Letterman eviscerates Bill O'Reilly. Money quote:
O'Reilly:It isn't so black and white, Dave — it isn't, 'We're a bad country. Bush is an evil liar.' That's not true.
Letterman: I didn't say he was an evil liar. You're putting words in my mouth, just the way you put artificial facts in your head!
This time, it's this story of a 19-year-old who disabled a carjacker/kidnapper by crashing the car. (The kidnapper/carjacker was not wearing a seatbelt.)
I can't be the only one who immediately thought of Larry Niven's "The Deadlier Weapon", can I? And my wife, when I mentioned the story to her, immediately thought of the season 1 finale of Veronica Mars.
Does no one read O. Henry any more? I'm saddened that no one mentioned "The Cop and the Anthem" in this AP story, titled "Jobless man asks judge for jail time".
If there's any phrase I wish I could insert into the national political consciousness, it would be trust laundering.
It's the perfect way to tie all of the Republicans together into one neat package, so we can toss them overboard all at once. The Foley cover-up scandal is the perfect mimetic carrier for this.
This provides a simple rhetorical hook to allow us to talk to moderate Republicans and unaffiliated people who have voted Republican in the past:
"No matter how decent or moderate or reasonable your local Republican Representative or Senator is,", we can say, "they still vote in the Republican caucus, and elect as their leaders people like Dennis Hastert and John Boehner, who have been covering for a sexual predator. They take your trust, and then, just like money laundering, they hand it up to their leadership, who abuses it."
The trust laundering goes farther, of course: the Republicans in Congress further launder this trust to support (some might say lie down for, or even bend over for) a President whose handling of the country a large majority of the population disapproves of.
The list of Bush's faults isn't worth getting into here (and it's probably preaching to the choir), but if you know someone who disapproves of Bush's handling of the country, but still feels it reasonable to vote for a Republican Representative or Senator because that Republican is a decent person, ask them "would a decent person support someone who covers for sexual predators?"
Via Slashdot a few days ago: Steven Levy on the secrets of the iPod shuffle. Executive summary: the iPod "shuffle" feature really is random, but since our big hairless ape brains are supreme pattern finders, we see patterns where there are none.
Most interesting tidbit:
But the non-randomness illusion was so prevalent that ultimately Apple felt compelled to address it. In the version of iTunes rolled out in September 2005, there appeared a new feature: smart shuffle. It presents iPodders with a scroll bar that "allows you to control how likely you are to hear multiple songs in a row by the same artists or on the same album". If you pull the lever to the right, the iPod will mess with its usual distribution pattern, intentionally spacing out songs by a given artist. As Jobs explained it in his presentation the day the new iTunes rolled out, he gave what he hoped would be the last word on the Great iPod Randomness Controversy: "We're making it less random to make it feel more random."
This is something that's driven me nuts for years: random does not imply equally distributed. In fact, it's randomness that leads to us seeing patterns. To borrow an example from Stephen Jay Gould, think of constellations: evenly distributed stars would not have any patterns -- they'd be in a grid or something. It is, in fact, the bunchiness that comes from a random distribution that leads to patterns emerging.
An example:
While I was a grad student at Harvard, the Administration (headed by the Dean, who was a computer scientist [remember this]) decided to switch to pure random placement of non-freshmen into the Harvard Houses. The previous placement method had been a weird ad-hoc system of "non-ordered choice", with a random component to spice things up; this had in turn replaced "ordered choice", which had replaced "apply to the House and see if the upper class twits would accept you". Or some such wonderfully egalitarian system.
In any case, while I was there (and a Tutor in Leverett House, if you're curious), It Was Decided that non-ordered choice had to go. (My interpretation: under non-ordered choice, a significant number of black students managed to end up living in the same House. And that Was Not To Be Borne.) So they went for random choice. (Ironically, one of the major justifications for it was "It's the way that Yale does it", which strikes me as simply insane, since Harvard's justification for 95% of everything else it does is "We're Harvard, we're not like other places, and especially we're not like Yale.")
