The Wingnut Musings

We don't believe in IQ, and incidentally, ours is higher than yours

2012-01-30T14:04:00.006-07:00

I watched the first couple of episodes of the fifth season Californication, where the idealized alter ego of the series creator basically only has to talk to a woman to have her try to have sex with him. To my surprise, after four seasons, this show set in Los Angeles finally featured one Latin American character. Sure, it was just the bumbling maid of the rich movie producer, and she got maybe one line and three seconds of screen time, but hey, it's a start! I could not help but think how this all relates to the recent work of Charles Murray and how living inside the insulated and incestuous elite bubble gives the ruling class a very distorted view of various issues and problems. That also reminded me of another old essay by Halla-aho that years ago predicted the amazing result that is now being touted as the definitive scientific proof of the liberal intellectual superiority: that the very poorest people at the bottom rungs of society tend to develop more negative attitudes towards the minorities they encounter in their daily lives and surroundings than, say, the privileged university professors who get to meet visiting researchers and other immigrants of a much higher caliber in their faculty lounges and ritzy wine bars that provide soft cushions that let them be all open-minded and tolerant and to take risks.

Trendoids, meet the trend setters

2012-01-30T13:22:00.002-07:00

Pretty much the same way that I heartily support mass immigration just to get to watch white liberals realize they have become an impotent permaminority while I sit high up on the perch and laugh, I can't say that I find Islamization to be an entirely negative thing. Speaking of Jussi Halla-aho, in one of his old essays he predicted that we will soon see the return of outright blasphemy laws in Europe after the long-fought secularism, the sacred principle that nothing is sacred, and the right to criticize religion, that is, "Christianity". The news article "London School of Economics brings back blasphemy" now informs us that this is becoming reality in Britain. Even more humorously, the far left groups are reported to support this, nicely revealing how hollow their "above us only sky" and "no Gods but Bob Avakian" defiant pose ever was to begin with. I am also delighted to see that Muslims are learning to use the victim rhetoric and crimestop words to get the white guilt liberals to work for their non-liberal goals. This should be interesting. And these contradictions are not yet anywhere in the heights that they should reach in about a decade or so, especially once we start intentionally heightening them a little. In the end, this is not about who is right, but who is left, and who has the requisite numbers on their side and the will to use them.

Push it, flyboy

2012-01-30T12:25:00.003-07:00

To continue the previous post a bit, my hat (if not my head) really goes off to anybody who can personally witness a public execution and still maintain a positive attitude towards postmodernism. It is no wonder that this ideology only appeared once the world had become safe and clean enough. Or if you can't get to a public execution, the same with a direct tornado hit. (Dammit, where the hell is that poem I once read about a postmodernist who finally found herself outside the text when she was caught in a tornado?) Meanwhile in my glacial guest to improve as a writer and one day become a worthy successor to both Chesterton and Wallace, and meanwhile to be able to better converse with my imaginary hip black friend J-Dog, I tried to read "Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos" to better understand and immerse myself to the history of the hip hop culture, but this collection of essays from The Village Voice basically required that you already knew who all these people are, and I am probably just too white for this (imagine I said that in Danny Glover's voice) and should rewatch some Spike Lee movies.

Oversight

2012-01-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

When I was compiling the book and browsing my blog archives for good material, I did not realize that Blogger is broken so that each monthly archive only shows half of that month's posts. So I probably missed a whole bunch of stuff, but then when I realized what was going on, I changed my blog archives to run on a weekly basis and went through most of them, managing to hit my pickaxe to a couple of gems that I had already forgotten. However, what right now, at this exact moment, annoys me the most that even though I actually thought to do so, I then simply forgot to combine my old posts "Infinite Fest" and "A blow-by-blow account followed by a gin and tonic at the Embassy" into a humorous speculation about the article that the late great David Foster Wallace might have written after personally witnessing a public execution in Saudi Arabia. I even had the freaking greatest title for it, "Consider the Chopster", with the text body oscillating between the abstract morality of the death penalty to the vivid depictions of its actual reality under the hot desert sun. Ah well, into the sequel it goes, unless I then forget it again. (Reforget?) Perhaps I will one day even get to write that actual article myself, should any magazine offer to pay me a "gonzo" junket.

That's so radical, dude

2012-01-30T11:50:00.003-07:00

The trailer for "God Bless America", another "edgy" and "dark satire", instead provides a clear view into the liberal psyche. But what it unintentionally pointed out is how the Phelps family really is far more "transgressive" than any washed-up liberal artist could ever dream of becoming. Merely by existing, they reveal how hollow the liberal pose of being "edgy" really is, to say nothing of their pose of being against the death penalty, since it is painfully obvious that liberals only oppose executing their fellow travellers and believe that everyone who disagrees with them "deserves to die". The Phelps family also resembles Ann Coulter and Jussi Halla-aho in one important aspect, in how liberals simply can't help but constantly scream about them. I think both Ann and Jussi each have now about three rebuttal books written about them by angry leftists without any self-awareness about how their screeds of how meaningless and insignificant Ann and Jussi are automatically only refute themselves. Of course, the left keeps the Phelps family in the limelight as a ridiculous enemy so that they don't have to acknowledge or address any actual problems. The least of which is not the fact that 99% of the Muslims in the world hold a view of gays essentially identical to that of Fred Phelps, they just happen to live in countries where the state already enforces their view so they don't have to stage any protests.

It was a musing

2012-01-30T07:16:00.002-07:00

Somebody already wrote the first five-star review for my book on Amazon, presumably for the instant Kindle version, since I don't think the paperback versions have been delivered yet. That is a nice way to start this new week on a Monday morning. Of course, that will certainly change the second that the first ponytailed lamprey in Birkenstocks gets the hold of this book. You just can't laugh at a downwardly mobile narcissist whose entire reality is collapsing around him, and expect to get to walk away from it without at least a couple of lashes. But like Richard Feynman said, there is plenty of room at the bottom, and all the more so in this age when you can pack gigabytes into a device smaller than your fingernail.

Armed and Dangerous: "Junk Science Double Fail"
Chesterton and Friends: "A Chesterton Buffet"
Coffee Theory: "The Upside of Envy"
Comics With Problems: "Madonna's AIDS Awareness Comic" (funny how back then it was still possible to say that gay men comprise the majority of AIDS cases... okay, so, libs, when will that heterosexual AIDS epidemic that you warned us about start ravaging through the West?)
Daily Speculations: "Will We Stop Wearing Shoes?"
I Want a New Left: "Multiculturalism: The Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost" (well, I know I am looking forward to the day that the Pharyngula-style smarmy Marxist atheists really collide with the Muslims, and all the hilarity that will ensue)
Jeff DeChambeau: "Western Doesn't Get It"
Destroy All Software: "Wat"
Raph Koster: "Awesome Paper on Games Math"
Mercy of Bemoaned: "Crazy People Are the Majority"
P.J. O'Rourke: "They Hate Poor People" (of course, modern liberalism has zero content outside signaling that you are a member of the Outer Party instead of a Prole, even if your social justice and puppetry double major did not make you wealthy enough to avoid being mistaken for some filthy Prole)
Ribbonfarm: "Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures"
Si Tacuisses, Philosophus Mansisses: "Four Thoughts About Digital Content"

The question is, will he try it again?

2012-01-29T16:59:00.002-07:00

The cartoon "Net worth" at Math Fail nicely illustrates another reason why that innumerate outrage about the disproportionate net worth distribution between the five quintiles was so silly. Those calculations ignore by far the largest financial asset that the average person holds... no, not his house, but his job. If Alice has $1 in assets but a job that pays her $100,000 year, whereas Bob has $100,000 in stock market assets but no job prospects, it would be very strange to claim that Bob is massively wealthier than Alice, let alone draw a pie chart with Bob's share drawn 100,000 times as large as that of Alice to illustrate this totes unfair distribution of wealth. Similarly, I remember when I first saw the video of Ashley Revell, the young guy who "bet his whole life" in a single spin of roulette in April 2004, how obvious it was that by any meaningful measure of "his whole life", the size of his bet was not even one tenth of his true net worth. Had the ball landed on black, he would have continued in his job and living with his wife just like before, so it's a bit weird to say that his "entire destiny hung on one spin", as if he were playing Russian roulette with the loss effectively ending his life as he knows it. Had he lost, how many people on Earth would have still traded lives with him in a heartbeat?

Windows to the future

2012-01-29T14:04:00.002-07:00

The guys who rent one of our unused parking spots came up to pay the rent for the next couple of months, and their cash payment had one of those new plastic hundred-dollar bills that feels really weird to hold in your hand and to think of as cash. Combined with those chips in credit cards and debit cards that I read somewhere that no criminal has so far been able to successfully duplicate, and the security cameras becoming ever cheaper and more ubiquitous and these days having enough resolution so that the criminal actually looks like himself instead of some unrecognizable splotch that could just as well be you or me, it just has to be way harder to be an ordinary decent criminal than this profession was a mere couple of decades ago. But up here in the future that is very different from what science fiction predicted (science fiction has always explored all possible futures, except the one that actually happens), I had to laugh for that Newt Gingrich guy who somebody once wrote spent his college years smoking weed and watching The Jetsons, and now wants America to build a base on that rock that orbits us with nothing on it. Space travel is such a boomer dream, although, of course, not even close to being the most socially destructive of their fantasies.

Thermidor

2012-01-27T17:49:00.002-07:00

A snowstorm filled the air with thick wet white crap for roughly three hours around the noon today, but then the late afternoon sun came out and all the snow that had fallen mystically vanished before I had to start the commute. I am still keeping my fingers crossed that this balmy weather of a snow-free January will continue well into the February and beyond, even if this unnatural anomaly causes unemployment and therefore an economic loss because we don't need to plow and salt the roads, or import more heating oil to keep the city warm. Perhaps the city of Toronto should start fighting its burgeoning unemployment (I could think of some ideas) by hiring a bunch of people to spread artificial snow and ice on the roads, so that the snow plow drivers could enjoy full employment and that way stimulate the economy with their salaries. Another bylaw could require that people need to keep their windows open so that they would have to keep their apartment heaters turned higher up, producing more employment for the energy industry. Meanwhile, I am also doing my small part in stimulating the minds, if not the economy.

William Briggs: "Low IQ & Liberal Beliefs Linked To Poor Research?"
Captain Capitalism: "God, Please Make It Stop" (in the same vein, see also "The Ignorant, The Arrogant and The Just Plain Stupid")
Futility Closet: "Ranks and Files" (that old matrix chestnut is funny how at least for me, it oscillates between completely obvious and hey-wait-a-minute...)
The Guardian: "Alain de Botton Reveals Plans for 'Temple to Atheism' In Heart of London" (since that one is located in London, if actually built, I give it an over-under of... say, fifteen years to turn into a mosque)
Law and the Multiverse: "Insider Trading" (I keep wondering why these guys still haven't compiled their deep analysis in a book form)
Daniel Lemire: "Citogenesis In Science And The Importance of Real Problems"
Marginal Revolution: "How Deserving Are The Poor?"
Silicon Valley Redneck: "Grade Inflation"
Still I Am One: "The Rule of the Last Inch"

Crumpled grumbles

2012-01-27T12:14:00.002-07:00

While going downstairs to pick up the mail, which there again wasn't any, like there never is on Friday because of some weird time warp they ought to send Stephen Hawking to study, I picked up the copy of the local free newspaper. Or, what passes as one around here, with a total of three pages of actual articles and then nothing but ads. It also had a reader's letters column, with one letter in it. It was a response to somebody who wanted to build more cell phone towers, and started by saying that the people who recently gathered to voice their opposition of a new cell phone tower should not be called mindless NIMBY's, since they support the existence of cell phone towers, just not in their own backyards. You just can't make this stuff up. This letter then explained that the health risks of cell phones are completely unknown and need at least 70 years of scientific studies, and then concluded by telling people to get more "educated", the surefire sign that the writer is a liberal trendoid. Sitting there in the lobby armchair, waiting for the mailman to finish distributing the mail to the mailboxes, I gazed up to the ceiling and wondered how in any sane society I am expected to look up to these people as my intellectual guiding lights whose ideas I am just too dumb and ignorant to understand.

Sputtering towards the future

2012-01-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

I wrote the book entirely with Google Docs, since I subscribe to the idea that all documents and computations need to move to the cloud. As much as I like this system, it still has a couple of weird bugs that just don't seem to ever get fixed, similar to the way how GMail simply could not produce a proper zip file from attached text files for a month, no matter how much the users pleaded Google in the support forums to fix this idiotic bug. I am sure that Docs internally stores the document in some neat trie structure that, for example, allows me to see in real time that my book contains the letter "e" a total of 44035 times, but the conversions to other formats just honestly don't work jack shit. Conversion to PDF gives me nothing but a server error; to Word Document, messed up line spacings; to RTF, giant unexplained bloat so that the resulting file is over ten megabytes even though in other formats, it should be less than one megabyte. I can only surmise that the folks at Google Docs really don't eat their own dogfood, since it's difficult to see how bugs of this magnitude could not be in front of the queue to get fixed before any new features are added.

Spite and polish

2012-01-27T10:38:00.004-07:00

In the long task of compiling and editing my book, I realized that I sure do make plenty of both outright typos and grammatical errors. Of course, I never claimed to be a professional wordsmith or a poet. Another big problem of mine is that since editing is now so easy compared to the clunky old typewriter age, I often rush to edit some part of the sentence without correctly editing some other part of the sentence that depends on the first part. These changes also often leave articles and prepositions as residual lying around in places where they are not supposed to be. On the other hand, it was nice to get to rewrite many posts the way that I would have written them, had known what the l'esprit de l'escalier was going to be as the future unfolded. When I first read the book version of Stuff White People Like, I thought it odd that the guy, given such a huge chance, didn't add or rewrite anything, but essentially copypasted his blog posts directly into the book. Perhaps that is how he got the book out in the first place, since I would probably still be editing and rewriting it based on all the feedback and comments that there must be thousands for each post.

