Sixteen Volts

Steve Dutch has a new essay out, which is always postworthy. The essay "Stupidest. Advertisement. Ever." first riffs on the ads of hamburger chains and political campaigns, but follows up with an ad against the "Just say no" anti-drug campaign that is so silly that it beats hands down even the worst absurdities of the drug war. Money quote:

This ad is essentially a proclamation of the Archie Simonson Syndrome, which basically amounts to saying that a civilized society never expects people to do anything difficult or painful. Sorry, sweetie, we haven't forgotten how hard it is. We just don't care. The price of living in a civilized society is that you may have to do the right thing even if it hurts or exposes you to ridicule, discomfort, or even danger. It's hard to say no to drugs. We know that. We expect you to do it anyway.

Professor Dutch's finishing paragraph is also a quotable:

Oh, by the way, I'm not compassionate. The term "compassion" has become debased to the point of becoming meaningless. Basically all it means is you are willing to gratify others regardless of the cost to yourself, them, or society as a whole. All that matters is not facing the discomfort of having people think ill of you (peer pressure?). Compassion has become a synonym for moral cowardice. So don't restate the obvious. I'm not compassionate. And I'm proud of having some people think ill of me.

But it's not like the good professor is alone in this sentiment, when we look at what people do instead of what they say. I have been looking forward to the new season of Nip/Tuck to begin on some channel that we get up here, but apparently it is already playing on pay cable in America. The article "Nippin’ Away at Abortion" discusses the first episode of this season and informs us that

But this particular episode offers an opportunity to consider the under-reported fact that some 85 percent of American unborn children with Down Syndrome are believed to be aborted. Down Syndrome is certainly disappearing, but it's not because anyone's cured it.

If that figure is true, I would say that it pretty much concludes the whole debate on what most people really think about eugenics, when they actually have to show it in their actions instead of just by their words.

Hey, I just noticed that Steve Dutch has another new essay, titled "Why This Male Doesn't Ask Directions", in which he explains the real reason behind this male tendency that can be so annoying to women:

The single most important reason I don't stop to ask directions is it's more often than not a waste of time. The average random person is clueless about things in his or her immediate neighborhood. Sometimes I get lucky and find someone who knows straight off. Usually then I find out I was headed in the right direction all along and I would have gotten where I was going - sooner - without bothering to stop at all. These happy cases are more than offset by the blank stares and garbled directions I get when I ask directions. In the time it takes me to stop and ask two or three different people where something is, I can usually find it myself. If I do stop and ask, I try to find a place where I can be sure of getting information; typically a gas station where they're likely to have a map.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 5:03 PM | Comments (5) | links to this post  

I found out a few days ago that somebody had sent the women's center of this university an email that contained a few well-chosen anti-feminist paragraphs clipped from my old blog posts. Whoever this person was, she had found some valid points (for her case, I mean) that would have been best not written, but in some others she had been pretty careful to cut away the surrounding context and leave in the most inflammatory parts. For example, the following quote snipped from my April post "Are you angry yet?" sure seems damning:

There should be some central planning mechanism that would allocate each woman a bunch of needy men to satisfy each week. I think that this would be only fair: if feminists think that they are entitled to 50% of wealth created by productive men that these men would selfishly want to keep to themselves, then those men should be correspondingly entitled to 50% of sex that the feminists are able to provide to men but selfishly choose not to.

Look, Ilkka wants to turn women into sex slaves! What a monster! But hold on a minute. Let's provide the full context to this snippet, so that we can see if it might change its meaning in some important way:

I said it once and say it again: feminism and socialism are one, and that one is socialism. For all practical purposes, all feminists are socialists, except those who actually had to live in socialist countries. That is, they believe that some central planning mechanism should take from each according to their abilities and redistribute to each according to their needs. Of course, this time this planning mechanism should be led by wise women, so that all reasons of psychology, economics and computational theory that make socialism impossible would magically not apply any more. But perhaps it surprises my readers that I actually support this principle, as long as it is also applied to men's sexual needs and women's sexual abilities --- and let's not forget which sex is capable of multiple orgasms when we determine which sex wants sex more and is therefore more capable of supplying sex. There should be some central planning mechanism that would allocate each woman a bunch of needy men to satisfy each week. I think that this would be only fair: if feminists think that they are entitled to 50% of wealth created by productive men that these men would selfishly want to keep to themselves, then those men should be correspondingly entitled to 50% of sex that the feminists are able to provide to men but selfishly choose not to. This arrangement would show us how committed feminists really are to socialism when they for once get to be the givers instead of the eternal takers. This should probably also drive through the point that socialism is great fun only as long as you get to be the taker.

Let's hope that she never comes upon Jonathan Swift.

I learned about this email when I was contacted by a reporter from the university newspaper. Even though I was surprised, I explained her my side of the story. Even though that reporter obviously stands ideologically quite far away from me, we had a friendly conversation and I believe that she will write the article fairly, so I look forward to seeing this article on print. Last time I checked, the paper had not yet come out at least at those stands that I usually walk by, but perhaps this will happen soon.

Meanwhile, as they say, dogs bark and the caravan passes. I let my teaching and the results that I achieve there speak for themselves. I am so certain of this that I actually, from my own initiative, compiled the said reporter a list of my female students for the past year and told her to ask them if they think that there is something wrong or unfair in my teaching.

But we'll see how this story will develop and whether it will turn into something out of a Tom Wolfe novel. By the way, once we note that the previous issue of the local student newspaper (note: this is a different paper than the paper mentioned above) featured a two-page fawning article "The importance of being Ernesto" about Che Guevara, the wannabe socialist dictator whose bloodthirsty career of eliminating dissidents was fortunately cut short by a well-placed bullet which unfortunately made him and his famous image the God of college leftists everywhere, I kind of doubt that I really am the worst moral influence to the impressionable young minds around here.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 1:41 PM | Comments (15) | links to this post  

EconLog offers us two excellent links. First, there is "Why not?" idea exchance service that would seem to me to follow Tommi's opinion that ideas should be posted in raw form for others to grab and build on. The site also has a collection of "Op-eds & articles". The second link points to the post "A Rant about Attorneys" at "Angry Bear" that asks:

Why is it OK to have an attorney making decisions about nuclear power, or how to combat mad cow disease or scrapie, or whatever else, regardless of the attorney’s level of ignorance on the subject at hand, but not OK to have, say a physicist with no legal training on the Supreme Court or a biologist with no legal training as Attorney General?

