There appears to be a concerted campaign to screw with my remaining regard for the words “human rights”. Something called the Finnish League for Human Rights is interested in studying whether a Christian revivalist movement (Laestadianism) is violating its own human rights by having women in the movement give birth to as many as ten children. Well, ok, right to contraception appears to be a human right and God knows this country is an epicentre for the repression of women’s sexual rights. And as the article says, many human rights violations are ignored due to religious context. However! The same Human Rights League declared a month ago that religiously mandated circumcisions must not only be protected from legal consequences but paid for by the state.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair used to talk about a “Third Way”, meaning the combination of efficient markets with some wealth and opportunity redistribution. You don’t have to like it, but as a guideline for a capitalist economy it was probably better than most of what had gone before. Now Finland’s prime minister is evoking the Third Way as a total opposite: spending untold billions in projects for his rural constituency that are essentially guaranteed to be inefficient.
Economics stupidity is pretty much a requirement in politicians; without it they seem dispassionate, cold and, well, apolitical. If someone suggests that a change would be beneficial whether you’re a socialist or a free marketeer, nobody believes him. Thus in this country, for instance, the state-owned rail monopoly does its best to negate the benefits of rail transport with its pricing structure.
State monopolies are expected to service both profitable and unprofitable connections, and to do this they typically choose to make large profits on the profitable connections to pay for the unprofitable ones. In theory it sounds workable, but in practice it means that the whole point of rail travel disappears; mass transit is supposed to be cheap, whereas now it’s cheaper for two people to pay for petrol and drive to, say, Tampere from Helsinki. If train tickets were priced at running costs (or to some realistic traffic capacity) and the unprofitable connections were directly subsidised (rail maintenance gets subsidised already, by the way), the whole venture would make a lot more sense with a large increase in system usage and potentially even the profitability of the profitable lines.
Private rail systems have been discovered to be able to have even worse problems, but this is one thing they do get right. If you’re not considering what people want when you’re pricing and designing the system, you’re doing it wrong. For the state to get a hard-on for building “mining infrastructure” and motorways wherever the most electorally profitable place is doing it wrong. Buying up billions of pounds of failing investment banks or billions of dollars of failing car manufacturers is doing it very wrong. It’s combining the inequities and inequalities of capitalism with the idiot cronyism and inefficiencies of 20th century socialism. Why take only the downside of the market?
The Corus Wijk an Zee (chess) tournament started, making for much spectating fun. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, check out Karjakin-Morozevich (black suddenly gets run over in a Taimanov Sicilian), Carlsen-Radjabov (1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. g3!? with a rather offbeat follow-up as well and white almost won) and Reinderman-Vallejo (utter insanity in the opening).
This is my new favourite facial expression:
Unfortunately I don’t really have the teeth for it.
It’s just too cool.
Ohh yeah. On 4chan I believe it is associated with the expression “dat ass”.
I’m on a deadline to decide whether to take a trip to New York and Albany this spring. Ahhhh just thinking about the expense makes my vision darken. Better do some…
Yeah.
I’ve listened the very end of the dvd of Queen’s Rock Montreal concert several times to make sure, and I think Freddie Mercury’s parting words are “Let’s go get fucked!” Kind of sounds sad, knowing how he died.
Believe it or not, before watching this concert I’d occasionally considered shaving my back hair. Back hair doesn’t really look good on anyone. But now I’ve decided what’s good enough for Freddie is good enough for me. Also it must be pretty awkward to shave your back.
Israel is fighting for its existence about thirty years down the line, the Gazans are fighting for their lives right now. The Gazans are currently desperate, Israel is ultimately doomed. Individuals Gazans have no property, no rights, no future, no perspective; Israel is being demographically buried – surrounded and soon populated by anti-semites made stupid by religion – and its political influence and allies are on the wane. I can’t help but understand and sympathise with both, but I also hate them for making the status of humans as lunatic animals painfully obvious.
I finally decided to get on Facebook, largely prompted by a Slate article about Facebook holdouts (titled You Have No Friends). It said that not being on Facebook is becoming like not having a mobile phone – an affectation that just makes life more difficult. I’ve also noticed that people only announce events on Facebook now, and I like to know what kinds of events I’m not going to. So I believed it.