Word made paper

2012-01-27T10:07:00.001-07:00

About that big announcement that I promised earlier: inspired by a whole bunch of other ctrl-alt-right cranks on my reading list who have already come up with books or are about to do so, and seeing how trivially easy and quick it is to publish a book on CreateSpace, a great service that I now heartily recommend to anybody with dreams of authorship, for the past two months I have been diligently (heh, first mistyped that as "digilently", an obviologism that I now claim) compiling the good ideas and zingers from the archives of this blog into a proper book form. And now I have done enough digging, editing, mixing and other tinkering that it is time to let out The Wingnut Musings and its 300 pages jam-packed with the good stuff you come to this blog for. Available at CreateSpace, Amazon paperback (this might take a few more days to properly set up), and Kindle. Be the first one in your social circle to quote the zingers from this hot bucket of thought fuel that is "dense" in more ways than one. A fun gift for liberal friends who will find their mindless beliefs challenged and disassembled on nearly every page, and educational and entertaining reading for all fine upstanding young men to counter the leftist brainwashing that they have been subjected to their whole short lives.

Inch time foot link

2012-01-27T07:16:00.000-07:00

Yet another week is almost done, and by the time it takes me to sip down the piping hot cup of morning coffee, I can copypaste the links that are waiting in the stack. And should everything go as planned, I can finally later today make that announcement about this blog that I have been promising for a while.

Ben's Blog: "Don't Bother With a Half-Measure"
Rick Brookstaber: "The Twilight of the Leisure Class"
Charlie's Diary: "Death: A Pantomime"
Clayton Cramer: "We Know Where You Live" (as a fun and educational gedankenexperiment, imagine how very different the liberal reaction to this incident would have been, had it been some anti-abortion activist taping a feminist meeting and then making the same threat)
Creative Review: "How Lo Can You Go?" (good to see how the Internet eliminates yet another overpaid and parasitic middleman)
Daughter Number Three: "WHY UPPERCASE TYPE IS HARD TO READ"
The Endeavour: "Twenty Weeks Down to Twenty Minutes"
Hidden Leaves: "Double Bubble"
Hildegarde: "The Rise of... Wait, I Am Not Sure Yet"
Mr. Manley: "Wanting to Smoke, and Not Smoking"
Samson's Jawbone: "Clash of Worldviews"
South Bend Seven: "This Does Not Make Me Want To Buy Your Orange Juice"

The ordys

2012-01-26T22:02:00.001-07:00

Reading about the "bubble" as identified by Charles Murray (come on, liberals, tell us again what an evil man he is just for talking about IQ differences, which is totes evil, except when you do it) and not confusing it with the "filter bubble" which is somewhat related but still distinct phenomenon taking place online instead of in the physical space, I remembered this one really great article, must have been back when I was in the high school, in the monthly supplement of Helsingin Sanomat. That article was, what I remember of it, very similar in spirit to what Murray now writes about the bubble, the reporter examining the values and lifestyles of the massive but invisible group of average Finns to correct the misconceptions that his urban friends have about them from inside their small enclosure where nobody would ever buy a Finnhits compilation album or take a vacation in Tenerife. For example, the average Finn does not spend any time in bars, because he thinks that even a glass of water costs there ten marks. I tried to google that article but without success, which is a shame, because based on what I remember, it really was a pretty excellent magazine article.

We are your overlords

2012-01-26T21:17:00.001-07:00

Oh goody, here's the latest from the cottage industry that tells liberals that they are the superior life form because they both have higher IQ's and know that IQ research is a dangerous pseudoscience. I especially loved the patronizing explanation of how this study doesn't prove that every conservative is dumber than every liberal. You know, I am pretty sure that if somebody ever published a similar study that purported to prove that women or black people are cognitively inferior on average, liberals wouldn't much listen to disclaimers of how some of the best friends of the author are black women who are perfectly good people. However, the reason I linked to this is that it is such a beautiful illustration of the "Bubble" currently making rounds. Even though I scored 3/20 and thus sit so deep inside the bubble that I can't even see it, I guarantee that the scientists behind this study are far deeper inside it. They can't even begin to comprehend how very different life is for someone on the opposite end of the Bell curve, so they can't empathize with someone who has no slack for error in his life and for whom the world really is a dangerous and uncertain place, or how very different their experiences about the minorities are because of the particular subsets of minorities that they ever encounter in their daily lives.

Can't you just tell by their names how wacky they are?

2012-01-26T09:35:00.000-07:00

Every September you see these lists of things that the current crop of freshmen don't know, and the lists of movies, historical events and other phenomena that, surprisingly, are older than them. I don't much care about those lists, but last week when I was teaching the computer programming for non-major engineering freshmen and explained the need and use of the metasyntactic placeholders foo and bar. After explaining that similar placeholders can be found in other walks of life ("Joe and Moe", "Alice, Bob, Carol, Dave", "widget" etc.), I mentioned that the number 42 used as a parameter is also understood to be a metasyntactic placeholder, and surely everyone knows where 42 is from... hey, wait, do they? A quick question and no hands went up, only blank faces. Well, that was unexpected. However, in retrospect I am very happy about this turn of events, as Douglas Adams must be the most overrated humour and science fiction writer of the twentieth century. Someone liking his works tells me instantly all I need to know about that person. His brand of humour makes me want to organize book burning pyres almost exactly the same way that I want to strangle Ricky Gervais every time I hear his voice on television.

Everything is best

2012-01-26T09:11:00.001-07:00

One thing I really miss from the nineties is the webcomic "Fried Society" whose archives I have been trying to find without success. The comic was after followed by a blog that only contained a few posts before also folding, but one item in the post that listed the paradoxes of television snobbery said that for some reason, watching a DVD on a laptop is much cooler than watching the exact same DVD on television. But that was almost a decade ago, so I don't know if the DVD players now have a hip "retro" vibe. Curiously, using a laptop to read the exact same text still seems to be less cool than reading it in a paper book. For example, some time ago I re-read the Ashida Kim koan compilation and realized how much "cooler" doing so would be with a small but exquisitely bound old book (the cover sporting some Japanese characters, of course) frayed from years of endless study. There just has to be a timeless zen koan or two hidden here somewhere... especially considering how comical the site front page is. Similarly, watching a lecture from way up in the nosebleed seats is somehow better than watching it up close on YouTube. Somehow the exact same photons and sound waves are less "authentic" once the information they carry has been processed with a digital machine.

No more water in the pail

2012-01-26T08:01:00.000-07:00

Staying on the general topic, the science and engineering programs of every reputable university see at least one third of their freshmen drop out, otherwise that program is not rigorous enough. Of course, this is rarely advertised to the high school seniors that the colleges try to recruit, and like that Duke study showed, universities that charge hefty annual tuition steer the weak students from STEM to less challenging majors. Closely related, the post "Is STEM Captured by Faculty?" at Blunt Object discusses a post at Slate that asks why the humanities are so eager to have masses of students take their introductory courses, whereas the STEM courses for both majors and non-majors seem almost intentionally designed to keep the teeming masses away. Sure, different sources of funding play a role, since STEM has real world productive applications that create wealth and people who matter would voluntarily pay for. But equally surely that elephant in the room plays an even bigger role. The design of the introductory courses was carved by the hand of reality itself, not that of mere mortal men. While every propagandist and flim-flam artist wants to maximize the number of eyes and ears that are captive to his fluff, knowledge that is actually true can be as choosy as it wants, and simply ignore those who are insufficiently motivated to work for it.

Ave-rage

2012-01-26T07:24:00.003-07:00

To close up the topic, it's a shame that the Duke study is framed to be about affirmative action, since its core finding about the humanities classes being less intellectually demanding is far more important than the racial relations in one small region of the globe. (It is an open secret that the human resources departments of large firms know well which majors cause the resume to be silently filed in the proverbial Folder Z in these litigious times.) The undeniable asymmetry remains that while even the weakest STEM majors can easily hack humanities, humanities majors can't hack STEM. But of course we cannot completely ignore the racial elephant in the room. Since tallying up the grades of various groups is so easy in this age of centralized grade databases, to heal this open wound I have long supported automatically detecting and publicly shaming the racist professors who give vastly different average grades to different ethnic and racial groups. In fact, I recall a few years ago reading in the local student paper that this idea was actually being considered (once the student data is in the grade database, it's just a couple of lines of SQL), but I wouldn't know what ever came out of it, or why its results were not published for the world to see.

Diploma-tic

2012-01-26T06:50:00.003-07:00

Continuing the previous post, of course it is not difficult to see why in the American system of higher education, universities steer the failing students who can't do science and math into humanities and all those softer "studies" majors. When the students obediently pay an annual tuition fee that amounts to three digits per one hour of classroom instruction in some mass lecture hall run by whichever tenure track slave couldn't find a way to dodge this duty, the university would have to be pretty damn stupid if it didn't try to hook these kids by dangling the tempting sheepskin just above their heads as long as it can still keep a straight face, instead of letting them drop out and take their taxpayer-backed tuition dollars someplace else. Like they say, you can shear a sheep many times, but kill it only once. It's all a giant scam, the signaling model of education at its barest. Of course, if the universities didn't need to worry about their reputations and the quality of their courses and diplomas, they could just take in all comers. And that, of course, is what the online universities of the future will do, once the marginal cost of undergraduate teaching per student falls to zero, and the good students never even have to see those who need the material dumbed down and proceed in half pace.

Easy like a Sunday morning

2012-01-26T06:28:00.002-07:00

If you make a bunch of people move a pile of ten-pound weights from one place to another, one weight at the time so that they are not allowed to run, they all might all seem about equally strong, but if you repeat this experiment with hundred-pound weights, highly nonlinear differences in strength and results suddenly emerge. Whereas math is hard, surely I have mentioned a few times that every time I have found material of humanities or various "studies" lying around, I have never been impressed with their difficulty and intellectual rigour, and have to wonder what a proverbial bag of hammers some student would have to be to possibly fail such a course. On the ctrl-alt-right section of my Google reading list, Gucci Little Piggy links to news about a study (note the protest sign comically illustrating the zero-one-many math brain of liberals) that found out that students who can't grok STEM tend to switch to humanities, but rarely the other way around, and these soft majors suffer from severe grade inflation. Echoing what liberals always say about whenever science produces results they like, tell me, why do you now deny science and hate the academia and intellectualism so much? Don't you understand that reality has a persistent STEM major bias, hyuck yuck yuck?

Textbook moves

2012-01-25T16:02:00.001-07:00

I stumbled upon some humour page that said that bad teachers basically read through the textbook in their lectures while the good teachers merely discuss it and assign parts of it for homework, but the great teachers could not even tell you what the assigned textbook is and what it looks like. Speaking of textbooks, of course this post is a little bit of a White Whine, but even so, one of the saddest things in the world must be those "Teacher's Editions" that come with the supplement of model answers in the back. Well, I happen to believe that if you can't solve the textbook exercises at a glance, or at least know, the same way that you know that you are currently on planet Earth, that you could solve them on the fly on a blackboard in front of everybody if you had to, you don't have the slightest fucking business in teaching that topic to anybody, let alone getting paid one red cent for it. But perhaps many schools are simply forced to take whatever people they can get from the prestigious and intellectual social class of edu majors, which is why we need the Khan Academy and a dozen other similar outfits now more than ever.

Robbers in robes

2012-01-25T15:37:00.003-07:00

Back when we moved to this apartment, one wall sported a mystery switch that didn't do anything, just like in that one early episode of Friends. An electrician that we finally called in solved the puzzle: this switch had been intentionally disconnected because it controlled the living room outlet that the entertainment system is plugged in. A few months ago, the outlet in our bathroom stopped working. It wasn't the breaker, since all lights in that bathroom were fully operational. We called in the super today and he solved the mystery to another mystery switch located in the guest bathroom on the other side of the apartment that I must have accidentally flipped at some point without realizing it. What a spooky instance of "action at a distance" in real life! Of course this is only appropriate in this networked age when a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the earth can make me flap my virtual gums over here, assuming that for you now reading this the notion of "here" (or, "you") is even meaningful.

Cafe Hayek: "PETA Should Praise Capitalism" (a downwardly mobile subsistence society without surpluses to pay for the status signaling with animal rights activism is not be a happy place for most farm animals)
Ben Casnocha: "The Jammed Career Escalator"
The Chronicle of Higher Education: "12 Inconvenient Truths About Higher Education" (echoing what I wrote earlier, if people ever truly realized how deep the hand of the educational sector has been inside their pockets...)
Gucci Little Piggy: "The Verbal Tip"
Matt Maroon: "Lobbying"
Mind Your Decisions: "Destination (Button-Less) Elevators Are Cool"
Newmark's Door: "Amanda Hocking, The Writer Who Made Millions..."
Roissy: "Long-Term Cohabitation Is Just As Good As Marriage"
Sultan Knish: "Food Fights And Class Warfare"
Unqualified Offerings: "In Praise of Lazy Boyfriends"
Volatile and Decentralized: "Making Universities Obsolete" (and here I thought that ditching the textbooks altogether and using Wikipedia instead was a big step... well, props to that guy, and for two in a row, watching "Smart E-Book Interface Prototype Demo" I actually felt the world suddenly change)
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "The Efficiency Case for Nepotism"

To know of the brush is to become part of the brush

2012-01-25T15:04:00.001-07:00

There is a school of thought that says that when teaching people to program or use computers, you should never type anything for them, but they always have to type everything by themselves while you are only allowed to talk, not do. I understand the rationale behind this idea, but it's certainly a bit difficult at least until programming languages get to a little bit higher level so that they would pass the simple telephone test. On a related note, when you sit down next to a female student and reach in to quickly type something short on the keyboard that is in front of her, well, there is this certain risk of an accidental brush. That one takes a little bit of maneuvering so that there is no chance of the brush, but you must at the same time also be fully natural and not twist yourself into some human question mark that makes it obvious that you are intentionally trying to avoid the brush, which makes it common knowledge that you are thinking about the possibility of the brush and how that would be bad, which is then awkward. At least if they ever make a comedy show about TA's with one character basically a young Woody Allen or Larry David, obsessing about that would easily be an entire episode.

We are the only ones

2012-01-24T15:10:00.000-07:00

If there are many more pleasant things on a warm January day (I am crossing my fingers that this warm spell continues so that this city saves a fortune on heating and snow clearing costs, no matter how huge a Keynesian stimulus they provide) while waiting for the teaching to start than eating poutine topped with various delicious pork products and piling up another link batch while Monster Magnet blares its stoner rock tunes in my headphones, right now I don't much care to hear about them.

