Pseudo-random Thoughts

Grammar vs. Gain

2006-03-07T00:38:00.000-06:00

That slogan [The Democratic Party motto for 2006] -- "Together, America Can Do Better" -- was revived from the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry. [T]here is an effort afoot to drop the word "together." It tests well in focus groups and audiences, Democratic sources said, but it makes the syntax incorrect.

My kind of party!

For an extended definition of tomorrow

2006-02-26T18:29:00.000-06:00

Ashvin reminds me that I was meant to post over a week ago with information about how my qual went. Even if I didn't post the day after the qual, I really should have once the results were announced. Anyway, I passed! Thanks to everyone for the good-luch messages, prayers, special qual lunch on the fateful day, and everything else.

Quals

2006-02-16T18:10:00.000-06:00

For my two-and-a-half readers who don't already know this, I'm taking my Ph.D. qualifying exams tomorrow. This has been the main ~~reason~~ excuse I've had for not blogging recently. I'll post again tomorrow with information about how it went.

An Iraq story

2006-02-16T17:45:00.000-06:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, I found this MSNBC article on the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's tour of Iraq. I blogged about the 3rd ACR right before they began their tour. Actually, I wrote about its commanding officer, Col. H. R. McMaster, who I always thought was going to be a star.

U.S. military experts conducting an internal review of the three dozen major U.S. brigades, battalions and similar units operating in Iraq in 2005 privately concluded that of all those units, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment performed the best at counterinsurgency.
...
The regiment's campaign began in Colorado in June 2004, when Col. H. R. McMaster took command and began to train the unit to return to Iraq.
...
"Every time you treat an Iraqi disrespectfully, you are working for the enemy," McMaster said he told every soldier in his command.
...
One out of every 10 soldiers received a three-week course in conversational Arabic, so that each small unit would have someone capable of basic exchanges with Iraqis. [McMaster] distributed a lengthy reading list to his officers that included studies of Arab and Iraqi history and most of the classic texts on counterinsurgency.
...
None of the soldiers from the unit have been charged with abuse during the regiment's current tour in Iraq.

The 3rd ACR was also among the first units to implement a clear-and-hold strategy. It seems to have worked; the city of Tall Afar now has 1400 police officers and 2000 Iraqi troops. The frequency of attacks has declined six-fold, and the townspeople often notify the Americans when they see explosives being planted. Perhaps most telling of all, the city's mayor is begging the 3rd ACR to stay; other American troops will arrive to replace them as they return to the US, but he does not expect the replacements will merit his trust and respect to the same extent.

Incidentally, the only thing preventing the regiment's success from being replicated elsewhere in Iraq is an insufficient number of troops. If Gen. Eric Shinseki's advice had been taken before the invasion, many of the problems Iraq is facing might not exist.

This is unbelievable

2006-01-21T20:47:00.000-06:00

CNN is carrying an article on a study on the 'literacy' of (American) college students. There were three types of skills measured: [the ability to analyze] news stories and other prose, understand documents and [the] math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips. The results were dismal, to say the least. They found that more than 75% and 50% of students at two- and four-year colleges lacked the ability to handle complex, real-life tasks. (Even with a very generous definition of 'complex'.)

Large numbers of students "cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school. Most students... showed intermediate skills. That means they can do moderately challenging tasks, such as identifying a location on a map."

I'm sorry, but identifying a location on a map is an 'intermediate skill' for students about to graduate from college? You would expect an eighth-grader to do that! But wait, there's "brighter news. Overall, the average literacy of college students is significantly higher than that of adults across the nation. Study leaders said that was encouraging but not surprising, given that the spectrum of adults includes those with much less education." If the reporters needed study leaders to tell them that, then clearly it's not just college students who have trouble understanding the results of surveys. (Ok, that was a cheap shot. But still, who on earth would consider that good news?)

Ok, done ranting.
Via Slashdot.

If you haven't seen it already...

2005-12-31T19:55:00.000-06:00

... the Times is running The Face and Voice of Civilian Sacrifice in Iraq, a collection of photos of civilians who survived attacks, or had their families and lives shattered.

Notes on News, continued

2005-12-30T19:37:00.000-06:00

I promised in my last-but-one post to explain why I like the New York Times so. (And while we're on the subject of lasts-but-one, did you know that 'antepenultimate' was a word? It means what you'd expect: before the next-to-last in a sequence. If referring to a specific item of the sequence, it means the one third from the end. I only learned this two days ago, but it got me curious. Who coined this word, and why? Ok, end of digression.)

I suppose that the reason I love the Times is that one can. Let me explain that: I grew up with The Hindu and I still enjoy reading it, but one couldn't love the Hindu; it's too impersonal. There's no magic to it; it reports the news, and that's it. While tabloids are at one extreme, the Hindu is at the other. I don't mean that I'm interested in the love lives of celebrities, far from it! But reading the Hindu, one feels that every trace of character has been excised. Young World and the Sunday magazine section were exceptions, but by and large the paper just sticks to the facts. In contrast, the Times has a distinct personality, a delightful one. There are two things I find particularly endearing.

First, the editorial observers and similar contributors. Verlyn Klinkenborg, in particular, is the perfect observer; his pieces have just the right touch of wonder as he describes the little things he notices, the things that most of us simply don't see. Recent articles that stand out in my mind have described riding the train into Grand Central station, driving across western America, and the pace of life on his farm. Today, at the end of the year, the Times had six poets write for the feature Closing Time.Two days ago, Nora Ephron wrote about her quest for long-lost Cabbage Strudel. A newspaper which can publish a 2-page article on cabbage strudel can't possibly take itself too seriously.

Then there are the short-term guest columnists. This month, Alexander McCall Smith is writing The Adventures of an Itinerant Scotsman, and in November, graphic artist Marjane Satrapi wrote (and drew) An Iranian in Paris. These posts are witty, whimsical, and full of joy in life. Last week, the transit strike in New York City left millions of New Yorkers with inadequate transportation. Alongside detailed coverage of the strike, reports on negotiations, and advice for commuters, the Times featured Scenes from a Strike-Bound City, in which local writers described how the strike affected their lives in a series of little vignettes on cycling to a poker game across town, dealing with the fact that the pizza didn't show up because there was a huge backlog of deliveries, and much else.

Second, the multi-page, 5000+ word stories that draw you in and keep you at the screen clicking 'next' until you're done. They could be about anything at all: news and analysis of current events, or from trends in the New York restaurant scene to economic trends in the past quarter, from the Science and Technology sections, or the Arts, or 'Home & Garden'. Invariably well-written and instantly engaging, they're also a great way to learn about a subject you knew nothing about. I've linked to a couple in the past, on the Orange revolution in Ukraine and Social security. Also, there are series that cover different aspects of a subject; the most recent have been about the struggle to create a modern legal system in China, and gold mining.

And that's why, every morning, the first thing I do is roll out of bed, turn on the computer, open Opera, and look at the New York Times homepage.

It snowed today...

2005-12-30T18:22:00.000-06:00

for about an hour. Big flakes that whirled madly in the wind, then settled softly and quickly carpeted the lawn, the streets, and the parking lot next door. Completely unlike our usual light flurries, or the little snowflakes that pelt down for hours. I hurried home from the library, to get my camera before sunset. I was just a little too late, and so I sat by the window as night fell, watching the wild dance of the snow.

Notes on News

2005-12-28T18:42:00.000-06:00

I'm a news junkie. I read at least two (online) newspapers every day: the New York Times and the Washington Post. I also sometimes browse through the online versions of the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune, to say nothing of the host of blogs and other news sites I religiously visit every day. A day seems incomplete without a quick morning fix and some time in the evening to relax and look up anything I missed.

Lakshmi tells me I even write like a newspaper sometimes. (She's right; look at the last two sentences of your previous post: "But their importance entitles them to a fair debate, and they should each receive a vote on their merits. Bundling them into one omnibus bill serves no one's interest." I rest my case. -ed.)

If you're still reading, I warn you that this post doesn't really have a point; I'm just going to ramble a little.

I was thinking this evening about the two newspapers I read most often, and the differences between them. The first thing I look at is the op-ed section, and the Post is miles ahead of the Times here. The editorials of both are comparable, but the columnists aren't in the same league. The Times line-up:

- Nicholas Kristof, probably the most sincere writer I read regularly. His concern for the genocide in Darfur (and other forms of injustice) is laudable, but I think he writes about it too often. I believe that the Darfur story is underreported in the U.S. media as a whole, but one writer dwelling on it (practically to the exclusion of much else) doesn't do much good; I think it would be safe to assume that after his twentieth story, everyone who reads his columns was aware of the crisis. It's certainly not his fault that the story hasn't caught on and I admire the man for doing everything he can to increase public awareness of the issue, but his Darfur focus detracts from the strength of the op-ed page as a whole.

Actually, that may be one of the chief problems with the Times: It takes a particularly strong and well-balanced opinion section to accommodate a columnist on a crusade, and the Times seems to have too many of those.

- Thomas Friedman, who can mix a metaphor with the best of them. His columns come in four categories: How/why China and India are overtaking America, how conserving energy will solve all the country's problems (reduce the deficit, make people more responsible, reduce global warming, decrease the amount of money flowing to unfriendly regimes such as Iran and Venezuela), what to do in Iraq, and combinations of the first three (such as environmental issues in China and India). While much of what he says makes sense, the repetition of the same basic ideas quickly gets monotonous. And sentences like "The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been — but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned" just make me shudder. Quoting Matt Taibbi: "It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius."

- Maureen Dowd, who isn't as shrill as Ann Coulter, but sometimes comes close. Lately, she's become obsessed with 'Dick' (aka 'Vice'). While Dowd does sometimes make me smile, I can't remember the last time she really made me think.

- Paul Krugman, who was something of a disappointment. With his reputation, I was expecting an outstanding column, but he's merely good (except when he strays from economics, when he's only average). His strong dislike for Bush works against him; one sometimes feels that he's not being completely impartial. Daniel Okrent, the then Times Ombudsman wrote: "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults."

While on the subject of Daniel Okrent, his columns as ombudsman were superb; his replacement at the Times, Byron Calame, doesn't write as frequently and isn't nearly as good. The Post's Deborah Howell isn't great, either, so we'll call that a tie.

- Bob Herbert, who does a good job and David Brooks, the token conservative on the page, who is possibly the best the Times has. There's also John Tierney, and Frank Rich, who writes a longer piece once a week on 'the intersection between culture and the news'.

And those are all the columnists. Particularly when one or two of them are on vacation or book leave (which happens fairly often), the page is remarkably bare. The Post, on the other hand, seems to have a rich and diverse opinions section. Conservative writers are better represented, and even though I often don't agree with them, they're almost always worth reading. They make cogent arguments, are intellectually honest, and unafraid to attack the administration when they think it's wrong.

Of the Post columnists, Anne Applebaum, Richard Cohen, Charles Krauthammer, William Raspberry (who is, sadly, retiring) and George Will are uniformly excellent. Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne are also good. Then there are several contributors who write about once a week: Michael Kinsley, who used to be editor of the editorial/opinions page at the LA Times is my favourite. Colbert King, Robert Samuelson, David Ignatius, David Broder, Harold Meyerson, Sebastian Mallaby and Jim Hoagland all do a fair job. It rarely happens that none of the Post columns gives me something to think about. Further, the Post gets a fair number of political figures to contribute to their opinions page. Today, for example, there's an article by Senators Barack Obama and Sam Brownback. I've read at least three columns by Kofi Annan, and several by heads of state and ministers from other countries.

Another difference between the newspapers is their approach to the Internet. The Times seems to want nothing to do with it. I'm currently paying $50 a year for TimesSelect, which essentially gives me the right to read their columnists. I also have access to the archives, which I don't really want, though the one time I did want an archived article, the website refused to show it to me (but it decremented the total number of archived articles I could access). Besides making me pay to read news (a sure way to drive away online readers), the Times site makes me deal with annoying ads: both banners, and occasional full-screen videos.

The Post, by contrast, has welcomed their internet readers, setting up washingtonpost.com as a separate company. They have added content online, with frequent video feeds of breaking news, and 'The Debate' with Emily Messner (a forum in which Messner posts about a controversial topic, and users discuss it in the comments thread). The Post also experimented with a blog, cross-posting Andrew Sullivan's posts for a week, and finally settling down with Joel Achenbach's Achenblog. Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing - a round-up of articles, columns, and Froomkin's thoughts about White House activities - is also very good. Best of all are the 'Live Online' discussions, where the author of a Post article or opinion piece will answer questions from washingtonpost.com readers for an hour. Recent victims have been Judge Richard Posner and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

And yet, I like the Times better than the Post. An explanation will have to wait until later, because I've already spent too much time writing this evening.

How not to legislate

2005-12-20T13:45:00.000-06:00

The U.S. Congress never ceases to amaze me. Lately, I've been puzzled by some of the more bizarre procedures and tactics that members of Congress use to pass legislation. From a New York Times article on Dec 14th:

With a budget-cutting measure stymied by stiff resistance to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, Congressional Republicans began exploring Wednesday a new tactic to win approval of both $45 billion in cuts and the drilling plan.

Lawmakers and senior aides said they were seriously considering tacking the drilling proposal onto a Pentagon spending bill that is among those that must pass before Congress heads home in the next few days... "It's going to be on one bill or the other before I go home," said Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska, a leading proponent of opening the Arctic plain to oil production.

Where is the connection between drilling in Alaska and the war in Iraq? The sole reason to combine them (admitted by legislators) is to allow an unpopular proposal to pass.

Sure enough, when the House approved the defense spending bill, the provision to allow drilling in the ANWR was tacked on. Democrats in the Senate then vowed to fight it, using a filibuster (another weird and wonderful practice essentially unique to America) if necessary. A Reuters story in the Times this afternoon quotes Stevens, who intends to stand firm:

"Extreme environmentalists think it (ANWR) is their playground, that they should set the policy for Alaska."

Stevens warned if ANWR is dropped from the defense bill, he would seek to delete other items attached to it such as funding for Hurricane Katrina reconstruction, the bird flu pandemic and a program that helps poor families pay heating bills.

Much as I dislike Stevens, I think he's on to something here (though he has it backwards). In a reasonable world, ANWR would not be part of the defense bill, but nor would Katrina-related funding, or anyone else's pet project. Don't get me wrong; I think that these are all worthy issues: the Government should undoubtedly provide more money to New Orleans and other coastal areas, prepare for a bird flu pandemic, and help poor people who cannot afford heating. But their importance entitles them to a fair debate, and they should each receive a vote on their merits. Bundling them into one omnibus bill serves no one's interest.

Sullivan on Torture

2005-12-09T00:47:00.000-06:00

It would be extremely remiss of me not to link to Andrew Sullivan's excellent essay The Abolition of Torture. It is widely agreed that torture is morally repugnant, besides usually being counter-productive (as it generates little actionable intelligence, and stokes resentment against the torturers). Charles Krauthammer, though, recently defended the practice, arguing that it should be legal to use torture in certain cases, such as the 'ticking-bomb scenario'. In fact, he goes further, arguing that one would be morally compelled to use torture in this situation.

Sullivan's essay was written largely in response to Krauthammer, and he makes the following outstanding point (among many others). Even assuming that all of Krauthammer's conditions apply (there is a terrorist who has planted a nuclear bomb in a major city, he has been captured after planting the bomb but before it goes off, he will divulge the location of the bomb under torture, and that there is no other way to obtain this information):

It is possible to concede that, in [such] an extremely rare circumstance, torture may be used without conceding that it should be legalized. One imperfect but instructive analogy is civil disobedience. In that case, laws are indeed broken, but that does not establish that the laws should be broken. In fact, civil disobedience implies precisely that laws should not be broken, and protesters who engage in it present themselves promptly for imprisonment and legal sanction on exactly those grounds. They do so for demonstrative reasons. They are not saying that laws don't matter. They are saying that laws do matter, that they should be enforced, but that their conscience in this instance demands that they disobey them.

In extremis, a rough parallel can be drawn for a president faced with the kind of horrendous decision on which Krauthammer rests his entire case. What should a president do? The answer is simple: He may have to break the law. In the Krauthammer scenario, a president might well decide that, if the survival of the nation is at stake, he must make an exception. At the same time, he must subject himself--and so must those assigned to conduct the torture--to the consequences of an illegal act. Those guilty of torturing another human being must be punished--or pardoned ex-post-facto. If the torture is revealed to be useless, if the tortured man is shown to have been innocent or ignorant of the information he was tortured to reveal, then those responsible must face the full brunt of the law for, in Krauthammer's words, such a "terrible and monstrous thing."

Go and read the entire essay for the best analysis of this issue that I've seen. It concludes:

By endorsing torture--on anyone, anywhere, for any reason--we help obliterate the very values we are trying to promote. You can see this contradiction in Krauthammer's own words: We are "morally compelled" to commit "a terrible and monstrous thing." We are obliged to destroy the village in order to save it. We have to extinguish the most basic principle that defines America in order to save America.

No, we don't. In order to retain fundamental American values, we have to banish from the United States the totalitarian impulse that is integral to every act of torture. We have to ensure that the virus of tyranny is never given an opening to infect the Constitution and replicate into something that corrupts as deeply as it wounds. We should mark the words of Ian Fishback, one of the heroes of this war: "Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is 'America.'" If we legalize torture, even under constrained conditions, we will have given up a large part of the idea that is America. We will have lost the war before we have given ourselves the chance to win it.

Two to read

2005-12-07T23:51:00.000-06:00

Say what you will about conservative intellectuals, at least many of them can write. And many of them are willing to take on Congress or the administration, especially when they abandon conservative principles. Andrew Sullivan, with his criticism of the torture policy is a case in point. Today's column, though, is by George Will in the Washington Post, attacking legislation aimed at subsidizing the purchase of digital televisions. To be fair, though, Will doesn't deserve too much credit; the targets are just too inviting and easy to hit.

Via Crooked Timber, I found this interview in the New Yorker with the author of an article on the evolution trial in Dover, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the article itself is not available online. This is, actually, my biggest gripe with the New Yorker: you can't access their content online. Of course, it is their content, and they have every right to keep the best stuff for their magazine instead of making it freely available on the Internet. Still, I live in an entitlement culture; the idea of paying to read a newspaper or magazine just seems wrong. I suppose I'll just have to subscribe, though, because I really want access to everything in the magazine; I've never read anything from the New Yorker that was less than good.