I actually held out on the phone thing for a long time as well, and even now I ignore it much of the time, which turns out to be pretty irritating to people. Funny how that wasn’t such a problem with non-mobile phones; if you didn’t answer it, people would just assume you were elsewhere. And there was no way to return the call. Much more civilized.
I’m now going through the standard agonies of incomphehensible friend requests, annoying web-polluting applications and a constant excess of information about everything. And the whole thing is making me feel so used – I’m giving my social graph away to Facebook for free. It’s unfortunate that the social graph could eventually become untraversable if I didn’t use this crap.
Glenn Gould anecdote with sound clip. This is apropos of Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which also reminded me I want to have a Glenn Gould evening (where we’d just listen to Glenn Gould records).
One of these days I will be asked to perform on the fourth of July, I’m sure, and when I do I figured out that by leaving out the repeats in the Star Spangled Banner and starting your entry on the thirteenth bar of God Save The King and then playing God Save the King over again and altering the harmony in the second half of The King to modulate to the supertonic region, it has the most marvelous effect.
Macintosh Stories. Utterly engrossing (if you’re into that sort of thing) stories about the people and events behind the early days of Apple.
John: “Well, if I’d known you were one of those I wouldn’t have wasted my time. When Hank kicks the shit out of you I’ll be there, counting my money and laughing. I’ll kiss Hank’s ass for you, you bunless cut-wienered kraut-eater.”
The End of Wall Street’s Boom, a rather long article about the craziness in the finance markets for the past couple of decades.
To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue.
My students take English 101 and English 102 not because they want to but because they must. Both colleges I teach at require that all students, no matter what their majors or career objectives, pass these two courses. For many of my students, this is difficult. Some of the young guys, the police-officers-to-be, have wonderfully open faces across which play their every passing emotion, and when we start reading “Araby” or “Barn Burning,” their boredom quickly becomes apparent. They fidget; they prop their heads on their arms; they yawn and sometimes appear to grimace in pain, as though they had been tasered. Their eyes implore: How could you do this to me?
most of the UK is censoring Wikipedia because it has a picture of a Scorpions album cover from 1976
This is especially stupid because the block is (of course) implemented in such a braindead way that besides from being easy to circumvent, the block causes the entire UK to appear to be from a couple of IP addresses on Wikipedia. This makes preventing vandalism rather difficult, so basically the UK has banned itself from editing Wikipedia (the addresses became autoblocked quite quickly because inevitably some vandals are from the UK). Good going, dumbasses.
This was amusing:
“When we asked the Internet Watch Foundation why they blocked Wikipedia and not Amazon [which also shows the album cover], apparently the decision was ‘pragmatic’, which we think means that Amazon had money and would sue them, whereas we’re an educational charity.”
Of course, Scorpions aren’t the only disgusting, inhuman, kiddie-molesting filth-troupe that should have its testicles pounded with a steak tenderizer. Click here to see child porn
While I’m probably at least as sexually inhibited as the next guy, I do sometimes feel there are certain obvious extensions to the way we think about sexuality. I think the official story right now is this: most people “figure out” their sexuality at some point during or after adolescence. A person’s sexuality is either straight, gay or bisexual (or “it’s a continuum” as some people are fond of saying). There are also some unusual cases, but they’re practically more like identities than sexualities. (If you don’t like sex at all, you’re pitiful and funny. If you want sex with animals, you’re strange and funny. If you want sex with children, you should be murdered.) Your sexuality can change later on, that’s ok, but it brings peace of mind to be “something”.
I always felt that this was a somewhat backward way of looking at the whole thing because I don’t feel sexual attraction to the majority of people of either gender. If you think you’re straight, ask yourself this: would you rather get with a hot member of your own gender or with a disgusting member of the opposite one? If your answer is the latter, you probably didn’t imagine a sufficiently disgusting person. Do a google image search and try again.
So rather than “I like girls” or “I like boys” it’s more like “I like hot people”. Of course, that’s not a sexuality extension. More like a… contraction? Let’s call it a generalisation.
