Fred Karlsson, head of the linguistics department at Helsinki, has on his web-page a generated list of word-forms for one Finnish word stem: kauppa (“shop”). It has 2253 forms. A random sampling:

kauppa-mme-kin-ko-han NOM SG PL1 KIN KO HAN
oh, our shops also [reference to earlier utterance]?
kauppo-j-e-si-kaan GEN PL SG2 KAAN
not even that/those of/from/belonging to your shops
kauppo-j-a-an-ko-s PTV PL SGPL3 KO S
oh, [absence-of-action-that-would-be-directed-towards] his/her shops [challenge/emphasis]?
kaupo-i-ksi-kin TRA PL KIN
[affirmative], to/into shops also

All perfectly parseable, at least to me. It rules to be a speaker of both a brutally synthetic language like Finnish and a strongly analytic language like English.

The Minister of Migration and European Affairs (I won’t even comment on that title) Astrid Thors is very understanding of Islamic culture. She’s not like those despicable racists who talk about things like crime and unemployment rates among immigrant populations from cultures that are totally incompatible with life in Finland. Now her understanding of Islamic culture has even reached the point where she can educate Muslims about their own religion. She comments on the recently founded Islamist party of Finland:

[The Islamist party] aims to incorporate Islamic Sharia law into Finnish legal practices, which is against Islam.

Oh really? Practically all Islamic countries have legislation either directly based on Sharia or strongly influenced by it. “Muslim leaders” frequently demand or praise the use of Sharia within Muslim communities. Parts of it are based on the Koran and the hadith, both holy texts of Islam. But no, we mustn’t let the Muslims themselves define Islam, because they usually want things no-one in their right mind would want, so it’s better to have Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila and Astrid Thors tell us want Islam is really like.

[Finnish law] does not require political parties to accept democratic principles or to respect human rights. [This] indicates a significant loophole in our legislation.

This is possibly even more stupid. It’s precisely what people who don’t understand the concept of democracy say every time they notice that some people want to radically change the rules: that the point of having a democracy is to abide by certain principles some very clever people from the United Nations made up. It isn’t! Having a democracy is the point of a democracy. Democracies actually produce terrible laws, start wars and break the UN-rules all the time, but we live with it because it’s democratic. There is no humanitarian God (not even Thors) to tell us what to do, there’s just people – nothing else. The same thing happened with the Dutch paedophile party a couple of years ago: perfectly normal people came out with things like “there are limits to democracy”. A fascist sentiment if I ever heard one.

If we don’t want an Islamic society, let’s not have an Islamic society. There’s no need to lie about what it would mean.

The Finnish parliament has been rocked by allegations that male members of parliament sexually harass women who work there, especially young female assistants of other MP’s. The allegations have been so vague that it’s impossible to comment on the situation, but the brouhaha has prompted some broader discussion that I find interesting.

I listened to a programme about the whole thing on the radio yesterday in the bus I was taking home (bus drivers almost always listen to Finnish iskelmä music, but this was a more academically inclined driver). The narrator said something like:

Sexual harassment is a controversial topic, but there are at least two things everyone can agree on. Sexual harassment exists in our society, and it must be removed from our society.

Not to sound like a sex offender, but that depends on what you mean by sexual harassment. No, really! For example, one of the cases of harassment referenced in the case of the Finnish Parliament, a middle-aged man was said to have placed his hand on the shoulder of a younger woman and said “Let’s take a look at these documents together.” Thus described, that situation could be anything: completely mundane or highly creepy. Obviously, some kind of metric is needed to assess when sexual harassment has happened.

And there’s the rub: people have wildly differing ideas on what constitutes unacceptable behaviour. I’ve understood that the minimum requirement from the legal standpoint is that it’s only harassment if it happens repeatedly, the harasser is asked to stop and it keeps going on after that. That seems reasonable, but I’ve heard considerably more fleeting situations being described as “harassment”. So what kind of behaviour counts? There are essentially two schools here: one is “it’s harassment if the harassee says it is” and the other is “it’s harassment if society at large says it is”.

