The Blog Monster
[Most Recent Entries]
[Calendar View]
[Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
shagbark's LiveJournal:
[ << Previous 20 ]
| Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 | | 11:40 am |
My buddy George W. Congress is voting today on the USDA farm bill, which would cost us $60 billion/year, basically to give free money to rich farmers. George W. Bush wanted Congress to change the bill, so that farmers can't get federal assistance unless they make less than $200,000/yr, instead of $1,500,000/yr as with the present bill. He also said that maybe we should only give farmers money if crop prices fall, instead of giving them money just for being farmers. I am behind Dubya all the way on this one! http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080509.html | | Monday, May 12th, 2008 | | 9:36 am |
The problem: Global warming.
The answer: Nuclear power.
Next question. | | Friday, May 9th, 2008 | | 3:07 pm |
When you cross a newspaper with an encyclopedia
Yesterday, a news article came out saying that an ancient human settlement was found in South America, and that there were gomphothere remains in their waste pile. Today, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on gomphothere, to see what it was, and it had already been updated with information from yesterday's news. | | Friday, March 14th, 2008 | | 12:48 pm |
Irritation of the day Today, I'm irritated at... several things, but if I have to choose one, it's credit card ads like this one that tell you all about how many points you get for different purchases, but nothing about what "points" are good for. So I called the phone number, cursed their robot answering system, and eventually spoke to a human. Me: I want to know what the points I get are worth. Her: You get 3 points for every dollar you spend at Borders. You get 2 points for... Me : No, I want to know what the points are worth. How many dollars is a point worth?
Her: No, sir, you spend dollars and get points, not the other way around.
Me: So what can I do with these points?
Her: Do you want to know about the benefits of the Borders Reward card? What merchandise you can purchase with your points and how to redeem them?
Me: Yes, please.
Her: I'll have to put you on hold.
[long time on hold]
Her: Sir, that information will be revealed to you once you receive the card. | | Monday, March 10th, 2008 | | 2:21 am |
Galileo and the Church Today I'm irritated at apologists for the Catholic Church in the Galileo affair. I needed to look up the event, and I found some pages by Catholics and Catholic organizations, like this one and this one and this one and this one. The Catholic Church officially apologized for how they treated Galileo in 1992. But all the Catholic websites I found about it to day are very unapologetic. In fact, they think somebody owes the Catholic Church an apology, for holding up the Galileo affair as evidence that the Church was against science. Here's an extract from one of these apologias, which shows the comical extent of their not getting it:
OBJECTOR: Okay, so Galileo was not forbidden to continue his scientific work. But the fact remains that the Church condemned a proven scientific theory by invoking the Bible.
CATHOLIC: We must remember that no one—not even Galileo, has he acknowledged—had proof for the motion of the earth in 1632. Evidence would come later, but that evidence was not available to the judges in 1633. The first experimental confirmation of stellar parallax, for example, did not come until the nineteenth century with Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel’s observations. So believing that the earth was motionless was not absurd in the seventeenth century.
OBJECTOR: Even if there was not firm proof for the heliocentric system and thus for the motion of the earth, the Church still used the Bible to condemn a strictly scientific theory. That’s bogus.
CATHOLIC: Again, we must work hard at thinking historically. Most people today would not use the Bible in a scientific controversy, but that wasn’t the case in the seventeenth century. Many leading thinkers of that day believed that the Bible taught that the earth cannot move. For example, the great observational astronomer Tycho Brahe, himself a Lutheran, thought this way. He believed that this agreed with the physics of motion as then understood. And remember, there was simply no compelling evidence of the earth’s motion. For people at that time, if physics and the Bible seemed to agree, that constituted strong reasons to reject the motion of the earth.
