Ayn Rand rant

In a fit of procrastination, I succumbed to my impulse to post on Digg, and I actually came up with a fairly concise description of my objections to Ayn Rand and Objectivism:

"There is a certain irony in Ayn Rand's philosophy in that she held "reason", which she defined roughly as "an objective view of reality," as the ultimate goal of life, and yet psychological studies prove time and again that people, when viewed objectively and scientifically, are fundamentally irrational. Animal training, conditioning with rewards and punishments, is a far more accurate model and effective guide to molding human behavior than any of her nonsense.

Rather than providing a guide for improvement, Rand's philosophy has served mostly as (ironically) a rationalization for discrimination ("if they're poor it's their own fault", "black people are incapable of the same kind of civilized reason that white people are", "women can't be trusted with anything important because they're too emotional", etc.), and consequently a blinder to the inadequacies of capitalism and free markets that arise from humanity's basically impulse-driven nature."

Infertility rant

Okay, seriously? I have exactly zero sympathy for bourgeois whining about the hardships of infertility. Don't compare the "suffering" of your "disease" to, you know, actual suffering and actual disease.

1. The world is already over-populated, and it's only getting worse. Your gas wouldn't cost so goddamn much if there weren't a billion people over in India and China who are suddenly discovering, "Heeeey...you mean, we don't have to live in squalor? And these 'vehicles' you speak of..." We don't need your own personal screaming shit factory adding to the problems.
   
2. Last I checked, the world was still full of unwanted babies and parent-less children in orphanages. If you want a baby so much, shut up, get over your goddamn genetic protectionism, and adopt one of them.

For fuck's sake...Americans get worked up over the dumbest shit...

The tragedy of the tutu

This is what I apparently do instead of research.

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Subject: This shall not stand!

I write to you, gentle-folk, to tell you of a travesty of staggering proportions. I arrived in the systems lab and immediately felt, in the depths of my soul, that something was deeply, deeply wrong. For a time, I could not fathom what was amiss, but the room felt dark, as if a savage murder had been committed here many years ago.

It was only when R pointed, her hand quivering as her brain undoubtedly struggled to process the savage deed, at the garbage can that my malady gained focus. My face blanched, and my jaw dropped agape, as I beheld the horror.

There, cruelly scrunched in pink mourning, lay my beloved tutu.

It is here that I must hastily remind you to breathe, gentle reader, for I was quick to save the poor thing from its fate. Disaster has, fear not, been averted. But, oh, the savagery of it! That the clearly soulless walking corpse that Shall Not Be Named but shall be referred to only as ******** ******** could behold the majesty of such a tutu, could be bathed in its wonder, and still, with malice aforethought and cruel intent, brazenly toss it in the garbage as one might a common candy wrapper or banana peel, shakes me to my very core!

What has this world come to, I ask you! What depraved state has this world decayed to that a tutu...a shiny, elegant, pink tutu...should, instead of inspiring the beholder to exclaim with glee, "Oh! The joy! The wonder! Let us hold a Pretty Pretty Princess Party in celebration of such a fine specimen of a tutu such as this!", incite a colder, darker response more along the lines of, "Bah! What a wretched tutu! Quickly! Brush it into the waste bin like so much refuse so that this one piercing ray of hope and light in my horrible world can be extinguished and I can return to my dull, dreary existence of kicking puppies and raping chickens (or vice versa)"?

This shall not stand, friends! This is a call to arms! If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem! Stay vigilant! You may think to yourself, "Surely _I_ could not return to my office to find a tutu massacred into a wastebasket! Such tragedies only befall the morally corrupt and the less attractive! Surely I will never endure such trauma!" If you delude yourself thus, know this, friends: I was once like you. I skipped through life as you do, oblivious to this dark, savage side of the human spirit. But then today happened, and I will never be the same. Part of me died today, and the human soul is a delicate thing that, like a central nervous system neuron, is bestowed upon birth and cannot regenerate if damaged.

So take care, dear comrades. Nefarious forces are at work. Cast not a blind eye towards such depravity. The soul you save may be your own.

Nick

P.S. To pre-empt the obvious question, no, I don't actually ever do any real work. Just ask ******** ********.

A doozie of a moral conundrum

I actually find this British debate over what is and is not allowed when performing IVF to be fascinating. This seems one of the first real-world examples of what has traditionally been merely an amusing topic for the philosophically inclined over cups of chai.

The issue is this: a deaf couple wants to ensure, via IVF, that their next child is also deaf. The question is simple: should that be allowed?

