motion to recommit, with instructions

Hey, it's another spare blog!  So I can dump some posts here which are ... interesting enough to be public, but not really "Medium" post-worthy.  Here goes.  originally written October 21, 2015.

and how do you like your blue-eyed boy mister death

and how do you like your blue-eyed boy mister death
the chorus of the rowdy revelers is loud tonight
maybe i should have joined them
each conversation becomes a word in their song
and i can hear the energy and i can feel the energy as if
i were there

this whole city howls(*)
with the best minds of my generation
in houses hidden away ...
... or even reveling on the street
a celebration of some event unknown to all but those
who celebrate it tonight
a bacchanalian festivity
screaming maenads tending the flames

i see and feel things i spend my days blind to
preferring to stare at other walls in the cave
walls of iron and stone
walls of logic and reality
walls of the light that shines so bright that it blinds you to everything around it


what is this thing that you love anyway


... when the character plays the actor, or the other way around?  does the meaning change for the thing being only the thing in the play?  is teaching just a series of buffer override attacks?  "what is your name?" "my name is NOBODY" "ok hi nobody" "bye!" "hey NOBODY stabbed me" ... and now you have the riddle: what does "NOBODY" mean?  and if you can't figure it out, you die.  or you just kill the guy the next time he tries it.


... and a king came forth, and he said "for thousands of years this city has been run on the grounds of equality.  now we suffer.  we starve when we should feast.  promise me that every year i shall get one wish, and in 20 years we shall feast instead of starve".  and they decide to let this guy who claims to be "king" to be claiming to be king.  and then you have all sorts of terrible rules that he enacts because he's kind of an asshole. [or are they not terrible?]  so you try to get around the rules, but they have other rules about that.  and at some point, the king comes to him and says "ok, i see you know what's going on.  we only care about the rules for the peasants.  do you want to be 'a manager'?  we just don't care about the rules for you".

... that got definitely not about crop rotation leading to the development of feudalism.  i'm projecting ideas into ideals into views of my life. that could be mathier.  so i know what the vector [crop rotation -> feudalism] is, by some concept of meaning.  and then i see what that concept means when applied to my situation.  and if it's an accurate philosophy (eigenvector?) it should work.  and if it's inaccurate, it should work occasionally by chance.  and we have to use this same damn algorithm to figure out what the winning condition is.

i win.  i win i win i win.  that annoying "i win" button.  that makes your head hurt.  use that key on the edge flip

didn't want to type that but flip

anyhow.  i have projections that are described in a constant way across all of my thoughts.  you have two parts.  defining what a "thought" is, and what a projection is.

to long timed out didn't quite figure it out sorry.

yeah you have vectors.  and somehow they do have fundamental meanings or at least are fundamentally equivalent to a pointer lookup.  a shared memory for the whole system on a delay.  so you can just do "call 0033" and then that executes on an 8 stroke lag.  or whatever.  and the lag is tunable.  so we've boot-strapped a programming language on top of this.  and we need to use that language to write a higher language.

except the higher language isn't at all like python or whatever.  maybe mysql.  an imperative language.

the three key operations.  lookup (tree lookup? pattern lookup?).  based on a series, look up a pattern.  this is stored as a tree.  the pattern can have a "repeat" symbol.  as long as you send data, you get data back.  something like an 8-second lag.  and the meta-program is just "input data until we know what program you want, and then run that program" and that solves the "repeat" and the "what data to send back" part.  so yeah, you send "10110101abcadag" and we run whatever "10110101" is and you can link that to everything as a shared memory.  and the fractal program thing should be able to do it if you always include a backlink up.  and of course sometimes we just get in a section with no working links out.  that's a program.

it's just like those room choose your own adventure things.  text adventures.  you're exploring a tree and it has back-links and all of a sudden now you're trapped and you can't get out until something changes everything.  and the only back-link we need is the one back up to the parent or a copy of the parent or ... no we have something doing a random-walk over the neural network, and that value is the return value of the network as a whole.  that's the computational model here.  we get some data and then it sends down to some function and that function may or may not even bother to listen to the input data at all but it sends out values by some pattern, until we stop listening to it.