Did you see the not-getting-it? They even wrote out the Objector's point, faithfully, twice, and still failed to get it: The Church used the Bible to condemn a scientific theory. It doesn't matter what the evidence for or against the theory was. It doesn't matter whether the theory was right or wrong. It doesn't matter that, as these pages never tire of pointing out, Galileo was a bit of a jerk. It doesn't matter that the Church interpreted the Bible "incorrectly" (which is apparently what the Pope apologized for, tho I can't find any copies of what he said). What matters is that the Church thought they had the right to tell people what to believe. Note that Galileo was condemned not just for teaching that the Earth went around the Sun, but for believing it - and for believing
... that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture
I'm not really mad at the Church. But I am angry at the apologists who, even now, are whining that, really, the Church didn't do anything wrong, and we should see it in the proper historical perspective. It's as if a present-day German were to complain that everybody was anti-Semitic in the 1930s. You can't adjust for the historical context in your judgement of someone, when it's the historical context itself that you're judging. And it's especially dishonest for Catholics to ask for us not to judge the Church of the 17th century by today's standards, because the whole reason people criticize the Church is for its insistence that the first century's standards should be applied to us today. I wouldn't be irritated if there were a spectrum of views from Catholics, with some who genuinely thought that the Church did wrong. But if there are any such out there, they're not posting web pages about it. | | Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 | | 3:30 pm |
Catch-22
My cell phone stopped working at the most possible inconvenient time, so I was cut off for days, waiting for my new cell phone to arrive. It came with instructions:
TO ACTIVATE YOUR NEW VERIZON WIRELESS PHONE PLEASE CALL 1-877-807-4646
I called the number and got a recorded message:
You cannot make this call, because your phone has not been activated. | | Friday, January 18th, 2008 | | 4:39 pm |
| | Sunday, December 30th, 2007 | | 12:14 pm |
Fox "news"
On Friday I watched Fox "news" with my parents. They closed with a "comical" film from YouTube that parodied Al Gore's global warming presentation, with a voice over saying that the world is in danger from our children, who are emitting CO2, and eating sand and thus eroding our coastlines.
Technically, they didn't make any arguments against anything Al Gore said. But the
purpose of the film clip was to make people associate Al Gore and his message about global warming, and farce.
This is an incredibly effective, and incredibly evil, propaganda method. They can't say anything rational to discredit Gore, so they just associate him with ridicule. And they do it all in the name of good fun, and pretend to be "fair and balanced"! | | Tuesday, December 25th, 2007 | | 9:24 pm |
From tafkad and madamruppy:
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Paper. Using a gift bag makes it look like you're trying to make up for not wrapping a gift by putting it in an expensive bag. Although the gift bag is more environmentally sensitive, since you can re-use it.
2. Tree--Real or Artificial? I like live trees much more, even though they're more work. But I'd choose whichever is more environmentally sound. If only I knew which that was.
3. When do you put the Christmas tree up? I usually don't.
4. When do you take the tree down? When it turns brown.
5. Like egg nog? Love it! What's wrong with you egg-nog haters?
6. Do you have a nativity scene? Nope.
7. Favorite gift received as a child? A guitar. It was fake, but for some reason I loved it.
8. Hardest person to buy for? My parents.
9. Easiest person to buy for? Abby. Anything with dragons.
10. Worst Christmas gift? Can't think of one.
12. Favorite Christmas movie? Miracle on 34th street - the original of course
13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? I shop all year round, and store the presents in my house. Then, near Christmas, I forget where I've put them, and rush out to buy new ones.
14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? Don't think so. Except white elephant presents.
15. Favorite food to eat on Christmas? A kind of cookie my mom makes, that is a bit like gingerbread, or maybe Graham crackers, if they were made into moist cookies and coated with icing.
16. Clear or colored tree lights? Depends on how the tree is decorated. If the whole tree is done in a single style, then clear. But if the tree has a mishmash of decorations gathered over 30 years, then colored.
17. Favorite Christmas Song? "I yust go nuts at Christmas", which I haven't heard in at least 20 years.
18. Travel during Christmas or Stay home? Travel to family who live nearby.
19. Can you name Santa's reindeers? Maybe. Not important to me.
20. Angel or Star on Tree top? Neither. The stars are too big, and it always looked uncomfortable for the angel.
21. Open presents on Christmas Eve or morning? Eve. It's a German thing.
22. Most annoying thing about this time of year? Non-stop Christmas carols. Which is funny, because other people always get irritated at me if I sing Christmas carols at any other time of year. | | 7:15 pm |
What I really wanted for Christmas: Earplugs
It's a testimony to the power of the Christmas spirit that, while shopping this weekend, I was able to get through 6 hours of nonstop Christmas carols without killing anybody.
If somebody would advertise that their store would have NO CHRISTMAS CAROLS for the week of Christmas, I'd shop there. | | Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 | | 10:57 am |
Spam now outnumbers email 10 to 1
Today's summary from the spam-filter for the domain gmu.edu:
Messages received by your organization in the past 24 hours
3751919 Junk
348437 Good | | Friday, December 7th, 2007 | | 1:04 pm |
Death of the desktop?
I don't have a phone in my house. I have a cell phone that is in my house when I'm in my house, but no landline. A lot of people don't, nowadays. It's an unnecessary extra expense. Landline phones are starting to disappear.