The True Story

2005-11-23T22:31:00.000-06:00

If you have access to it, read The Real Thanksgiving by David Brooks. It came at a good time for me; I needed the laugh. Among the best bits:

[O]nward they ventured, across the vastness of the ocean until finally the infinite wonder of the New World came into view, and the passengers of the Mayflower realized here they could raise their children and their children's children to be snooty and the subjects of John Cheever stories.

They were greeted at the shore by a tribe of native peoples, led by chief Massasoit and his lobbyist Abramoff. The Pilgrim leader William Bradford spoke first: "Behold! We have come to drive you from your land..."

And it came to pass that Massasoit was relieved by this declaration, for at least the strangers had not come promising to spread democracy. In exchange, all he asked was that he and his people be allowed to open casinos...

Others reacted to these difficult beginnings with murmurings of mutiny and discontent. It was said that Miles Standish had brought the flock to the New World on the basis of faulty intelligence, while others claimed the pilgrimage had been ruined by the religious right.

And my favourite sentence of all:

In the midst of these hardships, many did find spiritual succor by returning their attention to the Holy Book (even though parts of it were now behind a firewall as part of ScriptureSelect).

Happy Thanksgiving!

Doing the Math

2005-11-16T16:06:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's Washington Post carried an article on a study which showed that working out could improve your life expectancy. Essentially, the study claims that if you walk for half an hour a day, your life span will go up by nearly 1.5 years. More strenuous exercise produces even more benefits (up to almost 4 years).

Of course, I immediately had to figure out whether it was worth it. Sure, you live a little longer, but if you have to spend time exercising every day, is there a net gain? That is, does the total amount of time spent exercising exceed the increase in life expectancy? A quick calculation showed that there is a substantial benefit; depending on the amount of exercise you do, the total time invested is only between 1 and 6 months. (Admit it, you were disappointed. You were hoping for an excuse not to exercise - ed.)

Anyway, I'm bringing this up because I thought at the time that the article could have been strengthened by including this information. It would have been intellectually honest to point out that the 'net' increase in life span was a little less than claimed (especially when they claimed precision by using figures like 1.7 years), it would have saved geeks like me from performing the necessary computation, and most important, it would have helped readers relate to this kind of simple cost-benefit analysis. I put the omission down to the general math-phobia in the media, imagining some assistant-deputy-sub-editor removing it on the grounds that the math would drive readers away from the article.

I was surprised and delighted, then, to find an editorial - no less - in today's Post with all the omitted math - and then some. It adjusts the time spent exercising depending on how it affects the rest of your day and makes allowances for sleep (something I forgot to do!). Best of all, it includes the compound interest idea! That is, it assumes that time now is worth more than later, and allowing for the possibility of accidents, etc., it discounts the future at a (compounded) rate of 3% per year.

Unfortunately, even after making all the allowances one can, there's still an overall benefit. I guess that means I no longer have a good reason not to exercise.

Curse you, Blogger!

2005-11-09T16:37:00.000-06:00

I haven't posted here for ages, but I had a little free time today, and since the Pennsylvania news cheered me up a little, I thought I'd write about it. After I composed the post and clicked publish, the text disappeared! Frustrated, I tried again; at least the 'Recover post' feature seems to work. Blogger's consistent, I have to admit... the bug was 100% reproducible.

Eventually, I had to switch to Firefox to actually get the post published. Ok, I have a workaround now, but I don't want to have to use Firefox! Particularly when I'm blogging and have 15-20 pages open, Opera works much better. Switching around between browsers is just ugly. What makes it more frustrating is that Opera always used to work just fine.

While I'm ranting, why on earth has Blogger overloaded Shift-Ctrl-arrow? I'll grant that may not be the world's most popular shortcut, but it's the standard way to select a word in a text box. Perhaps this is also Opera-specific, but it loads the preview (which should be reached via Shift-Ctrl-p). It's disconcerting, to say the least, when your text box disappears in a heartbeat.

(Aren't you overreacting a little? You've posted 4 times in the last 3 months - ed. Look, it's the principle of the thing. Now that changes everything... -ed. Ok, fine; I'm done whining.)

To end on a positive note, Dan Drezner was offered a tenured position at Tufts. Regular readers of this blog will remember that he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago last month. (Two comments: First, what regular readers? Second, you didn't post about it! - ed. Well, I meant to; that should count for something, right? And I've been busy lately...)

Bravo Pennsylvania

2005-11-09T16:32:00.000-06:00

Right on the heels of the Kansas Board of Education effectively approving the teaching of intelligent design in biology classes (and redefining science while they were about it), all the members of the current Pennsylvania school board who were up for re-election were thrown out of office by voters. The board had required that science students hear about so-called gaps in the theory of evolution, and that alternative theories such as intelligent design be presented. It is likely that the new board will reverse this policy.

Life has a way of pleasantly surprising you once in a while.

Senate passes anti-torture amendment

2005-10-05T22:28:00.000-05:00

The Senate voted tonight on John McCain's amendment to define and restrict interrogation techniques used on enemy combatants and passed it 90-9.

Thank God for McCain, and the other Republican sponsors of the bill, including Lindsey Graham, Chuck Hagel, and (I think) Susan Collins and Gordon Smith. Also for Ian Fishback and other members of the armed forces who spoke out against the torture at great personal cost. If you haven't read Capt. Fishback's letter to Senator McCain, head over to the Washington Post and read it now. From the final paragraph:

[T]he most important question that this generation will answer [is]: Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession. I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is "America."

President Bush has threatened to veto the military spending bill if the anti-torture amendement is attached to it, so it may not become law. In the face of opposition from the administration, it's incredibly gratifying to see such bi-partisan support for this amendment. It's restored the hope that we can move beyond the politics, that we can hold accountable those responsible for these crimes, and that Americans will never again torture prisoners.

The Expander Blog

2005-09-14T21:53:00.000-05:00

I once wished that I could get (academic) credit for blogging. It turns out I now can! I mentioned in an earlier post that I was taking a course on Expander Graphs. There is no homework, no final exam, or anything else of that nature. Grades are determined by participation in class, posts on the course blog, and improvements made to the Wikipedia stub on expanders.

Dilbert Goodness

2005-09-14T21:43:00.000-05:00

This had me laughing out loud for five minutes. Ok, so it's not that funny, but the last panel was so completely unexpected that I cracked up.

This one is hilarious as well.

Katrina and Relief

2005-09-06T13:29:00.000-05:00

The big news of the last week is obviously hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. I haven't written about it so far because pretty much everything I wanted to say is being said well somewhere else. Along with the rest of the world, I'm shocked at the pitiful response from the authorities and in awe at the generosity of ordinary people - people who have rescued survivors at risk to themselves, welcomed evacuees into their cities and homes, and raised over $400 million to assist those affected by the flood.

I've been reading all week about the criminal incompetence of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), but today was the last straw. Constructive Interference has collected some of the worst incidents from last week. Read them and weep!

(Link via Andrew Sullivan.)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised...

2005-08-30T12:54:00.000-05:00

... at writers of op-ed articles being less than 100% accurate. But something like this always makes me see red. Georgia has a new voting law which requires voters to show valid photo identification at the polls. Critics of the law contend that it discriminates against minorities, who are much less likely to have an acceptable form of ID. Defenders say that it is not discriminatory, but simply intended to reduce fraud. I have no strong opinion either way; I think requiring photo ID is desirable, but efforts should be made to ensure that every citizen can easily obtain a valid form of ID (which apparently is not the case in Georgia now, though the new law will go some way towards addressing this problem).

So what am I worked up about? These sentences in the linked article:

Of Georgia's voting-age population, 2,260,437 more people hold such identification than are registered to vote. Thus the number of voting-age citizens who lack photo identification cannot, as a matter of math, be large.

The phrase "as a matter of math" obviously implies that mathematics shows that the truth of their statement cannot be denied. Unfortunately, mathematics shows no such thing: If the only thing we know is that a set X is larger than another set Y, there is nothing obvious that can be said about the number of elements in Y that are not in X.

Granted that the writers are non-mathematicians, and may know nothing at all about set theory. We could be charitable and assume that they thought it was simply common sense, and would be supported by mathematics. But that doesn't support their assertion. Consider this statement, which is entirely equivalent (with the numbers reduced, but remaining roughly in proportion according to the U.S. Census Bureau):
"Of the 150 students in a high school, 50 more played basketball than baseball. Thus the number of students who play baseball but not basketball cannot be large."
Perhaps we have 30 who play only baseball, 80 who play only basketball, 30 who do both, and 10 who do neither. That sounds plausible, but one-fifth of the students play baseball but not basketball. Certainly any law which disqualifies a fifth of the voting population would be unacceptable. So common sense doesn't really help them.

Ok, so I'm overreacting; this isn't even a particularly egregious example of using 'mathematics' to mislead. But I wish there were a penalty for regular offenders... maybe insist that they take high-school math again?

On Buying Books

2005-08-26T21:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was the first day of the annual Urbana Free Library book sale. Surplus books are practically given away - one dollar will buy you a hardcover in good condition, or 3 mass-market paperbacks. I bought close to 25 books, including a Graham Greene collection, Richard Adams's Watership Down and Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers mysteries.

There are good reasons I shouldn't have gone to the sale: I don't have sufficient shelf space to store the books I already own, and the more books I own, the less time I spend doing anything besides reading. What's worse, I haven't even read all the books I bought in the last year! Given the abundance of excellent libraries around here, there's no reason for me to actually buy books. And yet... the annual sale of the Champaign Public Library will be held early next month, and I'll be there when it opens.

I'm not normally an acquisitive person, but I make an exception for books. There's ... something about a full shelf, running your finger along the tops of the books and pulling one out, deciding that this is the universe in which you will wander for the next few hours. There's something intensely pleasurable just in opening a book, whether you're trying something completely new or renewing your acquaintance with an old favourite, in the smell of the book, the way the paper feels when you turn a page, the weight of the book in your hands.

When I was young, how much I enjoyed visiting a family often had less to do with the people in it than it did with the books they possessed. (My sister claims this is still partly true!). I suspect this is partly why I buy so many books, especially those I've read and enjoyed in the past, but doubt I'll ever read again. I buy them for kids like me who could never find all the books they wanted, for whom finding a new book to love is a joy like no other.

BITS2MSPhD

2005-08-24T00:10:00.000-05:00

Here's another of my excuses for not blogging: I've been spending a lot of time working on BITS2MSPhD. Essentially, it's a program (run by BITS, Pilani alumni) to help BITSians applying to grad schools. Besides the BITS2MSPhD website which contains application-related information, there's a Yahoo! group where alumni in grad school answer questions and help in any other way they can.

Since the only way to sustain the group is to build a large community, join the Yahoo! group if you aren't already a member. Also, the website needs content! We've got quite a lot of information up there already, but we can do with much more. You could write about your university or department (Who's looking for new students? Who's got funding?), your research area, or anything else that you think might be useful. The site is set up as a wiki, but editing permissions are limited at the moment (we'll soon be shifting the website, probably to a BITSAA server), so please email me any new content, and I'll upload it.

Comments/Suggestions about the group and website are welcome from everyone, whether you're a BITSian or not.

And So It Ends

2005-08-23T19:20:00.000-05:00

A wonderful holiday, that is. I was away for nearly two months, during which I visited 4 countries, attended 3 weddings and the baptism of a cousin's baby, and generally had a fantastic time with friends and family. As I mentioned earlier, my access to the internet was limited for a while, so that's my lame excuse for not blogging. Of course, that doesn't apply to the last month or so, but who's keeping track?

The new semester begins tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to it. I'm done with all my breadth requirements (though that required counting Complexity Theory as a systems course. I have no clue why the department does that, but I'm not complaining!), so this semester's pure fun: Combinatorics, Randomized Algorithms, Computational Geometry, Expander Graphs, and an independent study with Sariel. Yes, I know I can't do them all, but I want to! Most of them will help with preparation for quals, so that's another reason to take them. Choices, choices...

I'm also TAing the undergrad section of CS 473 (Algorithms) this semester. It's the course I wanted, but since it's also one of the courses most hated by students, it'll be... interesting. At the least, it should be good for a funny story or two.

Books that Shaped Me

2005-06-24T20:34:00.000-05:00

Re-reading this post, it's surprisingly personal. Instead of just answering a few questions, I've gone on about the books that changed the way I read while growing up, and by extension, changed me. I suspect that half my readers will be bored to tears, but I enjoyed writing it. Thanks, Indu.

Indu's tagged me for this book meme that's been everywhere around the blogosphere. This is the first meme I've seen a large number of BITSians involved in, and the first time I'm participating as well. Here goes...

Total number of books I own:
This is surprisingly hard to answer. There are about 300 books I have immediate access to at home. Then there are perhaps 150 in boxes some friends gave us recently when they went to Muscat, but we left India before I even looked carefully through this set. The books I did find were mostly very good - while scanning through one of the boxes, I discovered several Steinbecks I hadn't read. My grandmother's house contains another 80 or 90 books she left us when she died, and I have about 40 in America. All told, I guess it comes to somewhere between 550 and 600.

Last books I bought:
The Pickwick Papers
So Many Books, by Gabriel Zaid. This is a fabulous collection of essays on books and reading. Interestingly, Zaid owns over 10,000 books.

Last books I read:
Original Sin, P.D. James. This is the first of her books I've read, and I enjoyed it much more than I expected. I normally dislike murder mysteries where the reader doesn't have a fair chance of solving the crime, but Original Sin is worth reading as a novel, not just a mystery. Lady James creates a wonderful atmosphere, and she capture the Thames - in many different moods - superbly.
First Meetings in the Enderverse, Orson Scott Card. A terrible disappointment. This is the only one of the many Card books I've read that I positively dislike. (The Shadow series is not good, but it has some redeeming qualities.) First Meetings is a collection of short novellas, each of which describes the coming together of some of the key players in the Ender's Game Universe (I refuse to use the term Enderverse!). A couple of the stories just don't work, and the retelling of Ender's time at Battle School is, frankly, awful. A large part of the reason for my distaste is that it contradicts Ender's Game in so many ways that the result is terribly sloppy. Card used minor contradictions well in Ender's Shadow as an illustration of how perspective shapes narrative; Bean's perspectives are different from Ender's. I doubt that's what he was trying with this book; it looks much more like lazy writing and editing.
UPDATE: Apparently, the novella I disliked so much was the original version of Ender's game that Card wrote; he later expanded it into the widely-read novel. Much of my criticism is then unjustified, but I still think the novel is far better. In my defense, the book never makes this clear; I had the impression that Card cut down the novel so he could include it in this collection to add cohesiveness.

Currently Reading:
Nothing! (Stifles a sob, and uses the hem of the sack-cloth robe to wipe ash out of his eye.) I'm completely book-deprived in Brunei now, but I'll be back in India early next week. I can't wait to do some serious reading!

Books that have had an impact on me:
I have no idea where to begin answering this. I think I'll pick some of the more unusual ones; most of these have affected my reading, rather than being life-changing. So, in chronological order:

The first has to be the Bible, and it would be even if I were going in order of importance. It didn't just affect my reading, though it did that too. When I was little, my family would read out stories to me from various children's adaptations of the Bible, but at family prayers, they would often read aloud from the King James version. I've heard it described as the only translation of any work that's a stylistic improvement on the original, and I can believe it. Even when I couldn't understand all the words, I was mesmerised by their rhythm and flow. I think that was the first time I realized that writing could do more than tell a story; good writing could sound good. To this day, the King James (or Authorised) version is my favourite, and the one I find easiest to memorise - the words just sink into your consciousness.

From around the same time, I'll list Enid Blyton's Noddy series. I was 3, and my sister Nisha - 5 years older than I - would read to me when my parents weren't around. (My parents being doctors, that happened fairly often.) I loved the adventures of Noddy, Big Ears, Tessie Bear, and the rest of the gang, and I kept pestering Nisha to read to me even when it wasn't convenient - when she was busy, or when her friends were around. Partly out of exasperation, but mostly because she enjoyed it, she taught me how to read so I could entertain myself. The first words I remember reading are "See Spot Run", and Nisha kept me at it until I could read Mr. Plod and Little Noddy by myself. I have both Noddy and Nisha to thank for a lifetime of pleasure.

Fast forward a few years, till I reach the second grade. I spent that year in Coimbatore with my grandmother, when my parents were in England. I was 6 and she was 71, so we didn't really have too much reading material in common; most of her children's books had been given away years ago. While rooting around in a cupboard, I found an illustrated edition of Le Morte d'Arthur, and it captured my imagination. Of course, I didn't understand any of it, but when I dug deeper, I found a modern retelling. I've forgotten the title and author, but the stories - The Sword in The Stone, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Balin and the Stroke Dolorous, The Quest for The Holy Grail - enthralled me. I spent longer with the Arthurian cycle than with my schoolbooks; that was the beginning of my fascination with legend and myth. It probably paved the way for all the Fantasy and Science Fiction I read, as well.

In the fourth grade, I was bored and cranky when recovering from a bad bout of fever. The head of my mother's department at the time, Dr. Valerie Major from Wales, lent her The Hobbit to keep me occupied. I loved it so much that she sent me her precious copy of The Lord of the Rings a couple of days later. That started a life-long love affair with Tolkien, and fantasy in general; I've read the Rings trilogy 21 times so far, and the rest of the middle-earth canon fairly often.

Readers Digest is a magazine, not a book, but I'm going to include it anyway. We've subscribed to the magazine for as long as I can remember, and the arrival of each new issue was one of the events of the month. The whole family would fight over who got to read it first; I usually won. (Being the youngest has advantages!) The quality of the magazine was a lot higher then, and I would read and re-read every issue several times. For many years, whenever I had nothing to do, I would while away a few hours with an old Readers Digest out of the collection. In those days, the contents were printed on the front cover, and I can still close my eyes and picture some of my favourite issues. Readers Digest made me a much more discriminating reader - I consciously thought about why I liked Penny Porter's regular articles about her ranch, and why I often disliked the 'Drama in Real Life' feature, why an article about shipping in the South China Sea might unexpectedly stay in my memory, and the story of a murder investigation would not. 'Test Your Own Word Power' probably improved my vocabulary, so that's another way Readers Digests had an impact.

