fact, barely readable. I live in Berkeley; I have to talk to enough people who speak in word-salad due to experiments in recreational chemistry. I don't give a damn if the Doors' oeuvre is the key to the immanatization of the Eschcaton; this guy is a dame-bramaged old hippy bragging how he never sold out maaaaan. If I wanted such self-aggrandizement, I could mosey on over to telegraph avenue and speak in a similarly vile, though much less wealthy flower child who also never sold out. Or 40 of them.

Even Gore Vidal's stuff is pretty damned weak these days; senile dementia perhaps; and I say that as someone who considers Vidal one of the greatest writers and intellectuals of our day. Only Hitchens consistently writes anything of marginal readability or interest. Granted, the National Review is hardly filled with Teddy Roosevelts, but they are all excellent writers. The Nation seems to have degenerated into a sort of left wing celebrity vanity 'zine. I guess I shouldn't be suprised at the depths of their decrepitude; such people are becoming as marginalized as flat earthers and bildeberg conspiracy theorists.

2002-06-23T04:42:00.000-07:00
Since I just bagged on Eric Raymond, I figured I should look at what he's blogging these days. He wrote a very interesting essay on the aesthetics of porn. Like the last essay, this one is thoughtful, well considered, original in its conception, and rather incorrect in some of its premises and conclusions.
He finds himself confused on being confronted with Really Good Porn & tries to figure out what defines quality porn, like Robert Pirsig tries to figure out what defines quality motorcycle maintenance. This is a highly amusing project. In the matter of taste, I agree with most of his observations as to what is hot and what is not so hot. I even agree with the redhead fetishization, and the overcoiffed blonde icks -fortunately I am cuter than Eric and run in different circles, though he can have the fake german chick with her bazooms hanging out of her tank top -she just looks sloppy and roadworn to me. I'll add an observation of my own: there is nothing so sexy as a pouty "come hither" look on a pretty (or even a plain) face. Fortunately, most american women are incapable of firing off this look at will, or I'd have to be treated for priapism. There are actually nations where this is not the case: all Hungarian women seem to look like this, at least 20% of the time. That was a tough vacation, let me tell you.

His idea that the popularity of tarted up, over-makeuped, enhanced, fetishized, vacant eyed ice-queens has anything to do with "issues about female power" (or "madonna whore" complexes, which are really the same thing) strikes me as, well, rather silly. The real explanation as revealed by Lupowski for the popularity and prevelance of such things is both simple and subtle.

It is simple in that people who buy lots of porn to stroke their ding-dongs to are almost universally not getting anything satisfying at home. Whether this is because they are socially inept, because they're old or ugly, or because they've been married and have been monogamous for so long they're basically dead, they ain't getting much at home, and they're unlikely to want to be reminded of what they are getting at home. So it is off to fantasy land; stroking yourself into palookaville focusing on a sort of blow-up doll to escape from the fact that their wives are boring, or that no attractive woman will speak with them because they're (old, ugly, socially inept, poverty stricken, whaddeva). I suppose you could massage that around so that relates to something about "issues about female power" -but in real life, it is something about "not getting laid enough to know what it is like." Mr. Raymond seems to get plenty of nookie, so he likes the more plausible stuff.
That's the simple part; the more subtle part involves the actual models who do this for a living. I have a friend who does it once in a while for extra cash. She points out that the photographers are often slimeballs who are looking for a hooker, or at least a blow up doll. They often envince suprise when the model displays the capability for rational thought. And that the models are often willing to at least cater to the blow up doll idea, assuming they're not so vapid from a coked-up lifestyle they aren't more or less blow up dolls anyway. In short, it doesn't look like the models are having fun, because they're not having fun. Therefore such porn is not fun to fellows who make a habit of having fun with women.

He also seems to worry at the unpopularity of the "amateur" pr0n categories. I don't know if it is or if it isn't: I do know that one of the problems with "amateur" porn is that the models are often friggin butt ugly. When they are not, it can be pretty good stuff. Some of the best of it I have found shows more or less normal attractive people (which means, they're not from anywhere near Los Angeles or Van Nuys) having fun together.

Raymond also has an excellent essay on the violent tendencies of Islam. Since this article fully reflects my own prejudices on the subject, I can't add any smarmy comments. I'll relay a couple of stories to reinforce what we're up against. Unlike 99.99% of americans, I actually interact with upper middle class and upper class Muslim men from other nations on a daily basis. One of the faculty at my institution is a naturalized citizen who retains fond feelings towards his brothers from the Abdus Salam Institute and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals -no giggling back there, you degenerate heathens, it is really called this. The reality of the situation is rather different than I have seen it portrayed in most places. There are reasonable people from such nations: most of them are more or less secular humanists. Of course, even the secular humanists more or less reflect the prejudices of the rest of their countrymen: this is to be expected, considering the way things work in western nations (certainly, western left-wing ideas borrow an awful lot from christianity -one might argue that they are the logical extension of christianity). The religious ones, when they speak with me at all (rather than looking at me like I am a pig or ape), believe in some pretty frightening things. I was recently informed by one of my friends (and I do consider myself friendly with these guys) that Mr. Bush, "the jews" and the CIA blew up the trade centers and the pentagon to allow expansion into the new oil producing regions in the former Soviet states. I directed him towards the whackey French conspiracy theory so popular over there, while of course mentioning that it was all nonsense; american presidents can't even get away with schoolboy breaking and entering or cheating on their wives, let alone such vast plotting. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that I should be happy there are "muslim soldiers" in america, since we have soldiers stationed in the holy land of Arabia. That one made me bluster a bit, I must confess. He didn't see the incompatability between the two statements, presumably.

Back to the secular versus religious muslims; one way to make a distinction between them: the secular ones know that the only way they can win is via a moral victory. They know that the western nations control vast powers, but that westerners are uncertain of themselves, and so the Muslim nations might win via stunning, shocking force and diplomacy. I don't blame them for wanting to win. I want my side to win too. The religious ones do not share this belief. They see their nations as somehow more powerful than our own. For example, Dr. "you should be happy about muslim soldiers in your country" was incensed at the poor treatment of muslims in the U.S. (this despite the fact that he asked me to find him a job here), especially Saudis. He was of the opinion that the tourist industry in america would lose billions. I think he was off by a couple of zeroes, but even if he wasn't, we can well afford it here: there is no real consequence to america if every single Muslim tourist stayed at home. Of course, according to the Arab news they really ain't boycotting the U.S. anyway. Basically, he sees Muslim nations as of the greatest geopolitical importance, wheras the reality is that Muslim nations are of only of importance because of their backwardness. In a "mother of all battles" situation, they would last about as long as it took for the ICBMs to arrive. The planetary GDP wouldn't be effected much; it might even go up. The amusing dynamic is that the secular fellows seem to go along with the radical ones. Why not? They offer hope! Much like left wingers in the U.S. seem pleased with Mr. Bush at present. However, the secular fellows are almost trivially convinced of the Western case: remind them that the Suicide guys don't suffer. The Big Men like Bush, people who secular muslims may have good reasons to loathe, don't suffer. The little guys suffer. The cleaning maids in the WTC. The Osama lookalikes in Afghanistan. The Palestinians (people who no other arab nation will have; that much is obvious). Israeli pizza eaters. Anyone who isn't completely psychotic (or religious, if you like) will listen to that sort of reasoning, and they do.

Another thing seldom mentioned, which dovetails nicely with my theory of the 'enemy as projected self:' lots and lots and lots of these guys -ordinary, more or less law abiding guests in our country, are running interference for those who are not so ordinary and law abiding. For example, a Saudi guy I used to work with in a now-defunct .com took his vacation in August of 2001. He spent his time dressed in Keffiyah and Agal crossing the Canadian border, over and over again. We asked him why he did this (we asked this before the 11th). Why create trouble for yourself, acting like a suspicious foriegner? He answered that it was "fun." There are other examples I could name of this sort of behavior among men that I know. It's actually alluded to by law enforcement: law enforcement did not detect the 20 odd hijackers who enrolled in flight training schools. They detected the hundreds of similar men who were running interference for them. Doubtless the many odd occurrences that were making CIA director Tenet bounce around like a mexican jumping bean all during the summer of 2001. It's sort of disengenuous; it alerts authorities that something is up. However, it hides the actual perps by overloading the system with noise that looks like signal. Quite a clever scheme. it is frustrating to the men they're most trying to piss off (american officials and law enforcement). It is a great way to make the average muslim schmuck feel like a mighty warrior for the cause, even though he really risks nothing (though after the 11th, we can hope that such jokers are risking a lot more than they were before).

