The straight line

For several hours today Paavo Väyrynen acted as prime minister in the absence of Matti Vanhanen. Leading opposition figures have evacuated to Åland and declared a sovereign Finnish state there. The police is urging the public to remain calm. Suicide pills are being distributed in preparation of a recurrence.

I feel so dirty! There should have been a warning of some kind.

Some comedian I once saw had a bit about the phrase “adult language”, bemoaning the death of it. He said that the words we consider “adult” aren’t really adult at all, because kids understand words like shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits perfectly well. Adult language should really be the type of language adults use to talk about serious and complicated things; that’s what kids usually really don’t understand.

“Action movie” is a bit like that. Action movies are considered to be movies with lots of fighting, driving and exploding – but that’s really a rather small subset of the action that goes on in the world. I recently saw There Will Be Blood, and it was an action movie in the more literal sense: not much dialogue (or: big long sequences without any dialogue) and almost everything described by showing people doing things, ie. by action. Probably a quarter of the footage was of men doing some sort of physical labour, albeit most of it in the first half. Everything of value on the screen suggested the absurd amount of work people have had to do to produce it, not to mention the work historically needed to technologically get to the point where it’s possible to produce. It was the action that gave meaning to everything else, including the dialogue.

Also: There Will Be Blood has one of the most interesting and appropriate scores I’ve heard, ever. Great film.

Eugenics is one of those words I knew to be terrible before I even knew what it actually meant. Something disturbing and creepy, invented by people who hate humanity. The first two things that come to mind from the word now are the Nazi holocaust and the compulsory sterilisations of insane and mentally retarded people in Sweden – both sinister events that continue to cause feelings of shame. Of course, eugenics is now happily buried and forgotten. Except that it isn’t. Most people who get pregnant have their fetuses screened for certain developmental problems, and most (as in over 90%) people who get confirmation of something like Down’s choose to abort their babies. Morally, this turns out to be a lot more acceptable than allowing the baby to live and sterilising it – for reasons I don’t entirely understand.

Why exactly does a prospective parent choose to do that? I’ve understood it’s because they feel that having the baby would cause both their lives and the life of the baby to be more unpleasant than is desirable. That’s understandable. Down’s causes a variety of health problems – but I suspect only one of them is at issue here. Wikipedia says “most individuals with [Down’s] syndrome have mental retardation in the mild (IQ 50–70) to moderate (IQ 35–50) range”. That really is problematic. Nobody cares that people with Down’s look different, and I’m pretty sure parents could take the general health problems (increased risk of heart problems, hearing problems, low fertility) in a baby with normal intelligence. But the thought of having a child that will never be much good at anything, who one couldn’t have a conversation with, who will be determined to be inferior on sight by almost everyone he ever meets is heartbreaking.

So we as a society have determined that fetuses that can be identified in the womb as having sufficiently low intelligence are ok to abort. That’s a kind of eugenics, although it’s really done more for our general comfort – institutionalised retarded people don’t procreate very much anyway (then again, that’s a specific goal of the institutions). What about the heavy-duty stuff, like Nobel-winner William Shockley’s suggestion that people with low IQ’s (he suggested < 100) would be paid money in exchange for getting sterilised? People have a far stronger negative response to that idea, but I'm not sure why. After all, it would be totally voluntary. If there were a law that offered just me, personally, money for getting sterilised, that would just be a bonus. If I ever wanted it, it'd be there. But people are more offended by some group they identify with being targetted than by personal targetting. (Sidenote: someone recently told me that there are private abortion clinics in the US that you can donate money to to be used specifically for aborting fetuses of a certain race, typically blacks. Pretty sick, but curiously something we all seemed to think should not be illegal.) People who I've mentioned the Shockley idea to have tended to reject it on grounds of social justice: rich stupid people wouldn't need the money, so this would be biased against poor people having children. (Interestingly, they don't bring along the supporting argument that poverty and stupidity are strongly correlated, but such are the requirements of political correctness.) But there's already a strong disincentive against poor people procreating. If a billionaire has children, the effect on the wealth he can spend on himself is unchanged. If a wealthy person has children, it will be the most significant drain on his financial resources during his entire life. If a poor person in a country without social benefits has children, he's pretty much accepting that he'll be poor forever and that this way he'll have someone to feed him gruel when he's senile. Actually, the implications of this are known also to people who aren't Nazi zombies: one of the stated aims of most aid programmes in the poorest parts of the world is to reduce fertility by educating the women, and sometimes by other means. A couple of generations on, the poor of the world would do well to focus on improving their lives and societies instead of having lots of children as a kind of pension system. We're currently waging an existence war against the poor - the eugenicists want to wage one against the stupid. Then again, as I said earlier, we are already waging one against the stupid, just with a rather low lower bound for intelligence. The Down’s situation suggests that we don’t want people with IQ’s lower than about 70. It’s chilling, but it’s also true. Or do you feel moral outrage against the pregnant couples who make these choices? It’ll be interesting to see what “feels” moral with genetic engineering and another five billion people on the planet.