Sophie's World is the only book on this list I don't love. That's putting it mildly; someone gave it to me in the eighth grade, and I hated it. It's a history of philosophy shoved badly into a novel, it just doesn't fit. Perhaps I was just too young, but the two parts seemed very badly interwoven; the philosophy was fairly good, but I detested the plot. Still, I enjoyed my first experience of philosophy, and came to read more. I also realized that a good plot wasn't as central to my enjoyment of a book as I had thought, which led to a significant increase in the amount of non-fiction I read.

To Kill a Mockingbird was a book my father often talked about, and we owned not one, but two copies. Strangely, then, I didn't read it until the ninth or tenth grade; as soon as I did, it became one of my favourites. Atticus Finch, Jem, and Scout are each among my most-loved fictional characters, and Atticus remains one of my role models. To Kill a Mockingbird is also on my list of books to read to children. (Yes, I maintain such a list. No, I've never written it down; when I find a book that would be appropriate, I make a mental note. No, I don't have children, nor will I in the near future, but I have lots of young cousins to read to.)

I discovered The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant in BITS; BSL had copies of the first trilogy and part of the second. Not since Middle-earth has a world so rich been created; Stephen Donaldson portrays the land vividly and in exquisite detail. The themes are incredibly powerful - unbelief and leprosy and powerlessness, sacrifice, self-righteousness, guilt and despair, sin and redemption. Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever is a compelling, complex hero, far removed from the one-dimensional characters found too often in fantasy.
I've long been an advocate of simplicity in writing, of never using a difficult word where an easy one would do. Donaldson, on the other hand, never hesitates to use an unusual word if it conveys his meaning best. I like to think I have a good vocabulary, but I used a dictionary as often in the two days it took me to read Lord Foul's Bane as I had in the preceding five years. Not once did I disagree with Donaldson's choice of words. His prose is both powerful and beautiful; this is high fantasy at its absolute best.

Important! I'd love to hear other people answer these questions; if you have a blog and haven't participated yet, consider yourself tagged. Leave a comment letting me know where to find your post. If you don't have a blog, answer the questions in a comment to this post. Feel free to write as much or as little as you choose.

On My Religion and Politics

2005-06-18T22:55:00.000-05:00

John Danforth, a former (Republican) senator and an Episcopal minister, has an excellent op-ed in today's Times.

It is important for those of us who are sometimes called moderates to make the case that we, too, have strongly held Christian convictions, that we speak from the depths of our beliefs, and that our approach to politics is at least as faithful as that of those who are more conservative.
...
People of faith have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to bring their values to bear in politics. Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers. But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.
...
[M]oderate Christians see ourselves, literally, as moderators. Far from claiming to possess God's truth, we claim only to be imperfect seekers of the truth. We reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. We believe it is God's work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today's politics.

For us, religion should be inclusive, and it should seek to bridge the differences that separate people. We do not exclude from worship those whose opinions differ from ours. Following a Lord who sat at the table with tax collectors and sinners, we welcome to the Lord's table all who would come. Following a Lord who cited love of God and love of neighbor as encompassing all the commandments, we reject a political agenda that displaces that love.

Random Grammar Rant

2005-06-15T22:50:00.000-05:00

I nearly put this in the middle of Hiatt's column in the previous post, but it was so irrelevant to his point that it deserved a post of its own. What is it with Americans and the use of the word 'different'? Things differ from one another, not than one another. X is different from Y, not than Y. When this sounds awkward (though it is right, nevertheless), one can modify the sentence to simply say "X and Y are different".

I see this mistake everywhere in America - in general conversation, on the evening news (not that that means much), and - worst of all - in the print media. It grates on the ear or eye. Sure, American spelling and grammar is different from that of most of the rest of the world, and that's fine; I can deal with it. But I'm told this isn't correct grammar even in America! Sure, ordinary people make occasional mistakes, and that's cool too; I know I'm not perfect. But I've never seen a mistake so widespread; one expects better of professional writers, at least.

Ok, done ranting. Question: What's the difference between zeugma and syllepsis? Those of you who know why I'm asking probably read Madeira, M'dear. I'm a little confused - some of it seems more like syllepsis than zeugma to me, though Martin seems to disagree.

Welcome to the Second Season of Pseudo-Random Thoughts

2005-06-15T22:45:00.000-05:00

It's been a month since my last post, which is the longest I've gone without blogging since I began. Thanks to all the commenters; if it weren't for you, I might have waited even longer before resuming. My only excuse is that the net connection here is terrible, and blogging's no fun without decent internet access.

After leaving Champaign-Urbana, I spent a couple of days in Santa Barbara with Lakshmi - or perhaps I should say without Lakshmi. ;-) You haven't lived until you've eaten one of her super-sandwiches. Lachu, if you're reading this, what's the name of that cheese? It doesn't taste the same without it. I can't find any of the garlic sourdough bread either. The UCSB campus is incredibly beautiful (photos here) and I had a wonderful time, largely due to my charming hostess.
I flew out from LA to Brunei, where my parents have been working for the last year, and have been here ever since, except for a few days holidaying in Malaysia. In another 10 days or so, I'll be flying to India for a cousin's wedding. So that's my summer; more information on each part of the vacation in subsequent posts.

The Geomblog has had some very good posts in the last month, one of which pointed me towards Michael Nielsen's introduction to exander graphs. I've been meaning to read about them for a long time, but kept putting it off until now. Ditch, if you haven't already, check them out.

The reading assignment of the day, though, is definitely Fred Hiatt's superb piece in the Washington Post. I've been waiting a long time to read this; I wish more people understood it. I'm excerpting parts of it, but you have to read the whole thing:

"Two of the country's largest newspapers, for example, have devoted more than 80 editorials, combined, since March of 2004 to Abu Ghraib and detainee issues, often repeating the same erroneous assertions and recycling the same stories," [Rumsfeld] said. "By comparison, precious little has been written by those editorial boards about the beheading of innocent civilians by terrorists, the thousands of bodies found in mass graves in Iraq, the allegations of rape of women and girls by U.N. workers in the Congo."

The Post has criticized the administration for failing to give detainees hearings as called for under the Geneva Conventions; for writing memos that toyed with the definition of torture and undermined long-standing Army restraint in questioning prisoners; for prosecuting low-ranking soldiers while giving the brass a pass; for allowing the CIA to hold prisoners beyond the reach of the International Red Cross or any other monitor; and for refusing to empanel a truly independent commission to examine accountability for prison abuse up the chain of command, up to and including the White House... [Rumsfeld] would point out that none of these offenses, even if accepted as true, is as heinous as filling a mass grave.

But just invoking such a comparison, even implicitly, amounts to a loss for the United States. If we have to defend ourselves by pointing out that we are morally superior to terrorists, it's a loss.

The United States and this administration in particular continually assert the moral right to behave differently than [sic] other nations. We will not be bound by the International Criminal Court. We insist that other nations give up their nuclear weapons while we keep our own. We wage war without U.N. Security Council approval. We publish annual report cards on everyone else's human rights records.

[A]ny nation asserting such a high calling will be judged by an equally high standard. Are we better than the beheaders, the mass killers, the U.N. peacekeepers raping young girls in the Congo? That's not close to the right question.

Do we behave as well as we claim, as we should, as we expect of others? That's the beginning of the right conversation -- and why it's fair to write more editorials about exceedingly mild Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay than about the unspeakable mass graves of Hilla.

Another Disaster

2005-05-07T23:19:00.000-05:00

I just finished the Complexity exam. There were only a handful of us left in the class by this point. A total of seven people took the exam. One attended less than half the semester's lectures. One attended every lecture, but all his notes could be reviewed in an hour. One wrote "Via a simple induction" in response to a proof question, one made the same error on two different problems - and again, for another pair of problems. One walked in late, one left an hour early, one needed coffee to keep awake during the exam.

I've rarely seen such a sorry bunch. But it was a fun course, and I'm sorry it's over.

For Cherry and Mridula

2005-05-06T21:08:00.000-05:00

Funnily enough, I too had the remarkable insight that one could use an external text editor instead of Blogger's cursed text box. But Word? And vi?? I use Emacs, you insensitive clods. :-)

The only thing that could get me blogging again...

2005-05-06T20:45:00.000-05:00

... another election. What is it with me and elections? I sit glued to my computer, watching as the results come in one constituency at a time. At least twenty times a night, I update my estimates of each party's final seat tally. Indian elections, that's natural. American elections, that's reasonable given that I'm currently in Illinois. But British elections? The actions of the Prime Minister are unlikely to have a huge impact on me in the near future. Still, I reload the results page every half hour, not trusting the auto-refresh that runs every two minutes. The BBC's fantastic online election coverage - much better than that of any American network during the presidential elections here - completely destroyed any resolutions I made about uninterrupted study.

Anyway, congratulations to Tony Blair, though the sharply reduced Labour majority might indicate that he won't serve a full term. The Conservatives did fairly well, gaining over 30 seats for a total of 197. The commentators who kept predicting 209 Tory seats must have been smoking something; it seemed fairly clear after the first couple of hours that they'd be lucky to reach 200. The big surprise of the night was the Lib Dem haul; they did much better than expected, winning a total of 62 seats.

Ordinarily I wouldn't mind wasting an election night, but this is a bad time. I have a Complexity exam tomorrow, and really should have been studying. (For that matter, I shouldn't be blogging now, but I can't help myself.) This whole week has been kind of crazy; more on that later, though. There've been times I've itched to post about something, but I just haven't had the time. After tomorrow's exam, I should have a short breathing spell, so expect a couple of posts then.

We now return to the PCP theorem.

What's up with Blogger?

2005-04-22T20:57:00.000-05:00

The service had problems last week, but I thought they had all been fixed. Every time I've begun a post recently, Blogger has erased the text after a few paragraphs! That partly accounted for the long silence; the rest was sheer laziness. Thanks to Mridula for pestering me to write!

Does anyone know what the problem actually is, and how I can fix or avoid it?

An Introduction to Recursion

2005-04-19T22:00:00.000-05:00

Moebius Stripper has a fabulous post describing her first experience with runaway recursion. It made my day last week when everything else seemed to be going wrong. If you haven't read it already, check it out (and while you're at it, check her blog more often).

Tall, Dark and Mysterious also has a discussion of grading. I'd like to write on the subject, but I really have to get to work on my Operating Systems assignment. I'll update this post soon.

UPDATE: After every CS 225 mid-term, I dread the mind-numbing chore of grading over 200 exams. It has its moments, though, perhaps because American students seem to be much less repressed than their Indian counterparts. Every few exams, you'll find someone who was inspired to deliberately add a relevant joke for the graders benefit. I'm always tempted to go a little easy on someone who's made me laugh. (Perhaps we should have a policy of extra credit for humour, so we can reward them!) I was thinking of posting some examples here for my readers to enjoy, but decided against it after talking to Jason (who I TA for). You'll just have to take my word for it that they're hilarious.

Unforunately, the smiles don't last for long because some answers make you contemplate tearing your hair out. You occasionally wonder if you've been a complete failure as a TA... if you couldn't even communicate the key ideas to the one-third of your class that actually showed up at discussion. Grading a previous exam, I was sinking deep into depression when 6 students in a row couldn't correctly write a simple 5-line recursive function (Forget correctness; they weren't even close!). I almost gave up when I noticed that the next exam belonged to a student I'll call X. X had been struggling with the material all semester, largely because her understanding of the pre-requisites was weak. She worked extremely hard to catch up, though; I spent hours with her every week, helping her review her notes and debug programs. Still, she had not done well on the previous mid-term, and in no mood for further reminders of my failures, I was not looking forward to grading her exam. Five minutes later, I was in shock: X had perfect scores on every question I graded.

Moments like that make it all worthwhile.

Opera 8 released

2005-04-19T21:53:00.000-05:00

Download it and give it a try. I normally dislike even minor changes to an application's user experience, but Opera 8 is prettier and more responsive than earlier versions. Best of all, Gmail works (out of the box), as does almost every other site I've tested it with, including those that Opera 7.54 choked on.

If you haven't used Opera recently, you don't know what you're missing.

Cardinal Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI

2005-04-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

I don't know enough about his theology and positions to comment on the implications of this choice (besides, you can find such commentary anywhere you look), so I'll merely wish him well.

Fitting, somehow, that this post marks my return to blogging after a two-week absence.

Pope John Paul II is dead

2005-04-02T14:24:00.000-06:00

There were few men I admired and respected more. May God rest his soul.

The Washington Post describes his life and message.

DeLay on the Judiciary

2005-04-01T23:31:00.000-06:00

I had decided not to post again on the Schiavo case and matters related to it, but I can't ignore the comments Tom DeLay made yesterday. Talking to reporters in Houston, he said, "We will look at an unaccountable, arrogant, out-of-control judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president ... The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."

To begin with, the judiciary didn't 'thumb their nose' at Congress and the president: Congress brought the issue into federal courts, most of which ruled against Terri Schiavo's parents. Congress asked for judgments, and the courts gave it to them. Rep. DeLay seems to be crying foul simply because the rulings went against him. (To be fair, though, one court did rule that the law transferring appeals to the federal courts was unconstitutional. Tom DeLay may think of this as being disrespectful, but it's an important component of the system's 'checks and balances'.) And anyone who complains about how the unelected judiciary abused its power is ignoring the fact that Florida elects its judges. The Post is carrying an editorial strongly critical of Mr. Delay's remarks and arguing that the real problem in the Schiavo case was an arrogant, out-of-control, irresponsible legislature that thumbed their nose at Florida's judicial system.

Instead of worrying about a non-existent problem with the judiciary, perhaps Tom Delay should spend time worrying about his own ethics troubles. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal had a scathing editorial concluding, "[DeLay's] real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out." For the sake of Congress and its credibility, unless his behaviour changes, I hope it's sooner rather than later.

Response to Comments: The Schiavo Case

2005-03-28T23:40:00.000-06:00

Instead of responding below comments to my post Morality vs. Legality, I decided to create a new post to provide detailed answers.
Moebius Stripper says:

For those who believe that people can choose not to be kept alive, but that Terri Schiavo's feeding tubes should be re-inserted, the only remaining moral position I can see is that the patient alone can make this choice and it must be recorded in writing (in the form of a "living will", presumably).

Where do you get this? I personally think that people can choose not to be kept alive, but that her feeding tube should be reinserted. This isn't based on a belief that only a patient can make the decision to die (like you, I'd have trouble committing to something ahead of time) - it's based on a belief that no one should die by being starved to death over a two-week period. I think that the most disturbing aspect of this case is that it's basically taken for granted that shooting Terri Shiavo in the heart or giving her a lethal injection that would kill her in seconds is murder, but that starvation over a two-week period constitutes death with dignity.

This is a good point; my original post was flawed. I presume you'd agree with what I wrote if we were discussing a similar case which didn't involve a protracted death? For completeness, when writing about the Schiavo case, I should have discussed this argument as well. If it's any comfort, MS, it hasn't been completely neglected; several websites and talk-shows have dwelt on the starvation issue and why it's cruel. Still, I don't think it makes much difference, because it doesn't seem like a tenable position, either.

The claim I've seen advanced most often is that removing the feeding tubes will cause Terri Schiavo to suffer terribly for two weeks or so. The problem is that the word starvation is loaded: our visceral reaction is to imagine patients in severe anguish for a long time. This is inaccurate; it is generally accepted that death by complete starvation/dehydration in a hospital is not particularly painful. Here are three different articles quoting several neurologists who believe that Terri Schiavo will not experience severe thirst or hunger. I'm quoting rather extensively from the best of these, an L.A. Times article devoted to this issue:

[M]edical experts say going without food and water in the last days and weeks of life is as natural as death itself. The body is equipped with its own resources to adjust to death, they say.
...
"What my patients have told me over the last 25 years is that when they stop eating and drinking, there's nothing unpleasant about it -- in fact it can be quite blissful and euphoric," said Dr. Perry G. Fine, vice president of medical affairs at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization in Arlington, Va. "It's a very smooth, graceful and elegant way to go."
...
"The cessation of eating and drinking is the dominant way that mammals die," said Dr. Ira Byock, director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire. "It is a very gentle way that nature has provided for animals to leave this life."

In a 2003 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 102 hospice nurses caring for terminally ill patients who refused food and drink described their patients' final days as peaceful, with less pain and suffering than those who had elected to die through physician-assisted suicide.

The average rating given by the nurses for the patients' quality of death was an 8 on a scale where 9 represented a "very good death" and 0 was a "very bad death."
...
[The] pain of hunger is only felt by those who subsist on small amounts of food and water -- victims of famine, for instance, or concentration-camp inmates. They become ravenous as their bodies crave more fuel, said Sullivan, a senior fellow at Duke's Center for the Study of Aging.

After 24 hours without any food, "the body goes into a different mode and you're not hungry anymore," he said. "Total starvation is not painful or uncomfortable at all.
...
The weakening brain releases a surge of feel-good hormones called endorphins.

Doctors also have a host of treatments to ameliorate acute problems, such as sprays and swabs to moisten dry mouths and creams to moisturize flaky skin. They can also administer morphine or other powerful painkillers.

There's also some anecdotal evidence in a comment thread at DailyKos, but you might want to take that with a grain of salt. Given that this kind of death is fairly painless, I think it's reasonable to prefer it to lethal injections or the like. (And if the nurses in that study were right, dehydration is actually the less painful alternative.)

RL's comment was longer:

I would want my family to make the best decision they could based on medical advice and the probability that I would recover.

The courts have established that it is probable that she would not have wanted to be kept alive; even if this is discounted, her husband wishes it, and if anyone has a moral right to decide, it is her spouse.

Your above two statements are very disturbing as they lead to things very very dangerous. We are living in times of Harold Shipman. I don't think civilization has reached a decisive stage where even terminal patients themselves can be given the power to decide if or not to pull the plug - leave alone a third person - however he/she be close to him/her. It is not everyday that Bush comes up with sosmething like this - but it definitely makes a lot of sense to "err on the side of life"

If that be the question - I shudder to think of the debataes that will follow. Can severely depressed men and women allowed to take their lives? What about penuriously bakrupt people? What about people in lunatic asylums? What about people imprisoned for life without a chance for parole? What about people who cannot afford to keep their loved ones on life support - though they may have a good probability of recovery in the long term?