As I said, this reflects my theory of "the enemy." I don't have a convenient online essay on the subject, though I've written about it at great length on Usenet. People typically project their own failings onto "the enemy." The firey preacher who shouts out against the evils of sexuality is probably boffing his secretary (or, in Swaggert's case, rogering $20 hookers). The rabid homophobe would probably like nothing better than to suck a big juicy dick (there is even some odd research on the topic, though I suspect it is deeply flawed -the very idea of hooking up erectile meters to a man's weiner is pretty bizarre). And so on. In this sense, we can learn a lot about what islamicist yahoos are guilty of by looking at what they say about "the jews" . Remember the theory that "the jews" knew about the attack on the WTC, and so 3000 of them didn't show up for work that day? Well, the fact of the matter is, plenty of Muslim nutbags knew about this thing in advance. They didn't know in an exact way, but they did know in a vague way. That's why so many were crossing the borders and enrolling in flight school.

2002-06-23T03:58:00.000-07:00
Have you ever read Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar? It's one of the great essays about the open source movement. I'd go so far as to say it is a sort of communist manifesto for such things (though Raymond is more a libertarian to Stallman's Stalinism; hmmm, Stallmanism, Stalinism...). Of course, in one glaring area it is dead wrong. His assertion that open-source projects are "bazaars" with lots of little hacker dudes working on a given project is incorrect.

I've always asserted that almost all open source projects (and in fact, an awful lot of closed source projects) are, in fact, one-man shows. Oh sure, others may turn in bug reports. In a rare case, others may add a feature or two, or someone may even take over a project when the original developer moves on to other things, croaks or what have you. But the primary development model is that one guy writes it, debugs it and keeps it going (I won't bother with poltroonish nonsense by using a gender-neutral pronoun, as I can't think of a single piece of open source software, let alone a successful piece of open source software that has been written by a woman). The simple reason for this is that nobody likes reading the other fellow's code; much less understanding the engineering rationales (if any) behind the overall structure. In my contracting work, and in my professional/scientific work, I've almost always been better off rewriting the whole damned mess. Not that my code is anything special: I'd go so far as to say that it probably sucks. But it has the great advantage that I understand it. The other reason is that certain software projects require extremely specialized technical knowledge. Some of my coder pals inform me that any old programmer worth a damn could write a compiler or interpreter or a filesystem. I don't know if that is true; such feats impress the hell out of me. I know for a fact, the type of stuff I am able to do, that is, RTOS stuff, hardcore numerics, distributed supercomputing and my dabbling in Computer Algebra Systems, is far, far beyond the purview of even above-average code weenies. Not because such things are hard to do, but because they require specialized skills that may imply years of advanced training in another subject (like math).

Well, it turns out there is some empirical evidence beyond my apocryphal assertions. This link was sent to me by Bram Cohen. We had discussed this very thing fairly often when we should have been macking on goth girls.

All this probably dovetails with my previous comments on various inanities and misconceptions about open source, but I am tired and at a loss to reconcile my statements explicitly. More to follow on this later, when I feel up to it.

2002-06-21T20:49:00.000-07:00
Lileks goes to college.

2002-06-19T19:44:00.000-07:00
The brilliant Victor Davis Hanson again makes the observation that the overeducated elites of the nation are the class most out of touch with reality, which is why they end up saying such cemendheaded things.

It is a long standing assertion of mine, and therefore I must hail it as a piece of genius when someone else mentions it: the higher your social class, the less connected with reality you typically are. There are precious few blue collar intellectuals left, but those there are, such as Hanson, Huntington, or most specacularly in the last 60 years, Eric Hoffer, typically produce brilliant stuff. I don't know how to rectify the problem.
Increasing the inheritance tax would help get rid of some limosine liberals to be sure. National service with no exceptions perhaps?

2002-06-16T02:09:00.000-07:00
What is at stake, really?
A whole lot, apparently. Who will the Brits be using small nuclear weapons on? The Russians? The Chinese? The Germans? The French? The Indians?

2002-06-15T07:12:00.000-07:00
During a discussion of Wolfram's new book I went a little bonkers. Mostly, I was reacting to some absurd statements by someone at Wired magazine.
Here is the result.

>These are excerpts from a review of the "New Kind of Science" by

>Steven Levy. Enjoy!

>...A series of much-discussed reinventions made Him sort of the

>Bob Dylan of physics...

Brother Lupo couldn't agree more: Wolfram seems to sing tunes that others
have sung before (I haven't read much of his stuff, though it all sounds a
heck of a lot like something Edward Fredkin has already done), but he sings
them off key and in a much more self important fashion.

>That is, until Stephen Wolfram came along and uncovered what a

>few millennia's worth of scientists had somehow failed to

>comprehend. Whoa.

Indeed he has: "Making yourself rich rather than scrounging for sponsors
and grant money allows you more academic freedom and spare time to noodle
around with interesting things. Not to mention, helicopters. And vanity
publications."
Also previously discovered by Fredkin.

>He worked at night, when the world was asleep, and retired at 8 in

>the morning.

Wow; sort of like a grad student, or an astronomer, except he was paid
better. While florid allusions to Gerrit Dou paintings make for pleasant
copy, let's face it: Wolfram sat in front of a computer screen like any
other geek. If he had enclosed his screen with a roccoco picture frame and
covered the walls with leather-bound volumes of Physical Review Letters,
it *would* have been quaint and evocative. Barring that, staring at the
CRT at 4a.m. will only seem quaint and evocative 200 years hence or so.

>Over the next few years, Wolfram teased His public by hinting at

>the contents in occasional interviews.

Kinda like I have done to my thesis advisor. Though I think even I
manage to publish more.

>Wolfram predicts an algorithmic key to the universe that can

>compute quantum physics - or, say, reality TV - in four lines of

>code.

Brother Lupo can do it in one line of shell script:

cat ** > /dev/null

Doesn't make for much of a book though.

>The self-conscious comparisons with Newton's 1687 Principia will

>undoubtedly earn Wolfram both attention and derision

Of course they will. Newton's Principia contained rigorous
mathematics which made measurable predictions that were true.
Wolfram's stuff is more akin to Mandelbrot's. I remember when "fractals"
were supposed to reinvent science as "cellular automata" are now. In fact, I
remember when "complex systems" were supposed to reinvent science. Along
with "catastrophe theory," "string theory" and "wavelets" and every other
wannabe revolution of the last 10 years during which I have been alert and
educated enough to notice. All of these things are interesting. None of
them did anything resembling what Newton's Principia did. They appear to
be merely interesting ideas, some of which can be more readily studied
using computers.

>Either way, the world is about to reckon with a Scientist Who's

>making the biggest leap imaginable: remaking science itself, with

>only His computer and His brain.

My department gets similar tracts in the mail all the time. There was this
guy, Archemedes Plutonium, for example. Most of them appear to have
insights more profound than those that might be obtained by staring at a
screen saver for too long, though they are just as lacking in any useful
predictive capability.

Chuckles and my jealousy of Wolfram's brains and wealth aside (not to
mention my fury at occasionally being forced to write code in his
supremely ugly programming language), I am sure it will be quite
interesting. His book appears to be quite lucidly written, which is a
welcome relief from the obscurantism of standard scientific jargonitis. I
may even waste my time reading it for yarks.
But Wolfram's ideas don't seem to aid in the understanding of anything.
More like, "look, isn't this NEAT!?" If he could predict or explain
something previously unpredictable or unexplainable (such as Newton's
general explanation of the motion of the planets, or Einstein's
explanation of Brownian Motion or the precession of the perihelion of
Mercury), that would be something. Until then, well, yeah, I guess it *is*
kinda neat, but I'm not giving up my day job.

I don't think anyone can argue that science is sorely in need of original
ideas: most of it is mere cement-headed carrying on the work of your
thesis advisor. The ills of professionalism run rampant. For example:
high energy physics theoreticians used to be the ne plus ultra of
scientists (and they still do stunning mathematics), these days they're
rapidly approaching crank status. I realized recently that I now look at
them as only slightly more respectable than professional bong-tenders. In
fact, the two groups are becoming rather indistinguishable. Similar
comments apply to cosmologists and astrophysicists; formerly highly
respectable scientific professions. Computer science could also use an
enema: as a review of the last 40 years of the ironically named "advances
in computers" will demonstrate. The tables of contents have been the same
for 4 decades. Has computer science (as opposed to computer technology,
which isn't science) done *anything* interesting (let alone revolutionary)
since the discovery of the Fast Fourier transform? If so, nobody has
bothered to talk about it. Science is also sorely in need of rigorous ways
of looking at *patterns* in a general way, which is supposed to be at
least part of Wolfram's overall program. Really, we don't have anything
much better than glorified Fourier transforms. Biologists at least have
recently been doing interesting things, since they started giving them
classes in chemistry and the use of computers.