What about desktop computers? What are they good for nowadays? I do a lot of heavy number-crunching. Scanning genomes, comparing protein structures, collaborative filtering with 100,000,000 users. And I do most of it on my laptop. Sure, my code can run a little faster - maybe twice as fast - on my desktop. And I have 4G of RAM, instead of just 2G. And components (hard drives, DVD burners) are cheaper. But not cheap enough to make up for the cost of buying the desktop. And it takes me a lot of time to keep my files synchronized between my desktop and my laptop.
So why even have a desktop? Why not just have a big monitor, a big hard drive, and a nice keyboard at home, and plug your laptop into them?
Will desktops be unusual in 5 years?
Will somebody invent an external CPU that you plug your laptop into when you need more CPU? Probably not, since replaceable laptop screens or upgradable laptop CPUs are much more obvious and useful ideas, and it's been 20 years and nobody's done either of them yet.
In Japan, a lot of people don't even bother with laptops. They write on their cell phones. | | Thursday, December 6th, 2007 | | 6:08 pm |
Most popular song of all time: Linus and Lucy?
Move aside, "Yesterday" and "Stairway". Vince Guaraldi's "Charlie Brown Christmas" album must get more ears in the month of December, than any other musician gets in the entire year. They don't play it on the radio so much, so it doesn't show up in the lists of most-played music. But most stores in the US plays it several times a day during December. It's been that way every year for the past 40 years, while Led Zeppelin and Michael Jackson and Britney Spears have come and gone. | | Thursday, November 8th, 2007 | | 11:44 am |
I was just listening to C-SPAN on the radio. Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke was testifying before Congress. Someone asked him how he was going to handle inflation if he continued to keep the interest rate low.
He said - I am not making this up - that inflation isn't important, because most Americans get paid in dollars, and buy things in dollars. | | Sunday, November 4th, 2007 | | 9:16 am |
JK Rowling turns out to be an asshole JK Rowling is suing RDR Books, who wants to come out with an encyclopedaeic companion to Harry Potter written by Steve Vander Ark. Apparently, she's claiming that other people can't write books that even talk about her Harry Potter characters. In other words: Want to write a book about the physics of Star Trek? The Zen of Pooh? Or even a book of literary criticism? Too bad. In Rowling's imaginary legal world, soon to be made our real world by virtue of her huge financial power, only the author of a work of fiction can even talk about it in public. It is, however, OK for the author of a work of fiction to steal works written about her work of fiction, as Mrs. Rowling has already stolen some of Mr. Ark's writing and put it in as an "extra feature" on her Harry Potter DVDs without permission or payment. I tried to find a way to express my anger on www.jkrowling.com, but couldn't find one. You can choose to view either an awful Flash version of the website which takes forever to load and in which it is impossible to either find anything you're looking for, or to get back out of a sub-menu once you've chosen it; or you can view a text version with all the content left out. | | Saturday, November 3rd, 2007 | | 5:16 pm |
How Iraq's elections set back democracy This is an interesting article claiming that Iraq's elections set back democracy. I find this esp. interesting: "Furthermore, a new law should ban the use of religious symbols and rhetoric by candidates and parties - these have no place in democratic elections." Is it too radical to suggest a similar law in the US? | | Friday, November 2nd, 2007 | | 12:51 pm |
The root of all evil
I'm reading Napoleon Chagnon's book Studying the Yanomamo. He studied the dispersion of the Yanomamo population over time, as villages grew larger, then split in two and dispersed.
The popular account, among anthropologists, is that tribal warfare is an unusual condition, happening only when food becomes scarce. Food scarcity causes villages to split, and this causes warfare with neighbors.
Chagnon noticed two problems with this. First, nobody seemed to have food scarcity. Villages at war with each other were several days' journey apart, with most of the land in-between unused by humans. Second, villages would split as a result of fighting, rather than fighting always being caused by splitting. I will add that it seems from my reading that pretty much every village was always at war with some other village (although often a very intermittent, decade-long war with an enemy far away).
(This suggests that hostility is a group-selected trait, not just because it leads a group to fight with their neighbors until their neighbors move away and they can take their land, but because it leads a group to fight within itself until it splits and disperses. But I digress.)