And when you ask proponents for legislation to define that "life is sacred, and that we may never choose to let it end" - I shudder to think of the consequences. Do you think law can ever be complete ? Do we need to define everyday activities in black and white laws? We will enter a Godel's world where there will always crop cases which cannot and should not be for the courts to decide.

Life is something we havent cracked - and we cannot ever make a decision for anybody. I am a leftist liberal, but I cannot bear to bring myself to defend for everything branded as "liberal" - just for the heck of it. I believe in the sanctity of life - and I hold that above any judiciary.

He raises several issues, and I'll try to address them one by one.

To begin with, when I said, "Adherents to [the belief that we can never choose to let life end] would do well, in my opinion, to petition for legislation in their favour.", I was making a serious suggestion. This is a viewpoint I respect, and I thought (and still think) that a law would be the simplest and quickest way to ensure that it is complied with. We certainly cannot pass laws to cover every situation, but if you believe in the sanctity of life and that patients can never choose to die, legislation to that effect could easily be drafted. In the absence of legal guidelines, there will always be disputes.

As regards the liberal/conservative issue, I actually think I'm less leftist than you, RL. I'm generally liberal on social issues, but moderate to conservative on fiscal issues. Like you, I can't defend every 'liberal' cause: In fact, it's morally unacceptable to me to support any party on an issue if I disagree with their position.

And finally, while I agree that "erring on the side of life" is desirable (I don't think anyone objects to this principle), this is distinct from insisting that no-one be permitted to choose to die. My position is that people in a persistent vegetative state, with no hope of recovery, should be allowed to die if they so wish (or rather, if they had indicated this wish while still able to). In the absence of such a wish, the next-of-kin can decide. Yours, I presume, is that this decision can never be made. I think that would actually be more complicated: for one thing, the government would have to financially support such patients. On this, then, we appear to disagree.

Many of the problems you describe are not directly related to this issue. As an example, I'll pick one, the case of people who cannot afford to keep loved ones on life support even if it is likely they will recover. Consider the following problem: a member of your family will die if he/she does not undergo complex, expensive surgery. The surgery will probably succeed, but you cannot afford to pay for it. Wouldn't you agree that this is essentially the same as the previous problem? The solution has nothing to do with life-support: it would be reasonable (from a logical point of view) for the state to pay for both or neither. From an ethical perspective, I - again, like you - would rather the state paid for both. But these are issues best discussed in a separate post.

Another break

2005-03-27T00:08:00.000-06:00

I suspect that blogging will be sporadic, at best, in the near future: My roommates have given me the first three volumes of Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! I've wanted to read it for the longest time, so I'm eternally grateful. God bless them both!

And if anyone's reading this today, Happy Easter!

More blogroll updates

2005-03-26T18:29:00.000-06:00

I just noticed that Dilip D'Souza and Bharati have blogs:Death Ends Fun and Lest I Forget, respectively. I also noticed that I've somehow neglected adding QuestionableTaktix to the blogroll. Remiss of me, and I apologise to Sanky, Nair, and Rahul.

Morality vs. Legality

2005-03-26T14:58:00.000-06:00

After my last post on the Schiavo case, I spent some time thinking about the moral and legal issues involved, and how liberals and conservatives differ in their basic approaches to the problem. Today, David Brooks has a column on the subject in the Times. His thesis is that social conservatives believe that " ... the life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult", that life is sacred, and hence, presumably, that removal of feeding tubes is akin to murder. Social liberals, on the other hand, believe that there is "... a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence" and that "... it is up to each individual or family to draw their own line to define when life passes to mere existence." Brooks claims that there are flaws with both of these: the conservative viewpoint is not pragmatic, and the liberal argument lacks moral force.

I disagree with the last statement, as do Matthew Yglesias and others. The liberal argument is rooted in moral principles, just not those which Brooks considers. The principle is that faced with such problems, individuals should be free to choose; in the event of dispute, the courts can decide. Belief in freedom and respect for the law are surely good principles to hold dear.

I want to think about the principles held by those demanding Terri Schiavo be kept alive. Either they believe that people do not possess the right to choose to be 'allowed to die' in such situations, or that the right does not apply in this case. If the latter, why not? Terri Schiavo is in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS); electro-encephalogram results show no brain activity, even though most people in PVS have about 5% of normal activity. The courts have established that it is probable that she would not have wanted to be kept alive; even if this is discounted, her husband wishes it, and if anyone has a moral right to decide, it is her spouse. The fact that Michael Schiavo may benefit from her death should not be considered; it is routine for relatives who decide to withhold care from a patient to be named as beneficiaries in the patient's will.

For those who believe that people can choose not to be kept alive, but that Terri Schiavo's feeding tubes should be re-inserted, the only remaining moral position I can see is that the patient alone can make this choice and it must be recorded in writing (in the form of a "living will", presumably). If not for the written requirement, there would always be disagreement. This is not a very attractive position, because not everyone would write such a document, and we cannot foresee all circumstances. I, for one, would be uncomfortable to commit either way in advance of an incapacitating accident. I would want my family to make the best decision they could based on medical advice and the probability that I would recover.

With those who believe that life is sacred, and that we may never choose to let it end, I can only disagree; I (sincerely) respect that belief, but it is one I do not share. Adherents to it would do well, in my opinion, to petition for legislation in their favour. It seems to me, though, that only a minority of the demonstrators against removal of the feeding tubes share this viewpoint. What, then, is the moral position of the majority of those demanding that Terri Schiavo be kept alive? I'm genuinely curious; I'd love comments.

Day Tripping

2005-03-25T23:24:00.000-06:00

Photos from my trip to Chicago last Saturday have been uploaded.
To head off criticism from family and friends:
a) The only reason there aren't more is that I forgot to charge the batteries.
b) I know I'm not in any of the snaps, but this time it's not my fault. Amul took photographs with his camera, and I'm in those. When he sends them to me, they'll be added to the collection.

More Bits and Pieces

2005-03-25T01:13:00.000-06:00

First of all, thanks to madmrid for all the comments. They're a very large part of what makes blogging worthwhile. :-)

Second, I went to Chicago last weekend, and I promised to post photographs here. They'll be up tomorrow. There aren't many of them; idiot that I am, I forgot to charge the camera batteries.

Three, Moebius Stripper is conducting a multi-player pre-calculus bingo contest. Give it a shot! (Full details and history on her site.)

A Right to Life?

2005-03-24T23:55:00.000-06:00

The Terri Schiavo case has been dominating the local news for several days now: every American news website I've checked has it as the number-one story today.

I'm not going to comment on the case itself; pretty much every reasonable position (and almost every unreasonable one) has been presented and argued over in thousands of fora, from TV debates to blog comment threads. The issue has become incredibly politicized: it seems farcical that Republicans brought the issue to federal courts, or even got the government involved in the first place. And subpoenaing her so that she would have to be kept alive was downright stupid. I honestly don't see what all the hoop-la is about. There seem to be only three options:
1) Let the courts decide, and abide by this decision. If the decision is not the one you want, you'll just have to accept it.
2) Pass a law which would deprive Mr. Schiavo of the power to stop the feeding of his wife. This could be specific enough to apply only to the Schiavos (but that would be ridiculous, and probably unconstitutional), broad enough to apply to all spouses of patients in a Persistent Vegetative State (but then who else could make the decision? Who could be closer than a spouse?), or somewhere in between.
3) Amend the constitution in one of a hundred ways that could keep Terri Schiavo alive.

The third option is nonsense, and the second probably wouldn't work. That leaves only the first, but too many people seem to find it unpalatable. Even worse, they resort to legal irrelevancies like ad-hominem attacks on Michael Schiavo. (Some of the comments may be morally relevant, but that's a whole different ball game, which I'll come to in a later post.) In the absence of a "living will", the law says that the spouse decides, and Michael Schiavo wants the feeding discontinued. That should be all there is to it, and conservative talk-show host Neal Boortz explains why Christians should be willing to let Terri go to heaven after 15 years of suffering. Of course, if there is a reasonable doubt about the facts of the case, we should definitely "err on the side of life", as President Bush put it. Bill Frist's remote diagnosis doesn't cut it, though.

As an aside, Andrew Sullivan and Dahlia Lithwick point out another inconsistency in the Republican position: if marriage (even civil marriage) is a 'unique and special legal bond' between two people (one which must be protected from corruption by gay couples), then Michael Schiavo is the only person whose opinion matters in the slightest. (For someone who wasn't going to comment, you managed a fair bit - ed.)

Unfortunately, while the nation's attention is focussed on the circus that the Schiavo case has become, more serious issues are not being addressed. Cuts in funding for Medicaid and Medicare will result in many more lives lost over the next few years, but we don't have special Sunday sessions of Congress to consider that. E. J. Dionne Jr. has a good column on what being 'pro-life' really means. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever have thousands of people demonstrating in favour of Medicaid reform. Elizabeth Barrett Browning's lines in Aurora Leigh come irresistibly to mind:

A red-haired child
Sick in a fever, if you touch him once,
Though but so little as with a finger-tip,
Will set you weeping! but a million sick ...
You could as soon weep for the rule of three,
Or compound fractions.

Tidbits

2005-03-15T20:33:00.000-06:00

The Harvard faculty passed a no-confidence vote against their president, Lawrence Summers. This isn't the end of the world for Mr. Summers, who is responsible to a governing board that supports to him. Still, it can't have been a pleasant experience.

The Times is carrying a good editorial on why reform should begin in primary school, not high school. This is obvious, and it's bothered me that more people weren't saying it all along.

When I visited the Washington Post website today, the headline "Poll: Iraqis Better Off But War Not Worth Fighting" screamed at me. The obvious assumption is that the poll was conducted among Iraqis; in much smaller type below, we read "Majority of Americans feel...". In all fairness to the Post journalists, the headline of the actual article is "Americans Believe Iraqis Better Off Today", but the way it's presented on the home page is misleading, to say the least.

Staying with the Post, Richard Cohen provides a good example of how media organizations striving for 'balance' in coverage can go too far. C-SPAN wants to balance an upcoming Holocaust lecture at Harvard with David Irving, a Holocaust denier who has been ruled "anti-Semitic and racist" by a court in a lawsuit he filed.

The best news of the last couple of days was the huge demonstration in Lebanon yesterday against Syrian intervention in their country. Most of the American media outlets I've looked at have only vague figures on the total crowd size, but organizers claim over a million participants and the Associated Press put the total at 'well over 800,000'. For some perspective, the total population of Lebanon is 3.5 million. That is, one in every four Lebanese was at the protest!

I have a Complexity exam tomorrow, so thoughts on these and other issues will have to wait until that's over.

Books of the Month: March 2005

2005-03-14T00:20:00.000-06:00

In a email exchange yesterday, I wrote "I grew up in a small town in India where it was often very difficult to find books. It sometimes took years for me to get my hands on books I wanted, and I hated the waiting." One of my favourite things about America is that every book I really want is available from one of:
a) the Urbana Free Library
b) Campus Libraries (UIUC apparently has the third-largest academic library system in North America, after Harvard and Yale.)
c) the Illini Union Bookstore
d) Amazon or eBay.

In the last six months, I've read books ranging from Clausewitz' On War to E. B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan, books by Mark Twain and Stephen Donaldson, books of science fiction and on the science of Economics. I've found so many treasures that I've decided to pick (at least) two of my favourites every month and describe them here.

March's books are Manalive (Warning: The Amazon review contains spoilers!) by G. K. Chesterton and The Good Companions, by J. B. Priestley. They're both superb, absolutely; the only other thing I'll say about them is that you should get your hands on them at once, at once. If that last sentence seems awkward, you really need to read The Good Companions at once :-)

I discovered the books only because they were highly recommended by Deepak and Lakshmi, respectively. Readers are invited to list in the comments any outstanding books they've read in the recent past; I (and possibly some of the other commenters) would love to try them.

More on Software Patents

2005-03-07T22:03:00.000-06:00

There were several things I wanted to blog about, including several good editorials in yesterday's Post, and one from today which begins:

Remember the gag about "the three biggest lies"? They were: "The check is in the mail," "Of course I'll respect you in the morning" and -- the punch line -- "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

Maybe it's time to add a fourth: "We're from the private sector, so naturally we'll do it better."

William Raspberry explains why Private Doesn't Mean Better.

Worthy as all these subjects undoubtedly are, today's post is on everyone's favourite topic: Software Patents. The European Council approved a directive on Software Patents today in spite of opposition from Poland, Denmark and Portugal, and a demand by the European Parliament to re-write the directive. The directive now goes to the parliament again, but a larger majority is needed to reject or amend the directive. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) - the best resource I've found for information on the status of Software Patents in Europe - has some good coverage, along with a 'Horror Gallery' of European Software Patents (including a patent by Sun Microsystems on converting Windows 95 filenames to the Windows NT format, allegedly taken for the sake of annoying Microsoft).

I really did intend to write a serious post about why patenting Software is Evil (TM), but this is just so funny I had to change direction slightly. Pat-rights, a Hong Kong-based company, is threatening to sue Apple for infringing on their patent on 'Internet User Identity Verification' - somewhat ridiculously titled 'Protection of software again [sic] against unauthorized use' - United States Patent number 6,665,797.

I spent half an hour trying to figure out what, exactly, the patent covers, but am not much nearer to any conclusions than I was when I began. It appears to apply to any software-based system for authenticating users attempting to access any server to obtain 'service(s) or software product(s) or alike' (which isn't even good grammar), particularly when secure operations must be performed when payment is involved. The date on the patent is December 16, 2003; the decades of prior art seem to be irrelevant. (Granted, e-commerce hasn't been around for decades, but software-based user authentication certainly has.) The patent application says:

Conventionally, software protection methods for protecting commercial software products such as programs, multimedia software, distributed through a communication network, such as a telephone system, require a user computer to have a piece of hardware comprising decryption keys and system be installed therein, for to be authenticated by a software program running on the computer.

Are we to believe that every system prior to 2003 distributed hardware to permit access to its servers? The application also states that the invention provides a method to to discourage rightful users of the software from copying it 'to [sic] someone else' by means of a 'psychological barrier.'

Pat-rights' business model (openly stated) is to file patents, and collect 'staggering' license fees from infringers. So far, they have a grand total of 3 patents in their portfolio - one described above, one on Mobile commerce, and the third covering 'Vehicle Smart Window Safety Control.' This last is absolutely hilarious: a smart window (for the ignorant, like me) is "a window whose transmissivity / transparency can be changed electronically, i.e., by depression of a button, for stopping excessive incoming sunlight or for providing privacy, etc." The patent does not cover technology for building smart windows because Pat-rights does not have any such technology. This didn't stop them; they came to the stunning conclusion that any smart window must have a method for the user to control the transparency. Further, if the window is insufficiently transparent, this would make driving the vehicle dangerous. Therfore, the geniuses at Pat-right have patented "preventing an occupant of a moving vehicle from inadvertently touching the manual switch and causing the transmissivity / transparency of a smart window [sic] to a level dangerous for forward driving." In the 'Commercial value' section of the patent description, they proudly proclaim "While betting on a particular smart window technology may be risky, our vehicle patent provides a more secure investment opportunity, because it will always be indispensable, as long as there will be a success [sic] smart window technology in the future!"

While I'm laughing helplessly now, I'm depressed that people would consider this a viable business model. What's worse, I'm horrified that many of these patents are actually being granted by governments world-wide. The entire patent system is in urgent need of an overhaul, but no-one seems interested.

More information on the Pat-rights claim of Apple's infringement (and another affecting the iPod) are available here and here.
Hat tip: Slashdot.

The Jedi Mind Trick

2005-03-02T11:56:00.000-06:00

From Learning Curves, via Ernie's 3D Pancakes.
I wonder if this semester is going to see a significant improvement in student evaluations of Math/CS teachers. :-)

No More Executing Juvenile Offenders

2005-03-02T00:07:00.000-06:00

The Supreme Court narrowly (5-4) ruled that executing people for crimes they committed as minors was 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Interestingly enough, the court believes that a "national consensus" determines what constitutes 'cruel and unusual punishment'. Even the four Justices who dissented appear to concede this point; Justice Antonin Scalia objected on the grounds that such a consensus did not exist. This is not a new point of law, merely one of which I was ignorant: it apparently dates back to a 1958 ruling which states that as society matures, its standards of decency evolve. What is new, though, is that international opinion appears to have influenced the decision. The five judges who formed the majority and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor believe that international trends help define the meaning of 'cruel and unusual punishment.' The United States was - until today - one of the few countries to permit the execution of those under the age of 18, and the majority opinion holds that the views of the rest of the world confirm their conclusions.

My feelings on the whole issue are decidedly mixed. To begin with, I'm against the death penalty entirely. Gandalf sums up my feelings perfectly in this conversation - about Gollum - with Frodo: "Deserves [death]? I dare say he does! Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so eager to deal out death in judgement."

On the other hand, a previous ruling had already prevented the execution of children aged 15 and younger at the time they committed the crime. The new ruling affects 16- and 17 year-olds, and was partially based on evidence that they are too immature to be held completely accountable for their crimes. This leaves me feeling uncomfortable: Is 16 too young to realize that murder is wrong? And the death penalty is usually reserved for juvenile crimes that are particularly brutal, or for serial offenders. In my opinion, 16 year-old criminals probably know enough to be responsible for the consequences of their actions, but I'm willing to concede I may be wrong; I don't know much about the typical American teenager convicted of such crimes. Still, one would think that if you can't be held accountable at 17 years and 6 months, half a year more won't make much difference. To be fair, though, the same could be said of any artificial boundary, and I presume juries make appropriate allowances.

Surely a cleaner solution would be to abolish the death penalty altogether? The Supreme Court probably won't have a role to play, because the Constitution (via the Fifth Amendment) allows for the existence of a death penalty. Either the Constitution could be amended again (which is unlikely), or the 38 states that allow capital punishment could ban the practice. It'll be an uphill battle, but with luck, we'll get there eventually.