In the Random Choice method, each freshman would join a rooming group (of up to 20 students) and rooming groups would be randomly placed in a House. Details of The Placement Algorithm were tightly guarded. (Clearly it couldn't be pure randomness -- the Houses all had different capacities and whatever assignments were made had to fit the number of rooms.)
The first year after they implemented the Random Choice method, they ended up with Houses with drastically skewed gender ratios in their sophomore cohorts: the combination of the large rooming groups (which were largely single-sex) and the random placement meant that some Houses got a lot more men than others, and some few got equal numbers of men and women. (Harvard was one of the last universities in the country to reach gender parity in its student body, and it hadn't yet done so at that time, so no House got more women than men, as far as I know.)
There was a great kerfluffle. Perhaps even a hullaballoo. "How could the gender ratios gotten so far off?" came the cries, with much rending of garments. "It was random!"
Because, you see, random does not imply equally distributed. Especially for small numbers.
Now the Dean of Harvard at the time, you may recall (if you read carefully above -- you didn't realize there was going to be a quiz, did you?) was a computer scientist. One of the major problems in computer science is the generation of random (or more accurately pseudo-random) numbers. It undergirds all cryptography, after all. So my question for years has been: how the heck did Harvard's computer scientist Dean not understand this?
Clearly, being a Harvard professor may mean you're smart, but it doesn't mean you're wise.
John Scalzi blogged about Twenty Epics a couple of months ago. I thought it sounded interesting (the structuring conceit of the anthology is that each story tells an epic tale in 10,000 words or less), but this was in the middle of our two-weddings-and-a-funeral summer, so I more or less forgot about it.
A short while ago, I got back in touch with a friend I had fallen out of touch with, and it turns out he had a story published in Twenty Epics. When I found that out, I went and ordered the book immediately, read his story first, and quite enjoyed it. I then read the rest of the stories, and other than one or two which were a little too elliptical for my taste, I enjoyed them all.
So if you like epics you can read in less than half an hour, go get yourself a copy and enjoy. Or not. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Go read this interview with John Hodgman, and then go watch his bits from The Daily Show, especially Net Neutrality, White Minority, and Bush's Tax Cuts.
UPDATE: I forgot to add Hodgman's blog. So there it is.
A friend asked me for my list of Important SF Books. I posted one last week.
Which of course, means that I need to post a list of Important or just Favorite fantasy books.
To quote from the SF books post:
Note: this is a list that skips lots of things; this is my list, after all, and I may well have missed something in my scan of my bookshelves (I reserve the right to add things later!). While I think that all of these are Important, these are also ones I enjoy, so there are other Important books I did not include. Some of these were historically important but are dreadful to read now, or which I wouldn't want to re-read.
I'll leave the hair-splitting to others about what SF and Fantasy are, and where their boundaries lie. I include some Horror here, and put some "steampunk" (like China Miéville's stuff) here, but you should feel free to disagree with me on that one.
Anyone looking for good books to start on should look at the World Fantasy Awards or the Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards.
UPDATE: Edited the Prydain entry to be clearer. (Hi, Colorwheel. :-))
UPDATE: I'd like to add The Once and Future King by T.H. White, and The Princess Bride, by William Goldman. (Thanks go to someone who shall remain nameless, but who knows who he is.)
The ABC "Docudrama" (note, not a documentary) about 9/11 just gets worse and worse the more we hear about it. As related here, even people who've worked for Bush are calling bullshit.
The thing that really burns me about this is that the RoviansRepublicans are getting away with this, after spending months in 1998 blaming Clinton for "wagging the dog" by attacking al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, ostensibly to divert attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
I want to see one Republican (or hell, one Democrat) stand up and say publically "I was wrong to criticize President Clinton about that".
A friend (you know who you are -- hi!) asked me for my list of Important SF Books. So here it is.
Note: this is a list that skips lots of things; this is my list, after all, and I may well have missed something in my scan of my bookshelves (I reserve the right to add things later!). While I think that all of these are Important, these are also ones I enjoy, so there are other Important books I did not include. Some of these were historically important but are dreadful to read now, or which I wouldn't want to re-read.
