Thinking as a Hobby

Jumping Ship

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 09:08:00 GMT

All right...I'm going to go ahead and set up camp over at Blogger. I've really enjoyed my experience blogging here, so keep up the good work, Kenny.

My new URL is:

http://www.thinkingasaprofession.blogspot.com/

Update your bookmarks. If you're a subscriber, please subscribe to the new blog address. You can do that by signing up with a good blog reader (I recommend Google Reader)). Then you can just click on the little icon in your address bar that says "subscribe to this page".

See you at the new blog...

The Straight Dope Hates All Over the Flat Tax

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Sat, 5 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT

Cecil gets asked about the flat tax, and it turns out he's not a fan:

As a general proposition, the wealthiest Americans do pay the bulk of the individual income taxes collected in the U.S. That's a point worth making, since the belief that the rich pay zip while the little guy gets slugged is the impetus behind the "flat tax" proposal, the stupidest idea to come down the pike since pet rocks.

He then cites some statistics like this one showing that the rich bear a large percentage of the tax burden:

The top 3 percent of filers, those making $100,000-plus, paid 40 percent of the taxes.

So what information is he leaving out? He's not saying what percentage of their income rich people are paying.

It could very well be the case that the top 3 percent of filers pay 40 percent of the taxes, but that they're still only being taxed at a rate of 18%.

According to this story:

Warren E. Buffett was his usual folksy self Tuesday night at a fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as he slammed a system that allows the very rich to pay taxes at a lower rate than the middle class.

Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.

Cecil's entire argument rests on the percentage of total taxes that rich people pay, rather than demonstrating whether or not taxes really are "progressive" (a shitty word, if you ask me).

If you simplify the tax code, treat all income equally, and tax everyone at a flat rate sensible enough to still fill our coffers, it would be a simpler, fairer, more transparent tax system.

Top 10 Reasons Why America Kicks Ass

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 11:35:00 GMT

In honor of our nation's official birthday, I give you my...

Ten Reasons Why America Kicks Ass

1) We don't have a queen.

2) Our military-industrial complex can kick your military-industrial complex's ass.

3) We've won the most Nobel Prizes.

4) We can call our leaders douchebags and not get thrown in prison.

5) We don't have a national church (though we're dangerously close to having a national religion).

6) We can buy a .44 magnum if we want.

7) We have the world's largest economy.

8) Our movies gross more worldwide than anyone else's (even though most of them suck).

9) We've never been invaded.

10) We landed on the freakin' moon.

Engineering Biofuels

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 11:20:00 GMT

Fareed Zakaria interviews Craig Venter, the leader of the successful private initiative to map the human genome, about his current efforts to engineer microorganisms to produce fuels.

Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future?
Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.

...

How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

You always have to take predictions with a grain of salt, but this guy has gotten results before. I hope they really are making good progress.

Poker: Human vs. AI

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 09:15:00 GMT

Having defeated humans at chess, AI programmers are looking for other game domains that require more human-like skills. Good candidates are Go, Bridge, and Poker.

Right now there's a human vs. computer poker competition taking place:

Developed by an artificial intelligence group at the University of Alberta in Canada, Polaris will be pitted against several professionals at the Rio Hotel between July 3rd and 6th. Its human opponents will include Stoxpoker.com coaches Nick Grundzien and Ijay Palansky along with Matt Hawrilenko, all of whom have well over $1 million in lifetime winnings from playing poker.

They tried this last year, and the program did reasonably well, but didn't win. The reason poker might be a better benchmark for AI is that in involves making decisions with incomplete information (e.g., your opponents hands). It also requires probabilistic reasoning (unlike chess, which is completely deterministic). Also, it has been shown that any optimal strategy in poker requires some bluffing, which makes sense. If you can gain an advantage by misrepresenting your strength (either under- or over-representing) you're going to lead opponents into giving you more of their chips. But knowing when and how to bluff is difficult.

So it's an interesting story, but I thought this quotation near the end was pretty dumb:

"It's possible, given enough computing power, for computers to play 'perfectly,' where over a long enough match, the program cannot lose money," said associate professor Michael Bowling. "Humans will always make some mistakes, meaning the program will have an advantage."

I ran into this same fallacy when I read a paper about Tic-Tac-Toe several years back, in which they argued that a program that never loses at Tic-Tac-Toe is "playing optimally". Well, no. If you want to define it that way, good for you, but it's a very poor definition.

To play "optimally" or "perfectly" doesn't just mean that you avoid losing, but that you maximize wins against weaker opponents. I don't think we'd call a poker player that never lost money but just barely made money a "perfect" player.