So here's what I think:
1. The death penalty should be abolished.
2. I'm glad the Supreme Court abolished the execution of minors, but I feel that the reason advanced (that 17 year-olds are too immature to be held completely accountable) was somewhat specious.
3. The way to get rid of capital punishment isn't via the judiciary; instead, the various state legislatures should outlaw it.

It feels good to be back!

2005-03-01T22:14:00.000-06:00

I've been busy for the last two weeks, and so haven't had time to blog at all. I actually experienced mild withdrawal symptoms; after the first few days with no posts, I began to feel an urge to blog again! Unfortunately, assignments and mid-terms for the courses I'm taking - and grading for CS 225 (which I'm TAing) - kept me from writing. The horror that hit me one morning when I realized I hadn't read the previous day's newspapers is still fresh in my mind. :-) (Ok, so I'm a news junkie. Deal with it.) I still have most of an assignment for Computational Complexity left undone and over 150 papers to grade, but they'll just have to wait.

Quick updates for everyone who asked:
1. Mid-terms were ok. Not good, but that's the best I can say about them.
2. The Complexity course (CS 579, for the curious) hasn't become any easier. The only thing that consoles me is that everyone else is finding it incredibly difficult too. A friend commented that it takes a special kind of masochism to register for a course where collectively, the whole class can solve less than half the homework. Still, it's a lot of fun. More than that, it's beautiful.
3. The Socratic method worked with my CS 225 sections. More precisely, I used a modified version, to account for the fact that the students were familiar with some of the material from lectures. Participation in class has increased drastically, and they've even done well on the mid-term! (The fact that the exam was easier than usual has nothing to do with it, I'm sure. - ed.)

UPDATE: My apologies to Dilip Hiro, whom I quoted last night. For some reason, I read 'Iran' as 'Iraq', and so found a perfectly reasonable sentence hilarious.
I didn't even realize my error after reading the sentence several times! I haven't felt this stupid in a long time. Many thanks to Suresh for pointing this out.

The Socratic Method

2005-02-12T21:41:00.000-06:00

This is fantastic: Rick Garlikov describes a teaching experiment with a third grade class where he uses the Socratic Method (which consists of asking questions and allowing the students to discover answers themselves) to teach them binary arithmetic.

I have friends of above-average intelligence who didn't really understand binary representation when it was taught (badly) in a college Computer Science course for non-majors; it's incredible that he got a regular third grade class to understand it in 25 minutes! And practically the whole class was participating and having fun... I wish I could do that with my CS 225 section! I've got to try something along these lines next week.

There's no real point to excerpting it, so head over to the transcript now. He has some more information on the Socratic Method here.

Hat tip: Moebius Stripper.

Assorted Opinions

2005-02-12T19:24:00.000-06:00

Today's Washington Post has some good editorials. My favourites: Kofi Annan on how to move forward in Iraq, a Palestinian journalist who describes why he's hopeful about the peace process, and 'Marriage in the March of Time'. Read the last one to find out what it's about. And while you're at it, read the other two.

I'm famous (after a fashion)

2005-02-11T22:52:00.000-06:00

Well, ok, I haven't proved P != NP (yet!), but there are different kinds of fame. I'm a chocaholic (my friends will say that's an understatement second only to CNN's observation that black holes are typically more massive than the earth) and have the incredible good fortune to live a block away from the local Dairy Queen.

One of my roommates and I walked up to DQ this evening; as soon as we entered, the cashier began ringing up our orders. Apparently we're known to all the local Dairy Queen employees as 'The Chocolate Ice-cream guys.' The name leaves a certain something to be desired, but I'd put up with much worse for the quick service and generous helpings they give us as their best customers. :-)

In other news, Indu's started a blog. The latest post is sparking a discussion of free will. Also, Ditch has returned to AI-Complete with a post on using Google to extract meaning from the Internet.

Miscellaneous Meta-blogging

2005-02-05T21:36:00.000-06:00

I modified my blogroll today; the update was long overdue. I don't particularly enjoy reading American Leftist anymore, but that's less a comment on the quality of Joe's writing than a reflection of how my taste for blogging has changed. I still enjoy many of the conspiracy theories that show up in the comments, though!

Tall, Dark, and Mysterious, one of my new favourite blogs, is among those added. I love Moebius Stripper's writing and 'dark sense of humour'; every new post on her blog is a delight. I wish I had papers like this to grade. Where was she when I was learning algebra, statistics, and calculus?

Timothy Burke, who blogs at Easily Distracted mentioned in a comments thread elsewhere that grad students should remember that even if they abandon their blogs, their names will be forever associated with the arguments they make and sentiments they express. This is something I never even considered, and I'm not going to begin worrying about it now. The RIAA may never offer me a job, but I think I can live with that. Seriously, though, while I would like to think prospective employers won't hold an applicant's past criticism of their organization against him/her, I should know better. Waterstones, the British book chain, is one of an increasing number of companies that have fired employees based on the contents of their blogs. This case particularly irked me because Joe Gordon, the employee in question, was the sort of bookseller I love - knowledgeable and enthusiastic. He is very well known in the Science Fiction world as one of the most influential fans and critics in the United Kingdom and numbers several editors and best-selling authors (many of whom condemned Waterstones for their actions) among his friends. Apparently, doing your job supremely well is no protection.

Though it's got me in trouble more than once, I usually take for granted the freedom to speak my mind. I really should be grateful for the small measure of financial independence I enjoy, and more importantly, the fact that I'm living in a country which celebrates free speech to the extent that I - as a non-citizen! - can criticize the government without really worrying about adverse consequences.

On your deathbed...

2005-02-04T22:07:00.000-06:00

... remember to set up that P2P app and share all the files you've accumulated over a lifetime. Slashdot is carrying a story about an 83-year old woman being sued for file swapping a month after she died.

Yes, this is ridiculous, and the RIAA was made to look foolish, particularly when they admitted that they probably got it wrong; the woman, Gertrude Walton, apparently hated computers. What's most amusing, though, is that a few Slashdotters - inspired by Walton - believe they've found the perfect way to die happy, having screwed over the RIAA/MPAA without fear of reprisal: Just before you die, make your music and videos publically available on the Internet!

Fixing Social Security?

2005-02-04T21:57:00.000-06:00

In a briefing before President Bush's State of the Union Address, a senior administration official said, "In a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of Social Security."

So how will privatization help fix Social Security? Paul Krugman's response made me laugh out loud:

Private accounts will at best have a "net neutral effect" - that is, they will do nothing to improve Social Security's finances. Mr. Bush says the system faces a crisis; what does he propose to do about it?

The answer, presumably, is that his plan will also involve major benefit cuts over and above those associated with private accounts. And it's true that you can improve Social Security's finances with privatization, as long as you also slash benefits - just as you can kill a flock of sheep with witchcraft, provided you also feed them arsenic.

Abusing the FOIA

2005-02-02T18:06:00.000-06:00

I've been reading all year about the Justice Department obstructing requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, but this takes the cake:

People For the American Way Foundation (PFAWF) President Ralph G. Neas said today that a Justice Department demand for nearly $400,000 in fees for a FOIA request regarding the decision to seal the records of immigrants detained in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks is outrageous, and another in a series of strategies to deny access to public information.

The Times is carrying an editorial on what it calls ' an insult to the law's intent':

Justice officials insist that there is no easy way to provide the requested information from scores of regional offices. The law provides for two free hours of searching, but officials presented an estimated bill steeped in Newtonian gibberish, if not outright stonewalling. Let's see, that's 13,314.25 hours at $28 an hour for $372,799, plus more expenses not yet tabulated in other jurisdictions.

There are doubtlessly cheaper, simpler ways to find the extent to which the government buried court proceedings after the immigrant dragnet. We doubt that it would take that much time and labor if the White House were making the request.

This is just a step up from the all time champion of lame excuses: the FBI's mysterious write-only database which would crash if an attempt were made to read information from it.

More Good news from the Middle East

2005-02-02T16:59:00.000-06:00

It just keeps getting better: Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas will meet in Egypt next Tuesday, in response to an invitation by Hosni Mubarak. King Abdullah of Jordan will also attend the meeting, which will be the highest-level summit between Israeli and Palestinian officials in 4 years. Apparently Condoleezza Rice may also attend; she was scheduled to reach Israel on Sunday and leave for Europe on Monday, but is likely to change her plans.

Up for discussion, besides the usual Palestinian request for release of prisoners and Israeli demand for a crackdown on militants, are plans for Israel to turn over security in several West Bank towns to Palestinian forces, and a phased withdrawal from the Gaza strip.

Unusually for me, I've been optimistic about the peace process for the last month or so; I wonder if I'm coming down with something. In other news, the State of the Union Address will be delivered tonight, and the twin foci will be Social Security and global democracy, with mention of Ukraine, Palestine, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq. I'm looking forward to it.

An independent Kurdistan?

2005-01-31T22:52:00.000-06:00

This is interesting:

OF all the remarkable things that happened at the Iraqi polls on Sunday, perhaps the most striking was pulled off by the Kurdish independence movement. With almost no advance notice, hundreds of Kurds erected tents at official polling places in Iraq's Kurdish areas and asked those emerging from the ballot booths to take part in an informal referendum on whether Kurdistan should be independent or part of Iraq. From what I saw, almost everyone stopped to vote in the referendum, and the tally was running 11 to 1 in favor of independence.
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Iraq's new Assembly will face the task of preparing a constitution for a country where a sizable part of the population almost unanimously does not want to be part of the whole. The representatives of the Kurdish areas will most likely be the second-largest bloc in the Parliament. They will not press for independence any time soon, but they will be mindful of the referendum vote...The Kurdish region today functions as if it were an independent state. The Kurdistan Regional Government carries out virtually all government functions, and Baghdad law applies only to the extent the Kurdish Parliament chooses to apply it. Kurdistan is responsible for its own security (which is the main reason it has been free of the violence wracking the rest of Iraq) and maintains its own armed forces.

For the people of Kurdistan, the issue is not simply a matter of keeping what they have. What drives the move for independence is not just the love of Kurdistan but also a widespread antipathy toward Iraq.

America doesn't appear to be in favour of an independent Kurdistan, but will they be able to apply sufficient pressure on the Kurds? Turkey and Iran fear that their own sizable Kurdish minorities might wish to secede and join a new Kurdish state.

Also from the same editorial

The United States would do well to learn the lessons of the former Yugoslavia, where policymakers denied the reality of breakup until it was too late to contain the accompanying violence. Just four days before Yugoslavia's wars began in June 1991, the American Secretary of State, James Baker, was in Belgrade focused on the impossible task of stopping Slovenian and Croatian secession when he should have been trying to prevent the shooting.

Read the whole thing; the author (Peter Galbraith), as a former U.S. ambassador to Croatia, probably knows what he's talking about.

A Historic Day for Iraq?

2005-01-30T13:53:00.000-06:00

Good news from Iraq! Attacks on voters and polling stations have claimed 36 lives (so far), but the violence is less than expected. Much more important, turnout is higher than expected; the current official guesstimate is 60%. Unfortunately, Sunni turnout may not be very good. There are reports of a station where only 7 people voted in 7 hours, and another where the 15 people who cast their votes were the security forces assigned to protect the booth. Still, there are some encouraging signs; we'll probably do much better than Senator McCain's prediction of a 5% Sunni turnout.

So why the question-mark in the title? Partly because I'm an inveterate pessimist, but more because I read again today something we often forget: In fledgling democracies, the second elections are often more important than the first. Africa provides several examples of countries where the second post-colonial elections were never held; the winners of the first essentially became dictators. I don't seriously expect that to happen in Iraq, but like I said, I'm a pessimist.

Today, though, the world has reason to celebrate - to celebrate and honour the courage of millions of Iraqis who braved threats, bullets and bombs to help create a free Iraq.

A Numbers Game

2005-01-28T18:03:00.000-06:00

One of my pet peeves is the way people abuse statistics (or numbers, in general). When it's done deliberately, for economic or political gain, mild irritation gives way to extreme contempt. A good example would be President Bush's oft-repeated assertion that 14 out of the 18 Iraqi provinces are safe. This number was widely reported in the media, but very few reports mentioned the fact that the other 4 provinces hold half the population of Iraq.

Paull Krugman reports on another in an editorial for the Times today.

This week, in a closed meeting with African-Americans, Mr. Bush asserted that Social Security was a bad deal for their race, repeating his earlier claim that "African-American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people." In other words, blacks don't live long enough to collect their fair share of benefits.
...
First, Mr. Bush's remarks on African-Americans perpetuate a crude misunderstanding about what life expectancy means. It's true that the current life expectancy for black males at birth is only 68.8 years - but that doesn't mean that a black man who has worked all his life can expect to die after collecting only a few years' worth of Social Security benefits. Blacks' low life expectancy is largely due to high death rates in childhood and young adulthood. African-American men who make it to age 65 can expect to live, and collect benefits, for an additional 14.6 years - not that far short of the 16.6-year figure for white men.

Second, the formula determining Social Security benefits is progressive: it provides more benefits, as a percentage of earnings, to low-income workers than to high-income workers. Since African-Americans are paid much less, on average, than whites, this works to their advantage.

Finally, Social Security isn't just a retirement program; it's also a disability insurance program. And blacks are much more likely than whites to receive disability benefits.

Put it all together, and the deal African-Americans get from Social Security turns out, according to various calculations, to be either about the same as that for whites or somewhat better.

Of course, this form of intellectual dishonesty is hardly unique to the current administration; pretty much every group with an agenda to push is guilty.

The BBC runs a weekly programme on the subject called More or Less. From the website:

The programme was an idea born of the sense that numbers were the principal language of public argument. And yet there were few places where it was thought necessary to step back and think in the way we often step back to think about language, about the way we use figures.
What do they really measure? What kind of truth, if any, do they capture?

Open the pages of any newspaper and you will see risks of this, targets for that, new spending and new cuts, arguments about productivity, performance indicators, measurements, statistics and quantification of every kind.

We all use numbers in so many ways to argue about, understand, help make sense of the world around us. More or Less hopes to make that task easier, more entertaining, more surprising.

More or Less often reports on figures that have featured prominently in recent news; this week's programme describes why a recent survey claiming that a quarter of English boys had committed criminal acts was seriously flawed (Listen here). For example, teenage boys who once pushed a sibling hard enough to leave a bruise or scratch were guilty of 'serious assault.' In fact, merely pushing someone six times a year (even if the victim never suffered injury) makes you a prolific offender!

Here's an amusing example: STATS, an American organization (apparently based at George Mason university) that seeks to"hold U.S. journalists to the highest standards of reporting accuracy, while providing them with concrete assistance to help them better understand the complexities and limitations of scientific and statistical material", annually presents Dubious Data awards to media stories with particularly egregious statistical or logical errors. One of the winners in 2000 was a report on a survey which claimed that 70% of people surveyed had tried to quit smoking, and precisely 0 had succeeded. What wasn't quite so clear was that only smokers were surveyed, and only current smokers. People who had successfully quit were automatically disqualified!

I got this gem from the STATS site: "It is a cardinal rule of social science research that the plural of anecdote is not data."

Thank God for Sundays!

2005-01-23T15:02:00.000-06:00

Saturdays are all very well, but there's something special about Sundays. Actually, make that several things: talking to my parents, a wonderful church service, a lazy afternoon, dinner in CampusTown and dessert at Moonstruck Chocolate Cafe. But perhaps best of all are the Sunday editorials.

The Times has two pieces on genetic behavioural/intellectual differences between men and women; both well written, and both referring to Lawrence Summer's recent remarks.

Thomas Friedman writes about Iraq, elections, and the global 'war on terror'. He makes the point that however satisfying it may be to say "I told you so" if the elections aren't a success, the consequences of failed elections will not be good. In the event that the insurgents keep people away from the polls (which Friedman thinks unlikely), the world needs a Plan B. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have one.

This war also can't be won with troops - only with turnout. This is a war between Iraqi voters and insurgents - ballots versus bullets. And the people who understand that best are the fascist insurgents. That is why they are not focusing their attacks on U.S. troops, but on Iraqi election workers, candidates, local officials and police. The insurgents have one credo: "Iraqis must not vote - there must be no authentic expression of the people's will for a modern, decent Iraq. Because, if there is, the world will see that this is not a war between Muslims and infidel occupiers, but between Muslims with bad ideas and Muslims with progressive ideas."

This war also can't be won with troops - only with turnout. This is a war between Iraqi voters and insurgents - ballots versus bullets. And the people who understand that best are the fascist insurgents. That is why they are not focusing their attacks on U.S. troops, but on Iraqi election workers, candidates, local officials and police. The insurgents have one credo: "Iraqis must not vote - there must be no authentic expression of the people's will for a modern, decent Iraq. Because, if there is, the world will see that this is not a war between Muslims and infidel occupiers, but between Muslims with bad ideas and Muslims with progressive ideas."
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I spent Friday morning interviewing two 18-year-old French Muslim girls in the Paris immigrant district of St.-Ouen. (It is about a mile from the school where in March 2003 a French Muslim girl, who had refused the veil and rebuffed the advances of a Muslim boy, was thrown into a garbage can by three Muslim teenagers, who then tossed lighted cigarette butts into the can and closed the lid.)

Both girls I interviewed wore veils and one also wore a full Afghan-like head-to-toe covering; one was of Egyptian parents, the other of Tunisian parents, but both were born and raised in France. What did I learn from them? That they got all their news from Al Jazeera TV, because they did not believe French TV, that the person they admired most in the world was Osama bin Laden, because he was defending Islam, that suicide "martyrdom" was justified because there was no greater glory than dying in defense of Islam, that they saw themselves as Muslims first and French citizens last, and that all their friends felt pretty much the same.

We were not in Kabul. We were standing outside their French public high school - a short ride from the Eiffel Tower.

Senator John McCain has these predictions for the turnout: Kurds - 80%, Shiites - 60%, Sunnis - 5%. Will that be sufficient? I hope so, but I think not, unless the newly formed government is extremely magnanimous to the Sunnis.