Also: there is no fantasy in this list; I'll do that later. (I'll leave the hair-splitting to others about what SF and Fantasy are, and where their boundaries lie. To quote my wife, "I know what I mean.")
Anyone looking for good books to start on should look at the Hugo and Nebula Award winners.
Updates:
I was reading Standards and specs: Not by UNIX alone, which is a nice article on Unix software development. It made me pull out an older rant of mine and polish it up for this blog.
Software companies build a fundamentally different thing from hardware companies.
To most people, this is so obvious that it shouldn't even need to be stated. In the obvious ways, Most People are right. But there are non-obvious ways in which this is importantly true.
Toyota or Ford don't actually have to make next year's models "interoperate" with this year's models. I'm not even sure what "interoperate" would mean in the context of cars, beyond "they have to use some version of unleaded gas, and be able to fit on the roads, park in garages (I'm talking to you, Ford Excursion) and have the same user interface -- steering wheel, accelerator & brake pedals, etc.".
Auto companies can make everything else about their cars change from year to year.
They don't, of course -- there are strong rewards to not changing too much too fast, and for sharing ("conserving", in the genetic sense) parts within a product line -- both temporally (last year's model and this year's model have a lot of the same parts) and organizationally (our luxury model uses most of the same parts as the base model). But if someone wanted to radically change their engine without touching their car body or interior at all, they could. In fact, that's basically what Honda did with their Hybrid Civic. Looks just like every other Civic on the road, except for the little "Hybrid" sigil on the back.
In the same way, computer companies could radically re-engineer their hardware (motherboards, peripherals, CPUs) as long as they look the same to the rest of the world (e.g. programs). This is what Intel and AMD do every time they bring out a new product line. (Well, these days. The 286 to 386 jump was a doozy.)
But software? Software is a totally different thing. It has to interoperate. The lateral interoperation (between co-existing hardware) isn't that important to some software producers -- Microsoft deliberately engineers incompatibilities all over the place to keep the Mac a second-class computer -- but temporal interoperation, that's a big one. The Office 95/97 incompatibilities burned Microsoft pretty badly, although they'll never admit it.
This is arguably the defining distinction between the Unix and Microsoft worlds.
Most Unixes are built, maintained, and pushed forward by one of two groups:
Microsoft is a (relatively) hardware-agnostic software-only company (notwithstanding the Xbox or the Microsoft Mouse or Keyboard). Windows runs on most Intel x86 hardware.
Guess which set of software producers has sold the most incompatible versions of software?
Okay, that's a no brainer.
Apple navigated the 680x0 to PowerPC migration in the early 1990s quite well; I'm sure they'll handle the PowerPC to Intel migration just as well. Stuff will Just Work -- on expensive Apple-only Macs, but it'll Just Work. Mostly.
Unix is a weird case for a lot of people, I think. I remember doing a Sun 3.7 to 4.0.1 OS migration, which also involved a 68020 to SPARC 1 hardware migration at the same time. We had specialized video capture hardware to deal with, including all sorts of special code to drive it. We simply recompiled everything, and except for a few little things, it all Just Worked. Try that going from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, or 95 to NT.
There are programs written in the early 1980s which would compile directly on any modern Unix these days. They might need a little tweaking for header files or libraries, but they'd Just Work. A lot of this is the whole command-line vs. GUI issue (all our fancy Unix boxes still act like they're talking to VT100 terminals from 1978, which in turn are not all that different from actual teletype machines from the 1950s -- cf. In the Beginning was the Command Line). The Unix programming model is so clean and spare, it has barely changed (regardless of what's under the hood in the OS) -- the clean separation of functionality and coherent interfaces simply make it Just Work.
Unix has a long history of having things layer on top of each other -- things continue to Just Work. Contrast this with Windows, which changes radically (and disruptively) every few years. That might be calming down; Windows 2003 seems to be more like "Windows 2000, but done right this time" than a totally new OS. But the Home edition of it (XP) still has some idiotically disruptive things in it compared to 2000. E.g. the My Computer and My Documents links disappear off the desktop. The claim is that having everything under the Start Menu makes it easier to learn Windows. That may be true, but it's sure annoying to someone used to Windows 2000. Sure, you can tell it to look like Win2k, but you still have to manually tell it to put My Computer and My Documents back on the Desktop. Stupid!
