How not to legislate

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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...

... 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.