Well, why not? Unlike physicists or biologists, lawyers have pretty skillfully protected themselves against having any responsibility over anything they do or cause, so they get to do pretty much anything they want with no risk to themselves. I don't think that I am the only person out there who would like to see a legal reform that made lawyers have to play by the same rules as every other profession.

The blogosphere offers us today two excellent views into the reality of what life is like under leftism and socialism. First, the post "Power to the People" at "Cafe Hayek" shows us the Cuban version of Martha Stewart. Yes, the expected punchlines practically write themselves. But at least all Cuban get completely free education and health care, and they don't have to suffer and see their rights violated under the cruel rule of Chimpy W. Bushitler and his crooked cronies. Second, Chris Clarke has converted the book "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?" into a comic book form, to benefit us who have a shorter attention span. Leftists in general have been vocally enthusiastic about this book, but Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution is a bit more underwhelmed in his book report.

I remember one Finnish columnist once writing about the interesting phenomenon that can be observed whenever the President of Finland makes an official visit to some small town in the provinces. Go take a look at the line of local people, including businessmen, members of city council, government officials, artists, singers and other local mini-celebrities that is waiting to meet the president, and you get to see exactly what the real pecking order and power hierarchy is in that particular town. No matter what those people say that they think of each other, when time and space are limited, the truth just has a funny way of coming out. Now, why did I suddenly think of this particular column today, after all these years? Oh, beats me. As I always say, when chasing the rabbit, the hunter is blind to mountains, and won't hear the grumblings of little people who are envious of their betters.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 2:33 PM | Comments (1) | links to this post  

I finished reading "Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons", a book about John "Jack" Parsons, an American rocket scientist from the era when men were men, spaceships had tailfins, nuclear bombs lit up the nightly sky and women wore skimpy outfits on the covers of pulp science fiction magazines. When he wasn't inventing and building propulsion systems (we got to laugh at the famous Darwin Award winner who strapped a JATO on his car, thanks to Jack), Jack dabbled in the occult and the mystic arts, asking Pan to help his rockets fly, and apparently even reached some kind of AntiChrist or Master Klaxon (yeah, I know, but I am too lazy to look up the actual title) supreme level in the "arts". Appropriately enough, Jack died in a mysterious explosion inside his own stately home where he stored his explosive materials, thus giving fodder to conspiracy theorists who have probably since moved on to 9/11. His last words were "I wasn't done", rather suiting the man who was claimed to be the anti-Christ.

The book is written by the pseudonymous "John Carter", and it sure could have used a better editor to swing a machete through the forest of all that repetitive mumbo-jumbo. It was still an entertaining read, though, I'm not complaining, since the subject matter was so interesting. I could even easily see this story turned into a movie, perhaps starring Leonardo DiCaprio! Until then, perhaps I could also try to grow a thin pencil moustache the way Jack sported, move to live in a scorching desert, pop some LBJ pills (they're like LSD, but better) and gather a harem of hot chicks around me to, like, explore the tantric arts, cast a spell or two and perhaps even sire a Moonchild. Hey, anything for science.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 2:05 PM | Comments (2) | links to this post  

I photocopied the material to be distributed in tonight's class. In the photocopier somebody else had forgotten his originals, apparently some kind of Psychology 101 course or something like that. By quickly browsing through these overhead transparencies I learned that success tends to increase a person's self esteem, whereas failure tends to decrease it. Try to learn something useful every day, as I always say, like a true renaissance man.

As an atheist in a world where the vast majority of people profess some kind of faith or spirituality, I know that I am part of a small, almost insignificant minority. Within that minority, I seem to be in an even tinier minority in the sense that when I say that I oppose religion, I really mean "religion" instead of just "Christianity". Now, for practical purposes, overt mocking of religion needs to be carefully aimed, since I am willing to accept that to maintain a stable and peaceful society, the bottom 95% of people should perhaps profess some moderate mainstream faith to keep them in check. However, I am always disappointed by my fellow atheists, who normally endlessly criticize and mock Christianity, but whenever some other religion is much worse in almost every objective measure, they have nothing but silence, understanding and utmost respect for this religion, and could not even dream of pointing out and laughing at its silliest doctrines and rituals. This is why I was so happy to read the article "Head-in-the-Sand Liberals", in which Sam "The End of Faith" Harris warns about the threat that Islam poses to the Western liberal society while the liberals are mired in their denials to blame anybody but Muslims. This article was suggested to me by GMR of "GMR Musings" in a comment for my earlier post, and also by another reader in an email.

Meanwhile in these forms of dust that we temporarily inhabit, not everybody's life turns out equally well. The post "The Good Samaritan" at "Waiter Rant" tells us about the spiritual evolution of one good Catholic boy.

In the future, the most important political division and line of battle will not be between liberals and conservatives, but between primitivists and futurists, both of whom can today be found on both sides of the left-right spectrum. The article "A Conservative Case for Immortality" probably will not win the author many friends in the conservative Christian circles. Of course, Leon Kass is the most well-known and comical opponent of this view, but on the left we also have great thinkers such as Bill McKibben, whose ideas I examined in my old post "But that's just what you say".

When I want to link to a page about something, I prefer linking to the Wikipedia page, since openness is the key. The post "The rise of Wikipedia" at "Otaku, Cedric's Weblog" gives us another reason why the Wikipedia URI:s are so popular: they are so simple and persistent.