Seems simple. The more you think about it, though, the more your brain gets tied in knots. Shouldn't a couple be able to control their ability to reproduce? Does it really matter whether they use scientific tools to more carefully control the nature of their child? Aren't they already doing that just by using IVF in the first place? Why shouldn't they be able to manipulate specific features of the embryo? Wouldn't you want to be able to ensure your child is healthy? Is ensuring your child is deaf, if you think deafness is important for the child, no different?

And yet, it's different. I'm sorry, but deafness is a disability. It's great that the deaf community has found energy and power in their disability by embracing it rather than let it impair them, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a disability. The anatomy of human beings is structured to allow hearing. If the sense of hearing doesn't work, that's a malfunction. And it seems wrong to intentionally damage a child in that way from the get-go. Would we let a parents ask a doctor to sever aural nerves? Fuck no. That would be child abuse. How is this any different?

If they are proud of deaf culture, fine. Physically disabling a child in order to force it to have to participate in that culture is wrong. If it's that important, the child gets to hear by default. When it reaches an age where it's capable of consent, it can choose to become deaf if it really wants to.

And that's what I think about that.

A deep thought

Fuck Hillary.

That is all.

Schadenfreude

I know it makes me a bad person, but I take surprisingly immense satisfaction from the comeuppance just doled out to the first-time parents on the documentary I just watched. Mom and dad are (inevitably Republican) Florida douchenozzles. Mom energetically told the camera, "I go for long walks every day because it's going to keep me limber and give me an easier birth!" and insisted on an "all-natural" water birth. Dad explained that while mom was going through the pain of childbirth, he had to endure the pain of giving up his vintage Porsche in favor of the more "family friendly" Hummer.

Mom's mom wrung her hands about the water birth saying, "You know, sweety, at the hospital if the pain becomes too much, they inject you with drugs and the pain goes away. At the birthing center, there are no drugs." Ditzy mom replies, "Oh mom, it will be fine! It will be wonderful!"

Cut to delivery. 9 hours of labor and still not ready to push. Expression on mom's face says, "OOOHHHHH! When you said it hurts, you meant it fucking _hurts_!" Mom is screaming. Nick gets immense satisfaction from the suffering of Ms. Twinkle Tits who didn't have the goddamn humility to think to herself, "Maybe I should listen to the woman who had three children when she tells me it's going to be a level of pain that causes anything else I have experienced in my young, spoiled life to pale in comparison."

People: anesthesia is the greatest discovery of modern science. Use it, you twits.

Girls Next Door

I've wanted to write more funny stuff here. So, I'm going to, you know, do that. Although this one is cheating...I'm stealing from an email I wrote (two, technically). But damnit, I made myself laugh.

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My roommate and I were watching Girls Next Door. If you're unfamiliar with the show, it's half an hour of the profound philosophical musings of Hugh Heffner's cadre of bimbos. Anyway, the show was following Hootie McBoob or Chesty Larue or Busty St. Clair or whatever the fuck her name was, and apparently the powers that be deemed her worthy of having a radio show on Playboy Radio where she and her dog host.

Don't worry...yes, there were a lot of things wrong with that sentence, so I'll go back.

Let's ignore for a moment that she's hosting with her _dog_. Let's ignore the fact her dog is in her purse...her bright pink purse...with its own microphone. That's not even the part that makes my brain hurt.

What makes my brain hurt is that she's on Playboy radio. Playboy. RADIO. The fact that Playboy Radio exists means that sometime, somewhere, there was some douchenozzle at a photo shoot where some peroxide blond with big ol' fake titties was smiling vacantly at the camera, and said douchenozzle stared at her for a moment and said to himself, "You know what that girl's most marketable attribute is? Her witty banter!"

It reminded me of the time I read the article about how they were opening a Hooters in Shanghai. Or rather, I didn't so much read the article as I read the headline and then laughed, and laughed, and laughed...

(I asked my friend Matt who lives in China about it. He said, "It's as ridiculous as you think. The girls there are jealous of the walls.")

I don't understand the cult of Hef. I think they do probably bang him (I heard someone on Law and Order actually use the term "shtupp," which is, I've decided, one of the dumbest euphemisms for boning) in the interests of furthering their careers. What I want to know is: do any of the girls actually find him attractive? Are any of them _not_ cringing when he hobbles towards them with viagra-fueled, geriatric lust in his eyes? With his freakish night-of-the-living-dead cock waving threateningly from his raisin-like form? I mean, I realize that attraction tends to be less visual and more about personality for women, but for fuck's sake there must be a line...

(did you throw up in your mouth a little there?)

Superstupid Superdelegates

Okay. I admit it. In this one instance, the Republicans got something right that the Democrats fucked up.