Ace of Spades: "Bill Maher: I Support SOPA..." (ha ha, could not have happened to a nicer person, and this is all just the beginning)
Tommy Angelo: "Look Left"
Jon Bho: "I Want To Fix Programming" ("fix", of course, being one of those funny words that can mean either itself or its opposite)
Cobb: "Two Notes from the Encroaching United Police States of America" (it's just amazing what encroachments of privacy and personal freedoms you can sell to liberals by calling it "environmentalism")
La Cygne Gris: "Science Is Not Story Time"
The Endeavour: "Educational Monoculture" (when it comes to economy and education, funny how those who most proclaim to love change and localism suddenly insist on one-size-fits-all universal and uniform solutions), "Funny And Serious"
Gothamist: "$331.76/Month 4-Bedroom Village Apartment Will Make You Cry" (ha ha)
Hit Coffee: "Percentage-Based ATM Fees"
The Last Psychiatrist: "Couple Reveals Child's Gender Five Years Too Late" (why TLP does not have a book deal yet, I'll never know)
Overthinking It: "Four Years of Overthinking It" (and many mooooore... but I sure can't deny the quote starting that post)
Roosh V: "The Biggest Cockblocker In The World Is Denmark"
Whiskey's Place: "The Inexplicable Decline of Women's Tennis", "Charles Murray And The White Class Divide"

That's, like, commercialism, maaan

2012-01-24T07:57:00.001-07:00

To continue the previous post, not many liberals who gush over the generous benefits paid by Costco and Whole Foods seem to be aware of the fact that Wal-Mart employs far more people not just in absolute numbers, but as percentage of sales. When you skim the most productive employees from the very top and make your customers self-serve themselves, the way Costco does, of course it is easy to pay your workers top dollar and remain profitable while deriding the companies that hire the masses that you would never grant for a job interview for. The hypocrisy of white liberals here is truly staggering, in how they "feel more comfortable" shopping in Costco and Whole Foods around other SWPL customers and employees than go to Wal-Mart with all those white trash proles they fear being mistaken for, and the brown people stacking the shelves and working the checkout lanes. But even that is peanuts compared to the fans of Honest Ed's. Although both an amusing and educational experience and a sui generis historical landmark that everyone should visit at least once, Honest Ed’s is praised for selling things that normal people want and need far more cheaply than the small and local (and thus expensive) mom-and-pop stores that it displaced. That is, doing exactly what liberals now deride Wal-Mart and other big boxes for doing.

The world in every bite

2012-01-24T07:45:00.001-07:00

Before this morning's lecture, I glanced through the student newspaper. It had one article by some young progressive advising students to be more ethical in their consumption choices. First, they should not keep their money in any of the big five banks because these banks invest in Alberta oil sands. Because, you know, oil is bad. The article then advised students not to shop at Wal-Mart, but go to more socially responsible Whole Foods... if they can afford it. Now that is truly rich. It's like that old economics joke in which the guy complains to a shopkeeper that the shop next door sells chickens for half the price, and when asked why he doesn't shop there, he meekly says that they are all out. Similarly, a trendy progressive tells us that every store should be just like Whole Foods and pay its workers good salaries and benefits and offer a wide selection of organic produce from all around the world fully grown and transported with the energy of unicorn farts. When asked why he doesn't personally shop there, answers that it's too expensive for him. I again direct my readers to "Wal-Mart and Toddler Economics" by Tim Worstall, and "Whole Foods, ctd." by Radley Balko, and in the latter especially the point number 5.

It's how we keep score

2012-01-24T07:25:00.000-07:00

I forgot where I read somebody analysing why otherwise different people can still enjoy watching the same sports. Both politics and sports divide the fans into opposite teams, but since sport is ultimately about nothing real but its own artificial microworld, this doesn't create as deep divides as politics, except in the cases where the sport is used as a proxy for some actual underlying conflict. Also in sport, every match is a new event that starts from nil regardless of the past wins, whereas in politics, the same issues do not get replayed from scratch. Another weird thing I realized is that different sports produce very different divisions in their audience. Soccer and other team ball games explicitly pit the audience against each other, half of the audience openly rooting for each team. In individual sports such as long jump or tennis, the audience is not divided the same way, but watches the game together like they would watch a movie or a stage play. Pro wrestling is the only "sport" I can think of that openly pits the entire audience to root for the "face" and boo the "heel". Are there any real sports that produce the same audience state? What would happen if some pro wrestling league scripted its characters to openly divide its audience against each other?

From the pages of life

2012-01-23T15:21:00.002-07:00

Outside the university library today, there was a table set up by the student union advertising their campaign to drop fees. I thought it was adorable how these kids don't understand that since the adult union is doing its best to keep raising the already hefty salaries for the faculty and instructors and hire more of us (plus all sorts of supporting administrators), the money for this noble purpose needs to come somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be the pockets of these students. This is Social Justice 101, kids. Surely someone like me deserves decent pay seeing that I hold a Ph.D while you don't? What's next, are you going to expect me to scrub my own toilets too? But perhaps these well-meaning kids just haven't gotten this far yet in their social justice education. Inside the library enjoying its mix of old and new, I also suddenly realized something else that was important. Every time I go there, the exact same books sit (stand? what does a book do?) in the exact same places. Even though this university has thousands of students and faculty, nobody ever seems to actually take out any books from its vast library. I find this odd and a bit disturbing, to say the least. Despite this being a university, a place of learning for the sake of learning, I have this fearful suspicion that nobody ever actually reads any books unless they are forced to do so.

How many divisions

2012-01-23T06:43:00.001-07:00

To continue the previous post about the Finnish presidential elections, I truly hope that over the next couple of weeks, all trendoids will be maximally visible in all media, both traditional (if only reporters could vote, the left would never lose an election) and social, openly sneering at people with their narcissism in full display just like they did in the Toronto mayoral elections. Since the whole point of liberalism is status signaling to show that you do not belong to the prole class, it always takes extremely careful navigation and outright lying about its goals to trick the majority to get behind it. Again, the percentages would seem to imply that the trendoids will lose this one (merely adding the voters of Väyrynen, who I can absolutely guarantee will never vote for the Greens, already gives Niinistö a safe 55% majority), which in general is interesting when you compare this to the American system where I would happily bet that, barring any surprises with the proverbial dead girl or live boy, no presidential election will ever again be more lopsided than 53 versus 47, thanks to the science of opinion polls and message control that allows both parties to gain enough of the swing voters in real time.

Vote for me and I'll set you free

2012-01-23T06:24:00.002-07:00

Ah yes, the Finnish presidential elections yesterday, with no candidate receiving majority so it will be a runoff between the National Coalition and the Green party candidates. First thing to note here is that the Finnish presidential system is highly different from that of, say, the United States, in that it is more about the person, not the party, and the elected candidate will in fact explicitly give up all his party allegiances. So it became a runoff between trendoids and normos, so we'll see, just like in Toronto's mayoral elections, if the trendoid doctrine of a small enlightened majority deciding everything can attract the majority of voters behind it. I'm pretty sure that most of those who voted for Väyrynen and Soini will stand on the normo side. Next, note the complete destruction of the Finnish left parties, once clear majority but now officially obsolete, with their trendoid voters having migrated to Greens, and the working class voters to True Finns. And once again; amazing how the trendoids gush how wonderful it is that the Green candidate Haavisto lives with his decades younger latino boy toy, very different from their reaction whenever some straight middle class male similarly brings himself an exotic third world sex toy.

The people who protect us from the maniacs who infect us

2012-01-22T19:06:00.002-07:00

When we were out today having food court lunch on the way to the film, the background muzak was that older song about Fridays by The Cure, and I asked Moon Pie how that song is any different from Rebecca Black's more recent ditty. Other than the fact that Rebecca is not a whiny emo goth who sounds just as lame as every other British band of that genre, that is. But then again, I also could not see what was so very bad about that one performance of Britney Spears in that awards ceremony that I already forgot, or in the rap video by that casino executive that makes "words fail". Come on, if a rap video with exact same production values and catchy tune had been performed by some group of trendy activists or CERN scientists, it would have been instantly lauded as the greatest thing ever made. Of course, the real problem with that video is that, unlike many other rap videos that liberals think are "real" (the entire history of modern liberalism is contained in the evolution of two words "smart" and "real" within its discourse), this one unabashedly tells the truth with a smile on its face: that guy really does "live a life" far more interesting, pleasant and wealthy than most of us could begin to dream of. As Tommi once pointed out, scowling is a surefire sign that you are loser who can't hack it in a world full of opportunity.

Ceci n'est pas une liste de liens

2012-01-22T17:29:00.001-07:00

I remember this one McDonald's in Vegas where one front window has a sign (and not just some piece of copy paper taped on, but a permanent sign) informing people that it is not a door. I thought about that one after today's stroll at the center library and its recently renovated surroundings, where some genius had decided to make the road for cars indistinguishable from the surrounding areas meant for pedestrians, I guess merely because it looks all "cool" and postmodern and makes, like, people think and question and challenge stuff. But somebody must have already gotten hurt, since first there were signs informing pedestrians that particular area is a road for cars, and now they had also lined it with metal pylons to make it more obvious especially in these snowy months. In general, if your design ends up a Yoko Ono conceptual art piece, maybe that's the universe trying to tell you that you need to design things smarter in the future.

The Adaptive Curmudgeon: "Word of the Day: Welfare Hours"
Advice Goddess: "Why The Worst Get on Top"
Cartesian Product: "Better Algorithms, Not Better Hardware Are What Make Your Computer Faster, Faster"
Clayton Cramer: "Why I Can't Take Green Businesses Seriously" (in related news from the old country, the city of Helsinki has embarked on an expensive program to cut its energy use to fight the global warming... with the projected best case results literally offset by the increase of Chinese coal power in one week)
Cooper: "Oops! I Ruined Your Life"
An Exercise in Futility: "Online Piracy Is an Example of the Future" (see also "My Idea to Kill Hollywood")
Futility Closet: "Exit Lines" (a proper and complete list would also include the last words of their victims)
Mitchieville: "It Really Is The Favourite" (hah, so true... but I wonder if the result changes if you control for left- and right-handedness)
Once Upon a Time: "You Probably Owe Me a Million Dollars! For Serious!"
Overcoming Bias: "Religion Gets a Bad Rap"
Studiously Uncool: "What They Are Selling: Another Image"
Talk Straight: "Jay Carney: Obama Gay Marriage View Still Evolving" (I wonder, if you polled liberals about what they believe the Lightworker's views are on gay marriage, the death penalty, indefinite detention and the human right not to be assassinated without due process, what you think the majority of them would say without hesitation?)
The Wall Street Journal: "The New American Divide" (I hope liberals and trendoids enjoy the 20/80 society they unintentionally created as much as I know I will)

Chekhov's window

2012-01-22T16:57:00.004-07:00

We finally saw the latest Mission Impossible installment on glorious imax. You could definitely tell that the director and the effects crew had animation backgrounds, even though it was a bit too blatant that the needlessly complicated Xanatos gambits that this crew just pulled out their asses, with all the right futuristic equipment even though they found out about their mission like four hours ago, were all based on a rather optimistic assumption that nobody will unexpectedly stroll in these important places and expensive places, even when you start wrecking them. Especially if that Burj Khalifa really is such a maximum security hotel, I found it implausible that you could just have gunfights and throw people out from a hundred stories up, with no sign of security or the cops. Maybe that was like that one Deep Thought, the chick just went real limp so people thought she was a dummy and said "hey, free dummy". The tunnel that the remote controlled magnet roamed in seemed nice and wide, so wouldn't it have been simpler to make Jeremy Renner crawl through that? Cooling important computers inefficiently with air vents with big spinning propellers also seems odd, considering that liquid nitrogen cooling has been used at least a quarter century.

Outside of society, that's where I want to be

2012-01-20T20:21:00.004-07:00

The front page of today's Sun with the news about some all-girl punk band whose lead singer is now accused of robbery homicide shocked me: really, punk bands still exist? For pantychrist's sake, I had assumed that even "ironic" punk bands are in their beer belly forties by now. But if these kickass chicks didn't already have a recording deal, I am sure they now have several lined up, even though I am not fully sure if the punk subculture has the analogous notion of being "hardcore" and "street" to that of the gangsta rappers, and whether you achieve notoriety among your peers the same way. And even though the girl probably just was with the wrong people at the wrong time, I admit that she is now a counterexample of my thesis that "badass musician" is a contradiction in terms. On the other hand, in the prison being a "punk" is not something you would want to announce to the rest of the population, but that might again be completely different in women's prisons. Either way, I can already visualize the movie version, Josie and the Pussycats meets Alpha Dog. It really does need a bit more commercial soundtrack, though, so perhaps those spunky ladies of The Donnas could loan some of their kickier songs for this purpose.

The envy loop

2012-01-20T19:58:00.001-07:00

I adapted the previous math puzzle from "Mathematical Diversions", a book almost 50 years old where it was Adbul fairly dividing up a pile of raisins with his two brothers, and other similar olde-timey little details. (Although now that I think of it, every man who is actually named "Leroy" must by now be at least in his fifties.) Anyway, so I was thinking in the bus about the optimal way to resolve the envy objections up the line, which is easy if there is only one objector (just combine their disputed shares and then use cut-and-choose), but with more objectors (maybe they are all paranoid tweakers), can we do better than pool their disputed shares and use recursion? There I daydreamed about being the outsider who helps a gang of gangsters to do this (now there is a scene for Jesse's gang for the next season of Breaking Bad), but then thought of the giggle loop, and how catastrophic it would be for me to let out a nervous laughter at some point of this algorithm if a couple of guys down the line got impatient and interrupted me with questions and objections. Next back in the real world, I started thinking how stupid I would have looked if I had giggled at that thought. And pretty soon I was giggling into my palm. To know of the giggle loop truly is to become part of the giggle loop.