This is one of those clear cases where Microsoft is trying to make software the way that auto companies make cars -- "next year's model can be different because it'll be a new batch of people". Except it's not. The software market is a lot more mature than it was 10 years ago when Windows 95 came out. It's a lot closer to saturation. Even most home users are buying upgrades, not a first computer. And businesses? Wasn't Windows supposed to be the business OS? (Macs, of course, are the long-haired arty-farty computers.)
Businesses that plan for the future (i.e. businesses that will be around for the future) do not buy new OSes and throw the old ones away. They migrate: they have different versions coexisting. As much as it'd be nice to simply rip out everything and rebuild, it's simply impossible to do. If you have a big IT installation (and especially if you're providing a service, like web pages or email, or VOIP or something), you simply cannot do that. Won't work. You have to evolve, not revolve.
Any OS that makes it hard to migrate from one version to the next is a real pain. Unix is simple. It all Just Works. It has its pains, but it usually Just Works at this level.
Windows? Ha. This is an OS that doesn't have to worry about long-term OS uptime because urgent security patches come out monthly and therefore no box is going to be up longer than a month, because so many patches require a reboot. There are Solaris boxes at my company that have been up for 3+ years without breaking a sweat.
To summarize: software is NOT like hardware. It's not like automobiles, or appliances, or anything else that people replace. Software lives a lot longer than any single piece of hardware, has to play nice with other software, and most importantly, has to play nice with its descendants. The entire idea of "next year's model" is absurd and idiotic when it comes to software. There's only the next version. And that version MUST play nice, or you're going to piss people off.
It's entirely unclear to me if any Windows admin (who hasn't used Unix for any length of time) understands this. I'm guessing no.
It's entirely unclear to me if anyone at Microsoft truly knows this, either. Or is it just that if they understood it, they wouldn't be able to market their stuff without wanting to kill themselves in shame?
Over the past five years or so, my wife has consistently been disappointed with my utter inability to explain what I do at work in a short, pithy way that works at parties. I could just say "I'm a Sysadmin", but I'm not just a tape monkey, or a Windows re-installer, so I try to avoid the short title, because people have in the past assumed I don't do anything truly productive.
My job at this point is Systems Architect, but no one outside of Systems departments knows what Systems Architects do, so that doesn't help much on the party circuit.
When I've tried to explain more fully what I do, I have fallen back on metaphors of building trades. Basic sysadmin stuff (setting up accounts, changing backup tapes, etc.) is like being a building super. Setting up new servers is like contractors putting up buildings (or more floors on an exisiting building). Debugging and troubleshooting are like electricians and plumbers fixing problems. Designing large-scale installations is like being an architect (which is why we're Systems Architects, duhhh).
This may explain why I usually feel pretty comfortable with people that build and maintain stuff -- cognitively, we're all pretty similar.
In my previous post, I linked to Shop Class as Soulcraft, which gives me a lot more of a sense of just why I think this. Case in point:
White collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same process as befell manual fabrication a hundred years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system or process, and then handed back to a new class of workers — clerks — who replace the professionals.
One of the reasons I do what I do is that I find it challenging -- as much as they might want to replace us Systems folk with clerks, they simply can't. Here's hoping it actually stays that way.
Thank you, not only for this Labor Day, but for The Weekend.
In honor of Labor day, it seems quite fitting that I came across (via BoingBoing) this article on O'Reilly's site, pointing at "Shop Class as Soulcraft" on the The New Atlantis site.
It's a really wonderful essay on the artificial, Manichean, and ultimately incorrect divisions between "manual" and "mental" labor.
Bizarre.
Google Maps has a weird bug (feature?) in the way it chooses which cities/towns to label at different length scales.
Try this link. It should center around Albany, NY, with the "one grid = 100km" scale.
In New York State: no Buffalo, but yes Boston, Newfane, and Royalton (in a font the same size as Toronto!). I'd never heard of Royalton or Newfane, NY. (Newfane, VT, yes -- we got our marriage license in Newfane, VT.) No Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, or Albany.
