Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Via the Bookslut: A beautiful idea to give Iraq a makeover (my cache):

This means that there are approximately twelve Americans for every Iraqi. This means that, if we all go, each American will be responsible for one-twelfth of an Iraqi. An Iraqi family of five will thus be attended by sixty Americans. We will come, this second wave of three hundred million of us, unarmed. We will bring nothing but ourselves. We will simply show up, saying, “What would you like for dinner?” While we cook, our Iraqis can just relax. God knows they have had a terrible couple of years. We will encourage them to sit on their couches, if they still have couches, while we clean up after dinner. We will bring them coffee, tea, dessert, whatever they like. All these months, we have winced from over here, imagining their pain. Once we are there, we will do what we can to say, “We like you, and want the best for you. We’re sorry. This was not what we intended. No matter what it might have looked like to you, we have always wished you well.”

After dinner, our Iraqis will smile, whispering among themselves. “Not so bad, these unarmed ones,” they will say. “That coffee was super.”

Googling for “badblock howto” or “badblocks howto” brings up nothin’. So I would like to get the ball rolling by linking to both the Badblock howto and the Badblocks howto.

Thank you.

I should have mentioned this a few weeks ago: I love Brad DeLong’s synopsis of another blogger to the effect that Google is “about to reduce Microsoft Windows to an incompletely-debugged collection of device drivers.” There’s such acerbity and punch in that sentence.

I was reminded for some reason a moment ago of Joni Mitchell’s song “Amelia,” off Hejira and about Amelia Earhart. I popped it in, metaphorically speaking, and was once again reminded that Mitchell is one of the 20th century’s least-respected true geniuses. Near-literally every song by her repays constant relistening. And yet it seems that almost no one knows about her — certainly nowhere near as many people as know Bob Dylan. Yet Joni’s talent — if not her influence — is probably comparable to Dylan’s. I wonder whether Ani DiFranco was right that the 60’s music scene just wasn’t “ready for a babe”.

I’m making steady progress through Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert’s book Perceptrons, about a particular computational model of the mind. It’s a neat book, proving some basic — so far — logical results about the limitations of this particular model. And its goal also seems to be to re-establish some connections between logic, geometry and topology.

A perceptron, unless I misunderstand, is a collection of functions φ_i, each evaluating the truth of a predicate, each returning true or false, and each drawn from some class Φ, together with some aggregating function Ψ that is a linear combination of the φ_i. Finally there is a threshold θ; if Ψ > θ, the predicate evaluates to true. Additional structure is imposed on the φ_i, but they’re supposed to be simple and independent enough that they can each tackle part of a problem in parallel and feed their responses back into the main computational engine Ψ.

So for instance, it may be that each small square within your retina only looks at one portion of an object to decide whether it’s “dog-like,” then tells the aggregator. The aggregator decides, on the basis of a weighted sum of the sub-computers, whether what you’re examining is a dog.

Perceptrons shows that many of these pattern-matching tasks are impossible for a perceptron to perform. Within the first few pages is an absolutely brilliant little proof that a certain class of perceptrons (those carrying out pattern matching in which the φ_i are constrained to examine only a fixed diameter of a pattern) is incapable of deciding whether a shape is connected (i.e., that given any points A and B within the shape, and any path P between them, P lies entirely within the shape. A doughnut is not connected.)

The book is just filled with really good math, really good explanations, solid intuitions, and a lot of motivations. One of my pet peeves about math books is that they often portray their subject as polished and complete, which may work for the researcher but absolutely doesn’t fit the manner in which the math was likely compiled. Mathematicians take lots of false starts, proceed down blind alleys, and only realize later that they could have simplified their work in many places. Minsky and Papert are determined to preserve a lot of these mistakes in their book, but only to the extent that it helps the reader learn. Wouldn’t you love it if a math book said, “We might like to try this  . . .  but let’s not, and let’s tell you why that won’t work.” Or, conversely, “Here’s the path we took — and we’ll explain why, because this obviously didn’t land in our laps fully formed.” That’s what Minsky and Papert do, and god bless them for it.

They’re also establishing some connections between logic and linear algebra that I hadn’t thought of before. Imagine you have n propositions x_i (i = 1,  . . . , n) and you want to compute x₁ OR x₂ OR  . . .  . Letting 1 stand for true and 0 for false, the conjunction will be true precisely when x₁ + x₂ +  . . .  + x_n ≥ 1; it’ll be false when that sum equals zero. Joining all those propositions with AND will be true when and only when the sum equals n, false otherwise. Each of these inequalities defines a plane in n-space. (Actually, the set of all sums of unweighted x_i defines a collection of points on the n-dimensional lattice. To fill in the hyperplane, you can weight each of the x_i by a real number — which is precisely what a perceptron does.)