LA math test, game theory version

2012-01-20T17:46:00.004-07:00

Question: three lowlifes Tuco, Leroy and Wayne have robbed the crib of a wholesale cocaine dealer and got off with one "key" of the best Bolivian marching powder, now on the table between them. They decide to split the town and go their separate ways, but since they don't trust each other, need to divide the cocaine three ways. With no scale available, how can they divide the cocaine fairly so that none of them thinks the other two tried to rip them off. Answer: Tuco divides the coke, taking what he thinks is one third into a separate pile. If Leroy doesn't agree that this separate pile is at most third, he can move as much of it back to the main pile as he wants, but if he does, the separate pile becomes his share. Either way, Wayne next does the same. Now all three agree that the separate pile is one third, whoever has it. The other two divide the remaining pile the usual way. This method trivially generalizes to a gang of arbitrary size, and is envy-free down the line. However, I have been racking my brain the entire today's commute how to make this algorithm envy-free also up the line (Tuco, although happy with his one third, won't think that the messed-up dopehead Leroy has cut Wayne too big a share). How to resolve it with the fewest steps if more than one lowlife who already got his share both think that someone after them is getting too much?

What the goldfish saw

2012-01-20T10:17:00.005-07:00

Both "Mind-Benders" and "Puzzles" had several problems where you had to prove that some series of moves will necessarily eventually terminate, so you have to come up with some resource that each move consumes regardless of its immediate effect of increasing some quantity. The claim then immediately follows from the mere existence of this consumed resource, the same way that we know that even though you can affect your gas mileage by your choices of driving style and speed, no car can run forever with a finite tank of gas without refueling. Other problems ask you to prove that some series of operations never terminates, so now you have to come up with an invariant that is initially true doesn't change no matter which operation you choose, and the claim follows once you show that this invariant is false in the goal state. Last, the problems in one chapter would have been otherwise simple, had it not been for the additional restriction of fixed finite memory that allows you to keep only certain amount of information in your brain. For example, the classic algorithmic chestnut of checking if the given array has a majority element, when you are allowed to keep only one integer tally and one element value in your memory.

I am Wobegus

2012-01-20T09:57:00.002-07:00

Two highlights from good professor Winkler's two books. First, assume you are playing five-card draw poker and, unbeknownst to other players, for the next hand get dealt the pat full house of your choice, other players' cards being random. Which full house do you choose? (Careful: the one you instantly thought of is not optimal.) Does the answer change if you are playing five-card stud, or some other type of poker? Second, the book introduced several two-player games with the surprising result that every move is always equally good. For example, two players both have a team gladiators, each with strength that is a positive number. Each move pits two gladiators against each other to the death, the winning probabilities proportional to their strengths. Like in Highlander, the winning gladiator gains the strength of the loser. Continue until one player has lost all his gladiators. The book claimed that since each gladiator has the exact same zero EV in each match, it never matters for your overall winning probability which gladiator you put in the ring next. I found that one hard to believe, since in a poker tournament the chip EV of an action can be very different from its tournament $EV. Even more amazingly, changing the rules so that the winning gladiator maintains his original strength does not change this.

max f(x) = -min(-f(x))

2012-01-20T07:51:00.006-07:00

We normally think of the n queens problem in the sense of maximizing the independent set in the attack graph, so that you must jam as many queens as you can without any two threatening each other. In "Mathematical Mind-Benders", this problem is flipped upside down to ask you to minimize the dominating set, so that you need to place as few queens as possible on the generalized chessboard so that they still together threaten all other squares. Now, if we define f(n) as the smallest number of queens that can dominate the n*n chessboard when properly placed, I was surprised to learn that it is actually an open problem whether f(n) is always less than equal to f(n + 1). You might intuitively assume that a larger board would always need more queens to dominate it, but how to prove that? Of all the cute little problems in this book, this one is going to annoy me the most because you just know that there has to exist some simple proof in The Book of Erdős for something that obvious. Even without the elusive proof, the dominating set version would make a lot more educational backtracking optimization example than the cliched n queens problem.

To their heart's content

2012-01-19T20:15:00.003-07:00

Back in the days of the Soviet Union, the core rhetorical technique of its Western apologists was "Yes, but what about..." reflexively uttered when somebody asked why the superior and beautiful communism can't allow its people the freedom to say and move where they want, followed by some mostly imaginary sin of America that wasn't anywhere near in severity the thing it was supposed to counter. Even today, American liberals counter all criticism of their beloved China and Middle East with "But America pepper sprays its dissident voices, subjects its women to pressure about their looks, and now wants to censor the Internet too!" As if not allowing hipsters to throw toddler tantrums in public spaces and pirate Wes Anderson movies were exactly the same as shooting a dissident in the head or hanging porno site programmers. Although, don't get me wrong, I would be delighted to see all movies and television become freely available on the pirate nets for us middle class normos to enjoy, and laugh like a hyena as the dinosaur starves down to a skeleton. Free is always better, as the next batch of links once again amply illustrates.

Amerika: "The NPR Style"
Rick Brookstaber: "The Bifurcated Society"
Collapse: "What If Tim Tebow Were Muslim?" (the last stumper paragraph reminds me of my own question of why Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" preached tolerance by having a conservative white man live with gays and a conservative white man live with Muslims, but never a gay man live with Muslims, or vice versa)
Everlasting God Stopper: "Why Deadwood Is Better TV For Kids Than Buffy The Vampire Slayer"
Fabulous Adventures in Coding: "What Is The Defining Characteristic of a Local Variable?"
Le Cygne Gris: "Paragraphs To Ponder" (like Bart Simpson once said, we need another Vietnam to thin their ranks)
Megan McArdle: "Income Mobility Means That Some People Have To Lose Everything"
Normblog: "Loud And Clear" (it seems to me that "I am not an anti-semite, but..." said by a leftist is very similar to "I am not a racist, but..." derided by a leftist, but then again, the left has chosen its side a long time ago, and besides, a handy definition of a "racist" is someone who says the same thing about black people as "anti-racists" say about Israel)
Overcoming Bias: "Why Hate Firms, Love Cities?"
Luke Palmer: "Relativism and Language"
Ribbonfarm: "The World Is Small And Life Is Long"
Studiously Uncool: "What Are They Selling: Another Image"
The Trunk: "I Want Them To Remember That..." (this reminds me of my observation that if only women get to have a say about abortion laws because men can't have abortions, very well, then only corporations get to have a say in corporate law, only millionaires get to have a say in millionaire tax rates...)

A "wifebeater" is a type of bespoke business suit, right?

2012-01-19T15:07:00.003-07:00

The previous post reminded me of the analogous hot button issue of domestic violence. Many articles written by liberals take great offense at the idea that domestic violence is more common among poor people and especially the underclass at the very bottom than in the middle class and the rich, and haughtily explain that all stereotypes are wrong and domestic violence happens everywhere. Sure, if your analysis has the granularity of none-one-many, but real life requires more nuance in making decisions that have massively important consequences for actual people, consequences that far outweigh your status posturing by acting dumb. All types of violent crime are massively more common among the poor, and sure, this might not statistically hold for domestic violence, but the burden of proof is clearly on those making the extraordinary claim. Also, the liberal position that no statistical differences exist between groups when it comes to domestic violence is easily revealed as an empty pose by observing their reaction to the analogous suggestion that the perpetrators of domestic violence are equally likely to be women as men. Amazing how quickly the liberal can rediscover his or her ability to make statistical and stereotypical distinctions about group differences.

Street smarts

2012-01-19T14:45:00.002-07:00

Back when I linked to a news article about that new "avoid ghetto" app, I wondered if its prediction accuracy could be improved with the voting data of particular neighbourhoods, since street crimes tend to be far more common in areas that lean left in the polls. Waka Waka Waka links to and comments an article long across the parody horizon, nicely illustrating how liberals have no understanding of math past the none-one-many stage of the Piraha tribe. All crimes happen in all kinds of neighbourhoods, and therefore nothing can ever be predicted about anything. Right. But an even more hilarious article complains that this app doesn't track other crimes such as mortgage fraud. You can't make this stuff up. (Solution: let the users of this app choose which crimes they use for filtering, as suggested by Waka, so conservatives could use muggings, while liberals could use mortgage scams.) The conclusion "The reality is that “high risk” neighborhoods are most dangerous to those who are living in them" nicely illustrates how poorly liberals grasp even the basic probability math. ("Driving is more dangerous than BASE jumping, since more people die each year driving than BASE jumping.") And even if that were true, well, if something is risky for me, surely the fact that it is even more risky for someone else does not diminish the fact that it is still risky for me?

A future so bright that even text has shadows

2012-01-19T11:10:00.004-07:00

Okay, one more post about the general area. I think it was Joel Spolsky who, many years ago, compared web applications to software natively written and installed to a Windows box, and issued a challenge of a web-based text editor that underlines misspelled words with red waves in real time... damn if I can't find that essay right now, but, well, this Blogger editor window and the Google Docs text documents easily fulfill this requirement, so for all practical purposes we have reached the state where "the network is the computer", as Sun Microsystems envisioned (comically enough, I misspelled that word but noticed the red wave) back in the nineties when everything was quite a lot more primitive. That Google Docs text editor must be one damn great technical piece of work under the hood. There is no explicit save at all, but it saves even large documents in virtually (heh) real time as you type, so of course it only sends some suitable delta to the server that also automatically updates some whatever variation of a trie they use to index the document, so that incremental search can highlight the occurrences of your search pattern (and also show the count of how many there are) in real time.

Gremlins in the tubes

2012-01-19T10:43:00.003-07:00

Just like Homer Simpson, last summer when I switched to Mapple I was S-M-R-T not to fall into their trap of paying them for services that Google gives me for free. I use Google Docs for all my document processing needs, and have been generally happy to store all my documents in the "cloud", that is, in the hard drives of strangers who knows where in the world, even though I have found a few bugs in this software. Such as the fact that sending the text document as email attachment converted to PDF will always crash in the end, although the document does get sent. This conversion also does not handle line spacing correctly. The powerpoint presentation system that I have used to prepare the new slides for this semester's first programming course for the non-majors seems especially buggy in that occasionally the cursor randomly jumps back a dozen or so characters all by itself while I am typing. And of course there is something wrong with the behaviour of bulleted items. When I type one bullet using font A, and then first switch to font B and then press enter to begin a new item, this new item should now be in font B, yes? And yet it does not, but continues with the font A. It's almost like the font change applies after the character after the current one, not from the current one.

Bless this mess

2012-01-19T10:24:00.002-07:00

As nifty as it is that these days you can just copypaste pretty much anything from one document to another, over the past ten years I don't think that I have seen any word processing application that could correctly handle copypasting individual items from a bulleted or numbered list into another list of the same type that resides in a different document. Either the numbering, indentation or the spacing between the items always gets messed up somehow. So when I need to copy an entire list item, I always copy only its body starting from the second character so that it gets copied as an ordinary paragraph, not as an item of a list. Then I create another item to the target list, copy the item body there and add the first character manually. It's silly, but at least this works. Of course, there is a good chance that I am just stupid. For example, I still don't know how to add a line break inside a list item so that it doesn't start a new item, but continues editing the same item that will then contain multiple paragraphs. Perhaps the system is trying to gently nudge me to make me accept that each item of a bulleted list should be only one paragraph long.

Whatsherface

2012-01-19T10:03:00.001-07:00

I realized something strange last night: in all of the new sitcoms this season that we watch, I couldn't for the life of me name even one character. I can see their faces and personalities clearly in my mind, but not their actual character names. Okay, the cute Zooey Deschanel's character in New Girl is called Jess, but I know that one only because it is explicitly said in the theme song that is just as peppy as the titular character. Television shows just don't seem to have theme songs any more that would conveniently summarize what is going on, in style of Gilligan's Island or The Flintstones. And clearly I am just too old, but I don't understand at all these new Sunday night animation shows Bob's Burgers, Allen Gregory and Napoleon Dynamite that Fox is rolling out to supplement and eventually replace The Simpsons and Family Guy that must be running on fumes pretty much by now, even though the last weekend both shows batted 1000, and then even SNL did the same for a change to complete the trifecta. Napoleon Dynamite obviously tried to rip off King of the Hill, though. So I'll stick with The Life and Times of Tim, and that Canadian Flash animation The Dating Guy is also surprisingly good, both technically and for its dialogue.

Real life writes the script

2012-01-19T07:22:00.001-07:00

What is in the world news of this day where, despite being January, there is no snow on the ground in the view outside my window, even though in the old country, they are again getting a lot more than they had bargained for? Of course, there is the aftermath of the skirt-chasing captain Zapp Brannigan helming the large cruise ship and instead of following the marked safe route, chose the far manlier course towards that blackish, hole-ish thing. Next, it sure was annoying yesterday when I couldn't access Wikipedia, but I didn't realize until this morning the comedy in the massive rift that has yawned up between the old school content creators and hipster web kids in this topic, so let us "pass the popcorn" and enjoy the show. But speaking of movies, I would be surprised if the convoluted tale of Gemma Barker has not already inspired movie pitches, except of course re-imagined as a peppy romantic comedy with college-age characters and a happy ending to follow the crisis and fallout after the accidental revelation of this mischievous maiden's Shakespearean ruse. You know that you have a boffo premise when you can basically see the entire movie and its central scenes in your head based on a description of a couple of sentences.

Jumping the ocean

2012-01-18T08:05:00.000-07:00

After raving about "Mathematical Mind-Benders", I continued with "Mathematical Puzzles" by the same author Peter Winkler, clearly the "Fonz" of this genre who can "winkle" (yes, that's my new favourite word) new aspects out of tired old chestnuts. As a light-hearted interlude, one chapter points out that the globe is not a two-dimensional rectangle, so our world maps, combined with geopolitics, have given us a completely out of whack idea of how various places are located from each other. For example, when flying from Miami to Africa, the shortest route goes past Maine, something you sure wouldn't expect looking at the rectangular map. The second mental misconception I know I have always had is to visualize South America lying, well, to the south of North America. This is not even close to reality. In fact, even Key West off the coast of Florida is located further to the west than any part of South America. Amazing, but I have it on Google Earth right there in the other window. Another fun puzzle asks what is the largest American city lying in the vertical strip limited by Reno in the west and Denver in the east. Look at your mental map first, but then look at the actual map.

Once you go dark, you never do bark

2012-01-17T12:45:00.001-07:00

As the readers of my blog should know well, humour is a great tool to get across the point of how stupid various things are. Today's batch of links contains a lot more humour and sarcasm than the posts included in these batches usually do, although I admit that it's the kind of humour that mainly appeals to me. Speaking of which, I would like to announce that this blog will not, repeat, will not, go dark for a day to protest anything.

