I'm glad to see the media giving, for once, a very vivid and accurate portrayal of what scientists tend to be like.

Not that I would ever engage in this sort of research, of course. Um, really.

They set up a climbing wall at work today. (Just a temp thing) I've never climbed on a wall before.

If you're used to climbing on rocks, wall climbing is very very alarming.

Okay, this one is interesting:

I want anyone and everyone who reads this to post in here something they would LIKE to do with me SOMEDAY.

Then post this in your journal to see what I'd like to do with you.

A church has set up a virtual church on the net. In 3D.

I'm fighting off a certain urge to set up a large server farm, have a 3D interactive world with a full street of small gods. Virtual Methodists over here; virtual synagogue down the block; the imam's tower is about the same height as the cathedral spire, and the temple of Athena is on a hill nearby...

Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker has a new story on how the entire Abu Ghraib incident came to pass. The story relies a great deal on background sources, so it's got to be read carefully with a skeptical eye - but it smells more or less right to me.

( Some thoughts on itCollapse )
Key lesson from this: There are some very ugly things that are sometimes necessary. When those things have to be done - and sometimes they have to - it's not something that can be delegated to just anyone. It requires people who are not only supremely competent at their work, but have the maturity for moral introspection, and the ability to thereby control their own impulses even when doing such things. Not a job to farm out to random schmucks.

Anyway - a very interesting read, both for the main story and for the incidental glimpses it gives into many of our operations and the people behind them. Whether or not you agree with my opinions on the matter. :)

(Last Tuesday, at a rally in Cincinnati:) "You've got to get out there and turn out the vote... that's what we call the grass roots. I've come to fertilize the grass roots."

This is what we call an "unfortunate metaphor."

Zwei neibelungen wöhlen, ach! in meiner kopf.

--Goethe, more or less...

For those of you interested in astrophysics, this week's Science has a very interesting set of articles about pulsars, magnetars and neutron stars. Particularly interesting are the news articles "The Pulsar Menagerie" (1) and "Crushed by Magnetism," (2) and Lattimer and Prakash's review article "The Physics of Neutron Stars." (3) The latter includes a great discussion of the state of our understanding of type II supernovae and how neutron stars are formed.

(Interesting thought from this: The typical total energy release in a type II SNa is ~3*10⁵³ erg, about 10% of the total mc² for the star. Of this, about 1% is kinetic energy, 0.01% is photons, and the overwhelming remainder is a wall of neutrinos. During one key stage in the collapse, a region of star becomes sufficiently dense to become opaque to neutrinos (! - mean free path of about 10cm over a 20km region) so energy can build up in this form, and it's the sudden release of that which triggers the primary explosive shock wave. There's just something neat about that.)

And on another side, there's a new report out by Laumann et al titled The Sexual Organization of the City. (4) It discusses how cities tend to split into several independent "sexual marketplaces," often with radically different customs, leading to questions about how cities need to manage things like health and social issues with more refined tools. So far, I've only read the NY Times review, but I intend to get my hands on a copy of the full report asap - it looks like a good read.


(1) Science, 23 April 2004, vol. 304 pp. 532-3
(2) Science, ibid., pp. 534-5
(3) Science, ibid., pp. 536-41
(4) E. O. Laumann et al., (eds.) The Sexual Organization of the City, Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 2004.

In other news, anyone wanna hang out today/tonight?

For those of you who haven't seen the news yet, Google filed a form S-1 this morning.

And that's the last that I can say for the next six months or so. :)

The Hezbollah has a game show.

I suppose it would be appropriate to say something about postmodernism here, or about how media is starting to pervade and reshape even corners of the world that seem anti-modern by their nature, but this is really just surreal.

A single word can have two different antonyms which are not synonyms of one another. For example, synonymy (the condition of two words having the same meaning) has antonyms antonymy (the condition of two words having opposite meaning) and polysemy (the condition of one word having multiple meanings).

Also, "synonymy," "antonymy," and "polysemy" are cool words.

From doublefeh, although suitably modified since if he did it, why shouldn't I?

I want you, dear reader, whoever you are, to ask me exactly three questions about everything. I will probably even provide you with a truthful answer. Then copy and paste this to your own journal.

The difficulty of asking a finite number of questions about everything is left as an exercise for the reader. Which is a fancy way of saying, "I dunno if it can be done, either, so I'll let somebody else worry about it."

(From multiple sources)
1. grab the nearest book.
2. open the book to page 23.
3. find the fifth sentence.
4. post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions

"Consider N data points uniformly distributed in a p-dimensional unit ball centered at the origin."

(From Hastie, Tibshirani & Friedman, The Elements of Statistical Learning. Yes, I admit to being a geek.)

Bush's Medicare dream turning into a nightmare (Skullduggery w.r.t. the recent Medicare reform bill)

SCO takes on US government's supercomputers (SCO has decided to sue the Department of Energy for using Linux, too. This legal strategy is getting increasingly.... umm. right.)

Intelligence aide claims Bush ignored al-Qaeda (Former national counter-terrorism adviser for every administration from Reagan through the younger Bush has a new book out and appeared on 60 minutes, accusing Bush of systematically refusing to heed warnings about al-Qaeda and being interested only in Iraq)

Royal Dutch/Shell Restates Again (Your next major financial scandal in the works)

Zombies Push Jesus from Top of North American Box Office

Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of Hamas, was killed today by a helicopter gunship attack as he was leaving the mosque. Several other casualties reported in the vicinity.

