Cherry Chocolate Rain

It really, really freaks me out that that seems to be that kid's real voice.

Brilliantly composed photographs

Amusing/cool.

What the dilly-yo, Firefox?

Not that anyone cares, but I have finally given up on Firefox for the mac.  It's been really buggy lately and keep hanging at weird moments.  I heart FlashBlock, but not enough to make me suffer through my web browser not working.

Back to Safari it is.  <Dr. Claw voice>"You win this time, Jobs!"</Dr. Claw voice>

Your daily douchebag (11/28/07)

A long overdue DD (maybe it should be douchenozzle now?) to the distinguished Karl Rove. The Prince of Darkness hasn't really been in the spotlight lately. Then he came out with this gem.

Apparently, it was the Democrats who were in such a big goddamn rush to go to war in Iraq while Bush, level-headed, patient leader that he is, wanted to delay the Iraq vote until after the November elections so as not to, you know, politicize it.

Wow.

Is lying instinctual at this point for him? Does he lie about pointless stuff just out of habit? Like, does he just immediately answer, "Lucky charms!" when you ask him what he had for breakfast, regardless of what he actually had? I have no doubt he could pass any lie detector test on anything at this point. My question is whether there's any distinction left in that swirling vortex of evil that is his brain between his manufactured reality and the...oh, hell, what's it called?...truth.

Just...wow.

Fuck graduate school

I could be developing a true talent.

The failure of OLPC

This BBC article gives a nice summary of why I think the One Laptop Per Child project is misguided. First and foremost:

"In an interview with the BBC, Nigeria's education minister questioned the need for laptops in poorly equipped schools.

Dr Igwe Aja-Nwachuku said: "What is the essence of introducing One Laptop per Child when they don't have seats to sit down and learn; when they don't have uniforms to go to school in, where they don't have facilities?"

The whole concept is...okay, I'm not going to say dumb. Its heart is in the right place. But really, this is running before you can walk. Spend the money on teachers, desks...infrastructure, for chrissakes, before you go blowing $100 million on an unproven technology without the lesson plans, teacher training, etc. to go along with it.

Nevermind. Yes, it is dumb. And now Negroponte is spouting conspiracy theories about Intel and Microsoft undermining them. Actually, the problem isn't so much conspiracy theories as, well, the fact that he seems surprised that an effort to flood a good portion of the world's untapped markets with new hardware and new software might, you know, catch Intel and Microsoft's attention. Umm...duh? These are multi-billion dollar industries. You expected them to roll over out of some kind of corporate morality?

Daily Douchebag (11/26/07)

...and a hearty, "Hey! Fuck you!" to, well, to both President Bush and the National Review for taking credit for something that, not only did they not help facilitate, but more realistically did their best to impede.

Why? Well, maybe you heard about the recent effort to turn skin cells into stem cells. Apparently, at least according to the White House and the National Review, yeah, that was all Bush. Because apparently politicizing science and nixing basic science funding really inspired those guys to do their best work.

What a fucking douchenozzle...

"Cheney Found To Have Irregular Heartbeat"

The "irregular" isn't as surprising as the "heartbeat" part.

(You might think that joke would be beneath me. You'd be wrong.)

A bad combination

You know what I've decided is a really bad combination? Having lots of things you want to do, but at the same time being lazy, inefficient, and basically unproductive.

Funny, that.

Parasailing freighters

Very cool, but there's an important, unaddressed question:

"The Beluga shipping company that owns the 460-foot Beluga said it expects the kites to decrease fuel consumption by up to 50% in optimal cases as well as a cutback of the emission of greenhouse gases on sea by 10 to 20%. Interestingly, the ship will be hauling windmills from Esbjerg, Denmark to Houston, Texas."

...which is, why the fuck is Houston stockpiling windmills?

Color me dubious

A portable nuclear reactor, huh? Safe, you say?

“In fact, we prefer to call it a ‘drive’ or a ‘battery’ or a ‘module’ in that it’s so safe,” Hyperion spokeswoman Deborah Blackwell says. “Like you don’t open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don’t ever open it or mess with it."

Hey! Wait a minute! What you're describing is...is...Happy Fun Ball!

If There Were a God... (11/25/07)

...he would have struck this man down with a bolt of lightening long, long ago. *shudder* (nsfw)

Whatever you do, _don't_ watch the video clips. I didn't. And I know if I did, my brain would break. The pictures were bad enough.

As the article says:

Not to be all “Think of the children!” — but seriously, think of the children.

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.

The Discovery Institute can't even get copyright correct

Okay, that's it. The gloves are off now. It's one thing to spout anti-evolutionary pseudo-science. It's another to pirate the stuff biologists produce without attribution (especially when it's Harvard biologists who made it).

I hope Harvard Law has a field day with this one and sues those idiots out of house and home. Especially since they seem to have made their home in my backyard. I think the term "infested" might actually be more appropriate...

Kasparov arrested

Predictable but sad. Things seemed like they were looking up for Russia under Gorbachev, but it looks like they are descending back into the old ways. Sigh.

"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.

The Washlet

These people apparently have a way, way, way too intimate relationship with their toilet. (very mildly nsfw)

Ahmed the Dead Terrorist

Mmm...culturally insensitive-tastic...

AdultSheepFinder.com

"I am a Man/Woman/Couple/Group looking for Anything/1-on-1 sheep/discreet sheep/multiple sheep/shaved sheep/sheep fetishists/black sheep/"dogging"/transgender sheep"...

It's the official dating site of New Zealand!

Top 10 on wikipedia vs. top 10 on conservapedia

Obsess much???

Dude, that's a lot of thinking about gay stuff. You guys sure you're okay over there?