I had thought about the 1-true/0-false connection before (you could also state that the conjunction of n statements by AND is true when the product of their 0-1 mappings is 1, false when it’s 0), but hadn’t thought about it in terms of geometry. I’m really intrigued by where Minsky and Papert take this. I’m only on page 30, and already I’m hooked.

Joni Mitchell can knock me on my ass at will. I just finished watching Love Actually, which is fun and cheerful and just overpacked with feelgoodness  . . .  which isn’t a bad thing. (It cheerfully walks up to the gate at the edge of Plausibility Manor, tips its hat at the guard, then uses its jet pack to fly off to Ridiculous Village. It’s all so cheerful and honest about the whole production that you just have to wave as it flies by.) But there’s one shot in the middle of it where Emma Thompson discovers that her husband may be cheating on her, and the Joni Mitchell song “Both Sides Now” — performed on one of her recent, mature, throaty albums (I believe the album is Both Sides Now, actually) — kicks in. Absolute kick in the stomach. Here are the lyrics:

Rows and flows of angel’s hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feathered canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way.

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, but still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all.

Moon and Junes and Ferris wheels
That dizzy dancing way you feel
As every fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way.

But now it’s just another show
You leave them laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away.

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, but still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all.

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “I love you” right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I’ve looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day.

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose, but still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all.

I’ve only recently started reading Nick Kristof’s op-eds in the New York Times, but he really writes some nice pointed stuff. Well done indeed.

I’m setting up Thunderbird for my parents, and I’ve had no problem bringing over their messages and address books from Outlook Express. But I can’t figure out how to bring over their mail filters. They’ve only got a few, but I’d like them to convert as well. I can’t find any way to do it. Doing Tools → Import → Settings doesn’t import Outlook rules, apparently. Does anyone out there know how to?

Jesus Christ. Not sure if it’s been repealed yet, but the big spending bill got a little provision slipped into it “which allows the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees or their “agents” to review any American’s tax return with no restrictions whatsoever.” (Emphasis in original.)

Just stare in awe upon that.

(Via Cosma Shalizi, who got it from Julie Saltman.)

The Bookslut may not have liked it, but I found Jon Franzen’s discussion of what Charles Schulz and “Peanuts” meant to him absolutely captivating. It makes me want to buy the first two “Peanuts” collections even more than I already did.

Do you use MacMail under OS X and want it to behave like the world’s greatest hacked-together email client? Look no further.

That link requires a Perl library, which makes me wonder whether I can get shorlfilter running under MacMail. I use a lot of little custom tweaks in mutt, such as auto-shorling any long URLs in my messages (so that they don’t get cut at the end of a line), auto-encrypting any message whose recipients all use PGP, stripping shorl URLs from messages to my mom (her company’s email server deletes messages that contain shorl.com URLs without letting anybody know — a problem that it took us several months to understand), and so forth. That’s the only reason I’m hesitant to switch to a less hackable email client.

The Bookslut links to a really hilarious takedown by the author Neal Pollack of the idea that American novelists have any effect on politics at all. Part of the message is that the American public just doesn’t care what novelists think; another part is that most novelists don’t have enough courage to take an actual stand:

Novelists cannot deliver the “moral vote.” Most novelists can’t even match their fucking socks. Unless they’re Arundahti Roy and they’re willing to stand in front of a nuclear weapon about to be fired, they should just stop wringing their hands and go back to what they do best: attending cocktail parties.

As far as I can tell, this whole Iran-is-a-nuclear-threat story is bogus. And yet the press seems to be buying it hook, line, and sinker. E.g., the front page of the New York Times contains a headline reading, “Bush Confronts New Challenge on Issue of Iran,” with the lead reading, “President Bush is confronting what could become the biggest challenge of his second term: how to contain Iran’s nuclear program.”

Shouldn’t the media be a little circumspect by now? The Bush Administration’s clear goal is to remake the Middle East in their image; the Administration is filled with crusaders for this cause. So when the talking points suggest that Iran’s our new threat, shouldn’t the media immediately start questioning the evidence advanced for the new threat? This is something they didn’t do during Bush’s first or second Middle East war; you’d think they’d have learned by now. The press were contrite and virtually rending their garments after the Iraq “threat” turned out to be a complete lie. Do they only admit mistakes, or do they prevent them as well?