While I'm on the subject, I'm currently reading Tom Clancy's Battle Ready, written with (Marine) General Anthony Zinni. Gen Zinni commanded CENTCOM from 1997 to 2000 (during which time he directed strikes against Iraq and Al Qaeda) and later served as Colin Powell's envoy to the Middle East until he resigned in 2003 over disagreements about the probable aftermath of the Iraq War. I've only just begun, but here's an interesting snippet from the first 20 pages.
Gen. Zinni describes how, as CENTCOM Commander-in-Chief, he realised that his plans for defeating Saddam's military did not address the problems of reconstruction. He organised a "war-game" called 'Desert Crossing' that presented several post-Saddam Iraq scenarios and gave experts from several branches of government a feel for the extent of the problems they would face. Unfortunately, no government agency was willing to do anything about it; none of them had a charter to develop a plan for rebuilding Iraq. The CENTCOM planning staff began to work on it, but after Zinni left, nothing came of it. He later testified on the subject before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after it became clear that State and Defense Department officials had neglected such planning.

Also at the Times, the public editor discusses the way numbers are used and abused by the media. This is something I've been meaning to blog about; more coming soon.

Sadly, today's Post Opinion page doesn't seem as good as usual. They're carrying a story on Viktor Yushchenko's inauguration (as President of Ukraine) which reads more like a regular article than an editorial. There is, though, one remarkable column: Samuel Pisar's Will We 'Never Forget'? A survivor of Majdanek and Auschwitz, he writes of his experiences, the cruelty and heroism he witnessed. He writes, too, of the lessons the Holocaust can teach us.

We the survivors are now disappearing one by one. Soon history will speak of Auschwitz at best with the impersonal voice of researchers and novelists, at worst with the malevolence of demagogues and falsifiers. This week the last of us, with a multitude of heads of state and other dignitaries, are gathering at that cursed site to remind the world that past can be prologue, that the mountains of human ashes dispersed there are a warning to humanity of what may still lie ahead.

The genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda and the recent massacres of innocents in the United States, Spain, Israel, Indonesia and so many other countries have demonstrated our inability to learn from the blood-soaked past. Auschwitz, the symbol of absolute evil, is not only about that past, it is about the present and the future of our newly enflamed world, where a coupling of murderous ideologues and means of mass destruction can trigger new catastrophes.
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In the autumn of their lives, the survivors of Auschwitz feel a visceral need to transmit what we have endured, to warn younger generations that today's intolerance, fanaticism and hatred can destroy their world as they once destroyed ours, that powerful alert systems must be built not only against the fury of nature -- a tsunami or storm or eruption -- but above all against the folly of man. Because we know from bitter experience that the human animal is capable of the worst, as well as the best -- of madness as of genius -- and that the unthinkable remains possible.

If you read nothing else today, read his whole column.

Why Kerry Lost

2005-01-18T17:50:00.000-06:00

Much has been said and written on why Senator Kerry lost the election: we've heard everything from Karl Rove's genius (or underhanded tactics, depending on who you ask) to right-wing evangelical voters turning out en masse to oppose gay marriage, to allegations of fraud. Perhaps there isn't a simple answer, but this is one I like:

Mr. Kerry failed because of his inability to tell his own story.

Errol Morris has an op/ed piece in the Times that I think is very well-written.

My guess is that Mr. Kerry and his campaign believed that certain things could not be mentioned. Foremost among these was Mr. Kerry's opposition to the war in Vietnam, which was largely erased from the candidate's life. That was a mistake. People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.

Muting Mr. Kerry's opposition to the Vietnam War had precisely this effect. Remember, this is the man who in 1971 made the following statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say they we have made a mistake. ... We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
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After the 2004 conventions, a New York Times poll asked people whether they felt that the candidates were not being candid about their war records. Many of Mr. Kerry's supporters were mystified that almost as large a percentage of Americans felt that he was holding something back as felt that Mr. Bush was doing the same.

But the polls made perfect sense. Mr. Kerry was holding something back - his real story about Vietnam. And in the end the questions about his service in Vietnam became questions about how he would deal with the war in Iraq. Was Mr. Kerry for it or against it? Questions about Iraq became questions about his candor, and vice versa.

What's disconcerting here is that Mr. Kerry had an out. He could have explained why he went to Vietnam and then opposed the war, and then he could have used this explanation to help people understand why he voted for the Iraq war and then voted against it. His experience with the changing nature of a war could have shifted those critical swing voters, convincing them that he was just the person to lead them at this juncture in our history.

His thesis may or may not be correct, but it's one that I hadn't seen before, and sufficiently interesting to be worthy of consideration. (Admit it, another reason you liked it was because "People think in narratives" made you think of Terry Pratchett - ed. Yes, well, that too, of course.)

On Social Security

2005-01-18T17:28:00.000-06:00

This is one subject I never wrote about; I always figured I didn't know enough. (Or perhaps you instinctively thought of it as the 'third rail of blogging'; post about it and die? - ed.) I've been reading a lot about it, though, and today I found this superb report by Roger Lowenstein in the New York Times magazine. (Warning: 9 pages! What is it with you and multi-page articles from the Times lately? Are you being paid to increase their advertising revenue? -ed.)

Lowenstein, like many other writers for the Times, believes that President Bush is exaggerating when he claims an impending Social Security crisis. One way to use the market, he suggests, is to invest in equities directly; this would provide economies of scale, keep the Social Security Trust Fund out of the government's hands, and have the effect of decreasing risks for individual investors. Another option is to tweak the current system modestly to keep it solvent for 75 years or so; after all, long-term forecasts are notoriously inaccurate.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe that the administration may be manufacturing a crisis like they did with the WMD in Iraq, but I'm not really qualified to comment. If you, like me, are interested in the origins and history of Social Security, Lowenstein's article is well worth the read, regardless of your opinion on the best way to fix it.

In Defence of Lawrence Summers

2005-01-17T22:43:00.000-06:00

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard University, suggested at an Economics conference on Friday that one reason there are relatively few women in science- and math-related careers could be an innate difference between the sexes. Half a dozen of the conference participants were offended; Nancy Hopkins, an MIT biologist, walked out in protest, saying that she was upset that all the brilliant young women at Harvard were being led by a man who "views them this way." From another New York Times article:

"When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn't breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill," Dr. Hopkins said. "Let's not forget that people used to say that women couldn't drive an automobile."

This sort of thing (the objections, not Summer's comments) drives me nuts: to begin with, Summers was requested by the conference organisers to be provocative, and he stressed that fact repeatedly in his talks. Much more important, the comments did not show a bias. Is it biased to say that most men are taller than most women because of biological differences between the sexes? Research has consistently shown that men tend to score higher than women on mathematical tests; I even blogged about an extensive study last month. On the other hand, women tend to have better language skills. Some of these differences may be (as certain feminists like Dr. Hopkins claim) entirely due to sociological differences, but is it so inconceivable that there is an innate difference in talents? Even if there were such a difference, what does it matter? People like Dr. Summers are not claiming that men are intrinsically 'better' than women; math skills (or intelligence tests in general, for that matter) do not measure a person's worth any more than height does. All Summers did was advance it as one possible reason for the under-representation of women in scientific careers.

Unfortunately, it appears that at least to a few people, political correctness is more important than a genuine understanding of the problem being considered. I'm glad to see that Dr. Summers is standing by his remarks.

Update: Tall, Dark, & Mysterious makes some good points. This is getting more publicity than I thought it would; there's even a Slashdot article.

Revelations from Ukraine

2005-01-17T13:54:00.000-06:00

The New York Times is carrying a sensational 6-page article on the role of the army and security service during the recent presidential elections in Ukraine. It's a remarkable story; the S.B.U. (Security Service of Ukraine, the local successor to the KGB), led by its chairman General Ihor P. Smeshko, and other intelligence organisations decided 'to save their country' when it became apparent that Yanukovich would be declared the victor through the use of widespread fraud. It is believed that the S.B.U. bugged the Yanukovich campaign and made available recordings which showed that the results had been manipulated. The security services also refused to co-operate when Yanukovich wished to declare a state of emergency; they insisted on a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Further, when troops of the Ministry of the Interior (M.V.D.) were on their way to begin a crackdown on demonstrators in the capital, General Oleksander Petruk (the army chief of staff) warned the Interior Ministry that the army was on the side of the people, and that M.V.D. troops would face the army and special forces, not the unarmed protesters they were expecting.

Read the whole fascinating account of the post-election crisis. (I blogged about this subject previously here, and linked to these three posts by Dan Drezner.)

Graner Found Guilty

2005-01-15T01:22:00.000-06:00

Two stories; will comment further soon.

Considering he had Womack, I'm not surprised. Though in all fairness, it would have been a miracle if any lawyer had managed to get him acquitted.

Anti-Torture Legislation Scrapped

2005-01-14T23:59:00.000-06:00

I noticed this Post article a couple of days ago and meant to blog about it, but it somehow slipped my mind. The Post is enlightened enough to keep articles publically available for a couple of weeks after they're published (instead of moving them quickly to a pay-per-view archive), so the link should be good for a while.

The Senate had overwhelmingly (96 to 2) approved restrictions on 'extreme interrogation measures' by American intelligence officers as part of intelligence reform legislation. After pressure from the White House, these restrictions were removed from the bill. One reason given was that the question was 'too complex' to be included in the bill.

I must say I'm not surprised that the current administration would oppose curbs on extreme interrogation, but given that I'm unsure where to draw the line myself, this may not necessarily be a bad thing. Acceptable measures may depend to some extent on the circumstances, which would make legislation on the subject complex. What irked me, though, was the letter opposing the bill written by Ms. Rice.

In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."

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Of course it 'provides legal protections to prisoners to which they are not now entitled'; that was the purpose of the legislation. Does the administration think that this is by definition a bad thing? Imagine that Congress was working on a law on the rights of domestic prisoners. Would the White House object on the grounds that it provides legal protections that go beyond those to which the prisoners are entitled now under law? For a more ridiculous example, consider funding for any government program. Should a bill proposing an increase in funding be stopped because it goes further than the current amount allocated?

I suppose it's useless to expect logic from any government, though. :-)

Forget Graner, Can We Try His Lawyer?

2005-01-14T15:42:00.000-06:00

Guy Womack, attorney for Specialist Charles Graner, leaves me speechless. (See here for an earlier post on his incompetence.)

"Sometimes, when you make an omelet, you have to break some eggs," Mr. Womack told the jury, adding, "You had to use approaches that we would not want to do with our own children."

Because 'our children' are completely different from those heathen Iraqi kids dying from hunger and disease, right?

"They were just taking pictures of what they did at work all day," he said of Specialist Graner and his friends.

Yeah, this is just like taking pictures of a regular day at the office, isn't it? It gets better:

"The crime is that somebody leaked the photographs."

So that's what was wrong; torturing the detainees (many of whom weren't accused of any specific crime) was completely ok. But those criminal whistle-blowers deserve to be strung up.

Graner apparently even sent graphic photographs home to his young children, among others. In reply to a message about 'Take Your Children to Work Day', he said, "How about send a bastard to hell day?"

To be fair, Womack did make one good point: the mistreatment of prisoners was common knowledge.

Specialist Graner, he said, was taking the fall for higher-up officers who he said knew the harsh treatment was routine... "The tragedy here is that because of this embarrassment, now those pictures are orphans, and the United States government and the chain of command and the M.I.'s say, 'We didn't know about that,' " he said, referring to military Intelligence. "You know that was a lie."

I guess I have to agree... the 'few bad apples' theory isn't really tenable. Testimony from other witnesses indicates that even if abuse wasn't widespread, knowledge of it was. Several soldiers have said they witnessed treatment they weren't comfortable with, but they were reassured about these being interrogation techniques.

A Question of Ethics

2005-01-14T01:05:00.000-06:00

As President/Prime Minister of your country, you have to make a choice: either a million of your citizens die, or an innocent person from another country must be brutally tortured. Which do you choose?

I understand that's not a reasonable question; it's completely unlikely to arise in real life, and there are usually other alternatives. But just think about it; I want to use it as a lead-in to other questions.

Does your answer change if the innocent person is from your own country? If the number of your citizens who will die goes down from a million to ten thousand? One thousand? If the person to be tortured is not innocent, but has planned the attack which will kill your citizens?

And in the real world, there are more shades of grey... what if the person to be tortured is only suspected of having planned the attack? Should he/she not be presumed innocent until proved guilty? What if you are not sure that your citizens will die, but have reason to believe that it may happen?

Seriously, ask yourself these questions. I'm not happy with my own answers; perhaps there isn't a set of 'right' answers. Comments are invited.

I have to get up early tomorrow, so more on this subject later.

Making the Best of a Bad Job

2005-01-13T23:56:00.000-06:00

It appears that the administration realizes that the elections in Iraq aren't going to bring a whole lot of good news, so the damage control is already beginning. The Washington Post has a good article on how expectations from the vote have lowered.

[The U.S. is] increasingly emphasizing other steps over the next year as more important to Iraq's political transformation.

The Bush administration played down voter turnout yesterday in determining the elections' legitimacy and urged Americans not to get bogged in a numbers game in judging the balloting, a reflection of the growing concern over how much the escalating insurgency and the problem of Sunni participation may affect the vote.

"I would . . . really encourage people not to focus on numbers, which in themselves don't have any meaning, but to look on the outcome and to look at the government that will be the product of these elections," a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity at a White House briefing yesterday. The official highlighted the low voter turnout in U.S. elections as evidence that polling numbers are not essential to legitimacy.

If there is a better measure than voter turnout to measure a country's faith in democracy, or if a government truly represents a people, I have no idea what it is. And comparing it to the U.S. voter turnout is just plain idiotic: if the turnout in Iraq is in the same ballpark as for the presidential elections here, the elections will probably be deemed a success. Further, his (or her) statement is based on the implicit assumption that the U.S. government is legitimate. Not that I disagree, but if I had been a hostile reporter and present when the statement was made, I would have asked if the low voter turnout did not indicate that the government is illegitimate. At the least, one can infer that a large section of the population:
a) does not support the present form of government
b) is disillusioned with democracy
or
c) doesn't really care.
(No, I don't really believe this is true, but such a statement made by a senior government official always brings out the worst in me; it begs for this kind of response.)

At this late date, the United States also has no viable options or alternatives other than trying to go forward with the Jan. 30 elections, analysts say.

"I don't think they're thinking of a Plan B. What they have is permutations of Plan A: You go for elections, hope for the best and if it doesn't materialize, you go with whatever emerges -- probably a heavily Shiite government," said Henri J. Barkey, a former State Department Iraq specialist who is now head of Leheigh University's International Relations Department. "Then you hope that this new government will be smart enough and enlightened enough to make an outreach to the Sunnis."

So the fate of Iraq rests on the hope that the largely Shiite government will be magnanimous? Before I respond to that, I should mention this op/ed piece in the Times by Thomas Friedman, whose opinion I respect more than that of pretty much anyone in the current administration. He strongly supports elections at the end of the month.

I totally disagree with those who argue that the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections should be postponed. Their main argument is that an Iraqi election that ensconces the Shiite majority in power, without any participation of the Sunni minority, will sow the seeds of civil war.

That is probably true - but we are already in a civil war in Iraq. That civil war was started by the Sunni Baathists, and their Islamist fascist allies from around the region, the minute the U.S. toppled Saddam. And they started that war not because they felt the Iraqi elections were going to be rigged, but because they knew they weren't going to be rigged.

They started the war not to get their fair share of Iraqi power, but in hopes of retaining their unfair share. Under Saddam, Iraq's Sunni minority, with only 20 percent of the population, ruled everyone.
...
Despite my seventh rule, we have a much greater chance of producing a decent outcome in Iraq by appealing to the self-interest of the Kurds and the Shiites to be magnanimous in victory, than we do of getting the fascist insurgents to be magnanimous in defeat.

He makes a good point - that Iraq is already in a civil war - but I think it could get worse. I agree that a significant portion of the Sunnis want a return to the good old days, with a disproportionate amount of power. On the other hand, if the Sunnis have practically no power after the elections, almost the entire Sunni population will become hostile to the new government.

The 'seventh rule' he mentions is: In Middle East politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, "How can I compromise?" And the minute it becomes strong, it will tell you, "Why should I compromise?". Friedman is optimistic, but I doubt that the Shiites will be generous after the elections, particularly since they've been repressed by the Sunni minority for so long. Again, I'm praying I'm wrong; stories like this are reason for optimism.

And in other good news from the Iraq, it has apparently been decided that American troops should not be present in force around polling booths. This is to reassure Iraqis who fear America may intervene/interfere with the results. Has the lack of security been deemed unimportant? Perhaps I'm just sniping needlessly at the government; I trust the commanders on the ground will provide security without a needlessly overt presence at the booths.

More Bad News from Iraq

2005-01-12T23:40:00.000-06:00

The New York Times is carrying two pieces on the forthcoming elections in Iraq.

There are mysterious knocks on his door at night. His friends ask him not to visit. He declines to allow even his first name to be published. This shadowy figure, a young Sunni Muslim from Baghdad, is neither spy nor criminal.

The young man being described is an election worker. Faced with death threats, violent attacks, often murder, Iraqi election workers are "functioning like a political underground", according to an official of the Electoral Council. Many of them believe in democracy, but are resigning now that their families have become targets.

Prime Minister Allawi acknowledges publically that there are provinces which are unsafe for voting, but all the authorities can do is hope that the situation improves by the end of the month. President Bush says that 14 out of 18 provinces are safe, but does not admit that the other 4 (Baghdad, Nineveh, Anbar and Salahadin) contain over half the population of Iraq. Lt. Gen. Metz., the commander of American ground troops, says that he is "not in good shape to hold elections today." Given the length of the American occupation, what reason is there to believe that coalition forces will achieve in two weeks what they have not been able to do in over a year?

The Times editorial is advocating a postponement of elections, and this may not be a bad idea. It may feel like giving in to the terrorists, but reasonably fair elections six months from now are infinitely preferable to a bungled job in seventeen days. The authorities are not even sure whether all the polling stations in the 'Sunni heartland' will be open! Considering that poll booth capturing by armed attackers occurs in India (with a history of over fifty years of democracy, an army deployed during elections, and no popular support for terrorists/naxalites), it's only reasonable to expect the same sort of thing on a much larger scale in Iraq. If the elections are held at the end of this month, it is probable that the Sunnis will feel disenfranchised en masse. The consequences of that are frightening; a civil war becomes a very real possibility. American forces may begin leaving Iraq some time after the elections; if they cut-and-run, Iraq could descend into chaos.