Columbia Brain and Mind Symposium

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Thu, 3 Jul 2008 09:16:00 GMT

Via The Brain and the Sky here's a link to a symposium on the brain and mind that was held at Columbia University in 2004.

There are some great speakers, and the cool thing is that they've apparently just been adding videos of the talks. In addition, they've included slides and transcripts of the talks, which is very, very nice.

Check it out.

Torturing Mice

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Thu, 3 Jul 2008 08:40:00 GMT

About a week ago, for the first time, I saw a mouse (or maybe a rat) scurry across my kitchen floor at night. The pesticide people spray once a month, but that's apparently only for insects. So I told the front office, and they said they'd send a maintenance guy around "to put down traps."

The maintenance guy showed up holding two of these glue board traps. If you've never seen them before, they're basically a think plastic pan filled with glue. You can bait them with food, or just put them in a common area where the rodents traffic.

The rodent gets stuck in the glue, and they usually die in one of two ways: starvation/dehydration or they try to chew their own leg off and bleed to death. Charming, huh?

I'm no bleeding heart or anything. I used to hunt when I was younger, and I don't have a lot of love for a pest that's invading my living space. But I also know that rodents have fairly sophisticated nervous systems, and they're most likely capable of a fair amount of pain and suffering. No need to torture the things. So I thanked the maintenance guy and then promptly threw the glue traps in the trash.

If I'm going to kill the rodents, it'll be with good old fashioned snap traps, which have a much better chance of killing them instantly.

Hitchens Gets Waterboarded

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 10:28:00 GMT

And he concludes:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: âIf slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.â Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Ann Althouse says:

But if Hitchens is willing to submit to it as an experiment, it can't be the worst torture. We can easily think of many tortures that he would not have accepted for journalistic purposes and that no one friendly to him would have perpetrated.

Well, no shit. He didn't say it was the worst torture, just that it is torture. I still remember reading Tom Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, in which he describes the horrible torture methods used by the Syrians, including a chair with the hole in the seat in which a heated spike would slowly be risen up into the subject and then pulled back out.

I don't think Hitchens would go that far for a story, but that doesn't mean that waterboarding isn't torture.

He also brings up the subject of the quality of information derived under torture:

It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someoneâs being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been âdunkedâ this far.)

I don't think confessing you're a hermaphrodite is that big a deal. I wonder how long it would take to get him to confess in the existence of god, though.

Obama Trying to Jump the Shark

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 17:03:00 GMT

In an attempt to see how much he can pander to the religious vote, Obama has decided to back Federal funding for "faith-based" programs.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said he would spend at least $500 million a year to promote community aid programs run by faith-based groups.

Blech.

And get this part:

Obama, 46, an Illinois senator, called for rules to ensure that the council wouldn't breach the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Federal money could only be spent on non-religious activities and groups couldn't discriminate when deciding who will get their aid.

Hey Obama...if you really want to make sure that there's no breach of the separation of church and state how about not giving my fucking taxes to religious organizations?

Man, it's going to be a long, hard slog to the election in November. I'd nearly made up my mind, but occasionally McCain will say something that appeals to me, and Obama will pull a boner like this.

Please make him stop.

Carl Sagan on Recognizing Truth

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 09:26:00 GMT

I thumbed through a copy of Carl Sagan's The Varieties of Scientific Experience in the bookstore yesterday (it's also on my Amazon wish list).

I pretty quickly flipped to the back of the book, where they had included some transcriptions of questions that people had asked Sagan when he'd delivered the speeches in the book. There's lots of good stuff there, but I particularly liked this exchange:

Questioner: How do you recognize the truth when it is upon us?

Carl Sagan: A simple question: How can we recognize the truth? It is, of course, difficult. But there are a few simple rules. The truth ought to be logically consistent. It should not contradict itself; that is, there are some logical criteria. It ought to be consistent with what else we know. That is an additional way in which miracles run into trouble. We know a great many things--a tiny fraction, to be sure, of the universe, a pitifully tiny fraction. But nevertheless some things we know with quite high reliability. So where we are asking about truth, we ought to be sure that it's not inconsistent with what else we know. We should also pay attention to how badly we want to believe a given contention. The more badly we want to believe it, the more skeptical we have to be. It involves a kind of courageous self-discipline. Nobody says it's easy. I think those three principles at least will winnow out a fair amount of chaff. It doesn't guarantee that what remains is true, but at least it will significantly diminish the field of discourse.

