Wednesday, October 9, 2002
Back to the Nobel prize, Masatoshi Koshiba who won it for physics has made his college transcript public -- it shows he graduated at the bottom of his class at Tokyo University.
The copy of his transcript showed Koshiba earned As in only two of 16 subjects he studied during his junior and senior years in a specialized course within the university's undergraduate science program.
Even more surprising was the fact the two subjects in question were laboratory courses where, in Koshiba's words, "any student could earn an A as long as he or she had an adequate attendance record."
That plus watching Rushmore the other night has me ready to rehash my argument against 4.0s. That it is neither rational nor desirable to maintain a high average unless one intends to pursue graduate school (or is naturally that good.) Sure, I get As in my major --because I enjoy the classes and the work-- but for Communications? Who cares? Future employers don't.
Wednesday, October 9, 2002
Events: This Saturday, is the Champagne Socialism brunch at Marx Cafe. In the evening, Bellini (featuring Uzeda and Don Caballero members) is playing at Ottobar.
It's also the weekend of Laura Bush's Second Annual National Book Festival. The bill is tepid, but if it's a sunny day see Nancy Milford, David Halberstam, and Edmund Morris.
On Wednesday, University of Arizona's David Schmidtz is speaking at George Mason University on “Elements of Justice – Rawls and Nozick.” This is part of the excellent Kaplan lecture series, which will conclude this semester with Sylvia Nasar on "20th Century Economic Thinkers"
Friday that week, Politics and Prose hosts hipsters Dave Eggers and Jeffery Eugenides, but skip the latter to see Umberto Eco at Folger's Shakespere Library. That Sunday afternoon is a meeting of The Nation discussion group at the Cleveland Park Library
Also, if you're looking to pimp out your apartment sometime soon, Ames is going out of business and thus has worthless crap like christmas lights and satin sheets for sale half-off
It has been learned from highly placed intelligence sources that India's Reasearch and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Israel's Mossad are collaborating to train several hundred militants to be used in an attempt to destabilize the administration of President General Pervez Musharraf...
Once trained, the recruits will infiltrate the border areas of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan Province, where they will attempt to forge links with local tribespeople and militants in an effort to rally support for an uprising against Musharraf, who is widely discredited in these regions for abandoning the Taliban and siding with the US in its war on terror. These provinces have a strong pro-Taliban history.
Express India notes India's ties to Israel are strengthing. The country is also India's second largest importer of military equipment. "Experts cited in the Israeli press said relations between the two countries have improved because they both see themselves as threatened by Muslim extremists"
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were nominated for leading the war against terrorism, the Associated Press reports, but are now seen as unlikely winners with the possibility of military action against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Among the nominees are believed to be Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has sought to unify his country after the hard-line Taliban was ousted by U.S.-led airstrikes, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the Salvation Army and the U.S. Peace Corps.
Wednesday, October 9, 2002 The Globalist, a website I should visit more frequently, has an essay up on "what initially seems to be part of an easy solution often turns into a major problem for the entire region soon after," ie the propensity of US-backed local factions to start their own trouble later on.
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
"Choose your weapons, fellas, and leave us out of it," says Lew Rockwell in his essay, Give Dueling a Chance. Right on.
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
Talking with James tonight reminded me of this image he found and tiled on his desktop last year.
Lovely.
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
When Britain tightened their immigration policy in August, they made it much more difficult for gypsies to claim refugee status.
According to CNS, U.K. Home Secretary David Blunkett calls it absurd "that immigrants from democracies such as Poland and the Czech Republic claim that their lives are threatened."
This is troublesome for the Czech Roma, who are caught not only in a mollified apartheid, but between EU-expansion bureaucracy. In order to appear fit for EU membership, the Czech Republic must affirm itself as a safe place for ethnic minorities. But it isn't. Eastern Europe absolutely isn't a safe or fair place for the Romany minority.