In Massachusetts: no Worcestor, but yes to Belchertown. On the Cape, Wellfleet and Truro, but no Provincetown.
In Rhode Island: no Providence. That's basically the entire state!
Totally crazy.
Go read this post, and pretend I wrote it.
Okay, don't pretend I wrote it, but let me bask in reflected glory.
I'm now fully convinced that had Al Gore picked someone else (maybe Russ Feingold) as his running mate in 2000, we might not be in this horrible mess.
Every year in the hot weather, I have a conversation with my wife that goes something like this:
The vast majority (if not all) of air conditioners (and refrigerators, dehumidifiers, etc.) have two settings: a fan setting and a temperature setpoint. The fan setting just controls how hard it blows. The temperature setpoint does not control the temperature of the air the unit puts out. Instead, it controls when the system goes from full run mode to idling mode.
AC units push out only one temperature of cold air: cold. They work until their temperature sensor shows a temperature lower than their setpoint, and then they go idle (although their fans may continue to blow). When the temperature at the sensor rises above the setpoint again, it turns the system back on.
Turning the setpoint down very low will not make the room cool down any faster; it will simply make the AC unit work longer and not go idle as soon.
230? You don't look a day over 210. Honest.
Go Read the Declaration of Independence and annotations thereof.
From "Red, White, and Screwed", Lewis Black's recent HBO special:
I never thought that during the course of my life that a President would be elected who didn't believe in evolution. Or at least, kind of in the ballpark of it, or thought, "Maybe it's got some merit!"
But no! He believes that the earth was created in seven days.
Hoo! Takes my breath away.
And why does he believe that? Because he read it -- in the Old Testament. Which is the book of my people. The Jewish People.
And that book...wasn't good enough...for you Christians....
(laughter and applause)
...was it?
You went "No, we've got a better book, with a better character, you're gonna love him!"
And you called your book "New", and said our book was "Old".
And yet every Sunday, I turn on the television set, and there's a priest, or a pastor, reading from my book. And interpreting it. And their interpretations, I have to tell you, are usually wrong.
And it's not their fault, because it's not their book!
You never see a rabbi on TV interpretring the New Testament, do you?
I was listening to NPR while driving over the past few days, and I heard them use two phrases that made me realize just how little analysis they put into their phrasing -- or how much they're sucking up to the powerful (which is worse?).
The first, which I have to paraphrase since I didn't write it down yesterday, was their "headline" in response to the Supreme Court Decision against military tribunals: "President Bush will turn to Congress for the authority to deal with terror suspects".
Think about this for a moment. It sounds so reasonable on the surface, but if you unpack it, it's easy to see that this is basically a Karl Rove talking point. Implicit in the summary is the idea that the Administration's hands are tied; that the US Military and the Justice Department are totally incompetent to prosecute suspected terrorists; that 219 years of U.S. law under the Constitution (and several hundred years of English Common Law before that), plus the Uniform Code of Military Justice (plus those "quaint" Geneva Conventions) have nothing useful to say about prosecuting people who are accused (oh wait, no, there are no actual accusations -- these men are not so much accused as insinuated at) of conspiring to attack the United States, or who were prisoners captured in a conflict with the US armed forces.
The second phrase I heard today; it was regarding NASA deciding whether or not it would launch the space shuttle Discovery. The person reading the news said something like "Some inside NASA say that foam from the fuel tank could pose a risk to the shuttle....".
Some inside NASA? Like, the engineers?! But what really made my eyes bug out is the idiocy of the "could pose a risk" phrase. This is so meta it makes my teeth hurt. Something can "pose a danger", or it could "be a risk", but "could pose a risk"? That's saying "it might be might be dangerous".
Okay, I'm probably playing Militant Grammarian of Massachusetts too much here, but I really do think that that phrase has serious overtones that Orwell would recognize in an instant -- bluntly put, it's a way of downplaying whistleblower critiques of decisions made on political grounds. Not is a problem, not could be a problem -- but might could be a problem.
Feh.
Shame on you, NPR.
(What was that about a Liberal Media again?)