So the Toronto International Film Festival then ended a few days ago, for those of us who would wait for hours in line to see some movie that they wouldn't a month later watch for free if it was playing on TV. For the best comedy in this festival, I bet that the news "Penn's smoking to cost swanky hotel $600 in fines" made some people giggle. But so it must be: if something is illegal, you can't start making willy nilly exceptions and look the other way for famous people, rich people, attractive people etc. I think the funniest part of this story is that Mr. Penn will be receiving a formal letter from the health officials of Toronto that chastises him for smoking.

"From the Archives" has an interesting discussion "Justin asks" about whether husband and wife should have separate bank accounts. We don't, but have a joint account, since our spending habits are so modest and compatible. But I can easily see how the idea of both spouses keeping 1/3 of what they earn for themselves and putting 2/3 in a joint account would be a good solution for many couples, until debt us apart.

First there was The Long Tail, and now there is "Small is the new Big" by Seth Godin. The post "Private spam regulation?" at Marginal Revolution quotes one interesting idea taken from this book.

In his latest column, Panu examines the music of Abba, now relevant again in Finland with the musical "Mamma mia". I laughed most heartily at the following paragraph:

What about punk that was sold for us early 80's teenagers as an authentic form of protest? Today we know that Sex Pistols was, from the safety pins to their total inability to carry a tune, just as coldly calculated concept as any airhead model who sings with her voice spanning only one octave accompanied by studio musicians. In fact, these both are the exact same thing: take an "artist" who can't really do anything, build an image around it and then sell it as "rebellion" or "anarchism" or whatever to dumb kids who, despite their herd mentality, all imagine themselves to be great revolutionary individualists.

Punk was just as much fascistically uniform phenomenon as any other youth fashion. It brainwashed the youth to believe that everyone should play in a band, that the only legitimate and acceptable way of being young is to play in a band. Anything else is being a nerd, being a wuss, not getting a life or some other way something that should be looked down upon and punished with social shunning.

I was browsing my archives earlier today, and came upon a prediction that I made in early June. You see, something major happened back then that was supposed to be the turning point of the War in Iraq. Out of curiosity, how many of my readers can still, without consulting any references, remember offhand what this major event was? I certainly wouldn't have remembered it, had somebody asked me it. I doubt that I could usually even remember the news from last week or last month, let alone a year ago. There was this guy who did... something... whatever it was...

Were I an economics teacher, I am sure that letters to the editor in the local newspaper would be a constant source of merriment and potential exam questions. In the post "Price Theory: What Explains Gas Station Prices?", Eric Rasmusen reprints one such letter from some economic ignoramus who believes that prices of goods are set by some central planner according to what is "fair". Of if they are not, at least they should be.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 3:22 PM | Comments (9) | links to this post  

Tiedemies, a former colleague in Finland, describes in his recent post "Metavalitus" how he had read the newspaper of the university located in downtown Tampere that concentrates on humanities, while the place where Tiedemies works is a university of technology. He then spotted one especially comical article that basically blames the university, the government and capitalism in general for the fact that the brand new building is not pleasant enough for their liking because everybody gets an identical room, except that all these rooms vary a little bit in size. Tommi comments aptly, making a more general point that I enthusiastically agree with:

I believe that the "intelligentsia" generally wasn't any smarter in the old days, it's just that the world around it was even dumber.

On the other hand, these days intelligentsia is already completely useless even for the purposes of cultural production.

In the old times they were the only people who had time and interest to create. These days engineers and backpackers write for free and for fun, creating much better text than the real writers for hire.

This is because even the average citizen has resources for doing this, and on the other hand, publishing is so easy and effortless that you no longer need pickled memes such as "books" that are hard and painful to produce. It's enough to walk to the nearest Internet terminal and write your thoughts there, directly and in brief.

The so-called intelligentsia naturally wishes to maintain its privileged existence as a group, for essentially the same reason as, say, the darts and jogging clubs. It's fun to hang around with people who share your interests. In addition you might even get paid money if you have the right last name or an attitude that is otherwise worth compensation. But such a state of affairs will not last much longer.

Since I am sure that I have gained many new readers since I translated many of Tommi's best writings during the wintery months February and March and even later after that, perhaps this would be a good time to scan through the archives for these months and post the direct links here in one convenient location. So here they are, in the order of publication:

• Testify, brother
• The Finimal
• Listening to the colours of the wind
• The Finimal, part 2
• Don't be afraid to ask, comrade
• Totalitarian blues
• Bridging the two cultures
• The real reason why moral dilemmas are popular
• On the nature of writing
• Working hard, or hardly working
• Naughty or nice?
• Advice for youth
• To cut a long story short
• What dating is really about
• Don't mess with the missionary man
• Funny because it's true
• Simplicity itself
• Everybody is special
• Hey, let's refer to the band in this song as "we"
• Every dress you own is a loaded gun
• One meatsack speaks
• The mellow bombthrower
• The religion of women
• It is so very clear and rational to anybody who is not an oppressor

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 9:42 AM | Comments (3) | links to this post  

Jamie Whyte has a new totally excellent column "Why the best pecs get the best sex" that has a far more general point than the one that the title alludes to. It is completely obvious in retrospect, but has to be pointed out. Money paragraphs:

Consider another disappointment that I imagine many of you experience. Why don’t you live in a vast mansion bordering on Hampstead Heath? Some will say it is the exorbitant price of such homes that explains this disappointing fact. They are mistaken.

Suppose a law set the price of London mansions at zero. You still wouldn’t live in one. Because reducing the price of something does not increase the quantity of it. (On the contrary, it reduces the supply.) If they were made free, there would still be only a handful of London mansions and millions of Brits wanting to live in one. Why suppose that you would be at the front of the queue for mansions?

The Utopian mistake lies in failing to take scarcity seriously. That most people do not live in mansions, or more generally do not have everything they would like, is not a consequence of “the system”. It is a consequence of the real scarcity of resources. Since reality will always contain less than the sum of what everyone would like to have, disappointment is unavoidable. No reform of the system can eliminate scarcity or the dissatisfaction it causes. The only serious question is how scarce resources should be allocated.