The stage is set for new Principias to be sure, but this almost certainly
ain't it. If it is: where is Wolfram's precession of the perihelion of
Mercury?

2002-06-13T22:16:00.000-07:00
People actually wonder at my assertion that The Media are made up of Upper Middle Class Liberal Swine. Here's some grist for the mill.

Saw Rumsfeld today at the airbase, a day after I spoke with our American
boys. At one point the PIO cut off my probing questions about policy (do
you think marijuana should be legalized, things like that that had nothing
to do with the price of butter but i felt like twisting the minds of 21
year olds) and said, "they are trained to fight, not think." Ahh, the world
we live in.
I hang out with a wacky freelance guy out of Bangkok. He walked up to the
secret service guys who had leather pistol grips inside their thighs and
said, "so tell me about this bondage thing you're into.'' Then to some of
the soldiers, "so if you unlock your safety's, you could just blow Rummy
away, right?" He's a perfect match for me and behind the insanity a very
good reporter.
I'm growing accustomed to the cold although when I am ensconced on the
thrown with my jeans around my ankles and shivering and hear gunfire at
night, I feel a certain kind of vulnerability that goes behind wondering if
we're out of toilet paper.

I'd say something like, "well, he went to grad school in Berkeley." Except that they all went to grad school in a place like Berkeley. Therefore such people are almost universally smug, cutesy "has nothing in common with the nation outside of the upper middle class" worthless little pustules. Newspapers should go back to hiring men from the same classes as the police and bail bondsmen as in the old days of journalism. Certainly, there is no evidence that the profesionalization of the craft of newspaper reporter: the credentialization of the job has improved their output in any way. If nothing else, at least they'd be people who have something in common with the rest of the country, rather than smug supercilious assholes who think they're better than a guy who carries a gun for a living.

2002-06-12T03:25:00.000-07:00
Find out if you are Brother Lupo's dream date! Uses the magic of bullshit psychology! I found it on Eric Raymond's blog. I'd apparently make a good pal or date for Raymond (whatever that means).

2002-06-12T03:02:00.000-07:00
This sort of thing could eventually result in withdrawal from NATO.

I mean, what good is being in an alliance with such Ostriches? EU attitudes remind me of the Hy-Brasilians from Erik the Viking. In case you don't get the Python reference:

****************
THORFINN: You mean... you can't kill ANYBODY?
KING ARNULF: Right! Isn't it wonderful?

The Vikings are non-plussed.

THORFINN: What? Not being able to kill anybody?
KING ARNULF: (bemused) Well, of course.
ERIK: (interested) How?
KING ARNULF: (explaining the obvious) Well... for a start... er... there's
no killing...
ERIK: Well, OBVIOUSLY there's no killing.
KING ARNULF: Well... [isn't it great?]
THORFINN: But how d'you take revenge?
KEITEL: (guiltily) How do you punish people?
IVAR: How do you DEFEND yourselves?
KING ARNULF: (getting a little irritated) We don't have to. We're all
terribly nice to each other. Aren't we?
***************
(later)

The doors of the Great Hall burst open and a wall of water crashes
through, knocking the Vikings off their feet. There is little doubt
that the whole of Hy-Brasil is sinking see a street go down, a statue
sink and then we
Cut to a close-up of King Arnulf.
He is standing at the top of the Forum steps addressing a crowd of
anxious citizens. They are keeping surprisingly good order considering
they are already standing ankle-deep in water, and the whole town is
rapidly sinking around them.

KING ARNULF: Now, I know what some of you must be thinking... the day has
come.... we're all going down, etc. etc. But let's get away
from the fantasy and look at the FACTS.
FACT ONE - The threat of total destruction has kept the peace
for one thousand years.
FACT TWO - The chances of it failing now are therefore one in
three hundred and sixty-five thousand.
FACT THREE... By this time the water is up to people's knees, and several have
crowded onto the lower steps to avoid getting wet. KING ARNULF: FACT THREE - Our safety regulations are the most rigorous in
the world. We are all nice to each other, we never rub each
other up the wrong way or contradict each other, do we?

CROWD: No. Rumble. The buildings sink and masonry falls.
CITIZEN: We... er... do seem to be going down quite fast, Your Majesty
- not trying to contradict you, course.

KING ARNULF: No, of course you're not, citizen. But let's stick to the
facts. There has NEVER been a safer, more certain way of
keeping the peace. So whatever's happening, you can rest
assured, Hy-Brasil is NOT sinking. Repeat, NOT sinking.

We cut to an unfortunate Hy-Brasilian who looks out of a window to see
if it's raining, but is immersed before he can find out.
The citizens in the Forum, however, are reassured by the King's words
- even though they are now up to their waists in water. One of them
steps forward.
ANOTHER CITIZEN: May I just make a point in support of what King Arnulf's just
said?
KING ARNULF: We'd be delighted - wouldn't we?
CITIZENS: Yes, we'd certainly like to hear what one of us has got to
say... Erik, Sven, Sven's dad and Harald struggle out of the Great Hall,
carrying their belongings and the Horn Resounding, while the citizen is
still speaking most articulately in support of the King. They are
ALMOST in a panic.
ERIK: What are you all doing?
CITIZEN AT THE BACK: (cheerfully) It's all right. It's not happening.
ERIK: (urgently)The place is sinking!
CITIZEN AT THE BACK: Yes... I thought it was too, but the King's just pointed
out that it can't be.
CITIZEN: (still speaking in support of the King) ...and, of course, we mustn't
forget King Arnulf's EXCELLENT eye for flower-arranging.

There is a smattering of applause. A few people pull their robes up out
of the wet. Erik leaps onto a wall and shouts to the crowd.

ERIK:Save yourselves! Hy-Brasil... is sinking. There are a lot of knowing smiles amongst the citizens.
CITIZEN FROM MIDDLE: Look, you don't know our safety regulations.
KING ARNULF: It can't happen.
ERIK: But it IS! Look!
KING ARNULF: (ignoring Erik) The important thing is not to panic.
CITIZENS: Quite... yes... we understand....
KING ARNULF: I've already appointed the Chancellor as Chairman of a com-
mittee to find out exactly what IS going on, and meantime I
suggest we have a sing-song!
CITIZENS: Good idea!
ANOTHER:Can we do the one that goes "TUM-TI-TUM-TI-TUM-TI-TUM"?

Erik looks around in despair.

2002-06-10T15:15:00.000-07:00
Denbeste expounds upon Greek Science.
Even modern intellectuals like to make links to Plato and Socrates. In fact, these thinkers were responsible for the decline of Greek experimental and observational science, and the emphasis on moral philosophical thought. Few people actually name the Greek who did the most harm to philosophy and science. Perhaps this is because many fields of philosophy and human knowledge are still in the Platonic rather than the Eudoxian (experimental/observational) model.

2002-06-07T05:33:00.000-07:00
I'll never be a diplomat. Then again, neither is our president, so there is some hope for me.
Some chowderheaded frenchman posted a taking to task of a LaTeX based word processor I use in favor of his project, another word processor I use. I called him a cementhead. He didn't get it. I explained:

> > On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 11:54:35PM +0200, David Allouche wrote:
> > > I have just posted a very lengthy comment to the announce of latest
> > > LyX release on Linux Weekly News.
> >
> > To which I have a very concise answer:
> >
> > You are a cementhead.
>
> I apologize for my weaknesses in anglo-american slang, but I have seldom
> the chance to actually *speak* english though I can read and write it no
> so bad.

Desolee; en franglais:
Tu es un 'ciment-tete.'

I'll admit your written english is a lot better than my french; despite the
attempts of certain canadian nuns to enlighten me. There is no way to say
"Je m'apelle Scott Locklin" in French anyway. As such, I'll explain in my
own language.

I like TeXmacs as well; in fact, I like it better than LyX for both its
WYSIWYG features, its keystrokes (which are better than LyX's by far) and
its promise for the future. I would gladly convert to it if it weren't so
obviously incomplete and broken and lacking in documentation. In fact,
before I realized its shortcomings, I did convert a 150 page document to
TeXmacs. But my affection for TeXmacs has nothing to do with the reasons
you cite. LaTeX is the only reason to use *either* of these tools, as
LaTeX is how physicists and mathematicians (i.e., my own bad self)
communicate their findings to the world. Without LaTeX output, both
tools are just lousy word processors that aren't compatable with anything
else. Whether or not the intestines of TeXmacs may have a document model
which appeals to the sensibilities of computer programmers is irrelevent
to virtually everyone.
The fact that you actually tout similarities to LISP syntax as a *strength*
of the document model is so funny, I am sorely tempted to further tax the
relations between our two nations by making jokes about French cultural
awards for Jerry Lewis. LISP has many strengths; syntax is not one of them.
The chances of the TeXmacs document model ever taking over as a standard
like LaTeX are about as great as the chances of Bruno Megret, Arlette
Laguiller and Corinne Lepage having a menage a trois in a giant vat of egg
salad, broadcast on evening television, with a blow by blow account given by
a pink tutu wearing Yasser Arafat.

