scrofulous

pontiff-ication

2011-08-22T19:16:00.002+01:00

Regular readers here will have noticed that I have far too many ideas to contain on only one blog. Fortunately I've been asked to help carry the Quantum Pontiff's torch, along with co-bloggers Charlie Bennett and Steve Flammia. So you can read my quantum thoughts there. I'll keep this blog for non-quantum posts, so keep checking back here every 12-18 months for another paragraph or two.

Democratic voter vs Democrat

2011-05-15T17:50:00.002+01:00

I vote mostly straight Democrat, but wouldn't call myself a Democrat since my views are pretty far from those of the typical Democratic politician. Like many, I vote for them because I prefer them to the Republicans. Does that make me a Democratic voter? Or a Democrat?

Typically in the US, someone like me is a called a Democrat. Similarly, people who vote Republican are called "Republicans" rather than "Republican voters" or "Republican supporters."

In the UK, the dominant parties are Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats, while people are referred to as Conservative voters, Labour supporters, and so on. It's hard to even think of a noun associated with members of the Labour party (ok, well it's Labourites, but that's not used much). On the other hand, like in the US, party affiliation is also pretty stable, and there are still plenty of unquestioning supporters of each party.

But on the whole I like this use of language much better. Often the Democratic and Republican parties agree on things that the majority of Americans disagree with, and it'd be easier to talk about this if we didn't pretend that the entire country was made up of Democrats and Republicans.

why not assassinate Hitler?

2010-01-12T20:12:00.003Z

Reading a comment from a reader of Krugman's blog about the recent death of Paul Samuelson made me rethink my attachment to utilitarianism. You know the train scenarios for utilitarianism?

Scenario 1: You're standing next to a fork in the traintracks, with access to the lever that changes the direction the train will take. The train can not be stopped, and if left as it is, it will run over and kill 5 people standing at the end of the tracks. If, however , you pull the lever the train will change directions, killing the 1 person standing at the end of that fork. What do you do?
Scenario 2: The situation with the train is the same, however this time you're standing on a bridge over the tracks. There's only one direction the train can go, and at the end there are 5 people that will be killed. You know that the only way to stop the train is by throwing some sort of heavy object in it's path. The only heavy object at your disposal at the moment happens to be the very fat man standing next to you. What do you do?

Most people pull the lever in scenario 1, but refuse to kill the fat man in scenario 2. But the consequences of pulling the lever and killing the fat man are the same! So are we all just cowards? Somehow we have an instinct against violence that is hard to overcome. The discomfort of the situation leads many people to change the rules. For example, here is one response that totally refuses to accept the premises:

In both scenarios, I'd run down and tell morons from moronville to not stand on train tracks even when a train is coming.
But, if forced into the only given options, I would pull the lever in scenario 1 so less people would be killed (unless it was like, 5 old people and 1 child or something). In the second I would not throw the extraordinarily fat man into the tracks. Fat and already-in-danger-of-dying he may be, anything heavy enough to stop a train's momentum like that would cause the train to violently stop and derail. Many more than 5 people would die and be seriously injured that way.

Here is a slightly more realistic example. Suppose you lived in Germany in the late 1930's and found yourself with a chance to kill Hitler. Suppose further that you either wouldn't get caught, or else wouldn't mind sacrificing yourself for the greater good. And of course, assume that you agree with today's consensus about the Nazis being evil.

Of course, it'd be great to stop the deaths of fifty million people. So shouldn't you go for it?

I think you can make an argument against killing Hitler even on utilitarian grounds. The problem is that the future is never clear. This is why we don't like to kill the fat man, and why doing so wouldn't be defensible in court: in practice, we're never really sure that the train wouldn't have stopped anyway, that other methods of stopping the train aren't possible, or that killing the fat man would help instead of even leading to some worse outcomes. The only time we really know for sure is in a thought experiment, which is why these experiments feel so artificial.

But c'mon! It's Hitler! Nobody likes Hitler. What could possibly be bad about killing him?

Well, what if popular opinion otherwise would have turned against the Nazi party, and killing Hitler drew more popularity to the party? Certainly Hitler wasn't the only Nazi evildoer. And even in hindsight it's hard to know what would have happened. More importantly, Hitler made many mistakes in fighting the war, often related to not listening to the advice of his generals. A different leader might have been much more effective, and not much less evil. Indeed the British studied the question and decided to cancel their assassination plans because, as one British officer put it, Hitler's incompetence made him "of the greatest possible effort to the British war effort." And the German generals who tried to assassinate him were arguably more motivated by Hitler's incompetence than by his warmongering.

Of course, if you're just some random German barber in 1940, you might not know all this. But that's the point! We never know exactly what the consequences of our actions will be. In what seems to be even the most clear-cut case for murder, the situation gets murkier and murkier the more you look into it. And often we have to make decisions without looking into them. Personally, I hadn't even heard the arguments about Hitler's incompetence until a few years ago, and before I had heard them I thought killing Hitler would have been a purely good thing. So for most of my life I was (probably) totally wrong about this question, despite knowing more about WW2 than most other parts of history. Extrapolating to the future, this means that I shouldn't overstate my certainty about things which today I confidently believe.

Finally, let's come back to the comment on Paul Samuelson:

Samuelson was just another Eichmann. He is responsible for propagating a destructive economic dogma.

Whoever wrote this is convinced that Samuelson's economic theories (or maybe his contributions to linear programming) made him an evil person, maybe even evil enough that we would have been better off if he had been assassinated earlier. Obviously whoever wrote this is a nutjob, but they clearly don't think so. They probably think that they alone have the moral clarity to see that Scenario 1 equals Scenario 2.

But the problem is that any of us could be that nutjob. And that's why we shouldn't kill people, even if we're utilitarians and are really pretty sure that it's all for the best.

vegetarianism and animal welfare

2009-09-28T15:03:00.000+01:00

Based on a conversation with Charlie Bennett.

There are two reasonable assumptions that imply a surprising conclusion: vegetarianism increases human welfare at the expense of animal welfare.

Assumption 1: Living things are generally better off existing than not existing. The only exceptions involve constant pain of some kind, and are generally rare.
Assumption 2: Animals in factory farms may sometimes be worse off than if they were in the wild, but their lives are not so terrible as to be worse than non-existence.

To accept these assumptions you don't need to believe that factory farms are humane (only that a pig would rather be on a farm than not exist), or that abortion/birth control is immoral (since the loss your descendants experience by not existing is balanced by the benefits to everyone else).

To test assumption #1, I think suicide is the wrong way to think about it, since that has many other cultural associations. Rather, think about reincarnation. Morpheus offers you a red pill or a blue pill. Neither pill will have any effect until you die at the end of your natural life. At that point if you've taken the red pill then you have no afterlife. If you take the blue pill, you get reincarnated as a newborn piglet in an industrial farm somewhere in Utah, where you share a cramped space with 100,000 other pigs. (And after this, no more reincarnation.) Which pill would you take? If you prefer the blue pill, then I would say you accept the above two assumptions. (Apparently, the Talmud does not accept them, claiming that "It would have been better for man not to have been born, but now that he is born, let him look to his deeds." But let's leave this to the side for now.)

In this case, a higher rate of vegetarianism means that fewer animals will be raised and eaten, and as a result the Earth will be able to support more people. (Ok, so assumption #3 is that we reach an equilibrium without blowing ourselves up.) Thus human welfare will be higher, since there are more of us, and animal welfare will be lower since there are fewer animals.

What are my personal views? Well, I agree with the above two assumptions, and I prefer people to animals, so I think that vegetarianism is the more moral choice. However, I'm a hypocrite, so I eat meat.

the protection racket

2009-07-15T16:06:00.000+01:00

Many laws are justified by the need to protect ourselves from our own supposedly bad or coerced decisions. We have laws against drug use, prostitution, suicide, and so on. (And that's just for adults!) One problem with these laws is that we're often bad at making decisions for other people, usually because we don't take time to understand their situation. For example, we may want stop people in poor countries from moving to the cities to work in bad conditions, but this could be based on not understanding rural poverty.

Another problem is that "X is illegal" often slides into "X is immoral" and then "people who do X are immoral" and finally "people who do X are not fully human." (Or maybe the causality goes in both directions.) So that we get a "war on drugs" that is conducted with the same regard for human life as most wars are.

(Not the most relevant image, but I wanted an excuse to post it.)

But even well-meaning and compassionate thinkers, like Bob Herbert, get seduced by the idea of protecting people from their own supposedly bad decisions. Here is an article he wrote on legalizing prostitution. (This is even before Eliot Spitzer; I have a long backlog of blog posts.)

My reply articulates what I think is wrong with laws against prostitution.

Dear Bob Herbert,
I want to thank you for your excellent column on the under-discussed problem of everyday misogyny. Your focus on systematic aspects of culture was a welcome exception to the media's usual habit of viewing everything through the lens of a single scandal.
However, I don't think it's right for you to say that legalized or decriminalized prostitution is a step backwards for women. Obviously, decriminalization doesn't fix everything, but you should consider:

That many organizations of sex workers and their advocates favor decriminalization. See for example
http://www.sfbg.com/38/18/cover_hookers.html
http://www.bayswan.org/gagorder/orgs_oppose_gagrule.html
among many other examples.
You (and I!) should be careful of speaking on others' behalf, when they themselves may have different opinions about what's best for themselves.
This recent study of (criminalized) prostitution in Chicago [S.D. Levitt and S.A. Venkatesh. An empirical analysis of street-level prostitution. 2007] indicates several serious problems with the criminalized regime. It indicates that prices are low ($30-80 per sex act), meaning that the law isn't seriously restricting the availability of prostitutes (just as drug laws have failed to restrict the availability of drugs). It also found that 3% of sex acts by prostitutes without pimps were given to police in order to avoid arrest. The article calls these "freebies," but they should be called acts of rape, that if not formally sanctioned by the state, are entirely made possible by laws ostensibly in place to protect women. Finally, the article observed that prostitutes were victims of violence on average once per month. While legalization wouldn't stop this, it is undeniable that it gives them much greater access to legal remedies.
The above problems are inherent to any system in which prostitution is criminalized. However, the problems with Nevada could be addressed by further reforms: (a) the illegal prostitution in Las Vegas is partly because it is illegal within that county; and (b) many decriminalization advocates say it is better to allow prostitutes to work independently rather than only as part of brothels. Farley makes compelling points about PTSD, abuse and other problems facing prostitutes in legal brothels. But her research has been criticized for focusing on a non-representative sample of only the most marginalized prostitutes, and it not at all clear that legal prostitution is always as grim as she reports.
It's still great that you highlight the abuses of women under legalized prostitution in places like Nevada. But I wish you would devote a proportionate amount of ink to the places like Chicago where hypocritical prohibition often leaves women even worse off.

all self-serving generalizations are wrong

2008-12-03T19:25:00.006Z

I had meant to write a post reviewing the excellent Re-Imagining Rwanda by Johan Pottier, which I found a shocking corrective to my prejudices about who were the good guys and the bad guys in the DRC. But since I've meant to write this post for about two years, perhaps I should at least post a letter I wrote to the NPR show On The Media.

First, an aside. While on the subject of how country X discusses atrocities committed by group Y against victims Z, I'll mention some interesting differences in how the US and UK teach about the Belgian colonialism in the Congo. If you don't know this story, I highly recommend the book King Leopold's Ghosts by Adam Hochschild, which I'd also like to review here, but realistically won't: the brief summary is that in the early 20th century, Belgium killed about half the people in the Congo.

American schools don't teach about this, just like pretty much every other topic about Africa. Embarrassingly, I've read dozens of books about the Holocaust, but learned about the Belgian Congo only a few years ago. In the UK, though, everyone knows the story of the Belgian Congo. My theory is that the British view themselves as better colonialists (more humane, efficient, etc.) than the French and other Europeans, and so enjoy learning about the failings of the other colonial powers. As partial evidence for this I'll quote from yet another great book that I should review here but probably won't: David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

...British Cairo particularly misunderstood ... [that] the Moslem Middle East ... was not willing to be ruled by non-Moslems. Behind enemy lines there were Moslems who were dissatisfied with the Young Turk government, but they proposed to replace it with a different Turkish government, or at any rate a different Islamic government. They regarded rule by a Christian European power, such as Britain, as intolerable.
... Accurate reports... indicated that... most Syrians ... objected to the prospect of being ruled in the postwar world by France, and since [Ronald] Storrs [(Kitchener's Oriental Secretary)] and his colleagues took it for granted that the Arabic-speaking peoples could not govern themselves, the only possibility left was the one advocated by Storrs. [incorporation into British-ruled Egypt.]
Seen in that light, reports that the Syrians considered the Germans and Turks to be Zionists and the French to be detestable meant that the Syrians must be pro-British. Summarizing a memorandum submitted by a Syrian leader who called for Arab independence, [Gilbert] Clayton [head of British intelligence in Cairo] stated that "it is to England, and to England alone, that both Syrian Christians and pan-Arabs are turning."

To be fair to the British, this is the same sort of arrogant mistake that Americans make all the time, e.g. assuming anti-Soviet mujahideen are our allies.

Anyway, here is my letter to On the Media.

Dear OTM,
I'm writing about a story broadcast on April 4, 2008 about a disarmament campaign run by the Rwandan government for FDLR fighters in Congo. (Apologies for writing so long after the program, but I am a podcast listener.) I have both a complaint and a program suggestion.
While I think your story was excellent, I think your editorial framing of it was unbalanced and misleading. In particular, you seem to uncritically follow a narrative in which the RPF and Tutsis are heroes while the Hutus are villains. I am referring here to this part of the introduction to the story:
Bob Garfield: Tutsi rebels ended the slaughter and pushed the genocide's perpetrators, an extremist group of Hutus, into neighboring Congo... Today the remnants of the genocidal forces are known as the FDLR... The FDLR live like parasites among the Congolese. They are a source of strife that has cost five million lives.
Brooke Gladstone: For years, Rwanda's Tutsi government has used proxy rebel groups in Congo to hunt them down. ...
While this framing is in some ways reasonable-after all, extremist Hutus did perpetuate a genocide and the RPF did stop it-it is also misleading (and even somewhat inflammatory with the word "parasites"). For example, it was not only the genocide's perpetrators who fled to Zaire, but many noncombatant Hutus also became refugees. And while the FDLR have definitely been a source of strife in the DRC, they are far from the only cause of all the fighting or human rights abuses there. Brooke Gladstone alludes to this in her mention of 'proxy rebel groups,' but again this implies that Rwanda's involvement in the DRC has been limited to stopping extremists and genocidaires, when in fact it has been far greater and morally murkier; for example, the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma have brutalized civilians as much as any other armed group there.
I'm writing about this not to ask for an on-air correction (it is a little late for that, for one), but because your framing in the April 4 story mirrors common mistakes of reporting on Rwanda by Western journalists and aid agencies. An excellent discussion of these systematic errors can be found in the 2002 book Re-Imagining Rwanda by Johan Pottier, a professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS (part of the University of London). His thesis is that a combination of factors (lack of time, ignorance of historical context, guilt over failing to stop or properly report the 1994 genocide) has led many Westerners to uncritically accept the RPF's framing of the subsequent conflict in the DRC.
Since your program is dedicated to critically examining US media, I think you would be in a good position to do a story on the way the conflicts in Rwanda and the DRC have been represented in the US and Europe. Prof. Pottier's book would, in my opinion, make a good hook for the story, but no doubt there are others you could find as well.

where hope is just a Shinkansen ride away

2008-11-06T21:51:00.003Z

Outside In

2007-10-23T22:56:00.000+01:00

How to turn a sphere inside-out (but not a circle).

From the geometry center.

I'm bored.

2007-05-05T16:00:00.000+01:00

I'll admit it. I am terrified at the prospect of being trapped for more than a few minutes alone (like on a train or plane) without something to read or write.

Sure, being alone with my thoughts can be pleasant. Sometimes they slide dreamlike into each other and into unexpected and interesting territories. But like dreams, they're usually just out of reach of language and memory. And when I try to fix them in one place, or direct them, they end up in these aggravatingly useless circles, which I know I could easily straighten out with a pen and paper.

I shamelessly project these preferences on others too. I love how my dad will bring two books to the beach just in case he finishes one. I can't help but notice that subway riders in NYC read far more than those in Boston, and I can't help but feel a little surge of affection for New Yorkers every time this happens. Sitting in a Bristol doctor's waiting room with a pleasantly long manuscript to read, it was distressing to see how many other people had not even magazines for the hour-long wait. A mentally retarded guy in maybe his early 20's was in the waiting room too, and wasted no time in going to the children's area and playing with the sliding blocks. I respected that. (The toy with the marbles looked particularly fun.) And of all the atrocities committed by the US/UK in the GWOT one of the most vivid in my mind was when they banned books on transatlantic flights. Torture, massacres, dispossession---these I could understand---but what kind of twisted mind would ban books "just until things settled down"?

However, a recent paper titled A desire for desires: Boredom and its relation to alexithymia suggests that I shouldn't be so smug:

the bored individual is unaware of emotions and externally-oriented. Furthermore, although the bored person typically complains that the external world fails to engage them, the present findings suggest the underlying problem may be in the person’s inability to consciously access and understand their emotions. The present findings and accompanying literature review challenge the simplistic notion that boredom is never more than a trivial annoyance resulting from an under-stimulating environment.

This is only statistical correlation, I know, but perhaps should be occasion for introspection. On the other hand, that sounds boring, so I think I'll skip it.

women's underwear

2007-04-30T00:43:00.000+01:00

A recent post at I Blame the Patriarchy was hilarious enough to remind me of why I started reading the blog in the first place:

I mean to say that in report after gruesome report on torture tactics sanctioned by the Secretary of Defense and employed by American sociopath-imperialist forces in hell-holes like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, one reads ceaselessly of “snarling military dogs,” “stress positions,” “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli,” “20-hour interrogations,” “sleep deprivation,” “forced to perform tricks while tethered to dog leash,” “waterboarding, and “forced to wear women’s underwear on head.”

The rest of the post continues with an excellent discussion of why this last atrocity is so particularly degrading. Instead of commenting further, I'll recommend you check it out yourself.

Instead, I'd like to add my own story to this under-discussed field.

A few years ago I was buying undershirts in a K-mart. It took me a while to find them because they weren't with the other plain T-shirts, but were in the [Men's] "Underwear and Socks" section of the store. By this time I had thoroughly explored the K-Mart clothing department. Strangely, while there was a Women's Socks department, there were no signs for Women's Underwear. Instead the place to buy women's underwear was called "Intimate Apparel." (You can see this replicated in their online men's and women's catalogues.)

Hopefully any comment I could make here about how only women are thought to be gendered and about the pervasiveness of raunch culture would be superfluous. But could I be alone here in being shocked? Has the rest of the clothes-buying world long since gotten used to this? Or maybe is one of those quotidian horrors (like American TV news) that only becomes less appalling through wearying repetition.

In the next episode, I do a gendered reading of the tanktop. For women a perfectly respectable, if informal, summer top; for men, it is vaguely obscene without a shirt over it. Stay tuned!

I'm part of a movement!

2006-12-29T06:17:00.000Z

Who knew that even by neglecting my blog, I could be joining a 200-million strong online movement?

The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.
...
"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing," Mr. Plummer said.
"Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

However, just to show I haven't totally slid into apathy, here is a letter I just wrote to the NYT about what's missing from their recent Ford hagiography.

To the editor,
Much of your coverage of the Ford presidency was nostalgic and moving, but I was disappointed that you neglected to mention Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, which used mostly American weaponry, killed an estimated 200,000 out of 700,000 people and led to a 25-year occupation. The day before the invasion, Ford and Henry Kissinger were on a state visit to Indonesia, where Indonesian president Haji Mohammad Suharto asked for "understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action." Ford responded with "We will understand and will not press you on the issue," while Kissinger asked only that the invasion wait until Kissinger and Ford had returned to the U.S.
Sincerely,
Aram Harrow

I should point out that I didn't know of Ford's involvement here until I learned it from Jon Schwarz and Dennis Perrin, although my first letter to the The Tech (which was actually published!) was inspired by my realization that even in 1998 the Clinton administration was illegally arming and training the Indonesian military.

So now will I join Bernard, Carla, Julia, Michael, Dan, Fafblog and all of my other fellow no-longer-bloggers? Or will I turn to page 123 of some book and flesh out all of those drafts on book reviews, freedom of information, math problems, anti-nationalist mockery and women's underwear? All I know is that I'm not going to promise anything.

if you live in the U.K.

2006-10-01T10:09:00.000+01:00

Watch this show tonight on BBC2 at 8pm. In the U.S., you'll have to wait another month or so.

It's called Battle of the Geeks, and the premise is that in each show two crack teams of inventors/engineers (a.k.a. "geeks") compete to perform a different task in a different part of the world. This show takes place in the second largest canyon in the world: the Fish River Canyon in Namibia. Each team was given an egg

and their task was to get it as close as possible to a target on the other side of the canyon, about a kilometer away with a vertical drop of 200m. Without breaking it. The target in the photo is the red-and-purple X on the left. It's 10 meters across, which should help give you a sense of scale.

You can find a much more detailed description, with better photos, from my friend Jeff's account of being on the show.

unglorious problems in quantum information

2006-09-25T20:32:00.000+01:00

Along the lines of Scott's 10 annoying problems in quantum information (now happily only 8), I have a handful related to universal gate families.

Let V be an imprimitive gate in U(d²), meaning that it cannot be written as a product of two gates in U(d). We know that V and V^-1, together with U(d) x U(d) (i.e. all local gates), can exactly generate all of U(d²) [quant-ph/0108062]. But if we don't have access to V^-1 then we only know how to approximate all of U(d²). Without the subgroup structure, general tools like quant-ph/0209113 can't be used. This is clearly an absurd situation, but show me the simple proof that V and U(d)xU(d) are exactly universal (which remarkably, I could actually make use of in a proof) and I'll agree that I'm being dumb.
Does the Solovay-Kitaev theorem still hold if we aren't given inverses? Obviously, yes, but can we prove it? Even without giving an efficient construction of the approximating sequence?
Some univeral gate families (e.g. (1 +- 2 i \sigma_j)/sqrt(5) where j ranges over x,y,z) have the property that a sequence of length O(log 1/eps) can approximate any gate to within accuracy eps. This matches the Omega(log 1/eps) bound from counting epsilon-balls. Does the O(log 1/eps) upper bound hold for all universal gate families? Solovay-Kitaev only guarantees O(log^(3+o(1)) 1/eps) sequence length, but it probably makes the sequences longer than it has to by requiring that everything be poly-time.