France also hardened asylum policy, and so the gypsy rejects are sneaking over to Switzerland for relief. But the Swiss also claim these (mostly Romanian) Roma are safe in Central and Eastern Europe. They are currently expelling hundreds of refugees and rejecting recent asylum requests. “The federal government considers Romania to be a safe country. That doesn’t mean everything there is perfect, but for asylum purposes, it is considered to be safe,” says a spokesman for the Federal Refugee Office.
A Prague Post article this week is about "Coexistence Village," a charity housing project with a mix of Romany and Czech familes living peacefully
"It is a miracle. If Roma and majority Czechs can live together like this, there is no enemy that can hurt us. This community is an example to the rest of us, and the central government should take it as a lesson."
It's not that easy. Peaceful society doesn't spring just from a test-tube. They've got years and years of ethnic tension to work on. It's a pity true Western democracies believe the CEE's rhetoric.
Tuesday, October 8, 2002 Zoe has an essay up about sniper fever, cutting up a pretentious Post essay by Ken Ringle. There's a fetish for random death. It's special and we are each so special! Because of our self-affirmed specialness and uniqueness, we each assume that we'll be the ones to get West Nile or killed by a sniper or terrorist. Or at least the half-wits who consider Newsweek credibile journalism, believe so. Uhh, so all we need now is a Cuban Boy in a custody battle and a seperatist militia, and there will be no awckward pauses at the PAC meeting tonight!
One of my close friends, a paranoid hacker type, said, "Oh shit, you're going to become one of those live journal people, and I won't be able to talk to you. Anything you write about me will be searchable!" He outlined a future LJ scenario in which the company starts making money by charging users to keep their journal entries private. He's convinced LJ wants to copyright my entries and eradicate my privacy.
It's cute and funny, but I like her best doing "bleeding edge" stuff like equating open-source to swinging or this new essay for AVN on Sci-Fi pr0n
Tuesday, October 8, 2002
Is there any coverage of the Nevada initiative that doesn't start with an anechdote?
The woman--we'll call her June--hands me her pot pipe, and I'm impressed. This pipe has had so much marijuana smoked in it that the resin has impregnated the pipe's very metal. Instead of shiny silver, the surface is a burnished gold...
Monday, October 7, 2002 Artificial Intelligence captures the imagination of even the least science-minded among us, which is why Ellen Ullman's essay Programming the Post-Human in this month's Harper's is a fascinating read. Ullman offers a realistic analysis to an often times enthusiastic and optimistic field of study. She begins by tackling the basic question of framework vs. the outer environment. If the outcome of AI and human life is identical, than who is to determine which framework is superior? The problem is, humans can ultimatly accuse ALife of simulating their emotions. No one can read another's mind, so how can empathy exist with two different beings -- one made of non-living material?
The tangent this leads to is Ullman's belief that the complexity of human experience is far too broad to effectively replicate. Cynthia Breazel, an MIT roboticist, asks her, "do you have to go to the bathroom and eat to be alive?" Ullman responds in her essay, "yes." Forgetting the "body" of a being, ignores the unique experiences that serve as influences.
How close are these researchers to constructing even a rich simulation of mammalian emotional and social life? Further away than they realize, I think. The more the MIT researchers talk about their work, the longer grows the list of thorny questions they know they will have to address.
However, robotics has given some cache to the study of psychology and conciousness, not unlike what demand for graphic designers meant to art school grads. Every step these researchers take, leads to greater understading of our minds' unique function. "in other words don't think about it, build it; equate programming with knowedge."
Sunday, October 6, 2002
In local news, The Brockton Enterprise reports 22 year old Maureen Cronin faces charges after allegedly stealing $5,000 from the city government, where Cronin was employed as a researcher in the tax collection office. Her former boss describes Cronin as a "brillant mathematician who appeared to have a bright future." Haha. (She teased me in grade school)
Friday, October 4, 2002
He can't even get the vendetta excuse to work. Last week, Bush Junior cried over "the guy who tried to kill my father," but Antiwar has linked to an archived New Yorker article entitled "A Case Not Closed." Why am I not suprised?