Looking at the other responses to your comments, there are at least two
other people who say the same damned thing.

2002-06-06T02:06:00.000-07:00
I found this via the little green football weblog (which I ordinarily find in fairly bad taste).
Mostly, I provide the link as an excuse to reiterate his amusing praise of Victor Davis Hanson and his writing. Here it is as he put it:

2. Victor Davis Hanson - Recognize. If you are going to be a hawk, why be half-assed? Why make some candy-ass proposals about how to assemble a coalition and apply diplomatic pressure and use surgical strikes, when you can bellow from the crenellated walls of your Fortress of Blood that the armies of democracy will wash away all who oppose them like a dark tide? And why talk about modern politics and warfare at all when Perecles or Thermistecles or Triceratops offers a perfect object lesson in why America is the fucking tits, and is going to pound your sorry democracy- hating ass until my fist breaks. I think Mr. Hanson should consider taking some TM classes, and possibly a mild tranquilizer, but I hope he doesn't.
[Note: This is not in any way an attempt to exorcise myself of the nightmare I have where, night after night, I am a novice hoplite, sea-sick and terrified aboard my trireme, as Prof. Hanson screams in my face about the glory of Athens. We are about to attack the evil Persians, when I realize I am naked, and I don't know how to use my sword, and I'm late for a math test that Prof. Pythagoras said was half my grade. Also, all the Persians look like Jimmy Carter. I awake, drenched in sweat, only to find that I am clutching in my hand a piece of my sunken warship, still wet with the Aegean waters of 25 centuries past! Dear God, just give me one night of peace!]

2002-06-04T17:52:00.000-07:00
This is one of the most inspiring things I have recently read. Unfortunately, I fear our culture has become so degenerate that we may fall of our own weakness before we heed the call of the wild. As the author points out, environmentalists are already moaning that we evil monkeys shouldn't be allowed to pollute the pristine wildernesses of other planets. Only the chinese remain unabashedly space-expansionistic. We stick to that idiotic product of bureaucracy, the space shuttle: a technology that was supposed to cheapen space flight to the cost of a 747 flight instead costs for each flight what dozens and dozens of disposable rockets cost. It's preposterous and depressing; if the shuttle budget were diverted to R&D, or even simply to tooling up for mass production of ordinary rockets, spaceflight would become incredibly cheap. But there is presently no vested interest in making spaceflight cheap, so it remains expensive and rare.

2002-06-03T23:59:00.000-07:00
This is one of the most bizarre things about humans I have ever heard of. I would love to see some more work as to how common this sort of thing is.

2002-06-03T16:09:00.000-07:00
An excellent statement about limosine liberals versus working class heroes. It mentions the Arizona footballer who is joining the army as an example of a working class hero, which makes it all that much the better.

2002-06-03T15:36:00.000-07:00
Global warming declared real by the same government agency that let us know "secondhand smoke" is a carcinogen.

Amusing that someone at the EPA got that far out of control of the Bushies; right at a convenient time, the signing of the Kyoto accords by the EU. Personally, I refuse to take seriously any global emissions agreement that doesn't mention the termite population and volcanoes.

2002-05-31T04:59:00.000-07:00

A long read, but a good one detailing the roots of the differences between european and american policy these days.

2002-05-30T21:21:00.000-07:00
While the world burns, the Guardian, fearless defenders of freedom and liberty ensure that Britain can have a papist, jew or muslim king. This goes down in history as one of the most wretchedly stupid, untimely and useless pieces of legislation in the last 100 years of British history. In fact, it may be the most stupid, untimely and useless pieces of legislation ever passed by an english speaking nation.

In other news, The Guardian is apparently promulgating absurd "frankenfood" hysteria. Their scientific advisor condemned their efforts, but they are unapologetic.
Some dunderhead from the BBC was quoted as saying,

"If someone had written a drama about Aids 20 years ago, saying it would have spread to the extent that it has, people would have said it was impossible."

Er, actually, speaking as someone who was alive and conscious 20 years ago, the hysteria over AIDS made the present, rather grim situation look like a "happily ever after" scenario. People were talking about catching AIDS from spit, sweat, toilet seats or sneezing. Fortunately, that turned out to be science fiction; you still pretty much only catch it if you are a needle-sharing junkie, you take it up the ass, or you have sex while you have open sores. If genetically modified foods were associated with some fashionable (aka "victim") minority group like gay men or hemophiliacs, there would be no idiotic government funded scare-mongering like this little fairy story. Since GM foods are most often associated with "DA MAN" (aka "the corporations") they're fair game. Too bad about the millions of little brown people who will starve because white luddites won't allow them access to such technologies, and they're forced to go the "natural" route of scratching out a living at the whims of the elements, and dying of malnutrition. Nobody ever sees them, so they don't count.

2002-05-30T21:14:00.000-07:00
The chickens come home to roost. I told ya so. Not only was the "he knew" nonsense politics, it was bad politics.

2002-05-30T20:09:00.000-07:00
This appears highly unpleasant. On the surface it looks like the FBI is just getting the authorization to do what ordinary citizens (and members of foriegn intelligence groups operating on american soil) have. The ability to search public records without "probably cause" and the ability to attend any kind of public meeting. Maybee that is all it is. But from the looks of things, the FBI isn't suffering from a lack of that kind of information gathering ability. They are suffering from lousy command, control and analysis. Of course, this is a "management problem" and management don't want to address their own problems, so they're going to gope for more available power rather than comprimising their own personal fiefdoms. Maybee it will help, maybee it won't. Maybee it won't harm essential liberties, maybee it will. Frankly, I suspect that the worst case is true. It probably won't help -it will just make a large body of data even larger. It will almost certainly have negative civil liberty effects on our society, if only in the passive sense.

On the other hand, This is a hopeful development. Diverting resources from the useless and futile "war on drugs" and putting these resources on terrorism detail is exactly what we need. Since the 1980s, the number of police (and presumably FBI agents) devoted to drug interdiction and enforcement has certainly mushroomed. As a result, marijuana prices have gone up, though so has usage among the young. Cocaine and heroin, the real problems, have gotten cheaper and more widely used. I'd say that the drug war is a lost cause. Terrorism is rather a more pressing concern.

The article also points out that more analysts will be trained for the express purpose of information coalation (and from the hiring notices on their website, they're also writing some AI code to do the same thing). This is exactly what is needed. This is also actually good for civil liberties. In addition to de-escalating the drug war; other 'crimes' typically covered by FBI enforcement will become less and less enforced. What would be really salutary would be getting rid of lots of the victimless nonsense the FBI is required to enforce. According to the article, the FBI has 1000 new statutes to enforce since the 1970s. I can't imagine that even an appreciable fraction of those laws are worth or damn, or do anything other than stick the government's nose where it does not belong. As such, the neglect of such things will be good for freedoms. Again: if some enterprising congressmen would do the rough work of removing them from the books, or at least consolidating them, so much the better for everyone. Don't sweat the small stuff.

2002-05-29T23:26:00.000-07:00
More evidence for my assertion that all "do gooders" are degenerate swine. "Anti-smoking activists" are claiming that the anti-smoking adverts they have required the cigarette industry to promote have the opposite effects on teenagers. No big suprise: the anti-drug commericals certainly cause hearty chuckles around the bong wielding crowd.

Favorite quote:
"(anti smoking activists) said their own approach seemed to work better to discourage adolescents from smoking."

Golly, if that isn't a transparent groping after money, I don't know what is.

They veer into Onion territory with this one:
"The ads seem to appeal to the contrary nature of many
teens, and are "distinctly counter" to expert findings that
have found that directly telling teens not to smoke only
encourages them, a report published in the American Journal of
Public Health finds."

2002-05-26T06:25:00.000-07:00
Here's another from the european "intelligentsia"
Featured phrases:

"(Bush) must listen more "

Er, no, dipshit: Bush is the president of the most powerful nation in the world, and his agenda is pretty soft compared to the anger felt over here. It is you who must listen more. We're here, we're pissed; you're going to have to deal with the reality of it. Bush isn't beholden to "Europe." Europe is beholden to Bush.