This last one is actually something that real mathematicians have considered, but not solved. But the first two I'm almost too embarassed to ask them! I mean, come on, people: we can pull this together.

A different sort of unglorious problem is the kind that someone else has solved, but couldn't be bothered to write up. Watch this space later for Shor's construction of higher-accuracy embezzling states and Kitaev's O(t) quantum communication simulation of e^{-itZZ}. Or more realistically you could corner me or Debbie at a conference some time and ask for an explanation.

automatic 401k enrollment

2006-09-25T03:00:00.000+01:00

[This post starts slow, but the interesting point is at the end.] 401K's are a great deal (employer matching funds, tax-free interest), and make sense for pretty much everyone who's not completely desperate for cash. But people don't take them very often (40% of low-income workers, 50% of workers in their 20's). And it's probably not (just) because people don't want to save; it's more that they're paralyzed by inertia and having too many choices. This is evidenced by the fact that when people are enrolled by default in 401k's, most people (like 80%) stay enrolled and continue making whatever the default contribution is. (The sheep-like trust here reminds of this English guy I met who doesn't wash vegetables because "if they had toxic chemicals on them, the store wouldn't be selling them to us.")

Recently a new bill made it easier for employers to automatically enroll their employees in 401k's mostly by shielding them from lawsuits if the investments don't perform well. According to marketplace

[Harvard retirement scholar Brigitte Mandrian] expects more employers will migrate to automatic 401k enrollment. But slowly, cuz it's pricey. More employee savings means more matching funds from their bosses.

This is the weird part. Employers are doing something which costs them money, and, though it helps their employees, it only helps the employees who didn't really care about the benefit they're getting. The people who are excited about getting 401k's are probably the ones who'll enroll even if it's not the default. Could it be that the companies really do care about the welfare of their employees? Explaining Safelite Auto Glass's decision to automatically sign up their employees to invest 2% of their pay (matched by the company), Brenda Downing says:

We had a significant number of associates not saving at all. We were concerned they weren't going to be OK at the time they retired.

Is corporate benevolence really the only answer here? This is making my head hurt.

no seriously, don't profile

2006-09-15T04:10:00.000+01:00

Sarcasm may have obscured the point of the last post. Profiling makes even less sense against organized terrorists than against criminals. Why? The age/ethnic mix of terrorists that we see now is in part a reaction to the security that they'll face. If young men are always searched then female suicide bombers will be recruited, and the defenses will be worse off than if they screened passengers randomly. This isn't just a game theory exercise:

On April 17 1986, a young woman presented herself at Heathrow's gate 23 for that morning's El Al flight to Tel Aviv. She had cleared the airport's own security check-in procedures, but to El Al's security staff something didn't appear right. A search of her hand luggage revealed 1½ ounces of Semtex and a detonator, hidden in a calculator.
The young woman was Anne Murphy, a white, Catholic girl from Dublin. The explosives had been planted by her boyfriend, Nezar Hindawi, a terrorist with links to the Syrian government.

Of course, I'm starting to give the impression that we should worry about terrorism, when in fact doing so has surpassed the war on drugs as one of the worst acts of collective hysteria since McCarthyism. For example, think of dying prematurely as an enormous waste of time (like reading blogs! but worse.) The average adult has about 300,000 hours of waking life to expect, and a 1 in 13,000,000 chance of dying on the average U.S. domestic flight (this was true in 1990-1999 entirely from accidents, and in 2000-present almost entirely from 9/11, as there's been only one fatal accident during that time. Your chance of dying on a developing world flight is 1 in 1.5 million, regardless of carrier. These and other fascinating facts found here). If you're risk-neutral, avoiding this risk should be worth two minutes of your time. By this argument, two minutes is also a good baseline for the amount of time that airport security should be willing to waste per passenger. The last point is the crudest part of the argument and shouldn't be stretched too far, since it's based on the risks we currently see, which might change in the extreme case of airports completely eliminating screening. Needless to say, I think we're far from that point. (Incidentally, google for probability terrorism dying to see how a little math knowledge can be an upsetting thing.)

The time vs. death comparison seems a generally useful one because it avoids all the problems in comparing lives with money. Another place it's obviously relevant is in speeding. The probability of dying while driving is supposedly proportional to the fourth power of your speed. In the U.S., drivers die at a rate of about 15 per billion miles and are seriously injured at about 10 times that rate. If we assume the fourth-power law and that everyone is driving 65mph (assume a spherical cow...), then increasing speed by 1mph will save 0.84 seconds/mile and increase the chance of being killed/mile by about 9.2 x 10^-10. Multiply by 300,000 hours and you get just about one second, which is pretty close to the amount of time saved. To account for injury, one method is to examine the number of disability-adjusted life years (DALY's) lost. In 2002, 1.18 million died in traffic accidents and 38.4 DALY's were lost, which comes to about 33 DALY's/death. This means my "50 years/death" was an overestimate and increasing 1mph actually costs closer to 0.65 "disability-adjusted life seconds"/mile. Even if we assume there's another car involved half the time, this is close to a tie, meaning that 65mph is close to optimal. On the other hand, this still hasn't included property damage (which ranges from 1% of GNP in developing countries to a stunning 2% in rich countries), higher gas consumption and the fact that speeding tickets waste time too. So I think this means that

~~we shouldn't speed~~ Moderate speeding is a little dangerous, but not unreasonably so.
Applying the 300,000 hours argument to airline security can't be totally absurd since it leads to different conclusions in different contexts.
I should stop wasting so much time writing silly blog posts.

p.s. I look forward to Ilya's theory of driver safety profiling in the comments!

Update: Thanks to Aaron in the comments for pointing out mistakes in my driving calculations (now corrected); I had represented driving as 10 times more dangerous than it actually is.

terrorist profiling

2006-09-14T14:56:00.000+01:00

People get all worked up about this idea, but think about the benefits:

People spend on average less time in line.
Terrorists get caught more often.

Of course some people will get unnecessarily searched, but that's happening already! And just think of the absurdity of the status quo, when airport screeners waste their time searching uneducated young men and aren't left with enough time to catch the older, more educated, threat.

Suicide bombers who are older — in their late 20’s and early 30’s — and better educated are less likely to be caught on their missions and are more likely to kill large numbers of people at bigger, more difficult targets than younger and more poorly educated bombers.
... Whereas typical bombers were younger than 21 and about 18 percent of them had at least some college education, the average age of the most successful bombers was almost 26 and 60 percent of them were college educated.
Experience and education also affect the chances of being caught. Every additional year of age reduces the chance by 12 percent. Having more than a high school education cuts the chance by more than half.
There are many examples where young or uneducated terrorists made stupid mistakes that foiled them. Professor Benmelech recounts the case last April of a teenager from Nablus apprehended by Israeli soldiers before carrying out his bombing because he was wearing an overcoat on a 95-degree day. Mr. Reid, the failed shoe bomber, had only a high school degree. Would an older terrorist with more education have tried to light a match on his shoe (as Mr. Reid did) in plain view of the flight attendant and other passengers who proceeded to thwart his plan? Would a better-educated terrorist have been more discreet? We will never know.
The research suggests, however, that there may be a reason that the average age of the 9/11 hijackers (at least the ones for whom we have a birth date) was close to 26 and that the supposed leader, Mohammed Atta, was 33 with a graduate degree.

The solution is simple. Passports could be linked to electronic education records and every year of education could increase the expected length of screening by an extra 12%. Liberals will whine about unfair treatment, but winning the war on terror is about being effective, not pleasing a few politically-influential constituencies.

Our Troops

2006-07-30T19:15:00.000+01:00

I finally met one.

On a recent flight from San Diego to Newark I sat next to a Marine around my age who had done one tour in Iraq towards the start of the war, and now was about to start a second one. Even though over a million U.S. troops have been to Iraq or Afghanistan in the last five years, this is the first time I've talked to one.

And he wasn't happy about the idea of going back. I didn't feel like grilling him, but he talked only about how things had gotten more unpredictable and dangerous since the start of the war: "You never know who's going to want to kill you. Someone might come to a checkpoint five times and be all friendly each time, but then the next time will try to blow you up."

In particular, I didn't feel like asking him about the overall futility of the U.S. presence there, but elsewhere in the Middle East he was sharply critical. We were talking about evacuations of foreign nationals from Lebanon and he talked with disgust about how the U.S. military later billed the people it rescued for the costs of the helicopter flights. This bothered him not because of the principles of action-movie heroism, but for reasons I'd associate more with Chomsky: "Really the [U.S.] government should be responsible for the costs [of the rescues] since they're the ones who created the situation by arming Israel, and giving the green light without which this invasion wouldn't have happened." I mentioned our recent expedited delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel and he responded with something like "well, duh."

What made the conversation sad was how he already seemed to want to block out the upcoming Iraq episode from his life. He talked about how he had liked living in California, and said many times that Iraq was "not going to be fun." When I responded to his talk about unpredictability by saying "yeah, I read recently that now Sunnis are the ones who are more supportive of the U.S. presence since they're afraid of getting dominated by the Shi'a. It's pretty crazy how quickly the situation shifts over there," (Billmon discusses this topic with more bite.) he only said "I haven't been briefed about that yet. They'll do that soon, I guess. [He was headed to Indianapolis for two weeks before shipping out.] All I know is that you can never tell who's on your side."

I liked this guy. We had a (to me) hilarious exchange about California. He was from North Carolina, but said CA was surprisingly nice and that "all those things they said about it were totally not true."

me: Um, yeah, I like CA too. But what things do people say about it?
him: You know, about the people there.
me: Wondering how to translate 'effete' into non-ironic. You mean that they're elitist or something?
him: vague words to the effect of Well, that they're not good people then exact words that I'm not going to forget that they're practically like foreigners over there. But actually I found almost everyone to be really nice and I'm gonna miss living there.
me: Sorely tempted to remark that while I had earlier said I liked living in England, it is true that they're not just "practically like" foreigners over there. Instead I told my favorite California chill story, which I include here for completeness. I was riding a bus in SF when the driver got out, went into a fast-food store, came out with a drink, saw someone he knew, gave them a hug and chatted briefly before getting back in the bus. And the people riding the bus didn't lynch him on the spot!

I might be extrapolating here, but I liked how he was open-minded enough to question the (anti-CA and pro-war) prejudices he had been raised with. I hope that in Iraq he doesn't get killed or end up killing anyone else.

technically he should be the one to report this bug

2006-07-30T18:40:00.000+01:00

A recent mozilla bug-tracker post opens with the line: This privacy flaw has caused my fiancé and I to break-up after having dated for 5 years.

The free-ranging mixture of the personal and technical (e.g. "Steps to reproduce bug: 1. Create 2 unique Windows XP user accounts. 2. Log into one and open Firefox. ... 9. Break up with fiancé.") gets only more amazing in the responses, ranging from the "let's see how the personal problems complicate the technical issue":

I don't know if you still have access to the computer you and your ex-fiancé shared, but it sounds like Firefox was sharing a profile between the two Windows XP user accounts. How is that possible -- were both users administrators or something? Were bookmarks separate?

to the sisterly

Honey, I would think you would be the LAST person to be bothered by this [bug, presumably]. Not only did was he using your computer to be unfaithful, he wasn't smart enough to cover his tracks, and you got to know about it BEFORE buying the goods. If you're really THAT upset about finding out, take him back and pretend you never knew, or hold it over his head and use it to keep him in line.

to the creepy

Maybe this was a huge wake-up call after 5 years... maybe he's not the guy you thought he was... maybe its been 5 years of deception... Or, maybe it was just minor 'reveal' and not evidence of deep, serious transgression...just a 'white lie' where he was covering up some fantasy needs...and the 'white lie' need only be a bump in a long, long road and you can see if you can turn it into a growing experience..a call for a whole new level of openness in your relationship..
If the relationship is otherwise a complete wash, what is there to lose? Get it all out on the table.. Tell him he might as well say what he REALLY wants in his life.. what would his 'fantasy perfect male existence' be? Get it stated, honestly and openly for once.. And then see whats what..
Best of luck..

to the philosophical:

Really it's not that big of a deal that firefox saves the list of not saved passowrds. Browers are supposed to do this kind of thing. Anyway it would be the cheating boyfriend's job to run a cleaner to clean the history and cache.

Also included are an unrelated anti-Windows rant, a response consisting entirely of a Jesus quote, and much much more.

Is it too much to ask that...?

2006-04-04T17:08:00.000+01:00

cous-cous be steamed 2-3 times instead of just dumping boiling water on it and fluffing it with a fork? I mean, really, people.

When I feel like laughing or crying I google recipes for couscous. The vast majority are junk. ... Of course I'm delighted that couscous is becoming increasingly popular in different parts of the world and it's none of my business to tell someone what they can or cannot do with couscous.
If you want to eat delicious couscous it must be steamed at least 2-3 times. There really is no other way. ... If you are chef who has published such a recipe I really hope you don't prepare it like that in your restaurant. ...
Okay, I've been googling more. It looks like every Tom, Dick and Harry site has a couscous recipe! Maghrebis and couscous fans UNITE, email them, tell them how couscous should be prepared!!!!

From an Algerian cooking blog that's making me hungry, linked from an article about Bague de Kenza (Since I was buying for my whole department, I instead went to a cheaper place in the 18th called El Andalousia; also tasty, but of course I can't compare.)

But my point isn't about cous-cous, it's about what motivates people to begin an impassioned rant. Recently on the BBC I heard part of a Distinguished Lecture by this gentleman:

This year's Reith Lecturer is the eminent conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim, a leading cultural figure of our time. His remarkable career spans more than five decades. He has worked with all the world's great orchestras and now holds the posts of Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and General Music Director of the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin.
He is also co-founder, with the late Edward Said, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra which brings together young Arab and Israeli musicians. "Music", argues Barenboim, "lies at the heart of what it is to be human".

Should be good, eh? And the theme of the lecture?

In this lecture recorded in front of an audience at the Symphony Center in Chicago, Barenboim tries to rescue the neglected sense - the ear - and launches his own campaign against muzak.

He descibes his experience in writing to American Standard (you know, the company that makes toilets) to complain about their choice of Mozart's Requiem as the soundtrack for one of their toilet commercials. Apparently confusing him with a more common kind of letter-writing nutjob, they sent back a form letter saying that they weren't aware of the religious significance of the music, but were responding to complaints in the next round of commercials by replacing it with one of the highlights from something by Wagner which "music experts had assured them had no religious significance whatsoever."

I laugh, but I get far more comments about the exponential letter than anything else on this blog.

illegal aliens or self-leveraging entrepreneurs?

2006-02-26T12:55:00.001Z

What does it mean to cross into another country, stay illegally either avoiding border guards in the first place or overstaying a tourist visa, find a series of short-term jobs that pay cash, all while staying out of sight of the government whenever possible? According to a popular NYT article , it means "having international experience under your belt" (about which "employers are enthusiastic"), demonstrating that you are "inquisitive, flexible and adaptive---valuable skills in today's workplace," and, (contrary to what the cynics say), "it's not a money-making move," but rather "It puts you in a position to leverage yourself."

At least for some people. Meanwhile, Congress is starting to consider a guest worker bill for immigrant labor from south of the border. What are some of the key provisions for the budding Mexican entrepreneurs?

Applicants would be sponsored by employers — though they would be allowed to switch employers during their time here — and would undergo background checks and medical screening.
...
The draft bill would also authorize millions of illegal immigrants who arrived in this country before Jan. 4, 2004 to remain here indefinitely, along with their spouses and children, as long as they registered with the Department of Homeland Security, paid back taxes and remained law-abiding and employed, among other conditions.

Elsewhere in the paper, the Times editorial page argues that in "a nation that insists on paying as little as possible for goods and services, and as long as it remains impractical to send lawns, motel beds and dirty dishes overseas," we need a more humane and reasonable immigration policy. It says that "Congressional action is long overdue," and closes with

Laws that make it a crime to help illegal immigrants find work will make outlaws out of local leaders whose only crime is to want to live in orderly, humane communities.
Setting up a hiring site with bare-bones amenities like benches and bathrooms is not an indulgence of lawlessness. It is a common-sense tactic to help prevent the exploitation of workers, to rein in unscrupulous contractors and to impose some order on the chaos. It is smarter and more humane than the cruelty of harassing legislation that hopes, somehow, to make all those men and women disappear.

In other words, taking a practical approach to migrant labor as a solution to our demand for low wage, unregulated, seasonal work isn't about coddling illegal immigrants; it's the only realistic and humane solution to prevent them turning into a social problem for us and our communities.

(Not that I don't agree with the policy position of the NYT in both cases: I think living abroad as soon as you're able to be independent of your parents is a good idea, and most of the immigration reforms proposed right now would help people. It's just the terms of the debate, and the implicit assumptions that shape them, that are fucked up. This sentence lightly revised 9 July 2008.)

On a vaguely related note, I have at least one more data point supporting this essay: a white Parisian woman I talked to who distinguished the Maghrebians (French citizens living in Paris of N. African descent) from the French. As in, les Maghrebins in this neighborhood of Paris do X, but les Français living there do Y. I still love it here! And in my very limited experience, I still see a decent amount of social mixing between natives and immigrants. But I had to point this out.

Senegalese recipes

2006-02-12T00:43:00.000Z

general principles: Almost everything is in big pots on high heat. Use lots of mustard and garlic, and add the mustard early so it infuses the onions.

fish balls

Mash up pepper, garlic, parsley, Maggi (basically bouillon cubes, but the Senegalese version has MSG too), tuna and a little flour---in that order---in either a food processor (Western version) or a giant mortar and pestle (Senegalese version). Form into little balls (it helps to rub your hands with oil for this) and deep fry in batches, turning only once or twice through the whole process. Remove from oil with a slotted spoon when each side is done.

Next, dice onions and fry in the leftover oil (preferably peanut oil) until light brown, then mix in a good deal of mustard (something like smooth Dijon) and keep cooking for a few minutes. Meanwhile you should be boiling some vegetables (like eggplant, cabbage and carrot) in a sepearate pot. Once the onions have absorbed the mustard, add the vegetables and just enough of the water to cover them (using water that's been boiled means tap water is fine). Add salt, more Maggi and a little vinegar. Boil till everything is soft enough, then add the fish balls, and cook on low a little more. Serve with (short-grain) rice.

Fermented lemon juice: Add salt to lemon juice and let it sit in the sun for awhile. Here I've only tasted the final result.

Yassa chicken

Again, food process peppercorns, then garlic. Then combine with (optionally fermented) lemon juice, Maggi, lots of mustard, and a little water and boil chicken in this. Once the chicken is nearly cooked, remove it from the marinade and grill it on both sides. Meanwhile boil vegetables separately (carrots, eggplant, "African eggplant", whatever). Meanwhile, slice onions and fry in a ton a of (peanut) oil until brown. Then add mustard, cook for a little while, add the chicken marinade, the vegetables and, if necessary, some water. When the chicken has been grilled on both sides, add that too, but cook on low, and only long enough for the chicken to absorb some of the sauce. Optionally separate chicken, vegetables and sauce for serving. Serve with rice.

Pastel

Mix flour, salt and yeast, then add just enough water until it's nice and doughy. Knead well, brush with a little oil, and leave covered in a warm place; then repeat. Prepare tuna as for fish balls above, but cook in oil for awhile, then mix tomato concentrate with water and cook in this mixture until most of the water is gone. Then let it cool. The tuna should be breaking into smaller and smaller pieces, but by the end it may be necessary to further shred it. Grab a small ball of dough and flattened on an oiled surface, put a little bit of tuna in the middle, fold over, and press the edges shut with a fork. Deep fry in batches until golden brown, turning once or maybe twice. Sometimes served with a tomato-onion sauce, but instead this recipe combines the tomato with the tuna.

These really are tasty, but I'm not sure my sketchy description is good evidence for this. A shout-out goes to our femme de menage Yaye, for among other things, cooking all this, and then having the patience to teach me. At some point, Shefali will enter a recipe for Mafe into the comments and I'll update the post.

Her voice is full of money

2006-02-09T13:34:00.000Z

"She's got an indiscreet voice," I remarked. "It's full of---"
I hesitated.
"Her voice is full of money," he said suddenly.
That was it. I had never understood it before. It was full of money---that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals' song of it... High up in a white palace the king's daughter, the golden girl...

From The Great Gatsby.

This same idea (substitutability of desire) can also be illustrated using more scientific language. The link is via Tyler Cowen, who also argues that in general, fiction and science have more in common than one would think.

Update: After reading that last paper, I can say that you get everything you need out of it from the abstract, or even just spending awhile thinking about the title and its implications. To me the overlap can be seen by looking at the questions: how do you argue that your claims are true, that they are interesting and/or that they generalize? In both cases a blend of precision and ambiguity is necessary, a specific insight together with a claim to reflect a larger truth, etc... The differences between a novel and a scientific paper then come from different definitions of truth, interestingness, and so on. We can see this by looking at how these concepts have changed over time: for example, many early English novels were meant to scare girls away from sex, so they were much more didactic and specific than, say, a Salman Rushdie novel. The "interest" of these novels is clearly related to their educational/social value; in some ways not so far from a modern social science paper, but with a more condescending relation between author and reader. Similarly the concepts of truth and universality change over time and across fields. But these are just the sort of things I was hoping were explored in Cowen's paper! I'm not actually going to go through them myself...

Economics and the Public Purpose

2005-12-27T17:33:00.000Z

Review of Economics and the Public Purpose by John Kenneth Galbraith

I realize that the title seems to suggest that reading the U.S. tax code would be more interesting, but Economics and the Public Purpose is actually a great book. The writing is wonderfully crisp and engaging, and the ideas are something that everyone needs to become familiar with, even if they sometimes overreach a bit.