I refer, of course, to the Democratic institution of "superdelegates." You can read all about it here in Wikipedia, but basically superdelegates were a mechanism to maintain the power of the party leadership. Period. These Democratic leaders decided they didn't like, you know, democracy. So, being all-wise, they decided that their vote should count more than the Democratic electorate. You know...all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. That kind of thing. Orwell would be proud.

There are many ironies here. The first and most obvious is that the Democratic party is un-democratic. The second is that the rules were changed in response to the results of the 1980 election. In the 1984 election, the sage leaders of the party overrode the popular vote to nominate...Walter Mondale. Who, as we all know, went on to great fame and fortune having soundly defeated the re-election attempt of Ronald Reagan.

.....

Right.

And now, it's looking like there's a strong possibility that superdelegate support for Hillary Clinton is going to override popular support for Barack Obama. Yet again, the superdelegate system is going to prop up the entrenched aristocracy of the Democratic party in the form of Clinton party loyalists. The same people, let's remember, who managed to cede Congressional control to the Republicans in 1994 and orchestrate spectacular losses to George W. Bush. Twice.

Allow me to reiterate that because it's important: They lost to the dumbest and most corrupt Republican figure in modern history. Twice.

It was only when Howard Dean took over party leadership that they managed to barely scrape together a majority (with no small amount of help from spectacular Republican implosions).

Now, that system has worked so well that they're going to wave their hands dismissively at the first Democratic figure in my lifetime who has traditionally Republican voters considering supporting him in favor of the one figure in America whose name alone can reliably raise the blood pressure of half the country by at least 30 points.

God, the ineptitude of the modern Democratic party is staggering...

Obama vs. Hillary

Well, it seems to be coming down to this: will the Democratic party continue its long and distinguished history of choosing a fundamentally unelectable candidate by nominating Hillary Clinton, or will they actually go with a centrist who has momentum and can pick up independent voters and voters who don't usually come out for elections (by nominating Obama)?

The more I listen to Clinton, the more her voice grates on me. It just _sounds_ insincere. I heard her on NPR talking about how she's sat down with people and had delicious local microbrews with them, and I wanted to gag. She's simultaneously a political panderer and yet, at the same time, reviled by much of the country. It's like she has the worst of both worlds: she says what she thinks people want to hear, and they still hate her. Bleh. I can think of no better way to rally conservatives than to nominate her. And it depresses the hell out of me to think she might just get it.

As for Obama, I admit preferring him not because of any of his policies (in fact, I think Clinton's health care plan, which includes mandated coverage, is a better idea, though admittedly harder to sell) but simply because he's "new guard." I feel strongly that anyone who voted for the war resolution ought not to keep their job, and they sure as hell don't get to be promoted. Pragmatically, I think Obama's right that McCain will be able to nail Clinton on this point. She voted for the war. Period. As much as she tries to wriggle out of it, she voted for the fucking war. She rubber-stamped Bush. She went with the political winds, and that's not a quality people gravitate to in a potential President.

Yes, I know, "it's the economy, stupid." But on some level, it does come down to personality. Hillary really is unlikable, and she will continue to be unlikable no matter how much crying she does or how much she spins herself.

And speaking of the crying, it will backfire. It will gain her a certain portion of the female vote who will sympathize with her, but there's no way the American machismo will allow itself to vote for a girl who cries during press conferences. And frankly, I don't think that's necessarily something to condemn it for. Yes, machismo goes too far when it engages in "bring it on!" testosterone-laden cowboy diplomacy, but I'm sorry, stoicism is something you want in a leader. People don't follow leaders who visibly break down. We don't want leaders who are human. We'll vote for Sarah Connor, not Bridget Jones, for fuck's sake.

Is this really the kind of candidate you want to have? When you can have this?

In three days...

I will no longer be forced to go walking in a Winter Wonderland.
I will not have to be subjected to dreams of a White Christmas.
The little drummer boy will STFU.
And the nativity scenes will finally go away.

Oh, it will be blissful...

A quick defense of the anthropic principle

I have touched on the anthropic principle before; a concise metaphor occurred to me while watching a documentary on the formation of the solar system. (aside: did you know that all the water on Earth is believed to have accumulated from rocks displaced from the asteroid belt by Jupiter and hurled at Earth in the early solar system? Or that the moon was formed from the aftermath of a collision with some other nameless proto-planet? Crazy shit...)

Anyway...anthropic principle. Design arguments always seem so...anthropocentric. Narcissistic, even. They claim that the universe seems to be profoundly well-tuned exactly to support life. You start hearing the facts and it starts to sound compelling: tweak the weak nuclear force just a tiny bit, and atoms either collapse on themselves or fly apart. Tweak the gravitational force a bit, and the universe itself does the same thing. The universe has just enough mass, produced just enough carbon, etc. etc. etc.