"how little experience he has of foreign affairs and how recent is his discovery of the history and complexities of issues which have been unquestionably better covered and probably better understood in Europe than in the US."

And there was great rolling of eyes from the american peanut gallery. I have yet to see any specifics as to what "issues" are better "covered" and "understood" in Europe than in the U.S. Perhaps englishmen only meet certain kinds of bad stereotype of American; the kind wearing shorts, speaking slowly and nasally (in english of course) and smiling dimly. Do people believe we're all like this because certain of our tourists behave like ignoramouses? Perhaps I ought to judge englishmen by their soccer fans.
I have also yet to see any evidence of Bush amateurism in foriegn affairs in the last year. He won a war in Afghanistan. He has achieved an astounding rapproachmont with the second most powerful nation in the world (that would be Russia: not the UK, France or Germany). He pretty much gets his way. If he makes the nattering nellies in Europe's chattering and leftoid classes nervous, it is a job well done.

The author of this piece of finger-wagging at the Texan in Chief then goes on to completely understand the present electioneering issues in american politics (vis the "the president KNEW" japes and the "golly, 200,000 is a big number" mumblings). Mr. Potter would look at the president's ratings; they've gone up since the "the president KNEW" nonsense. As for the 200,000 issue; well, perhaps Mr. Potter should think about where they're going to come from. Big hint: we ain't gonna reinstitute the draft on this one. Probably won't call up the reserves either. We may, in fact, perform a little experiment to see if Europe is able to avoid mass slaughter without the benefit of occupying american troops.

Not a complete wash though: this article, linked to at the end of his, is one of the few sensible things written in a European newspaper on how to deal with the dreaded americano. This guy gets it.

"Europe fears that America has become a swaggering behemoth; the Americans despise Europe as an axis of whingers. And both are broadly right. "

2002-05-24T22:07:00.000-07:00
Here is a Salon article lionizing Gould for exactly what I have just excoriated him for. He outlines Gould's ideas well enough, though he apparently finds Gould's sentimentality to be admirable rather than preposterous. My favorite line is his paen to Gould's "belief that life could not be reduced to equations." This is an all too common sentiment among mush-heads. Emotionally driven environmentalist mush-heads, for example, almost never understand the math, the numbers or the science. But they will always point to someone with a large radiant forehead and a budda-like smile who is supposed to both understand the math, the "larger issues" (must suppress giggling upon hearing this phrase), and who supports their odd Manichaean views. Gould fans like Gould because they percieve him as having given a bloody nose to the "evil" sociobiologists with his public writings. While Gould should be given some credit as acting a useful foil to Sociobiology, his ass-backwards ideological view of the topic is certainly a personal failing, rather than something worthy of admiration.

Amusingly, the author of this essay, a journalist, has written a slim pop-science volume on the subject of "the Darwin Wars." According to the amazon reviews, this book is essentially a paen to Gould and other non-mathy Darwinians, and a demonization of those who would "reduce life to equations." The reviewers also point out that he missed much of the point. Amusingly the author seems to have a rackett as an atheistic religious writer. The perfect sort of self-contradictory dunderhead to praise Gould for his failings.

As the brilliant Daniel Dennett put it, regarding the essayist's book:
"what a sleazy bit of trash journalism"

Par for the course of late in salon.

2002-05-24T20:25:00.000-07:00
I don't ordinarily think much of sporto types, but this guy is a friggin' hero. I used to think they don't build them like that any more, but apparently they do. My friend, Joe Samurai is doing the same. If I weren't so old and chickenshit, I would think about it too. Almost did it in 91; people still think I'm nuts for even considering it...

2002-05-23T19:13:00.000-07:00
People everywhere have been wailing about the death of Steven Gould. Apparently he was the hero of many of the 'smart set' due to his intellectual battles royal with the creationists. I used to like arguing with superstitious scientific illiterates my own self, on Usenet and on campus. I never thought much of my efforts; arguing with such savages was about as intellectually stimulating as arguing with a flat-earther. Typically it was mere intellectual chest-puffery on my part. I don't see Gould as being a particularly impressive dragon-slayer in this regard. Beating a creationist in a cerebral fight is about as impressive a feat as beating up Steven Hawking in a fistfight.

I will say he was a good pop-science writer; "good" being in the sense of the writing, rather than the content. From my understanding of his actual scientific work, he was also a competent, if not a distinguished paleontologist (note, he was not an evolutionary biologist; he just played one on teevee). I suppose many people found his debates with the creationists to be a necessary if odious duty in the public service, and I suppose he did a fair job of it (though I personally disagree with the necessity of it). And, some of his rivals have conceded, in the spirit of the worthy adversary, that Gould was a useful foil in the debates associated with the formation of the sciences of sociobiology and "evolutionary psychology."

However, Gould certainly espoused a number of fairy tales about the evolution of human beings in particular, and evolution in general which where entirely the result of his upbringing as a red-diaper marxist. For example, Gould asserted that sociobiology, or evolutionary psychology were bunk, purely for ideological reasons. He couldn't see humans as animals; apparently, we are blessed by St. Marx in such a way that evolutionary forces couldn't possibly have any influence on the way we are, the way we think and the way we act. People like to claim that "the jury is still out" on such debates. This is nonsense; just as it is nonsense that "the jury is still out" on the "debate" between evolutionists and creationists. The fact that Gould, a popular writer, espoused a politically fashionable, but scientifically addlepated view of human evolution and biology does not mean that "the jury is still out" -it means Gould was an idealistic cementhead.

Beyond that, Gould opposed the idea of "progressivism" in evolution on purely ideological terms. This is in conflict with every piece of evidence available in evolutionary biology (including the promising mathematical directions of Illya Prigogene and Herman Haken regarding emergent systems), and in fact the fundamental ideas of Darwin. Apparently, Gould saw the ghosts of goose-steppers in anything remotely resembling this line of thinking. Gould's arguments were mostly historical (albeit, the history was most interesting, though I found even his purely historical conclusions associating progressivism with social Darwinism to be dubious); in fact, lots of fascist types did use Darwinian, or at least Spencerian arguments along these lines to promote their silly ideas. The fact that silly political types absconded with some ideas from biology and abused them has nothing to do with the scientific veracity of such ideas. The Nazis were big on rockets and invented silicone rubber as well, though I don't see anyone claiming space exploration or silicone rubber is somehow incorrect because the Nazis were involved in it. On the other hand, some Nazis claimed we lived in a hollow earth; they were wrong on this not because they were evil goose-steppers, but because they were wrong.

In all of this, Gould was no different than the fundamentalist christian "creation scientists" he used to debate so effectively. He believed in a weird version of a scientific theory on what was certainly an ideological/religious basis.

Just because someone has written a popular book, does not mean he has any scientific credibility. All it means is that he has written a popular book. Sometimes, as in the case of Hawking or Penrose or Gould, the popular books have the effect of netting their ideas (such as they are) more attention in the scientific community, but it certainly doesn't make such men right. Nor does it give them any more real following in the scientific community. In fact, such popular writings may simply convince their colleagues that they are full of beans.

As John Maynard Smith put it:

"Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the
Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen
by nonbiologists as the preeminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the
evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see
him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering
with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at
least on our side against the creationists."

There is an article I found in Arts & Letters Daily which covers these issues well (from which I got the above quote).

To use a Gouldian historical argument (actually, this is a better historical argument than most of Gould's which appear to be moral, rather than inferential); the scientific influence of men who wrotesuccessful science popularizations for the general public in the 1600s, the 1700s and the 1800s is pretty scanty. As such, I'd be willing to bet my spleen that the influence of modern science popularizers will also be scanty. I'm a sort of beginning collector of such things.
One of my favorite examples is Court de Gebelin's huge "Monde Primitif" published the late 1700s. It was alleged to be a general and linguistic history of the ancient world and comparison to the modern and suchlike. His basic theory, by the way, is virtually indistinguishable from modern popular linguistics scholar, Noam Chomsky's assertions that there is a basic "universal human language." The lasting impact of Gebelin's books, if you assume Chomsky isn't an intellectual descendent, has been to elevate what was a european card game (tarot, still played as a game over most of europe, rather than some dumb spooky thing for goth chicks to play palmreader with) into a weird occultnic stew of ideas dealing with language, prophecy and quasi-egyptology. Ever hear of J.L. Comstock? He wrote a general science book for the general, educated public in the early 1800s.
The 1900s has one spectacular example of a popular science book written by an influential scientist; Einstein's special relativity book. I doubt as many have actually read it through. It is a near perfect non-mathematical exposition of special relativity. The problem with it is that Einstein requires you to think about physics like a physicist does (though without the math). This is hard unless you have nontrivial physics training. Most people don't. On the other hand, the 1900s are filled with Blavatskys, Fritjof Capras, Fred Allen Wolfs,Douglas Hofstaders, Frank Tiplers and so on. These guys fall in a varying continuum of charlatanry; Blavatsky certainly being the worst offender (she wasn't even a scientist of any description, but a sort of general charlatan: she was also a greater science popularizer than Einstein was; just as Von Dainken was a greater archeology popularizer than any of the leaders of that field). As such the comparison is not all that fair. On the other hand, these guys have had little impact in science other than their popularizations, despite the huge popularity of their work for the common man. This is not to say they have had no impact on science; just not a particularly great one. I'm willing to bet Gould ends up somewhere around Court de Gebelin's level of influence.