Galbraith is a famous liberal economist, born in Canada in 1908 and somehow still alive. He wrote this book as part of a series which also includes The New Industrial State and The Affluent Society. I haven't read anything else by him, but if I do, I'll blog about it, and perhaps one of you can tell me about his other writings? Economics and the Public Purpose was written in 1970, and arguably the corporate climate has changed since then in ways that invalidate some of the book's arguments; however, I think most are still applicable.

As the title implies, the book is framed as a critique of economics (or as he calls it, "neoclassical economics") for not serving the public purpose. In particular, neoclassical economics assumes various things about markets that (a) are false and (b) obscure and thereby naturalize and strengthen existing power structures. These assumptions survive because of (b) and also because of their conceptual simplicity. Here are a few:

ideas from neoclassical economics

Firms always try to maximize profits. (It might seem paradoxical that profits are zero in perfectly competitive markets, but this isn't a big problem either in theory or practice.)
Sovereignty rests with consumers, whose tastes/needs dictate demand curves, and nature, which dictates supply curves. In particular, firms have no sovereignty, since if they try to do anything other than maximize profits they'll be replaced. (Even a firm in a monopoly position will be forced by its shareholders to maximize profits. Its shareholders have to, because they're mutual fund managers who will be fired if they don't. Or because if not, some aggressive new manager could borrow a few billion dollars, perform a hostile takeover and make higher profits. You get the idea...)
Similarly for government. All government ultimately responds to voter will. Or maybe voter plus lobbyist will, and maybe voters are dumb, but still government officials have no meaningful agency of their own to exercise.

I've of course phrased these in ways where it should be obvious what's wrong with them.

problems with neoclassical economics

Agency problems mean that corporations/governments are run in practice by managers (which Galbraith calls the 'technostructure') that are distinct from owners/voters. Monitoring is imperfect and costly.
This idea has been enormously productive in economics, political economy and elsewhere. For example, perfect credit markets make persistent poverty hard to explain, since the higher marginal product of capital in India (or wherever) should cause American investors to prefer it to loser GM stock. This would mean that a country's starting amount of cash should dictate only its level of consumption, while production moves to wherever it's most efficient (assuming free trade). The problem is that prospective borrowers don't have collateral, and it's too hard to keep them from disappearing with the money they've borrowed. As a result, everyone invests (inefficiently) in rich countries and poor countries stay undeveloped. Microcredit seems like a good, if limited, answer to this problem.
There are actually a lot of other interesting stories of agency problems, but I'll save them for another post, so I can focus on what Galbraith is talking about.
Firms no longer try to maximize profits. Instead their first goal is growth, as long as profits are high enough to avoid bankruptcy or a takeover. This is because profits (mostly) go to owners, but the technostructure mostly benefits from growth, through promotions, increased market power and better job security. (Arguably corporate shakeups in the last few decades have weakened this argument, though much of it still rings true.) The only time profits become an issue are when there's the possibility of takeover, shareholder revolt, or some other kind of external threat, which is not too often if things are going decently.
Some people have a hard time believing this point. If so, here's a useful thought experiment. Would you rather run a small dry cleaning business that gets 20% returns on capital, or be the CEO of GM in a year where the company loses 1% of its value?
Firms no longer react passively to consumer demand, government regulation and market prices. Instead they can shape these with advertising, lobbying/regulatory capture and by using their market muscle to dictate prices. Advertising and lobbying are obvious. Regulatory capture is when the corporate technostructure links up with the government technostructure and helps shape government action; the most famous example is the military-industrial complex, but the same principle applies to the FCC, EPA, FDA, etc...: Congress can pass laws, but the implementation has to be left to bureaucrats who can never be perfectly monitored and held accountable. Finally, having a large market share (the result of a focus on growth) means that large corporations have a good deal of freedom to negotiate their own prices. However, while a neoclassical monopoly or oligopoly should charge higher prices (and have lower sales, but higher profits), we actually see lower prices (and higher sales) since firms use their market power to promote growth rather than profits.

So (neoclassical) economics gets it all wrong. So what? What's so bad about implicit rule by the technostructure? (I should point out that Galbraith often reads like Chomsky. He has the same sweeping and blistering critiques of ideology and orthodoxy, and is refreshing in many of the same ways. Both are good remedies to Thomas Friedman, for example. Of course, he's frustrating in some of the same ways too; sometimes he treats the reader as though we've never read anything other than the standard party line, c.f. Goldstein's book. One of their main differences is that Galbraith is a liberal and Chomsky is a radical, so that Galbraith proposes solutions that, though counter-cultural, are more technical than revolutionary.)

Why rule by technostructure is bad

Inefficiency: Like in USSR-style state capitalism, prices and levels of production are set arbitrarily, and therefore inefficiently. If we presuppose that a free market will maximize total welfare (first law of welfare economics), then this is in general suboptimal. However, Galbraith gives more specific and interesting problems.
Underdevelopment of the market sector: First I should explain that Galbraith refers to large corporations as the "planning sector," meaning that they can exert control over prices, consumer demand, gov. regulation, etc., as opposed to the "market sector," which consists of small firms that don't have this power. Many economic activities naturally fall within the market sector and resist organization into large corporations: personal services, local businesses, artists that can't deliver standardized products, etc..
Since the planning sector is stronger than the market sector, they get to treat the market sector like a poor stepchild, for example passing price increases on to it as they see fit. Also, the market sector is vulnerable to inflation and interest rate fluctuations in ways that the planning sector is not, as large corporations are often able to finance expansion using profits rather than debt.
So we have less art, medicine and child care than we should, though these arguments always seem a little dicey to me. More compelling is...
Overdevelopment of the planning sector: We overconsume things produced by the planning sector, like cars and Coke.
It seems like this can't totally explain problems like suburban sprawl, though. Is it the planning sector's fault that we have too many cars and too few trains? Well, sort of, in that one part of the planning sector (car manufacturers) muscled out another part (trolley manufacturers, or whatever). But it's not like some general tilt of the playing field away from the planning sector and towards the market sector would help this.
More interesting is that we overconsume period. Or rather, we overconsume products and underconsume services and leisure (i.e. work too hard). This is relevant to the planning/market distinction because many services naturally fit into the market sector (because small/local businesses are involved), while manufactured products tend to come from the planning sector. Advertising is one mechanism that makes this possible. Advertising has many different effects: encouraging consumption of a particular brand (Saab), encouraging consumption of that class of products (cars) and encouraging consumption in general as a solution to problems (angst, need to express personality but not knowing how). (Or I could mention the rush credo for pre-frosh weekend: "rush MIT, then rush Greek, then rush AEPi," with "rush college" left implicit.) A car company without much market share can only take advantage of building brand awareness, while a large company also benefits from new drivers entering the market, since they'll get a decent fraction of them. Thus, we expect the planning sector to advertise more heavily than the market sector. Not only is this part of their advantage over the market sector, it also encourages consumption of products in general as a road to happiness.
However, advertising is only the crudest way that the planning sector shapes public thought. Beyond telling us what to consume, it also tells us what to think.
Shaping ideology: This last point is tricky, because large corporations of course don't have Thought Police (for the most part) and outside of their marketing departments, don't usually try too hard to shape public thought. However, ideology follows power, and so it's inevitable that our values will be shaped by the planning sector: the difference between serious/frivolous, respectable/eccentric, etc...
One example is the different way that we view science/technology and art. Advanced technology is naturally suited to the planning sector, because it relies on standardization, mass production, specialized labor, and so on, while art is not, since it's usually better if it's individually produced. Before the Industrial Revolution, art and science were considered comparably valuable, and as science and engineering became more useful to people in power, social values changed accordingly. On the other hand, maybe people just respect money, and that's why executives have higher status than performance artists. But that can't fully explain why we think some jobs should be higher paid than others; it's considered natural for artists to be poor, and in fact there's often the suggestion that their art is better if they don't expect to be paid for it (i.e. they don't "sell out"). No one would ever suggest doing the same for scientists, even if most scientists are similarly motivated more by interesting work than by money.

The way that the planning sector shapes ideology is worth dwelling on, since it's the first obstacle to reform. Galbraith uses the term convenient social virtue to describe values of the planning sector that have been internalized by mainstream culture in ways that make things cheaper, easier or more profitable (hence convenient) for the planning sector. For example, the military needs to convince millions of people to enlist and get salaries much smaller than civilian contractors doing similar jobs. This can be done on the cheap by promoting the virtues of patriotism and serving one's country; equivalently, one might say that soldiers are compensated partly by their salary, partly by their social role, which lets them be proud of themselves and gives them respect from the rest of society. For example, Vietnam vets complain that they were cheated out of the post-war respect that they considered their due. And compare the reactions of soldiers and of corporate lawyers when the work they do is criticized: soldiers need the cultural compensation in a way that people with higher pay and better working conditions never would.

Patriotism also has the side benefit of helping the government convince the population to go along with its policies, especially wars. Iraq is a good example, but in general, the political system in the U.S. finds wars almost irresistible. Dwelling on this point turns the idea of government responding to voter preference (e.g. the median voter theorem) on its head, in the same way that Galbraith critiques consumer sovereignty. It's far from a new idea (recall the Goering quote: "Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy,..."), but it's interesting how Galbraith unifies his critiques of modern capitalism and of modern democracy. Similarly, the Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt famously said that "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" (e.g. who declares a state of emergency).

There are many other examples of the convenient social virtue, and how it enables the system to be run more cheaply. Teachers, for example, could be underpaid initially because other jobs were closed to educated women, and later by representing teaching as a form of national service, as in Teach for America. Similarly for social work. (To see this, observe that if these jobs had competitive salaries, we wouldn't need to think of performing them as "service.")

Another of Galbraith's examples is the idea of the hard-working small business owner. He says that while those with comfortable jobs in the planning sector wouldn't accept unpredictable unpaid overtime, this is a natural part of the life of a small business owner. They put up with it because of the status afforded to entrepreneurs, rather than for the financial benefit. This one seems kind of dubious to me, mostly because I've forgotten his argument as to why it should help the planning sector, but also because even highly-paid people in the planning sector (like consultants) often work long hours, and because there are natural reasons for small businesses to be more flexible than large ones in many things, including demands on their workers.

Finally, he describes patriarchal consumerist family life ("the American way of life") as a convenient social virtue that's key to most of the others. The idea is that maintaining a high level of consumption requires women to stay at home to organize it all (an assertion which I don't think has aged well), but also that suburban family life encourages consumption through competitive pressure. It's seen as virtuous for women to take care of kids and do housework (w/o much pay) and for men to work hard to support their families. (An alternative choice might be for both parents to work part-time, reduce their consumption of goods and raise their consumption of services, including outsourcing housework. Or the traditional family might be rejected altogether.) Neoclassical economics overlooks all of these issues by making the "household" the unit of analysis rather than the individual.

The problem with this whole "convenient social virtue" discussion is that agency often gets confused, and it oversimplifies to say that the planning sector both benefits from and creates these convenient social virtues. The examples Galbraith gives are good starting points, but a Foucault-style critique is probably more appropriate. For example, The Wages of Whiteness is one long examination of how White supremacy became dominant in 19th century America; White pride is mainly considered a convenient social virtue for lower-class White workers (i.e. they receive social/psychological "wages" from their Whiteness), but the book goes on to say some nonobvious things about the origins of this racism. If/when I blog about it, I'll explain in more detail.

This post is getting long, so I'll skip to the punchline.

how to make things better

He starts with a section called "The Emancipation of Belief," which says that we need to actively resist advertising and propaganda that supports the values that come from the planning sector, instead of imagining that we're protected by cynicism about the more outrageous claims of advertising. Of course, this isn't really a personal project, and he's a little vague about how to pursue it with most of civil society in the hands of the planning sector, but it's a good start. And he also says that universities are a good place to organize around, since the economic necessity of critical thinking in universities will preclude any 1984-style repression.

The next step is to use the state (specifically the legislature) to restore economic parity between the planning and market sectors. This means easy credit from the central bank (since the planning sector finances expansion with cash and only the market sector needs credit), precisely targeted price and wage controls (since the planning sector is already controlling prices and wages), a universal living wage (he responds to the claim that it'll encourage unemployment by saying that unemployment is preferable to degrading low-wage work once you've rejected the convenient social virtue which says otherwise), and various other liberal reforms. In an era of New Democrats, New Labour (with new New Deals), etc., it's refreshing to hear such an unapologetic and compelling defense of big-government liberalism, even if it's not all completely convincing.

summary

Most of his arguments are still relevant in one form of another, and the writing is infinitely better and more enjoyable than the brief summary I've given above. Read it!

Les causes des émeutes en France

2005-12-15T14:55:00.000Z

For my evening French class I wrote a short piece about the riots in France. Since it's as interesting as anything else I post here, and since pretty much all my writing ends up either here or on the arxiv, I thought I'd share it. Plus, this way if I said anything stupid about France, someone here can correct me.

read French version of essay

La signification des émeutes en France dépasse les dégâts matériaux; elles montrent des problèmes profonds avec l'identité et la société française. Maintenant c'est clair que les communautés des immigrés maghrebins et arabes sont marginalisés economiquement et socialement. Bien sur, presque chaque pays du monde a des problémes similaire. Donc, il vaut la peine de demander si les elles sont pires ou simplement differentes en France qu'ailleurs.

Commençons avec les problèmes economique des immigrés et leurs descendants. C'est commun dans tout le monde que les immigrés arrivent pauvres, et soubirent la discrimination d'emploi et d'enseignement. En suite, c'est plus sur que leurs enfants manqueraient aussi de l'argent et de l'enseignement. Peut-être a cause des garanties d'emploi en France ce sera plus difficile de trouver l'emploi pour ceux qui ne sont pas déjà bien branchés. Et peut-être le fait que le systême d'enseignement français demande a une jeune âge des decisions importantes donne une avantage aux enfants avec des parents instruits? D'un autre coté, France a une système de protection sociale mieux que la plupart du reste de la monde. Mais peut-être ces programmes ne suffisent pas pour des communautés entières.

C'est improbable que tous les causes des émeutes sonts economiques. Le racisme est commun partout, mais en France elle est mélangée avec un nationalisme dangereux. Les vues racistes sur les français descendus des arabes ou des africains n'est pas qu'ils sont inférieurs, mais qu'ils ne sont pas vraiment francais. Ces vues sont associées avec la croyance du 19^ème siècle qu'il y a une vraie identité française qui est culturelle et raciale, est qu'il faut la protéger des menaces étrangères. La forme la plus dégeulasse vient de la Front Nationale, dont les partisans disent que les immigrés (généralement non-Européens) constituent ce menace. Mais les formes de nationalisme defensifs plus bénins essaient aussi à protéger les fromages français contre les réglementations Européens, la culture populaire française contre l'Hollywood et la langue française contre l'empruntage des mots étrangères.

D'un autre coté, le nationalisme française essaie à éffacer les differences a l'intérieur de la France. Il n'y a pas de statistiques raciales, des lois contre la discrimination raciale, et surtout il n'y a pas une compréhension de l'identité comme quelque chose fondamentalement multiculturelle. Un exemple célèbre est la phrase ``nos ancêtres, les Gaulois,'' qui apparaissait dans les livres scholaires aussi tard que les années cinquantes dans la France et dans ses colonies. Malgré le fait que la plupart des français blancs ne sont pas descendus des Gaullois (leurs ancêtres etaient plutôt allemands), cette mythe culturel dit que les citoyens français avec des ancêtres africains (ou arabes, or portugais) ne sont pas vraiment français.

Cette contradiction en l'identité française est une raison que les émeutes sont si inquiétantes; elles sont un signe qu'il faudra laisser tomber les idées de la purété raciale et culturelle pour que on ait une société inclusive et democratique.

see my notes (in English) for the paper

the significance of the Riots in france goes beyond the physical damage - they represent social problems that have been long simmering below the surfaces. the problem is economic and social marginalization of immigrant communities. of course, almost every nation in the world has these problems, so it's also worth asking if they're worse or different in france than elsewhere.

for example, many immigrants arrive poor, face job + education disc. and pass on poverty and lack of education to their children. perhaps job security in france makes this worse for those without jobs? and perhaps the fact that the education system forces early decisions may also give an advantage to children with educated parents, and may make it harder to escape poverty, especially for culturally marginalized groups. on the other hand, france has better social programs than many countries; [remainder changed to ``but maybe these programs aren't enough to help entire communities.''] however, it is possible that they merely ameliorate the worst effects of poverty w/o helping people rise out of it. the problem of unemployment is not just a lack of income, it's also a lack of social integration.

codeterminted, but probably more significant is the problem of racism, here blended with french nationalism. racism directed against people of arab/african descent is not so much that they are inferior, but that they are not ``french.'' correspondingly, there is a strong notion of french identity that is reminscent of the 19th century ideas about racialized nationalism. on the one hand, we see frequently the idea that french culture, language, society and identity are under threat from the outside. the ugliest form of this is from the national front, who argue that immigrants constitute this sort of threat, and today call for their deportation. but milder forms of defensive nationalism also try to protect french cheese from EU regulations, french popular culture against Hollywood, french language against borrowing words from other languages.

on the other hand, french nationalism tries to erase differences within its borders. no statistics of race, no laws against discrimination, and most of all, no understanding of french identity as fundamentally multicultural. even in the 19th c, racial purity was a myth, and as late as the 1950's textbooks (in both france and her colonies) referred to ``our ancestors, the Gauls.'' (and even white French mostly have German ancestry - "nos ancêtres, les Gaullois" and general sentimentalizing of the Gauls were only invented ca. 1789 b/c they fit the politics of the time.) but these myths are the reason that french citizens whose ancestors are from africa (and not Gaul, poland, or portugal) are not considered french.

this refusal to acknowledge race is also why the riots are so troubling; they are a sign that ideas about racial/cultural purity will need to be dropped in order to establish a democratic and inclusive

Earlier I also prepared a talk for the class, which summarized a talk I had heard a year earlier about first & second-generation female Arab immigrants in France. Here are my semi-grammatical notes (in French), but you should really just google the prof I heard the original from to read more.

Pour mon discours, je vais resumer une conference que j'ai attendu l'année dernier. La conference s'appellé "des beurettes -- aux descendantes d'immigrantes nord-africains" et c'était donnée par Nacira Guenif-Souilamas, qui est une sociologiste a l'université de Paris.

Le mot "beurre" est verlan - on l'obtien par renverser les syllabes du mot "arabe" - et "beurette" veux dire une femme arabe. Déjá en regardant les mot, on peux voir que, quand on parle des jeunes arabes, souvent on s'occupe seulement avec les jeunes hommes arabes. On voix ca aussi avec la discussion sur les émeutes maintenant. Mais les jeune femmes francaise-arabe ont leurs propres perspectives, et leurs propres problemes.

La lecture que j'ai attendu était fondé sur des centaines d'entretiens que prof. souilamas a fait avec des jeunes femmes qui étaient nées en france avec des parentes nord-africains. Je vais concentrer sur seulement une de ses arguments, qui est que les voix dominantes en france disent qu'il faut proteger les femmes arabes contre la sexisme de la culture arabe et musulman. Souilamas a dit ensuite que cette position n'aide pas beaucoup les jeunes femmes arabes. Premierement, etre émancipé de la culture arabe est souvent quelque chose que elles ne veulent pas. Souvent elles choisissent les hijabs (head-scarves?) que leurs meres ont abandonné, ou elles sont plus conservative sexuellement; peut-etre comme facon de s'exprimer et revendiquer leur identité (well, to express themselves by asserting their culture..). Deuxiemement, l'injoction de devenir francais enseigne aux jeunes femmes que leur culture ne vaux pas beaucoup; donc quand elles écoutent cette message, elles parfois acceptent et intériorisent cette racisme. Au meme temps, ca ne le rends pas plus facile assimilation, parce-que il reste encore la discrimation. Troisiemement, la sexisme qui vient des hommes arabes n'est pas souvent la problem la plus pire qu'elles ont. Souvent les hommes faisent pire en école et ont plus de chomage, et puis n'ont pas beaucoup de pouvoir pour maitriser les femmes. L'état, au contraire, peux enlever des droits plus facilement, comme la loi recu qui a interdit les hijabs dans les écoles. On n'osera pas interdire des practiques d'hommes, mais pour "proteger" les femmes, on enleves leur autonomie.

Tout ca n'est pas pour dire que c'est toujour mieux pour les jeune femmes arabe en france de choisir la culture arabe au lieu de la culture occidentale. Mais, ca sera idéale si elles avaient une vrai choix, et si elles seraient respectées n'importe quel choix elles ont fait.

Experimental validation!

2005-12-02T11:56:00.000Z

Publications are all well and good, but you only really know that you've arrived in physics when you (and collaborators) propose some "arbitrarily accurate composite pulse scheme" and some respected experimentalists actually implement it! "Hot damn!" you say? And rightfully so, but let's see their conclusions.

The more complex B4 and P4 sequences, although theoretically superior, do not perform well in practice.

Oh well. It can be hard not to take this personally, and feel, after long days in front of the blackboard/web browser, that as a researcher and even a person, I am "in practice quite poor," "less useful than initially expected" and even "highly sensitive to the presence of off-resonance and phase errors." Happily, though, I'm still "theoretically superior"!

On the other hand, I did recently propose a "bubble-collapse" theory that explained the noise electric kettles made, and after some pointless arguing about rival theories, designed and carried out an experiment that proved I was right. (Stir it and the noise goes away!) Nevertheless, it's probably good that I've moved to CS.

Beware the Phase Errors, my son!
The sigma_X that bites, the sigma_Y's that catch!
Beware the Homogeneous Broadening, and shun
The Far-Off-Resonance Bandersnatch!

p.s. If you're on a job committee for one of my collaborators, I should point out that our sequences are just optimized for one kind of error, and of course by ignoring others the practical performance will be worse. Our paper should be thought of more as introducing new techniques/frameworks for producing composite pulses than as providing ready-made sequences that can be put into experiments. But please read it yourself if you're not sure.

reading is fun! (damental)

2005-12-01T23:33:00.000Z

Proof that if you make your slogan jarringly annoying enough, people will remember it decades later.