But then you have to step back. Isn't this all a bit self-centered? Why are we so surprised? Let's use a simple metaphor: Imagine you just won the lottery. 6 numbers, each between 1 and 30. Right there are more than 400 million possible combinations, and YOU WON! Holy shit! How could this be?! 400 million possibilities and you got exactly the single combination that would win you a million dollars?! Surely it can't just be luck. That's so profoundly improbable, someone must have chosen you to win. God! God must have chosen you to win! There can't be any other explanation. God designed the game so that you won! How else could such a fantastically improbable event have come to pass?

See the logical fallacy yet? It feels very personal, but if you step back for a minute, something doesn't jive. Look at the lottery as a whole. Any single number, including the winning one, is highly improbable. But remember: there are millions upon millions of people playing, so _someone_ is going to win. And someone always does. There's always some excited woman with a bad hairdo who goes ballistic when they tell her she won. Every time. And indeed, that's the point: _someone is going to win_. The fact that the chance any single person is going to win is astronomically small doesn't change the fact that someone, somewhere, is going to win the lotto. It is a near certainty.

In fact, wouldn't it surprise you if you heard someone _hadn't_ won? It does happen every so often; they occasionally have to roll over the jackpot, which is when you get those really big lotto drawings. But what if the lotto went 10 times without a winner. Or 100. Wouldn't that freak you out way more than hearing some particular person had won?

Well, of course, the same analysis applies to the Design theory. I've said before that there's no reason to believe all arrangements of physical laws are equally probable, and hence the whole argument is relatively meaningless, but let's pretend for a second. What if bazillions of universes without the finely tuned physical constants existed before this one? Or what if there are other such universes existing in parallel to ours? Remember, a Design argument implicitly presupposes that all such universes are equally viable and, in some sense, equally probable, hence the excitement about being in the one where all the physical constants work out.

So, again, what about all those other universes? Well, there wouldn't be anyone there to see those other universes, now would there? They'd be lifeless voids, most of which would destroy themselves in short order. Not only would there be no life, there'd be no stars and perhaps no anything. Just a whole lot of nothing. Imagine it: a flotilla of parallel universes floating out there, dead. But remember: we know there's one combination of physical laws that does result in life. So somewhere out there, life crops up. On one of those myriad universes floating in that sea of nothingness, exactly the right combination of constants exist to foster life. Suddenly, that life wakes up. It looks around. Its eyes get wide, and it exclaims, "Holy shit! We won! God must really love us!"

Nope. Just probability. Combinatorics. Your little blue globe had to exist somewhere. We're happy for you and all, but it's just another lotto drawing. Someone had to win. And someone did. Yay. You want a cookie?

Generational divide in copyright

The obvious reaction is, "Well, duh."

But, of course, that's simplistic. Or at least, the issue merits further analysis. Why are kids much more willing to brazenly ignore copyright? I think the simplest answer is that they have grown up with modern technology a) that makes it easy to the point of being innate to copy data, and b) for which the instruments of copyright enforcement (i.e., DRM) present a perpetual annoyance and frustration when trying to do simple things like use a song that normally lives on their computer on their mp3 player when they go to the gym.

I honestly don't know what the right answer is when it comes to what public policy should be. As I've said before, I think watermarking, if it worked, would be a better solution than DRM. In general, I'm a big fan of using instruments of accountability for illegal activity over instruments of prevention. Indeed, that's the main problem with music distribution on the Internet. Think about it: when you walk into a toy store, you can play with the toys before you buy them. Hell, you can generally even walk out with them without paying and often get away with it. So why does anybody pay for anything? Partly out of an inner morality, yes, but I think more importantly because they stand to get caught. They, personally, can be seen walking out of the store. They can be caught on video with something they haven't paid for in their hands.

The point is that there's accountability. There ostensibly isn't prevention. It's not like there's a giant magnet that will suck the toy out of your hands. You aren't _prevented_ from doing something illegal (in the same way that your car's accelerator will not prevent you from going more than 65 mph). No, what keeps you from stealing, and what keeps you from speeding, is accountability if you do those things.

The Discovery Institute's talking about the Internet now???

Shit...really? _That_ Discovery Institute? Why are we listening to them?

Oh, and please don't use the term "scholar" and "Discovery Institute" in the same sentence. It physically pains me.

It shouldn't surprise me that the conclusion of Captain ID is that, "...and therefore net neutrality is bad." Incidentally, let me point out before moving on the following passage in the Ars Technica article:

"The first two [of Captain ID's] examples have nothing to do with any sort of commonly-understood concept of 'Net neutrality (neither Google, MySpace, nor Dell are network operators), but one sees what Swanson means."

How typical of Discovery Institute publications: "Well, it's kind of incoherent nonsense, but we can sorta kinda see the point the guy was ineptly trying to make."