and so all the input has to be in unary, 11010110101011101111 ... which is like 3/5 or something.  i don't want to count.  but the ratio of 1s to 0s is the value.  and when we have a program we can also call input() which takes all the input up to this point and returns a value.  we have a shared input read as well.  and most of the neurons ignore the input. ... you're just walking a pattern.  you're just walking a pattern.  and the pattern exercises lots of useful skills like remembering english.  and we have enough space to actually learn words.  so many that we're still inventing useful words to be able to teach them.

so we have

GLOBAL INPUT

neurons + inter-connections

GLOBAL OUTPUT

and global input is only connected to the head.  or rather, the head is where the global input is.  we have lots of these topologies.  so we have a monad? input

nope.  too much.

so you have 96 neurons.  all hopelessly mangled.  but each node has either 1 input or 1 output attached to it.  and you have inter-connections hopefully pre-weighted to tie inputs and outputs together.  and then you may or may not be able to solve it it shouldn't be that hard these are just giant clos networks and you can do a lot of interesting things with that many connections that much bandwidth mental bandwidth we're building up cables wires things and that's biologically maybe how we can send signals because we have a highway of 24 neurons and they serve as 24 parallel bits of input and we can just use a 24-dimensional vector and then do all the math at a higher level.  (and we get a 24x speedup by using binary rather than unary.  or maybe we do stick to unary for now. ... unary lets you program the *timing*.  which is important.  anything at a value of 2/3 on the unary input runs at 2/3 the speed as if it had input of 1.  because you have quantum neurons.  not like microphysics, like

because funny things happen with large integers because there is still a smallest integer even though it's really small.  and unary doesn't have large integers.

well the algorithms for doing it in unary would be interesting.  every 16 bits, you take the average, you get 1/4, and you spit that back out elsewhere.  and you have some conservation of energy here so you have parallel directions of "1" and "0" so you can violate that as long as the attention spent still sums up. because really you're just hiding things.

algorithms.  yeah, algorithms.  we have a stream of 4-bit integers.  we want to calculate what the next integer will be.  so we have 3 8 3 8 3 8 3 ? ... well, 8.  or maybe 9 or 7, counting is hard.  or maybe just 15 since it will be bigger.  or maybe 0 because this was a phone number.

...

so other than lookup, the other two key operations are:
* addition.  a + b has to be defined.  there are many ways of doing that.  mean, error function, etc.  we need to hard code 2 or 3 ways everywhere.  a + b = (a + b) / 2 is good.  a + b = (a - b) / (a + b) can work.  we have two signals and we need to combine them.  a merge gate.  2 inputs, 1 output. though possibly you can just do any one of these, even a + b = max(a, b).  if you can hard code 6 or 8 and keep track of the math to pick them, do that.  parallel dimensions are your friend.
* learning.  truth.  what is the desired value here.

hah.  really.  truth and love.  and algorithms.

---

i hate when i figure out what i'm thinking of and it's so disgusting that's related to what i was thinking.  or i'm just connecting ideas in my head and then typing them out so there's some sense of whether it's working and most of it should mostly be true by the rules i am using.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave


... when was the 4-field crop rotation invented?



the feudal lord, part 2: st anselm's feudom.

after 478 years, the feudal lord has made 478 rules.  some of the rules apply to some people, some to others.  some people fancy themselves duchess, presidents, kings.  can you topple the feudal lord?  or do you just want to be the king.  and if you can't topple the system, do you still want to be king.  the system will progress without you.  but you get to be the king.  or the avatar of the gods.  do you really want to have to do that?  and you might even get to guess what direction the feudal lord might change his mind next.  and maybe it will be to some madness that will cause empires to fall.  or maybe it will be a rule that moves it forward.  and maybe it will be a rule to put things on auto-pilot until things start to collapse.  and you get to live like a king.

this is once again on that uncomfortable border of "giving myself suggestions i don't believe"


... the feudal lord, part 3: when i mention st. anselm i'm lying.

for seriously.  it's a fundamental logical paradox.  that all things exist.  if all things exist, then "the thing that doesn't exist" exists.  then you have a contradiction.  it's godel mark-0.

so some things are fiction.

set theoretically that's: with E for there exists and A for for all

not E S: A x: x in S

we first assume
A x: x in S
"x: x not in S" <- b="" is="" p="" that="" thing="">b in S
g in b  # Logical error if we have the empty set!
g in S
g not in S
CONTRADICTION
... therefore not S.

if you apply formal logic to formal logic you get Godel.  and then you starve yourself to death, and consider yourself lucky not to have been died like Keats and Ramanujan.

