Archives 2010

AI vs. EC

Since the 1940s, computer scientists have been seeking to make machines perform the same kinds of tasks as humans. This pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI) has yielded a lot of impressive results, such as Deep Blue beating a chess grand master, but it has fallen short of people’s expectations: computer translation, for instance, is still a long way away.

And so computer scientists started emulating evolution by natural selection, a process about as far removed from intelligence as possible: try everything and see what works. A process so amazingly stupid that even inert, nonliving material cam perform it. This research seems to have succeeded much better than anyone expected.

Which just goes to show that artificial intelligence is no match for artificial stupidity.

Everybody Draw Mohammed!

Here’s my contribution to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day:

Mohammed

It’s a good thing there aren’t any talent requirements. The only way you can tell that this is actually the prophet Mohammed venerated in Islam is that I’m telling you so.

Just in Case…

Just in case Elena Kagan’s nomination falls through and I am asked to serve on the Supreme Court, I thought I should mention that I don’t play softball, and am therefore not a lesbian.

I would also like to assure the Senate Judicial Committee that I would not be an activist judge, and would almost certainly not repeal the 21st Amendment or any legislation favored by the people who support me. Not until an attractive lawyer from the other side offers me a blow job, or something of equal or greater value.

Basically, I would use Original Intent in my rulings, interpreting the Constitution strictly as I think the founders should have meant it, if I were around to tell them how to get it right.

Nun Excommunicated Over Abortion

The Arizona Republic is reporting that a nun at a Catholic hospital was disciplined and excommunicated for allowing an abortion that saved a woman’s life:

A Catholic nun and longtime administrator of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix was reassigned in the wake of a decision to allow a pregnancy to be ended in order to save the life of a critically ill patient.

The decision also drew a sharp rebuke from Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted, head of the Phoenix Diocese, who indicated the woman was “automatically excommunicated” because of the action.

The article goes on to say that “The patient had a rare and often fatal condition in which a pregnancy can cause the death of the mother”, and that pulmonary hypertension was involved.

“In this tragic case, the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy,” [hospital vice president Suzanne] Pfister said.

So. Fetus poses a clear and present danger to the life of the mother. First trimester of pregnancy, so the fetus isn’t viable outside the womb. Throw in some rape or incest (which may conceivably have occurred, but the patient’s identity hasn’t been released, for privacy reasons) and you’ve got the textbook description of a justifiable abortion, it would seem.

But still, the Catholic church — run by a bunch of people who’ll never never be put in this predicament themselves, what with not having a uterus — prefers to dogmatically maintain that abortion isn’t acceptable, even under these circumstances, not even as a regrettable but necessary evil.

The article doesn’t say what this policy is based on, save that the fetus is “a human life”. But given the Catholic church’s history of encouraging and abetting the termination of human lives — Saracens, Jews, heretics, Protestants, etc. — there’s got to be more to it than that. Unfortunately, I suspect that the “more to it” is “a bunch of our ivory-tower mental masturbators derived it from our magic book.”

I also can’t help noting some sexism: for decades, men in the organization rape and abuse children, and they get a slap on the wrist before being shuffled off to another parish to avoid embarrassing the church. But now a woman authorizes an abortion — due to, I assume, compassion for the mother — and is immediately reprimanded and kicked out of the club. Would you like to super-size your standard and make it a double?

I remember reading an article about attitudes toward gays in the Catholic church. The investigator found that policymakers in the upper echelons were a lot harsher on teh gays than were priests who dealt with gays in their parishes and heard their confessions. It’s easier to condemn someone when you never have to meet them.

I suspect that something like this happened here. McBride, the nun who was disciplined, made her decision in large part out of compassion for the patient. The bishop who excommunicated her never had to meet the patient beforehand.

If my suspicion is true, then that means that the morality formulated by the higher-ups may look good on paper, but were the rubber meets the road, the rank and file don’t abide by it. That’s a sign of an impractical morality in bad need of a reality check. Unfortunately, if the Catholic church had any interest in reality, they wouldn’t believe in gods and miracles.

Update, Mon May 17 14:10:29 2010: Fixed a missing in a sentence.

Cracked on Psychics

Cracked has entitled “5 Cheap Magic Tricks Behind Every Psychic”. The introductory paragraph reads:

I got into magic at the age of five. I stopped thinking psychics were real at the age of five-and-a-half. Mainly because most of them were doing tricks I had just read in the colorful magic book I had bought for three dollars the week before.

Now go read .

This Is a Political Leader?

Today, the Washington Post hosted a Q & A session with Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation. Presumably that makes him a big wheel in the Tea Party movement, and Someone To Take Seriously, as opposed to the random riff-raff who seem to dominate TV coverage of tea-related demonstrations.

And so one might expect to get reasonable, well-thought-out answers to questions, outlining specific policies and measures that the Tea Party supports. One would be wrong.