First, let's point out that this is just the classic last-mile problem being rehashed. This has nothing to do with the capacity of the Internet itself. It's an economic rather than a technical problem.

Further, it's alarmist horse shit. They make it sound like we will continually need to upgrade wires into everybody's homes. We don't. Install fiber once, and the problem is basically solved, at least for the next few decades. The problem just becomes who is going to pay for the wire. And hey, psst, you know what? If private enterprise is balking at paying for it, we could...*gulp*...get government to do it. It's common infrastructure. That's supposed to be part of what government does. We did it with roads, we did it with electrical wires, and we did it with telephone wires. Why is fiber so different? Government builds the wires and then leases them to ISPs. You get the side benefit of inducing competition in the ISP market. Come on people, it's just not that hard!

If a bunch of schmucks from Utah can do it, I think we can handle the problem, don't you?

Software patent grumble

The more I see stories like this lawsuit against Apple for the iPhone's visual voicemail, the more angry I become at the state of IP law in the United States.

This is stupid.  Anybody can see that.  They're honestly claiming a patent on the ability to touch someone's name and hear a voicemail from that person?  Really?  _That's_ your significant scientific achievement, your innovation?

It's retarded.  You shouldn't be able to patent something any schmuck who has used a computer can think up in the course of having a cup of coffee, for fuck's sake.  Patents were supposed to promote innovation.  Now any time anybody designs any kind of hardware or software at all, they get sued for it.  It's ridiculous.

Communication whine

If I'm not careful this might turn into an _actual_ blog if keep up this existential musing crap...

I've had a lot of academic frustration lately. Some of it is purely logistical and political; this is not unexpected, and it will pass. But I've also had a log of...hmm...let's say "pedagogical" frustration. No, this isn't a coded way of saying I hate my teacher(s). More, I don't understand things, and when I search out resources to help me understand them, those resources are more likely to infuriate me than enlighten me. Notable exceptions to this are the professors in my department; indeed, that's one of the reasons I (heart) my department: it's full of insanely smart people who are remarkably eloquent and lucid in their explanations of things. Unfortunately, I can't go bug them for every little question that pops into my head.

My frustration revolves much more around written pedagogy in my field. It drives me absolutely batty how profoundly incapable most people seem to be when it comes to verbally communicating an idea. I think I've mentioned at some point previously how dismal Wikipedia is in this regard. On most normal, run-of-the-mill topics, Wikipedia does an admirable job of giving a coherent overview of a given topic. When it comes to highly technical topics, however, it seems to go off the deep end. Technical articles are so inscrutably technical that you basically need to understand the topic before you look it up.

Let me give you an example that made me want to bang my head against a wall today. I wanted to learn about support vector machines (SVM's). Here's Wikipedia's first paragraph in the support vector machine article:

Support vector machines (SVMs) are a set of related supervised learning methods used for classification and regression. They belong to a family of generalized linear classifiers. They can also be considered a special case of Tikhonov regularization. A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin; hence they are also known as maximum margin classifiers.

To understand my frustration, look no farther than the 3rd sentence: "They can also be considered a special case of Tikhonov regularization." What?! Why? Why the fuck is that the third sentence in the article?? If I'm looking this up in Wikipedia, chances are I want to understand what the fuck an SVM is from a high level. Why is the third thing you tell me related to an obscure formalism that I, and probably most people who look at the article, don't care about?

Then look at the fourth sentence: "A special property of SVMs is that they simultaneously minimize the empirical classification error and maximize the geometric margin..." Great. The third sentence told me about some weird formalism, and now you've used two terms ("empirical classification error" and "geometric margin") that you haven't defined, nor have you provided a link for. Meanwhile, you still haven't told me any of:

• What an SVM is in terms a lay-person (or at least a lay-person with a computer science degree) can understand
• What it's used for (in similar terms)
• Why it's called an SVM

Wikipedia goes on to note that there is "excellent introduction to the topic" at an external link. Let me excerpt for you what comes immediately after the opening notes of that "excellent introduction":

There is a remarkable family of bounds governing the relation between the capacity of a learning machine and its performance. The theory grew out of considerations of under what circumstances, and how quickly, the mean of some empirical quantity converges uniformly, as the number of data points increases, to the true mean (that which would be calculated from an infinite amount of data) (Vapnik, 1979). Let us start with one of these bounds.