The extension is that I think a lot of sexuality is really directed towards non-humans. Go to the opera sometime and see the middle-aged, slightly weird-looking guys spring up at the end to applaud and shout, red-faced, often with tears in their eyes and tell me that’s not a sexual climax of some kind. Or just listen to almost any symphonic classical music; abstract sexuality is never far. People get attached to all kinds of things with the kind of intensity that looks more like romatic love than anything else. Somewhere deep in the brain these emotions are connected with the procreation drive, but the brain is not an intelligently designed thing; things get mixed up.
(There’s also the matter of solitary sexual fantasising which I suspect accounts for a supermajority of human sexuality but I’m not going to get into that now.)
As for me, I’d say I experience a lot of this kind of non-human sexuality. Here’s a medium-difficulty representation of what I’m trying to say: PJ Harvey and Nick Cave performing Henry Lee.
1) If this does nothing for you, you are a cold fish.
2) I don’t think most people’s interest in this video will be directed towards whichever person is of the opposite gender to them. It’s the situation, the tension, how they behave that’s attractive.
3) I’m sexually attracted to this youtube clip.
For people who like computers: a perspective on what computers spend time on. Highlight: when you look something up from L1 cache, your processor has time for ~3 cycles. L2 cache, ~14 cycles. RAM, ~250 cycles. Reading from the disk, ~41 million cycles. Reading from the Internet, ~240 million cycles.
For people who have time on their hands: one of ye olde webcomic classics, the long defunct Sexy Losers. It has sex.
For those with less time on their hands, a digest:
#7 (Suicide prevention week) #83 (highlight: Good God, she sucks some mean cock for a 72 year old transsexual.) #22 (highlight: Your fuck is shit, dickass.)
A conversation I had yesterday evening revealed something about computability and mathematics that hadn’t occurred to me. First, some preliminaries.
Consider a computer running a program written in a language with a finite number of symbols. The computer proceeds step by step through a string of instructions, some of which may tell it to execute commands from another location in the string of instructions. Some programs like this will run forever (for instance a program that simply enters an infinite loop) and others will do some finite number of things and then stop executing. Call these two groups of programs “non-halting” and “halting”, respectively. Defining these things suitably it is possible to prove that if a program is halting, its length determines an upper bound on the number of steps it takes. If the length of the program is n, call the maximum number of steps f(n).
Now consider a mathematical statement about the natural numbers, the unproved Goldbach’s conjecture for instance. The conjecture says that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes. 4 = 2+2, 6 = 3+3, 8 = 3+5, 10 = 5+5, 60 = 7+53 etc. This is a claim about every even number there is, so presumably there isn’t any way to just do calculations to prove the conjecture: we have to prove it for all of the infinitely many even numbers at once.
Now consider a computer program that goes through even numbers, checking whether each can be written as the sum of two primes. This program is either halting or non-halting. If it is halting, Goldbach’s conjecture is false (because the program would only halt if it finds a counterexample). If Goldbach’s conjecture is true, the program is non-halting – but we can’t exactly wait forever to see that it never halts. But because we know that a program of length n will either halt by step f(n) or never, we only need to wait until the machine has taken f(n) steps. This means that it is sufficient to do finitely many calculations to find out whether Goldbach’s conjecture is true.
Unless I or the guy who explained this to me missed something; I haven’t actually read about this in a book or anything.
And of course this doesn’t make for a very feasible way to solve the problem because f(n) grows very quickly indeed.
On my planet, every day is technology appreciation day.
I get to cheaply do the best things I know of and want for practically nothing. Some people get extra pleasure from flying to Thailand every year, owning a nice car and generally out-affluencing at least half the population, but for me every day in my high-tech, information-cheap society with my computer and Internet is about as good as it gets. I don’t even like going to restaurants.
Let’s hope it lasts for at least a little while longer.
edit on January 16th 2009: it only lasted for a little while longer. The rather excellent video is no longer available due to a copyright claim.
I was actually saving that title for my cultural studies (yes, thisreallyexists) thesis but the cover of the newly released Deep Fritz 11 (a computer chess program) was just too evocative for me:
Ample evidence of [Short’s lack of subtlety] is on the record, not the least of which was his response to a question posed by a French journalist that “France represents everything I detest most in life. Your country’s only useful products are porn films.”