But seriously, reading is a good idea, and I should be doing more of it. Soon I'll try to blogs review of the (embarassingly short list of) books I've read this fall. But here's the quick summary.

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. It's ridiculous how I haven't read or seen this before! This play is so moving that I wanted to clap after finishing Act One, even though I was just reading a script. And it's still incredibly relevant (if a little patriarchal): for example, you could argue that Requiem for a Dream just updated it for the 90's. And it's so much better than On the Road, which seems to be a lot more popular.
The rest are in order of increasing specificity and convincingness.
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if people mattered by E.F. Schumacher. Classic 1970's critique of capitalism with a very Limits to Growth flavor. Argues that instead of prioritizing production through large-scale industry, we should focus on human fulfillment with smaller organizations. Nice ideas, but thoroughly missing is a look at the power relations that sustain the systems he criticizes. Without this, the whole thing starts to sound like those NYT editorials calling on the Bush administration to start respecting human rights. Plus the writing style often reminds me of management seminars and/or theology.
Economics and the Public Purpose by John Kenneth Galbraith. Classic 1970's defense of big-government liberalism. I would recommend it highly for the writing alone: crisp, witty, compelling and easy to read. I know the title makes it hard to argue this convincingly, but you really will enjoy reading this book. Anyway, I'll blog later about its contents in more detail, but for now will mention that its answers to the "why are things shitty?" question are much more specific and convincing than those in Small is Beautiful. It also proposes bold solutions that, while less convincing than the rest of the book (sometimes too radical, sometimes not radical enough, often dated), make a nice contrast with the usual alternative-less leftist whining.
The Wages of Whiteness by David Roediger. Explains how white working class racism emerged in 19th century America. Despite being much more academic and focussed than the above books, it's still very readable and engaging. I'll write later about how its specificity crushes Galbraith's arguments on the points where they clash. Also, almost all of its points are sadly still relevant today: how whiteness is constructed, why struggling separately against racial and economic oppression isn't likely to be successful, and how racism is so rarely about hatred. Again, the writing is inspiring; just check out the first few pages of the semi-autobiographical introduction (which you can do through amazon, or google book search) and you should be convinced to read the whole thing.
In the Shadow of "Just Wars": Violence, Politics, and Humanitarian Action. A collection of essays from Médecins sans Frontières staff, editted by Fabrice Weissman. Western political discourse usually misses the point so badly that it's offensive, especially when talking about poorer parts of the world. This book is an incredibly welcome counterpoint to that; but as it's late I'll keep this short. It discusses dozen humanitarian crises around the world, and critically reviews the responses to them. The results often aren't pretty, but I think we have a moral obligation to not to ignore them.

Wierdly, they all have a lot to do with money, though that wasn't my plan at the time.

Why have I read so little this year? I blame partly the thesis, but more the fact that I read too many blogs; for example, see this ironic blog post about how reading books is better.

this time I really did learn from Wal-Mart

2005-11-11T10:18:00.000Z

In response to a customer who wrote complaining that "Merry Christmas" had been replaced by "Happy Holidays" (via pandagon):

Walmart is a world wide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than "christmas" which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. The colors associated with "christmas" red and white are actually a representation of of the aminita mascera mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world.

The Christians respond:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue speculated the writer of that e-mail was perhaps drunk.

Which is actually pretty fair; I would write that sort of email while drunk myself.

Update: The NYT weighs in and even they can't help but be funny. Also a grad student in the Bristol German department says that not all the credit for the xmas tree should go to Baal; 16-17c Germany played a vital role as well.

perhaps I myself am not guiltless

2005-11-05T12:54:00.000Z

From Walt Whitman's "Democratic Vistas," quoted in a great article about why American political novels generally are moralizing crap that can't compare with what Europeans like Orwell and Stendahl have written.

It is the fashion among dillettants and fops (perhaps I myself am not guiltless,) to decry the whole formulation of the active politics of America, as beyond redemption, and to be carefully kept away from. See you that you do not fall into this error. America, it may be, is doing very well upon the whole, notwithstanding these antics of the parties and their leaders, these half-brain'd nominees, the many ignorant ballots, and many elected failures and blatherers. It is the dillettants, and all who shirk their duty, who are not doing well. As for you, I advise you to enter more strongly yet into politics. I advise every young man to do so.

Learning from conservatives

2005-10-26T11:25:00.000+01:00

Sometimes they have a lot to teach us. Listen once in a while, and we might learn something. For example, here's Wal-Mart on the evils of Medicaid-dependency:

The memo said Wal-Mart workers tended to overuse emergency rooms and underuse prescriptions and doctor visits, perhaps from previous experience with Medicaid.

They go on to point out that health savings accounts are mostly useful for screening out people likely to get sick (also known as skimming). While this is pretty obvious, most people wouldn't realize that just making jobs more physically active is an even more cost-effective way of achieving this!

The memo proposed incorporating physical activity in all jobs and promoting health savings accounts. Such accounts are financed with pretax dollars and allow workers to divert their contributions into retirement savings if they are not all spent on health care. Health experts say these accounts will be more attractive to younger, healthier workers.

Also, sometimes people say that efficiency and health gains from causing people to change behavior will outweigh the negative effects of screening. "Not so!" says Wal-Mart, and one has to assume that they know their shit.

"It will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier work force than it will be to change behavior in an existing one," the memo said. "These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."

On a somewhat unrelated, and much less sarcastic, note, they might have some good points about the origins of the minimum wage and about the role of White Southern business owners in ending Jim Crow. (But lest we confuse conservatives with people with actually admirable politics, let's take a moment to remember Rosa Parks.)

Update: The full Wal-Mart memo is also educational. And encouraging! In the "Public Relations" section, it concludes that

While [Wal-Mart] critics have not yet harnessed all of these facts, they are successfully exploiting those they do have, suggesting that, when discovered, the others will also become effective ammunition.

frogmarch! frogmarch! frogmarch!

2005-10-23T10:53:00.000+01:00

It's been years since reading the news has been this enjoyable! Josh Marshall points out that we should still watch out for Administration damage control, specifically trying to get everything to stick to Libby, and letting Bush float above things the way Reagan did. More fundamentally, we shouldn't be fooled when the press starts saying that they've changed, and really do love democracy, and while they might mumble a lot over their apology for all that Iraq WMD reporting, everything's under new management and it's all going to be better now; despite this, let's not start trusting our abusers any time soon.

In any case, I think this is a good time to post some of my favorite links related to the scandal. (Drafted months ago, as with many of my recent posts...)

First, let's just take a moment to savor the word "frogmarch":

Now, here's a video of the press trying to sweet-talk us into letting them back into our confidences. It's a beautiful sight, and if you haven't seen it before you should definitely watch, but don't let yourself be seduced.

Much less well-known is this gem from Josh Marshall about Robert Luskin, who is Rove's personal lawyer. You should just read the whole thing, but here's the key excerpt.

One case that jumps out at you is his representation of Stephen A. Saccoccia.
Saccoccia and his wife Donna were eventually convicted of laundering more than a hundred million dollars for various Colombian drug kingpins. Stephen is currently serving a 660 year sentence. Their racket was laundering drug money through companies which traded in precious metals.
Saccoccia was convicted in 1993. And Luskin [now Rove's lawyer] took up his case on appeal.
Eventually the Feds got the idea that the money Saccoccia had paid Luskin and his other attorneys for their services was itself part of the $137 million in drug money he was ordered to forfeit. Now, on the face of it this seems a bit unfair since under our system everyone is entitled to good representation and how was Luskin to know it was tainted money.
Well, the prosecutors thought he should have gotten some inkling when Saccoccia started paying Luskin's attorney's fees in gold bars.
Yep, you heard that right. Luskin got paid more than $500,000 of his attorney's fees in gold bars from his client who was trying to appeal his conviction on charges that he laundered drug money through precious metals dealers. Who woulda thought that was drug money?

Another key moment in this saga: the emergence of the line "double super secret background" on the national stage.

Mr. Cooper said he spoke to Mr. Rove on "deep background," saying the sourcing description of "double super secret background" he used in his e-mail message to his boss was "not a journalistic term of art" but a reference to the film "Animal House," where the Delta House fraternity was placed on "double secret probation."

Speaking of Rove, it's worth noting that he was fired by Bush Sr. for---you'll never guess---retaliating against an opponent by leaking a damaging story to Robert Novak! I have to admit, though, that I only learned about this via Mark Fiore.

Finally, in the recent Times coverage of the Miller fiasco, the google ads at the bottom were:

Cheap Flights - Iraq
Last minute deals and cheap flights to Iraq
www.travelbag.co.uk
Security Iraq
Convoy escorts, personal security, base security details
www.rr-group.co.uk
Jobs in the Gulf - US$79
Send your resume to 200 Consultants in the Gulf through Monster-Resumes
www.monster-resumes.com

Lest we forget what this First Amendment crap is ultimately all about.

The first ad has a link to "Saddam Airport" in Baghdad with airport code SDA. Unfortunately, there weren't any flights available, and the page that says this seems to think that SDA stands for Shenandoah. On the other hand, the second website seems well-maintained...

one of several courses competing for the attention of a student

2005-10-20T17:23:00.000+01:00

The only internet quiz I've ever posted (via Mick and Steve Flammia).

If I were a Springer-Verlag Graduate Text in Mathematics, I would be Bela Bollobas's Modern Graph Theory.

I am an in-depth account of graph theory, written with the student in mind; I reflect the current state of the subject and emphasize connections with other branches of pure mathematics. Recognizing that graph theory is one of several courses competing for the attention of a student, I contain extensive descriptive passages designed to convey the flavor of the subject and to arouse interest.

Which Springer GTM would you be? The Springer GTM Test

I think it is safe to say that this subsumes many other quizzes, like the nerdiness quiz.

TB muddies the water

2005-10-18T00:15:00.000+01:00

Since the patent for ciprofloxacin (a.k.a. Cipro) expires soon, Bayer is going to test the successor drug moxifloxacin against tuberculosis. If the clinical trials work, it'll be the first new TB drug in 40 years; something which should be high on the priority list of the human race, as 1.5-2 million die of TB each year (at one point, 1/4 of all preventable adult deaths in developing countries were from TB).

This potential new treatment is great news, but it's hard not to notice the fucked-up incentives that dictate availability of these drugs:

Beside the small profits made serving poor countries, there are other risks to registering a drug for TB. For example, the cheaper pills may be shipped back to rich countries for "gray market" sale. In nations with broken-down health systems, the drug may be sold openly and overused, leading to drug-resistant germs that make their way to rich countries and render the company's best-seller useless. And when millions use a drug for months, rare side effects can emerge, forcing its withdrawal, much like unexpected reports of heart attacks forced Merck to pull Vioxx, its best-selling painkiller, from the market.
"Companies are much more likely to offer drugs that have no commercial value, or to piggyback a drug from the veterinary sector and give it a human application," said Dr. Mary Moran, an expert on drugs for neglected diseases at the London School of Economics. "Big companies say 'TB muddies the water.' If it works, governments may try to restrict it for TB use. And if you get a side effect, you've just trashed your best commercial antibiotic."

The problem with drug-resistant diseases isn't even that eventually White people will get them, it's that their spread will undermine the value of crucial intellectual property.

Hopefully a future civilization will some day look back on the broader picture the way we look back at, say, child sacrifice. But at least this development is positive!

coexisting with nature

2005-10-06T00:20:00.000+01:00

This is less of a post than a placeholder for article links, but I saw an article that asked why mosquitos were essential to ecosystems; a natural question since this is one species most of us would like to see extinct. It turns out that mosquitos are actually more important than most other species to ecosystem survival, but only partly because they keep animal populations in check by spreading disease. Much more important is that they keep humans away by spreading disease. A pretty gruesome tradeoff, and hopefully one that is not often necessary.

With that prologue, here's an article about how the Northeast of the U.S. wasn't originally covered in forest, since Native Americans regularly used fire to clear land. The forests appeared as the Native Americans disappeared, which is why they're only a few hundred years old.

Also, an article titled Does a Tiger Lurk in the Middle of a Fearful Symmetry? points out that tigers and other wildlife have returned to the Korean DMZ. Landmines and barbed wire are far less of a threat than highways and subdivisions. Likewise, animals are doing much better with post-Chernobyl radiation than anywhere where there are people.

I feel weird ending a blog post without some kind of bold and ill-thought-out political statement, so perhaps I should say here that the U.S. should depopulate the middle of the country (other than farming, mining, parks, a few roads, trains and Wall Drug) and move everyone into dense cities with populations no smaller than half a million each. This is sort of happening already, but people are doing things to stop it that are shitty economically and worse environmentally.

Shooting Friedman in a barrel

2005-10-06T00:15:00.000+01:00

Though this post was drafted almost a year ago, and neglected, Thomas Friedman is fortunately constant enough that it should stay relevant.

In this Thanksgiving 2005 article, he mocks privileged Americans whose unconscious selfishness ignores the sacrifices that our troops are making to establish democracy in Iraq. Examples are Republicans changing House ethics rules to save Tom Delay's bacon, overpaid basketball players and of course SUV drivers. The way he keeps coming back to Iraq needs to be quoted,

Yes, I want to be Latrell Sprewell. At a time when N.B.A. games are priced beyond the reach of most American families, when half the country can't afford health care, when some reservists in Iraq are separated from their families for a year, including this Thanksgiving, I want to be like Latrell. I want to make sure everyone knows that I'm looking out for my family - and no one else's.

in order to bring out the connection with

WALTER: Those rich fucks! This whole fucking thing-- I did not watch my buddies die face down in the muck so that this fucking strumpet--
DUDE: I don't see any connection to Vietnam, Walter.
WALTER: Well, there isn't a literal connection, Dude.
DUDE Walter, face it, there isn't any connection. It's your roll.

But what really makes this article over the top is that it's written by one of the leading American cultural figures most responsible for getting us into Iraq! If we're assigning blame to elites, Thomas Friedman gets way more of it than Latrell Sprewell. Adding further to the irony, of course, is that his article is all about how these elites enjoy their privilege entirely self-righteously, without any apparent guilt about our troops dying over there.

On a vaguely similar note, Naomi Klein has an article about how thoroughly blind Americans are to the fact that we're butchering Iraqis on a massive scale. In contrast, the Bristol Metro recently had the front three pages about war pornography on the normally "regular porn" website nowthatsfuckedup.com (no link to the Metro article, but see billmon for an explanation). The emphasis is still on how this is bad for the soul of the West, but at least violence against Iraqis is an implicit theme.

newspeak

2005-09-30T16:13:00.000+01:00

One gaping hole in the English language is that there's no universal word for females between the age of "girl" and "woman."

But that's only the most common example of how our uneasy relation with gender is wreaking havoc with an otherwise wonderfully expressive language. Consider the absurdity of saying "anchorman or anchorwoman," or my favorite, trying to pronounce a word I've seen often in print: "Latino/as."

The solution is actually quite simple, and manages to completely avoid the horrors of "womyn."

The answer isn't to stop using "man" to stand for all humans. It's to make "man" universal again! We can assume that when people used "man" more than 50 years ago, this is probably what they meant anyway, so translation shouldn't be a big deal.

Then we need to invent a single new word to describe male members of the species "man."

I propose "he-man," or simply "heman." It's more nearly symmetrical with "woman" and yet still manly (or should I say "he-manly"). Yes, there's an upfront cost of not being able to keep a straight face for the next few years. But future generations of hemen and women will thank us for protecting our language from the likes of chairwoman, firewoman and womanhunt.

(p.s. I drafted this over a year ago! But felt like too much of a dork to post it until I recently realized that I have more drafts right now than actual posts.)

beyond Bisquick

2005-09-29T23:26:00.000+01:00

Two pancake recipes, both tasty.

whole wheat pancakes

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (or whatever)
1 tblspoon baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tbl brown sugar or honey
2 cups milk
1/2 cup oil or melted butter
3 egg yolks
3 egg whites

Mix dry ingredients together and beat wet ingredients together, except the whites, which you should beat heavily, until peaks form. Then mix dry + wet thoroughly and finally fold the whites in. It's not really vital that you separate the egg whites, but it will make the pancakes fluffier if you do it right.

Of course you can (and should) also mix fruit into the batter. Blueberries/strawberries are obvious, but bananas will take things to the next level.

option two: who says you need to have the OJ on the side?

I actually haven't tried these, so let me know if you make them.

2 eggs
1/4c oil
2c flour
1/2tsp baking soda
1/2tsp salt
2c orange juice

Mix wet & dry ingredients separately, then combine.

Lo vs. Wang becomes Lo vs Wang vs. arxiv.org

2005-09-16T11:41:00.000+01:00

Every day, people post new papers on the arxiv.org preprint server, and they can update old papers. It's mostly unrefereed, but yesterday a paper titled "A brief history of the decoy-state method for practical quantum key distribution" (quant-ph/0509084) was replaced by the single line "This paper was removed by arXiv admin due to content not conforming to the standards of academic communication."

Fortunately (depending on your perspective perhaps), the arXiv still saves old versions of papers, and the original version is still online. Even non-quantum people should be able to appreciate the human drama contained within. (Quick summary: Lo is widely credited with being the first to do something, but Wang says that Lo's first implementation didn't work and/or didn't contain new ideas and that either he (Wang), or another guy, Hwang, was the first to do it, depending on how you define "it.")

I mention this a) because it's kind of funny when dirty laundry is aired in public, but b) because there are some semi-serious issues at stake. It's kind of tacky when people argue about priority, but let's be serious here - we do care about it, often we care about it a lot. And what exactly are "the standards of academic communication" when it comes to arguing about priority? And of course, who decides?

Right now, I think decorum may be preventing some useful clarifying discussion. For example, who should I cite for the result that N qubits can specify a reference frame to an accuracy of O(1/N^2)? quant-ph/0405082 and quant-ph/0405095 appeared on the same day. The acknowledgments in the published versions don't really clarify things. Do I cite both to avoid offending either group of authors? Or should I just cite quant-ph/0407053, which was definitely later, though also done independently? I might do this partly because I'm more familiar with its methods and partly because, being later, it references all the related papers, so that I only need one reference to explain this (for my purposes) rather tangential point. Frustratingly, it's hard to tell if a consensus emerges when people a) don't directly talk about it, and b) instead often err on the safe side by citing every paper that has made some contribution to the final answer.

Of course the problem is that people doing the citing (like me) care about things like not offending anyone, making the references useful to the uninitiated reader, and keeping the total number of references under control; usually in that order. The only people who care about clearly establishing priority are usually the authors of the papers in question, and of course they're always self-interested. This post is starting to have a pointless feel to it... But at least quant-ph/0509084v1 is a good read!

travelling again

2005-09-15T10:45:00.000+01:00

by Dar Williams

have i got everything?
am i ready to go?
is it going to be wild, is it gonna be the best time?
or am i just a-saying so-o-o-o?
am i ready to go?
what do i hear when i say i hear the call of the road?

i think it started with driving
more speed, more deals, more sky, more wheels
more things to leave behind
now it's all in a day for the modern mind

and i am traveling
again

calling this a ghost town
and where is the heartland?
and i'm afraid, oh, was there any good reason that i had to go
when all I know is i can never come back.

traveling i made a friend
he had a trouble in his head
and all he could say's that he knew that the bottle drank the woman from his bed
from his bed

he said "i'm not gonna lose that way again."

but sober is just like driving, more joy, more dread,
someone turns her head
and smiles and disappears
he's gotta take it like it is, and it goes too fast
and he is just like me, caught in-between, no sage advisor
does weary mean wiser?
and someday will i sing the mountains that carried me away away
from home and hometown boys like you?

yeah, but what about us?
was it really that bad?
oh it's hard to believe i want a highway roadstop
more than all the times we had,
on little dirt roads
what am i reaching for that's better than a hand to hold?

it really was about driving
not fame, not wealth, not driving away from myself
it's just myself drove away from me
and now i gotta get it back and it goes so fast,

so i am traveling
again

sitting at the all-nite,
picking up a pen
and I'm afraid, oh, was there any good reason that i had to go,
when all I know is I am all alone
again

and you are the ghost town,
and i am the heartland
and i can say, oh, that's a very good reason
that i had to go, but now all i know is i can never come back
and i will never go back.

Meditation at Lagunitas

2005-09-13T20:08:00.000+01:00

by Robert Haas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

some black people who look like they might be preachers

2005-09-12T11:48:00.000+01:00

If you haven't yet donated money for Katrina, these organizations may be better choices than e.g. the Salvation Army. At first, the clearly political framing of these groups made me uncomfortable, but I'm now pretty convinced that aid is necessarily and inevitably politicized already. Of course another problem is that they might not have the capacity to handle a lot of donations if this page gets too popular. Plus they're not so verifiable, etc...

Also, I wanted to save a quote from a NYT article titled "Gulf Coast Isn't the Only Thing Left in Tatters; Bush's Status With Blacks Takes Hit." (sadly no permalink)

One of Mr. Bush's prominent African-American supporters called the White House to say he was aghast at the images from the president's first trip to the region, on Sept. 2, when Mr. Bush stood next to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, both white Republicans, and praised them for a job well done. Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of New Orleans to meet with black victims.
"I said, 'Grab some black people who look like they might be preachers,' " said the supporter, who asked not to be named because he did not want to be identified as criticizing the White House.Three days later, on Mr. Bush's next trip to the region, the president appeared in Baton Rouge at the side of T. D. Jakes, the conservative African-American television evangelist and the founder of a 30,000-member megachurch in southwest Dallas.

It's good to see the president is finally taking charge of this dangerous PR crisis.

Le Nature's Water

2005-08-11T05:36:00.000+01:00

My substantial-cooler replacement at Bexley had a clash with a bottled water company that you can read about at: Le Nature's Water.

The funny thing (besides the posts that the VP of Le Nature's made on Jay's blog) is that googling for Le Nature's Water brings up Jay's site first. You can help perpetuate this by linking to Jay's site, preferably labeling the link "Le Nature's Water."