Bruce Charlton: "The Conservation of Fairness"
Collapse: "Questions Leftists Rarely Ask And Couldn't Answer" (and you know, I got plenty more)
The Daily WTF: "Terrorists!"
The Fantasy Novelists's Exam (this must be an oldie, but it is a goodie, and newie-to-me-ie)
House of Eratosthenes: "Tarantino vs. Coen Brothers"
Andrew Hyde: "Extreme Minimalism" (okay, now how did I just know that one of those 15 things would be a Macbook?)
I Want a New Left: "Blue-Collar Impact Statements" (somebody forward this idea to Rob Ford's office, and pronto!)
Measure of Doubt: "My Little Pony: Reality Is Magic"
Offsetting Behaviour: "Partial and General Food Equilibria" (see also "No, no it doesn't")
Vox Day: "Voltaire Had It Wrong" (ha ha, it's literally like something out of Dilbert... but how long until the inevitable fawning biopic?)
Zen and the Art of Programming: "On The Usability of Codeacademy" (no matter how experienced coder you are, giving your program to the hands of an actual user will crash it in seconds)
Zombie: "The Leaf-Blower Paradox And The Fundamental Fallacy of Obamanomics"

Fair use

2012-01-17T11:50:00.001-07:00

Speaking of posters, I again noticed in the campus hallways these posters informing students of their right to opt out for submitting their term papers to the Turnitin plagiarism detection service. I think it's nice for the student union to make it clear whose side they are on, since the reasons listed in these posters were so flimsy that it's hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously. First, the service might make a mistake... although the poster doesn't explain why the professor then won't immediately realize this after comparing the paper and the original that Turnitin provides for comparison. Second, forcing you to submit your paper to this service is treating you as a presumed criminal. Well, that's how many people feel during the tax return season. The third argument is that the service keeps your paper for future comparisons. That one is strange, coming from people who otherwise believe that everyone should be allowed to copy, distribute and remix everything as much as they want, and are now going dark en masse to defend this right. Of course, it's not like we'd need Sherlock to crack open the mystery of why these people oppose Turnitin that takes the humans entirely out of the plagiarism detection. The reasons the left says it hates something are surprisingly often very different from their real underlying motivations.

I never thought people were that destructive

2012-01-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

Some guy in his forties was attaching to a lamppost a poster about a march at City Hall to oppose cuts in social services... and you know, it's not like I need to describe that guy any further, do I? In the subway, other posters informed me about the world, but in a different way than their creators most likely intended. First, some campaign to plant mango trees in third world schoolyards so that the kids can study instead of thinking about their hunger. As a fun thought experiment, imagine if some Conservative Party bigwig proposed helping the poor Canadian schoolkids who go hungry mutatis mutandis the same way. Everyone would see that proposal just as idiotic as it is, but for some reason, our critical faculties (heh) tend to quiet with these feelgood projects that build nothing but the self-esteem of Western liberals and actual aid workers in the field would probably only laugh at. Another poster asked us to imagine a city where the high rises in poor neighbourhoods are not ugly bare concrete boxes but filled with smiles and laughter of people dancing in the yards. Sure thing, I can imagine that.

Enter the wingnut

2012-01-17T09:21:00.001-07:00

As you can see from the above title, I finally retired this blog's old name that didn't even make any sense anyway. There must have originally been some kind of rationale, but damned if I can remember it any more. Sure it was distinctive, but anyway. Since I am a wingnut, and these are my musings, this blog shall from now on be known as "The Wingnut Musings", everything else still remaining the same. That one is a good and descriptive name for this blog. I tried to reserve a whole new BlogSpot domain name to host all posts, but after several failed attempts finally gave up trying (as usual, trying is the necessary first step to failure), since apparently there is some stupid hard-coded limit how much data the importing process allows you to move, this limit apparently fashioned by how much data fits on a floppy disk. Funny how this right after the post where I praised the modern web services for their usability. The behaviour of the importing process and the error message were rather cryptic and unhelpful, very much something out of Cooper's classic book where even the ATM's could still brusquely terminate the transaction without even telling you what you did wrong. Even if the import had succeeded, apparently I would have needed to publish all the posts manually.

Landslides and water slides

2012-01-17T08:54:00.002-07:00

What is happening in the world news? First, we got the answer to that hypothetical question of if Titanic sunk today, would women and children still get to go first in the lifeboats while the men chivalrously stayed behind. The answer is not metaphorical in just that obvious way, but also of what will happen once the financial turmoil leads to the realization that the European welfare states won't have enough goodies for everybody. Second, the Americans had their MLK day. The one thing that I always notice there is how King is one of the very few historical figures who must always be addressed as a "Doctor", even (well, especially) by the people who otherwise tend to see very little value in theology and divinity studies. Last, back in the old country the presidential elections are underway, the cold not keeping the Finns away from the polls to draw their red lines. I can't help but notice how the Green League with its 7% of vote in the previous election has, in all apparent seriousness, deluded itself to take it as given that their candidate, a gay man living with his young latino boy toy, will actually win. Somewhat reminds me of the mayoral election of Toronto. Then again, it's easy to understand where this delusion comes from, since literally everyone these people even know will vote for him.

I want to play a game

2012-01-17T08:00:00.002-07:00

The cover of "Mathematical Mind-Benders" did not look that promising, but hoo boy, was I ever impressed of the beauty and elegance of this text. Despite being simple enough to explain in a couple of sentences without any higher math, not only were most of these problems were completely new to me (there had to be dropping the egg from Empire State Building), but the overall style and spirit were as if Donald Knuth had written a mathemetical puzzle book. The game of HIPE, where one player gives a string of letters and the other player has to think up a word that contains those letters consecutively somewhere in it ("archipelago") has potential but seems vulnerable for somebody preparing tricky questions in advance. On the other hand, some of these puzzle wordings are actually pretty disturbing when you think about them, such as executing prisoners unless they solve a certain problem co-operatively, people with differently colored dots on their foreheads (seriously) killing themselves, or the classic Microsoft job interview question rephrased with a woman imprisoned inside a fenced circular area patrolled by a killer dog. The next installment of Saw pretty much writes itself, no?

Not true

2012-01-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

Filling up the book bag with a fresh smelly load, I noticed some book that on its very cover exhorted its readers to give up Microsoft. I looked at the publication year, 2005. Talk about being obsolete almost the year it was written, although it was entertaining to scan it for the nostalgia value. In the same spirit, I re-read the 1999 tome "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" about usability issues and the psychological differences between programmers (especially the propeller beanie Unix folks) and normal people. Given the choice of a simple feature that works for 99% of cases, and a complex one that handles every corner case that never occurs in real life, which do you implement? Over the past couple of years, all usability has quietly but massively increased, because on the web, there is always a competitor so people don't need to tolerate crap. But things were very different back in the year 1999 when even on the web, forgetting to fill in one field in a form usually meant that you had to fill the entire form again. I remember how around those times I always simply refused to use any web-based service for anything because you just knew that at some point, loading the next page would freeze and then finally crash, losing all your data. Maybe the easiest way to see how far we have come is that the term "power user" (who always seemed to be some fat guy in a suit) no longer even exists.

His perfect little criminal mind

2012-01-16T15:24:00.002-07:00

We watched "High Life", a small budget Canadian film about small time criminals and junkies who in the early eighties plan to rob one of the first ATM machines. This was billed as a caper comedy, but after the Goodfellas ripoff opening in medias res, there really weren't that many laughs, not even the subtle kind that the far superior "In Bruges" in similar spirit offered in spades, but at least Timothy Elephant played the character he always plays in every movie in various sides of the law. Many little details in this film made me again think how much easier all crime really must have been just a few short decades ago. I finally got a chip version for both the credit and debit cards, so that ought to put a stop to all those card skimming machines that caused my debit card to be shut down for security reasons so many times that I finally simply gave it up in frustration. However, over the past week my credit card chip has stopped working, or at least it has been rejected in five different stores, so perhaps I should call and ask them to send me a new one. Amazing, really, this trust that technology makes possible so that you can just take a small piece of plastic to a store and they give you a big screen TV or some other magical device that in the Middle Earth would have been a sufficient cause to mobilize a huge troop of elves and dwarfs for a quest to retrieve it.

Scylla and Gunubris

2012-01-16T13:57:00.002-07:00

I recently read somebody claim that no idea can ever justify shooting people. This is interesting, since it would seem that you don't truly believe in some idea unless you believe that idea can be used to justify shooting people. Let me explain what I mean by this. Of course, if you claim that nothing can ever justify shooting anybody else, very well, our ways have parted a long time ago. But if you believe that shooting someone can be fully justified (in some cases, even obligatory) in some cases (e.g. in a just war against an invading military force), suppose that somebody presents you an argument why shooting some particular person was justified, and you can't find anything wrong in the logic of this argument. Assume furthermore that this argument uses as one of its necessary assumptions some idea X that you believe. Now, if you really believe in the idea X, you must accept the proven logical consequence of that idea, namely that shooting that person was justified. Conversely, if you claim that the shooting was still unjustified despite the solid argument to justify it, and can't pinpoint anything else wrong with that argument, you have no choice but reject the idea X.

If nothing exists, what do these links point to?

2012-01-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

Another important idea related to the previous post is that when you own something expensive, be it a Ferrari, a mansion or even something immaterial such as a college degree from an exclusive private university, instead of being proud of having spent a lot of money for it, you should instead be bummed that science, engineering and commerce have not yet reached a sufficiently advanced level that would allow some entrepreneur to arrange the raw materials that comprise that thing into the correct shape and combination with the total cost low enough to allow it to be profitably sold in mass market prices. Fortunately, this stage has long since been reached when it comes to bits. Despite having spent the previous week proofreading and tinkering, I have managed to click the yellow star button enough times to produce another link post.

Alternative Right: "Socionomics 101" (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble)
assertTrue: "How The Internet Is Changing Economics"
Inviting Epiphany: "Why Do Most Programmers Work So Hard at Pretending That They’re Not Doing Math?"
Jim's Blog: "Burning the Past"
Kevin Kelly: "Tiny Homes"
Lord Popinjay: "If Someone Doesn’t Believe In Evidence, Hit Them In The Face" (also known as "Dokuon's stick")
Matthen: "Mass on a Spring" (beauty is the difference between the complexity of results and the complexity of implementation)
The Old New Thing: "Keys Duplicated From Photo: Delayed Reaction"
The RBC: "Bank Job Pay Less Than Minimum Wage" (Frank Abagnale pointed out the exact same thing in his book, and Freakonomics did the same for crack dealers: we are long past the bank robbery golden age of John Dillinger that had reliable automobiles for a clean getaway, but no security cameras or Interstate dragnets)
Roosh V: "Introduction to Danish Culture"
Rhymes With Cars and Girls: "Things Your Boss Might Ask You To Do"

Chains of choice

2012-01-15T11:55:00.001-07:00

I had a new-to-me episode of Pawn Stars on the background where Rick bought a helicopter that he had somebody fix up for him to flip for a profit of tens of thousands of dollars. It reminded me of one of the first opinion pieces I ever read that was written by a libertarian. It pointed out that as much as we dream of "getting rick quick" and without real effort, a society where that is possible would be a horrible place to live in, since it would have to be so economically inefficient that its residents would be much poorer and less free than us in their invisible shackles that allow a few lucky people to profit without effort. In a society full of opportunity and competition, there are not many of those proverbial hundred-dollar bills lying on the sidewalks. As entertaining as Rick's customers are, never any ratlike degenerates pawning their children's toys to get money for gambling and meth but middle class people wishing to cash in their historically interesting antiques, I have to wonder if none of these customers has ever heard of eBay, but let Rick and his obviously profitable shop (which, just like everything else on TV, is much smaller than it seems on TV, although Rick himself live is just like Rick on TV) to act as a middleman who takes his chunky cut from the price.

Dark half past midnight

2012-01-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

When I was a teen, Stephen King was the "king" of books that people with real jobs actually wanted to read. Then he became pretty much invisible, but has gone through a renaissance over the past decade, although I couldn't tell you anything about his last, say, ten books. For a warm Sunday pizza afternoon, we started watching the "Bag of Bones" miniseries. Pierce Brosnan plays a writer who may or may not be idealized version of King. Giving a book signing in the city, he suddenly hears sirens, and just like people who live in the city, stops what he is doing and walks out to investigate to find his wife hit by a car and dying. The emergency workers are courteous and let him have the last moment with her, instead of rushing to take her to the hospital to save her. After funeral, we spend two hours with Pierce in writer's block walking around a lakehouse (wasn't this "Secret Window"?) filled of visions that I am sure were meant to be scary. But you know, can there ever be a situation where looking under your bed is a good idea? If there is nothing, it's pointless, and if there is something, then you die. Instead of sitting through the second two hours, I said "fuck it" and just read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I think I could write the book based on that, including which text is in italics. Come to think of it, I could just as well write the Dean Koontz version. I now have to wonder, has either man really written anything for the past twenty years?

A crooked little town

2012-01-14T11:46:00.003-07:00

I was going through the Apple trailers site to check out what movies are coming up in the next few months. I am pretty sure that the Ayn Rand biopic (I read the tagline "After 50 years and millions of books sold...", their emphasis, in Dr. Evil's voice) won't be playing in any theater nearby, but I don't think I'd pay to see it even for humour value. "Catch .44" looks interesting in that the genre of "country noir" has been dead for some time. You know those films where a lonely drifter arrives (or a city slicker passing through is forced to stop because of car trouble) in a small town and uncovers some criminal scheme involving multiple layers of betrayals and double crosses, with the cast of characters including the stern sheriff and his dim deputy, the town lawyer, the simple but jovial mechanic, couple of wacky hillbilly hired goons, and of course the richest man in town with his much younger femme fatale wife, each more crooked than the next? Of course, all those films were also done in a simpler era when the menace of meth had not ravaged through the fruited plain. That, and how the modern telecommunications and mobility make it kinda hard to believe that some criminals could rule a small town, no matter how remote.