Someone — it might have been Josh Marshall — pointed out recently that the Arlen Specter flap is a win-win situation for Republicans. On the one hand, he’s had to grovel so much to get the Judiciary Committee chairmanship that he’ll do whatever Republicans want him to do. On the other hand, Specter’s been labeled ‘too liberal,’ so few from the left will oppose him. The Republicans get a puppet who seems publicly like he must be a moderate, without the inconvenience of actually accepting a moderate. Yay for those of us who support a woman’s right to an abortion.

 . . . says the New York Times (my cache). Only I can’t understand the reasoning. So his station played a videotape of a government official taking a bribe  . . .  where’s the crime in that?

Can someone with a better grasp of the law than me (read: most anyone) explain the logic to me?

(Could just as easily be cross-posted to media. I think Blosxom allows cross-posting in version 3, but I’ve not bothered to investigate.)

Given the enormous censorship power that it wields, and given that it’s probably not necessary for spectrum allocation anymore, isn’t the FCC just a political tool? Shouldn’t we just get rid of it?

P.S.: The Peggy Noonan editorial that Frank Rich mentions is on the web, and I’ve cached it.

P.P.S.: Rich writes,

In a memorable passage in Ron Suskind’s pre-election article on the president in The New York Times Magazine, a senior White House adviser tells Mr. Suskind that there’s no longer any need for the “reality-based community” epitomized by journalists. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the adviser says. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” A test run of this approach dates at least as far back as May 2003, a week after the president declared the end of major combat operations. When a reporter told Donald Rumsfeld in a Pentagon press briefing that “journalists in Iraq report that a sense of public order is still lacking,” the secretary of defense ridiculed journalists for showing only “slices of truth.” The reconstruction effort, couldn’t anyone see, was right on track.

The creation of this alternative reality has been perfected into an art form in Falluja  . . . 

This raises an interesting question. If Rich is right, then the two halves of America (Noonan refuses to admit a schism, but it is a fact that Bush got 51% of the vote to Kerry’s 48%, after a bitter election) are operating off different fact bases. How can I even begin to convince someone on the right that Bush is an incompetent scoundrel? I advance evidence based on what I’ve read, and he retorts with evidence from what he’s read (Fox News, say). He tells me that while my evidence may be true (and I doubt I could actually get him to say that), it’s only one small part of the picture; he responds like Rumsfeld, in other words. So if even my evidence does nothing to him, and his evidence does nothing to me, where’s the common ground? Where can we start talking?

I could abstract this into something more general about the subjective nature of truth, but that’s completely useless here, and totally beside the point. The point is: this country has serious problems that need fixing; if we don’t get people talking, it’s just going to get worse and worse, and the only times that either side will be able to make any policies are when it’s in the majority. Unless one side believes that it’s a durable majority, or unless it believes that it can advance policies while in office that cement its majority, I don’t think this is all that good for either side.

In other words, I’d think it would be in either party’s interest to get talking. But that’s not happening, and what seemed to be the last hope to get it to happen — namely the media — are failing at their job. So what do we do?

Jackie MacMullen nails Red Sox Nation’s zeitgeist perfectly (my cache)

This site’s RSS feed doesn’t seem to load properly in quite a lot of browsers — either it doesn’t validate, or the <span> and <div> tags show up literally. And the CSS for the RSS doesn’t seem to load anywhere.

Hence I’m going to spend a little while trying to clean up the RSS. If you experience any problems, let me know. In all likelihood, those syndicating my site will see every post labeled ‘unread’; I apologize. Hopefully I’ll fix it for good this time.

A friend who spent six or seven years in Boston and is now attending med school in Dublin tells me that she didn’t fully understand Boston until she got to Ireland. Now she realizes that Boston doesn’t work precisely because it is the most Irish city in the world — just a bit less Irish than Dublin, says my friend.

I could put out countless examples, but the latest news from the Big Dig (my cache) is a nice juicy datum.

Via Kevin Drum: Michael Hirsh has a great article up on Washington Monthly about Bernard Lewis’s understanding of Islam (my cache), specifically Lewis’s complete ignorance of the effect of Western colonialism on the Middle East. The neocons pick up the thread, assuming that they are the bringers of democracy to the benighted Muslims. But, since they don’t understand the history, and they fundamentally sneer at Islam, they make no inroads and we end up in the quagmire we’re in now. Hirsch’s article is great, and well worth the read.