The radio programme seemed to subscribe to the former view. It was a lot like the Wikipedia definition: “Sexual harassment is harassment or unwelcome attention of a sexual nature.” To rephrase what the radio said, our society should be such that unwelcome attention of a sexual nature doesn’t exist. Now, I don’t know about you, but every way I try to imagine such a society seems worse than the one we’re living in. It’s a bit like wanting to remove meanness, nastiness or gossiping – sounds kind of positive, but is actually completely impossible and even undesirable to achieve. If everyone has the right to be offended by anything and to have the authorities intervene on their behalf, life becomes impossible.

Of course, the situation in the Finnish Parliament is especially prone to the real problems of sexual harassment: power-mad older men, living away from their families, interacting with younger women who work in positions of far lower status and power. It’s really all about power: try to imagine a woman with a high-status job seeking protection from sexual harassment coming from men in low-status jobs. What we really want to stop is people abusing their power in social situations in the workplace. That includes low-status men being terrorized by their high-status male supervisors, something I’d bet happens more than sexual harassment. It’s also extremely difficult to define or punish; the culture accepts what the culture accepts. The real challenge is to change the culture. Which, by the way, is never going to happen – people are always going to be horrible to each other. All we can hope for is slow & slight improvement, and to be decent people ourselves.

Some time ago, when spending a lot of time talking about things like these appeared to be a reasonable thing to do, a friend of mine said that

It’s important to distinguish between different meanings of the word “exist”. I realised recently that in the sentence “the world exists” I use the word the same way I would use it in “all the possible chess games exist.”

At first I didn’t quite understand what that meant, so I instinctively thought it didn’t mean much of anything. Here’s how I later made sense of it:

1) “All the possible chess games” are in this case obviously considered to have existed before they were played (some games haven’t even been played yet). They kind of emerge out of the possibility of them being played, or the space for them is created by the rules of chess.

2) But of course the rules themselves are just arbitrary information, and as such they too existed before they were actually spoken or written down. This is also true of, say, mathematical proofs: a proof is correct even before someone discovers it and checks it for correctness.

3) So there is really no difference between information existing and not existing, some of it is just modelled in our biological brains and some of it isn’t. For example, our biological brains carry a model of what we consider to be the reality around us.

4) A clarifying example: a computer simulation is just a deterministic process starting with some arbitrary state of information and ending with another arbitrary state of information. So the simulated thing was really “being simulated” just as much without the computer, because the states of information are just states of information. So we could extend the science fiction concept of our reality just being a simulation to there being no simulation and that the mere fact of everything being “describable” inevitably causes the world to “exist”.

5) According to this line of thought, it’s impossible to distinguish between the world “really existing” and the world being “merely describable”. What does that mean? Well, that’s what they call an epistemological question, but I think it means that the two things are actually the same thing.

If it’s impossible to know which of two situations is true, the situations are identical.

I think this is a reasonable and practical way to think about reality.

This morning’s futile wrestling with a problem-set from a course I can only attend half the time due to overscheduling has produced a decision: I’m quitting the course. I have too much school as it is, and Algebra II is arguably the least urgent and definitely the most difficult course I’m taking, so it’s going to have to take one for the team. Maybe I’ll look into it this summer.

That means more time for:
-doing better at my other courses
-chess-playin’
-boozin’
-blogging!
It’s win-win. Or lose-win, but you know what I mean. I might even start running again – I think I’ve lost sufficient weight recently for my injury rate to be lower than it was last year.

Another person who’ll have more time on his hands is Jérôme Kerviel, the man who stands accused of losing five billion euros of his employer’s money in fraudulent trading. The moment I heard about it I thought there has to be something fishy about it, and of course there is. Every bank has sophisticated risk control and trade-approval mechanisms, ostensibly to prevent this sort of thing. Why didn’t they function here? Jean Veil, one of SocGen’s (Kerviel’s employer) attorneys in the case, says “Kerviel did not have the right to gamble […] a bank is not a casino.” Of course it’s a casino, that’s why they have “star” traders and risk control mechanisms in the first place. Had Kerviel’s trades turned in a huge profit, I don’t think SocGen would have minded.