The notation here will largely follow that of (Vapnik, 1995). Suppose we are given l observations. Each observation consists of a pair: a vector xi ∈ Rn, i = 1, . . . , l and the associated “truth” yi, given to us by a trusted source. In the tree recognition problem, xi might be a vector of pixel values (e.g. n = 256 for a 16x16 image), and yi would be 1 if the image contains a tree, and -1 otherwise (we use -1 here rather than 0 to simplify subsequent formulae). Now it is assumed that there exists some unknown probability distribution P(x, y) from which these data are drawn, i.e., the data are assumed “iid” (independently drawn and identically distributed). (We will use P for cumulative probability distributions, and p for their densities). Note that this assumption is more general than associating a fixed y with every x: it allows there to be a distribution of y for a given x. In that case, the trusted source would assign labels yi according to a fixed distribution, conditional on xi. However, after this Section, we will be assuming fixed y for given x.

What?! How is something that talks about a "fixed distribution, conditional on xi" an "excellent introduction"? Here's a general rule to go by, as far as I'm concerned: math is not ever an excellent introduction to other math. And indeed, this is the source of my frustration: people who have incredibly analytically adept minds (unlike mine) seem terminally incapable of explaining concepts in anything other than excessively, anally precise mathematical terms that obscure what the fuck they are talking about.

This has become a pet peeve of mine in no small part because stuff like this used to make me feel stupid. I thought I was an idiot because I found it really hard to understand. I am now of the belief that I find it really hard to understand because it's really fucking hard to understand. And, it doesn't need to be. Most people, including a lot of computer scientists and people who might be interested in a topic like this, *gasp* don't think in math. Like most people, a huge amount of their brain is dedicated to visual processing, so give me something to visualize. Also, like most people, it helps them to have a concrete example to frame what you're talking about before you go into the gory details of the theory. If someone would just take the time to write these things in an accessible manner, a lot more people would discover, "Oh, _that's_ what you're talking about! That's much simpler than I thought it was."

Here's what the article on SVMs roughly should have said:

"Support vector machines are a mechanism by which a program can learn to classify data. Imagine, for instance, your data lies on a 2D coordinate plane. Each data point is a dot on that plane, and the data falls roughly into two groups, which translates into two distinct clumps of dots on your 2D plane (perhaps one grouped somewhere around the y-axis and one around the x-axis, for instance). Support vector machines are a learning mechanism that allows an automated agent to segregate the data into the two groups (and, implicitly, to figure out which "clump" a new piece of data should belong to). It does this, roughly, by figuring out what line most cleanly divides one clump from the other."

See? Was that so fucking hard? That's the basic gist of support vector machines, and any schmuck with a basic college education can probably understand it. I'm not that smart. Other people just seem to have the communicative abilities of an orangutan. Grr.

Anyway, it's really really really really frustrating, and I hate it. I don't care how smart you are if you can't communicate your ideas effectively. Part of the reason I am not that interested in areas like security and things like puzzle-solving is that I hate having to figure out things that somebody else already knows but won't/can't/is too incompetent to explain to me. It feels like a profound waste of my time. There are too many problems out there that are hard to solve when we're _cooperating_ without introducing ones that arise just because we're incompetent dicks and can't or won't talk to each other.

"Taking Science on Faith" - find the logical fallacy, kids!

This kind of horse shit apologetics (small 'a', not big 'A') just irritates the fuck out of me, even more so given that the author is a physics professor and should know better. Here's the op-ed, and here's the problem with it:

First of all (and this is mostly just kind of an annoyed aside), the observation isn't even remotely novel. It's been around for quite a while, and anyone who took even the most basic course in philosophy will recognize we've slammed head-first, yet again, into Hume's problem of induction. You just rediscovered it, Mr. Davies. Congratulations. You want a cookie for that brilliant insight?

Okay, so if we start worrying on a philosophical level about the methodologies of science, then yes, Hume threw us a hell of a curve ball, one that is basically unresolvable. We only expect the future to resemble the past because, in the past, the future has typically resembled the past, etc. etc., blah blah blah. It is entirely possible that we could wake up tomorrow, the sky would be green, everything would be floating, the sun would have exploded, and time would be going backwards. Nothing in science can guarantee that won't happen.

So? Why is that an indictment of science? If you read Feynman's stuff (as I was trying to get a certain crackpot, who understands science even _less_ than Davies does, to do) he'll tell you that doubt and uncertainty are quintessential to science. Let's remember what the scientific method is:

1. observe
2. theorize
3. test
   

Note the conspicuous absense of "4. Declare as absolute, inviolate truth for ever more." Scientific theories hold until they don't. If the sun turns purple tomorrow, fine. All the theories the sun turning purple violates get thrown out. Sure, that would definitely turn the scientific _community_ on its head as it would constitute a violation of a lot of principles that had certainly seemed inviolate. But that wouldn't indict science as a whole even slightly. Step 3 is ongoing. It's never, philosophically speaking, done. Just because we continue to take as given theories that have as-yet failed to be falsified and build on them does not mean that it is _impossible_ that they will be falsified in the future. We just, personally, would be really damned surprised if certain ones were falsified at this point, because there is a mountain of evidence that has failed to falsify them, and DAMN did we ever spend a lot of time and money trying to rip them apart.