I hate to be a prophet of doom, but I'm profoundly depressed at what's happening in Iraq. I would love to be proved wrong, but I doubt I will be. I can only hope that something remarkable happens in the next fortnight, though I fear that nothing short of divine intervention will make a difference.

In other news, I found this Reuters article about a propaganda video made by Iraqi insurgents, via American Leftist. The makers of the video portray themselves (and they may be justified) as nationalist freedom fighters, not foreign terrorists. The true Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, they allege, were the sanctions and the Oil-for-Food program. Unlike many other videos that have been released, this does not show soldiers being brutally murdered. Instead, a single voice explains calmly (and in English) why 'the resistance' is fighting, their beliefs and their goals. As a result, it is far more effective propaganda than anything I've seen from Iraq. Parts of their message:

We have not crossed the oceans and seas to occupy Britain or the U.S. nor are we responsible for 9/11... We thank all those, including those in Britain and the US, who took to the streets in protest against this war... We also thank France, Germany and other states for their positions, which we need to say are considered wise and valid until now... We ask you to form a world-wide front against war... Know that by helping the Iraqi people, you are helping yourselves, for tomorrow may bring the same destruction to you... To the American soldiers, we say, "Go back to your homes, families and your loved ones. This is not your war, nor are you fighting for a true cause in Iraq."

Of course, parts of it are needlessly jingoistic and Anti-American, but it's fairly well done, overall; at the very least, it makes 'the enemy' seem more human. I do not condone the action of the Iraqi guerrillas, but I do hope more people realise that most of the fighters in Iraq today are not hardened terrorists with an unreasoning hatred for all things American; they were once people just like you and me.

Good luck to Palestine

2005-01-11T01:10:00.001-06:00

Since I'm awake and blogging, I figured I should mention the recent Palestinian elections. I'm very glad Mahmoud Abbas won with a significant mandate; his moderate message and desire for peace lead me to hope the conflict will begin to diminish. (I'm too much of a pessimist to hope it will end, at least in the near future.)

Israel's willingness to work with him and President Bush's invitation to Washington are very positive signs. I like the president's remarks on the subject:

"It is essential that Israel keep a vision of two states living side-by-side in peace, and that as the Palestinians begin to develop the institutions of a state, that the Israel government support the development of those institutions," Mr. Bush said at the White House.

Not particularly profound, perhaps, but something worth remembering.

The only thing that bothered me was the turnout. For a surprisingly long time after the results were declared, none of the reports I read gave figures. I wondered why, but the Times reports that "The Palestinian Central Elections Commission declined to give a figure for the percentage of eligible voters who cast ballots." It's not that bad, though; over half the registered voters showed up, though if the unregistered voters (who were still permitted to vote) are included, the turnout drops to less than 50%.

Israel is no longer "the region's only democracy." Palestine may now count itself as one, as one of Mr. Abbas' allies said. I fear the forthcoming elections in Iraq will not add a third democracy, though; reports from there are very discouraging.

Re-implementing life

2005-01-11T01:10:00.000-06:00

This is incredibly cool. Tom Knight, Drew Endy and others at MIT are working on Synthetic Biology:"specifying every bit of DNA that goes into an organism to determine its form and function in a controlled, predictable way, like etching a microprocessor or building a bridge."

I kind of like the idea of an engineering approach to Biology: while future applications might include things like the mass production of rare drugs or mineral extraction, students at MIT this year are going to focus on building a simple counter. In true engineering style, Endy and Knight came up with Biobricks, a set of standard building blocks (a library of parts, if you will) with a consistent interface. Instead of voltage or current, they are using the rate at which RNA polymerase (which transcribes DNA) moves along the component.

Of course there are ethical issues that will have to be resolved. Eventually, techniques similar to the ones used here may be used to modify the genomes of plants and animals. On the plus side, complete synthesis of genomes (instead of modifications to existing genomes) could allow us to create organisms fundamentally different from any known today, minimizing the risk that they could interact with the environment in undesirable ways. In any event, the fact that science is capable of such things is profoundly exciting.

Via Slashdot.

If you ever need legal help...

2005-01-10T23:54:00.000-06:00

... don't go to Guy Womack. Spc. Charles A. Graner, the first soldier being prosecuted for the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, is unfortunate enough to have Mr. Womack as his lawyer at court martial.

Using naked and hooded detainees to make a human pyramid was much like what cheerleaders "all over America" do at football games, the lawyer, Guy Womack, argued. Putting naked prisoners on leashes was much like what parents in airports and malls do with their toddlers: "They're not being abused," the lawyer told the jury of 10 soldiers, "they're being kept in control."

On the other hand, after what Graner did, he probably deserves this kind of incompetent attorney. I hope that all the guilty soldiers are punished severely. (Note that this is not necessarily the same as the set of soldiers accused of crimes. I'm fairly sure at least some of the senior offenders have managed to escape charges, and it's possible that some of their subordinates are being blamed unfairly.)

Writing for Children

2005-01-08T01:00:00.000-06:00

Part of my New Year's resolution about blogging was that I would try to avoid consecutive negative posts. It's difficult when you read things like this right after blogging about Alberto Gonzales. I'll leave it to people like Democracy for Virginia to write about Virginia's ridiculous proposed bill requiring women who suffer miscarriages to report it to the police within 12 hours, failing which they could be imprisoned for upto a year and fined $2500 for their heinous crime. This ranks as a class 1 misdemeanour, along with statutory rape, arson, stalking, and bomb threats by minors. (Considering that you intend to leave it to other people to tell the story, you managed to write quite a bit! - ed.)

What I am going to blog about, then, is C.S. Lewis' wonderful essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children. I read this in Cleveland; it was appended to a lovely edition of The Chronicles of Narnia. He explains why good writing for children is good writing for adults, which is why we enjoy at fifty the stories we enjoyed at twelve. The essay is such a gem that I went out and bought the book because I had to have it, and couldn't find it anywhere on the Internet. If it weren't copyrighted, I would host it myself. As it is, I've typed in a large part of it to email to friends, but beyond that, I cannot in good conscience call it personal or fair use. What I can do, though, is to reproduce the conclusion:

Once in a hotel dining-room I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes." "So do I," came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funnny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. Of the far higher and more difficult relations between child and parent or child and teacher, I say nothing. An author, as a mere author, is outside all that. He is not even an uncle. He is a freeman and an equal, like the postman, the butcher, and the dog next door.

Readers are invited to name their 3 favourite children's books (or series, or authors) which still appeal greatly to them. Only books written for children count; not books which you happened to enjoy as a child because you were precocious. The 3 I'll list are (not necessarily my favourites, and in no particular order):
1. The Chronicles of Narnia themselves
2. Most (if not all) of Edith Nesbit's work
3. Richmal Crompton's William books

What are yours?

Ashcroft's sucessor

2005-01-07T22:36:00.000-06:00

I must confess I was thrilled when John Ashcroft's resignation from the post of Attorney-General was announced. Unfortunately, Alberto Gonzales doesn't seem to be much better. The New York Times has a few editorials on the subject.

The Associated Press headline that came over the wire yesterday said it all: "Gonzales Will Follow Non-Torture Policies."

You know how bad the situation is when the president's choice for attorney general has to formally pledge not to support torture anymore.

Unfortunately, that seems to be one of the few direct answers he gave; the rest of his Senate hearing was marked by evasion. This Post editorial describes it further.

At the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, Mr. Gonzales repeatedly was offered the chance to repudiate a legal judgment that the president is empowered to order torture in violation of U.S. law and immunize torturers from punishment. He declined to do so. He was invited to reject a 2002 ruling made under his direction that the infliction of pain short of serious physical injury, organ failure or death did not constitute torture. He answered: "I don't have a disagreement with the conclusions then reached." Nor did he condemn torture techniques, such as simulated drowning, that were discussed and approved during meetings in his office. "It is not my job," he said, to decide if they were proper.

Also, he claimed to have forgotten his role in the policy on the treatment of prisoners. How can one forget something like that? This is the man who believes "Cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment of prisoners is not necessarily torture." In a Jan. 25, 2002, memo to Bush, Gonzales said the new war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners."
This says it all: In response to the question of whether US personnel could legally engage in torture under any circumstances, , Gonzales didn't give an unequivocal "No." Instead, he said, "I don't believe so, but I'd want to get back to you on that."

(Retired) General Wesley Clark had it right in this Hardball interview. "How", he asks, "can the American people have confidence in a man like Gonzales after what he's written for the President of the United States?"

There's no reason to hope he won't be confirmed by the Senate, so there's probably no point my complaining about it. I had hoped the president would select as Attorney General a man known for his integrity, someone who would uphold the law regardless of inconvenience to the adminstration. Instead, we get a man with 'an inspiring life story', a man whose most positive quality is loyalty to the President.

Stuffed Omelettes!

2005-01-07T21:58:00.000-06:00

Everything I wanted to blog about is ridiculously depressing; NOT how I wanted to begin the new year. So our first post is on a subject I've never touched before: cooking. Considering I couldn't cook at all before coming to Champaign-Urbana, it's remarkable how much I enjoy it now. I was feeling slightly out-of-sorts, so I decided to try something different for dinner. We've been eating a fair amount of chicken and fish lately, so I decided to try omelettes with a completely vegetarian stuffing: a mushroom persillade. I was improvising, but they came out fairly well; perhaps I'll experiment a little more sometime. For now, though, here's the recipe, meant to serve 3:

6 eggs (2 per omelette. 3 each is entirely reasonable, but my roommates would have none of it!)
4-6 tablespoons of cubed mushrooms
1 clove garlic, chopped fine
1 tablespoon shallots, chopped fine
3 tablespoons of chopped parsley
1 tablespoon butter
a hint of chives (added at the last minute for no discernible reason)
Salt and pepper to taste. (I thought half a teaspoon of salt per omelette would be excessive, but it turned out just right.)

Blend the persillade ingredients: parsley, garlic and shallots. Melt the butter in a skillet, and add the mushrooms and persillade. Saute for a few minutes, stirring well, and take the mix off the fire.
For each omelette, beat the eggs with salt and pepper, and add the chives. The manner of adding the stuffing depends on your skillet and personal preferences. If you have a reasonably large skillet, you probably want to add oil and heat it well; the omelette will cook in seconds. If so, add a third of the mushroom persillade to the beaten eggs and mix well before pouring the eggs onto the pan.
Our omelette skillet is too small for this technique to work well when cooking more than a single egg. What works for me is to add the eggs to the skillet when the oil is not too hot, immediately followed by the mushroom persillade.
The rest is standard omelette mechanics; remember to serve hot!

I'm back...

2005-01-07T21:36:00.000-06:00

... in town after a wonderful holiday, and back to serious blogging. This post is merely for updates on my life for everyone who asked.

I was in Seattle for Christmas, where I spent time with my cousins Rohan and Susan. From Seattle, I went to Cleveland, where I celebrated New Year's day with Natasha and Jesse. (Actually, I seem to recall we celebrated every day but New Year's; we got up that morning, a little disgruntled at the lack of a church service, drove around Cleveland until we realized that every place we wanted to go was closed for the holiday, then went back and vegetated on the couch until dinner.) Actually, I seemed to eat and sleep through most of the holiday... exactly what I needed after a hectic semester and the nightmare that was grading the CS 225 final.

One of the highlights of the trip was learning to play golf; another was The Incredibles (and, of course, Bouncin'). Spanglish was nowhere near as good. Still better was the quantity of shopping I got done; I came back to Champaign-Urbana with over 20 books, 2 paintings now on display in my living room, a dart board, and a miniature foosball table, among other things. Best of all was the time spent with family I hadn't been with in a long time.

Two New Year's resolutions
1. To post here more often!
2. To be more grateful for the wonderful people in my life... my family (all of whom came through the Tsunami okay in spite of being in affected areas; a cousin and his wife had a very near escape.) and friends. I'm not going to list all their names and risk leaving someone out by accident; you all know who you are, and you should also know that I love you very much.

I think I'll move on to some serious posts before this gets any more sentimental. Happy New Year, everyone!

Why don't I get credit for Blogging?

2004-12-17T16:12:00.000-06:00

Students who register for "Internet and Society" at Northwestern University this winter are going to be required to maintain a blog. Over at Crooked Timber, Eszter Hargittai describes her ideas and motivation. The course will focus on "the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the Internet." The first two lines of the course description: "What's it like to maintain a blog? How about if you are in Iran or China?"

I found it interesting that several of her commenters say that they have been using blogs for coursework for a while now, and that students seem to respond well. Extra credit for blogging might make me post more regularly. (Don't you blog enough already? You have a final in two hours! - ed. Yes, but I can't disappoint my adoring public. Derisive laughter from ye ed.. Ok, ok, point taken. One last comment and I'll go.)

There was a rumour floating around that Time magazine was considering naming 'The Blogger' its person of the year. (Unfortunately, it now appears that they've decided to go with George Bush.) What is the world coming to?

Soldiers accused of War Crimes

2004-12-13T23:11:00.000-06:00

This Washington Post article is horrifying. I sincerely hope the soldiers accused are innocent of any misconduct; but it seems unlikely. As a longtime fan of the US military, I'm extremely depressed by this turn of events.

Interestingly enough, I was thinking about the U.S. Army a couple of days ago. I read an article which casually mentioned 'Col. McMaster' as commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. I was curious to see if this was (then Capt.) H. R. McMaster, who commanded Eagle Troop at the Battle of 73 Easting in the first Gulf War. He was then in the 2d ACR, and I distinctly remember that when I first read about the battle a few years ago, I wondered if he would ever command the regiment. I checked, and it's the same McMaster; I was nearly right, but he's commanding the 3rd ACR instead of the 2nd. For some strange reason, reading about his promotion made my day.

The mind is a remarkable thing; there was no reason that I should have remembered McMaster's name, still less that I should be so pleased about his promotion. What's even more strange is that I have a terrible memory for names in general, but I remember from an interview I read (years ago) that his wife's name is Katie! And yet I often struggle to remember the names of authors of papers I read months ago.

For everyone surprised by my interest in things military: Several years ago, I developed an interest in first small-unit tactics and then the intellectual challenge of developing strategy for larger units in wartime, when information is often unreliable or incomplete. In particular, Armored Cavalry fascinated me because of their emphasis on combined arms at all levels. I've always been impressed by U.S. equipment, training and doctrine.

And for the curious, the Battle of 73 Easting was one of the key actions in the Gulf War of 1991. Eagle Troop of the 2nd ACR, led by Capt. McMaster, made contact with the Iraqi forces and began an assault. With the support of two other troops, they destroyed an entire brigade of the Tawakalna division of the crack Republican Guards. U.S. losses to Iraqi fire amounted to one vehicle and one soldier. The battle is regarded as almost a textbook example of small-unit operations, and has been re-constructed in almost every detail by DARPA for use in simulations.

Yushchenko Definitely Poisoned

2004-12-11T17:12:00.000-06:00

I hadn't blogged about the Ukrainian presidential election results before, because I didn't really have anything to say. There's been lots of media coverage; Dan Drezner has a good roundup. In a nutshell, the official results declared a victory for the departing president's protege, Viktor F. Yanukovich. There were widespread allegations of fraud, and supporters of Viktor A. Yushchenko,the opposition candidate, paralysed Ukraine for several days. Given that most (Western-run) exit polls showed a double-digit lead for Yushchenko, most outside observers are convinced that the polls were rigged.

Just to make it more interesting, Viktor Yushchenko fell seriously ill during the campaign. The mystery illness changed his appearance completely; he looks haggard and worn now, while he had been known for almost-movie-star looks earlier. (CNN has good before/after pictures here.) Yushchenko alleged that he had been poisoned; his detractors claimed he had eaten bad sushi. Today, the Times is carrying a story from the International Herald Tribune confirming that Yuschenko had been poisoned. Tests conducted in Vienna indicate that this was a severe case of dioxin poisoning.

I'm not sure what this will mean for Ukraine; I hope it doesn't endanger the agreement to conduct new elections.

All Your Crustless (PB&J) Sandwich are Belong to Us

2004-12-09T19:21:00.000-06:00

U.S. Patent No. 6004596 gives Smucker's broad protection on its "sealed crustless sandwich". In 2001, Albie's Food Inc., a small grocery company selling pastries and sandwiches, received a Cease and Desist letter which accused them of violating Smucker's Intellectual Property by selling crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

IEEE Spectrum is carrying an article which comments on the woeful state of the U.S.P.T.O and suggests fixes. Their ideas are reasonable and will probably improve the efficiency of the patent office while decreasing the number of frivolous patents issued. I suppose that means they have a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being implemented.

Why, yes, I'm feeling cynical today. However did you notice?

PISA 2003: Survey Results

2004-12-07T17:23:00.000-06:00

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has conducted it's second study of learning skills among 15-year olds. The study (called PISA, to be conducted every three years) was first performed in 2000, and then again last year. Results from PISA 2003 have just been released by OECD. The main focus in this study was on mathematics, while PISA 2000 was only a reading assessment. Over 250,000 students from 41 countries participated in the study; countries that were not OECD members could also choose to be included.

Finnish students were overall the most proficient, though four other countries (Korea, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein and Japan; all in the top 8 overall) had a greater percentage of students at the highest proficiency level. Incidentally, Finland had also led in the reading assessment of PISA 2000. The U.S. was 28th out of 40 countries, just behind Latvia and ahead of Portugal and the Russian Federation. Interestingly, Canada has the third highest performance overall.

The full report is available as a PDF from the OECD website. So far I've only managed to skim through the entire 471-page report; I would read it through except for the fact that I was meant to be working on a unit project for the last 2 hours. They have some obvious conclusions ("Both students and schools perform best in a climate characterised by high expectations [and] supported through strong teacher-student relations"; "Students whose parents have better-paid jobs, are better educated ... perform on average significantly better in all countries than those without such advantages") and some interesting ones.