I don't read much fiction, but I find it easy to believe that everything in Udolpho's new post, "Epitaph, not manifesto", is true. The few books of fiction that I have read in the recent years, off the top of my head "The Savage Girl" and "I Am Charlotte Simmons" were both great, though. "Savage Girl" was written by Alex Shakar, and when I tried to search for more books written by him to read, I found out that there weren't any in existence. It was his first and only novel. If so, then it must be about the greatest first novel since "The Secret History". I simply couldn't believe that anybody could write that well for a first novel. Tom Wolfe, on the other hand, is of course an old hand, and more than enough has been written about "Charlotte", including my own post "The bonfire of charities". You all know who hates and opposes it, and who loves and is enthusiastic about it. "Calico Cat", the earlier blog by the guy who now runs "Half Sigma", has a two-part analysis "I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe, part I" and "part II". Read the whole thing, but here is the money paragraph:

The Adam Gellin “nerd” character in the book is one such example, and it’s interesting to note that although everyone has been criticizing Tom Wolfe’s depiction of Charlotte, I have not yet read a single review where someone said that Adam Gellin was not a believable character.

By the way, is there an archive page that has all the posts of Calico Cat conveniently available? I would so like to read them through.

But since I am usually linking to conservative-leaning sites (they seem to be the only ones with intelligent content these days), perhaps I should give the blogosphere leftists their day too whenever they write something quotable. Hey, I could even turn this into a fun little game. So here is one paragraph as a blockquote, and let's see if I have any readers who can guess or otherwise recognize which popular lefty blog this paragraph was snipped from. No cheating with google or other similar tools!

Jesus, what a day. The fifteenth anniversary of our wedding is tomorrow, and we wanted to celebrate this milestone of our happy marriage with a nice and expensive steak dinner. I wanted to thank her for being such a loving wife and an ally during all these years, and for remaining as slender and beautiful as she was in our wedding day. We sure have a great marriage going on here. But as luck would have it, today we were suddenly hit by an extra bill of five hundred bucks. Fortunately, thanks to our degrees in well-paid reality-based fields, our good work ethic and future time orientation, added to the fact that we have always been solidly in control of our own lives, ponying up the extra cash for this bill from our savings account makes a hardly noticeable dent in it. We won't need to dip into our retirement savings or take out a mortgage on our home, which we own outright. And I especially won't need to sell my high-traffic web address to work as a PageRank link farm, beg my readers for handouts, and hate this great nation, the greatest place on Earth to live, for not being enough like those European welfare states that would control my life because I am unable to.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 6:40 PM | Comments (3) | links to this post  

Years ago when I was teaching the "theory of computation" (you know, with Turing machines, Rice's theorem and all that stuff) course one weekend a month in another town, one student had signed up for the course thinking that it would be "computer literacy 101", having taken no computer courses before that. What is even scarier was that this guy then actually went to pass this course fair and square. In that same course there was another guy who, during one break, told me that he designs elevator software for Kone, and was looking into using genetic algorithms to come up with optimal elevator control scemes. That interesting topic never came up later, but I have occasionally wondered what would be the optimal way of running a group of elevators.

Back in Finland this wasn't much of an issue, because a typical apartment high-rise building (if you can even call five to eight stories a "high-rise") is divided to separate sections (called "rappu" in Finnish) that have one elevator each. This lone elevator of course immediately goes wherever it is called, so there is no advanced logic or optimization involved or even possible. However, the condo where we now live has 25 stories and a group of four elevators that together serve all floors. Occasionally while waiting on the ground floor I have killed time waiting for the car to arrive by looking at the floor indicators to see what the logic of the elevator control would be. And for all I can tell, it could be a helluva lot better. I mean, what is the point of having four independent elevators, if in practice only one of them will ever be moving at any given time?

For example, it has happened to me countless times that I am waiting on the ground floor, and the elevators at located something like 8-12-15-22. The elevator at 8 starts coming down... and reaches the ground floor... but wait, it continues past G and moves all the way down to B2 (lower parking level) to pick up the people waiting there. Coming up, this elevator will stop once more at B1 (upper parking level) to pick up more people, and only after that the people at G can finally get in an elevator that, to add insult to injury, is sometimes so full of people that not everybody can fit in. And during all this waiting time, the other three elevators have been standing at their original locations 12-15-22, doing nothing. So clearly there is room for serious optimization. For starters, since I would guess that about 35% of all trips start from G and 10% from B1 and B2, the control should automatically try to ensure that there are always one or two elevators around there, by bringing down one empty elevator that is otherwise doing nothing useful.

A related issue that I have occasionally wondered but have never had a chance to observe in practice follows from the logical observation that when the control receives a request from some floor, at some point it internally commits to servicing that request with a particular elevator and no other. No matter how the system is programmed, there must necessarily exist such a moment in code and time. Perhaps this commitment is not finalized until the moment that the elevator arrives and opens its doors, but I could easily see it happening even earlier in a simple system that is less well thought out. So what happens if the control has already internally committed to serve a request using elevator A (instead of B, C or D), but at the floor where the elevator A previously makes a stop, some prankster decides to hold the door open indefinitely? How long would it take for the control to realize that it had better start moving one of the other three cars? In principle, this time would be unlimited, if the system has already internally committed to using the elevator A to service the request.

I would assume that there would be some kind of timeout after which the control replans the requests to elevators, but I could easily see that unless the programmers thought of this unlikely scenario, the control would again decide to use elevator A, especially if it is the closest and coming the right way. Perhaps one night at 3 AM when there isn't any traffic so that we wouldn't annoy other people, we should really try this in practice between two floors and see what the elevators will actually do.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 1:30 PM | Comments (5) | links to this post  

I remember loving to read the original Moomin comic strips by Tove Jansson when I was a kid. I must have read all the albums several times, as they must be by far the best thing that the Swedes in Finland ever did. And now I noticed, via the post "Hattifatteners ordering cocktails?" at Crooked Timber that these original strips of Moomin have been translated into English, and are being posted for free on the web one strip a day! All right! I am especially waiting for the infamous series when the Moomin family took a vacation to Tenerife, and eagerly wanted to try marijuana and LSD. Ooh, ooh, I can hardly wait!