Ah, it's too bad Sagan is dead. He was one of the clearest voices of reason.

To summarize...three general guidelines from distinguishing truth from hooey:

Check for internal consistency
Check for external consistency (does it jive with the best available knowledge?)
Be as unbiased as possible

This is sort of a truncated version of Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit from A Demon-Haunted World, and it's a nice summary.

But, Dirty Harry is Cool

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Tue, 1 Jul 2008 08:46:00 GMT

Mark Harris in Slate takes a look back at the Dirty Harry movies, and doesn't like what he sees.

The movie's most inflammatory sequence is not Harry's famous, twice-delivered "Do you feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" monologue. It's the scene in which Harry traps Scorpio and then tortures him to learn the whereabouts of his latest victim (who, unbeknownst to Harry, is already dead). "Rights. â¦ I have rights," Scorpio shrieks, sniveling as Harry's foot presses down on his bleeding leg. Because of Harry's literal overstepping, the killer eventually goes free; he then hires a large black thug to beat him up so that he can work the easily duped court system by filing a false police-brutality claim. While the city's brass wants to bargain with Scorpio, Harry knows the only solution is to hunt him down and kill him. Which he (spoiler alert) does.

In other words: Of course this is a right-wing fantasy. Ideologically, Dirty Harry was a well-calculated sop to the group of Americans that Richard Nixon identified in 1969 as the "Silent Majority" (though neither word was entirely accurate), those for whom everything about the period, from burning ghettos to women's lib to anti-war marches represented steps toward barbarism.

Harris fails to mention that the torture of Scorpio was a "ticking time-bomb" scenario. Scorpio had kidnapped a little girl, ripped out some of her teeth and mailed them to the police as proof that he had her, and had stashed her somewhere. Harry thought the only way to save her was to torture Scorpio. Was this justified? I thought it was interesting cinema, because the main character had to make a choice between the law and the life of the girl.

And then Harris leaves out the very end of the movie. After Harry kills Scorpio, what does he do? He throws his badge into the water. There are multiple ways to interpret this action, but I think one clear implication is that he realized that he couldn't function within the confines of the law and still be true to the people he vowed to protect. If this makes Harry fascist, then what does that make Batman look like?

Another significant ommission of Harris' is the fact that in the original movie Harry never kills anyone who isn't either holding a weapon or making a move for a weapon. He doesn't indiscriminately blow bad guys away. He gives them a choice, to gamble with their lives by picking up a weapon to kill him, on the chance that Harry's gun is out of bullets.

The implication of the films is that the system has become bloated and bureaucratic to the point where it protects criminals more than citizens. In that sense it's reactionary. But the character isn't an assassin with a badge. He's more lawful that most movie superheros, and he's at the other end of the spectrum from Bronson's character in Death Wish.

He's just a decent guy with a giant hand cannon trying to protect the honest, hard-working people of San Francisco.

Computing Beyond Turing: Jeff Hawkins Talk at UCSD

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:53:00 GMT

As you may or may not know, I'm a big fan of Jeff Hawkins, entrepreneur, engineer, and cognitive theorist. You really should read his book On Intelligence, if you haven't already. It's changed the way I think about cognition and has been a driving force for the direction of my dissertation.

There are some older talks out on the web of Hawkins explaining the theory that's driving the technology he's now working on, but here's a fairly recent video of a talk he gave at UCSD this year:

He does review the theory, but he also gives a demo of the NuPIC software and describes some of the recent additions they've made in the past year. It's about 1:15.

One of the things that's funny is that the title of the talk is "Computing Beyond Turing", and Hawkins spends some time talking about Turing and the Universal Turing Machine. When a questioner points out at the end of the talk that he didn't really talk about computing beyond Turing, he admits it, so it's really not a good title for the talk. The hierarchical computation Hawkins is talking about is still carried out on a Turing machine. If anything, it's a subset of Turing computation.

Still, it's an interesting and worthwhile talk if you care to invest the time in it.

Blogging in Parallel

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:31:00 GMT

I've heard that on average every seven years the cells in your body are completely replaced by new ones. That's probably not true, but it's interesting to muse on.

I've been blogging on JournalScape for about seven years now. My readership has grown incrementally during that time, but according to Google Analytics, I still only get 20-40 unique visits a day, which ain't a whole lot.

So I've been thinking about switching to a new site, with a new look...basically starting over. I haven't completely made my mind up, though. There are some things I obviously like about JournalScape.

I like the way it lists the titles of blog posts for an entire month, though I'd guess that some people would like to immediately begin reading a blog post without clicking a link. I like that it's simple and easy to use. Kenny is a great administrator and has been very helpful every time I've asked him about something.

