Quote of The Day

I may try and write about Rep. Bart Stupak’s amendment to the House health bill, which blocked insurance companies enrolled in the exchanges from offering abortion coverage, as it raises a few interesting questions.  However, I don’t have the time right now, so I’ll leave you with a revealing comment from Ezra Klein, in his post The Stupak amendment: As much about class as about choice:

And it did not block the federal government from subsidizing abortion. All it did was block it from subsidizing abortion for poorer women.

Every Night, I Break Into People’s Homes And Replace The Twilight Series With Logic Texts

I’m more than a bit tickled to see that Dover has reprinted an edition of Raymond Smullyan’s First Order Logic.  It’s a Dover book, cheap and thin, so you can imagine someone casually picking it up to find out what this “logic” is about.  But despite its initially inviting exterior, it’s not a book of baby-logic, and section titles include

The Skolem-Lowenheim and Compactness Theorems for First Order Logic; Gentzen Systems; Gentzen’s Haupsatz; Craig’s Interpolation Lemma and Beth’s Definability Theorem

Contrary to my initial reaction, this is par for the course for Dover, which was founded after Tables of Functions with Formulas and Curves was an unexpected smash hit in the United States.

In general, math and logic books range from expensive to insultingly expensive, so it’s more than a little surprising to see serious (if outdated) books on the subject that are cheap.  For instance, I’m sure there are better books on the subject, but I’ve actually had Paul Cohen’s Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis recommended to me.

The Highbrow Life

I’m obviously flattered that Go is the game of the highbrow, according to a 1949 issue of Life magazine, but having played both, I wouldn’t say it’s a more highbrow game than bridge.  I like it better, but I wouldn’t say it’s a better game than bridge.

Even more confusing, Go’s footprint in the US was extremely small in 1949. Not even many highbrow individuals would have played it, even if they’d heard of it.

The King Is Coming

I didn’t initially care that much about the G20, or think that it would be a big deal. Clearly, I was wrong.

What first made me angry was learning that several downtown universities would be closing for the three days surrounding the summit. At least one university is closing its residence halls, though it will deign to provide the students with alternate housing.  To drive into downtown, you’ll need a driver’s license with a downtown address. No word what you do if you just moved.

Pitt is three or four miles from downtown and the convention center, but because of a dinner being held at the Phipps conservatory, Thursday evening, all classes after 4PM are being cancelled, and all classes in the Cathedral of Learning are being cancelled starting at Noon.  I won’t pretend that having the afternoon off is a terrible burden.

What rankles is that this is all for a dinner.  After all the disruption that’s being inflicted on people who live and work downtown, they’re taking the delegation to Oakland just because they fancied the dinner location.

I don’t mind the tremendous expense of security, and I don’t think that the meeting is a waste of time.  I do wonder if there might have been a better city than Pittsburgh (isn’t this why we built DC?), but I have to admit that the visitors will probably bring enough money for it to be a net benefit.  I don’t even mind that the White House is a very nice place, and we the people spend money on ensuring that the president’s bed is comfy.

But when we’re shutting down a university for the sake of a dinner, we’ve crossed a line into treating the heads of state as if they’re kings and we’re their subjects.

Beginners Go Tournament

Just a quick note: there will be a go tournament for beginners held in Oakland this coming Tuesday–I’ve included the announcement below.  I doubt I’ll be there to offer moral support, but it’s a good opportunity to play go if you’re just starting or haven’t played in awhile.  I suspect that the fifteen game limit may be more of a rough guideline, but if you’re worried, you can contact someone at the club and ask.

Let me also note that September is just about the best time of year for new players in our club.  Every year there’s an increase in the number of attendees right after CMU’s activity fair, and it brings in folks of all levels.

——————–

The tournament will be this Tuesday night (Aug.  25) at Phantom of the Attic in Oakland (406 S.
Craig St.).  It will start at 7:30 and go no later than 11:30.

The tournament will be played on 13×13 boards and is aimed at players who are new to the game of go.  Anyone who has played around fifteen games or less is welcome to play.  So, if you’re new to the game yourself, be sure to stop by, and if you have friends that you’ve been trying to get excited about go, encourage them to attend.  First prize is a used go board.  Second prize is $5.

Josiah will be at Phantom of the Attic at 6:30 to give a review of the rules and other tips to anyone who shows up early.  Other
non-beginners are invited to stop by to observe and/or teach before the tournament and between rounds.