so the paradox is:
There exists the empty set.
There exists the full set.
The system can be fully expressed by a language written in the system.

turing-complete.

and then "what is the nature of the good?  what is 1 and what is 0 and what is -1"

... the lie is the full set.  the empty set exists all the time.  it is the world of ideas.  anything you can imagine that is not real, is the empty set.

is this the difference between "pursuing truth" and "defeating falsehoods"?  is this once again some map that we build up. we have a map of "the truth" and we have a "not" button that flips us to the other map.  and then we progress there, but with everything backwards and in high heels.  and once we're done with that, we flip back to the main part.  that word again.  in the right spot.  we pursue truth in the world.  we defeat falsehoods in our minds.  you will never find truths in your mind unless you find falsehoods so outrageous that people are determined to prove you wrong.  and then you may or may not know how they will prove you wrong.  anything outrageous must be an invitation to be proved wrong.  you're searching on a map and sometimes you go beyond what the borders of the map are supposed to be, and maybe you live and maybe you die.  and maybe you missed something about the map and it was actually on the map after all.  this is a literal "go off the map" metaphor isn't it.  like "take the piece of paper, flip it upside down, and go to sleep" off the map.  this is literally an "it's 11:30pm the part of me that wants to go to sleep is suddenly triggered".

i should just sleep now NOW see if it's great.

This week's sign of the apocalypse

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40820669/ns/us_news-life/

TLDR: There's no evidence that putting seat belts on buses would make kids safer, but because one kid died on a bus, some parents want them to be mandatory.

Why is this so bad?
* The "we have to do something, even if it isn't helpful" philosophy of governance, seen in almost every bill named after a person, is pretty obviously harmful.
* The complete lack of concern for the actual facts is generally bad.
* When it is pointed out that kids may not be the most fastidious users of seat-belts, the response is generally "oh, we'll have to punish them if they don't wear it".
* People assume "just because it's cheaper, it has to be worse", or rather "because it would be expensive to install seat belts, they must be helpful".

Being Opinionated

I can't help but think of things as a formal system. For example, when I think along the lines of "I don't have enough opinions about certain types of things", my reaction is "I should do a blog post with the pretense of '20 things I like'". In particular, stuff along the lines of "my life". Secondarily, "positive" things, rather than a list of annoyances (since really, I can list more than enough about dealing with the DSL connection for any 12 people). And thirdly, things that I am keen to admit to (as opposed to various random internet-based addictions).

[I just realized why I find it annoying when people say the word is "arbitrary" and not "random" for choices that are the result of a random walk. This digression brought to you by the fact that it is 5 characters longer than Twitter allows]

I don't like having to walk down two flights of stairs to do laundry.
I like being within 1 block of at least half a dozen restaurants.
I don't like that the bathroom in my apartment is half a size too small.
I love lamp. Actually, Mr. Burgundy, I rather prefer when it's dark enough to see the stars. Or 75-degree nights with no humidity.
I don't like folding clothes after doing laundry, even without the stairs element.
I like cooking ... when I actually have food and a clean kitchen. And when it is followed by eating.
I don't like buying large amounts of food that will go bad ... or cleaning the various papers on my kitchen table.
I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. - wait, see, that's what I'm saying about gratuitous references to anything under the sun to avoid talking about myself.
I don't like scheduling appointments at businesses I've never been to.
I like cute girls wearing orange.



... and now I read http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/22/incredible-growth-of-the-internet-since-2000/ and am more interested in what the book The Internet Chronicles would contain.

This world has lost its glory, let's start a brand new story now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnpaMPmivPE

Once upon a time, sheet music was the canonical form of popular music. Then Elvis happened.

If you look at the Billboard Top 100 charts, you can clearly see the jump in 1956. We have songs like The Poor People of Paris, Lisbon Antigua, and The Wayward Wind atop the charts, any of which could have been from 1946 or 1926. And then there is Hound Dog. And it's impossible to separate the performance from the music; you can either do a cover of it or do a separate version of it. Nobody was ever a cover band of Mozart or Billie Holiday or Cole Porter.

God Sex Money Love Football

These seem to be the most popular results for a search of "what is the most important thing in the world". There's a bit of grouping (I throw family in with love most notably), but that's a pretty good breakdown of the results online.