Sing like no-one is judging you

2012-01-13T19:00:00.003-07:00

My iPod died mysteriously today, having now served me almost three years. It's not like music would sound any better coming from a new machine, but I couldn't listen to my favourite tunes while reading on the subway trip home. Is the universe trying to tell me that I need to pay less attention to myself and more attention to other people? I might assume so if I were a superstitious person, especially since some mentally ill woman in her fifties kept vocalizing in the subway car. Her voice was actually surprisingly beautiful and clean, at least when contrasted to her speaking voice that came out in a couple of places, informing us that she is "from Croatia, one nation under Satan", and bits of some songs that sounded like gargling of a filthy sewer. Some teens kept laughing and comically echoing her vocalizations, which actually annoyed me way more than the woman and made me think of Alex and his droogs in the Korova milk bar when the sophisto started singing glorious Ludwig van, and Dim expressed his distaste with a raspberry. The impromptu concert ended when the woman suddenly realized it was her station and rushed out the last second, her bag on wheels bouncing on the gap like an animal. Later, it turned out that my iPod had simply run out of juice, since I had forgotten to earlier turn it off. But once again, I think I learned nothing of this experience.

Effing ficient

2012-01-13T18:41:00.006-07:00

To continue the previous posts "Waiting for mademan" and "Plus the back end" about how the cost of college is a lot more these days than it really ought to be, at most certainly won't be in five years since I would happily bet anything that there is a group of people in Google working on this with some ten million dollar seed money from between Larry's couch cushions, I thought of how every time when I see an empty seat in the class, I think how it goes to waste exactly like an empty seat in an airplane, and filling that seat would have been pure profit for everyone. At least for the night school, the pricing system is clearly inefficient and sorely needs some kind of discriminatory pricing... which would be the most trivial thing to do with education. You charge everybody the exact same tuition fee for each course, but then grant some people a "scholarship" that just so happens to pay the difference between the full fee and the discounted fee, and to save everyone some trouble, pay that "scholarship" directly to the admissions office without it ever going through the student's grabby hands. Of course, this is exactly how the exclusive American private universities handle the matter to let in good students who couldn't afford to pay the full tab, but whose presence keeps the quality high to attract the scions of the wealthy.

Pulse of the city

2012-01-13T16:06:00.002-07:00

At the place where I got my poutine dinner that I am now enjoying as I wait for tonight's teaching to begin, I read the current issue of the local alternative weekly newspaper, not having read any issues for a few months. But they are always the same anyway, and it's not like anyone would notice anything different even if you switched the weeklies of different cities. First, a couple of pages of snarling hatred towards Rob Ford made me hope he also wish the next mayoral election, which happily seems like a demographic certainty. Another article was about environmentalists protesting against some quarry being planned on local farmland, and I think I'll nominate the sign "You can't eat solar panels" in the photo of a protest as the definitive beclowning of the modern environmentalism. Once again, a signal is always more reliable the more it costs to give, and the advertisers of this paper certainly know their urban and progressive target audience, with one big ad featuring a young liberal male depicted wondering if he is only imagining the fever and the rash, and exhorting him to get tested. Once again, there would be no need for such winkling if all those liberal males in ponytails and Birkenstocks bravely came out together as "men who have sex with men", so that they could be open and honest about their proclivities and play safe by regularly getting tested without shame.

The eggs of change are faintly crackling

2012-01-13T06:47:00.000-07:00

I have a big change and announcement for this blog coming up over the next week, but until then, here is another batch of Friday links, to be enjoyed with the morning coffee while the snow falls outside covering everything under its blanket.

Cheap Talk: "How To Stop People Using Their Phones at Dinner"
Data Addict: "Why You Shouldn't Follow Your Dreams"
Engineer Blogs: "The Trickle-Down Techonomy"
Jim Goad: "A Clockwork Orange County" (see also "Imagine Your Father as a Street Bum")
Half Sigma: "The Purpose of College", "Intelligence and Physical Appearance"
I Have Seen the Whole of Internet: "An Honest James Bond Theme"
Vivek Haldar: "The CS Assignment I Wish I Had"
Kids Prefer Cheese: "Umm... This Kind of Stuff Happens All The Time"
Overcoming Bias: "Unspeakable Arrogance"
Werner Patels: "Calgary: Let's Have It Both Ways!"
Rhymes With Cars and Girls: "Why All Scorers Should Subtract N-1 And Multiply By 10"
Spleenville: "Beta Males And Gay Marriage"
Threat Quality Press: "Ghost Protocol: The Best Mission Impossible Since That Last One You Forgot About"
The View from Alexandria: "Thoughts on Equality" (those who most tell us to "celebrate our differences" rarely seem to want to celebrate differences in wealth and income)

Waiting for mademan

2012-01-11T14:39:00.002-07:00

Speaking of the price of education, a few months ago I watched some low-budget crime movie that I already otherwise forgot, but it had the young hero straddling between his two lives as a mafia hoodlum and a student in the prestigious Columbia University. One scene showed him in a lecture hall during student group work, and he didn't take the bait of vapid college discussion on cultural relativism, but asked the other students to divide their annual tuition fee by the number of their lecture hours, and ask themselves if they think they are getting good value, with the professor depicted playing on her BlackBerry in the background. Bit of a shame that the movie didn't develop this theme any further. I wonder how anyone can seriously argue against the signaling model of education. If I had to learn something and had a budget of $200/h to do so, the last thing I'd do is spend that money on lectures. I'd hire some ABD, or somebody who didn't make the tenure track in that field and doesn't want to move to Podunk, for $50/h to work as my private teacher, and I would at the same time hire some graduate student in India in the same field (that would be what, $5/h?) to read through all the books and other material and summarize them for me before I read them.

The kilobit universe

2012-01-10T21:59:00.003-07:00

Lex Luthor famously noted that some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story, while others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe. My link compilations occasionally feature posts that I decided to include for their titles alone, even before I actually read the post bodies that had been perfectly summarized in the witty title. With actual literature the same rarely happens, but sometimes I get lucky, for example, with my commute read for today, "We Need To Talk About Kelvin". A fun book and educational to boot, it explains the physics behind macroscopic everyday truths that we can observe with our own eyes, such as the translucent reflections in glass, the steady heat of the sun on our faces, the dark coldness of the night sky in an infinite universe, plentiful iron amply available, how it is much easier to break things than to put them together, the sky in Chiba City on the TV tuned on a dead channel, how randomness seems unavoidable, and the complete absence of space aliens buzzing around our planet like the electronics geeks currently in Vegas.

Gale force

2012-01-10T11:55:00.001-07:00

I actually didn't get the pun on the title "Math Hysteria" until I started writing the blog post about it, but at least that took me less time to get than the pun in "CitiKitty". Sometimes I am just so very slow. For example, the book referred a few times to the mathematician David Gale, who I didn't know was the inventor of Chomp, but I had to look up his Wikipedia page to realize that it's "Gale" as in the "Gale-Shapley algorithm". But as history amply teaches us, great genius is often accompanied with madness. Surely my readers are familiar with the biopic docudrama starring Kevin Spacey. It takes a truly diabolical mind to not merely come up with a mathematical proof to demonstrate everybody that capital punishment is wrong, but to sacrifice your own life in pursuit of truth and equality. Although at least the movie version failed to make a convincing case about this, since on one hand, it proved too little, but on the other hand, too much. If somebody intentionally tied himself to the middle of a railroad crossing, swallowed the key and pretended to desperately try to get away as a train ran over him, would that similarly "prove" that railroad crossings need to be abolished?

Mathhole

2012-01-10T10:53:00.002-07:00

I had "Math Hysteria" as a commute read, collection of columns by Ian Stewart written in style and spirit of Martin Gardner's famous columns in Scientific American. I can't help but appreciate somebody who can breathe new life to the most cliched lateral thinking problem in existence, tiling the chessboard with two opposite corners cut off. And almost all these topics were new to me, for example, the question of whether a polyhedron with its edges infinitely stiff but its corners flexible joints is rigid, and if not, can its volume change when you press on it. In other words, it is possible to create bellows out of a polyhedron? Another column illustrated that the children's game of dots and boxes is actually mathematically very deep, very similar to go endgames in the sense of combinatorial game theory. I recall once reading about protocols to divide cake (either literal or metaphorical) fairly among n people (the case n = 2 easily solved with "one cuts, other chooses"), but even that gets trickier if in addition of each person being satisfied with his share being at least 1/n, no person will envy anyone else for his share that he perceives to be larger.

But what goes on really?

2012-01-10T07:41:00.000-07:00

I decided to write my own overhead slides for the non-major mass programming course where I am but one professor among many, to better fit my own teaching style. Self-made is always more fun anyway, and so far this has been a surprisingly painless process, as I just imagined myself teaching before a class and wrote down the highlights of the stuff that I'd say. (I am still working on how to best incorporate this idea: dare I use the expression "on the pleasant side of the barbed wire fence?") However, I am not entirely sure why Google Docs presentations change themselves while I am not looking at them, and why it is so very difficult to save them as PowerPoints. (Then again, it's not like anything Microsoft has ever done has been compatible even with itself.) Anyway, so I was writing this slide for a future lecture on pointers and dynamic memory, and in a flash, suddenly understood the real purpose of that stupid advice, found even in some textbooks, to always assign p = NULL; after each release operation free(p); This nonsense is like that famous "no brown M&M's" rider of Van Halen, in that every time you actually see such superstitious ooga booga in somebody's code, you know that that programmer doesn't really understand anything about pointers and memory management and how dangling references happen, so you need to go through his code extra carefully.

Pigs in the field

2012-01-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

I got a bit confused when a couple of students separately asked me if it is okay to use laptops to take notes in my class. Well, seeing that the fact that they still have to drag their meatsack bodies physically to the lecture room at the specific time (which today happens to be 8AM, which will certainly be a lot of fun when the weather gets more wintery) is already surreal enough, so I guess I'll just have to live with such a medieval mindset. Then last night, as I was on a break from the intro lecture and slowly strolling in the hallway, I heard some a prof in another classroom bellow that he won't tolerate laptops when he is talking, and he can tell when a student is doing something else than listening to him. I stopped and perched my ears to listen some more: had I accidentally wandered into some junior high? As far as I am concerned, as long as the student doesn't bother me or other students, they can do anything they want on their laptops whenever there is a lull in the communication from me to them. Especially in the adult school (and I am so old that I can remember a time when even an 18-year-old was considered an adult), if somebody really pays a grand for the privilege to sit in a course and then doesn't listen to what I say, that's entirely up to him.

Plus the back end

2012-01-09T08:11:00.000-07:00

About the start the first lecture in the mass programming course where I am but one professor among many, and for the first time, my lecture has been assigned to one of the theaters in the cineplex next to the university. I have to admire such efficient use of expensive downtown real estate, but this also makes me wonder all the more about the mystery of how college can be so expensive. Later today, any student can go to the same theater to watch Tom Cruise run and shoot his way from one thrilling adventure to another for two hours for $10, if even that, but how much more does that same student watch me yammer for the same two hours with not quite as snappy dialogue and action? There is just something fundamentally wrong in such a lopsided equation of value and cost. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever any more why any college course should cost more than $100, including the electronic textbook. Once people realize the full extent how deep the hand of the education industry has been in their pockets, anything that we now think of as prevailing "anti-intellectualism" is going to be small potatoes next to that rage backlash.

Facta Informatilkka

2012-01-08T13:39:00.001-07:00

Too bad nobody has yet developed an autocomplete for writing in general, so that you would start writing a sentence and this autocomplete would guess what you mean to say and offer the rest. But we can simulate this by looking at each sentence one word at the time and measuring how quickly on average it becomes possible to correctly guess the rest of the sentence. I wonder if some linguist has already done this for samples of various writers and inferred something from the results. I could also think of a software tool that measures how clear your writing is from how often this guess about the rest of the sentence goes completely wrong. Or how concise your writing is, in that it is rarely possible to guess the rest of the sentence before you have actually read the whole thing. Of course, like all problems in life, even this one will eventually succumb to Moore's law. Meanwhile, here is the Weekend Issue of the "magazine" in which I am both the editor-in-chief and the crank writing to the reader's letter page, and everything else in between.

Amerika: "Leftist"
Cafe Hayek: "Two Caplan Gems"
Chicago Boyz: "The Dangers of Demonology" (it's just obvious projection when liberals say that conservatives are "medieval" and "fascist", when they themselves have a pure a medieval mindset and hysterically fear a shadowy cabal of usurious "international bankers" who suck the blood of the people)
Counting Cats in Zanzibar: "The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel"
Jack the Insider: "Space Wasters Wasting Time" (unfortunately, politics does not seem to have the "time-space tradeoff" well known in computer science)
Andor Jakab: "This Is Why I Don't Give You A Job" (also known as the "If I can't fire them, then I won't hire them" principle... but spunky little Hungary sure seems to gone downhill from the short period of freedom between the Soviet rule and becoming an European welfare state)
A Neighbourhood of Infinity: "Lossless Decompression And The Generation of Random Samples"
Nick's Blog: "Damn Cool Algorithms: Fountain Codes"
Quizzing the Anonymous: "Why Is Life Unfair?" (answer)
Street Boners and TV Carnage: "The Chuck Zito Test"
Tim Worstall: "Strange Newspaper Questions We Can Answer: Why Isn't There a Grindr for Lesbians?" (I thought there was, and it is called "U-Haul")
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "Putting the Econ into Econometrics"

The prophecy says no MAN can slay the wolf

2012-01-08T12:57:00.000-07:00

Some low-budget TV version of Robin Hood once saw Robin and his merry men pursued by samurai, and a few of the medieval villagers wore sunglasses. It seems surreal now to think how distant the era just a few decades ago when something like that was considered laughably stupid is from our time, in some sense just as far away as the actual medieval times. As the afternoon sun pleasantly heated up the apartment, we enjoyed pizza and watched "Red Riding Hood", that original "Twilight". The medieval village haunted by a werewolf thinks it's safe to go back in the water after the successful hunting party, but... hey, is that Gary Oldman? So, Gary arrives with his troop of black and Asian warriors to spoil the celebrations (a rave where Amanda Seyfried lezzes out a bit to attract the attentions of the alpha male, an experience young adult female audience can probably identify with) by informing them that the wolf is still on the prowl. (Plenty of all sorts of metaphors in this movie.) The rest of the film went pretty much the way I assumed it would, although I did doze off in a couple of spots. Somehow the story also involved a witch, so Gary Oldman turned into a maniac witch hunter inquisitor, avoiding the dumbest things I feared there would be but still reminding me of one famous quote of C.S. Lewis.