Small govt.: I get that the tea partiers want smaller government, but you all seem to think government should have no part in basically life at all. The scandal arising today over lack of control in the plant producing children’s medication as well as the oil spill make me very much weary of this point of view. I want the government actively protecting and monitoring my food and drug supply. Leaving that up to the free market will result in disaster, as has been proven time and again. What is your response?

Judson Phillips: If you leave it up to the government, you end with 72 million doses of a vaccine that no one wants. One of the liberal myths is that the Tea Party Movement wants no government. No, we want a constitutional government. Throwing someone in jail because they do not want to buy government health insurance is not smaller government. It is a dictatorship

Is there any way to read that other than “let’s get rid of the CDC, USDA, FDA, because it’s better to have trichinosis in our pork chops, than to waste money by overestimating how many people will want flu shots?

Notice, too, the unsupported cheap shots: what, exactly, about our current government is unconstitutional? And unless I’m missing something, there’s no “government health insurance” that I can buy.

And to all the people who complain that requiring them to buy private health insurance is unconstitutional, there’s a simple fix: you find an insurance plan that works for you. But instead of paying the company directly, the cost of your insurance becomes a tax that you send in to the IRS. The IRS then forwards your money to your insurer.

That way, it’s a government service contracted out to private enterprise, and paid for by taxes. Of course, that’d probably get the anti-big-government people in a lather, and it’d be a lot simpler to just pay your insurer directly, but it’d be constitutional.

Phillips goes on in that vein, spouting slogans, but never getting down to nuts and bolts, despite being prodded several times by readers. Color me less than impressed by the teabagger movement.

Oh, and for anyone who gives me grief over calling them “teabaggers”: if they didn’t want to be called teabaggers, they shouldn’t have called themselves that. But maybe I’ll reconsider when the right wingers learn that there’s an “ic” in “Democratic”.

iPhone Keyboard Trick

I’d noticed a while back that if you hold down a key on the iPhone keyboard, such as the ‘E’, for a second or two, you get a pop-up menu with variations on the ‘E’ theme, like ‘é’, ‘è’, ‘ê’, and so on.

But what I hadn’t noticed until just now is that the “.com” key, which appears when you’re expected to type in a URL, exhibits the same behavior: if you hold it down, you get a popup menu with “.net”, “.edu”, “.org”, and “.com”.

In addition, since I have the French keyboard installed, the popup contains “.fr”.

In the email application, when you’re entering an address, there’s no “.com” button, just a “.” (period) button. However, it also has the domain popup, with the same TLDs as the “.com” button.

I’ve gotta say: it’s little touches like this that help the interface get the hell out of the way of whatever it is you’re trying to do.

Observations on PS3 Pricing

I just noticed something odd in the price of different Playstation 3 models: Amazon.com’s PS3 page has:

Playstation 3, 120 Gb: $299.99

Playstation 3, 250 Gb: $414.99

From this, we can work out the price per gigabyte: ($414.99 – $299.99) / (250 – 120) = $0.8846 $/Gb.

That’s not the odd part. Since I have some old Playstation 2 games, ideally I’d like a PS3 that’s backward-compatible with the PS2. According to Wikipedia (which can be relied on, here, since it’s a nerd topic), those are the 20 and 60 Gb models, as well as some 80 Gb ones.

Again from Amazon, we have:

Playstation 3, 20 Gb: $229.99

Since this has 100 Gb less than the 120 Gb model, we would expect it to cost 100 × $0.8846 less, or $211.53. But it costs $229.99, or $18.46 more. So that $18.46 must be the price of PS2 compatibility.

Now we get to the odd part:

Playstation 3, 60 Gb: $849.99

We would expect this to cost $299.99 (the price of a 120 Gb model), minus 60 × $0.8846 = $53.08 because it has 60 Gb less storage, plus $18.46 for PS2 copmatibility, for a total of $265.37. So why is the real cost over $500 higher?

All I can figure is that the 60 Gb disk is a lot bigger than a 20 Gb disk, leaving less free space inside the case. So the PS2 compatibility has to be built out of smaller components, which are vastly more expensive.

Boobquake vs. Feminism

For those who hadn’t heard, some idiot Muslim cleric said the other day that “women who do not dress modestly” cause earthquakes. So Jen McCreight, aka Blag Hag decided to test this proposition scientifically. This became known as Boobquake. There was much tittering on the intertubes, and it quickly became more popular than any of the myriad thoughtful posts she’d written up til then.

But it also apparently raised the ire of feminists, on the grounds that encouraging women to show cleavage promotes the objectification of women. Okay, I can see that as being a valid concern.

Now, I like to think of myself as a feminist, in the sense of someone who thinks women should be equal to men in most situations. So of course I’m opposed to seeing women as nothing more than sex objects.