If I were to really work at it, I could probably get some form of a pentagon of equivalence of these (God is Love and the like). But that would be too clever by half. The more interesting ordering is linearly looking at God Love Football Money Sex, where we go from the heavy to the trivial, the permanent to the ephemeral, the communal to the individual, but also from the painful to the pleasurable or the immaterial to the concrete.

It's probably most peculiar having Football being listed as more weighty than Money. But football and similar contests are by necessity about "us v. them", while money is "me v. the world". Money may bring power, but football can bring glory. And conversely, it's a lot easier to get pleasure out of money than it is football.

Webrings and Blogrolls

Is the web at large too big and impersonal to support community?

Not a community of people, a community of web sites. The sense of implicit camaraderie that caused the development of one of the popular features of 1990s Geocities pages, the Web Ring. For those that choose not to remember, a web ring was a collection of sites that had a banner on them "This site is part of the Terry Pratchett Web Ring", with a link to the "previous" and "next" sites, and a link to the web ring home page (which had a link to all of the sites). You don't see this type of thing any more (except possibly for irony) and for good reason: It was pretty much a terrible idea all around.

1) Most of the sites were lousy even by 1990s web standards.
2) Because most of the sites were lousy, the good sites wouldn't join, causing the quality to get even worse.
3) Who really wants to look at 57 different Terry Pratchett Fan sites?
4) Not only were the sites lousy, a bunch of them were almost certainly going to be broken links or unrelated pages by the time you looked at it.

With all those caveats (and I could have listed more), the question remains: Did they support community on the web? Did "Joe's world of Klatch" belonging to the prestigious "Top Pratchett Fan Sites" web ring make Joe feel like he was a part of the Pratchett fan site community?

In a scientific sense, it would be hard to tell, since Joe probably has tried to forget about the site for the past 10 years, and now that Geocities is dead it is probably offline entirely. And since there may not have been more than 4 or 5 people that cared about the web ring at any one time, it's hard to say that there ever existed a community in the first place. Maybe Joe felt he was now part of the world of the internet with a real web page , who knows.

Anyhow, we now have something that we didn't have in the 90s, blogs. (Dave Winer aside, blogging didn't really take off until the 00's.) And the thing about blogs is that it's immediately obvious whether they are completely out of date or not, since each pot has a nice timestamp at the top. Blogs can try to be topical, but they generally meander from their ostensible topic somewhat. And blogs can have the aforementioned blog roll. The list of 20 to 500 "blogs we like". Arguably a relic of an earlier era, thse are still present on virtually every major blog-like site, be it Kos or Huffington Post or Matt Drudge or the New York Times' blogs. And while many of these have the soft personal touch that only a faceless corporation can provide, there's definitely some sense of association associated with those.

Trying to Essay

( with inspiration from http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html )

The astute reader may note that this follows a long period of silence here. This derives less from a lack of time compared to a lack of topics to write about. There's nothing happening in my life so thrilling that I feel it obligatory to expound in long form; 140 characters is generally more than plenty for daily occurrences. It avoids the forced literary diarrhea of excessively long and descriptive sentences, filled with a multitude of adjectives and words of more than 8 letters. It is an avoidance of technical exercises in tempo and rhyme and 14-line poems.

But if clear thinking begets clear writing, and clear writing conveys meaning, then unclear, meandering writing is certainly the sign of a mind trying less to be clear as it is looking for a therapeutic release of thought. The goal is less to present a coherent thought, but a picture of sorts, with sentences providing brush strokes towards the final result, a mosaic that portrays a general sense of feeling. And if art can exist for art's sake, then so too can there be writing for writing's sake, writing that strives to convey emotion or confusion, writing that is deliberately obtuse.

I say this in the context of a recent century where many of the literary greats prided themselves on such obtuseness. Joyce's later works are notorious for such, and later authors such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace are even more in such a line. Henry Miller may be less difficult, but is just as meandering, and makes up for it in obscenity.

Anyhow, maybe I should work random anecdotes from my life into 500-word treatises; maybe I should spend that doing circumlocution of interesting work happenstance; maybe I should just post more book reviews and constrained poems. None of those sound terribly exciting, but they might be better than the alternative.

Pore Jade is Daid

Pore Jade is daid
Pore Jade Goody is daid
All gather 'round her cawfin now and cry
She had a heart of gold
And she wasn't very old
Oh why did such a feller have to die?

Two things:

1) I'm apparently the first person to make that pun on the internet.
2) I guess it's fitting that someone who was a celebrity because of being a celebrity and always went for television coverage has the same coverage in death as she did in life.