In addition, and as many other Grandmasters seem to, Short has a tendency to describe this apparently (to us patzers) docile, if cerebral, game in largely sexual language. And it’s rough sex Nigel seems to be looking for.
Dominic Lawson’s book The Inner Game has the slight, rather imp-ish Short quoted as saying about a particular opponent: “I’m going to give it to him good and hard. I’m going to give the guy a good rogering. I’m going to give it to him good and hard, right up him. I want to rape and mate him.” Tyson language in spectacles.
Lawson also reports that in Barcelona in 1987 he first heard Short use the acronym TDF, which he imagined to be a contraction of some arcane chess strategy. Short and the American Grandmaster Yasser Seirawan kept using the expression while poring over a board and discussing tactics. Finally Lawson asked them what it meant. In unison, and with evident pleasure, they growled back:
Martin Seligman, psychologist, on the state of psychology and especially the “psychology of happiness” or how to make people happier (23:41). If you’re interested in finding out whether you’re really happy you may want to do some of Seligman’s questionnaires (registration unfortunately required).
Barry Schwartz, psychologist, on the paradox of choice or why more choice isn’t always a good thing (1:04:07). If this is too long for you there’s also a 20:23 TED talk by the same guy on the same subject.
This was perhaps the most interesting one to me personally: Luis von Ahn on human computation (51:31). You really have to watch it to understand what it is. I’ve tried to get some of the old fogeys at the language technology department to watch this but they haven’t been interested; it’s truly their loss.
A Shakespeare question came up recently regarding the following:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
(from Measure for Measure)
The question concerns the interpretation of the last two lines (I kept the rest to give some context). What is the subject of imagine in the last line? At first glance it would appear to be those from the penultimate one, but if so, what were the things thought lawless and incertain? And if imagine is just an exhortation to the reader, what does the penultimate line mean? Some suggestions:
-how lawless and incertain to imagine one’s own future to be “worse than worst” of those in the aforementioned scenario; imagine the howls of those who end up in Hell
-it is too horrible to endure even worse than the imaginings of those of lawless and incertain thought which manifest themselves as howling
-it would be too horrible to imagine the howling of those who, when they lived, were of lawless and incertain thought
-to suffer worse than those who according to people’s lawless and incertain thoughts howl in Hell; something altogether too horrible
The last is perhaps closest to the mark. The picture becomes clearer if you replace “thought” with “thoughts”. I guess it was possible to contract like that in Shakespeare’s time, the expansion being “lawless thought and incertain thought”.
The programming problems on Project Euler are almost always fun to do, but the mathematics behind the (early) ones have mostly been unsurprising. But this was something I hadn’t heard about: if you arrange the natural numbers in a counterclockwise square spiral and look at the diagonals like this
you notice that
1) the odd squares are on the lower right diagonal (easily proved and not so shocking)
2) 8 of the 13 numbers (~62%) on the diagonals in this 7×7 square are primes.
If you keep extending the spiral you find that primes end up on the diagonals surprisingly often. The programming task was to find what size the spiral has to be for the proportion of primes on the diagonals to be less than 10%. The suprisingly large answer: 26241×26241, by which point the numbers in question are obviously already quite big.
And of course if one discounted the lower right diagonal there’d be way more primes yet.
Slate has an article about the next minority to make US president. The part about atheists is pretty funny:
The atheists: When the lion lies down with the lamb, when the president is a Republican Muslim and the Democratic speaker of the House is a vegan Mormon lesbian, when the secretary of defense is a Jain pacifist from the Green Party, they will all agree on one thing: atheists need not apply. A 2007 Gallup poll found that 53 percent of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president. (By contrast, only 43 percent wouldn’t vote for a homosexual, and only 24 percent wouldn’t vote for a Mormon.) As Ronald Lindsay, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, told me in an e-mail: “Atheism spells political death in this country.”
Indeed. Only one current congressman has confessed to being an atheist: Rep. Pete Stark, a Democrat from the lefty East Bay region of Northern California. If he ever ran for president, he would need God’s help just as surely as he wouldn’t ask for it.
Disclaimer: I don't add links because I endorse their messages or like their authors. I add them because I find them interesting and because you might not be familiar with them.