So, where Davies claims that, "Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith," I claim that Davies needs to go the fuck back to school because he doesn't understand the philosophical underpinnings of science, and he should keep his damn yap shut (or at least refrain from publishing idiotic op-eds in the New York Times) until he does.

(yes, I know I'm taking on a cranky tone...I'm just tired of seeing this kind of shoddy thinking over and over again, and if a damn academic can't get it right, we have no hope of the voting populace differentiating between pseudoscience like creationism/ID and _actual_ science)

Now, an entirely separate issue Davies brings up is the origin of the set of laws that (seem to, so far) govern the universe. Davies off-handedly dismisses his colleagues who claim, "that’s not a scientific question," but in fact (again if Davies understood science at all), that's the right answer. Why? Because we have absolutely no way of testing any hypothesis we come up with. Any explanation you could come up with as to why the set of laws are the way they are is almost by definition untestable. Think about it: how the hell would you test any explanation you came up with? What experiment could you do that would invalidate your hypothesis?

Here's another way to look at it: our only experience is with the particular universe we live in. Religious philosophers always like to posit things like, "Why is there something instead of nothing?" and then use that to justify a belief in god, but if we're being intellectually honest here, we have no justification for believing nothing is any more or less reasonable than something. We have no frame of reference, no way to control for variables. It's not like we have been in 99 other universes where there was nothing and then we happened upon this one where there finally was something. Nope. Just this one.

Similarly, we have no justification to believing this particular something is more or less reasonable a universe than some other, less life-friendly something. We have no framework in which to evaluate such reasonableness. We're kind of SOL on the scientific front in this regard. These are questions more suitable for philosophers and religions, although I of course feel the need to point out that any ideas they come up with are merely finely crafted bull-shittery since such ideas would be, say it with me now, untestable and unverifiable.

Sigh. The only thing worse than dumb people is dumb people who should be, and think they are, smart.

Halfnium fairy tales

I found this article in the Washington Post on "Halfnium bombs" profoundly depressing. This is exactly the way science is _not_ supposed to work (and why am I not surprised the Rumsfeld DoD had a part in it?).

We're talking about the next cold fusion in the sense that cold fusion also turned out to be a pipe dream. This is supposed to be _science_, boys and girls; if it can't be independently verified, it's a fairy tale. In this case, they tried to verify it once, failed, got yelled at by the kook who made the original claims because they supposedly did it wrong, ran it _again_ to his new specifications, and it still failed. On top of that, a group of the best and brightest reviewed the concept and said it didn't work, hadn't worked, and fundamentally couldn't work. In other words, independent verification failed. Spectacularly. So why the fuck are we still spending money on this horse shit?

On top of it all, the episode has all the telltale signs of pseudo-science. When you start claiming that the reason your idea has not been accepted is because of a cabal of established scientists who are too closed-minded to accept a "revolutionary" idea, that's pretty much sign #1 in my mind that you're probably a crackpot. The number of Galileos and Einsteins in the world is greatly outnumbered by nutcases with genuinely stupid ideas. Moreover, you'll notice that Einstein's theories were quickly proven _correct_ once objective experiments were devised. Reproducible results: there's a novel idea!

But you're right...I'm sure Einstein had much less resistance to his idea that time slowed down the faster you traveled and that gravity wasn't so much a force as a curvature in the 4th dimension. Clearly your ideas are much more threatening to the scientific establishment, and they're all just too incompetent to reproduce your results correctly.

Sigh.

I can't help but think this kind of shit is kith and kin to other forms of magical thinking Americans seem to be especially prone to lately like homeopathy and naturopathy. The terms "alternative" and "complementary" medicine, which have been bandied about a lot lately, drive me insane. They are idiotic, meaningless terms meant to suggest that somehow, you know, the scientific method just isn't quite cutting it. This is exactly the same logic used by people who try to tell you that you're being closed-minded when you won't consider the Bible as "another source of knowledge," "different" from science. Not inferior, or the refuge of crackpots, no! It's just "different."

Horse. Shit. I am so incredibly tired of this line of reasoning. Let's dispell it right now, shall we?

Science _is_ knowledge. The two are synonymous. If your "knowledge" is not scientifically acquired, it isn't knowledge. That was the whole point of the scientific method. Namely, if an independent 3rd party can't verify something, it isn't true. Period. End of statement. You can believe that extract of whosiwhatsis improves your mental health all you want, but if a double-blind study shows no difference between your extract and placebo, you're full of shit.