Ready, Set, You Know Who To Blame For This…

As to why white parents would be especially pessimistic, Warnock notes that previous studies have suggested that up to one third of junior and high school students believe that financial aid is available only for minority students. This could account for low-income white parents thinking they don’t have any help for them – even though Pell Grants (and many other programs) are based on income, not race and ethnicity. (Inside Higher Ed)

If Stanley Milgram And Phillip Zimbardo Hadn’t Gone Into Psychology…

They might have gotten involved in Pranknet, the subjects of an article at the Smoking Gun.  These trolls call various places, especially hotels, and manipulate the people on the other end into destroying property or humiliating themselves.  In a few cases they tricked their targets into stripping naked in public, and even drinking a strangers’ urine in another.  Despite its similar style, Pranknet was not behind the strip search prank call scam.

The Smoking Gun has responded by revealing the real identities of a lot of the individuals involved.  The ringleader is Tariq Malik, who they visited at his parents’ house, but he turned out to be afraid of talking to the reporters, or at least going outside in the sunlight.  Shawn Powell is another member of the group and a registered sex offender–the smoking gun claims he’s not even the worst of them, but I’m unconvinced.

I’m not sure the traditional explanation of outing is applicable here, since you can’t expect these guys to feel much shame.  But so far as it punctures their sense that they’re invincible thanks to the anonymity of the internet, exposing them can’t help but do good.

I’ll leave you with an anecdote.  One day a professor of mine started class by telling us that “One very hard question in the social sciences, one that provokes a huge amount of disagreement is ‘why are men such jerks?’ ”

I Am The Anti-Plato

When one wishes to exercise the mind, one should lavish treats on the body.  I’m drinking soda, eating candy bars, and finishing with bourbon and valium tonight.

…Well, I do ascribe to the theory–since college started, I’ve always written papers with various tasty but unhealthy things on hand, but today only the soda has actually happened.  No candybars or valium in sight, and we’ll have to wait until much later to see about the bourbon.

Recently, my soda of choice has been Boylan Black Cherry, which is made with cane sugar.  The first time I tried it, it was like giving crack to an addict, but I’m no longer rocking back and forth when I go into withdrawal.  I highly recommend trying it.

I also highly recommend gawking at the list of colas in Wikipedia’s template for them (at the bottom of the Boylan Bottling Company page).  Andy Warhol said that in America, everyone drinks the same coke, but there appears to be an awful lot of variations.

Breaking News

Thomas Pynchon’s middle name is Ruggles. How did I fail to find out about this until now?

Quote Of The Day

How can you not admire someone like that?

Actually, it’s not so difficult, I’ve discovered. All the someone in question has to do is begin thinking differently from me about a few important matters, and in no time I find that his qualities have subtly metamorphosed. His abundance of colorful anecdotes now looks like incessant and ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous copiousness and fluency strike me as mere mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity. A prose style I thought deliciously suave and sinuous I now find preening and overelaborate. His fearless cheekiness has become truculent bravado; his namedropping has gone from endearing foible to excruciating tic; his extraordinary dialectical agility seems like resourceful and unscrupulous sophistry; his entertaining literary asides like garrulousness and vulgar display; his bracing contrariness, tiresome perversity. Strange, this alteration of perspective; and even stranger, it sometimes occurs to me that if he changed his opinions again and agreed with me, all his qualities would once more reverse polarity and appear in their original splendor. A very instructive experience, epistemologically speaking. (George Scialabba on Christopher Hitchens).

Striking for the role of personality in the literary or political essay.  If you’re weighing whether to read the rest, I’m not sure a 2005 article on Christopher Hitchens is the best way to enlighten yourself today, or that all of Scialabba’s diagnosis is apt.

Round Numbers And The Netflix Prize

The Netflix prize was just won, making a post I had sitting in the back of my head a lot more timely.  In case you’re unaware, the competition was to improve by 10% on Netflix’s own algorithm for recommending titles to customers based on their previous preferences.

But what’s special about 10%? I ask because improvement on Netflix’s algorithm was extremely quick.  5 % took less than 2 months, and multiple teams had reached 8% in a year.  It’s been 18 months since then to reach 10%.

On the fact of it, that’s very strange.  It’s true that a well designed prize would take long time to beat, and that it should take increasing quantities of time to make improvements as time goes on.  But then it should be possible to overshoot and set a target that won’t be met.  The timeline of the Netflix competition suggests that they did a very good job setting a target–not too ambitious, but not too easy.