But I'm feeling a little restless. So, I started a blog in parallel, over at Blogger. It's called Thinking as a Profession.

There are a few things I like about Blogger, most having to do with search. First of all, Blogger is now owned (like every other internet company) by Google. So a Blogger blog will probably be indexed higher on Google and Google Blogs than JournalScape pages, in general. Secondly, the blog contents are searchable, which is something I really need. Often I'm looking for an old post, and sometimes I can't find it. Even when I do, it takes forever. I also like the fact that Blogger as an import/export feature for blog content, so that I can easily backup or move content.

What I'm going to do is cross-post for a few weeks, and play around with the Blogger blog and see how I like it. If I feel like it's a significantly better blogging experience, then I'll probably jump ship. If not, I'll continue to blog here.

Either way, I'll keep you posted on what I end up doing.

Recalling Bobby Jindal

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:38:00 GMT

Well, Jindal signed the incredibly stupid Louisiana Science Education Act, but that didn't seem to upset too many people.

What did upset a lot of people is that he didn't veto a recent pay raise that Louisiana legislators proposed for themselves.

Now papers have been filed calling for a recall of Jindal.

Part of me thinks this is kind of amusing and also appropriate. Another part of me realizes that this is probably dirty pool, trying to taint a young rising star in the party who is being considered as a VP nominee by McCain. Recalls in general are a bad idea, I think. The candidates are vetted by a long and grueling process, and office terms aren't that long. I think if you make your bed, you have to sleep in it. If you screwed up, vote the person out the next election.

Still, I find this somewhat amusing.

WALL-E Negative Review Backlash

djames@gmail.com (derekjames) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:04:00 GMT

WALL-E is currently at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, with 129 positive reviews and only 4 negative ones.

Who are these four brave or utterly misguided fools who dared to be in the extreme minority? Well, one is Brian Orndorf of the SciFi Movie Page, who gave the film 2 stars out of 4.

I read through his review, and a lot of what he said I agreed with.

Wall-E is Pixar's biggest creative gamble in over a decade; a genuine cinematic leap of faith. However, the ambition doesn't match the outcome, and while Wall-E dances whimsically, it's a plodding, frighteningly hypocritical, and forbidding film that trips over its fogged intentions at every dreary turn.

Wait...hypocritical? How?

[Plot points from the second half of the film up ahead...slight spoiler alert]

Where Wall-E heads next is sure to divide audiences. Following Eve into space, Wall-E boards the "Axiom," a huge cruise space ship that's home to the loose ends of the human race. You see, in the 700-years since mankind bolted from Earth, they've evolved into overweight blobs of pudding, nurtured by the Buy-N-Large Corporation who use humans to feed the endless, aggressive cycles of profitable consumption, leaving them helpless and totally enslaved to commercial trends. The human characters are obese nincompoops who've lost the ability to walk eons ago, puttering around on floating chairs waiting impatiently for their next needless desire to be force fed to them by the all-powerful corporate machine.

Here's where I remind everyone this is a Pixar/Disney picture. Pixar/Disney. Decrying greed.

The guy's got a point. I wasn't that impressed with the preachy nature of the second half of the film. I was more let down by the lame story. But Orndorf points out the hypocrisy of a film criticizing consumerism while its title character is plastered all over lunch boxes, pajamas, and dozens of other tie-ins and products.

Fair criticism, right? Well, here's what some of the comments on Rotten Tomatoes thought:

Nice last name Brian orndork....... Idiot.

...

Mmm, I've never liked self proclaimed critics. You hurl insults at the movie but I'm not sure I've heard you explain why it's "hypocritical" or "forbidding".

...

Apparently any douchebag can start a website and write 'reviews' for movies. Get bent you steaming pile of sh*t.

...

Is it Andrew Stanton's fault that Disney will try to sell this like crazy? Why not actually review the film instead of talking about how they'll make toys.

...

I'm going to take a guess since you go on for 3 paragraphs about the obese, that you yourself are fat and worthless and took this film personally.

...

Hey Brian, you're in luck! If you and your boyfriend Phil move to California, the two of you can get a legal civil union! Then you can cuddle and whisper sweet nothings into each other's ears like, "Wow, I love being completely out of touch with society's tastes in movies!"

...

You should quit your day job and go sell mattresses. Moron.

That's just from the first two pages of comments. There's lots more where that came from.

I always enjoy a level-headed, reasoned response from the movie-going public to legitimate criticism.