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 8:32 PM | Comments (3) | links to this post  

"Celebrity Poker Showdown" is perfect low-intensity TV for those moments when you just want to laze around and are perhaps reading a newspaper or a comic book or something that doesn't require your full cognitive attention. The gameplay is not too complicated to follow and the professional poker player Phil Gordon who comments the game seems like such a tremendously nice and interesting fellow that you'd watch the show just for him. He's like this guy you'd want to have a beer with, which is probably why they hired him for the job.

I don't remember actually ever channel flipping into a poker show where Gordon had been actually playing for real against other professionals, but I can easily imagine what he would be like in the table. He most certainly wouldn't be wearing those ridiculous sunglasses that you can see many young male players constantly wearing so that the other players couldn't see their eyes. When some of those games have been on I have thought that somebody should come and rip those sunglasses of their heads and give those jokers a serious slap to awaken them to their senses. What's next, some player coming to the table wearing a full hockey goalie mask?

As deep as Phil's poker expertise and ability to read players must be, I have to really wonder about something in this show, though. Once per episode, one hand is played so that the viewers only get to see one player's cards, instead of everybody's cards, and asked "How would you play it?" Once the guy from Kids in the Hall announces this, the hosts change their chatter so that they only talk about what the said player can see. Strangely enough, in every single "How would you play it?" segment they always manage to choose to follow a player who doesn't immediately fold but who gets an interesting hand and bets, and then an interesting play follows because some other players stay in and do something interesting. I mean, considering the number of episodes of this show that have been produced by now, heck, what are the odds? It's almost like some kind of trickery is used in the production of this show.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 4:35 PM | Comments (5) | links to this post  

During today's shopping, I bought us a case of new Pepsi Jazz, which is supposed to have some kind of fruity taste of strawberries and cream. It is now waiting in the fridge so that after it gets properly cold, I'll try some. Since I also got myself some Black Cherry Coke, my wife looked at me in this funny way and asked me if I am sure that I am straight. Well, Beavis, perhaps she will "straighten me out" later, uh huh huh. Hopefully I will soon also get to purchase and taste Coke Blak, that edgy energy drink that isn't yet available here, and we couldn't find it anywhere in Vegas either during our recent vacation there.

Of course new is always better, and therefore we need more new things shining in their sheer newness. The same goes for not only material things but also language, in which neologisms keep appearing almost on a hourly basis so that Urban Dictionary can have hundreds of pages for one letter. Finnish is a much slower language in this respect compared to English, and it is not quite easy to playfully create new words. But back in the days of the Go boardgame club, a new verb "öyhöttää" with several derivatives emerged in it and later broke into wider use, and at least I have seen it many times used within the Finnish blogosphere, even in many blogs that have nothing to do with this club and its alumni. I have kept my eye open for the first appearance of this word in the mainstream media, but so far this has been in vain.

This word "öyhöttää" also has the nice property that you don't need to explain what it means, since I would bet that any native Finnish speaker, when he first hears this word used in a sentence, immediately understands what it means. (Roughly, to act big and tough similarly to the way that a gorilla would pound its chest, and to simultaneously cause or threaten to cause comical mayhem and property damage with vandalism.) I don't know if there is a word that means a neologism that has this property, but the English language has seen several of these, off the top my head "rink rage". Perhaps the English language needs a word that means such a neologism. It would be even cooler if this word itself had the property that it describes (by the way, I know there is a word that means words that have this property, but I forgot what it was, so that any native speaker who hears it for the first time immediately knows what it means. Any suggestions, my readers?

Update: that word that I was looking for is autological, as opposed to heterological. Of course, the classic interesting problem here is whether the word "autological" is itself autological, and whether the word "heterological" is itself heterological. But I am still looking for a new word that would mean a word whose meaning is evident for a native speaker when he hears it for the first time. If this word is also autological, even better.

Update 2: The commenter "andy" from "I, Ectomorph" suggested "obviologism", and that great new word is clearly what I was looking for here. And this neologism is itself an obviologism, so it is autological to boot.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 4:13 PM | Comments (6) | links to this post  

"This blog sits at the intersection of anthropology and economics" examines the subtext of that viral four guys on treadmills music video in the post "OK Go Again". Another post "The Problem of Smugness" comments those stupid Apple ads where PC and Apple have been antropomorphised into a bumbling square business guy and a cool hipster guy. I am sure that as soon as Udolpho sees these ads, he will realize the error of his ways as a Windows drone and become an Apple genius.

For the moral philosophers and professional ethicists out there, Blackfive offers a provocative treatise "On the Virtues of Killing Children". Is it morally wrong to engage in a war that potentially kills children in other nations, if those nations would potentially attack and kill our children?

One thing that I have personally found puzzling in the American universities is their selection of students, since you'd think that just like in Finland, at least the top outfits would have many times more applicants coming in than they can possibly take. In Finland, universities select the incoming class based solely on the high school grades and the entrance exam, scored and weighted in some uniform manner that is same for every applicant. However, at least for some American places, I hear that the applicants send the selection committee an essay that they wrote, and this essay somehow significantly affects the selection process. Now, I may have once again misunderstood something or perhaps I don't see the whole picture, but this just sounds like about the stupidest idea that I have ever heard, since the possibility and ease of gaming this system is so blatantly obvious. Professor Greg Mankiw has doubts about the same issue in his post "Improving College Admissions".

"Coming Anarchy" brings us "Truth Air", an airplane takeoff announcement for the passengers from which all the doublespeak has been removed. Another post, "The Base vs The Alliance Base", applies some graph theory to the war against terror. Or for the terror, depending on where you are reading, I guess. Network for success, as they say!