Personally, when I run out of scientific gas (realistically, I never had much anyway) I will absolutely, certainly write a popular book on some scientific subject. Most of the popular books on the subject are bad, and many of them seem to be lucrative. Plus, it would put me on the map as a "famous scientist," which is a lot better than slaving away in obscurity. Probably get more chicks that way. Look at what it did for Richard Dawkins.

*drools a little*

Something tells me Dawkins was a lot more popular with the ladies after writing something most of the brighter ones were capable of digesting.

2002-05-23T00:49:00.000-07:00
I am a jelly doughnut.

I wonder what cold war era people think about such things. I was particularly struck by this imbecile and his statement,

""Solidarity after the attacks, yes," Fabian Scheidler, of the anti-globalization group Attac, told the radio service. "But, at the same time, it doesn't mean we do everything they tell us to.
"Europeans need to be allowed to have their own view without being labeled anti-American."

Gosh. Maybee if you dunderheads weren't burning our flag, we might be able to take it that way.

2002-05-23T00:36:00.000-07:00
Another reason to be afraid. Now, our troops are the only ones holding the Afghan/Pakistan border.

In other news, apparently the guy who slaughtered an american journalist iin Pakistan for being a jew s Described by the UK Guardian as "British." I think someone ought to be reporting this to american newspapers. I wonder if the guardian is actually arousing righteous Euro indignation due to Her Majesty's Subject's likely execution.

2002-05-22T19:44:00.000-07:00
The most compelling argument for pot-legalization I have yet read. No more deadheads! No more tie-dye! No more smelly hippies saying ... 'duuuuuuude...."
(found this at Instapundit.)

2002-05-21T18:18:00.000-07:00
War looms in Kashmir. I don't think people (other than the Indians and Pakistanis, and possibly the Chinese) realize how serious this could be. The Indians feel shortchanged by the U.S. due to our lack of active engagement with their problems. I suppose I can't blame them. Though from our perspective, the Indians would seem to be our natural allies, a realistic assessment of the situation shows that there isn't much we can do for India that would be helpful to our own cause in anything but a moral sense. The american policy view seems to be to encourage strong governments to crack down on the lawless fringe places were terrorists thrive. Places like Kashmir, parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. A war between Pakistan and India withdraws any pressure that Pakistan can put on its lawless regions in order to fight against India. Bad for our interests.

2002-05-21T17:26:00.000-07:00
A National Review Essay On why book reviewers of modern literature are full of shit.
I found this particularly amusing, as I recently had made the $25 error of paying attention to a review of a book on a spectacular mutiny on a whaleship in the 1820s. The book wasn't very good; it was sort of adequate to conveying the story, but the amount of material in it really only justified a lengthy magazine article. Instead the mutiny, the author's relationship to it via his job as rare book seller, an interview with some native on an island tangentially related to the mutiny and various other non sequiters are exploited to draw it out to 250 odd pages of double-spaced large type.
Shortly after reading it, a writer friend informed me that it is trivial to get $20k advances for nonfiction these days.

2002-05-17T18:17:00.000-07:00
The Birds and the Bunnies people
Strike again!

2002-05-17T17:08:00.000-07:00
Ooops, Doctor Volokh corrects me; it's "Annals of Congress" and while the meaning is right, the exact quote isn't. Maxima mea culpa; that's what I get for not checking my primary sources (checking primaries is almost never rewarding in physics papers which are extensively peer reviewed -but I'm a dummy for assuming gun-rights websites would be similarly peer reviewed).

2002-05-17T03:28:00.000-07:00
Professor Volokh weighs in on gun rights. Lots of cute stats here. I found it from his WSJ article, which is also worthwhile.

One thing he seems to miss, the quotations I always use to shut the pie holes of those who yammer about "collective rights" interpretations,

"The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of people, trained in arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country."
James Madison, I Annuals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789)

"Americans need not fear the federal government because they enjoy the advantage of being armed, which you possess over the people of almost every other nation." James Madison, "The Federalist 46 (1788).

James Madison (author of the 2nd amendment) didn't leave much ambiguity there. Too bad that Madison couldn't anticipate changes in modern english usage.

2002-05-16T23:33:00.000-07:00
Here's another representative example of this nonsense. Do these knucklheads read their own copy?

"Bin Laden's name was specifically mentioned by an FBI agent in Phoenix
two months before the attacks in a memo urging headquarters to
investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in flight schools in that city."

Gosh, ya know, I bet Quadaffi's name has been mentioned in the past relating to terrorist undertakings. Hussain and Khomeni and Arafat as well. That about exhausts the potential terror magnificoes of the last couple of years, excepting perhaps Carlos the Jackal. This is just like any other kook conspiracy theory, Consider the thought processes in the following statements:

"LOOK, Oswald used to be a HOMOSEXUAL COMMUNIST, that proves that the MAFIA DID IT."

"LOOK, Vince Foster was FUCKING HILLARY, so he had to be SILENCED, or Paula Jones would have squealed."

"LOOK, the JEWS run the MEDIA, so of course the palestinians are being genocidally exterminated."

"LOOK, black people wouldn't sell crack to each other, it was obviously the CIA performing TUSKAGEE like experiments on soul brothers..."

"LOOK, there was an obscure REPORT about AIRPLANES and BIN LADEN which of course PROOVES THAT THIS WAS BUSH BURNING DOWN THE REICHSTAG!!!"

Is conspiracy theory respectable these days? Was conspiracy theory always this common?

2002-05-16T23:15:00.000-07:00
Ah Salon The once proud flagship of online journalism slowly decaying into reflexive old media posturing and all around money-grubbing decrepitude.
On today's front page: five blubbering denunciations of the "Bush Coverup" of various intelligence reports about Arab plots to hijack using airline training schools.
One article is even by their resident microcephalic paranoid and former Clinton poodle, Joe Conason. How I would have ground my teeth at that one, back when you didn't have to pay to read that lackwit's infuriatingly stupid gibbering.

I find it amazing that these pious asses find this scandalous. I mean, I expect that Congress will make some self-righteous partisan noise. But the fact remains, we had Zacarias Moussaoui in custody almost a month beforehand; we knew that since September. Presumably, this would have spawned some kind of report. It appears that this was the case.
Remember back in the early months after the disaster, when all manner of preposterous rumors of a "second wave" of attacks, poison gas, poisoning of food and so on were released? That ought to give a hint of the sheer overwhelming volume of information about terrorists that is constantly circulated at the highest levels. We didn't hear about every preposterous possible plot before the disaster because there is too much noise in the signal. We don't hear such rumors any longer for the exact same reason. Doubtless, such reports still flow into the executive branch on a daily basis. Perhaps one will turn out to be justified in retrospect. Meanwhile, who knows how to filter the real stuff from the crazy rumors and speculation.

The fact that the media are following the dumbocrats in an attempt to tar this as some kind of conspiracy probably shouldn't be suprising to me any longer. Are they even remotely objective? Do they have any credibility any longer? Does anyone to the right of maniacs like Nutty Noam consider if credible Fuhrer Bush and the illegal Bush Junta (tm) masterminded a plot to up their polls and legitimize their "regime" by burning down the proverbial Reichstag using a couple of "useful idiots?" Expect some prateing numskull to tie this all in with Enron and Oil Pipelines.

2002-05-16T22:28:00.000-07:00
Some good articles on open source by Steven Denbeste. Check out all three. Denbeste is typically a very original thinker; his thoughts on open source are no exception: not a cliche among them.

The typical reaction to open source falls into one of three categories:

1) The fanatic "open source will take over the world" approach. This is almost entirely religious fanaticism. There are a couple of good arguments to be made in favor of open sourcing a given piece of software. Morality enters into none of these arguments. Sadly, open source zealots (and they earn the name) see it all as a titanic battle between the elemental forces of good and evil. This is certainly useful in gathering the young and impressionable (people with the spare time to contribute to the movement), but not at all to convincing sensible people.