And indeed, that's the crux of the whole issue: the revolution that was science was the ability to objectively show someone was full of shit. See, the human imagination is powerful. It's capable of coming up with lots and lots of weird ideas about the world. But...psst...most of them are _wrong_. Hate to break your bubble, but there are certain rules the universe operates by, and if your rules contradict the universe's, hey, guess what? You lose. You can believe that your crushed DirtyHippyBerries will inspire your aura to enhance your body's natural disease resistance all you want, but in the meantime that cancer is going to keep merrily metastasizing until you're dead. Universe: 1, stupid hippy: 0.

There's no truth in belief, sunshine.

(In fact, it's even worse than that: the moment there _is_ truth in belief, it's not belief any more. It's been objectively verified, which means it's *gasp* science! So _by the very definition of it_, belief is not truth!)

Giuliani

Fyi, Giuliani is a giant douchenozzle. Not as obviously a douchenozzle as GW, but a douchenozzle nonetheless. Besides, as Biden so eloquently pointed out, not being able to say anything that isn't of the form, "noun + verb + 9/11," he is nepotistic, short-sighted asshole. And apparently only European tv is willing to say so.

What depresses me most is that the following is going to happen: Hilary is going to win the Democratic nomination, and Giuliani is going to win the Republican nomination. A combination of a well-organized Republican attack machine and Hilary's simultaneous ability to shoot herself in the foot and alienate everybody is going to allow Giuliani to win. And once he gets in the White House, he'll be the same douchenozzle he is today, and the people who voted for him will act surprised. Just like they did when GW turned out to be such a monumentally incompetent asshole.

So...fuck Giuliani and fuck Hilary, in that order. I'll be over here trying to figure out a way to monetize the kind of stupidity that gets these people elected.

Your daily douchebag (11/11/07)

Congratulations, House Democrats! You've just earned yourself a Daily Douchebag!

I don't even know where to start with this one. I know: let's start with the embarrassment of pork that was the Bush-veto-overridden Water Resources Development Act.

The WRDA proved once again that if there's anything that brings lawmakers together, it's a bill chock full of pet projects that are of dubious utility. I don't even know what things are in the bill; all I know is that if Trent Lott says the bill is filled with, “good, deserved, justified projects,” it's almost certainly a bad idea given Lott's history.

Point being, while Democrats are being spineless pussies about the important stuff...like, you know, _torture_...they crow about defying Bush in order to do important things like give additional money to the Bridges to Nowhere. And btw Democrats: I hate you perhaps most for inducing me to link to a Heritage Foundation page. I feel dirty in a way that a week's worth of showers is probably not going to fix. *shudder*

But, let's get to the crux of their current douchebaggery. After bitching (rightly) about Bush co. and the Republicans' completely fucked up priorities (Terry Shiavo, anyone?), they turn around and come up with this gem. Because really...what's the point in training the next medical researcher if he or she is going to have downloaded music illegally? Even if they come up with the next Polio vaccine, if an illegal copy of the latest Britney Spears album is festering on their computer, hasn't the moral battle already been lost?

The Republicans think the greatest threat to our country is gay people getting married. Democrats apparently insist that, no, really it's music piracy that will be the downfall of our civilization, and we must threaten the livelihood of our educational system in order to do the RIAA's work for them. And everybody is pandering to their fucking political and financial base as we bleed $200 million _per day_ on a war no one can come up with a coherent explanation why we're waging. Meanwhile, China (authoritarian regime though they may be) is actually teaching its students science, a fact that _might_ just have some long-term ramifications.

I hate everything.

Ron Paul

Having seen another car with "Ron Paul in '08!" written on the back, I feel the need to point out that just because Dr. Paul, unlike his Republican colleagues,

1. is not an utter moron,
2. holds a deeper understanding of and opinion about foreign policy than, "terrorists...bad!", and
3. is honest,

...that doesn't actually mean that his ideas are _good_. Yes, the whole, "we should never have invaded Iraq and should get the fuck out at the earliest possible moment" is a good idea and refreshing given the Republican field (hell, it's refreshing even given the Democratic field), but let's remember: this guy is a Libertarian at heart. He believes that, essentially, the federal government shouldn't exist. At all. We can have the military, but that's about it. No National Science Foundation. No National Institute of Health. No FDA. No EPA. Nothing. All federal research money would dry up instantly if he had his way. There would be no environmental or consumer protections. Hell, I'm pretty sure he'd get rid of the federal reserve as well. The guy is a nut. Just because he's a different kind of nut than the standard, modern neocon Republican fare, and just because he would be a more interesting, intelligent guy to talk to than most politicians doesn't mean he's any less of a nut.