Fooled

Taken from this post, this passage hit a bit close to home:

Since TV was invented, critics have pointed out the dangers of watching the perfect people who seem to inhabit the screen. They are almost universally beautiful, live in interesting places, do interesting work (if they work at all), are unfailingly witty, and never have to do any cleaning. They never even need to use the toilet. It cannot be psychologically healthy to compare yourself to these phantasms.

So it’s interesting that social networks have inadvertently created the same effect, but using an even more powerful source. Instead of actors in Hollywood, the characters are people that you know to be real and have actually met. The editing is done not by film school graduates, but by the people themselves.

I confess: much of my Facebook/blogging/tweeting are the 'highlights,' versions of myself that I'm most proud of (or least ashamed of). I don't write about them often, but my life is plenty full of struggles, questions, insecurities and obstacles. I used to blog about those things (though, as if to foreshadow, I wrote very, very cryptically) over at my old blog, which I kept between freshman and sophomore year of college.

I don't think there's any shame, however, in just broadcasting your highlights. People comb their hair and check their teeth before they go out; they wear Booty Pop panties and overblow their resumes. We've always advertised what we think is our best believable narrative, and when we get hard pressed, we'll believe it, too.

In only slightly related news, see a blog devoted to ugly animals. Also, check out Jewel singing her own songs at a karaoke bar to unsuspecting crowds:

Kind of reminds me of Charlie Chaplin losing a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest.

GADDAG and Capitalism

I decided to revisit ScrabbleCheat (took a break for administrivia), and wrote my first Wikipedia article, on the data structure I'm refitting it with, to celebrate. It's rare that you can write something on Wikipedia that isn't there, so I had to pounce.

Hope I can keep editing it with diagrams and the like, as it's a little lame at the moment. Against my better other judgment, I'm still writing it in Erlang ^_^

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Also, while I do believe in capitalism and it's ability to generate wealth, here are a few lame things from the last few days:

• This infographic, What BP could have bought with all the money they lost, is striking. I'm not so shocked that they lost all that money, but that they had it in the first place. One company was worth all that cumulative wealth, what are the others who haven't had cataclysmic disasters worth? And what are they doing with it?


• Then there's this: "The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth." Their tax rate is also the lowest on record. But hey! They generated wealth, didn't they? Look at the economy now!


• Some graphs visualizing the awful. Guys, something isn't working.

Forgive the poor sound quality, but this Louis CK bit comes to mind:

One of the more convincing arguments for atheism...

... for me, anyways, was the size and scope of everything that has nothing to do with us. Statements like "If the whole history of the universe were as long as your arm span, you can eliminate the entire history of humanity with the scrape of a fingernail." (I can't find the official reference, but it's used in the irrelevant introduction to this Ruby talk, until I can find the real one).

If God existed, and cared at all about us, why would he also create so much universe, and have it exist for so much time?

Even as someone who already feels this way, this graphic surprised me:



You can't see it, but to the left is our Sun. You really need to see the original image, and note that the Sun is represented by 1 pixel (the image itself is 10,173 pixels by 2500).

Also remember that the Sun contains 99.99% of the matter in our galaxy.

In a related note, Pharyngula points us to some video added to Carl Sagan (kind of) on the matter.

"Everything is Amazing Right Now and Nobody Is Happy."

This video (at least the middle segment on banks, flying) got a lot of coverage on some programmer blogs about a year ago, I'm glad I finally found it again and can share it with you all:

Some thoughts:

• When he talks about the "miracle of flying," I tend to feel that way about computers. Computers/Internet are a complete miracle, and the beautiful thing about studying Computer Science is that I know how it's working and can contribute to it. Education is the best drug, because the euphoria never leaves. It's also a great reason to study science (not necessarily at the expense of Arts/Humanities).


• I'd never seen that last bit about his daughter. That made me incredibly happy, and very sad for the daughter; I got to confronting that much later in life. That's progress, I guess.

Ben Stein is an idiot.

It's my blog, so I'm free to feel smug and righteous as I like. Today, I'll target Ben Stein, mostly because a few days ago he said:

The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along -- not always easy.

Something was amiss though, and that's this: a little business editorial he wrote in 2009 for the NYT that said, among other things:

NOT long ago, a woman in California called me for advice. She is divorced, with two children, and has a series of interlocking financial problems.

She lives in a lovely home in a stylish inland enclave. It has an interest-only mortgage of about $2.2 million that requires a payment of $12,000 a month, very roughly. It was last appraised at $2.7 million, but who knows if it’s now worth anything remotely close to that price.

The woman, whom I’ve known since she was a teenager, has no job or other remunerative employment. She has a former husband, an entrepreneur whose business has suffered recently. He pays her $20,000 a month, of which roughly half is alimony and half child support. The alimony is scheduled to stop this summer.

She has a wealthy beau who pays her credit card bills and other incidentals, but she is thinking of telling him she is through with him. She has no savings and has refinanced her home repeatedly, always adding to indebtedness and then putting the money into a shop she owns that has never come close to earning a dime. Now she is up all night worrying about money. “Terrified,” as she put it. She wanted me to tell her what to do.

What could I say? I did the best I could, but I had to tell her that she was on very thin ice.

Ever since, I’ve been thinking of the troubles of this sweet woman, consumed with worry about money.

[...]

And all of this is compounded again because my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.

Yes kids, Ben Stein thinks unemployed people in the worst recession in US history since the Depression are, on the whole, lazy grumpy people who deserve no benefits (we just extended them, thankfully).