A while ago one local channel played the scare documentary "The Corporation" in two parts. I watched the first part and I can't help to say that as leftist propaganda goes, this was even more inane than the usual fare. So I didn't even bother to watch the second part. An incoherent jumble of topics that the filmmakers thought were shocking. As an interesting thought experiment, imagine if the same people ever created a movie "Humans". But perhaps not all is lost, since Julian Sanchez notes that the film features a choir singing the writings of Milton Friedman: "Let Friedman ring". Commies sure seem to have making music to arouse workers down to the pat, and using a choir is perhaps appropriate since these people are "preaching to the choir". I am sure that the viewers who already hate capitalism found this movie very intelligent and devastating, but us boring happily-married normos with steady jobs with good salary to pay off our mortgages and pay taxes to support and feed you need quite a bit more convincing.

By the way, if anybody ever wants to set my writings to song, so that you have a full choir at your disposal, make this choir instead sing "Bengt Hilgursson", which is, repeating this Swedish name of a well-known Go player to the tune of Blade Runner theme by Vangelis. Some members of the choir can accompany the song with repeated "bebe bebe" at suitable points, or simulate vocally some other synthesizer effects in the song especially if the choir sings a cappella. It's just that I have always wanted to hear some real choir actually do this, instead of just me and my chums years ago at the Go boardgame club.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 2:22 PM | Comments (3) | links to this post  

Like I have said a few times already, I actually hope that global warming turns out to be real and serious, since it would be such beautiful and cosmic justice to all those anti-nuclear activists and other primitivists, thanks to whom most energy is still produced by burning valuable and soon-to-be-peaking hydrocarbons. Today in the breakfast show of our local television network, the host had some guy in the studio, and this guy said that the global warming is not an entirely bad thing but that there are also benefits to it. Well, yes, there most certainly are, although they depend a lot on where you happen to live. However, this guy said that if Canada gets four degrees warmer on average, five thousand fewer Canadians would die each year. Now, I do acknowledge that the cold climate strains and drains and pains and thus indirectly kills especially old people, but at least in the long run equilibrium, I don't see how that claim is even theoretically possible.

When people get to freely choose who they associate with, the market reality necessarily follows, and especially so if the participants tend to have highly uniform and strongly correlated preferences. Like they do in the real world, although if I am wrong, please somebody point me out a woman who would prefer to marry a homeless midget, or explain me once again why the standard sitcom family of fat doofus dad and hot slender wife is "unrealistic". In fact, I would say that all people are something like 97-98% similar in their thoughts, desires and preferences, but most of this similarity is so obvious that it gets ignored and taken for granted (let's do a show of hands, how many of you prefer to eat cow pies instead of eating blueberry pies?) while we concentrate and make a big show about the 2-3% that we differ in (let's do another show of hands, how many of you prefer blondes over brunettes?) Agoraphilia's post "The Calculus of Commitment" analyzes some practical consequences of the market reality of the sexual market. Common sense, really, but looking at what life is like for many people, perhaps not so common. The post links to the post "Commitment-Phobic" at Volokh and recommends the commenter Dan Simon, whose comment is indeed quite excellent:

The popularity of the idea that men are "commitment-phobic" -- despite the rather high percentage of them who get married, many of them more than once -- isn't hard to understand. It serves two constituencies extremely well: women who don't want to admit to themselves that a particular man isn't as devoted to her as she'd like, and men who don't want to admit to a particular woman that he isn't as devoted to her as she'd like.

I'm sure lots of men would gladly embrace the theory that women are "sex-phobic", if only they could get away with it. But unfortunately for them, most women expect men to be emotionally tough enough not to need a mutually face-saving excuse like "it's not you--it's just that I'm afraid of sex".

By the way, I recall that The Danimal also once similarly wondered about this issue of "commitment phobia", and asked whether most men who are classified as "commitment-phobic" would really be that reluctant to marry women who are able to get work as NFL cheerleaders or Playboy centerfolds. Another time, he noted that

How many women have you overheard saying, "That man finds me sexually worthless"? Typically a woman rationalizes away a man's lack of interest by saying he is commitment-phobic, or he is a man who "cannot love," or he's gay, or he "has issues," etc. How many women state the obvious: "I'm just not attractive to most men"?

The weird thing is that lots of women are well aware that they have physical flaws; a few women might even understand that they have personality flaws. But few women seem able to understand what a given level of flawed-ness translates into.

That book "He's Just Not That Into You" was like a great intellectual leap for women, as if many women did not even have the concept that a man might not want to have sex with them (or keep having sex with them). Women have been sold the huge lie that every woman is equally entitled to the same storybook relationship with her dream man. And women generally believe it because they don't hit on guys and get rejected hundreds of times.

Do you think anybody needs to write a book "Dude: Chicks Don't Dig You"? "Dudes" already know they don't get much love from most chicks.

The moment I read Dan Simon's comment, I knew that I want to read more stuff that he has written. Well, the man has a blog, modestly called "I could be wrong...", but it seems to update quite rarely. But let's take what we can and not complain. The post "A Russian joke for International Women's Day" points out a hypocrisy in feminist argumentation. Another post points out a revealing hypocrisy in a group of leftists making an appeal to the government of Iran, as opposed to how they would behave if they had to write the exact same appeal to, say, to the current government of the United States. In fact, I would say that what is clearly going on here is the exact same phenomenon as depicted in my Jussi Halla-Aho translation post "The rhinoceros in our living room". Western leftists understand perfectly well the reality of Islamic nations, but they carefully walk on eggshells to avoid this reality ever becoming too explicit, the exact same way that the family of an alcoholic denies the existence of the problem in their family and makes excuses for it, even blaming others and themselves for the actions of the alcoholic if that's what it takes.

In other news, a bunch of Finnish bloggers maintain a group blog "Tietoisuuden vapautus" that parodies leftists, larp and manga enthusiasts, feminists, anarchists, New Age believers, alternative medicine quacks and other similarly comical people. The post "Lysenko" reminds us that

As the September approaches its end, we get closer to Trofim Lysenko's birthday. This year will be thirty years since his death. Lysenko was a rare sight in the scientific world, since he dared to defend the values of ordinary people and workers. The capitalist establishment of course never acknowledged his results, but they still live in our hearts. Brave trailblazers like him would really be needed these days to show us alternatives to the lax and weakened materialist and technocratic values of the West. Let us light a candle to remember him.