The Garden Weasel

Or, how you know the economy is in trouble:

I saw a live commercial for Maytag on Jay Leno, and for Samsung on Jimmy Kimmel. Letterman's on re-runs, so it doesn't count.

I don't believe I've ever seen a live commercial in my life on a show of this sort, excluding Intel's sponsorship of Conan in San Francisco (which was always counterbalanced by a larger sign for Sam Wo Noodles as a joke). Of course, I've seen them on re-runs of old-timey (think 1950s Flintstones tobacco ads) TV. The first episode of the Larry Sanders Show was also about the host's reticence to do such an ad for the "Garden Weasel".


Seriously, watch it.

One of these ads is not like the other

One of these ads is not like the other. Can you figure out which one?

Bob Shamansky: ad 1
Dave Loebsack: ad 1
Alice Kryzan: ad 1 and ad 2

Give up? The difference is that Bob Shamansky lost 57%-43%, while Dave Loebsack won in a major upset over Jim Leach in 2006, and Alice Kryzan won her primary in a moderate upset against Jon Powers and Jack Davis yesterday.

While most of the time, ads aren't necessarily that effective, the right ad can in fact be devastating. However, no matter how snappy or funny it is, you have to have the right opening. Apparently, a humorous ad tying Pat Tiberi to George Bush didn't cut for Shamansky.

While most of the political pundits dismissed Loebsack's ad as "A race so civil the challenger's ad calls the incumbent a good man", as someone living in IA-02 in 2006 I thought it was a brutally effective ad. Jim Leach was an incredibly well-liked incumbent, and George Bush was incredibly unliked. It tied the two together in a way that would be nearly impossible to rebut. For other context, Jim Leach threatened to bolt the GOP if they came in with 3rd party ads, said "This is the happiest day of my life" in his concession speech, and endorsed Obama at the DNC.

And in a race as horribly nasty as NY-26 this year, it's very effective to push through with one or two showings of an ad to get people to do something else. When you're running against someone as horrible as Jack Davis, and Jack is determined to destroy your other opponent, it's pretty easy to get through this way.

The Stock Market is Not News

A sizable fraction of the news coverage in the United States is focused on the day to day fluctuations of stock prices. Most major newspapers have at least a full page of stock quotes, and many have 4 or 5 pages of coverage. The nightly news on TV gives a summary of the days action, with the change in the Dow being "a summary of the day in the financial markets". The radio updates "In moderate volume, the Dow is up 21, while the NASDAQ is down 6". However, this is in opposition to the fact that none of the aforementioned should be considered news on a day-to-day basis.

First, the day-to-day fluctuations generally aren't very large. What does it mean if the Dow is up 50 today? It means that the 30 stocks in the Dow cumulatively have a price around .4% higher. It's the equivalent of saying that gas prices have gone from $4.21 to $4.23 . And if tomorrow, the Dow is down 50, well, now absolutely nothing has happened from two days ago in prices. Hardly news.

Second, even when they do go up or down 5% in a day (which is significant), the price of stock in and of itself isn't really news either. Unless you're day trading, it's hard to see how it will affect you in any way. And if you are day trading, you certainly want more details than you could get in mass media news. Even here, the change in price isn't the news in and of itself; it's supportive evidence for other events. "Financial stocks were down 10% because of another failure in the mortgage industry" is inverted; the correct sense of the news is "Another major failure occurred in the mortgage industry. Investors are concerned that more failures may occur and pushed financial stocks down 10%."

Third, looking at the day to day fluctuations misses the big picture. "GM stock up 10% on improving financial situation" may sound good, but if you don't explain "GM stock is still down 58% on the year", you miss the entire point. "Intel stock was down 5% on the earnings report" would sound better if it was up 20% in the 3 weeks leading up to the announcement.

Finally, the stock market is generally treated as a numbers game. In this respect, it's no better or worse than sports coverage or the lottery, where undue attention is payed to minute details either only somewhat luck-related (were the two home runs last night luck or skill), or completely luck-related (7 hasn't come up for 3 weeks in the Daily Millions; it's due!). But most major newspapers will relegate the lotto and box scores to back pages of separate sections, while the fluctuations in stock prices are given far more prominence and respect.