Normal service suspended – enjoy this rubbish cultural retrospective instead

B.B. King:

As long as payin’ I’m the bills, woman
I’m payin’ the cost to be the boss

I’ll drink if I wanna,
And play a little poker too
Don’t you say nothing to me,
As long as I’m taking care of you
As long as I’m working baby,
And payin’ all the bills
I don’t want no mouth from you,
About the way I’m supposed to live

You must be crazy, woman,
You just gotta be out of your mind
As long as I’m footin’ the bills,
I’m paying the cost to be the boss

Now that you got me,
You act like you are a shame
You don’t act like my woman,
You just using my name

I tell you I’ll gonna handle all the money,
And I don’t wanna no back talk
‘Cause if you don’t like the way I’m doing,
Just pick up your things and walk

Paul Anka:

Well she always knows her place
She’s got style, she’s got grace, she’s a winner
She’s a lady – whoa whoa whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady, and the lady is mine

Well she’s never in the way
Always something nice to say, oh what a blessing
I can leave her on her own
Knowing she’s okay alone, and there’s no messing
She’s a lady – whoa, whoa, whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady, and the lady is mine

Well she never asks for very much and I don’t refuse her
Always treat her with respect, I never would abuse her
What she’s got is hard to find, and I don’t want to lose her

Led Zeppelin:

Working from seven to eleven every night,
It really makes life a drag, I don’t think that’s right
I’ve really, really been the best of fools, I did what I could
‘Cause I love you baby, how I love you darling,
How I love you baby, how I love you girl, little girl
But baby, since I’ve been loving you I’m about to lose my worried mind, oh yeah

Please don’t pay attention to the chronology. Just absorb the truth.

Or: the world has traded stylish scoundrels for stolid ones. Think about it, man! But more on that later.

They say only boring people talk about the dreams they’ve been having, so here (and yes, I’ve been sleeping a lot better):

1) At one point during a long and complicated dream I was in a hurry somewhere. I want to get across a street but it’s full of cars. The traffic eventually comes to a halt, but there’s no gap between the stopped cars. For some reason I think the normal way to act in this situation is to get in a car by the back door and then get out through the other side, but as soon as I do this, the car starts moving again and I realise this wasn’t the normal way to act after all. I realise that the car is in fact a taxi, but the driver nevertheless knows that I was just confused and don’t actually want a ride in the taxi. He doesn’t say anything for a while, just drives the car for a couple of blocks, stops the car and says that it’s all right and that I can just get out. As a consolation, he hands me a gift wrapped in brown paper. It’s very embarrassing.

2) Last night I had some difficulty getting back to sleep after I’d woken for some reason and I kept checking the time to see how little sleep I was going to get at best (yes, this is totally pointless). Suddenly I realise it’s actually late in the morning and I’m going to be late for my exam! Then I wake up, feeling exactly the same as in the dream with everything around me looking exactly the same way, and the clock on my phone says it’s still night. This was strangely creepy. Also: a dream about insomnia. I think this is a first for me.

3) Later in the same night I had a dream in which I was supposed to be auditioning to be a singer in a band. I was very nervous about it because I can’t sing, but when I turn up the band says that there’s no need to bother with the audition and that they’ll take me anyway. This makes me feel even more nervous. All morning after waking up I thought about taking singing lessons.

And now for a brief salvo in my ongoing personal vendetta against Suvi Lindén, from her interview in the mtv3 news:

Toimittaja: Kuitenkin nämä tämän lain kriitikot sanovat sitä, että laki sinänsä ei auta sitä perimmäistä asiaa eli sitä että, että lapsen seksuaalinen hyväksikäyttö tai tämmöisen materiaalinen levittäminen estyisi. Mitä te siitä ajattelette?

Viestintäministeri Suvi Lindén (puhelimessa): Olen kyllä heidän kanssaan siinä mielessä vähän eri mieltä, että tämä laki on tehty toisaalta estämään, estämään lapsipornografian levittämistä tuolla netissä, mutta myös estämään, sanotaanko, lasten ja nuorten surffatessa netissä heidän pääsy, pääsy tämän tyyppisille sivuille. Ja, ja siinä suhteessa uskon, että se lain tarkoitus jota varten se on säädetty ainakin osittain toteutuu. On varmasti paljon muitakin keinoja joilla, joilla tätä, tätä asiaa hoidetaan ja näitä keinoja tulee käyttää ja se on paljolti kiinni poliisin yhteistyöstä sitten kansainvälisesti ja, ja niin edelleen, mutta uskon kyllä, että tällä lailla on oma paikkansa tässä kokonaisuudessa.