Tornado got Old Yeller

2012-01-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

A few people have linked to Matt Yglesias commenting a study that found out that most people would not kill their favourite pet for a million dollars, the final nail to the coffin of all "studies" that ask people what they say they would hypothetically do, as opposed to looking at what they do in reality, especially when the socially acceptable correct answer is obvious to any non-autistic person. Of course that is all just posing and not really thinking through the offer, but if, for the sake of argument, we actually took these answers as serious, the inescapable conclusion is that these people think that their pets are more important and deserving than thousands of poor people whose lives they could massively improve with a million dollars. Sure, you can argue that things closer to you are valuable to you by the virtue of being closer. Fair enough, and in general, I agree. However, I will never again want to hear you complain that capitalist society is totes "unequal" and doesn't do enough for poor people, domestic or foreign. Why the hell should I, since you already declared that you literally consider these people lower than animals?

Pulling it off

2012-01-07T11:21:00.003-07:00

After I had bought myself another GTA area transit pass for the next week now that the semester starts again, I suddenly understood something I had wondered about earlier, why these GTA passes come with stickers that say that the pass is valid only after this sticker has been removed. I could not see the point for such stickers (I am suddenly reminded of that famous quote by Chesterton about the gate on the road), but I then realized that their purpose is to prevent vendors from giving out these passes to their friends and families to travel for free, and then at the end the week, collect them back and return them to the transit officials as "unsold". Because I always buy my passed from the transit system itself, I was unable to see this possibility. It wouldn't make sense to manufacture passes with and without stickers (I am now reminded of that puzzle of drive-through ATM's with braille keyboards), and besides, even the transit system itself needs to prevent employee pilfering. Strolling there I realized how very essential one-way operations are for society to exist, and tried to imagine a non-entropy society where every physical action was always reversible with equal energy.

Everyone in the position

2012-01-06T22:08:00.000-07:00

Blunt Object: "Tax Something, Get Less of It — Not Always in the Way You’d Expect" (the Sorbus Squad always finds a way)
CBS News: "Microsoft Patents 'Avoid Ghetto' Feature for GPS Devices" (surely also voting pattern data could be used to improve the accuracy of this algorithm)
Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Magical Mind of Persi Diaconis"
William Briggs: "We Are All Dogmatic"
Cheap Talk: "Blogging Something I Know Nothing About"
Martin Durkin: "The Greens: A Warning From History" (as the ancients said, vestigia terrent)
Fred on Everything: "Urinals" (it seems Fred has found himself living inside Palomar)
Gene Expression: "The Poverty of Multicultural Discourse"
Gyre & Gimble: "Two" (well, Isaac Asimov did point out that two is an impossible number...)
Maverick Philosopher: "Paradoxes of Illegal Immigration"
Polite Dissent: "What's The Point..." (ha ha, indeed)
Roosh V: "50 Things I Learned Last Year" (whereas I think I learned pretty much nothing... but we'll see how the year 2012 turns out)
Software, Systems and Solipsism: "On Problem Complexity and Artificial Constraints"

It all adds up

2012-01-05T13:30:00.001-07:00

Watching the Crime Story set in the sixties Vegas reminded me of something else I meant to write about after the recent Vegas trip but forgot, but better late than never. Sitting at one pai gow table while sipping my "free" drink, I realized there that casinos differ from almost every other type of business in that each individual transaction (that is, a single hand) doesn't leave any receipts to document what happened and how much money changed hands, so all they can do is at some point take out the one-way cash box and count the bills in it to find out how they did. To meanwhile prevent employee theft, all actions that are allowed to happen are designed so that they maintain some invariant. The pit bosses and the eye in the sky enforce that these invariants are maintained, and these invariants automatically maintain the correct balance at the table and prevent unearned money from disappearing in the pockets of a crooked dealer or his confederates, exactly the same way that, say, the red-black invariant in a red-black tree automatically keeps the tree structure balanced without the tree manipulation algorithms ever having to actually explicitly measure this balance.

The prestige

2012-01-05T12:33:00.003-07:00

Time to watch some more of the second season of Crime Story while digesting the delicious Chinese food I chomped down with J-Dog before going for the takeout rotis, and finish up the material for the next semester now that I know exactly what courses I am supposed to be teaching. Nothing that I haven't taught for a decade or at least thereabouts, but one can always think up more interesting and educational exercises and examples. I mean, if these people honestly have to pay what is now over a freaking grand to sit in the course, I don't have many good excuses to slack off in the delivery. How the hell can college be so expensive in this age when everything, especially information, is becoming almost too cheap to meter? In a sane world, one college course would cost about a hundy, but based on the emails I occasionally get from the union, charging these people tons of money is social justice so that guys like me get paid $130/hour just for talking about stuff that I'd talk about for free as long as you like. It's a bit like the transit strike up in York, still going on after eleven weeks as it's starting to get freezing. You'd probably need at least a Master's in social justice to explain why these union workers getting another hefty raise trumps some poor single mom fighting the elements to get to her minimum wage job waiting tables and scrubbing toilets.

Leeward

2012-01-05T11:46:00.001-07:00

Since I haven't seen my imaginary hip black friend J-Dog for some time, I headed out to his more vibrant neighbourhood for some delicious ethnic takeout food for tonight and tomorrow. We rapped a bit (I am just too white and tired to think up a more current verb) about what was going on, then parted our ways, and I decided to this time go for some rotis from a new-to-me place that was run by a trio of young women. Waiting for my food that I had specifically asked should not contain any MSG, I glanced through some local Caribbean newspaper that seemed rather strange, a bit like all those local Desi newspapers a couple of years ago until they suddenly became more like mainstream newspapers, and especially its editorial cartoon made very little sense to me. But the food smelled great, so I'll find out tonight if I should switch from my usual roti provider. I paid by the credit card that these days has a chip and requires the PIN, which makes me more confident to use it everywhere, but when the handheld machine asked for a tip, I typed in zero percent. I am honestly drawing a blank (heh, I first mistyped that as...) whether I am supposed to tip for takeout food that I pick up myself, especially when the proprietor of the restaurant is the one handing me the food (I read somewhere that you never tip the owner).

Dis-criminations

2012-01-05T09:18:00.001-07:00

Okay, one more post on the topic before lunchtime. A new campaign against rape is making the rounds (even including one gay couple so that it's not "heteronormative"), illustrating the paradox why such an approach is taken only to prevent rape but not other crimes so that, for example, a campaign against burglaries or robberies would sternly inform the would-be liberators of property that breaking into somebody's home or snatching his bag is wrong even if that somebody owns more money and material wealth than you and thus clearly needs it less than you, to counter the "stealing culture" currently prevalent in media that tells people that taking what you want by force is okay. But surely somebody has already photoshopped new posters with obvious extensions of this principle to other types of crime such as, say, drug dealing, home invasion or carjacking. Outside the dark waters of crime, I could also think of another obvious parody of this campaign, featuring some "99%" Occupest with the accompanying text going something like "The power of state is not for stealing. When that big corporation refused to hire me despite my expensive Puppetry Studies degree, I didn't camp out to demand legislators to force them to pay me money anyway."

Forcing the more privileged to share their wealth

2012-01-05T08:57:00.001-07:00

Writing the previous post about who the rapists mostly tend to be as evidenced by actual crime statistics, as opposed to some liberal wet dream episodes of Law & Order: SVU, I was reminded of Mao's famous observation of the masses of people being the "sea" where the guerrilla swims in, or analogously in this topic, where the rapist swims in. Without these masses to disappear in, or to give him shelter after the fact by covering for him and even threatening the accuser and the witnesses, the rapist would be instantly caught by the numerically and materially superior police force. But to explain the mystery of why the ultra-left Sweden currently boasts the highest rape rate in all Europe, perhaps Olle and Bosse are only acting to be all "sensitive" and "enlightened" to lure in chicks in style and spirit of this old article. "Hey babe, don't be so traditional and uptight..." or however you say that in Swedish. On the other hand, since leftism and liberalism are based on the twin ideas of the collective making all decisions over an individual and taking by force what they can't have, is it really such an impossible stretch to believe that many leftists might resort to force to take the female bodies that they can't otherwise have?

The value is incredible

2012-01-05T08:27:00.002-07:00

I don't remember why I first added "G Manifesto" on my reader stream, but this morning I watched "The Cuba Prostitution Documentary" they linked to. A bit more serious in spirit than, say, Roosh's travelogue in Medellin, although I don't know if this can really be 100% genuine, since these people don't seem to much react to the presence of camera. But it's certainly an interesting preview of the life that liberals and greens have in mind for us. I also see why Cuba is such a popular travel destination for the middle-aged ponytail sandal-wearers as described in the article "Men I'm Over: The Ones Who Use a Laid-Back Hippy Persona to Cover Up That They Are Uptight Control Freaks" that one commenter helpfully suggested. Just like I suspect that living in denial about their closet homosexuality is far more common among the lefty males than among us on the right, I also suspect that, as unintentionally revealed by their fantasies of shadowy conspiracies of rich Nazis who routinely kidnap, rape and murder women, obvious psychological projection in its refusal to acknowledge the real world if I have ever seen one, most of the real-world rapes are committed by liberals. For example, the left's very own utopian model society Sweden currently boasts the highest rape rates in Europe.

Atomic fallout

2012-01-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

I started watching the second season of Crime Story. Even though filmed in the eighties, the Fremont Street could still play itself in the sixties in the era when men were made of steel and nuclear explosions were still the height of cool. The dialogue has some comical lingo such as the euphemism "neighbourhood girl" and the expression "cleaner than a Chinese laundry". That Michael Mann fella sure seems like scenes where two unsuspecting undercover cops sitting in a parked car are annihilated with military-grade heavy weaponry. Just like everything else that preceded the mainstream Internet, this show is also slow-paced enough (and my Mac screen is wide enough) that I can run the video on one window, and during all the lull time, temporarily switch my attention to the web browser, this way creating a strange mixture of old and new.

Altucher Confidential: "I Hate Feeding My Kids"
Brooklyn Ink: "Soft Porn, Hardening Hearts" (seeing the first photo, I was instantly reminded of that one Family Guy skit)
Cheap Talk: "Averting Your Eyes"
Vedant Misra: "The Best (Of The Best)^4", "Elevator Algorithms" (hmm... there's an idea for a programming project / contest if I ever get to teach an AI course again)
Programming in the 21st Century: "A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of"
Raganwald: "Five Things Roger Ebert Taught Me About Criticizing Programming Languages"
Rhymes With Cars and Girls: "TV Doesn't Pay"
Slate: "The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See"
Ultratechnology: "Introduction to Thoughtful Programming and the Forth Philosophy"
Xtranormal: "So You Want To Get a Ph.D. In Theoretical Computer Science" (sure, the animation quality is not quite yet at the level of Tintin, but hey, it's the content that matters)
Zunguzungu: "A Nation of They"

Just like... the big mushroom!

2012-01-04T05:51:00.001-07:00

Half an hour with the morning coffee, and suddenly the Google Reader starred list is like that monument in the end of "2001", full of stars. I wonder, how many days does it take today's average person to read as much text as Plato read in his entire lifetime? I don't know, but I plan to spend the rest of this suddenly very cold week to find out, before the next semester starts.

Business Insider: "108 Giant Chinese Infrastructure Projects That Are Reshaping The World" (but it was only a couple of years ago when Dubai Was Nuts)
Command Center: "Esmerelda's Imagination"
Le Cygne Gris: "Why I Don't Care About Poor People"
Defunct: "Why Ad Blocking Is Not a Moral Dilemma" (if everyone simply stopped paying for bits like I have sworn to do, all these petty problems would vanish overnight)
John Derbyshire: "Pick-Pocketed in Peckham" (again, recall "A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece")
EconLog: "The Bell Curve or The Bimodal Distribution?"
Forbes: "10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution"
Abtin Forouzandeh: "Pay Your Programmers $200/Hour"
Kevin Kelly: "Beyond The Uncanny Valley"
Daniel Lemire: "Are You A Gold Prospector, Or a Construction Worker?"
Megan McArdle: "Why Can't Hollywood Get Washington D.C. Right?"
McSweeney's: "Fading The Vig: A Gambler's Guide To Life" (although contrast these delightful stories of the "guys and dolls" of our age to Honest Abe's grim eliminationist view of gamblers)
MoneyMamba: "No, Really: What Is Your Time Worth?" (I will never stop shaking my head at people who drive across town to wait in line for gas that is cheaper by five cents a liter, often with some $3 cup of coffee in their hands)
Raptitude: "There Are No Clean Slates, And You Don't Need One"
Slaughterhouse 90210: "We Exist Because of Suburbia" (and how!)

Homo homini lupus

2012-01-03T15:37:00.001-07:00

Now that times are getting more surreal for those who haven't properly prepared for them, while those of us in the "know" understand that all we see is just objective reality reasserting itself after most of us had long closed our eyes and wished upon a star, I start the year 2012 with cautious optimism. I mean, it's not like I would have considered something like "Occupy PokerStars" or "Columbia U to offer course in Occupy Wall Street" to be real things in this world, but oh, what I would give to be able to pipe a few chosen articles such as "President Obama Signs Indefinite Detention Into Law" back in time to just a couple of years to... say, January 2009, the time when idiot liberal triumphalism was at its peak all around the world and they thought that socialism would take over the world. So, guys, after only three short years, how did that one work out? Meanwhile, the torrent of good posts is so massive that even though I flushed just a few hours ago, I have to flush this thing again so that it won't overflow.