The title of this posting is because (a) it's approaching Passover, a traditional peak time for terrorist strikes anyway, and (b) this is, by far, the highest-level Hamas (or other terrorist) operative ever killed by Israeli forces, especially in quite so public a fashion. The result is almost certain to be tremendous violence, and it's not at all clear to me why the hell the government thought that this would be a good idea. Violence has been at overall low levels recently, although this is in part because of very stringent enforcement efforts by the Israeli government - the wall, bad as it may be for other reasons, has been very effective at cutting down terrorist attacks, and a major attack was recently thwarted in the northern port city of Ashdod.

But this... this one is really asking for an opening to the gates of hell. It's second only to killing Arafat for impact.

Some more analysis from Debka here. They seem about as confused as I am, although they offer some other points. Be aware that Debka has a right-wing (by Israeli politics axes, not American) bias.

(Stolen from gaaneden)

"If you..."

1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?
I'd either run a cafe of much the sort gaaneden described, or a more traditional restaurant, a small, intimate sort of place in the mountains, focussing on traditional food types with subtle variations, and a lot of experimentation in the sides and garnishes. I'd definitely be aiming for a few stars. :)

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?
Very likely a bookstore, trying to go for real depth of inventory and a very knowledgeable staff. A pleasant environment and maybe a cafe next door. But I'm not really much the type to be a retailer.

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?
Probably a textbook on physics, mathematics or some related subject. Maybe, many years from now, I'll try to tackle a systematic work of philosophy - but that's for much later.

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?
Well, everything. I'd try to run a universal academy; no matter what the level, try to make certain that the students left with a strong basic knowledge of every field, and an in-depth knowledge of at least one. I would expect all students to end up conversant in language, literature, history, science, mathematics, and engineering, at least enough to function. And I'd probably be kinda old-fashioned and also require things like foreign language and physical education - mens sana in corpore sano and all that.

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?
Classical piano. Probably some combination of Beethoven and Chopin, with something lesser-known -- maybe some interesting Spanish composer? -- for balance.

It's 0400 on what's now a Sunday, I get home, and I can still hear my upstairs neighbors walking around.

Do these people never sleep?! I hear them doing this at more or less every hour imaginable...

If you call me "Yonatan," you either know me from work, or you're a friend of mine.
If you call me "Yony," (long o) you are either one of two specific exes, or met me during a particular time window about two years ago.
If you call me "Yony," (short o) you are probably a friend of mine.
If you call me "Yony," (with a Hebrew accent) you are probably a relative, or Israeli.
If you call me "Dr. Zunger," you probably know me professionally, and only from a distance.
If you call me "Fred," you probably have me confused with someone else.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that accusers have the right to confront witnesses which may exculpate them, and that the Sixth Amendment commands "not that evidence be reliable, but that reliability be assessed in a particular manner: by testing in the crucible of cross-examination." (This being from the majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia)

What I find particularly interesting about this is that certain other cases, e.g. US vs Moussaoui, are coming up in which this is expected to be a very substantial issue. A strong ruling from the court in this case - and with an opinion written by Justice Scalia, of all people - could be a very significant influence on what comes next, and could even provoke a constitutional crisis if Ashcroft follows through on his threat to unilaterally remove Moussaoui from the justice system if the courts rule in Moussaoui's favor.

The case today was Crawford v. Washington, No. 02-9410.

The porn business is high-margin low-volume, very competitive and has a low turnaround time. This forces it to be extremely responsive to even subtle undercurrents in the mood of its customer base.

Conjecture: The set of popular textual advertisement themes for porn (e.g. subject lines of porn spam) undergoes systematic collective fluctuations. (New popular themes arise and disappear) These fluctuations contain a nontrivial signal about the current zeitgeist among the primary target audience (suitably subsection the audience if there is enough breadth in the market to justify so doing) and could be usefully mined for a lot of interesting information about what's going on in the country. Its fast response time makes it particularly interesting.

This could be a better signal than e.g. tabloid covers, since while they have similar fluctuation patterns, they seem to have settled down into a fairly constant set of themes that doesn't fluctuate nearly as broadly as porn.

Opinions?

Secretary-general Hassan Rohani of Iran's National Security Council (a group affiliated with the ayatollahs rather than the reformers, for those of you keeping score) issued a statement urging the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to end its investigation and "accept Iran's membership of the atomic club."

His statement further explained that Iran's nuclear program is purely aimed at civilian nuclear power, and their advanced centrifuges and the discovery of 80% enriched Uranium by IAEA inspectors^* was ignored.

English translation: Iran's nuclear program is farther along than most estimates, especially after their little deal with North Korea (and thus indirectly, Pakistan) to trade workspace for technology; they're not confident in having a bomb testable within a year, though, so they want to institute some medium- to long-term delays for the IAEA. (Rather than the more direct obstreprious stonewalling that they would use if they just wanted to keep the IAEA busy for a few more months)

But their technology is good, so expect to see Iran enter the nuclear club (barring unforeseen circumstances, which is a hell of a "barring") somtime between now and 2007. The ayatollahs would like that to be earlier, the reformers could work with either early or late. Iranian internal politics may have an order-1 effect on all of this.

Just remember, kids - nuclear weapons don't kill people, people kill people. Erm. With nuclear weapons.

An interesting editorial by Jonathan Rauch on the subject of gay marriage.

Picture from The Onion, 2/25/2004