However, there’s a difference between not being merely a sex object; and not being a sex object at all. I have friends who are fantastic cooks, and I’d be a fool to turn down a dinner invitation from them. But that doesn’t mean they’re merely cooks, that they aren’t fully-rounded people. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I can just expect them to cook for me whenever I want, or that if I walk by when they’re cooking, that it’s somehow acceptable or even expected that I’ll be so overcome with hunger that I’ll be unable to resist stealing their lunch.

Having said this, I don’t deny that sexism is still a problem in the US (where, after all, “she was asking for it, dressed the way she was” is still a credible excuse for rape in some circles). But we’re still light years ahead from the sort of society where women are expected to be covered head to toe lest the sight of an unclad earlobe send a man into an involuntary libidinous frenzy or, worse yet, challenge his assumed superiority in all things, including control of women’s bodies. And that alone makes Boobquake a worthwhile poke in the eye to more repressive societies.

But I’m not going to tell anyone to participate in Boobquake who doesn’t want to. That’s an individual decision. But in the final analysis, the whole thing is a bit of fun, albeit with a serious underlying message. And if you can’t have fun with sex, you probably have other problems.

The Essence of Crackers

For some reason, I’ve been thinking recently about the eucharist. Specifically, how a piece of flavorless bread can be transformed into a piece of Jesus while still looking and tasting like a flavorless piece of bread. I’d like to think that this is because I try to be fair to theists, but it might also be that I have too much free time.

The best analogy I could come up with was when I bought my house: you could have watched it the whole time I was at the signing ceremony, with electron microscopes and whatnot, and you wouldn’t have seen the moment when “some guy’s house” became “my house”.

What happened, of course, is that by virtue of me signing the paperwork, the rules for interacting with that house changed. The seller and I — and the rest of society — have agreed that once the paperwork is signed, I am allowed to come and go as I please, knock down walls, and take furnishings out to the dump, things that would have been considered breaking and entering, vandalism, and theft before the signature.

It seemed reasonable to conclude that something similar goes on at mass: once the bread has been blessed by the priest, the rules for interacting with it change. By mutual agreement, the congregation treats the wafers like Jesus Pieces.

Then I realized that that’s just a long-winded way of saying that it’s symbolic, and all the Catholics who raised a fuss over Crackergate were quite adamant that that wasn’t the case.

Here’s what the Catholic Encyclopedia has to say (or at least part of it, since the Catholic Encyclopedia can never give a plain and simple answer to anything):

The study of the first problem, viz. whether or not the accidents of bread and wine continue their existence without their proper substance, must be based upon the clearly established truth of Transubstantiation, in consequence of which the entire substance of the bread and the entire substance of the wine are converted respectively into the Body and Blood of Christ in such a way that “only the appearances of bread and wine remain” (Council of Trent, Sess. XIII, can. ii: manentibus dumtaxat speciebus panis et vini).

As I understand it, this means that everything has an essence that makes it what it is. A dog remains a dog even if it loses a leg; an albino ape is still an ape; if you break the arm off of a statue, it remains a statue. What happens at mass is the reverse: instead of the thing changing and the essence remaining the same, the thing remains the same, but its essence, its what-it-is-ness, changes.

Which is all well and good, except that it’s also bullshit.

If you keep breaking pieces off of a marble statue, at some point it stops being a statue and becomes gravel. If you keep changing pieces in a Lego house, it can become a Lego spaceship. If you eat a hunk of cow muscle, its atoms get rearranged and become human liver and bone, as well as a pile of feces. Which brings us neatly back to theology.

The notion that a communion wafer has an essential what-it-is-ness separate from the atoms that constitute it and the way they’re arranged is of a piece with belief in souls that survive the death of the body, and the “it’s still just a fruit fly” argument against evolution. It may look on the surface as though things have a magical essence, but that’s an illusion. Just because we see it, doesn’t mean it’s there. In fact, our economy is based in large part on the notion that things can change from one thing to another — that pile of rocks can become a pile of iron which can become a Ford Taurus; that a fistful of acorns can become a dining table.

The closest thing I can think of to essentialism that isn’t bullshit is intellectual property law. If I draw a cartoon mouse with a round head and round ears, the Disney Corporation will be able to successfully argue in court that I’ve infringed on their copyrighted image of Mickey Mouse®. In effect, they’ll argue that the essence of my picture is something that belongs to them. But even there, if I make enough changes, my picture will stop being Mickey Mouse.

I haven’t looked into it, but I imagine that while essentialism is an illusion, it’s a practical one. It’s useful to put men with beards in the same mental category as men in general, and to think that if a person loses a leg they don’t automatically stop being a person. So it’s a useful heuristic (a heuristic being defined as a rule that gives you something close to the right answer most of the time, but much more quickly that solving the problem properly).

Wafer-to-Jesus transformation clearly falls outside of the realm where the illusion of essence is useful or true. It’s time for theologians to stop twisting themselves into pretzels to pretend that it has any correspondence to reality.

Update, May 5, 2010: Inserted a missing “instead”. Oops.