Distributed Mind

Titan is the only moon in the solar system that has a thick atmosphere. In fact, its atmospheric pressure is about 1.5 times that of Earth's. Titan's atmosphere is made very hazy by a multitude of different hydrocarbons. It is so hazy that we cannot see the surface. Current theories suggest that the complex hydrocarbons are the result of the sun's ultra-violet radiation breaking up methane in Titan's atmosphere. The methane in turn may be evaporating from an ocean of methane at the surface. Hopefully, the Huygen's probe which will drop into the atmosphere next January will give as better picture. Image release

As an attempt to generate some sort of agreement on this issue, Justin and I argued about school vouchers for a while, and managed to hack out some conditions that would be necessry for voucher skeptics like Justin to accept them (and they seem somewhat resonable, if rather restrictive to me; I would rather have them restrictive and unabused with agreement between everyone, than controversial and manipulated, so I think these are good proposals). (Incidentally, text by me; Justin may or may not agree with it.)

Vouchers

• Vouchers must preserve current per student spending

  [It is important that vouchers are not seen as a cost cutting measure, but rather a way to give families choices about schools, and enable them to find the best and most appropriate education for children practically available.]

• Vouchers may be accepted only by schools that are non-profit

  [It is important vouchers not become a tool for profit, or an opportunity for government corruption, but rather are used for their true purpose of furthering education.]

• Vouchers may only be accepted by accredited schools [we need to figure out what that means though...]

• If a voucher is accepted, no additional tuition may be required

  [This is to ensure that families are not priced out of schools. Otherwise, schools might merely raise tuition but offset part of the cost by using vouchers. While lowering tuition may be an admirable side effect, the possibilities are too great in our estimation.]

From the testimony of Tom Malinowski, Washington Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch, before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations on July 7th:

But if we know that hundreds of thousands of people are going to die, we should not care if the experts call it genocide or not. We already know what we need to know to decide to act. We know that innocent lives are being lost. We know who is doing it. And we know exactly what will happen if we do not act. Ten years from now, we will be gathering to remember the anniversary of Darfur, just as we recently remembered the anniversary of Rwanda. Journalists will write retrospectives. Government officials will express regret. We will all wonder why we didn’t do more. And we will all pledge to do more the next time. It would be far better if we agreed now that Darfur is the “next time” and that this is the test of our moral commitment to stop atrocities when we can before it’s too late.

Amnesty International has some recommended steps you can take to help encourage those in our government to be even more pro-active (and so far, the U.S. is one of the leaders on this - but it is still not enough) and to encourage those in the Sudanese government to do the right thing.

Amnesty has more information about the Darfur conflict, and Human Rights Watch has information as well.

Update: I am still trying to decide how best to respond personally. I am not sure what I can add that the U.S. State Department is not already doing, though there have been some suggestions, but I am not sure how I feel about them. In the meantime, I believe I will send a fax to Khartoum. Why not, right?

The Bush administration shows it's media savvy again. Here's an article from The New Republic regarding the administration's timely pressure on Pakistan:
July Surprise

Mozilla turns out to have a fairly serious bug for the Windows version... eWeek has an article on the problem. (News from, dare I say it, Slashdot.)

Cassini, barely just now arrived at Saturn, has already been used for getting some data on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Titan is possibly the most interesting thing that will be examined by Cassini (since, well, Saturn is basically just a giant ball of gas; though, the rings are starting to sound fun). Titan is one of the few bodies in the solar system with an atmosphere (and a fairly dense one; 1.5 times earth's - which is much more than most rocky bodies in the system), so it was already of interest. It has lots of methane, which makes exobioligists drool. And it has been speculated it has a fair amount of water ice. Titan's famous atmosphere has also made it one of the more enigmatic moons in the solar system, since its dense clouds have made observation difficult (well, that, and the fact it is really, really far away). Well, the Cassini team has done some near-infrared imaging, which gives some idea of surface features (infrared light tends to pass through clouds better than visible light). They have also been doing some other surface imaging, but I don't know what frequencies or anything like that. Probably we will see better images in the near future. I keep an eye on their Press Release Images; usually (i.e. that's what happens with other NASA missions) the best stuff shows up there.

Near-infrared image of Titan's surface (NASA/JPL/University of Arizona. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.)

Far more interesting than the current imaging, though, is the Huygens probe which is scheduled for a January landing on Titan.

Artist's depiction of Cassini entering orbit around Saturn. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.)

Today, it was announced that a NetBSD volunteer had successfully ported NetBSD to an Analytical Engine emulator...

(And, no, I am not serious. Somebody should try this, though...)

Surely, the real point of me writing this blog is to make you all intellectual clones of me! Oh, wait, I forgot this was a multi-author blog. I guess then our goal must be to turn you all (all 3 of you?) into intellectual clones of some virtual composite being based on the combined intellects of all two of its active authors? At least our resident elf and I probably have sufficiently similar views for such a being to be more or less possible. But, I don't know about the effectiveness of our cloning that virtual intellect...

