From Reuters: TV ratings for State of the Union have slipped. Apparently 30% fewer people watched this year than last, because without a war brewing it just wasn't as dramatic.

I'm always glad, for one, to know that our wire services are keeping such careful track on television rating numbers and what they mean for politics.

(Depressingly enough, of course, these numbers do mean something for politics - or at least, they do now that they're publicized and being discussed.)

And on a different note, also from Reuters, the rabbi Shlomo Eliahu of Tzfat (one of the old hearts of cabbala, and to this day a thriving center of rabbinical thought) has composed a new proposed standard prayer for surfing net.pr0n.

No, I'm not kidding.

Well, at least it's topical and relevant in our day and age...

I've finally gotten annoyed by my current bank (SFCU) one time too many. Are there any banks in the Mountain View area that people out here have had good experiences with?

J. T. Chang, Recent common ancestors of all present-day individuals. Chang considers a statistical model in which a population of constant size n goes through successive generations, and shows that (under suitable assumptions - infra) for n reasonably large (>~200 based on numerical simulations), there exists a single common ancestor of everyone in the population log₂ n generations in the past - and if one goes approximately 1.77 log₂ n generations back, everyone in the population is either a common ancestor of all people in the present generation, or of nobody. That is, either a given family line has died out completely, or just by statistical diffusion, they've become related to everyone living.

Applied to the population of Europe, this threshold seems to happen about 1000 years in the past. So it's fairly likely that everyone with even a single European ancestor within the past 100 years or so can, in fact, claim descent from Charlemagne.

There are two technical assumptions in this paper. One is constant population size; it seems like it would be straightforward, although a technical pain in the ass, to relax this. The other more interesting one is that it assumes a random mating model; i.e., the probability that someone in generation t is a parent of someone in generation t+1 is uniform. This obviously isn't correct, but I can think of a good way to model something more realistic - consider a set of k populations of size f_k, each of which has random mating within it, and with a cross-mating probability distribution p_{k k'}. This could model the existence of disjoint social or geographic groups. I'm rather curious about whether this would substantially change the results. One interesting question is, given a total population size and a decomposition into subgroups, whether or not there's a "critical size" for a subpopulation which will lead in finite time to that population dying out, becoming completely assimilated, or becoming ancestors of everybody.

Date:	2004-01-19 12:00
Subject:	Logolalia
Security:	Public
Mood:	relaxed

In the past day, I've come across a surprising number of bizarre words in the English language.
( Yes, these all are real.Collapse )
Yes, I realize this is a pretty random thing to be posting. But I'm taking this morning off from work, and it's rather refreshing to sit in a coffee shop in the sunlight and write about utter nonsense.

Bathykolpian: Deep-breasted.

Yes, the English language has a word for everything.

Current Music: (I wish they all could be) Bathykolpian girls... [Now firmly stuck in my head]

In Israel, late at night, the government started erecting a 30-foot wall separating Jerusalem from the neighboring town of Abu Dis. (story)

I don't know why, but this in particular terrifies me, like it's a sign that something truly horrible is going to happen. Not in the usual politics sense - in some vaguer and more metaphysical sense. This is a bad idea, one that's going to have consequences for ages to come, and I'm very scared of what may come next.

So this politics post is dedicated to pure hearsay and strange rumors that I've been hearing bits of lately. As a latest reference I'll just point people in the vague direction of debka, a notorious rumor mill if there ever was one, but a lot of this has been showing up in a wide variety of channels - NY Times, IHT, and so on. The point of this is mostly to mull over strange ideas.
( That wacky QaddafiCollapse )
( Illicit use of chemicalsCollapse )

Anyway, these are just random political thoughts for the day. And now, back to the lab for me - time to test systems. Fun fun.

66.66666666666667% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?

(TODO: Remember that under OS X, one has to actually type 'command-C' to copy and 'command-V' to paste, rather than simply selecting and center-clicking. The above took too long to insert.)

The following may be a little on the technical side. It deals with some thoughts about physics that have been going through my head lately.
( Physics ramblingCollapse )

(Summary: In a previous post, I referred to a statement made by Lee Smolin that "time does exist," and that I disagree with him. It has been pointed out to me that this sounds like an extremely odd statement and counterstatement without its original context. I offer in my defense that he started it, and he gave no context either. So here's a summary of what he meant by that, and in very briefly why I don't feel confident that it's correct.

Lee, if you're reading this, please correct me if I've misstated your position!
( Read more...Collapse )

An interesting article in Edge where a large number of intellectual luminaries of various sorts - scientists, businessmen, literary people, and so on - were asked to think of interesting universal laws that they've observed in the course of their endeavours, and then naming those laws after the people. Some of them are good, some not so good, but by and large it's a pretty interesting article.