But what’s the prior probability that any given target would be right? Not wonderful.  So here are three possibilities: 1) It was luck.  10% was a nice round number, Netflix chose it, and the competition worked out right.  2) There’s only so much possible improvement to be had.  More than 10% was unrealistic, and Netflix knew that, because a) there are theoretical results out there that suggest the systems can only be so good or b) the Netflix algorithm team had some know-how. Perhaps they already knew they could improve their system by n percentage points, and gambled $1 million on competition producing a better result.  3) More than 10% was achievable, but the way the problem was framed limited experimentation.  Note that even well into the competition, there was a lot of collaborative discussion of ideas between the teams.  Basic ideas would be shared, and then different teams would implement them, perhaps sharing tricks discovered on the way.  Presumably this died down as teams approached the 10% goal (though the winner fused the two teams that had previously been closest).  This kind of setup has the potential to make everyone take the approach of trying to eke out a few tenths of a percentage point from essentially the same approach as they’d been using.  If so, that has the potential to create an artificial ceiling, as teams approach a local but not global maximum of fitness.

All of this is pure speculation by an outsider, but the phenomenon surrounding the 10% target caught my eye, and I couldn’t resist.  Bottom line question: could Netflix benefit from a second round of competition, or have they tapped out the resources available for $1 million?

Update: Seems that the winning condition was a bit more complicated than I’d realized, though it doesn’t matter for what I’m saying in this post.

Ty Lawson

I just found out that the draft is in two hours, so…good timing!

So Matthew Yglesias has a post about Ty Lawson, arguing that he should go higher in the draft than he’s projected to go (21st by nbadraft.net).  He was criticized for being short (6′0″), even for a point guard, and not fast enough.  I just don’t get the speed complaint, since Lawson was possibly the fastest player currently in college.

The height issue is possibly even weirder.  As for the height issue, the weirdest thing is that Yglesias’ comment thread didn’t mention the most relevant comparison.  Namely, three years ago, UNC sent Raymond Felton, an extremely fast 6′1″ guard to the NBA, and that’s…working out nicely.  They have a similar style and played the same system in college.  And Lawson has at least one thing going on Felton–his three point shooting was substantially better than Felton’s.  Actually, Felton had bad 3-pt shooting in college, and continues to be bad in the NBA, while Lawson is an outstanding three point shooter.  There are differences–Felton is actually a mutant who can just throw the ball through defenders to make a pass, and he’s probably faster than Lawson by a bit.  Still, Felton fully justified his status as the 5th pick, so it feels safe to say Lawson would justify a lottery pick.

Last fun stat, Lawson’s assist-turnover ratio? 3.48, which is just sick.  And it’s doubly important, because he always looks out of control, like he’s about to throw the ball in one direction and then careen into the stands.  But the stat shows that’s just an illusion.

Tacked on at the last minute: I see that Felton’s PER isn’t great, so maybe I was followed by superficially impressive stats.  Hollinger points out that the Bobcats made an obvious mistake playing Felton at the 2.  Or maybe I’m just out of my league trying to comment here–I don’t really follow the NBA, except sometimes during playoffs and to check on players I liked in college.

Watching the draft: When I saw that Minnesota had drafted Ricky Rubio, Jonny Flynn and Ty Lawson, I thought of the scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker faces three of a dead mobster’s henchmen, breaks a pool cue in half, and tells them he’s taking auditions, which will conclude in 5 minutes.  I think that’s a much better storyline than trading Lawson.

17th Century Productivity Blogging

You know that Munday is Sundayes brother
Tuesday is such another
Wednesday you must go to Church and pray
Thursday is half-holiday
On Friday it is too late to begin to spin
The Saturday is half-holiday agen.

That’s by Merlin Mann some moralist, writing in 1639, which I found in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” the E.P. Thompson paper that Julian recommended. Thompson soon offers as an aside:

The work pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives. (The pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students — today, and provokes the question whether it is not a “natural” human work-rhythm.)

I am so glad to hear that.

The Weekend

This 1991 Atlantic Monthly article “Waiting For The Weekend” by Witold Rybczynski is interesting throughout, even if it doesn’t fully substantiate its most ambitious claims.  It’s worth reading if just for the depiction of work culture before and after the Industrial Revolution, which is quite fascinating.  I’d known that drunkenness on the job was common before the Industrial Revolution and remained a problem throughout it, but I’d never heard of Saint Monday, for instance.