My advice to struggling newspapers: Cut the stock quotes. Drop the separate "finance" section. Put business news in the same place you'd put any other news, don't emphasize day-to-day stock swings, and put "personal finance" stories in the lifestyles section. If you really feel you have to be in the stock quote business, tell people to go to your website to find quotes. After all, who do you think reads these quotes anymore on news print anyhow? You'll save space, cut costs, and have a more useful and news-filled product.

Really Bad Jokes

Some "choice selections" from http://www.rinkworks.com/jokes/ :

Why are crocodiles brown and flat? - Because if they were yellow and round, they'd be lemons.

What did the big chimney say to the little chimney? - You're too young to smoke.

What do you call a tree from Tulsa? - An oakie.

Where do mentally unstable trees go? - The insane a-xylem.

What did the boots say to the cowboy? - You ride -- I'll go on foot.


Once there were three Indian women. They were all pregnant, and they slept in their husbands' teepees on animal skins that they had killed or traded for.

The first slept on a deer skin.

The second slept on a bear skin.

The third slept on a hippopotamus skin.

All three had their children on the full moon. The first had a strong baby boy. The second also had a strong baby boy. The third had twins.

This just proves that the sons of the squaw of the hippopotamus are equal to the sons of the squaws of the other two hides.

News Digest

Gosh, today was a busy day. Lots of stuff happening in the world. Enough, in fact, that it's worth an actual blog post (*gasp*) rather than just Reader notes to run down them.

Supreme Court decisions - 3 of them today, two of note. First, the "millionaire's amendment" to campaign finance got struck down, so the limit for campaign contributions doesn't increase against self-funders. Campaign finance law will continue to be a mess; film at 11. Also, the DC gun law was struck down, in what was generally a good decision in my opinion. I think it's pretty clear that the federal government can't make such a law prohibiting handgun ownership based on historical precedent and common-sense reading of the 2nd amendment.

ICANN releases domain names - We will now have virtually any string be a potential FQDN (fully qualified domain name), which will wreak havoc on many things. There are two parts; the first is allowing non-ASCII characters, which should be fine, except for standard i18n concerns; the second is allowing anybody who will pay $50-100k to get a TLD, which might be any arbitrary string (excluding trademarks), so http://mail./ might be a valid domain. (The ending . is to prevent browsers from, naturally, doing all sorts of things with the string that would make sense, and ensuring they treat it as a FQDN)

Microsoft to buy Powerset? - At $100 million (or even more) for what is essentially vaporware that can search Wikipedia only moderately worse than Microsoft's existing search engine, I think it's fair to say that Microsoft is trying to make Yahoo! jealous by buying a bunch of other search engine companies.

Oil at $140 - No link, but it seems to be going up and up ... at some point, both supply and demand will become inelastic, and substitutes will increase; but there's no saying where that point will be.

Fear and Loathing on Daily Kos

The backwaters of the Daily Kos diaries can tend to have content that is somewhere very near Youtube comments in the level of sanity and balance involved (at least the spelling is better at Kos). Most of the time, these comments and the resident troll population are easily ignored. However, occasionally they invoke enough "false outrage" which gets plenty of attention, and it cannot be ignored.

Breaking: Des Moines floods, Evacuation: Where is Anderson Cooper?. The lack of facts, misfacts, and truly pathetic attempts at political grandstanding in this article are incredible. With regards to the Iowa flooding, there are a few facts that first need to be considered:

1. No amount of levees and other flood protections could have prevented there being catastrophic flood damage in Cedar Rapids. It is completely impossible to design a city around a river and to expect to be able to hold back the amount involved.
   
2. The flooding is not nearly as bad in Des Moines as in Cedar Rapids. In many areas, the floods only are covering a few neighborhoods. In Cedar Rapids, it is at least 400 city blocks in downtown.
   
3. This is not Katrina. While parts of the devastation may be that bad, it is important to keep in mind that everybody was within at most 5 miles of complete safety. With Katrina, there was at least a 50 mile swath hit by a hurricane, and the corresponding winds. Also, Cedar Rapids is not nearly as densely populated as New Orleans, and it is not under sea level.
   
4. There is nothing that having more resources on the ground could have done to mitigate the damage. There seemed to be almost as many "We have too many volunteers, please do not go to this area" announcements on the news as "We need volunteers at this area". The national guard, FEMA, etc. could not have done anything more.
   
5. There is no major risk to human life. As mentioned above, there was no hurricane associated with this storm. Virtually everybody in danger was evacuated before floods hit.