Thursday, October 3, 2002 Robot EMT? The future has arrived!
An emergency response team of robots and their handlers has been created following the success of the machines in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.
Thursday, October 3, 2002
These FOIA discoveries reveal Pearl Harbor wasn't that big a suprise. Let's hope it doesn't take 50 years to figure out 9-11.
Thursday, October 3, 2002
There is a great article on Tom Paine identifying just why the public "trusts" the Bush Administration although they've done little to deserve the image besides wearing pressed suits and holding meetings on time
The Bushies have the added advantage of another sort of media bias that often goes unnoticed. Most journalists are Democrats. But that doesn't necessarily help Democrats or hurt the GOP in the way whiny conservatives like to imagine. In a Democratic White House, journalists identify with the administration, whose policies and beliefs tend to mirror their own. But this familiarity makes it easy to criticize when things go wrong (and even when they don't). Reporters understand a Democratic administration's flaws more readily because it's made up of people much like themselves. This is a large part of what made the media's relationship with the Clintonites so toxic. At its nadir, coverage of the administration got caught up in a vortex of baby-boomer self-loathing; familiarity bred contempt.
Thursday, October 3, 2002
The Robert Torricelli scandal is sending pundits to their civics textbooks. As Dave Franklin writes for EtherZone,
[T]here's a lawful process by which the Democratic Party nominates candidates. Those results cannot be cast aside, lest elections are meaningless and government of, by, and for the people is non-existent. It is possible the Democrat Party would have it that way, but the American people and our courts must not allow it.
The nominee of New Jersey's Democratic Party for U.S. Senate in 2002 was chosen during a statewide primary. The voters who are registered Democrats in the state were allowed to make their voice heard on who they wanted for their nominee. That choice having been made, it is more than a little bit authoritarian for senior leaders of the state's party to decide the candidate is not able to win. And it violates the state's law if Robert Torricelli doesn't remain as the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.
Julian Sanchez has a good post up, touching upon some public choice aspects,
One of those wacky features of democracy they teach you about in the mathy-er polisci courses -- a kind of cousin of Arrow's theorem -- is that for a multidimensional race (e.g. one in which there are several issues, variously salient to different voters), there's almost never an equilibrium pair of positions for candidates to take. That is, there's usually going to be a positional shift one candidate can make so as to beat the other, who in turn can beat the opponents new position by shifting herself, and so on. Candidates don't actually do this, because you lose credibility when you change your platform every few minutes. If, however, a party can just switch candidates once the other side is committed, they can indeed play this strategy.
This gives way for a new election strategy to employ: game show suspense. What will it be voters? Would you prefer politician A, or the mystery candidate behind Door #1?
Of course, the electoral process is disingenuous from the beginning. People seem to forget a politician acts to maximize votes, just as an entrepreneur works to maximize profit. However, instead of adjusting marginal cost and marginal revenue, the politician works with his own ingredients to at once differentiate himself from the other candidate and also to establish himself at the populist center. Getting labeled an “extremist” is a death warrant to a candidate. If it appears one candidate is taking a “risk,” it’s only a strategy, and he’s probably made up for it several times over by taking the centrist positions elsewhere. It’s a little dance: one candidate moves forward on this issue and the other leans back, they meet at the middle here and then continue to sway – but never inch far from the center. At every election you have the choice of centrist A or centrist B. And either way you lose, cause once you’re guy is in office, you can bet he’ll eschew campaign promises to follow the wisdom of his party comrades.
In the last six months or so, Reason magazine, and even more so the Reason website, has increasingly taken on the tone of the asinine college sophomore. You know, the kid who knows more than everybody else, or at least thinks he does, but can't understand why nobody thinks he's funny or really cares about his opinion. Worse, he doesn't understand why he's not cool, even though he rides a skateboard to class and has "Bad Brains" patches on his backpack. Even the stoners don't want to get high with him because he's always laughing at how much smarter he is than everybody else. This is too bad because there's often some very good stuff in Reason and I respect some of the authors in its orbit.