2) The ignoramous. "Free software? There must be a catch; it must all suck, or they'll change the license later!" These are the opposite of the zealot. They are similarly cretinous and as lacking in critical skills on the matter as the zealots are

3) The Microsoft employee "Free software is evil and a threat to the american way of life, or at least ours, which consists of controlling as much of your life as possible." Microsquish employees aren't necessarily on the payroll, they may simply be Bill-fans. They're not as cretinous as the other two categories. They have a firm appreciation of the potential for open source software to undermine their hegemony. They appreciate the fact that, in a very real business sense, it is a "salt the earth" tactic being used by their enemies. They of course, know all about such strategies, though their monopoly doesn't require them to open-source an item of software to control a market: they can just buy the market.

For my own self, I mostly agree with Denbeste, though I am particularly against Richard Stallman's "free software" ideas, as they're really a form of totalitarianism. With many open source licensing schemes, there is no obligation that future revisions made by anybody must also be open source. GPL does require this; if you release a copy of GCC for your new chip, you are obliged to release the source. Of course, I can name a dozen examples of companies which blatantly violate the GPL in this way, and they have yet to be sued, so this is a little loose. I liken GPL and such schemes to toddlers who won't let you play with their toys unless you do it *exactly* their way. It's rather small minded and against the spirit of sharing if you ask me.

There are successful profit models based on open source. By all accounts, zope is wildly successful. It's a dumb (as in "relatively easy to
write in its respective language of python") tool which is quite useful to experts, but has a steep learning curve (steeper than, say, a word processor or the administration of an Apache server), so it is oftene asiest/cheapest to hire an expert, such as one of the creators, to make it work for you. This model, of course, does not lend itself to standard marketc apitalism. The "investor" is an individual who has invested his time in writing some free software. The payoff to his investment is to charge obscene fees consulting for his presumably at least somewhat useful tool. The only real way I can think of "investing" in such a model is to make loans to promising open source programmers and hope they don't declare bankruptcy before they pay you off. My friend Bram Cohen is going this route (of software developed on your own time and given away with the idea of making money providing support) with his swarming filesharing system, BitTorrent. It looks as if he is likely to succeed.

Of course, there is no model for doing this for the desktop, or consumer applications. It really only works with business tools like zope.

Mostly, I see "open source" as a valuable international intellectual resource, subject to peer review. It allows for the building of a database of reviewed useful software, rather than requiring engineers to perpetually reinvent the wheel. An example of where this is most helpful, even necessary is in scientific computing. Scientific software is quite difficult to write compared to ordinary software. The knowledge required to write the stuff is pretty obscure, even among the small number of specialists there are.
100% reliability is often absolutely necessary, at least in the libraries, otherwise it is completely useless. The wrong answer in Windoes can kind of clunk along and function anyway. The wrong answer in a dot product is just plain wrong.

Archives like Netlib are international intellectual treasures. The mere existence of the Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (BLAS) that lots of the Netlib codebase is built on, has made much of intensive computational science possible. Note that BLAS and most NetLib code is anything but GPL, which is, as I mention above, actively baleful in its influence.

Open sourced code also has the benefit that it doesn't need a company or even an active developer to keep it around. There are substantial intellectual creations which are lost forever because the developer or company is gone, and nobody has access to the source. This happened to the later versions of Macsyma (the first real computer algebra system) when the company changed hands, though it appears they may be back. The same thing threatened to happen to the
Watcom compilers after Sybase bought Watcom and decided it wasn't profitable to keep developing their excellent and widely used compiler. A consortium of users of their compiler sucessfully petitioned Sybase to open source it, and seems to have kept it going. Another example of a huge, specialized intellectual effort was the AXIOM computer algebra project of IBM. IBM ceased development, and sold it to another company who ceased development and sold bits of it to a competitor. The main guts of this CAS was actually saved by people who use it, and apparently will continue to be developed and released. I never used AXIOM, but it apparently had some unique features unavailable elsewhere.

Note that none of these innovative, technical and intensive projects could have been developed under the open source model. But they are great examples of huge intellectual efforts which have been preserved by an open source model. Personally, I tend to think languages, useful libraries, compilers, interpretors (python, perl, etc), numerics work and other specialized technologies are those that are most healthily open sourced.

Denbeste in one of his essays used an example of releasing source with the funny restrictions of,
"You may read my source with your browser, but you may not make a permanent copy of it on your computer. You may not compile my source. You may not use fragments of my source in any software you write."

That sounds an awful lot like the ATT restrictions on
Lions' Unix source code commentary book; a hugely successful book on writing Unix kernels. I don't
remember the actual restrictions, as I haven't looked at it in a while (and don't own a copy, as I am another kind of nerd), but they were effectively a lot like that; and still quite useful for pedagogical purposes.

Another book which had similar licensing restrictions at one time (which, if my experience as a computational physicist is any indication, were universally ignored, for obvious reasons) is the series of Numerical Recipes books in various languages. These were designed more or less for pedagogy; you were supposed to pay a hefty licensing fee to use the actual algorithms. You can't blame the authors too much; beyond the difficulty of writing the book (which is most excellent in all its versions), they developed an extremely impressive repetoire of specialized numerics code. Such code was traditionally sold as "canned" software libraries when available at all. The auhors of NR could have done that themselves.
On the other hand, they didn't think their premises through. Most of the people who "stole" their code from the book were mere students, or harried researchers who hadn't the time to write their own. Not exactly juicy targets for software copyright litigation. Then there was the issue of "intellectual property." They certainly held no patents on the ideas expressed in the book, nor did they claim to (nor should they). Would the software still have been "theirs" and subject to their copyright if it was copied by hand? If the variables and layout was changed? If it was more or less equivalent, but had different calling conventions? What if it was written in another language, but essentially the same? What if it was machine translated from copyrighted originals? Such niggling is actually the stuff of software copyright law. In the end, they seem to have sidestepped the issue, making their software available to researchers in general, which is how it should have been in the first place.

2002-05-16T21:03:00.000-07:00
From the Mark Steyn halleluia corner again...

"Right," said Ron. "If Pim's successor, Joao Varela, becomes prime minister, (the queen is) planning to refuse to take tea with him because his party are Right-wing racists."
"Good for Her Majesty!" I said. "It's great to see someone who won't have any truck with white bigots who hate immigrants."
"Well, actually, this Varela feller's a black guy from Cape Verde. But for Holland to elect the first black immigrant prime minister in Europe would send a frightening message that virulent racist nationalism is once again on the rise."
"Okay, then we go to one of these reactionary Right-wingers campaigning for casual gay sex. And presumably there's a liberal progressive party that wants to restrict casual sex?"

2002-05-16T20:34:00.000-07:00
A dizzying pirouette of illogic from the NY press.

I don't really follow the logic here, if any: american conservatives lionize
Fortuyn, therefore conservatives want to put arabs in internment camps?
Fortuyn never advocated such things; neither have any americans above the
rank of construction worker, despite the nellie blubberings about Japanese
internment during WW-2 (curiously, nobody talks about the Germans, Italians and
Russians who were similarly interned in those days) of the professional finger-waving
classes.

It seems to me that conservatives like Fortuyn for two reasons:
1) Wanting to preserve the essentially liberal culture of the Netherlands is
essentially a philosophically conservative stance. He wants to keep things
the way they are. That's the definition of a conservative. Locke and Mill
rather than Foucault and Marx; the former thinkers are proved with the test
of time.

2) Fortuyn and american conservatives have a lot in common in detail, beyond
the broad philosophical similarities. Both the Pimmies and amero
conservatives object to socialized medicine, they support cultural
assimilation rather than "multiculturalism," they like free-market
approaches and so on.

There's also the case that lots of "conservatives" are actually more
properly "muscular populist libertarians," in the spirit of the similarly
glabrous drama queen, Jesse Ventura. This is really a fair description of
what Fortuyn seemed to be all about. The fact that the nattering nabobs in
the general media couldn't distinguish Fortuyn from Ernst Rohm until after
he was dead (in fact, even after he is dead) certainly speaks volumes of
their collective and individual capacity for rational thought.

2002-05-14T00:27:00.000-07:00

OK, perhaps I got sucked into some hype. If you scroll down, you'll see that Mr. Instapundit (but wait, isn't he an Israeli stooge or something; yikes!) actually bought a piece of Israeli art. Perhaps it serves me right for linking to that boob at anti-war.com.