The financial world has been behaving irresponsibly for five years straight and there’s every kind of unavoidable loss barreling down the road, as yet unannounced to the public. Quite possibly SocGen is surprised that Kerviel was so successful at doing what they basically wanted him to do anyway: piling on more irresponsible gambling to save them from the structural irresponsibility everyone’s been complicit in. They intentionally turned a blind eye and hoped that a roll of the dice would save their bonuses, urgently needed for this year’s payment on the yacht / villa / cocaine debt. They just didn’t realise they were gambling as much as they were.

Most things that get said a lot are true, but some aren’t. Example:

(1) Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence

That’s just patently false. In fact, the only way (that I know of) we can increase our confidence that something doesn’t exist is to try to look for it and not succeed. (1) Can be made true with two possible changes:

(2) Absence of evidence is evidence of absence

which is true but probably isn’t what is meant with the original, or

(3) Absence of evidence isn’t proof of absence

Of course, (3) is just a special case of an even more useful result,

(4) Nothing is proof of anything

Now, that actually isn’t something that gets said a lot, but perhaps one day it will be. I call it – Hardwick’s law.

Now, quick, is the following web-headline from a satire mag like The Onion or from a serious source of news and commentary?

It’s actually from Slate. How can one help loving these postmodern times?

I haven’t managed to post as often as I intend to. It’s mostly because of school: I have too much of it. Not so much that I wouldn’t actually have the time to write, but enough to keep my mind from wandering much. Math is hard! I should train my brain to accept a greater workload – at the moment I just zone out once I’ve done everything I absolutely need to do.

As an example of what serious business mathematics is: in a weekly session where students demonstrate their solutions to assigned problems a guy rather cocksurely asked at the beginning of the session to do problem number five (out of six). Our tutor agreed, the guy went up to the blackboard, said something about how this is actually a special case of something coming up later in the course (some people like to pretend they know the material before taking the course: why?) and… totally shut down. He drew a graph for illustration, started to explain his approach and realised he didn’t know how to make it work after all. His voice faltered, each word took about five seconds to come out. Eventually he just gave up and even left the room, presumably to commit suicide. The tutor was nonplussed, as they often are, and asked someone to come up to do the first problem.

But mathematics isn’t the only thing that’s serious business; I should make an effort to spend my down-time more productively.

Went to see Tuntematon Sotilas at the National Theatre. It was pretty much the way I’d imagined it from the reviews. Perhaps that’s not such a good thing: art with a Mission that can be reasonably dismissed with one word (here it might be “iconoclastic”) is too uncomplicated to my taste. Luckily it’s pretty entertaining just as a show, which is the way most art justifies its existence anyway. I don’t know why people try to analyse it so seriously – the play is a purely emotional reaction. There’s no final opinion-type message that I could find, except “this is what it feels like”, and the feeling the play transmits isn’t one I particularly get from Finland or life in general. Perhaps the final refrain of “Finland is dead” was intended as a sort of anti-message: the whole flag-shootin’, icon-destroyin’ thing was evidence to me that Finland is very much alive and a big deal to the people who made the play.

As a sidenote: a shocking amount of utter twaddle has been written about how people who haven’t seen the play (or any work of art) shouldn’t criticise it. The prime minister said he didn’t like the idea of pictures of politicians being symbolically shot at at the end, and didn’t even intend to see the play. Cue the huddled masses of art-understanding people accusing him of being a philistine (which he may well be, but that’s beside the point). Were they suggesting that Vanhanen shouldn’t believe the reviews telling him what happens at the end? Sure, there’s context, but it’s still possible to comment on the thing without the context. Perhaps someone should tell people who study ancient theatre to stop doing it because they can’t possibly understand plays they haven’t even seen.

If you disagree, pose yourself the following question as honestly as you can: have you ever felt that someone else’s opinion on a work of art that they have experienced and you haven’t is stupid? I expect this has happened to everyone. I’m so arrogant that I feel like that all the time, but everyone has at least heard about nazis condemning Jewish art as “degenerate” and internally disagreed.

And finally, here’s my new favourite Fischer picture.

Kt-R6ch is a commie move!