(From what I've read so far - about a third of it, it's long - Pollack's First Law is the one that's caught my eye the most, although there has certainly been competition. And Smolin's Third is the one I most disagree with, but on that one it's clearly necessary to wait for the experimental and theoretical results to be in before making any conclusions)

Of Bam following the earthquake, from the Federation of American Scientists.

Since most people probably missed the news headlines for today, a quick summary with some captions that the stations seem to be omitting. It's been a heavy news day.

Updates: More info on several events added behind the cut (0005 PST)

( Behind a cut, for those who don"t feel like mixing Christmas and newsCollapse )

Update: At 0527 local time a magnitude 6.3 earthquake hit the southeastern Iranian city of Bam. Details are still coming in, but heavy casualties are reported.

Update: As of 1030 PST, estimates in Bam are reaching 4,000 dead, 30,000 injured.

Update: As of 1115 PST, the latest number from the Iranian government is 15,000 dead.

For once, something possibly good on a political front. From an unexpected source.

Apparently, yesterday Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz was on the radio in Iran, taking live questions. (In Farsi) The questions and the answers were... unexpected. Summary here.

I have no idea what to think, or say.

From the NY Times review of the Return of the King:

"The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" is rated PG-13 for a stunning mastery of violence and intense scenes of bloodletting.

Happy birthday, gaaneden!

Date:	2003-12-06 00:14
Subject:	I am, I confess, a geek.
Security:	Public
Mood:	geeky

Just got back from an excellent company holiday party, held in the Computer History Museum. Apart from the general party itself (which had much to recommend it - food, music, interesting people, a trampoline) there were the actual exhibits.

This place is simply neat. I need to go there again sometime and look at things more carefully - they've got an amazing collection of everything from an Altair 8800 to pieces of ENIAC to the first CDC6600 to a whole array of bizarre things Apple has built over the years. (The 20th anniversary Mac, a Lisa, a 128k, a PowerBook 170 done entirely in primary-colored plastic especially for a Japanese golf tournament...)

They also, oddly enough, have the very first computer I ever had a UNIX account on. Not one of the same model - the computer itself.

Hmm. I wonder if my password still works on it... :)

[politics, mostly just shaking head at odd behavior and useless news stories]

An article today in the NY Times informing us that hostile forces in Iraq are acquiring intelligence information about the comings and goings of various people they would like to gak by hanging out on street corners and watching, and similar reasonably straightforward means, and that this isn't difficult because we've got a large footprint for pretty much everything we do there.

No shit?

The only thing that really caught my eye in this was this line:

The American-led alliance's intelligence system "continues to get better every day in theater, and we receive credible information which assists us in pre-empting potential attacks against our soldiers," a military officer said.

[politics]
( An unpleasant developmentCollapse )

So the GOP is airing its first campaign ad of the new election season, and it urges people at one point to "support the president's policy of pre-emptive self defense."
( The following is not only politically oriented, but shows my party affiliation pretty strongly. You have been warned.Collapse )

So half an hour of sitting and futzing with the piano has produced a pretty neat cadenza for the end of Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2. (Based rather loosely on some notes of Chopin that are reproduced in the back of my edition of the music, together with a rather unhelpful explanation in German, which - after deciphering it with the aid of a German-speaking friend - turns out to be almost completely incomprehensible in any language.)

And I just realized that it's only 9:30, so I can spend some time working more on this without waking my neighbors.

BTW, if anyone's been trying to reach me over e-mail today - my e-mail server seems to have been mostly down since this morning, so I haven't gotten any messages. No, I'm not ignoring you. :)

So - back to the piano with me! Wahahaha!

Apparently, there's a resolution in the UN that wants to reward Iran for its recent openness about its nuke program, and just forget about the past 20 years of its running it covertly. (Story here) Apparently, if we're nice to them now, they'll stop trying to build nuclear missiles.

( mrphCollapse )

This bit of political cynicism brought to you by another day of sleep dep and coding...

(No, this is not another post about buggery)

Put up your weapon in the sheath. We two
shall mingle and make love upon our bed.
So mutual trust may come of play and love.

(Kirke to Odysseus; Odyssey, X:375-7, Fitzgerald's translation)

[politics]

It looks like Iran has finally agreed to suspend uranium enrichment, after first agreeing, then backing out of the agreement, and then delaying a few weeks.

Hypothesis: they wanted to delay a few weeks to get their enrichment program to a checkpoint state before any inspection regime started. Purpose could be to get it into a state where it could easily be resumed, or to get it into a state where it's no longer obvious to inspectors. This suggests that their nuclear weapons program could be farther along than is commonly known.

Date:	2003-11-08 23:10
Subject:	Lovely line...
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused

From an FAS report (interesting read) on the potential use of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles against passenger aircraft, a little bit of bureaucratese:

"the penalties of dropping incendiary flares on populated areas near airports are prohibitive."