I found the article via the Atlantic’s new ideas blog, which is being written by Conor Friedersdorf–more about which later.

Update: In a comment to this post, my friend Julian suggests a very nice piece of academic history on changing conceptions of time and work for those who want to read more.

Quote Of The Day

So there’s a characteristic pseudo-self-sufficiency to concessive theory – a characteristic pseudo-completeness. (A feeling that when you’ve said all there is to say about how to be an effective leader, or an effective person, in a rather instrumental way, there isn’t anything left to be said.) There’s also a characteristic bait-and-switch quality to it, in that it is normative, so it is easier to miss that it may not be normative in all the ways that we need it to be. (John Holbo)

A Cute Coincidence

I just today found out that Khoi Vin, the design director for nytimes.com since 2006, was also responsible for the 2005 redesign of The Onion’s online newspaper.  In that design project, he said the hardest task was to make the site look like an actual newspaper.

If the results look suspiciously like a green version of The New York Times Online, it’s because we spent a lot of time studying how the Gray Lady delivers news — but I like to think we were conscientious enough not to steal crassly.

Comment Spam Keeps On Giving

Start making out with the person at the terminal next to you (It helps if you know them, but this is also a great way to make new friends).

“if” was a link to an appliance website.

Dum Dum Da Da

This Saturday, May 16th, I’m going to be getting married. I don’t know if I have a good, or at least short, way to describe what this means to me.  I think it’s enough for now to say that this will be the most important day of my life so far.  Perhaps the most important day ever.

So I’ll confine myself to commenting on how this event affects my blogging. I’ve set this entry to appear as I’m leaving for Raleigh, and leaving without my computer.  Instead I’ve settled on a few books and my kindle, all of which is pleasure reading–Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore being the highlight.  I’ll be gone until the 25^th and I won’t be posting during that time. On the other hand, after May 16th, I’ll consider myself, based on personal experience, to be an expert on any marriage related topic.

Somewhere Out There, Someone Is Actually Trying To Provide Free Ringtones…

Yooo..

I kno it has nothing to do with what you wrote, but have you ever heard of http://***********/ringtones.php. They seems to promise free ringtones

PS. Dont be an ass, this is NOT spam 

The PS aside, this is obviously spam.  And yet it’s got just enough anthropomorphic features that I feel a twinge upon deleting it.  The poor spambot is actually a lot more considerate than the average person who derails a comment thread.  They wouldn’t realize or care that they’d said something off topic.  What cinches the deal is the painfully honest phrasing–the website “seems to promise” free ringtones.  I’m sure they do.

The definitive treatment of inhuman comment spam is John Holbo’s “Comment spam, me? Ha! This must be one of your human jokes!”  I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve linked to it before, but I make no apologies.  (And do see the most recent xkcd).

Preparatory Reading For Tonight

My friend JT shared an article from basketball prospectus on the UNC team that’s worth reading.  It argues that playing a fast paced game is almost completely unimportant to UNC’s offensive success.  That’s surprising, since UNC is one of the fastest teams in college basketball, and this style of play is characteristic of Roy Williams’ teams.  However, so far as I understand statistical analysis of basketball (ED: And that’s not far at all…) the argument seems legitimate.

A second article focuses on Tyler Hansbrough’s game.  Nice paragraph:

The broadcast did do a great job of highlighting a three-possession sequence early in the second half where Hansbrough showed off the breadth of his offensive skills. On the first play, he caught the ball at the three-point line, put it on the floor and used a spin move to free himself for a banker off glass from about 10 feet. Next, Hansbrough established deep post position early in the offense and scored on a soft hook shot. Lastly, Hansbrough caught the ball just outside the paint, saw a double-team coming and dished to teammate Ed Davis for a dunk. Few big men in the country could have made any two of those plays, let alone all three.

The biggest thing keeping Hansbrough from being a major factor in the high post is the fact that he is so good at playing nearer the basket. I anticipate this element of his game being developed at the pro level…

The comforting upshot of the piece is that Hansbrough could be a strong role player in the NBA, despite the fact that many elements of his game are unlikely to be effective in professional play–he’s neither tall enough nor athletic enough to play the same role he has in college.