Speaking of corporations that could use a little more sunlight, Curves is opening a branch in central square (of Cambridge). I'll be sad not to be here to see the "For Sale" sign when it goes under! [Aug 11 update: The above link doesn't quite express my point about Curves starkly enough. A bitchphd guest blogger put it in stronger terms.]

Another Aug 11 update: I think it is important that everyone read this letter, even if they don't follow the above links to Le Nature's Water.

Cease and Desist Letter Received by my Web Host 8/3/05
Subject: Violation of Acceptable Use Policy
I am counsel representing Le-Nature's, Inc., and I am writing to inform you of violations of your "Acceptable Use Policy (AUP)" and "Terms of Service (TOS)" agreements by one of your customers. On July 2, 2005, a web log hosted by your service was posted at http://punkhop.com/jaysilver/index.php?p=41 that contained an article entitled "Ice Water, or Ass Water? Investigative Report." This article was credited to "jay," which refers to Mr. Jay Silver, the owner of at least two of your hosted sites, namely, www.jaysilver.net and www.punkhop.com. In this article, Mr. Silver violated several of your hosting policies, as well as various copyright and defamation laws. Mr. Silver compared the taste of Le-Nature's ICE WATER to "purified rotten ass" and "simmering armadillo feces." Mr. Silver further alleged that Le-Nature's product was made from "sewage treatment discharge." Such statements are defamatory and libelous. In addition to the above activities, Mr. Silver illustrated his article with copyrighted photographs which he copied illegally and without authorization from Le-Nature's website, www.le-natures.com. Such activities constitute a violation of the U.S. Copyright Act. Together, these activities are also clear violations of your AUP agreement, sections 1 (Illegal Use), 4 (Harassment), 12 (Copyright or trademark infringement), and 17 (Infringement of Copyright, Patent, Trademark, Trade Secret, or Intellectual Property Right).
...
As of July 13, 2005, Mr. Silver had apparently blocked my firm's access to his websites. However, when attempting to access his sites from computers outside of the firm, it appears that these websites are still readily accessible, and Mr. Silver has continued to add damaging comments to his web log. Therefore, we are requesting that pursuant to your policies, you terminate Mr. Silver's [edited for privacy] account and permanently remove this offending material. Please provide us with confirmation of these actions.
Sincerely,
[edited for privacy]
Pittsburgh, PA

find her a golden retriever

2005-07-20T19:46:00.000+01:00

I went camping this weekend in New Hampshire with three friends: B, J and L. B is a gay guy and J and L are a straight couple - J=male, L=female. (If you can't guess who they are, you can email me and I'll tell you.) I should say that the written form of this story doesn't nearly do it justice, but this is the only way I can record it for posterity.

We met Gary from Lynn, MA when he helped L carry firewood from the car to our site. The dialogue was something like:
G: you look like you could use some help with that.
L: no thanks, i think i'm ok.
G: no, it's no trouble, let me help you.
then soon after while carrying our firewood,
G: I believe that when you help someone, then that kindness gets returned on you sevenfold.
and later,
G: We're in sites 16 and 17 if you want to come party with us. All of my friends are with their girlfriends, but I'm single.

Sadly, I only overheard part of this conversation and L claims that she doesn't want to share the details of their "private moments"; I think she just forgot. In any case, Gary was clearly dismayed that L was there with her boyfriend and two other male friends, but kept up a brave face regardless.

So whatever.
We spend the next hour struggling to get a fire started with the apparently quite wet firewood we bought from the gas station, when an even drunker Gary shows up and offers us dry firewood! He brings some over and leaves, and we're finally able to cook our dinner, which rules. A little later, he wanders by again to ask how the fire is going and out of gratitude we invite him over for a beer.

It's pretty obvious that we're going to have different outlooks on the world; e.g. I ask if he and his friends are going hiking anywhere, since he said they were spending several days here, and he says something like "No time for that crap - we're partying by the river!" We do the "where are you from" thing and B says California, at which point Gary starts talking about when he was in Palm Springs and he was getting cruised by this gay guy and was thinking about throwing rocks at the faggot. We all look up at each other to make sure everyone's paying attention.

Gary realizes he's been the only one talking for awhile and says to B "but it's cool that you're from California as long as you're not a faggot or anything." J, L and I are completely silent. Eventually, there's a long slow "ummmm......" from B, and then "actually I am gay, but it's no big deal."

Then a series of amazing quotes follow, organized into different phases:
First incomprehension:
Gary: "Why? Why would you want to do that?"
B: I don't know. I wish I did.
Gary: "So you don't get turned on by women??"
B: nope
etc.

Then trying to figure out what he's gotten himself into.
"L, so you're here with three gay dudes?!"
"No, it's just B, J is my boyfriend."
Around this point, he says things like "Did it just get really quiet around here all of a sudden?" (because we're now all at the edge of our seats, not wanting to miss a word he's saying) and "I feel like I'm in the wrong place here..."

Also at some point he's grilling B about being gay, and says "since you're gay---I mean, you even admit it---then..." The tone here is key - it suggested both (a) that he would never insult B by calling him gay unless B had already admitted it, and (b) that he couldn't imagine why someone unlucky enough to be gay would ever want to admit it openly.

Then backpedalling - there's a lot of "I don't mean no disrespect" and "If you want to do that that's your business." Usually immediately followed by "but I find that stuff disgusting," or "I can't imagine why you'd ever want to do anything with a filthy, stinking, dirty cock." (B's reply: "I don't." [i.e. I like them clean.])

At some point, there's the "I'm just a nice guy" phase. He says (unprompted) "I'm the kind of guy who - when someone is broken down by the side of the road - stops to help them out."

Then there's my unsuccessful "reason with him" phase.
me: It's not like no one finds men attractive. Women do, for example.
Gary: But that's natural - women and men "fit together like puzzle pieces."
me: But even women and men fit together in other ways...
Gary: I don't care - two dudes together is disgusting. Two women on the other hand is another story. Or threesomes. But if one of my buddies were in a threesome with me and some chick, and tried kissing me, that'd be gross - I'd slap him. I'd kick his ass. Two women, though, is a beautiful thing.
me: You know how kids find any mention of sex gross? Even adults kissing they find disgusting? Maybe this is the same thing - it just seems gross because it's unfamiliar.
Gary: puzzle pieces!

Then instead of talking to B or me, he remembers why he's there (L) and turns to talk to her and J. Of course, he can't get the gay thing off his mind.

The next phase is female bisexuality. Of course he's ok with this and says something I forget about it being a beautiful thing. He asks L if she's into it, and talks about the possibility of her and J bringing in another woman - specifically, he tells L that she should "fulfill J's fantasy" and invite in another chick. They demur, perhaps saying that they're not into L's friends that way or something, and Gary tells J that the problem is that "L has been hanging around too many pit bulls. You need to find her a golden retriever."

Then he gets back to B. "But women are warm... and soft... and ....!" (B: "Maybe I don't want warm and soft.") followed by the repeated command to "just look at L" along with "how can you not want that?" It's a little awkward, but B defuses a lot of it by conceding that L is hot.

The end is kind of sad. We find out (in a single unprompted and uninterrupted narrative) that he's on parole for receiving stolen goods, and has been single for 2.5 years (or maybe it was "I haven't been laid in 2.5 years"), in part b/c of spending a year in jail for: driving drunk back from Foxwoods at 7AM going 90 with a beer bottle in his hand, then not pulling over for the cop until his engine dies, at which point the cop isn't fooled by him putting on his blinker as though he meant to pull over. It was "even after he had won [at Foxwoods]" and in his "late twenties/early thirties." Prison can't be good for homophobia. There were two other lines he repeated a couple of times: first that the sneaky cop had been hiding in the bushes and second that "those exits [on the Mass Pike] are so damn far apart!"

He kisses L's hand when he leaves.

postscript: Another story from that weekend. That night, B and I shared a tent, and as I was falling asleep, I "let out a shriek" (in B's words) and yelled "Get out! Get out!" while kicking and pushing B. Then I rolled over and went to sleep. He says he then made a comment about how my wedding night was going to be hilarious, but I remember none of this.

Also, watch out for leeches in Lonesome Lake.

sidebar

2005-07-14T17:06:00.000+01:00

See the annoying gap between this post and the next?

It's obviously related to the sidebar somehow, but I don't know CSS well enough to know how to fix it. If anyone has ideas about fixing this, please let me know.

comments

2005-07-14T06:15:00.000+01:00

I just wanted to say that I get emailed when you (readers - whoever you are) leave comments, so if you comment even on very old posts, I'll still notice and maybe reply.

Also, all the old Haloscan comments disappeared, which I apologize for, but future comments will stay up.

old stuff

2005-07-14T05:54:00.000+01:00

Last year I started a blog using emacs and html, thinking I didn't need this fancy blogger.com interface. Here are all the posts I made to it. The quality is a little mixed, but some of these I'm fond of.

4/29/04:

I went to a talk by John Ehrenfeld on sustainability, and how sustainability differs from sustainable development. He says that reason, science and technology got us into this mess, and can't entirely get us out. Green technology for sure won't be enough, and tinkering with the tax code and regulatory system probably won't either. We need to change the way we relate to the world, each other and ourselves.

But does his critique really need to be that broad? Is it really "reason" and "science" that are problems (because they lead to objectifying and dominating nature and so on), or just the way they're used in the service of our current hierarchies of power? Take economics for example. Theoretical economists often say things like "trade helps everybody" and "inflation needs to be controlled" that translate into real suffering for real people. This is taken as evidence that economics is an amoral field ("can calculate the cost of everything and the value of nothing"). In reality economics can be used to figure out (say) how to help the poor, and some people do use it that way, but the people who wield power use it to hold onto their own power. Later in the day I heard a talk about how communication technology could be used either to empower or to entertain all depending on how we use the technology.

Maybe this doesn't clash with what Ehrenfeld said, or maybe he'd claim that since these technologies are alienating, they naturally lend themselves to being exploited in that way. Either way, the anarcho-Marxist approach of blaming everything on hierarchies and power relations seems more apropos. You can defend the environment with completely human-centered and scientific reasoning with the "future generations" argument (i.e. we should preserve nature because it will benefit future humans, rather than rejecting the entire anthropocentric cost-benefit framework that both this claim and status quo environmental exploitation are based on). Ehrenfeld would say that this logic isn't enough without breaking our addictive emotional patterns; a Marxist would say this logic isn't enough as long as those in power have no incentive to follow it. So maybe Ehrenfeld's way is slightly more concrete, even if it sounds more wishy-washy.

Addendum: After the talk, I was feeling down, so I bought some $100 headphones.

7/17/05 update: A recent NYT article on hybrid cars gives an argument why technology won't save us:

The two-miles-per-gallon increase over the V-6, about 8 percent, is still significant... But 8 percent is not in the range that would make a substantial dent in American oil consumption. If every car in the country were converted to a hybrid with that improved mileage, the gain would be swallowed up in three to four years by growth in driving demand.
Mr. Buford said he got just what he wanted from the Accord, a hybrid with no sacrifices. "I wasn't prepared to give up anything to 'go green' - not performance, amenities, or space," he said.

On the other hand, economics is also a technology...

4/19/04:

A terrible last day of SAT teaching. The weather was beautiful and the students really didn't want to be there, and I was annoyed since this was something that I interrupted other plans to do entirely for them, and they were treating me like I was some teacher assigned to babysit them. High school teaches such terrible lessons about initiative. (7/14/05 update: Could be just American schools.).

Plus, I had little patience for the "I don't understand when you do it with variables. Let me do the problem with numbers." ridiculousness. Of course, this is just because their HS math teacher doesn't know any math either. In Romania they do Putnam-level problems in 10th grade.

4/14/04:
"Powers of Darkness" was amazing, esp. for an MIT production! I should read get around to reading it now...

4/13/04:
After a few days of increasing stress, I did an hour-long meditation class and then went rock-climbing at the MIT bouldering wall, both with Ilya.

Meditation: Normally I'm pretty skeptical of this sort of thing, and tend to note with ironic glee that the people who talk most about karma and balancing themselves and whatnot are usually the most unbalanced. But my standard "ignore" method of dealing with stress had been failing, and paying $5 to sit (or slowly walk) for an hour was really effective. I completely failed at meditation (its goal being to clear your mind of thoughts and focus on a sensation, like breathing); my mind was buzzing with thoughts the entire time, many of which were more imaginative than my dreams are. Still, even this sitting and thinking is something that I need to occasionally take time to do.

Rock climbing: Really hard. Or at least Ilya and I are really bad at it. Either way, a lot of fun.

4/7/04:

The front page of the Boston Metro was filled with a big, ugly photo of Moqtada Sadr with the caption: "The most evil man in Iraq: Go Get Him!"

Look, folks. I try, sometimes, to identify with the blue collar Boston mindset that surrounds my little island of geeky libertarians, even if I only encounter it while waiting in line for an eggplant sub at Yoni's "God Loves America" food truck.

But can you try to meet me halfway?

3/31/04:

I've been to three talks in the last two days, each of which was ostensibly in my field, and each of which serving mainly to teach me how little I know about things. Sean Hallgren talked about a pure math topic (finding the unit group of a number field), Ken Brown talked about something from theoretical physics (anyons in BECs) and Ike Chuang talked about experimental physics (ion traps).

I guess I can multiply two-by-two matrices and that'll have to be good enough for now.

3/27/04:

I went to Newburyport today to try to get people to (as I pleaded verbatim a million times) "support same-sex marriages by signing a postcard" which we would then deliver to their legislators. I was there with a gay guy, Dan, and a straight girl, Geeta.

A lot of people were supportive, but there were a number of reactions that pissed me off. Primary among them is the "this isn't my problem" reaction. As though during civil rights, white Protestant men didn't need to worry about supporting the movement. Clearly only an asshole would say this (on a side note, Watermelon Man is an awesome movie), but gender/sexual orientation stuff is even more absurd than race because there's likely to be someone in your family who's affected, not to mention the heavy costs that straights incur from rigid gender lines - arguably worse than the psychic costs borne by whites engaged in colonialism and racism.

The obvious corollary to "oh, I'm straight, so I don't give a shit" is "you must be gay if you're out collecting signatures for this." This was mostly annoying because it was related to the "not my problem" attitude, although I guess it was mildly eye-opening to experience a little taste of discrimation [this was expanded in 2005 from very sketchy notes written in 2004, so the emotions aren't so fresh any more.] (Amusing interchange: at a demonstration in front of the State House, one counter-demonstrator had a sign saying "Gay marriage theatens children" and I yelled at him "People like you threaten my children!" and he yelled "you can't have kids because you're a homo!" and I yelled "no I'm not!" but it felt way more like middle school than a critique of his narrow world-view and all its ideological baggage.) What was particularly funny about everyone imagining that I was gay came at the end of the day when we left downtown Newburyport and went to a supermarket in a strip mall, where there were actually many more people. People went through a narrow area and we were kind of tired by then, so we'd take turns collecting signatures one at a time. However, it didn't work so well when Geeta was collecting them, because she'd say "would you like to support gay marriage?" and their eyes would naturally go to me and Dan, standing by the side trying to look unobtrusive, and they'd immediately assume we were a gay couple that just wanted to get married like anyone else, if only they'd sign Geeta's postcard. It was funny, but they'd get weirded out by this - I bet if Dan and I were girls it would've worked.

3/25/04:

I read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich a few days ago. She's written a lot for Time and Z magazine (and The New Yorker, I thought too, but maybe I just imagined that) in the past. In Nickel and Dimed, she goes "undercover" into the side of America experienced by the poor. Specifically, she tries in three different places to survive on the wages from entry-level jobs while starting with only her car, some clothes and about $1000.

Her descriptions of poverty in America shouldn't be surprising, but I found them pretty jarring. Sometimes it's hard to imagine why low-wage workers don't demand better conditions, but she does a compelling job of explaining how good corporations are at wearing down their employees and discouraging them from speaking up or taking risks. (A lot of this reminded me of high school.) This partially explains why wages are often low even in tight labor markets; employees don't have the time, energy or financial independence to look for other jobs. Also, grad school sometimes tricks us into thinking that a little poverty isn't that bad. The problem is when you don't have the security deposit for an apartment, you need to pay a lot for a hotel. Or your lack of health insurance can cause all sorts of horrible problems. Or your work is so draining (many people have to take two full-time jobs and/or have long commutes) it leaves little time to get the rest of your life in order. [7/14/05 update: Likewise giving anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients in Africa is of limited help if they don't have enough food to eat.] In the end, it makes the idea of lifting yourself out of poverty through hard work seem as naive as, say, getting a lot of reading done in prison where there aren't distractions.

What I found really interesting about the book, though, was the very fact of its existence as a description of American poverty addressed towards Americans with money. The book is billed as investigative journalism, but really it's more like anthropology. The star researcher leaves the lecture circuit behind to go live among the natives, get their trust, learn their ways and translate their discourse into commercial and academic success. One point of the book that this reinforces is how invisible the poor are to the middle and upper classes (and even to each other - she writes compellingly about how poor people never see anyone like them in popular culture and fail to realize how widespread their condition is).

The anthropological style of the book also hints at the enormous differences between how poor and rich people think and perceive the world. The narrator keeps reminding herself and the reader that she doesn't really belong, that's she's actually sneaking off to make mortgage payments and think subversive thoughts while remaining literally obedient to the strictures of her "experiment." She even does some union organizing to relieve the tedium and hopelessness of working at Wal-mart. This ironic distance from the way a real poor person would write furthers another point of the book, which is that the poor inhabit an America radically different from our bourgeois version. (Maybe this isn't so different from the last point. I need to figure out where I'm going with these arguments. Plus, this whole thing has probably been written before in a million freshman comp essays.)

It'd be interesting to compare this with, say, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, another book about American poverty (among other things). Manchild moves in the opposite direction, from poverty to the middle class, and is dramatic (there's heroin, prostitutes, gangs, etc.) as opposed to the crushing banality of Nickel and Dimed. Also, the intended audience of Manchild is probably pretty different.

This is pretty rambling, but my point is that the narrator is ironically distanced from actual poverty because of her audience, language and the breaks in the narrative when she starts talking like someone involved in policy. The reality of American poverty is only inferred from these gaps and inconsistencies in the narrative which demonstrate how truly invisible it is to "people like us" and how radically different it is. Is this the Lacanian Real? I'm not sure, but maybe a better analogy is that it's like the thoughts you have when you've been on your feet washing dishes for 16 hours and you're too tired to think.

3/18/04:

The Iraq on the Record report, prepared at the request of Rep. Henry A. Waxman, is a comprehensive examination of the statements made by the five Administration officials most responsible for providing public information and shaping public opinion on Iraq: President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

http://www.house.gov/reform/min/features/iraq_on_the_record/

3/16/04: A photo tour of Chernobyl.

Old stuff from Spring 2003.

Don't use the wrong words in your AIDS grant. ["Certain Words Can Trip Up AIDS Grants, Scientists Say" NYT, Apr 18, 2003.] Sorry about the lack of link, but here are the first two paragraphs:

Scientists who study AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases say they have been warned by federal health officials that their research may come under unusual scrutiny by the Department of Health and Human Services or by members of Congress, because the topics are politically controversial.
The scientists, who spoke on condition they not be identified, say they have been advised they can avoid unfavorable attention by keeping certain "key words" out of their applications for grants from the National Institutes of Health or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those words include "sex workers," "men who sleep with men," "anal sex" and "needle exchange," the scientists said.

I like how the automatic nature of the screening is an important piece of this story.

Afghanistan: the Taliban's smiling face, March 2003 http://rawa.false.net/smiling.htm

It seems the only time US-UK troops needed to wear their chemical warfare suits was when recovering a body from a friendly fire incident to protect themselves from the radiation given off by US depleted uranium ordnance -- which, of course, the Pentagon claims is absolutely harmless.
Audrey Gillian, "'I never want to hear that sound again': Five British soldiers have died under 'friendly fire'" Guardian, 3/31/03, p. 3.

pulling down Saddam's statue

404 - WMD not found

the mind of the enemy

2005-07-12T15:30:00.000+01:00

First, please watch this video. It's only a few minutes long and it's amazing. Watch it..

My reactions are pretty obvious, and not particularly original.

These people are dumb as toast.
But their positions aren't that far from those of any pro-choice politician in America! It's kind of like people who oppose drug legalization because it would "send the wrong signal" that "drugs are ok," while at the same time believing that users should get treatment and not jail.

On the other hand, is it the fault of pro-choicers that this needless gulf exists? Similarly, anti-abortion activists should be leading the charge for sex ed, widely available birth control and so on, so there's always talk (from pro-choicers) that there should be a glorious compromise where both sides work together on these no-brainer win-win issues. But this runs squarely into problem #1 (above)! Pro-lifers seem to prefer instead to undermine sex ed and access to birth control. Likewise, anti-terrorism liberals should have been able to compromise with anti-terrorism conservatives/craven Democrats on the only reliable way to reduce terrorism (at a cost of negative $200 billion), which would be to not invade Iraq, but this potential win-win was also DOA due to the "dumb as toast" problem above.

Of course, one consistent way to explain this is that the leaders of pro-life movements aren't so much about protecting babies but punishing women for having sex; as evidenced by general support for exceptions when it's "not her fault" as in rape. So while most followers might be dumb, the overall organization is best described as stupid and/or evil.

Well, I must say it feels good to finally understand the other side, rather than just demonizing them all the time.

I'm always looking for a few good shirts

2005-07-10T16:51:00.000+01:00

Via pandagon and a feminist livejournal, comes this charming tank-top.

While in an ideal world, these people would be called to account before some kind of ad-hoc tribunal, I couldn't help but think of how fetching I would look in this shirt, with little bits of scraggly chest hair tufting out of the top.