2002-05-13T23:53:00.000-07:00
More fodder for conspiracy theorists. Ya know, the Mossad isn't making it any easier for people to discredit the whacko "zionist conspiracy" types. Between that and the zoomcopter and Israeli art student/DEA affairs, they seem to be regularly shooting themselves in the feet. Maybee they're working for the Muslims?

2002-05-13T23:32:00.000-07:00
More fodder for conspiracy theorists. Ya know, the Mossad isn't making it any easier for people to discredit the whacko "zionist conspiracy" types. Between that and the zoomcopter and Israeli art student/DEA affairs, they seem to be regularly shooting themselves in the feet. Maybee they're working for the Muslims?

2002-05-08T01:28:00.000-07:00

fodder for conspiracy theorists?
Kinda scary to be a scientist these days.

2002-05-08T00:57:00.000-07:00
Another stellar example of British logic.

In this, Fortuyn is dismissed as "more than a ... conventional racist" while he refers to Fortuyn's second in command: a black man. It annoyed me so much, I wrote the author.

************

How in the name of the english language can you refer to Fortuyn as "more of
a libertarian than a conventional racist" when you previously said:
"Fortuyn's little-known black deputy..." ???

Just because the guy wasn't constantly blubbering the leftoid volk religious
beliefs of the european ruling class doesn't mean he was a racist or even
particularly right wing. He was pretty obviously a mere populist.

When you newspapermen begin to refer to people like Fortuyn as racists or
"extreme right," or compare someone like Sharon to Adolph Hitler, you fellows
rather begin to lose credibility with anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky,
which is to say, just about everyone. It is no wonder ordinary people aren't
voting for the media mandarin approved candidates.

Even the stuff said by Le Pen which I have read (and yes, this dumb american
reads French) doesn't seem all that radical. He's an anti-globalist rather
than a racist, by his accounts. His anti-semitism and anti-immigrant stances
seem to be overstated. He's even got blacks, arabs and jews in his party
speaking up for him (in fact, I met one in Paris last November; he runs a
swell Algerian restaurant in Versailles). Granted, Le Pen is a buffoon, a boor
and a misogynist; but tell us these things -don't give us some cartoon-like
image that he is openly espousing the mass slaughter of brown people. He
isn't. Not even a little bit.

The danger in all this is not being able to tell when an actual right wing
maniac comes down the pike; you dunderheads so universally bellow the
epithets of "racist" or "fascist" nobody is likely to believe you when a
real one goose-steps along.

2002-05-08T00:14:00.000-07:00

Weylp; there you have it. Was Pim Fortuyn's murderer an evil right wing nazi?
Nope; a left wing "animal rights activist." Fucking monsters.

2002-05-07T01:46:00.000-07:00

More bad science from the left.
Now "secondhand smoke" is alleged to cause learning disabilities, whatever that means.
What's next?

Secondhand smoke causes cute and fuzzy bunnies to grow large unsightly tumors!

Secondhand smoke causes hairy moles to grow on the chins of otherwise attractive women!

Secondhand smoke is radioactive! (don't laugh; someone already came up with that one)

Secondhand smoke causes gun violence!

Secondhand smoke causes men to grow breasts!

Secondhand smoke causes bleeding from the eye sockets!

I do not smoke, nor do I appreciate breathing someone else's crappy cigarette fumes (and americano cigarettes are far worse than pipe, cigar or eurotrash cigarettes). But my distaste for such things is no excuse for making up lies about them, and polishing my lies with the veneer of science. And that's exactly what is happening today.

2002-05-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

Looks like it was another dutchman who shot him.

I wonder what his justification for his crime will be.

2002-05-06T18:12:00.000-07:00
I find this to be rather desperate stretching of the truth. I suppose there is a vague possibility that Cuba is developing bioweapons. But why? To what end? I do not assert that nations act in a purely rational fashion, but I do assert that they themselves will have some sort of logic to justify military expenditures; particularly in a poor nation like Cuba.

Saddam Hussain, no doubt, justifies his weapons expenditures in the name of killing jews. Not a particularly rational reason, but it is a reason none the less.

North Korea sees imperialists and foriegners as a threat. It's whacky, fucked up thinking, but it does justify the expenditure: plus their rockets sell for hard cash.

How would Cuba justify biowarfare? It sounds to me more like the re-reading of the well known fact of Cuba's advanced biological reasearch as some kind of threat. I don't like Cuba any more than the next fellow. Castro is a dictator; no question of it. But america's obsession with unseating the guy is more than a little weird. Cuba is presently not a threat any more than Haiti or the Dominican Republic is. The fact that they have one area of advanced technology not withstanding. It seems that some people are looking to settle old scores while they can. Doubtless they would have been accused of making smart bombs if they had a microchip industry. I personally would rather efforts were expended destroying actual threats, rather than sucking up to certain Florida voters.

2002-05-06T18:04:00.000-07:00
As everyone now knows, the Netherlands anti-immigration candidate has been killed.

It will be interesting to see how the election pans out without him, His party started only a year ago, and he was scheduled to have a big chunk of Parliament this May 15th. Lots of people seem to associate him with the "radical right" candidates like Heder and Le Pen. Unlike Heder or Le Pen, he was an out homosexual: rather more Michel Foucault in his bald-headed right wing posturing than like Benito Mussolini. In any case, if this was an attack by Muslim radicals, it is likely to swing the entire continent even farther to the right.

2002-05-06T17:35:00.000-07:00
I wonder why they printed this? I mean, it is quite obvious to me, knowing many reservists (and presently dating one) that most of them didn't plan on going to war. That's what makes being a reservist such a good deal that people do it. "Golly, I think I'll become a reservist in case we have a war" seems a lot less likely than, "that tuition money and coupla hundred bucks a month to play army once a month sounds like a good deal."

I'm just curious as to why anyone would bother to print such a thing.

2002-05-04T05:42:00.000-07:00
From an online conversation:

>>USA Patriot already has the laws codified to make unions and protesters
>>illegal.
>>
>>If there was something specifically I could "do", I'd do it.
>>
>>
>>People are willing to sign away their liberties now, how can anyone stop
>>that in a democracy?
>
>An Scaring Development!

Overstated, to say the least.
There is nothing on the books to make unions or protesters illegal in this
country, nor will there ever be. Frankly, I wouldn't mind the latter; I
fucking hate hippies, and they regularly screw up the traffic patterns
near my house.

>I hope that such things dont' get around in Europe!

Two words: Pim Fortuyn.
Actually, I can't argue with the guy too much: it must suck being a
bald-headed homo around a bunch of foriegn religious freaks.

Two more words: Le Pen.
Funny, as much a horse's ass as Le Pen is, the people opposing him; people
who are *protesting the outcome of a democratic vote* mind you, make him look
like friggin' Thomas Jefferson.

Two more words: Kirsten Jacobsen.
Chick nazis!

Two more words: Joerg Heider.
Funny how the EU wanted a recount. I mean, the guy won. If you're not
going to use democracy, what are you going to use? Bureaucratic outrage?

2002-05-04T03:31:00.000-07:00
I've been telling people that many arab and black residents of France support Le Pen. People seem shocked to hear this; well, here's
some evidence. As it turns out, quite a few jews think he is OK too, according to this article. I'm betting on a greater than 30% showing on Sunday.

2002-05-04T01:51:00.000-07:00

This is an amusing article. The Guardian has it right; the american newspapers have hardly mentioned the recent nonbinding Senate and House resolutions suggesting that the Palestinians be kicked out of the West Bank. The papers also haven't mentioned the huge pro-israel demonstrations in the country, though relatively tiny anti-globo protestors make the front page. The fact of the matter is, the newspapers are pretty much made up of the same group of people here as over there at the Guardian: smug, wealthy liberal swine. They no more reflect the opinions of the american public than the writers for the Guardian do.
I've said it before: if this country were acting in a democratic fashion right now, there would be a nuclear Sherman's march through the Middle East. Much like, if the population of the Middle East were allowed to act in a democratic fashion, they'd likely declare war on Israel and the U.S...

2002-05-03T21:18:00.000-07:00
I'm in the Mark Steyn Halleluia corner again. This one is really, really damned funny.

2002-04-29T17:59:00.000-07:00
I found this essay in a discussion of the relative merits of LISP in writing Computer Algebra Systems. It is quite a fascinating thing written by an old creator. His essays on LISP are also compelling enough to further encourage me to learn this arcane language.

2002-04-26T20:46:00.000-07:00
Mark Steyn has more to say on Le Pen. He is right, as usual. It is nice to know some people are getting it right about Le Pen; ce n'est pas un fascist.