I’ve been neglecting my culinary side for ages and ages. Depending on what degree of seriousness counts as proper cooking, it’s probably been over a year of joyless eat-grinding at home. But, for whatever reason, tonight was the night for balls-out gourmandism – and here’s the fascinating story! Warning: this post contains over-analysis of one evening’s cooking and nothing else.

Planning
We’d received a luxury food voucher as a present some time ago and gotten two rather nice duck breasts out of it. They spent some months in the freezer before I found the courage (fear of failure) to do something with them. Or perhaps it was the gentle prodding from my domestic counterpart. Anyway, I knew I’d have to improvise a bit because I hadn’t cooked duck before and don’t enjoy following recipes (which all seem to be be for duck à l’orange anyway).

I had a bottle of red wine I wanted to use for a sauce and bought lots of shallots for frying in the lovely duck-fat. I then had the idea of using some dates I had at home. They’re extremely sweet (I only used two), but I figured that would balance the acidity of the wine and suit the duck quite well anyway. That decision made me feel just so CRAZY that I just knew I had to have some cocoa powder in there as well. Gameplan at this point was to brown the duck in a frying pan, get it in the oven, use the pan to make the shallot-wine-date-cocoa sauce.

I agonised over whether I needed something like roasted potatoes or rice to soak up the (delicious, as I thought at this point) sauce. For a while I thought a simple side of lentils would work, and it probably would have been better than the rather boring jasmine rice I ended up going for.

We were also making a salad (romaine lettuce, tomatoes, balsamic vinegar) but I still wanted something to make the whole thing a bit more interesting. Partly in the interest of cheapness, for this purpose I bought half a swede, two beetroots and some blue cheese.

Execution
I started with the root vegetables, slicing the swede, a beet and a carrot rather finely (nothing thicker than half a centimetre), putting those in the oven in an uncovered pan with a dash of salt. I wanted them to dry a bit and become as flavourful as possible. I worried a bit about whether I’d be able to soften them up enough this way, but they were fine.

I scored the duck rather deeply, perhaps half the way through. This was okay, but I only really needed to get through the fat layer. I got our big, heavy, cast-iron pan good and hot and plonked the duck on. I’d read that there’s a lot of fat on a duck and it’ll start rending onto the pan quite quickly, but I used a bit of vegetable oil anyway because I was afraid the skin (which I wanted to get nice and crispy) would burn and stick. The fat really does come off quickly – it would have been enough to just baste the skin with a bit of oil.

The pan was so hot I only kept the duck on for a total of 6-7 minutes, the first four or so being just for the skin side. The skin turned crispy without any sticking – in fact I had rather too much fat spitting out of the pan. I managed to splash some hot fat on myself and the floor as I turned the breasts over. I moved them into the oven, skin-side up (190 degrees or so) and got started on the sauce.

I spooned about half of the liquified fat out and put the cocoa powder (half a teaspoon or so), the finely chopped shallots (quite a lot, perhaps 2.5 decilitres) and dates in. Added some salt. After a couple of minutes I poured in a generous amount of wine and turned the heat down. About five minutes before serving I cut up some blue cheese and threw it over the root vegetables.

Evaluation
The sauce didn’t quite satisfy my expectations. There was a pronouncedly bitter aftertaste (the cocoa, I think, which spent a bit too long in the hot oil) and just not enough duckiness. The cocoa didn’t really add anything positive. The dates dissolved completely, I was happy about adding those. The duck fat had relatively little flavour, and to have left any more in would have made the sauce too oily. Perhaps I should have used stock of some kind – as it was, the rice-sauce -combination wasn’t as tasty as I’d hoped. Don’t get me wrong, the sauce was good – just not good enough.

The duck was a success, althogh the breasts were not very thick and I overdid them in the oven by about five minutes. They weren’t dry by any means, but there was no pinkness left either. The crispiness and flavour were very nice.

I was happiest of all with the vegetables. The blue cheese was a critical addition; that, the slightly dried beetroot and the sweetish sauce combined to make the best flavour of this dish. I could have easily left the rice out, it didn’t really bring anything but bulk to the mix.