I Got Rhythm

2005-07-09T04:29:00.000+01:00

For all those who want to play a musical instrument and a) have a copy of matlab, but b) have no ability to keep a beat (surely these must go together often enough) here is some useful code.

function metronome(persec)
blip = sin(1:82 * 2 * pi * 1000 / 8192);
while (1)
   soundsc(blip);
   pause(60/persec);
end

And in stereo!

function metronome2(persec)
len = 500;
blip = sin((1:len) * 2 * pi * 1000 / 8192)';
blip1 = [blip zeros(len,1)];
blip2 = [zeros(len,1) blip];
while (1)
    sound(blip1);
    pause(60/persec);
    sound(blip2);
    pause(60/persec);
end

Matlab is good for tuning too - all you need to know is that a violin's A is 440Hz and a fifth (interval between violin strings) is seven half-steps, so the frequencies are separated by 2^(7/12).

shotgun weddings make so much more sense now

2005-07-07T16:00:00.000+01:00

From a recent NYT op-ed:

Throughout much of history, upper-class men divorced their wives if their marriage did not produce children, while peasants often wouldn't marry until a premarital pregnancy confirmed the woman's fertility.

Two conclusions:

I always suspected that my understanding of shotgun weddings (a father preserving his daughter's honor) wasn't quite patriarchal enough. I think I was confused by thinking of premarital sex in more modern terms, whereas in societies where the female orgasm is quasi-taboo, the function of premarital sex would probably be different.
The rest of the article is a nice reminder of why marriage should go the way of slavery - that is, replaced with something still exploitative, but less so, and more fluid and market-based. It brings up a potential double turn problem with defending same-sex marriage. Conservatives say gay marriage undermines traditional marriage, and traditional marriage is good. It's naturally to respond by saying:
1. Same-sex strengthens marriage because it supports gay/lesbian couples who want commitment and monogamy, thereby taking legitimacy away from more flexible "domestic partner" arrangements. By contrast, acceptance of public homosexuality is pretty much inevitably increasing, and if this continues without legalized gay marriage, then the "domestic partner" model of a long-term relationship will continue to gain credibility. For example, after gay marriage was legalized in Massachusetts, many companies stopped offering health benefits to both gay and straight domestic partners, because now anyone can get married.
2. Fuck the sanctity of marriage. Any institution where you can sue for loss of housekeeping and sexual services is based on some seriously twisted foundations. That's fucked up even aside from the sexism. Long-term monogamy is often great, but the state/religious/cultural sanction has more drawbacks than advantages.

But things get dicey when you make both arguments at the same time. I suppose you can say that same-sex marriage undermines the bad aspects of marriage and strengthens the good parts. Or you could oppose same-sex marriage outright. Some queers do oppose same-sex marriage based on the above arguments; or more often, just can't bring themselves to support it, though they also would never vote for the alternative---kind of like how radical leftists felt about Kerry. I saw a good book presenting this position, but, um, I forget the title and the author. Anyway, I think I agree more with the "best of both worlds" argument at the beginning of the paragraph, though I admit it has some problems.

rather eager than lasting

2005-07-07T03:40:00.000+01:00

This excerpt is from Mansfield Park:

Henry Crawford ... longed to have been at sea, and seen and done and suffered as much. His heart was warmed, his fancy fired, and he felt the highest respect for a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through such bodily hardships and given such proofs of mind. The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and happy ardour, instead of what he was!
The wish was rather eager than lasting.

This suggests two rhetorical questions.

How awesome is Jane Austen? I mean seriously, what the hell is wrong with people who don't like her?
Who hasn't felt like Henry Crawford from time to time? Or even disturbingly often? Despite a spring I should feel pretty damn good about, I still find myself wishing I had done a million things differently; e.g. meeting someone who played the Mendelssohn violin concerto in e at 15 (and w/o being a total violin dork) made me kick myself for not putting actual effort into violin during the ten years I played it. I think this is the closest to personal revelation I'll ever put on this blog.

Anyway, the relevant passage continues with:

He was roused from the reverie of retrospection and regret produced by it, by some inquiry from Edmund as to his plans for the next day's hunting; and he found it was as well to be a man of fortune at once with horses and grooms at his command. In one respect it was better,...

and then it talks about horses and the other characters.

On that note, I think I'm going to watch a movie. Or should I pick up the violin?

Oh, and see the next post for what reminded me of Mansfield Park.

my sister can beat up your sister

2005-07-07T03:22:00.000+01:00

What's better than publishing your first book?

Getting a positive review in the Times Literary Supplement, that's what!

Go Sha!

federal income taxes

2005-06-27T15:07:00.000+01:00

Why are "taxes" and "federal income taxes" so often thought of as synonymous?

Part of it is that those are the most noticeable on Apr 15, and part is that they're easier to have a national conversation about, but part really is a deliberate effort from right-wingers. The progression of arguments is pretty amazing (from rushlimbaugh.com):

Only the Rich Pay Taxes!

NEW UPDATED FIGURES: Top 20% Pay 80% of Taxes

New York Times Buries, But Reports, Truth on Taxes
CBO report misheadlined by New York Times still reveals truth...tscript,
• CBO Report: Effective Federal Tax Rates Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014
• Posted Forever: Top 50% of Wage Earners Pay 96.03% of Income Taxes
• Excel file: IRS Income Stats
• Myth Buster: Democrats Get More Campaign Cash from "Rich"

Only the rich pay taxes!!!
Well, 20% pay 80% but that's still a lot of money wasted on public goods.
and by taxes, I mean "federal income taxes."

(Context: Overall the tax burden is a pretty even share of income for everyone, or if anything is slightly regressive. But the federal income tax is strongly progressive, and that's what everyone notices.)

I found this while trying to substantiate the argument that Rush Limbaugh's genius is to approach familiar issues with unfamiliar arguments. I do have to admit that the Club G'itmo golf shirt definitely was an unfamiliar approach to an issue I thought I knew.

peliculas con pasión

2005-06-23T05:29:00.000+01:00

My impressions of the movie Bad Education. Click below if you want to read the post and don't mind hearing about the plot.

To see how to do this sort of thing, see Suzanne's description or the javascript method I ended up using.)

read the rest of the post

Almodovar's Bad Education closes with the self-referential line "Enrique continued to make films with passion" and then zooms in on the word "pasión" until it fills the screen. Why does that sound so false after a movie with priests molesting little boys, brother betraying brother, a plot driven by desperation, sex, drugs and love, and great acting, especially from Gael Garcia Bernal?

This confused me for awhile, and I thought I might just be getting jaded, but that's not it. The problem is that the intricately twisting plot, in which every character, every scene and every relationship is doubled and redoubled, in a film script, a flashback or a fantasy about what might have been. When the terrifying Father Manolo is knocking one by one on the bathroom doors, it's like the knock on the door in Rear Window, or maybe the late-night bathroom crackdown in Apocalypse Now, and even when he's sitting behind his desk being blackmailed, you feel like he holds the cards. But then he follows Juan puppy-dog style to the film set, and when asked by Enrique to identify himself, self-consciously says "I'm the villain in your film." This right after we see that the claustrophobic office that had trapped Ignacio is part of a set that gets taken apart while the camera slowly zooms farther and farther out. So it's all very postmodern and fascinating, but emotionally totally pulls its punches. Then at the end Manolo has taken the place of Ignacio as the one desperate for love and for control, who tries blackmail and only ends up getting killed.

It's hard to really believe that anyone is suffering when the movie moves so fluidly between different realizations of the same drama. It's as though halfway through Schindler's List, the Jews went to Israel and started bulldozing Palestinian homes while the Germans started going to onion cellars to make themselves cry, and then AIDS victims in San Francisco adopted the onion cellar idea to deal with their own pain. Yes, they're all very tragic stories, but really it gets hard to take any of this stuff seriously after a while.

Still a really nice movie (beautiful, thought-provoking, well-acted) if you don't mind the passion not being there.

Pink tuur daal

2005-06-07T04:50:00.000+01:00

from Piali's mom
Ingredients:

1 cup daal
2 ripe tomatoes
1 inch fresh ginger, finely chopped
2 fat cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 heaped teaspoon Indian cumin
quarter teaspoon turmeric
1 tablespoon coriander powder, or half a cup of finely chopped cilantro
salt to taste

Wash the daal a couple of times, rubbing it well. Soak for up to an hour (cooks faster!). Bring to a boil in 4 cups of water in a medium size pot on low heat for about 15 minutes. Add turmeric and very finely choppped tomatoes, and continue to simmer until very tender and tomatoes have disintegrated. Keep simmering on low heat.

In a frying pan, heat a tablespoon of oil. When hot, add the cumin seeds, lower heat to avid burning the garlic and add the garlic and ginger. Stir well, add a bit of the daal, covering the pan immediately to prevent the aromas from escaping. Immediately transfer the mix to the rest of the daal. Rinse the pan with a bit of water, and add that to the daal too.

Add salt and pepper (check the heat!) and garnish with cilantro, only if good and fresh leaves are available. If not, just add the corriander powder instead, and bring to one more final boil. Serve with rice?

I have substituted garlic for the asafoetida and curry leaves, which I use. Those are very ethnic, very hard to find, and need cultivated taste! I have also substituted black pepper for dry red chilli, since the "heat" is moderate. Also, the ginger adds to the heat. [I made this and it's tasty! I added green chili peppers, cayenne and a little lemon juice. --Aram]

If you have a hammer....

2005-05-30T20:59:00.000+01:00

...everything looks like a nail.

This list makes me happy; not so much the specific examples on it (some of which seem a little dubious), but just the fact that such a list exists. It helps me get through those depressing moments when I fear that the only useful Fourier transforms are over abelian groups. And I like the idea of working to add quantum information theory to the list.

biting the hand

2005-05-19T02:06:00.000+01:00

In case you haven't been following the debate over the Chinese's central bank's practice of linking the renminbi to the dollar, here's the background: China has kept the renminbi at the artificial low price of 8.28 since 1994. It does this by buying hundreds of billions of dollars of US debt per year - basically financing our budget and trade deficits. The low renminbi/high dollar helps Chinese exports and US imports, while hurting Chinese imports and US exports. It also keeps interest rates low in the US, encouraging borrowing/investment.

Americans who are trying to compete with Chinese imports don't like the cheap renminbi, and politicians can often be seen denouncing China's currency peg as "unfair" to American manufacturers and whatnot. But, if China didn't buy all our debt, we quickly have to face the laws of economics and, for example, pay for the war in Iraq. Wikipedia puts it in terms more dramatic than you usually get from economists

The ensuing depreciation of the US dollar might price oil out of the reach of the american economy, causing stagflation, a collapse of US oil dependant industries, massive unemployment and other dire economic consequences.

And it would be no picnic for China either; aside from the collapse of their largest trading partner, having too much cash could lead to the sort of crises that SE Asia had in the late 1990's, though I don't entirely understand how. (Good references are Nouriel Roubini's blog post, his paper with Brad SetserWill the Bretton Woods 2 regime unravel soon? The Risk of a Hard Landing in 2005-6, and billmon's posts (1 and 2)). Roubini actually thinks it would be best if China started letting its currency slide now, before it gets any worse.

But the point is that the U.S. and China are locked in a weird kind of mutual death-grip, with China having slightly more control over the situation, but all of the fiscal irresponsibility coming from the U.S. So it's natural that in this situation Congress would start blaming China for the situation. But what somehow still managed to blow me away is that their threaten-China bill would be attached as a rider to a spending bill that will only sink us further into this mess. The NYT article doesn't say which spending bill it is, but I bet it's the supplemental $82 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that Bush didn't deign to put in the budget.

Mr. [Charles] Schumer [D-NY] and Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, stunned administration officials last month by winning bipartisan Senate support for a measure that would threaten China with tariffs up to 27.5 percent if it failed to change its currency policies.
The Senate voted 67 to 33 against killing an amendment that would have attached the provision to a spending bill. Mr. Schumer withdrew the amendment, but Senate Republicans have agreed to allow a vote on the measure before the end of July.

law of the father

2005-05-15T04:58:00.000+01:00

I should be horrified at how Christian fundamentalists want to bring back honor killings (via atrios and pandagon)

Daddy, What's A Virgin?
Virginity was an inheritance to be brought into a marriage, and the father of the bride was responsible to preserve that inheritance. If a new husband slandered his bride and claimed that she was not a virgin, the bride's father and mother would defend her name and the name of their family. They would present the evidence of her virginity to the elders of the city (Deuteronomy 22:15). But if the charge was true, and the woman was not a virgin, then the bride was to be executed in front of her father's house. "But if the thing is true, and evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father's house. So you shall put away the evil from among you" (Deuteronomy. 22:20-21). Why the doorway to her father's house, rather than her husband's house? Because she had rebelled against her father's authority, and dishonored him. [see illustration]
In scripture it is obvious that daughters are to submit to their father's authority, while the father's responsibility is to protect their daughters.

But instead I can't help but find the whole thing (especially the despicable article Daddy's Girl: Courtship and a Father's Rights) not so much threatening as pathetically reminiscent of a scene in The Satanic Verses. But I lent my copy to someone who I think lost it! So the relevant quote will have to wait... Check back in this spot later.

Quantum error correction fails only when you don't use it

2005-05-12T05:29:00.000+01:00

This (or a more formal version) is going to get posted to the arxiv, unless one of my quantum compadres tells me why I shouldn't do it.

In "Quantum error correction fails for Hamiltonian models" (quant-ph/0411008), Alicki argues that when our controls are Hamiltonians of bounded strength (say the gate time is t_0), error correction fails. How badly does it fail? Well, suppose we want to protect a single logical qubit, and have M physical qubits, which are subject to independent depolarizing noise at rate lambda². Then he says that every encode-protect-decode cycle of arbitrary length has fidelity no greater than exp(-M t_0 lambda²). First of all, I think there must be a mistake somewhere since increasing M shouldn't necessarily make the system decohere faster; after all you can always add qubits that you don't use. Worryingly, I can't find the mistake... Second of all, this doesn't mean that fault-tolerance, or even error-correction, don't work. His analysis (minus the math) is roughly as follows. You start and end with an unencoded qubit. The Hamiltonian has finite strength, so the qubit must be unencoded for the first O(t_0) time and the last O(t_0) time. During this time errors act on it.

This means the problem isn't that your Hamiltonians aren't infinitely fast. The problem is leaving a qubit sit around unprotected by any code. In FTQC this doesn't happen. Computatons map one encoded state to another. Ergo no problem.

This argument could be better written, but hopefully the point is clear.

recipes I actually use

2005-05-10T23:43:00.000+01:00

Unlike other recipes I've posted, I've made these recipes many times and highly recommend them all.

Rice Pulao

from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Spiced Lentils with spinach and applies

1 Tbs canola or peanut oil
1 Tbs butter
2 cup minced onion
2 cup dried lentils
5 cups water
2 large stalks of celery, minced
1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp dried mustard
1 Tbs minced fresh ginger
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp tumeric
3 Tbs fresh lemon juice
3 large cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp salt (or more if needed)
black pepper to taste
cayenne to taste
1/2 lb fresh spinach, *washed*, stems removed, and chopped (note: if making this for hundreds of people, use frozen spinach to save time.)
2 medium-sized tart apples (Granny Smiths work well) peeled and chopped

Heat oil in medium-sized skillet, and melt in the butter. Add the onion and cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the onion is soft and turning golden.
Meanwhile, place the lentils and water in a large saucepan or Dutch oven, and bring to a boil. Lower the heat, partially cover, and let simmer for 15 minutes.
Add to the onion: celery, cumin, mustard, ginger, coriander, and tumeric. Cook together over medium-low heat for 10 minutes, or until the celery is tender. Scrape all of this into the lentils, add the lemon juice and garlic, and stir. Simmer, partially covered, for 10 more minutes--until the lentils are tender.
Stir in the salt, black pepper, cayenne, spinach, and apples. COok for just a few minutes longer--until the spinach is wilted and the apples begin to soften. Serve hot.

Raita

2 cups yogurt
1 tsp whole cumin seeds
1 tsp fennel seeds
salt and cayenne

MANY POSSIBLE ADDITIONS:

minced ripe tomato (seed it first)
minced or grated cucumber (peel and seed it first)
minced bell pepper
minced red onion (ew) or scallion
minced fresh herbs (cilantro, mint, parsley, chives)
grated carrot
grated beet
minced spinach

cranberry scones

2.5 cups flour
2.5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp soda
2/3 cup sugar
3/4 cup butter (cold, cut into small pieces)
1 cup coursely chopped dried cranberries
3/4 cup buttermilk

Mix flour, baking powder and soda. Cut in butter with pastry blender until coarse crumbs. Stir in cranberries and sugar then buttermilk until blended. Cut dough in half. Lightly flour surface and knead dough lightly. Press into 8" circle 1/2" thick, cut into 8 wedges. Place 1/2" apart on ungreased cookie sheet.

Preheat oven to 400° F. Bake 12-15 minutes.

You can substitute nuts, choc chips, or other dried fruit for the cranberries.

Scones can be frozen unbaked; bake without thawing.

cauliflower curry

from book two of the vegetarian epicure

1 large head cauliflower
1 small potato (6-8oz)
4 tbs vegetable oil
1 tsp black mustard seds
1 tsp ground turmeric
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 clove garlic, minced or crushed
1/2 onion, slivered
1 tsp salt
1.25 cups water
1 tomato, chopped
2 tbs lemon juice

Scrub, then boil the potato in salted water until it's nearly done. Wash and chop up the cauliflower into small pieces.

Heat the oil over medium-low heat and add the mustard seeds. Cover until they pop, then remove from heat until they're done popping (they should turn grey). Then add the onion, garlic and spices. Saute over medium heat for 3-4 minutes, stirring constantly. Then add cauliflower, saute for a few minutes, add salt and water, cover the pan and cook for another few minutes. Meanwhile, chop the potato into 1" cubes. Then add the potato, cover again and simmer for 10minutes. Finally, add the tomato and lemon juice, stir and cook uncovered for a few minutes fbefore serving.

another pilau

(also from the Vegetarian Epicure, book 2)

4 tbs butter
2 cups long-grain white rice
1/4 tsp cinnamon
crushed seeds from 8 cardamom pods
3/4c blanched, slivered almonds
1/2c raisins or currants
1c green peas
4c hot water
1.5tsp salt.

Melt the butter and fry the rice in it over low heat until it just starts to color. Add the cinnamon and cardamom, and fry for antoher minute or two. Then add everything else, stir, bring the water to a boil, lower the heat, cover the pot and cook for however long the rice needs.

You need a heavy-bottomed pot that can be tightly covered for this. The important thing is to fry the rice before boiling, and to add vaguely sweet, nutty and salty flavors - otherwise don't worry about following the recipe too closely.

E=mc2

2005-05-09T18:08:00.000+01:00

I always imagined that this equation would appear somewhere in Einstein's original paper. But not so. Here's the relevant text (he uses V instead of c to denote the speed of light):

If a body gives off the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass diminishes by L/V². The fact that the energy withdrawn from the body becomes energy of radiation evidently makes no difference, so that we are led to the more general conclusion that:
The mass of a body is a measure of its energy-content;; if the energy changes by L, the mass changes in the same sense by L/9×10²⁰, the energy being measured in ergs, and the mass in grammes.

One thing that struck me is how Einstein's approach today feels dated, belonging to a time (perhaps the last time) when you could do physics without knowing so much math. Or maybe it was just Einstein who could jump to such broad conclusions from one thought experiment involving radiation emitted by a slowly moving object. It's as though he knew the answer all along and just gave us an example to illustrate the point.

For example, today people favor the mathy Lorentz approach because it shows energy and momentum form a covariant 4-vector just like time and position do. So massless particles satisfy E=cp and light carries momentum. But Einstein saw this (and more) immediately with no intervening math! The next (and final) two sentences of the paper are:

It is not impossible that with bodies whose energy-content is variable to a high degree (e.g. with radium salts) the theory may be successfully put to the test.
If the theory corresponds to the facts, radiation conveys inertia between the emitting and absorbing bodies.

[Here's Einstein's first paper on special relativity.

Another old paper worth finding is the one where Born's rule that probability is the absolute value of the wavefunction squared is introduced wrong in the main text, and then later corrected in a footnote. I can't find it online, but the cite is Born, M., 1926a, Zeitschrift für Physik 37, 863; translated in (Wheeler, 1983), pp. 52-55. See also Born, M., 1926b, Zeitschrift für Physik 38, 803. and Born, M., 1927, Nature 119, 354.]

genocide-related program activities

2005-05-07T06:07:00.000+01:00

I think I liked the State Department's previous politically-motivated exaggerations of the deaths in Darfur better than their new politically-motivated minimizations of those deaths. So far probably 400,000 have died, and if aid stops because of insecurity, 100,000 deaths/month are possible.

The NYT recently published pictures drawn by kids in refugee camps on the border of Chad.

Top:Rashid, 13, from western Darfur "I saw janjaweed coming quickly, on horses and camels. They were shooting guns and yelling, 'Kill the slaves. . . . ' I saw people falling on the ground and bleeding. They chased after my brother; he is 12. One girl I saw -- they tied her up, put her on a camel and went away. All our animals were taken. Then the planes came and bombed our village."
Bottom:Salim, 13, from northern Darfur "We returned from school. . . . We are all looking, and not imagining bombing. The first bomb landed in our garden. The bombs killed six people, including a young boy, two women, a boy carried by his mother and a girl. Now my sleep is hard because I feel frightened."