Indeed. The funniest thing about the much-reviled figure of Trofim Lysenko is that the vast majority of leftists still fully support his views in practice. After all, they like to proclaim that nature is essentially meaningless, but nurture and environment determine everything, and that there are no important hereditary differences whatsoever between any two people or groups (thus directly contradicting Darwinian natural selection, which requires hereditary inequalities to select from) so that regardless of his "genes" and "DNA", anyone or anything can be raised to be anything at all.

The post "Liberals, Conservatives, and the Use of Racial and Ethnic Classifications" at the Volokh Conspiracy points out an interesting symmetry:

I have long been fascinated by the fact that most conservatives support racial and ethnic profiling for national security and law enforcement purposes, yet are categorically opposed to the use of racial or ethnic classifications for affirmative action. Most liberals, by contrast, take exactly the opposite view. Both ideologies oppose racial and ethnic classifications as a matter of principle in one area, yet defend them on pragmatic grounds in another.

As controversial as those issues are, intelligence is an even more controversial issue. Noboby objects to the idea that some people are more athletic than others or that they can play guitar better, but intelligence is so important in life that it has to be hushed up. Vox Day's post "Talent is better than brains anyway" contains a few paragraphs that were to me highly reminiscent of The Danimal:

I was not provided with any information about my IQ until I took what was then a form of IQ test at 16. Given the amount of information I had amassed by that time regarding the cognitive capacity of those around me, I was unsurprised to receive confirmation that mine was superlative according to the accepted measure.

It is ironic that parents attempt to hide such information, particularly from those most capable of gleaning it from casual observation. One can no more hide the fact of an individual's intelligence from the intelligent than height from the tall, weight from the fat or coordination from the graceful. I've found that one can even sometimes spot an above-average or a sub-standard intelligence simply from a glance at an individual's eyes.

Lethal Sangerian elitism aside, it is a greater and more injurious error for the intelligent to insist on treating the less intelligent as if they were as cognitively capable as their superiors.

Intelligence is highly correlated to many good things. Tommi once noted that people (and especially teenagers) can be divided in two groups, those who can tolerate peace and silence and concentration, and those who simply can't but who soon have to start some kind of noise and activity. Theodore Dalrymple has a few times noticed the same thing about the unemployed underclass who always have to keep the television loudly turned on in their crappy apartments. In school, when a member of the latter group sees a member of the former group reading or studying, he feels instinctively threatened by this and can't help himself but to start bothering him, perhaps even with a violent slap to amuse other members of the Idiocracy. I noticed that "Mean Mr. Mustard" has encountered the same phenomenon in his travails, as documented in his post "Another Retreat of Silence".

It is always good to acknowledge when and where you have been wrong. If I ever am, I will let you know immediately in a post similar to "Mulligans" by "God of the Machine".

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 10:05 AM | Comments (3) | links to this post  

The much-ballyhooed new season of Survivor, this time taking place at the remote Cook Islands, started yesterday. My wife watches every episode of this show, but I have pretty much lost all interest in it, no matter how authentic and exciting it is to see modern people living like primitives and recreate the rituals that our ancestors practiced thousands of years ago. For example, after an ancient tribe had suffered some kind of devastating loss, its members gathered to the sacred ritual of "tribal council" to vote one member of their tribe to be permanently cast out. This simple ritual necessitated the invention of primitive arithmetic and led to the invention of numbers and counting, and the ritual itself later gradually evolved into what we know as the modern voting and the political elections. So you could say that this ancient ritual was actually the important seed of our whole modern society! It is historically at least as important as the Roman, Greek and Judeo-Christian legal, social and intellectual traditions that the Western culture otherwise emerged from, and I can't understand why the modern historians neglegt it so totally. An important part of this sacred ritual was also that fire symbolized life, an idea later embraced by great thinkers such as Ayn Rand.

But of course I had to watch this first episode so that I could make a blog post about the new "controversial" season where the contestants have been divided in four tribes based on race, to the great dismay of certain people. The words "social experiment" have been bandied around a lot, although I seem to remember that starting from the very first season, these words were part of the advertising copy of the show. Of course, this hook to add up viewership for the first episode will be finished by episode three when the four tribes are randomly shuffled in two tribes. And then shuffled again and again, since the producers are never going to risk again having the game go like it did a few seasons ago, one tribe becoming totally demoralized, vanquished in every challenge and all its members being voted off one by one. And after the merge into one tribe and especially when the game gets to top six or so, I don't think that anybody even remembers what tribe each contestant originally belonged to. This might be different this season now that your race is your uniform, but even so, have the original tribes ever made any difference in this show when alliances are forged and broken in a fluid fashion? I don't think that they have.

To start the analysis of the show with one more general observation about the debate around this show, I find it very hypocritical that the crowd that normally claims that race is a social construct and doesn't even exist (strangely enough, every time I have read somebody make this claim, that somebody has been him- or herself white) and therefore it is not possible to divide people in tribes based on race and what about all those mixed-race people and so on, also seems to be the same crowd that complains that there are not enough nonwhite people on television. Well, if race doesn't really exist and it is only a social construct, how could you even possibly be able to tell what race a face you see on TV belongs to, and thus be able to say that there aren't enough nonwhite people on television?

In a similar fashion, I find it rather strange that the leftist crowd never protested the earlier seasons when the tribes were assigned based on sex. After all, the progressives have been telling us for a long time now that gender is only a social construct and that instead of two binary sexes, there is a whole continuum of gender. But funny thing... I just can't seem to remember the leftists snarkily asking what tribe the show is going assign all the numerous transgendered and genderqueer and "questioning" contestants to.

But enough of that snark, let's rather examine the show itself. When you edit a couple of days into a one-hour show, naturally the producers choose to show us the most comical moments, including the light and good-natured in-group comical banter of self-deprecation based on racial stereotypes. However, when that Latino guy who looks a bit like that singer from Biohazard but without all those tattoos said to the camera that his tribe has an advantage because they are accustomed to living in warm tropics, now I am a bit fuzzy on the details, but wasn't there a few years ago some white conservative politician in the States who got in trouble for saying something essentially similar? (And no, by this I don't mean Arnold, but this one was a longer time ago.)