Armed and Dangerous: "Through The Mirror, Darkly"
Beezer Notes: "Two Master Degrees But In Poverty Due to Student Loan Debt and Sickness" (pray in one hand, poop in the other, see which fills up first...)
Brad Ideas: "Maybe You Shouldn't Give a Nice Bag As Your Conference Schwag"
Charlie's Diary: "Sometimes I Hate Being Right"
Coyote Blog: "David Henderson Talks to the Occupy Folks"
Dubious Quality: "McDonald's" (see also "Everybody Gets Rich")
Hit Coffee: "The Other Rubber Rooms"
House of Eratosthenes: "Anti-War" (ha ha, and of course, most "anti-war" people are really just "pro-enemy")
Inside Higher Ed: "Why We Disrupt" (I link to this one to highlight the point that for all their posturing of free speech and tolerance, ultimately the only language that liberals listen to, understand and respect is violence)
Kids Prefer Cheese: "Not The Onion?" (I am so jaded that I guessed the correct answer on the first lazy scan... but speaking of cheese...)
Maverick Philosopher: "Neologisms, Paleologisms, and Grelling's Paradox" (but what is the similar opposite of "obviologism"... perhaps "cryptologism"?)
Larry Sanger: "On Educational Anti-Intellectualism: a Reply to Steve Wheeler"
SymOmega: "No 16-Clue Sudoku Puzzles… Finally Proved!" (eventually, combinatorics will have exhausted every possibility)
Throne and Altar: "Personal Insults: Liberal and Conservative Style" ("We accuse liberals of being what they champion"... this, a thousand times this... I just love accidentally stumbling into these rare posts like this that instantly make me want to read through the entire blog and compile a list of the best posts there)

Organ grinders

2012-01-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

A news item is making rounds that Obama administration is considering making requiring a high school diploma illegal discrimination. Well, once you accept the idea that employers should not be allowed to discriminate based on criteria that don't directly affect job performance, it's hard to see why this would be any different from saying that they can't discriminate based on race or sex. In fact, I would wholeheartedly support the Harper government initiative of banning all discrimination based on the college degree, unless the job specifically requires a particular degree, such as a doctor or a lawyer. This would prevent employers, now de facto banned from using many more accurately discriminating criteria, from requiring college degrees as proxies for middle class values and expensive filters at zero cost to themselves while imposing a gargantuan cost on the rest of society, especially its marginal members with insufficient cognitive capacity for college education. Then all colleges and universities could decrease their student intakes by one third and massively increase the quality of their degrees, and also get rid of all the nonsense degrees needed to accommodate students who can't do math and logic but still need some degree so that they can get some job that in all sane societies would be done by a high school graduate.

On the next page

2012-01-03T15:01:00.003-07:00

Roger Ebert's essay "I'll Tell You Why Movie Revenue Is Dropping..." is making rounds, reminding us once again that to kill some industry, you don't need to snatch away its entire revenue, but only whatever its profit margin is. And that one is razor thin for movie theaters, those remaining behemoths of the seventies that now that I think of them, seem as antiquated as VHS tapes. Or magazines, another dying relic of the past where it would have been economically and physically infeasible for writers to copy and distribute their individual articles for readers interested in them, so magazines served as information middlemen and centralized points of decision making that, at the slight risk of redundancy, packaged articles into convenient compilations that were feasible to copy and distribute to readers while also offering handy venues for advertisers. But now that individual articles can easily live on the Internet so that they can be searched, copied and distributed at essentially zero cost, they no longer need magazines as delivery devices from the writer to readers, so the only reason left to have magazines at all are the brand names that promise the readers something about the style and editorial responsibility.

The silent language of the unheard

2012-01-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Ace of Spades: "Steel Panther, The Greatest Band Ever" (truly)
Blunt Object: "Profits, Not People" (compare to "Quotation of the Day" and "Demonizing Wal-Mart")
Ben Casnocha: "Eat Global, Not Local" (the doctrine of mercantilism has been resurrected from the dustbin of history by renaming it "localism", but in practice both are objectively the same ideology)
Critical Thinking Applied: "The Atavism of Totalitarianism"
Bookworm Room: "The Coming Soft Dark Ages"
Ed Driscoll: "Apocalypse Now" (and let's not forget such gems as "By the year 2000, one fifth of American heterosexuals will have died of AIDS", "The efficient central planning of the Soviet Union will leave our inefficient system based on redundant competition in the dust", and a hundred others in the same vein)
The Endeavour: "Moore's Law Squared"
Five Feet of Fury: "George Carlin Wasn’t Funny: The Top Five Most Overrated Comedians"
Jim Goad: "Blight of the Living Dead"
John Graham-Cumming: "International Object-Sizing Tool"
Mathematical Poetics: "The Idea of Holonomy"
Overcoming Bias: "Low Status Workers Are NOT More “Exploited”", "Me-Now Immortality"
The Ship Has Sailed: "Quick And Dirty: Three Litmus Tests"

To put right what once went wrong

2012-01-03T08:51:00.001-07:00

We watched "Source Code", the thriller where Jake Gyllenhaal finds himself in middle of strange events that include time travel and distorted reality of him desperately trying to find out what is going on, with occasional visions of this weird human rabbit... oh, wait, that was a different film. As Jake repeatedly quantum leaps to the past, he pummels his way through various brown people looking for the terrorist, eventually uncovering a group of Al-Qaeda fanatics... nah, just kidding, of course it's an unpleasant lily white guy who calls himself a "patriot" and brandishes American flags. It must be so hard to find inspiration for mass murderers these days. In the end, Jake discovers that the power of love allows him to stay in the past and that he changed the actual reality, not just some parallel alternative, so all these people who died in the terrorist attack get to continue their lives as if nothing had happened. Except the one guy whose body Jake jumps into, whose consciousness I guess just magically vanishes, but hey, he was probably some meaningless redshirt anyway. His family, friends and colleagues might wonder why he has suddenly became a completely different person, though.

Pinch hitter

2012-01-01T12:23:00.003-07:00

In the game of Trivial Pursuit, questions such as which continent has the lowest highest mountain are universal and unlikely to change in foreseeable future editions, but the easiest way to stump me is to ask me a simple baseball question, or any sports question. If the category was just "sports" instead of "sports and leisure", I'd probably never get that pink wedge. So just like I'd answer any unknown music question with "Beatles" with a good chance of being right (or a death question of some olde-timey celebrity, "in a plane crash" since back in the day, air travel was actually dangerous), I'd just say "Mickey Mantle", "Babe Ruth" or "Ty Cobb". However, one question with the answer "Lou Gehrig" reminded me of the joke in The Sopranos when Christopher wondered how freaking unlikely it was that the guy died of Lou Gehrig's disease. I thought of that and realized that this question is not stupid at all, since that outcome really was extremely unlikely. As a comparison, what probability would you now assign to the future event that I will one day die of some newly-discovered disease that will then be named "Ilkka Kokkarinen's disease"? Way less than one in a trillion, I'd guesstimate, even for some big name celebrity.

Link-in park

2012-01-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Seeing that I already managed to break the New Year's resolution that I made, the first batch of links for the year 2012 may or may not foreshadow any trends to watch, especially the Diamond Age scenario of economic Brazilification (damn, the editor window still puts the red wavy underline under it but by 2015, everyone who matters will use this word) into winners and losers as analyzed by Charles Murray in his latest work, but as always, hopefully it is as entertaining and educational for my readers as compiling it was for me. In the end, everything is text, even when we temporarily think of it as something else.

Brave New Life: "The Non-Retirement Generation" (as Mark Steyn recently pointed out, the most amusing thing about the Occupests is how they can't comprehend who caused their poverty... of course, living with your parents is how most people have always lived outside this temporary anomaly of the modern Western world)
Jack Donovan: "Hate Globally, Like Locally" (the title alone)
Freakonomics: "Can Parking Direction Tell Us Anything About Company Morale?" (we need a new word for these single bits of data that still somehow condense everything important in them)
I Beg To Disagree: "Guilt By Association" (one good way for liberals to convince me that they are not dishonest communists would be to at least in some disputes take the side of us conservatives against communists)
Scott Locklin: "Never Trust Anyone Who Hasn’t Been Punched in the Face"
Mr. Money Moustache: "Prospering in an Anti-Mustachian City" (although much like violence, physical segregation is a vastly undervalued technique in resolving conflicts)
Multiplication by Infinity: "The Privileged Character of 3+1 Spacetime" (the word "privileged" made me immediately wonder how to turn this into a Sokal hoax for the new millennium)
Ben Nesvig: "Fun vs. Happiness"
Offbeat Girl: "Thoughts On Being Batshit Crazy" (it's cute when girls do it)
Occupy Babel!
The RBC: "Small Lies Are The Lubricant of Civilization" (I have no idea who this Keith Humphreys character is, but you know, I am going to confidently bet "STEM Ph.D.")
Spleenville: "I Want To Punch Rembrandt In The Face" (ha ha, again the title alone... but compare to "Hipsters Ask for Criticism, Want Only Praise")

Later no harm

2012-01-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I decided to revamp my big batch of array problems that I use one entire lecture to go through in the first programming course, weeding out all the boring problems and those that added nothing, kept the good ones and added some more, and then went through the Wikipedia page on voting systems and electoral methods, and turned as many systems there as I reasonably could into Java programming exercises. It's always better when an exercise is about something real, since reality has certain innate hairiness in it, and it is always pleasant to discover a handy shaving blade that makes it smooth as the proverbial baby's bottom, and it's hard to think of exercises on two-dimensional arrays that have a natural feel about them. The next thing I ought to do is try to find the energy for would be to take the batch of final review questions that is now literally a decade old (I just got "ten-yeared" in what I do, heh) and, albeit having edited it in a few places, now gives me the same surreal feeling as the original Trivial Pursuit that I just wrote about. I sure had a weird mindset when I first started teaching here.

Tales from the bit heaven

2012-01-01T11:14:00.003-07:00

I keeping linking to good stuff and will soon compile the first batch of this new year, but I remember four great blog posts from years ago that I have occasionally been trying to Google with zero success, which annoys me because I bet that whatever these people write today is also just as great. First, a guy who listened to somebody complain about living in America and just replied that you know, maybe he is just doing America wrong. Second, a female writer (who may have been some kind of stripper) vividly describing how she went to see a very stereotypical mob lawyer who saved her thousands of dollars in taxes in fifteen minutes. Third, a guy who wrote a serious article about the sex lives of the disabled, and had it published in Hustler that edited it into lurid tales of horny slobbering retards. (My searching for that one may have left rather interesting Google searches into various visit logs.) Fourth, a white guy who lived in a ghetto and who described how, when he was one day sitting in his yard behind a fence, had a crack whore run to him to hide from a gang that was chasing her, and she... well, returned the favour (in Police Academy style) while the guy was telling the gangstas that yeah, she ran that way.

Before Wikipedia, when you actually had to know stuff

2012-01-01T11:05:00.001-07:00

Last night waiting for this brand new and shiny year, the questions in the game of original Trivial Pursuit (played against boomers pumped up on balsamic vinegar, but I held my own surprisingly well) reminded me of the completely different mindset that people had in the seventies and eighties, and a ton of people, words and terms that I honestly haven't seen mentioned anywhere since I was a kid. Of course the game showed its age in various places, such as the question "What city has the largest black population in the world?" with its surprise answer New York. (Not even close today.) Sure, the demographics of Gotham are very different from what one might assume from movies and TV shows, and back in the day even the Finnish joke books only had to say "Harlem" and not need to explain certain jokes any further. I realized a few weeks ago that the one rut where I am probably deepest stuck in the seventies mindset is that I still automatically think of all martial arts as "karate", even though no serious security or other professional applicator of violence has probably even practiced that for decades, let alone taken out an attacker with a well-placed "karate chop".

The chillax factory

2011-12-30T17:38:00.003-07:00

That nearby restaurant location that I have written about many times before, the cursed one where every attempt to open a restaurant has failed before the opening night, finally opened its doors, so we decided to finally visit the place before it closes. The investors had clearly put some effort in it starting with brand new fancy doors, while the inside had been renovated into a snazzy nightclub that works as a restaurant bar during the normo hours. The hostesses and waitresses seemed way younger, hotter and more slender than in places we'd normally frequent, and the food was actually quite excellent, so props (or whatever you kids say these days) to whoever hired the kitchen staff and designed the menu. I wouldn't know how the overall decoration with lots of uneven rock measures up to what is normal in nightclubs, but I can already confidently predict that the unisex restroom located upstairs will witness numerous drunken accidents, seeing that the stairs leading there have one half-step, and the restroom itself is inexplicably split in the middle so that one half is one step lower than the other half. On the way out, I chuckled at the poster for their upcoming New Year's party that was essentially identical to the generic poster that is now making the rounds.

Laugh, learn, grow

2011-12-30T10:53:00.002-07:00

My readers are probably not surprised to learn that I enjoy watching "Beyond Scared Straight", the reality show that sends budding little criminals to prison to experience the future that is waiting for these ugly little weeds unless they change their ways. However, I was surprised how in one new-to-me episode both the guard and the burly prisoner running the program explicitly threatened these kids with prison rape. Sure, prison rape has always been an effective extra punishment that very credibly and efficiently (in fact, at zero cost) deters weaklings and middle class normos from becoming career criminals, but even so. I next switched over to TLC, even though I rarely watch their "I weigh 700 lbs" and other freak-of-the-week "educational" shows, but the documentary about extreme tightwads seemed interesting. However, I just about lost it when the guy who saved money by "bartering" was described to work very hard to constantly find good bartering opportunities so that he doesn't need to have a real job. On the other hand, his "bartering" seemed indistinguishable from outright begging in how he, for example, went to a donut shop and offered to sing a song in exchange for one donut.

Voting with your clicks

2011-12-30T08:35:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Angry Birds, I say it's time to toss the notions of "level" and "progress" to the dustbin of history and just let the players directly play whichever level they want, instead of making them jump through the hoops of toiling through some annoying level n before they are allowed to even see the fun level n+1. This would be combined with an automated bookkeeping mechanism that keeps track of which levels people actually do play for fun when given free choice, and then suggests these levels to other players. Make the damn games work the same way that pretty much everything else works these days, since isn't the goal to make games more lifelike and realistic anyway? If you want to listen to some peppy song by a new band, are you first required to sit through the entire collected works of some other, much worse band? What a moronic idea, and yet this is exactly the thinking that most games are built on. Of course, even advanced things can regress. One especially annoying thing for me about OS X Lion was how it broke Expose so that it now groups windows behind each other, which is pretty much the exact opposite of "exposing" them, yes?