Sixteen Volts

Right now I have a couple of ZZ Top songs playing in the background. It doesn't matter much which songs you play from this orchestra since they are all essentially the same song. Even so, the song "Doubleback" contains an interesting temporal qualifier "sometimes never". Some philosopher or linguist out there could perhaps examine the semantics of this qualifier, which must be quite interesting. Some kind of branching of temporal logic, perhaps?

This simple Flash game where you just run endlessly smashing through ice walls has kind of a very Hoogerbrugge feeling in it.

I had forgotten the article "A Rent Affair" by Paul Krugman, a man whose economic expertise liberal credentials are pretty much unassailable. Professor Paul Krugman should be confused with professor Peter Krugman PhD³, who uses his beautiful mind to explain the economics of high gas prices in "Gas Prices: Too High or Not High Enough?"

I enjoy reading Cafe Hayek, although I can't really understand why massive foreign debt, government deficit and trade imbalance wouldn't be serious problems, even though they constantly explain it. See, for example, "Krugman's Deficient Analysis". But that's probably why these guys are economics professors and I am not.

A few weeks ago I also tried to read a book called "Debunking Economics", but it was so confusing that I couldn't really tell what it was supposed to debunk in the first place. I guess I'll have to accept my place as an economic ignoramus and go sit in the corner with a... whatever that conical hat that stupid kids wear is called. I wonder if any schools out there still actually use this delightful practice? But for anybody who doesn't believe that economics can explain or predict anything, I recall this observation of The Danimal:

If you call market pricing a "tautology" does that persuade anybody who owns a ten million dollar home to sell it to you for five dollars? You can invent all the pejorative labels you want to deny the reality of market behavior, and this will not change your market value.

Theodore Dalrymple has two new essays "It's this bad" and "Growing up British".

The last few days I have been playing backgammon against GNU Backgammon. For all my skepticism towards artificial intelligence, it is delightful to see how well neural networks and reinforcement learning by self-play can work in a simple and well-defined microworld. These techniques don't really work for other classic board games such as go, chess and checkers, but since backgammon has a significant element of randomness in it, exact planning doesn't work the same way as it does in these deterministic games, so the neural net evaluation of states has a chance to work. I would assume that GNU Backgammon was trained pretty much the same way as the classic TD-Gammon, whose details are explained in "Temporal Difference Learning and TD-Gammon".

I haven't looked at Waiter Rant and Clublife for a while. I noticed that just like everybody else, the latter blogger has views on the "Duke Lacrosse" team rape case.

Kuro5hin is another site that often has good stuff, so somebody should integrate it with Diggdot or something. I am sure there are some kind of systems that all the kids use to read all their stuff in one place, but isn't that what a web browser was for? Anyway, the post "HOWTO: Hosting An Orgy" explains how to become the "orgy guy". If you just want to enjoy escorts, I am sure that Marc Perkel's site "How to Use Escort Services: A Men's Guide" is useful.

There don't seem to be very many sitcoms worth watching these days, other than "My Name is Earl" and "Freddie", which I like for some reason. I don't know if Earl can really be called a sitcom (since it doesn't even have a laugh track and it is mostly filmed on location), but Freddie works so well because it is such a pure and unabashed sitcom, a kind of rarity these days. My wife also likes "That 70's Show", but I just can't understand why that one guy can do... whatever it is that a Latino equivalent of a minstrel show is called and get away with it. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Metaphilm has a new essay "BloodViolet" that analyzes a modern genre of films in which a hot and acrobatic vampire girl fights with guns and martial arts.

I actually borrowed an anthology of 2005 science fiction short stories a few months ago, just to see if anything has changed in this field during the past decade or so. It was quite boring and I only read a few of the stories that it contained, even though the short stories I read didn't use anything from the "The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés". Since science fiction had to become "speculative fiction" to attract girls with stories of space princesses and unicorns, perhaps the "The Grand List of Fantasy Cliches" is also appropriate here.

I tried to watch Da Ali G Show once, but it felt like a one-joke pony. Even so, I just had to watch the video "Ali G Interviews Noam Chomsky". Just... had no choice in the matter.

This weekend is again time to shave my head, since my hair has gotten too long because I can move my fingers through it. Damn hippie. Everything would be so much easier if humans didn't have any body hair. Before waiting for evolution to get us that far and give us huge heads with levitation and telepathy powers at the same time, the page "Flat-Top Crewcuts" shows us how real manly men like their hair.

When I pass a stranger with a flattop, I usually say, "Sir, that's a great haircut!" Almost always, I'll get a smile, and some reply that confirms the common bond among flattop men.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, April 28, 2006 at 4:41 PM