Chagnon says, "The Yanomamo do fight about 'things' like bananas - or women - or possessions as such. I could easily fight with Moawa 'over a banana,' and one of us might get gravely injured, or killed. But the banana would have been only a very insignificant aspect of the fight. The real reasons for the fight would be very different and would have to do with the status system... In few cases in the Tropical Forest was intertribal or intervillage hostility and fighting clearly reducible to competition over scarce resources or population pressure (Carneiro, 1970)... Like the American military involvement in Southeast Asia, some tribal warfare is best interpreted from its political attributes." (p. 194-195)
But this doesn't explain the motivation of politics, or why people seek status. I think the root cause was best explained by one of his informants (p. 82):
Dedeheiwae: ... then they fought with each other with arrows and had a war, and then the Kohoroshitari fled.
Chagnon: Why did they fight?
Dedeheiwae: Don't ask a silly question like that! Women! Women! Women! Women! They screwed all the time and made a noise like this: wha! wha! wha! wha! when they screwed. Women! | | 11:05 am |
| | Monday, October 29th, 2007 | | 4:45 pm |
At least somebody likes us... sort of From an article in The International Tribune on Burma: None of the three saw a solution. One said he would "wait out" the geriatric junta. Another, like many people in Yangon, hoped for an unlikely U.S. invasion. "When American troops attacked Saddam Hussein in 2003, a lot of Burmese wished that American military planes would attack their country too," said another relatively well-off resident, the owner of a machine tool shop. "This time, too, a lot of Burmese wish that the United States would launch a surgical strike at Naypyidaw," he said, referring to the isolated jungle capital the junta built in 2005, whose name means "abode of kings." | | Sunday, October 28th, 2007 | | 2:44 pm |
Our philosopher kings turned out to be rocket boys Finally, after thousands of years of civilization, we've reached the first decade in which science-minded people have touched the brass ring, and amassed enough cash to change the course of history. Future-minded people have been anticipating this for some time: We'll develop artificial intelligence! Have clean, cheap power! Make neural interfaces! Cure aging! But our visionary high-tech billionaires have, so far, focused on one thing: Making rockets. Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/178691_spaceship19.aspRobert Bigelow of the Budget Suites hotel chain: http://www.wired.com/science/space/magazine/15-11/ff_spacehotelElon Musk, PayPal co-founder: http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/articles/2087762.html?showAll=y&c=yRichard Branson, Virgin: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/branson.htmlJeff Bezos, Amazon: http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn9626-internet-billionaire-aims-to-build-spaceport-in-texas.htmlLarry & Sergei, Google: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/957/1Now, I could understand this if these billionaires were all old guys who grew up in the 1960s, and were captivated at a young age by dreams of space travel. But some of these guys are younger than me. What's their excuse? They're supposed to be the smartest tech guys on earth, as evidenced by their great technical success. So they should know - as every scientifically-oriented person I know agrees - that space is now relatively boring. Not boring compared to the ways previous generations of the super-wealthy spent their money (building pyramids, buying islands, funding wars, further-endowing Harvard). But boring compared to curing cancer, or making the lame to walk and the blind to see. Maybe the boys find it exciting to build large, powerful, penis-shaped objects. Props to these billionaires with some vision: Craig Venter (Celera) took a yacht trip around the world to gather microbes from the sea and sequence their DNA. A brilliant combination of vacation and truly important, world-class science! Paul Allen, one of our rocket-boys, also funded the Allen Institute for Brain Science ( http://www.alleninstitute.org/). Last year, they completed a gene-expression map of the mouse brain, which is a fabulous piece of research that I did not imagine would be tackled for many years. Peter Thiel (Paypal): Donated $500,000 to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I can't recommend SIAI as an organization to contribute to for actual AI research, because they're too secretive for me to be able to evaluate their work. (That in itself would disqualify them to me.) In fact, they're ideologically somewhat torn between promoting AI research and preventing it. But as an organization to get people thinking about AI, they've done very well, including holding two SIAI conferences, at very low cost to participants. Anyway, the point is that Thiel is at least in the right general area. Peter Thiel is also the only person to make a major contribution to the Methuselah Mouse prize for anti-aging research ($1.5 million plus up to $3M in matching funds), one of my favorite charities. One exciting research area, that no one realizes is an exciting research area, is political science. Our political systems haven't been improved much since 1789, despite our having gained a lot of experience with them, and having learned a lot about economics, psychology, and dynamic systems. A lot of money has gone into "think tanks" to push liberal, conservative, or libertarian agendas, but none AFAIK into basic research in political science. There is a malicious syllogism in most Westerners' minds: A. Democracy is the best of all possible governments, for all people, in all circumstances. B. "Democracy" means the current government of .
C. Therefore, we have the best of all possible governments.
Once we realize that A and B are false, perhaps we can bring political science forward into the 19th century. |
[ << Previous 20 ]
|
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
shagbark's journal