I am sure that many other bloggers will examine the first immunity challenge, what happened in it and the consequences and symbolism for the tribe that lost much better than I could, so I am not even going to touch that particular minefield.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 9:19 AM | Comments (2) | links to this post  

I had another course starting last night. This one was great, since the class was small and teaching sure is fun and easy when the audience pretty much consists of the A-list of the students of your past courses for the last couple of semesters. Sure can't much complain about my life in general.

After the long day of yesterday, I don't have any real work to do today, so I can just goof off and perhaps prepare material for the oncoming weeks, even though for some reason, the theme song of the 90's sitcom "The Mommies" was playing in my head as an earworm. Earlier today around the lunchtime I took a stroll down to the local area that I have jokingly dubbed "Ethnictown" (as in that one episode of The Simpsons), and noticed that a brand new Hakka Chinese restaurant had opened there. The interiors were still looking pretty unfinished, but their five-dollar lunch special drew me in. For this measly five dollars, they brought me this whole big plate heaping full of rice, vegetables and spicy beef. Definitely a place that I will keep frequenting in the future.

Of course, what Ethnictown is for me in the culinary sense, the Internet is the same in the intellectual sense, an endless all-you-can-eat buffet of pleasurable engorging. First, as Stephen Wolfram argues in his tome "A New Kind of Science" (now available online for free), iteration of simple rules can generate tremendous complexity. The post "Automatic Sayings Generator" at "Let the Finder Beware" in a way illustrates this important principle.

Professor Peter Kurgman is the foremost progressive thinker of the Internet. I would say that he is a true renaissance man, but that would be blatant phallogocentrism that worships dead white males. In the post "The Charter of Progressive Politics: What We Demand", the good professor outlines and summarizes the demands of the modern progressive movement. On the other side of the fence, Lawrence Auster offers a succinct analysis of liberalism in his post "How liberals sustain their liberalism".

The news article "Colombian gangsters face sex ban" is comical in many levels at once. A bunch of women who date those exciting and dangerous criminals are now complaining that these men use violent means to fight over their turfs. I guess that this one also pretty definitively answers the question which sex is the sexual gatekeeper so that it wields the power to influence the actions of the opposite sex by threatening to withhold sexual interest. We'll see how well this lockout will work with those hardened macho gangsters who I'm sure won't mind at all coming up looking like they are pussy-whipped. I'm personally a bit skeptical about the prospects of this "strike", but hey, surely anything could happen.

Another news article "'Men cleverer than women' claim" that reports that men have slightly higher average IQ than women has raised heated objections all over the blogosphere. I can't help but wonder if those very same people would object so much or perhaps even gloat a little if, instead of men and women, a similar IQ differences had been reported to exist between certain other groups. For example, progressives and conservatives. At least I seem to recall the former group gloating and coasting (heh) quite a lot when that famous fake table that listed the U.S. States sorted by average IQ. As Steve Sailer often likes to point out, liberals are superior of the bunch because they have a higher IQ, and unlike those bigoted conservatives, they also believe that IQ is meaningless.

Speaking of the devil, I noticed that Steve has finally turned his eye to questions of human mate seeking, in style of The Danimal or The Bulletproof Pimp, but in that distinctive manner that he uses to approach other issues by connecting them to wider statistical realities. The post "Lonelyguy15million" explains why marriages between white men and Asian women are significantly more common in America than marriages between Asian men and white women. No wonder that websites such as "Bitter Asian Men" exist. In all societies women tend to distribute their sexual attention and favours far less equitably and in a more discriminatory fashion compared to the way that capitalists distribute their paychecks, which is something to remember the next time some lefty complains about the unfairness of capitalism.

The post "Is early admission a good idea?" at Marginal Revolution draws an interesting analogy between the "early admissions" in American universities and how young adults pair for marriages in the marriage market. When people get to freely choose who they associate with and they can't force anybody to pal up with them, the market reality necessarily follows, even with the sacred notion of love which leads to assortative mating, the undesirables of both sexes having to settle for each other or remain alone.

In our cold and hard world of ruthless competition many loser men fall out of society altogether. Some of them, such as the infamous bomber Petri Gerdt, are mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore. And as the news article "NYPD Boom: Bomb Shock" tells us, their job is not going to be very expensive difficult. The liberal society with its individual freedoms will probably find it rather difficult to adapt to situation when anybody can build a literal blockbuster.

Or you can just take a gun and vote from the rooftops. Now that there is clearer information of what exactly happened in that Montreal "apeshit" (for example, where did that whole idea of three gunmen come from?), what I really can't understand is how a man who is seriously intent on going on a murderous rampage to kill as many people as possible with an assault rifle manages to kill only one person while he seriously wounds nineteen, since a seriously wounded person is not going to be running away. I guess that killing just doesn't work in real life the way it works on television and video games. Or maybe this little video game freak seriously believed that once they are hit and lying down, they will simply disappear after a few seconds and turn to food, medipacks and extra ammo. The post "Online Communities And Incitement To Murder" at "Ace of Spades HQ" examines the issue of potential killers and the participants on the online forums who nurture and encourage them.

Since this apeshitter chose to end it with a suicide by cop, there are no thorny questions of sentencing him. As the news article "Justice at the click of a mouse in China", this difficult task is more suited for impersonal and cold computers rather than emotional and vindictive humans. The implementation of this system is probably what in the AI community is called "case-based reasoning". The link was provided by the combination service Diggdot that also informs us that Wikipedia now has a page about the famous "Stormtrooper effect", which might explain the inept shooting that Kimveer exhibited.

Many other students die violently without their fates gaining national attention and filling several pages of national newspapers. I noticed that the local student newspaper features a story "A tragic end to a promising life" of a tragedy closer to home, a lovely young female student whose promising life was cut short by a violent ex-boyfriend's knife.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen at 2:11 PM | Comments (3) | links to this post