Eating
Eating was fun, and you have to do it anyway in order not to die. I recommend eating.

My Icelandic isn’t that great, but I think this means that the 11th World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer has died. The tragedy is that he never got help for his severe mental problems and spent half his life as an unhappy recluse, when things could have been so different.

Of course, his chess life died a long time ago, but it still evokes considerable emotion in the chess world. To me, this is perhaps the coolest game of his:

[Event “US Championship 1963”]
[Result “0-1”]
[White “Robert Eugene Byrne”]
[Black “Robert James Fischer”]

1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. g3 c6 4. Bg2 d5 5. cxd5 cxd5 6. Nc3 Bg7
7. e3 O-O 8. Nge2 Nc6 9. O-O b6 10. b3 Ba6 11. Ba3 Re8 12. Qd2
e5 13. dxe5 Nxe5 14. Rfd1 Nd3 15. Qc2

Fischer has chosen the most active moves in a rather nondescript opening, and it’s time for the sacrifices:
15… Nxf2 16. Kxf2 Ng4+ 17. Kg1 Nxe3 18. Qd2 Nxg2 19. Kxg2

It’s very impressive to be able to calculate even a shortish sequence like this to a position like this and be able to judge it favourable. It looks quiet, but black’s long-range pieces will now finish the game in short order.
19… d4 20. Nxd4 Bb7+ 21. Kf1 Qd7 0-1

There would follow something like 22. Qf2 Qh3+ 23. Kg1 Re1+ 24. Rxe1 Bxd4 25. Qxd4 Qg2# (or else white dumps a load of material to boringly avoid mate). Even the final mate idea is just so… simple.

Fischer was everyone’s favourite because his play was so elegant and logical in a not-needlessly-complicated way, even to beginners. Like it was with Capablanca, everything seems “obvious” once you understand it (apart from the combinations, of course). This kind of clarity is the most beautiful thing in chess, and Fischer’s games speak the joy of discovering and being able to actually create it. Thanks for the games.

There’s a legal principle in civilized countries that although certain kinds of speech (or communication) can be illegal and punishable, the state is not permitted to use censorship to prevent the appearance of such speech. This is essentially what freedom of speech means: private citizens have assumed complete responsibility in what they communicate, and thereby the freedom to communicate as they wish. It doesn’t guarantee that the laws regulating speech are just or sensible (for instance it would be illegal for me to inform you of the fact that with freely available software you can make copies of any copy-protected CDs you own), but it does guarantee that I can make the decision to suffer the punishment for the information I want to transmit.

Like any legal principle, this one will frequently be trumped by expediency unless the freedom it guarantees is specifically safeguarded. Finland does have a constitution that guarantees it, but there’s no constitutional court to enforce it nor strong public opinion to demand it, so rights like this are regularily trampled.

Here’s a recent example: my Internet service provider is censoring the Internet. It doesn’t do it very well, and it isn’t yet actually compelled to do so by law, but there it is, nevertheless. Government-“recommended” censorship. If you’re interested in whether yours does, try to view one of the blacklisted pages – (warning: contains pictures of naked people and your ip address will probably be logged) younger18.com, for example. The people who administer computers at these companies are obviously embarrassed by the whole thing; the computer at Saunalahti that hosts the “this page is blocked” -page is called isoveli.saunalahti.fi.

The law in question is similar to what various other European countries have passed – basically it requires the police to maintain a database of suspicious domains. Internet service providers are not compelled to block the pages on the list, but in every country this has happened in it’s quickly become difficult for them not to. So too with Finland – this will become universal, or the law will be changed to actually censor. Almost certainly there’ll be no need for that.

Of course, this has nothing to do with stopping abuse of children (the system has zero effect on a person’s ability to get child porn) and everything to do with scoring political points, making a fuss and not caring that much about what happens to freedom of speech in the process. Certainly the site I linked to earlier doesn’t seem to contain any child porn, and the police doesn’t really care that much whether it does or not. After this it’ll be dangerous “hate speech”, after that instructions on how to make bombs and drugs and eventually it’ll probably be sites that tell you how to get free copies of motion pictures on the Internet.