Presidential Race Projection: June 9 Edition

I'm going to use a few more categories than the standard "Solid/Lean/Tossup" breakdown. I'm adding "lock" for a drop-dead 100% sure bet, and "likely" in between solid and lean. (Note: Nebraska divides its electoral votes by CD, with 2 going to the state winner)

Obama Lock - DC (3), HI (4), IL (21), MD (10), MA (12), NY (31), RI (4), VT (3) - 88EV
McCain Lock - ID (4), NE-3rd (1), TN (11), OK (7), UT (5), WY (3) - 31EV

Obama Solid - CA (55), CT (7), DE (3), ME (4), MN (10), WA (11), WI (10) - 100EV, cum. 188EV
McCain Solid - AL (9), LA (9), NE-AL (2), KS (6), KY (6), SD (3), WV (5) - 42EV, cum. 73EV

Obama Lean - CO (9), MI (17), NJ (15), NH (4), OR (7), PA (21) - 73EV, cum. 251EV
McCain Lean - AK (3), AR (6), AZ (10), GA (15), FL (27), IN (11), MS (6), MT (3), ND (3), NE-1st (1), NE-2nd (1), SC (8), TX (34) - 128EV, cum. 201EV

Tossup - IA (7), OH (20), MO (11), NC (15), NV (5), NM (5), VA (13) - 76 EV


What's obvious here is that Obama is in a lot better shape than McCain. "Serious" people have suggested that he may win any of the states in the "McCain lean" column, including Texas, Alaska, North Dakota, and Mississippi, none of which would generally be considered "Swing states", but certainly should be considered as such this election. McCain certainly has a shot at the Obama lean states, but there are a lot fewer in that category. Most are at least "Solid", which means it would take significant effort, luck, and national swing for McCain to win them.

As far as strategy suggested by this setup, we have the following:
1) If Obama wins Texas or Florida, he definitely wins. The punditry generally look at Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania as "key battleground" states, with Florida generally included as well. However, even if Obama lost 2 of MI OH PA, Texas or Florida would likely ensure he had enough EV to win.

2) McCain needs a base. The general Republican bases are in the west and the south. In the south, evangelical dislike of McCain plus an expected huge black turnout makes a lot of states possibly competitive. In the west, Obama has very strong popularity, and the Democratic party overall is on the rise. McCain has no shot unless he can establish early (before the conventions) that either Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas are safe (and FL NC VA are lean McCain); or that Arizona, Montana, Nebraska, and the Dakotas are safe (and CO NM NV are lean McCain). Texas, once again, would be useful for either group.

3) McCain and California - As I mentioned above that Obama winning FL or TX would make things very easy, McCain could probably do the same thing in California. The state is probably the friendliest of the "Solid Obama" states to McCain. It's also the only way he could win if he lost MI PA OH.

4) GOP VP selection - I see three possible paths to victory for McCain. Strategy 1 involves focusing on the 55 EV of California as much as possible. Schwarzenegger would be the obvious VP choice, even though it might not help; but he's not eligible; maybe something like Carly Fiorina. Strategy 2 is the 58 EV of MI OH PA. Here, there once again aren't any governors or senators of note (Voinovich is unlikely), and I doubt Rob Portman is going to get consideration; maybe Mitt Romney's Michigan connections are the best regional tie he could get. Strategy 3 is the "We're tough and macho and Obama is an evil wimp that will surrender to the terrorists", and that can take virtually anyone, though Joe Lieberman would probably be the most likely candidate for that strength.

I Hate Bank of America

More specifically, I hate their branding and promotions, but that's a large enough portion of my overall view that I'm not going to bother with any nits along those lines.

Exhibit 1: "Risk Free CD" - It's a short term CD, only you can take your money out early! Normally, you can do this with a small penalty. Right now, it's 2.80% APY for 9 months, while US Bank offers 3.00% for 11 months. It's a comparable rate to other big banks I suppose, but ING savings is at 3.00% and has 9 months at 3.30%, and is probably a better option for savings.

Exhibit 2: "Keep the Change" - Seriously. "We automatically transfer money between your accounts" has got to be the stupidest idea ever. It's a program designed for those people who are too spendthrifty, poor, or stupid to save even $10 or $20 per month without a gimmicky program run by someone else to help them. In that regard, it's probably a good idea from a business proposition, but still. It falls very close to "evil".