I knew it! The justifications for the censorship legislation have all been lies and they’re not even embarrassed. Youth of Finland, you’re in safe hands. Now bite them.

Here’s something intriguing. The top three sites you get when you search for gay porn on google (as one does) are:

http://www.hornygreek.com/
http://www.hotgaylist.com/
http://www.onlydudes.com/

Can you think of anything else they have in common? No? They’re all on the list of sites censored for child pornography. These are, obviously, extremely mainstream gay porn sites and would probably not be interested in endangering their considerable incomes by hosting child porn. For me, as a Welho customer, they’re all blocked right now.

The picture is getting clearer…

edit: as you can see from browsing the list, having the word “teen” in the url seems to be grounds for censorship. Perhaps the police haven’t done all that much porn-browsing. Is that a good thing?

Also, je.org points out that the police is ignoring real child porn hosted in Finland. Like Jörn Donner having it off with a 15-year-old.

Suvi Lindén, minister for Transportation and Communication, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Nikki case. She says that using child pornography for “testing the limits of free speech” is unconscionable and makes the comparison that books “that have or that refer to child pornography” would be confiscated just like Nikki’s site was censored.

At first look it would appear that Lindén severely misunderstands the state of freedom of speech in this country (for example by the aforementioned standard a book that contains Lindén’s interview should be confiscated as it refers to child pornography), but I suspect that in reality her quote is the product of

a) the fact that she doesn’t understand what a link is, which is unfortunate for someone who “demands that Finland make greater strides towards an information society”

b) being too stupid to think before talking even when giving an interview as a minister

As it happens, Nikki has consistently removed sites from his censorship-list when he’s found evidence that they have child porn content. The vast majority of the sites on the list are porn sites in the EU or US that feature either young women or gay sex (it’s an interesting question why so much gay porn has groundlessly ended up on the list) – sites with child porn are, of course, illegal in both the EU and the US. So if the Finnish police believes it’s found child porn hosted in those places, why doesn’t it tip the local police off so they can shut these sites down?

In any case, discussion of censorship is precisely what the list is for. As I previously discussed, anyone could generate such a list by scanning the Internet with free programs. Nikki’s site itself doesn’t contain child porn, just the addresses of the sites that are being censored.

So what Lindén meant was, presumably, that Nikki’s site is some kind of portal for child porn, and that if a book were a portal to child porn (when she said “refers”, she meant “has printed links to”), it would be confiscated too. To say that Nikki’s site contains child porn is not only untrue – it’s libel. But the core thing here is her inability to comprehend the www.

The web is an extremely interconnected place, and basically everything connects to everything else “eventually”. She thinks Nikki’s site is immoral because you can get from it to sites on the censorship list via one “connection” (I’m not even talking about clickable links in this case – the distinction in any case is trivial). But Helsingin Sanomat, the newspaper that published her interview, has published the address of Nikki’s site, so you can get from hs.fi to censored sites through two connections. If you think that’s such a world of difference, what if Nikki’s site had a redirect directly to a random censored site? Then, from the point of view of Finns who are automatically going to turn into paedophiles if they venture within one link of censored sites, hs.fi becomes a danger zone.

Links don’t really mean anything when the entire Internet is one network, proxyable and searchable. Lindén doesn’t understand this, and is incompetent as a minister of Communication.

The Bad Astronomy blog writes that science isn’t faith-based:

Science is not faith-based, and here’s why. The scientific method makes one assumption, and one assumption only: the Universe obeys a set of rules. That’s it. […] A simple example: we see objects going around the Sun. […] [From observation] we can apply mathematical equations to describe those motions, and then use that math to predict where a given object will be at some future date. Guess what? It works. It works so well that we can shoot probes at objects billions of kilometers away and still nail the target to phenomenal accuracy. This supports our conclusion that the math is correct. This in turn strongly implies that the Universe is following its own rules, and that we can figure them out.

Why do we make the assumption that the Universe follows a set of rules if we think we can deduce that from what we observe? Is the writer confused here or am I?

I’ve often wondered what is the real assumption behind rational thinking, but this isn’t it – which goes to show that sincere and serious people can get it totally wrong. Any suggestions?

I was reading through the terms and conditions of a savings account I have, and in the part where the calculation of interest is explained it says “The interest on capital is computed daily, with the number 360 used as the denominator.” Huh? Denominator? And aren’t there 365 days a year? Does this mean I’m missing out on five days of interest a year? I needed to know! But perhaps not badly enough, because I forgot about it until yesterday evening when I was trying to get to sleep and the answer suddenly occurred to me.