As it happens, I’ve also accidentally broken the law that makes it illegal to distribute child porn. Or semi-accidentally.

It happened around the time these kinds of laws were first being discussed and there was a lot of stupid noise being made about the whole thing. I read a web-page about the situation by someone called muzzy – the current version is here. The definition of child porn in Finland was (and is) “indecent images of a person under 18”, which is obviously rather strict. Muzzy had, as an example, a link to the website of a trashy Danish newspaper (think The Sun or Iltalehti) which had a section where they have a nude picture of a pretty girl every day, as papers like that are wont to do. Many of the girls were under 18, some were as young as 16 – it seemed not to be a big deal in Denmark. When I checked the link out, the web-ad that loaded right next to the nude picture was one by the Danish Save the Children organisation, saying something like “have you seen child porn on the net? Inform us and we’ll get it on the Danish block-list.”

Well, I obviously thought this was pretty funny, and took a screenshot of the situation. I added some emphasis, named the picture “prevention.jpg” and placed it in my personal (public) web directory. I told muzzy on irc, he thought it was funny too, and sent the link on. At some point he remarked that I was distributing child porn and I thought “gee, I guess I am.” And then I rather meekly removed the picture because I didn’t want to get into trouble. The picture in question is here, judge for yourselves.

For future reference: screaming protesters calling the previous prime minister of the UK ‘Tony Bliar’ are unfunny because they take their rather weak joke so seriously. Private Eye calling Piers Morgan ‘Piers “Morgan” Moron’ is hilarious because it’s an even weaker joke but suggests that Private Eye has to descend to Morgan’s level just to name him. Geddit? All puns (and most gags) are dreadful, and funniness has nothing to do with reality and sincerity. “Tony Bliar” just means “Tony Blair is a liar, plus here’s a play on words.” Nothing surprising or new, just po-faced ranting. It would be funnier to call him Tony Cockmaster.

This is also why Krisse Salminen is not funny: she just serves up a rather pointless aspect of reality, namely that some people are really thick. Or so I gather.

A friend of mine suggested that I’m wrong to say I’m socially inept and that it’s really just that I hate people so I don’t make a proper effort to get them to like me. Partly that’s true, but hatred is perhaps not quite right – it’s more like fear-hate. I am eager to get people to like me, but I’m also terrified of everything, which makes me suspicious and withdrawn. I’m so convinced that people don’t like me that I’m automatically resentful of them for it.

I got thinking about this due to the Wikipedia article on Akiba Rubinstein, which says that Rubinstein suffered from “anthropophobia, a fear of people and society.” Maybe that’s what I’ve got! I wonder is there a club for it.

One of the strangest (to me) kinds of mental bias is the tendency reject a statistical argument due to statistically insignificant exceptions. Curiously, I’ve mostly encountered this with people who are seriously interested in the social sciences, a field that is pretty much entirely statistical and quantitative (or at least the useful parts are). Of course, people only do this when they know what the correct opinion is anyway so they’re not so bothered about engaging the actual analysis.

Example: I was recently talking with a friend about differences between the sexes. The conversation went something like this:

Gandalf Kensington (name changed): But are you talking about sex or gender, here?

Me: Sex, although I think gender is almost the same thing – so close that the same things apply.

GK: Well, the whole debate is kind of pointless because sex doesn’t really exist.

Me: Oh? I’d say the distinction between the sexes is pretty clear-cut.

GK: What about gender-ambiguous people? Or transsexuals? Obviously it’s not binary, it’s a continuum.

Me: But those constitute such a small part of the population that we can just throw them out and look at the rest of the data.

GK: That’s so typical of sex-normative discourse: just throw out the exceptions and get the results you want. You can’t ignore reality!

Me: I’m not ignoring reality, I’m just approximating a part of it away.

GK: Well, you can’t.

If people thought like this about everything, it would be impossible to make sense of the world. There are always exceptions and statistical noise. That’s not to say it isn’t understandable; it’s difficult to accept unpleasant things. I’m sure I do it a lot without noticing. But I don’t recommend this approach people who want to change the world. Ignoring the unpleasant parts is very unlikely to change them.