And the worst part of both of these is the ads. "What if you couldn't kiss your kids for 9 months, or go outside? Why should it be different with your money. This is America. You deserve a risk-free CD". or "We save everything in America, the whales, jam, everything. Why not your money? This is America. You deserve to keep the change." It's both the moronic jingoistic patriotism, the horrible metaphors, the annoying narrator, and really the entire thing.

Book Review: The End of Science

John Horgan summarizes his conversations with dozens of top physicists, philosophers, and other scientists, trying to get an answer to the question: What will happen once we have "The Answer" to everything?

Of course, this question presupposes that there is such an answer (or a collection of answers), and Horgan makes no attempt to be anything but biased in his view that there is such an answer, and that the peak of scientific progress has already passed. He claims that since the discovery of quantum mechanics and relativity, and to a lesser extent evolution, the double helix, and a few other developments, very few has occurred in science. Furthermore, that which has occurred has mostly been "minor details". There has been no Grand Unified Theory in physics over the past 50 years.

However, his examples of "the end of science" are carefully cherry-picked and calculated to be able to support his hypothesis. The data for relativity and quantum mechanics came as a result of the massive increase in the scale of observations caused by improvements in telescopes and microscopes, which are a continuous trend from Galileo to around the 1940s, where we hit Heisenburg uncertainty limits on one scale, and a sheer lack of observable data on the other scale. At some point, Moore's Law will break, and computer capacity increases will taper off. However, he generally ignores mathematics and social sciences, and says very little about chemistry as well. While these can be chalked up to the specific interviews he has conducted, it is more than coincidental that he focuses most on the few topics where the end of science may come sooner rather than later or never.

Horgan claims that there are no "surprises" forthcoming in science. He cites relativity, quantum mechanics, evolution as "surprises", but doubts that these will be forthcoming in the future. This is the silliest of logical errors; if it were expected to occur, it wouldn't be a surprise. He dismisses out of hand that the solution to "dark matter" might be something unexpected, though I cannot imagine how it could be explained purely by "details".

The book doesn't support the end of science very well, and some of his claims on where "the end of progress" lies seem out of date after only about 10 years (especially relating to AI and computing). However, the discussions with various scientists are generally fascinating. One scientist suggests that while bacteria and viruses come from the fabric of the universe, AIDS must come from a research lab, while another suggests that environmentalism is a plot to impoverish black children. Many of them are based on his interviews with Scientific American, and this book is worth reading solely on these accounts.

Coincidence

John Adams, Jr. (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826) was the second President of the United States (1797–1801).

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States.

Can you imagine if Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were to both die on July 4th of this year? I don't know if the JFK-style conspiracy theories or the terrorist conspiracy theories would win out.

A Modest Proposal on Gender in Language

There are all sorts of half-baked proposals to develop a new set of "gender-neutral" pronouns and other relevant gendered words (co, zie, jhe, te, hir, che, and many more). However, most of them are generally silly-sounding words, and all of them have a very high barrier to start being used.

How about this approach:
Step 1) "She" ("her", etc.) is the new gender-neutral pronoun, as well as referring to females. "He" refers specifically to males.
Step 2) "She" ("her", etc.) is the pronoun used to refer to anyone, either male, female, or of indeterminate gender. "He" is abandoned as an abandoned linguistic relic.

This has the advantage that even if someone thinks you sound weird, she will still understand what you are saying. It should also provide a jumping point for a single neutral pronoun that using "he" for just won't work.

What's up with Firedoglake?

A common claim of the right-wing is that they are the "real" friends of Israel, and that Democrats hate Israel or are anti-semitic, or whatever else they claim.

Of course, this is normally bogus. In general, this is either meant to mean "I hate Arabs, and thus I must support Israel", or "I support Israel because the Bible says I should, though if the situation changes I probably wouldn't", or even "I hate Israel, but I'll claim you do".

However, I found this recent post at Firedoglake God Bless Jimmy Carter, the Best Friend Israel Ever Had to be one of the few examples of somebody on the left that isn't a certified racist nut to be actually and blatantly anti-Israel. It's generally weak on logic and facts as well, so I won't go for a point-by-point breakdown. It also seems to vacillate between "Israel has lost" and "Israel will lose", and I don't see how Jimmy Carter comes into play anywhere other than "He's kind of on my side, so he gets the lede".