Unfortunately, even if Western governments are pressured into action, it's not clear that what they do is likely to be productive. I'm not sure what I think is the right thing to advocate for, but am sympathetic to this argument by Alex de Waal, which is vaguely reminiscent of what Republicans said about Clinton's intervention in Bosnia:

Sudan is back at the top of the UN Security Council agenda and a focus for concern in Washington and London. Much of this concern is framed by the ICI report and the agenda of prosecutions. But these issues are marginal to the central challenges of Sudan and are indeed a distraction from investing the necessary political and diplomatic energies in the search for long-term solutions. The call for sanctions is similarly a response to the pressure to be seen to be ‘doing something'. There are no realistic scenarios in which sanctions would have a major positive impact: they are simply a means of expressing outrage. This is symptomatic of the way in which international engagement in Sudan has become focused upon short-term management rather than strategic thinking. In turn this reflects the predominance of activist agendas, and the lack of strong material interests in the outcome for Sudan.

french toast recipe

2005-05-02T04:52:00.000+01:00

one loaf French bread cut into one-inch slices put in glass pan
4 eggs
1.5c milk
1/2c OJ
1/4c sugar
2 tbsp orange liqueur (like Grand Marnier)
1 tbsp vanilla

Cover with saran wrap and refrigerate for 1-24 hours. Transfer to lightly buttered pan so they're not touching. Bake for 12-15 minute at 425 or until it starts to turn brown. Add powdered sugar.

raw salsa

2 cans black beans
2 cans corn
1 large red onion, chopped
2 red and 2 green bell peppers, chopped
1-1.5 bunches of cilantro
1-1.5c red wine vinegar
maybe some avocado would be good too
jalapenos to taste (dice, put in half raw, cook half on low heat in oil; alternatively you can broil them and pull the skin off)

another change of blog focus

2005-05-02T00:13:00.000+01:00

Two things:

Inspired by Jeff's blog, I'm going to start posting about things I've been learning. The idea is a) to not forget as much and b) to sometimes get people to tell me more about these things. The post below is an example of this.
Inspired by the experimentalists in my lab, I started a blog to track my thesis work (or lack thereof) at aramthesis.blogspot.com. The sort-of-Ilya-inspired idea is related to time management; seeing how long I spend on tasks vis-a-vis their importance. And hopefully it'll lower the interestingness threshold for posting.

How many people live on less than $1/day?

2005-05-01T23:21:00.000+01:00

It's weird how hard this question is to answer. The two kinds of statistics I'm aware of are household surveys, which ask people to estimate their consumption, and national account statistics, like per capita GDP, which measure output. Both are seriously flawed and different methods give dramatically different answers. For example, Sala-i-Martin's 2002 paper The World Distribution of Income (estimated from Individual Country Distributions) argues that the number of poor has dropped dramatically from 1976-1998, while Ravallion and Chen's paper How have the world’s poorest fared in the 1980s? says that poverty rates have been close to flat from 1987-1998; and the differences aren't explained by the differnet time periods they look at. Some of the controversy is addressed in Ravallion's response to Sala-i-Martin.

A summary of the household survey vs. national accounts statistics dilemma is in the abstract of Deaton's 2005 paper Measuring Poverty in a Growing World (or measuring growth in a poor world):

Abstract—The extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years. Although there are better data than ever before, controversies are not resolved. A major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys, which is used to measure poverty, grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts, in the world as a whole and in large countries, particularly India, China, and the United States. In consequence, measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries. One plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys. But growth in the national accounts is also upward biased, and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys. So it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption, without any increase in measured inequality. Current statistical procedures in poor countries understate the rate of global poverty reduction, and overstate growth in the world.

Another pitfall is how people approach the topic with preconceptions (also known as null hypotheses). For example, the paper by two World Bank economists [Dollar, David and Aart Kraay (2002) “Growth is Good for the Poor,” Journal of Economic Growth, 7(3) 195-225.] should really be titled "Growth cannot be shown to not be good for the poor," since rather than showing that the bottom 20% receive an equal share of growth, they fail to reject the null hypothesis that the bottom 20% receive an equal share of growth.

Got it? They find that a 1% increase in GDP increase the income of the bottom 20% by an amount that is not significantly different from 1%. But that doesn't mean it's close to 1%, just that their data is sufficiently noisy that 1% lies within their error bars. So maybe "Growth might be good for the poor" would be a better way to put it.

Also, household surveys are probably more accurate for levels of consumption by the poor than for the relative share of consumption of the poor (since the rich underreport consumption or don't reply to surveys). But this paper uses household surveys only to establish the poor's share of consumption, and then estimates the level of consumption by multiplying this by GDP. Since GDP in India (for example) has grown 5-10%/decade faster than consumption measured by surveys, this should systematically overestimate both the level of income the poor get, and the rate at which it grows.

That was worse than a crime; it was a mistake

2005-05-01T23:05:00.000+01:00

Not as entertaining as the sewer rat letter, but hopefully clearer.

To the Editor,
The May 1 op-ed "The war we could have won" ignores the staggering immorality of killing 2-4 million people who posed (let's be honest) no threat to the U.S. Imagine how Germans today would feel about speculation that the Final Solution was actually not such a hopeless goal.
It's hard to admit that Americans were on the wrong side of history, so that a defeat for the U.S. was a victory for humanity. However, like Germany, Japan and other nations with war crimes in their past, we need to ground our public discourse in honest remorse for our crimes before going on to speculate about how to fight more effectively.
Sincerely,
Aram Harrow

We're just here to help.

2005-04-27T00:35:00.000+01:00

To an outsider, a "problem-solving court" might not look very different from a traditional one. These courts exist, for the most part, in regular courthouses, and there are judges in robes and court officers in uniform.
But there are significant differences. The judges often have an unusual amount of information about the people who appear before them. These people, who are often called clients, rather than defendants, can talk directly to the judges, rather than communicating through lawyers.
And the judges monitor these defendants for months, even years, using a system of rewards and punishments, which can include jail time. Judges also receive training in their court's specialty and may have a psychologist on the staff.
New York Times
In Problem-Solving Court, Judges Turn Therapist
April 26, 2005

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.
Michel Foucault
Discipline and Punish
1973

Introduction
This article refers to the findings of a study into the way that nursing staff working in high security forensic settings construct accounts of offending behaviour, most notably that the concept of ‘evil’ retains usage alongside clinical language. The results have previously been reported in the professional literature (Richman, Mercer & Mason 1999; Mercer, Mason & Richman 1999), and here some more general reflections are offered about the implications of ‘medicalised deviance’ (Conrad & Schneider 1980) for mental health nursing practice and research. Attention is focused on the dominance of psychiatric language in a borderline territory where medicine, morality and the law compete for ownership of the disordered offender. Ultimately, though, it raises concerns about the way that research is conducted, funded and presented. In an era of deference to the ‘gold standard’ of the randomised-controlled trial, the gospel of the ‘systematic review’ and the grail of evidence-based practice it urges us to re-examine the neutrality and benevolence of ‘science’.
Nurse2Nurse magazine
‘Speak no Evil’ Research in a Forensic
Sep 1, 2002

3:49:46

2005-04-19T17:16:00.000+01:00

splits:

first 7 miles: 1 hour
next 7 miles: 1 hour
next 7 miles: 62:30
last 5.2 miles: 47:15

why I love economics papers

2005-04-06T16:37:00.000+01:00

because of lines like "The policy recommendations would involve a reallocation of children into "fun" activities." .

And because of the whole link turn philosophy of unintended consequences: the paper argues that vegetarianism can make animals worse off because cows raised for meat are treated better than dairy cows. ("In fact, animal welfare conceivably could be improved by a boycott of vegetables and an increase in meat eating.") Of course, similar sorts of argument could also be made about problems of trying to act altruistically towards people when you're only able to make a small difference.

Also while reading marginal revolution: It's funny how economists have such physics envy, when I read econ papers for fun, but am apathetic about quantum gravity, the black hole information paradox, or other physics things outside my work.

Ph.D comics

2005-03-31T06:47:00.000+01:00

somehow the humor of reading phdcomics while procrastinating on the thesis never gets old for me.

recipes

2005-03-06T16:16:00.000Z

Copied from Saveur, an absurdly chi-chi cooking magazine.

warm soft chocolate cake

1 stick butter (8tbsp)
6 tsp flour
4 oz bittersweet chocolate
2 eggs
2 egg yolks
1/4 c sugar
1 tbsp unsweetened cocoa

Preheat oven to 450 and butter four 4-oz molds with some extra butter. Then dust each mold with 1tsp flour and tap out the extra.
Cook chocolate + butter in a double boiler on medium-low heat until almost melted, 10 minutes.
Beat eggs, egg yolks, sugar until thick + pale yellow, 2-3 minutes.
Stir choc. + eggs together and then whisk in 2tsp flour.
Pour into molds and bake for 6-7 minutes - should still be soft on inside. Invert onto plates and wait 10 seconds before lifting the mold to let them drop out. Dust with cocoa.

ponche

2 lbs seckel pears (or tejocote)
4 oz peeled tamarind pods
6 6" pieces of sugarcane
5 peeled, seeded, quartered guavas
3 tart apples, cored and cut into wedges
12 prunes
2 tbsp. raisins
2 sticks cinnamon
2 cones piloncillo (Mexican brown sugar)
usually there's some alcohol in it too, though this recipe doesn't mention it

Simmer pears + 1 gallon of water for 5 minutes, then remove the pears and cut them in half.
Add taramind + sugarcane, cook for 30 mintues until taramind is soft and starting to fall apart.
Add the rest and cook until the sugar falls apart, 10 minutes.

spiced okra

1/4c vegetable oil
1tsp brown mustard seeds
1/2tsp urad dhal (black gram beans)
1/2" ginger, grated
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 large yellow onion, chopped
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 lb okra, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/4 tsp tumeric
salt
juice of half a lime
4 sprigs cilanto, chopped

Heat oil, add mustard seeds, wait 1 minute for them to pop, add urad dhal and fry, stirring constantly until golden, about another minute. Add ginger and garlic and cook another minute. Add onions and cook until soft, another 5 minutes of so. Then add tomatos and okra, and cook until okra begins to soften, 2-3 minutes. Add cayenne, tumeric and salt to taste. Add 1/2c water, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until the okra is soft and the liquid has thickened. Add lime and top with cilantro.

carrot halwa

4 tbsp butter
5 carrots, grated (about 3 cups)
1.5c half-and-half
1c sugar
10 cashews, chopped
2 tbsp raisins
1/2 tsp cardamom
18 blanched sliced almonds

Cook butter in nonstick pot on medium-low for 15 minutes until milk solids fall to the bottom and start to brown. Then pour off the melted better and throw away the milk solids.
Fry the carrots in 2 tbsp of this butter at high heat until they start to brown, about 5 min. Then add half-and-half and sugar, reduce heat to medium and cook until thick, 35-45 minutes.
Fry the cashews in the rest of the butter until pale golden, for 1 minute.
Mix it all and top with almonds.

spinach and ricotta gnocchi

2.5c ricotta
1 bunch spinach
2/3c flour
2c grated parmesan cheese
4 egg yolks
10 leaves mint, minced
salt, pepper and nutmeg
8 tbsp butter
10 small leaves sage

Drain ricotta in cheesecloth lined strainer in fridge overnight.
Bring water to boil and cook spinach until wilted, about 5 seconds. Drain, cool under cold water, squeeze out exra water, finely chop and then pound into paste with mortar and pestle.
Add flour, parmesan, egg yolks, ricotta, mint, nutmeg/salt/pepper to taste and mix well. Dust a surface with 1/3c flour and drop mixture on, 1 tbsp at a time. should make about 40 gnocchi.
Bring a pot of salted water to simmer. Cook sage and butter for 2-3 minutes on medium heat until leaves start to fry, then keep it warm on low heat.
Cook gnocchi in simmering water in two batches until they float, 3-5 minutes. Remove them and cook in the sage butter until heated through, 1-2 minutes.
sprinkle 1/2c more parmesan on top to serve.

turnips with yogurt and tomatoes

1.5c plain yogurt
6 turnips, peeled and cut into 1/2" cubes
3 tbsp peanut or canola oil
2 shallots, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tomatoes, chopped
1/4 tsp cayenne

Put yogurt + 1 tsp salt in bowl with turnips, cover with plastic wrap and marinate in fridge at least 3 hours.
Drain, and keep yogurt and turnips separate.
Fry shallots, 1-2 minutes, then turnips + cumin seeds, 10 minutes, then the rest until turnips are a little soft and the sauce has thickened, another 10 minutes. Salt to taste.

turnip fries

Cut 4 peeled turnips into 1/2" slices. Toss in a bowl with 1/4c olive oil, 1/4 parmesan, nutmeg, salt + pepper. Bake on oiled sheet at 450 for 18-20 minutes.

a random Mahfouz quote

This is from "Autumn Quail," and it's very simple, but I like it.

In spite of this scene, Isa decided not to give in to despair before making one final effort to defend the sole corner of consolation that had not yet been destroyed for him: the last word had to come from Salwa and no one else. Neither the strength of her character nor the depth of her love gave him great expectations, but he phoned her next day in the afternoon. "Salwa," he pleaded, "I've got to see you immediately."
Back came her answer like a slap in the face.
---------end of chapter------------

and for my next act....

2005-02-27T21:42:00.000Z

Possibly better than the article ahren linked to is this story about why you should always prepare a followup, even if you don't think you'll need it. Click here and skip past the first 22 minutes.

ageism hurts us all

2005-01-21T18:54:00.000Z

Censorship is an obvious example of this, but also our policy of prioritizing flu vaccines for the elderly (who are more vulnerable to flu) rather than kids in schools (where flu is mostly spread) ironically means more adult deaths from flu. From a recent article in Science:

If, for example, coverage of schoolchildren increased from the current 5% to 20%, they predict it would reduce more deaths in the over-65 population than increasing their vaccination coverage from the current 68% to 90% (see graph).

Of course, this could also be because of our preference for individual rather than communal solutions.

Susan Sontag on writing

2005-01-02T18:47:00.000Z

and on New York, written in 1996:

I had come to New York at the start of the 1960's, eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer: someone interested in "everything." I had always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis than in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent universities I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren't more people like me.

Her obituary is also good.

a better letter to the public editor

2005-01-02T00:17:00.000Z

This one, titled "Writing columns about press releases," actually got a "maybe we'll use this" response.

Dear Public Editor,
When writing science columns, what is your policy on when to use press releases rather than preprints or published papers? In particular, this Oct 19 article [Danger From Depleted Uranium Is Found Low in Pentagon Study] is about a Pentagon study on depleted uranium, and appears to be based entirely on the Pentagon press release, since according to the article, the paper hasn't yet even been submitted for publication.
While I'm not familiar with all the background here, I have some obvious concerns with this practice of reporting based on a press release rather than an actual study. It is impossible to check the claimed results, let alone get reactions from other scientists. For example, the above article contains the line "opponents of using depleted uranium, who have not yet seen the study, were skeptical of the findings." This is especially problematic if the NYT never follows up with a longer and more detailed article once the actual study emerges.
Also, it becomes more difficult to decide what to report on. The article about the Pentagon study mentions that it is "a five-year, $6 million study," but this is a terrible way of connoting credibility. If you had the actual results you could tell how statistically significant they were, and if the paper had been published or presented at a conference, you could tell if its methods or analysis had been usefully critiqued by other scientists. Making editorial decisions based on press releases alone risks reducing journalists to mouthpieces of competing PR departments.
Finally, this practice risks doing a disservice to science by encouraging sloppy science that bypasses the normal peer review mechanisms. As a scientist in a trendy new field (quantum computing), I often see press releases for weak and over-hyped results. We wouldn't do this if you didn't encourage us.
I understand that some science reporting might be time sensitive. And most science reporters might not be qualified to evaluate the actual scientific papers. But you still might wait until the paper is published (or at least posted on a website or preprint server) so that you can get opinions of qualified and independent scientists.
I don't have many more examples on hand about articles based on press releases, so if I'm mistaken about how common this is, then I'm sorry for the criticism. But if the practice is as frequent as it seems, then maybe a review of your science writing guidelines would be in order.
sincerely,
aram harrow

to the (public) editor

2005-01-02T00:10:00.000Z

In the hopes of having someone actually read what I write, I've been writing to public@nytimes.com instead of letters@nytimes.com. Unfortunately, the first thing I sent probably made me look like an idiot and a pedant at the same time.

From: me
To: public@nytimes.com
Date: Aug 17, 2004
Dear Mr. Okrent,
I know there are plenty of more important things out there, but do you think you could get the Times to stop misusing the term "exponential growth?" The common mistake is to use it to indicate rapidly increasing growth, as in "Charters are expected to grow exponentially under the new federal education law" from today's article Nation's Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal.
Actually, exponential growth (or decay) means growing (or shrinking) by a rate that is a percentage. So increasing the number of schools by a steady 1% per year is exponential growth, but a sudden one-shot increase in the number of charter schools is probably not.
If every occurence of "exponentially" were replaced by "rapidly" then in almost every case the desired meaning would be better communicated.
thanks,
aram harrow

And the reply,

Dear Aram Harrow,
Maybe I've overlooked something here but the dictionary definition seems appropriate for use this way in the article.
2 entries found for exponential. To select an entry, click on it.
exponential:exponential function
Main Entry: ex·po·nen·tial
Pronunciation: ek-sp&-'nen-ch&l
Function: adjective
1 : of or relating to an exponent
2 : involving a variable in an exponent <10x is an exponential expression>
3 : expressible or approximately expressible by an exponential function; especially : characterized by or being an extremely rapid increase (as in size or extent)
- ex·po·nen·tial·ly /-'nench-(&-)lE/ adverb
Sincerely,
Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times

Instead of explaining why the dictionary is wrong (and why it's possible for dictionaries to be wrong), I gave up.

Update: This Dilbert strip sums up the situation pretty well (thanks to Mark Dowling for sending it to me). But whatever, I'm still right.

putting the tyrants and the torturers on notice

2005-01-01T23:16:00.000Z

[consider this a sketch of a real post. sort of meta-wit.]

People like Thomas Friedman are always saying that invading Iraq has put "the enemies of freedom" "on notice" (it's hard to write about this stuff w/o scare quotes), so that the undemocratic regimes elsewhere in the Middle East would be looking over the shoulder, wondering who's next, etc. Somehow this nervousness should cause them to be more accomodating towards the pro-democracy/theocracy reformers that so far we've only paid them to suppress.

A post I'd like to write would satirically take one of Bush's freedom on the march speeches and apply it to Morocco's recent and historic creation of a truth commission to investigate human rights abuses from 1956-1999 by the pro-Western King Hassan.

The idea is that Morocco is an example of how human rights advance in Muslim nations without bloody invasions and occupations from the West. This "puts on notice" the Crusader types who run Abu Ghraib while they're cutting deals with Qualcomm to install CDMA in Iraq instead of GSM. Combine it with lines like "justice will eventually come to those who run the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib" and Bush's line "All nations are in this struggle together. And all must fight the murderers" and the piece should write itself! Which is good, because at this rate I probably won't write it.

why I don't want to live in Westchester

2005-01-01T23:09:00.000Z

From an article (interesting in its own right) about stay-at-home dads, titled "Housewives, try this for desperation":

Many stay-at-home fathers find that they are fish out of water, too.
"Conversations with men here [in Purchase, NY] revolve around banking, and the kinds of cars you drive, and the country club," Mr. Purinton said. "That gives me the heebie-jeebies. I'm socially ill at ease. I'd rather talk to the mothers about raising children."

Non-white racism (or Eurocentrism, part 2)

2005-01-01T22:58:00.000Z

In House of Flying Daggers, a Chinese kung-fu movie, the heroine is much paler than the male leads. (Yes, I realize I use "kung-fu" with about as much precision as my grandfather uses the word "chop suey.") In old Miyazaki anime movies, the men look Japanese (if they're not animals), but the women are so light-skinned that I thought they were white at first. In Ray's The Lonely Wife, it's the same story with skin color, but in India.

How is this so universal? Is it because of contact with Western racism or because rich women who stayed indoors more were lighter skinned than men who worked outside?

Eurocentric every last one of 'em

2005-01-01T22:22:00.000Z

FOX's tsunami coverage (which I watched w/o sound at a gym) spent several minutes with the story of a Czech supermodel who survived at a beach in Indonesia.

I didn't even know where to begin being upset. It's like the 7-layer burrito of Evil. Or the joke headline: "American tourist in India almost hit by falling body of man committing suicide."

Update: CNN did a feature on a different model, who I think dated a local boy. I know my blog should aim for wittiness and not inchoate rage, but these people are just such scum. It's so hard not to hate them.

Americans, not women.

2005-01-01T22:10:00.000Z

Engraved on the World War II memorial in Washington D.C.:

Women who stepped up were measured as citizens of the nation, not as women.... This was a people's war and everyone was in it.
Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby

love those republicans

2004-12-19T18:29:00.000Z

on the importance of male-male relations:

Viacom's Gail McKinnon sent an e-mail this week to offices in the U.S. House of Representatives regarding a job opening in Viacom's government relations department. The e-mail calls for a male, Republican to fill the open position and reads as follows: "Importance: High We need to hire a junior lobbyist/PAC manager. Attached is a job description. Salary is $85-90K. Must be a male with Republican stripes."

but of course not that kind!

Bush is interested in Allen's opinions because Allen is an elected Republican representative in the Alabama state legislature. He is Bush's base. Last week, Bush's base introduced a bill that would ban the use of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that "promote homosexuality". Allen does not want taxpayers' money to support "positive depictions of homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle". That's why Tennessee Williams and Alice Walker have got to go.

On a side note, the whole "educated tolerant liberals vs. red-state neanderthals" narrative (c'mon! Tennessee Williams! Hamlet! These people are against Shakespeare.) makes me uncomfortable, even though in this case there does seem to be some truth to it.

dear reader(s)

2004-12-19T18:16:00.000Z

To be honest, I have trouble thinking about this blog as me communicating to you, rather than me communicating to myself in a way where I don't mind others listening.

On that note, here is me writing about movies I've seen recently, so I won't forget what I thought about them a year from now.