From the PDF or OECD article, some things that struck me were:
1. Australia, Canada, Finland and Japan stand out for high standards of both quality and equity, with above-average mathematics performance and below-average impact of socio-economic background on student performance.
2. Poland had a dramatic variation of performance between schools in the original study; this has shrunk drastically after the school system was integrated in the intervening period.
3. Most countries have more boys than girls among top mathematics performers, resulting in a slight overall advantage for boys in average terms. On the other hand, boys and girls tend to be equally represented among the low-performers. It's interesting to note that girls attend the higher performing, academically oriented tracks and schools at a higher rate than boys but, within schools, girls often perform significantly below boys. Girls also consistently report lower interest in and enjoyment of mathematics than boys.
4. Better performance was often related to an enjoyment of mathematics, but perception of ability was not as strongly correlated to ability as one might expect. About a third of US children (ranked 28th overall) did not feel as though they were good at math, but nearly two-thirds of Koreans (ranked 2nd) felt the same. (Editorializing: Has worrying about students self-esteem hurt academic performance? Increasingly, schools are refusing to differentiate between students for fear of hurting the image students have of themselves. Readers Digest recently ran a story on how schools are refusing to recognise true merit; some high schools had 50 to 100 valedictorians! In Nashville, one high school principal was told he couldn't release the names of high scorers at basketball games. Another school couldn't announce the winner of the spelling bee! But I digress... I'll leave the subject for a future post)
5. The US also seems to have the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. The performance in reading (18th out of 40) is better than that in math, though. "While spending on educational institutions is important," the report says, "it is not sufficient to achive high levels of outcomes." (I wish more administrators would realize that throwing money at the problem wouldn't work!)

Unfortunately, India isn't rated. I'm curious about how Indian students would have performed. I suspect that the reading assessment results would have been abysmal, but the mathematics results very good. This is entirely due to the fact that only students still in school at the age of 15 participate in the survey; the majority of Indian children have dropped out of school by this time, if they ever attended. (It's technically illegal in most states to not send children to school, but this is rarely, if ever, enforced.) Glancing through the questions, I would be shocked if the average 15-year old Indian still in school couldn't solve at least half of the problems listed as most difficult (Level 6). (See my previous post on high-school math curricula.)

From the section titled "The PISA approach to Assessing Mathematics Performance":

PISA therefore presents students with problems mainly set in real-world situations. These are crafted in such a way that aspects of mathematics would be of genuine benefit in solving the problem. The objective of the PISA assessment is to obtain measures of the extent to which students presented with these problems can activate their mathematical knowledge and competencies to solve such problems successfully.
This approach to mathematics contrasts with a traditional understanding of school mathematics which is often narrower. In schools, mathematical content is often taught and assessed in ways that are removed from authentic contexts – e.g., students are taught the techniques of arithmetic, then given an arithmetic computation to complete; they are shown how to solve particular types of equations, then given further similar equations to solve; they are taught about geometric properties and relationships, then given a theorem to prove. Having learned the relevant concepts, skills and techniques, students are typically given contrived mathematical problems that call for the application of that knowledge.

Indian (and Asian, in general) schools usually use the latter (traditional/narrower) approach, in contrast to many Western schools which teach mathematics the way PISA tests it. So I find it strange that Korea, Hong Jong, Macao and Japan would be in the top 8, and I believe India would be up there with them. (Assuming, of course, that questions were appropriately translated into the local language and cultural context; I can see the average Indian student having difficulty on the question about skateboarding.) Perhaps the PISA test doesn't measure what they think it does, then.

The New York Times story had some interesting insights; they've obviously spent a lot more time analysing it than I have... With luck I'll get to it after Finals week. (Don't forget all the exams you'll have to grade! - ed. Siiigh - you had to remind me, didn't you?)

Word-of-Mouth Advertising

2004-12-05T17:17:00.000-06:00

I was taking a break from an assignment and saw this article on Slashdot, based on a New York Times magazine story. (Warning: 9 pages!)

Convinced that everyday conversation is the most powerful medium for consumer seduction, companies have begun organizing advertising campaigns based solely on word-of-mouth publicity, and results have been fairly good. Whether you think this is downright sleazy or the coolest thing since the GPL (Slashdot is having a hard time making up its collective mind), the NY Times article is well worth the read.

Give Thanks!

2004-11-21T13:58:00.000-06:00

I suspect that the thing I'm most grateful for this year is the fact that we get a week off for Thanksgiving; I need the break! I'm looking forward to seeing Boston and New York and meeting family. Photographs will be forthcoming.

Oh, and I've always been curious about this: What's the origin of "the Bean and Cod"? I googled it, but was surprised to find no useful links except for a poem by William Corbett. I'm too lazy to look it up, so I'd be grateful for a reference.

Updates from Iraq

2004-11-21T13:45:00.000-06:00

The Iraqi Electoral commission has confirmed that national elections will be held on Jan 30th. A commission spokesman, Farid Ayar, said that violence-prone areas like Falluja and Mosul will have elections at the same time.

"No Iraqi province will be excluded because the law considers Iraq as one constituency, and therefore it is not legal to exclude any province," he said.

In other news, the Post reports that American forces have found the houses where several hostages were tortured and killed in Falluja. The city appears to be slowly coming under American/Iraqi control, but an increasing number of resistance fighters are using white flags to pose as civilians and then attack deceived soldiers.

One can only hope that elections bring some peace to the country, but it seems doubtful.

And finally...

2004-11-09T18:33:00.000-06:00

Firefox 1.0 has been launched. Download it today!

Fighting in Fallujah

2004-11-07T22:40:00.000-06:00

Not that it wasn't expected, but Fallujah is under attack. What's most disturbing is that Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has declared a state of emergency, not exactly the best start to democracy. Quoting the Times and Post:

Hours earlier, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, faced with an expanding outbreak of insurgent violence across the country, formally proclaimed a state of emergency for 60 days across most of Iraq. The proclamation gave him broad powers that allow him to impose curfews, order house-to-house searches and detain suspected criminals and insurgents. The order will run for 60 days but could be extended through elections planned for January.

An Eternal Golden Braid

2004-11-07T01:09:00.000-06:00

I'm reading (for the first time, much as it pains me to admit it!) Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I had meant to read it on many previous occasions, but never got around to it; now, that seems like criminal procrastination. So far, it's a superb book; the author's idea to intersperse dialogues with chapters was nothing less than inspired.

I expected to like the book and find the material not too difficult to follow (Four years of a Computer Science had to have been good for something! -ed.), but the presentation is so lucid that the material should be accessible to a high school student with no exposure to formal systems and so on. In fact, the author's interest in the subject was sparked when he was in high school and read Godel's Proof by Nagel and Newman.

Definitely one of November's Books of the Month!

High School curricula

2004-11-06T15:30:00.000-06:00

Continuing our math theme, we just conducted our second CS225 mid-term, and I've been grading exams for the last few days. I've noticed something interesting; students tend to provide reasonably good answers to questions which require them to write code, but are often unable to write proofs/justification for running times and correctness of algorithms. When I find a particularly good answer to a mathematical question, I often turn to the front and check the student's name out of curiosity; it appears that the best solutions are often written by non-Americans (judging solely by names). Before I get flamed for being racist, I should reiterate that I mean American, not Caucasian. Students of different ethnicities who went through school in America don't seem to do better than average; at least, I haven't noticed any evidence of it.

The most compelling reason for the discrepancy that I can find (since I absolutely refuse to accept any claim that Americans are 'inherently' less mathematically able than others) is the difference in the way Math is taught at the school level. (Disclaimer: I only have India as a basis for comparison, so perhaps this isn't reasonable either.) An Indian student who enters engineering college has already studied (differential and integral) calculus for two years, probability and statistics for at least as long, some form of co-ordinate geometry (with its emphasis on proofs) and algebra for over five years, besides some combinatorics, matrix algebra, and complex analysis. Some high school syllabi even include a fair bit of group theory! Graders in India also tend to be demanding (bordering on ruthless!) when evaluating exams, so students quickly learn when an answer is sufficiently precise to deserve full credit.

So is that a better system? I'm not sure; many Indian students never see a complex number after leaving high school and years of demanding Math often leave them hating the subject. I know several Indians who feel uncomfortable answering an exam question unless they're reasonably sure how to do it; a lack of partial credit (much less common in India than in America) discourages people from risk-taking. And I've noticed that American students are often more creative with solutions to both exam problems and random problems discussed in section, which makes teaching fun. It looks like they make up most of the relative deficiency in college, so doing less math in school doesn't seem like much of a loss. Perhaps the syllabi will change to embrace the best of both systems.

Right now, though, I often wish that there were more emphasis on rigorously correct solutions. Some of the best students seem to think that proof by example is completely reasonable! And it always makes me feel like I've done a terrible job in section when I have to grade papers which make warm, fuzzy statements like:

Trees are a Good Thing (tm) in general when compared to lists (except when they (the trees) are unbalanced, but that doesn't happen for Red-Black Trees (because they are always balanced), so it doesn't make a difference to this answer) and so searching in a tree is usually better than in a list (because we don't have to look at all the tree nodes), so we would rather use a tree.

(Admit it, that's an exaggeration! -ed.) Granted, but I yearn for a plain O(log n)!

Math was never this interesting

2004-11-05T22:26:00.000-06:00

2 is an interesting number : Among other things it is the smallest prime. Ramanujam's number ,1729, is interesting, it is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two cubes in two different ways. Perhaps the largest interesting number we know of is Graham's number.

Is it possible to define exactly what the set of 'interesting' numbers is? Not in any non-trivial way, if you're working with only the natural numbers. Suppose I is a set of of interesting numbers, such that I' is non-empty. Let d be the least element of I'. Since d is the least non-interesting number, it is therefore interesting. This contradicts the assumption that I' is non-empty. Therefore we have,

Theorem: There does not exist a set of dull natural numbers.

Corollary : Every natural number is interesting.

This argument can be extended to any countable set of numbers. How about the real numbers?

Can there exist a dull set of real numbers? Maybe, as long as they are uncountable and do not contain any natural numbers (or integers or rationals) , for then the least such natural number (or integer or rational) would be interesting.

It might seem that since a countable set can always be embedded into such a uncountable dull set of real numbers, its minimum element must always be interesting, but we have to be careful here. We cannot consider arbitrary orderings since they are not interesting.

Thus, if there exists only a countable number of interesting orderings, then there must exist a set of dull real numbers, because each interesting number can also be represented as the least element of an interesting ordering (interesting because it has an interesting element as its least element). Assuming the continuum hypothesis, the converse follows.

(Disclaimer: This article was written after drinking one too many tequila shots and should therefore be taken with a generous dose of salt, rather like the tequila.)

Four More Years!

2004-11-03T01:58:00.000-06:00

It looks like President Bush will return to the White House for another 4 years. It was evident for several hours that Ohio would decide the election. With 98% of Ohio precincts reporting results, President Bush leads by 51% to 49%, a margin of 136,000 votes. Provisional and absentee ballots are still uncounted, but given that there won't be more than 250,000 of these (a very loose upper bound) and that some of them will be disallowed, I think it's unlikely that Senator Kerry will win enough of these to offset the Bush margin.

Still, the Kerry campaign is not giving up. Mary Beth Cahill, one of the campaign managers said, "The vote count in Ohio has not been completed. There are more than 250,000 remaining votes to be counted. We believe when they are, John Kerry will win Ohio." A few minutes ago, Vice Presidential candidate Senator John Edwards made this announcement to the Democratic supporters outside campaign headquarters: "We've waited four years for this victory, so we can wait one more night."

Since many Democrats were unhappy with Al Gore for not fighting "hard enough or smart enough" (quoting George Stephanopoulos) after the Florida debacle four years ago, Senator Kerry is understandably unwilling to concede the election until he has explored every avenue that could lead to victory. I'm not exactly thrilled by the prospect of a protracted battle, though; such wrangling could have the effect of polarizing the country further. Surely the statisticians employed by the Kerry campaign have reported exactly how unlikely it is that the Senator can pull off a win.

The Republicans appear set to dominate Congress as well. They held 51 seats in the Senate earlier; they have 52 so far, and are leading in all 3 seats for which final results have not been declared. Democrat Tom Daschle, the Senate Minority Leader, appears to be one of the casualties. The Republicans will also probably have a comfortable majority in the House. We'll have to wait to see how all this plays out.

Record Voter Turnouts?

2004-11-02T13:24:00.000-06:00

Looking through early news stories, one thing is clear: regardless of who wins, the turnout at this election will be among the highest in recent memory. In spite of heavy rain in many parts of the country, this election is expected to witness at least 118 million voters, and may set the all-time record. Two newsbites that struck me:

From the New York Times,

In North Philadelphia, Valerie Morman, a legal secretary, walked to her polling place at St. Malachy School. "The last time I voted," she said, "was about 20 years ago."

From the Washington Post,

In north Milwaukee, 19-year-old Maurice Dodson waited in a long line to cast the first presidential vote of his life. "No way I'm leaving," he said after an hour with no ballot in sight. "I'm very excited.

In just a few more hours...

2004-10-31T22:55:00.000-06:00

... just over 48, to be precise, the result of the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections will be known. Assuming, of course, that the election doesn't have to be decided by the Supreme Court again; a state of affairs that I'm sure nobody would like. I'm not going to comment further now, though; I'll be up all night on Tuesday as the results come in and will post any thoughts then.

Oh, and a Happy Halloween to all my readers!

Seen in a Slashdotter's signature

2004-10-25T00:46:00.000-05:00

"With Microsoft, you get Windows. With Linux, you get the full house" - original source unknown.

Enough said. :-))

More Bad News in Iraq

2004-10-24T23:54:00.000-05:00

The New York Times is carrying two stories from Iraq. The first covers the loss of 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives from Al Qaqaa, a former Iraqi military facility now (at least nominally) under American control. From the article:

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal I.A.E.A. memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it.

"After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything was under the coalition forces, under their control," Dr. Omar (Rasheed Omar, the Iraqi minister of Science and Technology) said. "So probably they can answer this question, what happened to the materials."

Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that question. One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.

Granted, it might not have been possible to secure every pound of arms and munitions in Iraq, but 380 tons of HDX and RDX? Assuming that the looters used 10-ton trucks to carry the explosives away, they would have needed a convoy of 40 trucks! And no-one noticed? (Perhaps they took it away in smaller chunks at a time - ed.) That's even worse; it implies that they waltzed in and out of the facility on a regular basis! Incompetency doesn't begin to describe this. One can only shrug in wonder at his capacity for self-delusion when President Bush portrays himself as the only candidate capable of winning the 'War on Terror'.

In the second story, Edward Wong reports that fifty freshly trained Iraqi soldiers were ambushed and killed by insurgents dressed as police officers in eastern Iraq. He writes

The executions of the Iraqi soldiers on Saturday evening - and what may also have been three civilian drivers in their convoy - raised disturbing questions about the training process and the recruits: Why were the guardsmen allowed to travel unarmed and without protection, given the frequent attacks on the Iraqi security forces? Why did men trained as soldiers not put up a fight, especially when there were so many of them? How did the insurgents get police uniforms and information on the travel plans of the soldiers?

Iraqi and American officials said they had no immediate answers.

One can't invent this kind of story... and there's no need to comment on it. In other news from Iraq, Edward J. Seitz, a 16-year employee of the State Department was killed this morning in a mortar or rocket attack on Camp Victory, near Baghdad International Airport. Camp Victory is the U.S. military's operations center in Iraq. Mr. Seitz seems to be the first American diplomat to be killed in the war.

After a day filled with bad news, a little thing can sometimes make a huge positive difference. This statement in a Washington Post article on voter rights and harassment moved me nearly to tears.

"I'm excited to cast my first vote," said Heidi Carrillo, 24, a new registrant who was born in the United States to illegal immigrants. "They can ask for ID. They can make me last in the line. I don't care. I'm voting!"

Isn't that what democracy is all about?

Biological Nomenclature

2004-10-17T23:57:00.000-05:00

Slashdot ran a story on Taxonomy and amusing nomenclature today. Mark Isaak collected some names worth a second look. The page is fairly detailed, but here are some of the more amusing names.

Ba Humbugi (endodontoid snail) from Mba island, Fiji.
Eubetia Bigaulae (tortricid moth, pronounced You betcha, by golly)
Pieza Kake, Pieza Pi, Pieza Rhea (mythicomyiid fly)
Strategus Longichomperus (Honduran scarab with elongated mandibles)
Ytu Brutus (water beetle)
Eristalis gatesi (a flower fly, named after Bill Gates. Someone decided he deserved a bug named after him!)
Montypythonoideriversleighensis (An extinct python whose remains were found at Riversleigh in Queensland, Australia, it was named in a tribute to comedy)
Fiordichthys slartibartfasti (a fish named after Slartibartfast - the award-winning Fjord designer in the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Commelina (day-flower, named after the three members of the Dutch Commelin family, two of whom prospered. The flower has three petals, one of which is small, pale, and shriveled.)
Mephitis mephitis (common striped skunk, variously translated "noxious vapours noxious vapours", "stench stench" or my favourite, "smelliest of the smelly")

Scientists with a sense of humour... my favourite form of life!

Photographs of Champaign-Urbana

2004-10-17T23:29:00.000-05:00

Champaign-Urbana is a beautiful town, and Fall is one of its best seasons. I've been meaning to capture some of my favourite views, but never seemed to have the time. I dug my camera out this weekend and finally took a few photographs. I didn't intend to photoblog, but since Faraz and a couple of other people asked for photographs, here they are:

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus.
Photographs of our apartment.
Fall in Champaign-Urbana.
Siebel Center for Computer Science. This is very much a work in progress; my snaps of Siebel are very sketchy at the moment.

I uploaded them to Ofoto, but suspect that eventually I'll host them myself at UIUC. Another task for my to-do list. Sigh!

AI-Complete

2004-10-17T23:21:00.000-05:00

Ditch (Deepak Ramachandran for the non-cognoscenti) has launched a blog of his own. As you can tell from its title, it's meant to be a weblog about AI research.

... (M)ostly this blog is about the discipline of AI as a distinct subfield of Computer Science - The effort to build machines that think, know, learn and are aware. Along the way, if we could define what these terms mean exactly, well that would certainly help. I hope to take it in the same direction as Lance Fortnow's Computational Complexity Blog.

Ditch was an occasional contributor to Pseudo-random Thoughts; with luck we'll hear more from him now. I hope he'll continue to grace us with guest posts here, though.