But last year, he knew a sweet woman who doesn't work, living off her ex-husband in a 2 million dollar home receiving $20,000 a month. She has a current "beau" who'd been paying her credit card debt and incidentals. And there's his son, recently married and with no other support but his father. These are sad tales of desperate Americans.

Of course, all this is a product of a recession caused by subprimes he said would "blow over and the people who buy now, in due time, will be glad they did."

Let's also not forget that he "starred" and "wrote" the Creationism documentary that failed by almost every observable metric.

Like Bill Kristol, this guy has a staggering habit of being wrong and unhelpful, on everything. The fact that he still gets paid for his opinion or presence is staggering.

MAGNETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?

Let this be a myriad post with some of the trends that currently come up in this blog:

Music. This was shown to me by a former roommate, and while acapella isn't normally my thing, I found this pretty hip:

Internet lulz. I never really cared much for Insane Clown Posse (see this lame interview, where they manage to make Bill O'Reilly look like the slightly saner party). I had never been exposed to this, a 2009 release that compares to Brokencyde in claw-your-facedness:

What makes this more notable is the meme arising from the line "Fucking magnets, how do they work? And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist; Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed."

Murrrrrrrrr.

(edit: Madly Brilliant throws me the link to an SNL parody of the video, which I found sufficiently lulzy).

Programming languages. I like the tone and content of Mozilla's "A re-introduction to Javascript." While I don't love everything Douglas Crockford writes, but I agree with him in that there's a beautiful language trapped deep inside Javascript trying to get out. This helps us get there.

Also, reddit has started a mini-course on programming language math and formal specification/semantics. While it's too early to tell how successful it will be, I'm rooting for it!

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I have lots more to write about in the coming days: soon I move to San Francisco, and I just took a trip to the Midwest. Now though, I have to pack!

On Freedom of Speech

Back in DC, my family is hosting an international student for a few days as part of a summer program, and she had a wonderful conversation with us regarding her faith and country. She's a Muslim, and her progressiveness, eloquence, and intelligence really gives a jaded, disillusioned person like myself hope for the future.

That being said, she brought up Everyone Draw Mohammed Day, clearly unhappy with it, and attributing it to Muslim hatred, as this came up in the context of post-9/11 hatred in the United States.

I attribute her reaction mostly to the press in her country, which was inaccurate and unfavorable (her description of it had factual errors, and she didn't really address the cause). It wasn't the time or place for me to defend it in person. But as a participant, allow me to go into detail.

First, watch this 1:25 video of Phillip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials, discussing the offense caused by the title of his new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:

Yes, it was a shocking thing to say, and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it.

And if they open it and read it, they don't have to like it. And if you read it and dislike it you don't have to remain silent about it; you can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book.

You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book, no one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read. And that's all I have to say on that subject.

I participated to condemn acts of violence upon those who were exercising their rights to free speech. Again, if you don't like what I produce, you can choose not to consume it, and you can choose to argue with me about it, you can post rebuttals, and we can have a free exchange of ideas.

Victims of violence get no such choice. This professor of Mayalayam, a language of India, did not choose to have his hand cut off when in a simple language exam ("find the grammar errors in this passage") he used the name Mohammed for a character.

Theo van Gogh did not choose to get killed. Lars Vilks didn't choose to get attacked.

To any who say or believe these victims "chose their fates by their actions": you are agreeing with murderers and barbarians on the tactics used, and wish to stifle free speech. It is comparable to blaming rape victims for their rapes. That is not an opinion, it is a fact. In what twisted world is the appropriate punishment for saying something, drawing something, or singing something death and/or mutilation? No, these victims didn't choose this in the way someone offended by the content of a blog can just choose not to look at it. If the appropriate response to a question or an idea is aggression, than your ideas are weak, you have the mind of an 8-year old, and you live in the 12th century.

On a larger point, no topic of discussion should be off the table because some arbitrary group of people doesn't want it discussed. By this (lack of) logic, suppose I have billions of followers and I demand and order the killing of anybody who uses the letter "v". Suppose you used "v". Better, suppose I just thought you used "v," when you feel like you didn't. Would you actually deserve death?

While the arbitrary selection of a letter in the alphabet is ridiculous to almost everyone, to a large number of people in the world like myself it's just as ridiculous as depictions of a man who lived over a thousand years ago.

To be clear, our student does not agree with any of the violence propagated by murderers, barbarians, and extremists, and is as quick to condemn them as I am. But she (like many progressive, modern Muslims) was still angered by Everyone Draw Mohammed Day.

To her, and the rest: take back your religion. It's easy to pass the buck by calling the perpetrators "not real Muslims," and mentioning that Islam is primarily about Peace and Tolerance, etc., but it is cold comfort to those of us who feel threatened (not offended, mind you, which we can deal with) by people justifying their actions by citing hadith and the Koran. As long as a bunch of idiots are going to threaten me and my peers in the name of your religion, I and others will do what we can to point out the absurdity. Please, fight them, don't fight me.

My choice to participate was not because "I hate Muslims," it was because "I hate those people calling themselves Muslims who are threatening me for exercising free speech."

Also, remember I'm an equal-opportunity blasphemer. See this post on Christianity in the news, with this favorite video of mine (language NSFW):

I'll close with a buddy, Bill Maher, who states it simply: Freedom of Speech is non-negotiable. This isn't uniquely Muslim hatred; if it were Buddhists we'd be pissing off Buddhists, if it was McDonalds we'd be protesting McDonalds.

(Also, for those who missed it, Boobquake!).