About Baghdad - Great documentary made by this Iraqi-American who goes to Baghdad in June 2003 (the occupation's "honeymoon," though it might not have seemed so at the time) to ask Iraqis how they felt about the war, the end of Saddam, etc... He had wanted to go all over Iraq, but it wasn't safe to leave Baghdad. He said that today he wouldn't feel comfortable doing even that.
I mostly liked it because it felt like a conversation among Iraqis, so it wasn't narrowly directed at the American political scene like Fahrenheit 9/11, and it didn't have Westerners constantly speaking for Iraqis, which gets annoying as shit after awhile (kind of like "would someone please remember the children?"). Also the director is more honest about his biases than e.g. Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11, and gives plenty of air time to opinions that he clearly disagrees with. There's this awesome scene towards the end when he's arguing with a taxi driver: the director is saying that the U.S. is to blame for the Iran-Iraq war and for Saddam crushing the Shiite uprising in 1991, while the taxi driver says that Iraqis should take responsibility for their own leaders. Eventually the driver pulls over and turns off the meter in order to get more into the argument, which goes on for awhile.
outfoxed - Less good. Mostly stuff I had seen before and doesn't really address how much other TV news sucks, not to mention the NYT, NPR, etc... Random example: Maureen Dowd saying we need "positive profiling" (sorry, forgot to permalink) of air travellers, so that we stop wasting time on nonthreatening white grandmothers. Also, everything Thomas Friedman writes. There was a good excerpt of a Bill O'Reilly interview with an anti-war activist whose father died in the WTC. But it would've been better just to watch the interview w/o commentary.
While I'm writing, I'll post some quality O'Reilly links that the gay-book-banning article in my last post vaguely reminded me of.
- How (and why) the liberals want to take away Christmas. In particular, be sure to check out the oh-so-modest closing paragraph. Reminds me of Hochberger.
- "Even Jewish people like Christmas"
- to a Jewish caller, "[I]f you are really offended, you gotta go to Israel"
I guess I'm trying to say that FOX is pretty well covered by the internet, without the need for movies to profit from us being pissed off. Speaking of the latter, I get annoyed at movies that little attempt to engage the mainstream because of the profit motive in preaching to the converted.
The Lonely Wife by Satyagit Ray. Losing blog patience, but awesome blend of personal and political. Plus I like to identify with out-of-touch theorists/idealists. I need to see more by this guy.
he loves me, he loves me not (a la folie, pas du tout!), starring Audrey Tautou. Medium good, but I think I'd rather watch Mulholland Drive a third time.
women on the verge of a nervous breakdown by Almodovar. Decent, but my hopes were so high after All about my mother and Talk to her that I was a little disappointed.
Watermelon Man by Melvin van Peebles and starring Jeff Gerber. Solid movie about 1970's-style racism. ("This neighborhood was getting a little Jewish, anyway.") Next up is Sweet Sweetback's Badassssssssss Song.
Castles Made of Namm - words fail.
reassemblage - a little too much like a lecture for my tastes. update!: My dad says that Trin T. Minh-ha (the director) made another movie, Naked Spaces, which is mostly the anthropological African breast footage that she ~~mocks~~deconstructs in this one. In fact, Reassemblage might even be confusingly-editted outtakes from Naked Spaces, but for some reason Naked Spaces gets much less attention. Strange...
Sideways was excellent, but American Splendor may have been even better.

Also, I want to save this quote from "The Body as Property" by Rosalind Pollack Petchesky in Conceiving the New World Order (1995):

[examples of why "consensual contracts" are not totally plausible:] "the trade of sterilization for jobs in Brazil or Norplant for nonimprisonment in the United States" (p. 396, citing The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia Williams).
"The language of reproductive freedom is still burdened with 300 years of the dominant Euro-American model of dichotomization between self and community, body and society." (p. 404)

in the spirit of ahren's comment

2004-11-09T15:11:00.000Z

Here's my try at a consistent line of communication through history:

now

then

And even further back to the Declaration of Independence:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

we decide, you report

2004-10-22T13:52:00.000+01:00

From a Bush aide being interviewed by the NYT magazine:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

"you found me beautiful once"

2004-09-01T00:14:00.000+01:00

This is old news by now, but in June, Maureen Dowd wrote a reaction to Clinton's book that brought me back to the good old impeachment days. My letter to her is posted below, but I recently found a much better explanation of what I was trying to say.

Dear Maureen Dowd,
I fully agree with Clinton's rant. My career has little to do with politics, so I always assumed that those who choose political reporting must have far more interest in policy than I do. When columnists (sadly including you during the Lewinksy affair) focus on personality and style so completely as to ignore policy questions, I find it extremely upsetting.
What's your opinion about American in-kind food donations to the UNWFP, and how we use them to push GM crops on unwilling African nations? How appropriate was Clinton's response to the currency crises in SE Asia? How many died in Afghanistan when we interrupted food aid there?
Any one of these questions should be millions of times (in terms of lives affected) as important as Clinton's disgusting abuse of power with Lewinsky. Even if he killed and ate her, they would be millions of times as important, though I'm not sure the press would agree with me here.
I realize that you're not the only one responsible for this, and appreciate how you've changed somewhat during the Bush presidency. Nevertheless, Clinton is completely right that he deserves more scrutiny on Bosnia than on Lewinsky.
sincerely,
aram harrow

announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July

2004-08-10T06:00:00.000+01:00

So is anyone really surprised that the Bush administration would pressure Pakistan to announce the capture of al-Qaeda "high value targets" during the Democrats' convention? Or that the media would complacently shift their attention to the new headline? Or that even the attention they gave the convention would ignore all the substantive issues discussed there?

In fact, this NYT oped mentions all the other news we've been missing. But I think the real stories last week, over which governments deserve much more political heat than over Iraq, are financial:

The World Bank considered a proposal to reform and ultimately eliminate its funding for oil and gas development. The NYT, generally pro-globalization, endorsed the proposal, but on Aug 2 the Bank rejected the plan. However, they're reconsidering some kind of watered down version in a few weeks, so the short-term issue is not yet settled.
For a broader perspective, this recent Foreign Affairs article explains why being rich in natural resources can make a country poorer. (Email me if you don't have lexis-nexis and want the full text.)
The WTO talks in Geneva came up with an agreement to agree on opening agricultural markets, mainly by reducing subsidies from rich countries. Though this is widely seen as a good idea, especially for the poor countries that have long been demanding it, it's not clear how much will actually be implemented any time soon. Again an issue that's probably far more consequential than the Iraq war, but it continues to get zero attention from the public. Though there is now a blog devoted to the subject.

feces are people too

2004-08-10T02:30:00.000+01:00

NEWSWEEK reports that George W. Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida on June 17, stated: "We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all of the rights and God-given blessings of any other human being." Bush repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word 'feces" when he meant to say "fetus."

decades apart

2004-08-06T01:49:00.000+01:00

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author talks about how he likes to read to his 11-year old son, Chris, in a way that made me somewhat look forward to having kids myself.

I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago... when Chautauquas were more popular. Unless you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way. (p. 46-47)

That was written in 1974. The 1980's brought us, among other things,

Then the narrator talks about the crisp autumn morning air and wanting to share it with those around him.

I'm afraid these other characters will sleep all day if I let them. The sky outside is sparkling and clear, it's a shame to waste it like this.
I go over finally and give Chris a shake. HIs eyes pop open, then he sits bolt upright uncomprehending.
"Shower time," I say.
I go outside. The air is invigorating. In fact--Christ!--it is cold out. I pound on the Sutherlands' door. (p. 48)

I'm sure you know the relevant Calvin and Hobbes strips, but because of copyright laws, all I could find on the web about character building camping trips was this site. This site is better, but less relevant.

Finally, I went to Shaolin Soccer with two physicists, so naturally the conversation turned to some recent heated arguments over the anthropic principle. (Yes, these things are what we get excited about.)

Anyway, I found it a funny coincidence that as soon as I got home and picked up Zen, the page after I had left off contained this passage:

At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson's law that "The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him to never run out of hypotheses. ... It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have doubts about the humor or benefits of it.
If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. That law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!
...[If] the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested..., then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge. (p. 115)

go see these movies

2004-08-04T01:58:00.000+01:00

Shaolin Soccer:

Just from the title you can get an idea of how amazing this movie is. It evokes all that is good in Jackie Chan, Tunak, Mortal Kombat, Cool Runnings and middle-school anime. This may sound like faint praise, but the movie is seriously amazing.

Crimson Gold:

The underdog doesn't do quite as well in this movie. If only he knew some kung-fu. Rather than talk about the movie (which showed the ugliness of life as beautifully as anything I've seen) I just want to mention two things about the Q&A session with the director afterwards. (It was directed by Jafar Panahi, who also did The White Balloon, and written by Abbas Kiarostami.)

My respects to the Iranian censorship board

One of the reasons this movie was banned in Iran was the following scene.

Guest: Mind if I smoke?
Host: Go ahead.
Guest: Want a cigarette?
Host: What kind do you have?
Guest: 57's
Host: Oh, those are too strong for me.
Guest: They're too strong for me too.

Doesn't seem too bad, does it? Apparently, since 1957 is the year of the revolution in Iran, this scene was deemed counterrevolutionary. Whatever else you might think about the censors in Iran, at least they're on top of their symbolism. I certainly wouldn't have caught that.

The postmodern condition

Skip this part if you don't like hearing about the plot, though everything I write will be obvious in the first 10 minutes.

The movie is framed by a failed robbery attempt by the protagonist, a pizza deliveryman named Hussein. One way to interpret the entire rest of the movie is as expressing the humiliations and class pressures that lead Hussein to this. During the Q&A, one guy asks the director "why, in your opinion, does Hussein attempt the robbery?"

There's this collective groan from the audience, and in the dark a collective roll of the eyes, as we feel sympathy for the director having to explain through a translator that, unlike Hollywood directors, he doesn't want to force any one interpretation on the movie, but prefers to leave the viewer free to blah blah blah... Ok, maybe it's just me and I'm projecting, but I really think the whole audience had so internalized the postmodern project that what the director said was just part of a no longer questioned canon.

Except that it was obvious why Hussein tried the robbery! The whole movie was classic social realism! When the rich guy invites Hussein to his table (where he later asks if he can smoke), Hussein first says "I'm too dirty for your table" and goes upstairs to wash and shave. Freedom of interpretation, my ass.

What's the moral of the story? Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer? The NYT public editor says that the word "postmodern" appears in the NYT in an average of four article a week. I think it says something about what we take for granted when of course we expect directors to refuse to admit a dominant interpretation of their movie.

Of course, this only holds among the subset of the population that doesn't know whether to laugh or cry at the phrase "they hate us because of our freedom."

why are they such meanies??

2004-07-29T07:44:00.000+01:00

Why are emigres from places like Cuba or Vietnam so often the most strongly in favor of hardline sanctions? You know, the kind that make the people there miserable without doing anything to improve human rights. Either I'm totally confused about how sanctions work, or people who come to the U.S. from places with shitty governments tend to go off the deep end, like Ayn Rand did.

In any case, at least this might be starting to change for Cuban-Americans, since the ones who have family members in Cuba care a little more about conditions there.

survival of the theorists

2004-07-27T12:34:00.000+01:00

There are probably many different morals to this story, but I'll take it as endorsement for my non-experimental kind of physics.

May 21, 1946 – Canadian physicist Louis Slotin manually assembled a critical mass of plutonium while demonstrating his technique to visiting scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The device consisted of two half-spheres of beryllium-covered plutonium, which can be moved together slowly to measure the criticality. Normally the device would be operated by machinery, but Slotin distrusted the devices and manually operated it by holding the upper sphere with his thumb inserted in a hole in the top like a bowling ball. In most experiments, a number of washers would be arranged to prevent the two hemispheres from falling together completely, but he had removed them. In order to slowly bring the two pieces together, he rested one edge on the lower sphere and rotated a slot screwdriver between the other edge to control the separation. At one point, the screwdriver slipped and the assembly went critical while he was still holding onto it. None of the seven observers received a lethal dose, but Slotin died on the 30th from massive radiation poisoning, with an estimated dose of 1000 rad, or 10 gray (Gy). This was dramatized in the movie Fat Man and Little Boy, except that the movie placed the event before the Trinity test [1]—in reality, a device that Slotin had helped to assemble.[2]

fly-over states

2004-07-27T12:11:00.000+01:00

I drove to Wyoming recently with my family.

Grand Teton was okay, I guess. Anyway, here are some random notes from along the way.

please folks!
Found posted on the door of an opera house in a small Minnesota town:

The Fairmont Opera House would like to remain gun-free, so please: NO GUNS ALLOWED.

freedom tickling
In several gas stations, one of the choices on the condom dispensers was:

~~French~~ freedom tickler - Tickle her fancy with the real thing! It's the patriotic thing to do.

blood for oil
A blood drive in Minnesota offered gas cards to those who participated.

Greek yogurt

2004-06-29T06:09:00.000+01:00

The other night I had fresh blackberries, cubed mango, and, most importantly, thick slightly-lemony Greek yogurt. I think I'm in love...

rising tide my ass

2004-06-24T23:58:00.000+01:00

my fraternity in the news

2004-06-22T22:32:00.000+01:00

I think I'd rather hear about olive races.

hand-packed pint

2004-06-21T17:12:00.000+01:00

Along the lines of "small, medium, large" being replaced by "large, super-size and Gigantor," I recently went to a Friendly's in the Long Island town of Lake Success for ice cream. Having entered the restaurant so full from dinner that breathing was difficult, I was looking for size along the lines of "wafer-thin". Instead, the smallest cone size was "big," followed by "biggest," a description apparently only intended metaphorically, since the "hand-packed pint" was a yet larger option.

On a vaguely related we're-doomed-and-probably-deserve-it note, this NYT article describes how hybrid cars have become hip in part because they involve not changing consumption patterns, but if anything more consumption: spending more money on a high-tech status symbol. This explains why there's no contradiction when a young well-off friend of a friend bought a Prius after his last three cars were SUVs. (Not that this isn't positive; it's just a disappointingly small change in world-view.) Continuing the anecdotal free association, drug companies spend lots of money convincing us that cheap Canadian drugs are somehow unsafe, but only our own good sense tells us not to waste our money.

don't cry for me, east campus

2004-06-17T20:56:00.000+01:00

This was sent to reuse-sell recently, by someone who suddenly realized she had more shoes than she needed. Is it just a male thing to find it absurd to own this many?

spring, summer, fall, winter, ... and spring

2004-06-16T01:00:00.000+01:00

If you don't like knowing the plots of movies in advance, then a) you should go see this movie, preferably on a big screen, and b) don't read any more. Otherwise, here are some of my thoughts.

restraint

The movie promoted the idea of self-restraint, both literally and figuratively, as a way of preventing violence and suffering. We should deny our anger, lust, desire for possession and so on; monks even tie rocks around themselves to do penance when their internal restraints aren't enough. With this such a strong theme, it was disappointing that the filmmakers didn't always show the same restraint they demanded of their characters. For example, the wife didn't need to be killed to expose the evils of possession; it would have been enough for her simply to have ran off and left the husband heartbroken. And the flashbacks to the animals with rocks tied around their bodies made me think of disaster pornography [also].

possession and appropriation

The movie is visually so stunning that I started daydreaming about how cool it would be to have a video projector in my apartment. Irony aside, it's funny how elements of Buddhism and "Eastern religions" are adapted to or appropriated by Western consumer culture. For example, Lancôme sells a small container of "Hydra Zen cream" (described as an "Advanced destressing moisturizing cream") for about $40. New York City seems to me a good place to find contradictions like expensive yoga classes attended by people financially locked into stressful livestyles. In Saturday's NYT Review of Books there was a piece by Lucinda Williams on Bob Dylan next to an article by David Frum on Walter Russell Mead. Trying to imagine the reader who would appreciate both articles led me immediately to the stereotype of a rich conservative (New Yorker) who grew up listening to Dylan.

violence is natural

since our innate human urges inevitably lead us towards it and because children start off violent unless they're taught otherwise. This is both negative, since it means we'll never abolish violence, and positive, since placing violence within a larger cycle of life (more snakes are born by summertime) seems to lessen its evil. This subverts the seemingly anti-violent message of the movie (and of Buddhism); even if we are always struggling against violence, we shouldn't ever expect total victory. For example, if every life were sacred, the old monk could have stopped the boy in Spring from tying rocks to the three animals, but he wanted to teach the boy a lesson (which didn't even stop him from killing again). This makes me suspect that the ultimate goal is not so much to end suffering, but to achieve some sort of enlightenment, which brings me to the next point:

learning as fetish

Korean characters are written beautifully, but not subtitled. The old monk carefully practices calligraphy, but writes with water on wood, so the words fade as soon as they're written. A long scene revolves around carving letters out of wood, but we never get a complete shot of them, so that even reading Korean wouldn't help us learn what they mean. It seems that learning, study and literacy have value beyond the meaning of the texts being read.

This is of course bigger than Buddhism. For example, literacy often has class implications. L. said there was one village in Sudan where after the government cut funding for schools people hired an illiterate man to teach, since they had a not-quite-understood notion that there was a connection between sitting in a classroom every day for a long time and getting a government job with good pay and status.

The idea of fetishized learning could also apply to the way that Western audiences receive the movie as a whole; we feel we should learn or appreciate or take away something from it more profound than we'd get from, say, Bruce Almighty. This connects to the particularly American drive for self-improvement [also]. Not that this drive is a bad one; it's just interesting to see what brings it out.

More movie reviews

Soon after I saw Evil Dead, the Army of Darkness predecessor in which a woman is raped by a tree before she turns into a flesh-eating zombie. I'm not sure what more to write about the contrast.

Balancing the gross-out with the political, I next saw Super Size Me, the recent documentary about a guy who eats nothing but McDonald's for a month. It was definitely successful at making me care about the importance of having healthy choices in school cafeterias (my high school gave Coke a monopoly of 20oz pop machines in the cafeteria in exchange for the rather lame ProQuest for the library), and in general validating my trend towards healthy, organic, home-cooked, vegetarian eating. (Recently I realized how thoroughly I had become part of this demographic when I caught myself getting excited at finding organic lactose-free milk in the grocery store.) As a movie, though, it had some problems. The central conflict seemed to be about the filmmaker's deteriorating health, but after the scene where the doctor talked about "pickling his liver" and he seemed on the verge of sudden death, the days started flying by without any more incidents. The style was watered down Michael Moore, of which the high point was probably visiting the middle school cafeterias where he asked school officials what they were doing to promote healthy eating, but it was mostly toned down a lot. For example, the food industry lobbyist never got challenged when he said that they marketed responsibly; obviously he didn't come across as credible, but we bought our tickets to see public humiliation! The statistics came by a little fast, and didn't have much context. Come to think of it, most of the movie didn't have much context: why are people exercising so little? and is the non-McDonald's portion of the American diet that much better? The stomach-stapling scene was reminiscent of Requiem for a Dream, a comparison which was a jarring reminder of how much more powerful movies (or should I say 'cinema'?) can be. The music (Beethoven? I can't remember.) during the scene suggested A Clockwork Orange, again to the current movie's profound disadvantage. I don't mean to deter people from seeing this movie; just think of it as a good student film and you won't be disappointed.

Natural Born Killers: The only thing I wanted to mention was Mrs. Marks' reaction. She came in halfway through and read her newspaper the whole time. As soon as the credits rolled she asked "Is that damn thing over yet?" and then launched into a tirade about how much she hated it, mostly because of violence but including the line "and I can't stand that damn language!"

The Abyss: Again I'm going to ruin the plot, if you care about these things. The underwater shots were pretty, but as with many movies involving aliens, I felt it suffered from a lack of imagination on a grand scale. Would aliens really care if we kill each other, or fight wars or movingly reconcile with our divorced spouses? The same complaints have been made about religion: wouldn't an all-powerful deity have more to worry about than our sexual indiscretions? Even a nuclear war would probably leave this planet better off for everything non-human; Chernobyl has been great for wildlife since so much land is now considered too dangerous for humans to enter. The only plausible sci-fi account of alien motivations that I've found was in Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves.

oversocialization

2004-06-10T21:25:00.000+01:00

What's your score?

talk with L.

2004-06-05T19:43:00.000+01:00

I just had lunch with L., a Sudanese guy I met doing a recent fundraiser. Before I forget what he said, I'm going to blog it.

Issues with food aid

He worked with an indigenous aid group called IFRA (International Famine Relief Assoc.) or something. Because of the civil war, parents sent their kids to Khartoum, imagining it to be big village, but really the kids ended up in the slums. First L's aunt gave them ice cream, then his dad gave them medical care, then various family members adopted them, then they started doing organized relief work.

The biggest thing that he said backfired was trying to change the social order in villages by giving food to everybody, or to only women or otherwise marginalized people. He said this encouraged dependency, by disrupting their social structures, and he would later see the people begging in Khartoum. Instead, he said it was best to give the food to the headman or chief, who'd then distribute it as he saw fit, as counter-intuitive as it seemed.

As for international organizations, he said the WFP was the "least bad" because they did their research well. He said GOAL (from Ireland) and MSF were good too.

Why Sudan is fucked

The US supported Nimeiri for decades as a corrupt Cold War proxy and then the IMF used the debt he incurred as leverage to force SAPs on the country. There were some interesting consequences of this, like school fees forcing kids out of public schools into Muslim schools.

Right now, he said the biggest thing that would make a difference is access to markets, of which US/EU agricultural subsidies were the most important barrier. He said this was more important even than debt relief. There was an article in May/June '04 issue of Foreign Affairs by the president of Tanzania about the failed WTO talks at Cancun with pretty similar conclusions.

As for Western Sudan, the problems were largely caused by extended and severe drought, the doubling of the population over a short period and the availability of lots of cheap weapons left over from the Chad-Libya conflict in the 1980's. Of course, also the economic problems of the entire country were a factor, as well as the government marginalizing the region economically and politically, disrupting traditional forms of dispute resolution, exploiting ethnic tensions, and finally arming the Janjaweed and giving their attacks the green light.

Also, the JEM, one of the main rebel groups in Darfur, is the remnant of the hated NIF that was forced out of power a few years ago. Who knew? (Not me.) Things are kind of complicated there.

US intervention

It's a two-edged sword. You can kind of guess this part. The culture, values, products, etc. have many appealing things about them, but it's all the supporting illegitimate governments that people aren't so crazy about. Actually American (or rather modern capitalist) culture is sometimes a little tough too, because it's changing lifestyles so quickly that people from different generations don't quite understand each other.

Only the Rich Pay Taxes!

NEW UPDATED FIGURES: Top 20% Pay 80% of Taxes

New York Times Buries, But Reports, Truth on Taxes
	CBO report misheadlined by New York Times still reveals truth...tscript, • CBO Report: Effective Federal Tax Rates Under Current Law, 2001 to 2014 • Posted Forever: Top 50% of Wage Earners Pay 96.03% of Income Taxes • Excel file: IRS Income Stats • Myth Buster: Democrats Get More Campaign Cash from "Rich"