Now, the interest of the account is given as an effective annual interest, meaning that it is computed in some way that gives the same result as a certain interest compunded once a year, assuming that the capital doesn’t change. Of course, the capital does sometimes change, so they’ve chosen to calculate a daily interest that matches the promised annual interest instead. If the interest is such that it multiplies the capital by x, after one year the capital has effectively become multiplied by

For that to be equivalent to some annual interest multiplier y, necessarily

So the desired daily interest is the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth root of the annual interest. Now, that’s not something you’d necessarily want to work out with a piece of paper, but a calculator can do it in an instant. For instance, the current annual interest of the account in question is 3.5% so to compound daily the multiplier would be

which corresponds to an interest of about 0.0094%. Okay, so that’s the correct way of finding an appropriate daily interest (in the sense that it’s equivalent to the definition). What could the bank possibly be doing with denominators and the number 360? Could 3.5% divided by 360 be approximately the 365th root of 1.035 minus one? Let’s see:

It is! So I’m guessing this is what the bank actually does. Notice that their method even produces a slightly higher result. Does this result in any actual difference over a year?

Yes! I’m up a tenth of a percentage point on this deal! Big money, here I come.

I can understand that in olden days it might have been a bit onerous to calculate 365th roots of ever-changing interests, so someone thought of this alternative method. For small interests it’s only off by a bit. But today, in the time of practically free computing power? Seems a bit odd.

edit: I just realised something: not all years have 365 days! Allowing for leap years, the average year has 365 + 97/400 = 365.2425 days, so I should really have been taking the 365.2425th root and also using that figure for finding the difference between the bank’s method and the correct method, but it doesn’t really change anything.

edit the second: now that I read over the details again, it seems to imply that the interest is calculated daily but not compounded to the capital. So they’re doing something else I don’t want to get into right now. Banking is complicated.

The Finnish authorities are escalating their frenzied, idiotic and menacing action over “child porn”. The story so far:

Last year the Ministry of Communication instructed the police to compile and maintain a list of web addresses containing child pornography to be given to Internet service providers to block. The Ministry assured the public that the list would not block entire domains or IPs, just single urls. The decision-making regarding what goes on the list was to be transparent. In particular, no Finnish sites would be censored, because in those cases the police can just use normal means to physically shut illegal sites down.

As censorship started appearing, Matti Nikki, who maintains a website critical of censorship, ran a computer program to scan the Internet for sites that were redirected to the police’s “this page is blocked” -notice. He posted the output of this program on his website. Most sites on the list appear to contain only legal porn. Some contain child porn.

Then, Nikki’s site itself goes on the censorship list. Soon sites that appear to have no connection whatever to porn of any kind are blocked. The police does not comment on any of this.

And now the real bullying starts: as criticism of the police’s behaviour has mounted, Nikki is requested to appear for interrogation at the Helsinki police’s violent crime unit (I think this is because they also deal with sex crimes). He has been informed that he will be questioned as a suspect in the crime of “accessory to the dissemination of an improper image”.

Note: his only possible crime here has been to inform the public about what is being censored. The police has indicated that posting even a single link to a page that is suspected to contain child porn is grounds for censorship, and now this apparently also justifies groundless threats (because that’s what they are!) from the police force. Emphasis: Nikki isn’t suspected of anything that I, for example, haven’t done. If they could be bothered, the Finnish police would feel themselves justified in censoring this blog. Nikki is suspected of being a criminal for posting the list of websites on the censorship list, one of which I posted earlier.

If you care about freedom, care about this. Become a member of Electronic Frontier Finland. If there’s a protest about this, go protest. Stay informed about this case, and about civil liberties and privacy on the Internet in general. It’s important, and it’ll be even more important in the future.

When I previously wrote about censoring the Internet in Finland I thought I might be overreacting to say that it was only the beginning and that soon other things would get censored. One site that’s now censored is lapsiporno.info which I linked to in my original post. It’s a site intended to present the arguments against the current system of censorship. It’s hosted in Finland, which fact alone disqualifies it from censorship as per the law in question. It contains no porn, child- or otherwise. Just unpopular opinions, and a list of the censored sites – and this last thing is apparently the excuse for censoring it.

This is totally unacceptable.

Usually when words mean two different things at the same time, I notice both meanings. But just now as I was listening to the sad/happy Smiths song I Don’t Owe You Anything I heard the lines

You should not go to them
let them come to you
just like I do

as “let them come to you, the way I always come to you”. I always used to hear it as “do like I do and let them come to you” – I don’t think I was even aware of this other meaning.

It’s like the song suddenly became twice as good.

When I’ve not been getting sleep I’ve been doing mainly two things:
1) learning about webservers, blogging software and the Internet – I’m planning to quit livejournal and have my own site on my own domain
2) reading through archives of apocalyptical financial and societal predictions from Generational Dynamics. The guy who writes it seems like a bit of a kook at first, but I think he’s on to something. At least as far as the US goes.

Sudden Debt is another fine resource, and its predictions keep coming true.