But, seriously, is this just me, or is that what every writer, especially one writing persuasive writing, hope? (Although I can think of times when authors really jsut want to have a conversation, or even ask a question, though I think these occur more often in fiction. But short subject writing seems to be largely about bending peoples' minds through education / information / persuasion / indoctrination / propagandizing. I hope my writing is more toward the first two of those...)

As you may have seen elsewhere, evidently the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team recommended against using Internet Explorer for security reasons. Someone finally said it, publically! Because IE will automatically, or anyways with little input from the user, execute code it finds on web pages, there are lots of potential for abuse (this is where alot of that annoying spyware some of you are running into comes from). By the way, the new XP Service Pack 2 is supposed to fix alot of these issues when it is released, so be sure to watch for that and run Windows Update when it comes out. Did you know Microsoft has stated repeatedly that they will not make any major changes to IE until Longhorn comes out (at the earliest next year - and nothing from Microsoft ever ships on time) - and this despite the fact that IE does not properly implement some basic parts of web standards that have been around for years? IE's poor standards support is a problem for web developers and, even if only indirectly, users. So between IE's staleness, its terrible support for all the standards the web is based on, and the (soon to be fixed?) security problems, now is a great time to try an alternative like Mozilla's Firefox. Besides, the government told you to!

For my job, I have to deal with a little Microsoft produced language called C# (pronounced "see sharp" - as in the musical notation). C# is similar in syntax to Java, though you could also say it is similar to C++, as it is hard to tell which really had a bigger influence on the language syntactically (it has been suggested C# is Microsoft's answer to Java - which is in large part almost certainly correct). It has its quirks, but I like it better than Java, and in some ways better than C++. At any rate it is simpler than C++, so there are less nasty surprises. However, I find it is often too restrictive, and tries to read my mind too much, preventing me from doing things which should be doable. And since it is essentially you would call a dynamic language, it prefers to check things at run time, rather than when it is compiled. Unlike some dynamic languages though, C# likes to add all sorts of compile-time checking, which occasionally prevents one from doing things that one would expect to be able to do in a dynamic language. And C# 2.0, which will probably come out officially next year (but there are already some solutions in place now) will, among other things, add support for generics, which are related to those template things in C++, though in C# generics are more tightly integrated than in C++. So C# has a few things going for it.

C# runs on the .NET Common Language Infrastructure (CLI), which is Microsoft's answer - with drastic improvement - to Java's Java Virtual Machine (JVM). .NET is like the JVM in that it runs code that is not native, but it uses Just-In-Time compilation to improve performance; in my experience it is nearly as fast as native code (some claim Java is nearly as fast these days, but I try to avoid Java, so I would not be the best person to weigh in on that). What is even more interesting than the JVM though is that the .NET CLI is specifically designed to handle different languages (though C# is definitely its preferred language).

Anyway, I like C# and I like the CLI, though, obviously they are not perfect. (I actually would like to play more with languages like Forth and LISP - C clones are starting to bore me, but there is no doubt they are still pretty powerful, especially compared to has-beens like poor Forth). One fear need not be its being bound by Microsoft: C# and .NET are covered under an ECMA standard, and there are now open source implementations of both (as I will explain shortly). I would like to mention two interesting releases of software projects related to C# and .NET this week: the Visual C# Express Beta, from Microsoft, and Mono 1.0.

Visual C# Express is a low-end Integrated Development Environment deisgned for those who are not professional developers. (Pricing has not been announced yet, but the beta is free.) It is too contstraining for real developers - including legally, there are restrictions on what you can do with code written on it, but it is smaller and cheaper than Microsoft's full-blown Visual Studio development product. Anyway, it is a good way to try C# for a Windows environment, though I would go with Mono, myself, but I think C# Express is worth trying too. Oh, and it includes all those promised C# and .NET Framework 2.0 features, so you can get those now (actually, you could also just use the .NET Framework SDK without C# Express).

Mono 1.0 is an open-source implementation of both the CLI and a C# compiler. It just hit 1.0, though it has been around for a while. It has its own class libraries to replace those of Microsoft's which are proprietary (only some are, but notably those related to windowing code). And it is designed to be cross-platform (.NET is supposed to be, but again, some of the windowing code is not; some Mono-related projects fix that). Anyway, it is completely free, and it already implements some of the C# and CLI 2.0 features (I keep running into minor problems related to generics, but they are usable).

So try them out! (Or read about Forth or LISP instead, if you are brave.)

Have you listened to Nelly Furtado lately? If not, why not? Well, anyway, I finally got around to listening to some of the stuff off her new album Folklore. And it is better than I expected, and my expectations were already fairly high.

Her first album, Whoa, Nelly! showed some great potential, but did also demostrate some immaturity (in the words of one reviewer whose name I have long ago forgotten, it was "over produced", for example). It was interesting for its mix of many musical styles, including some that don't exactly fit in the usual pop mainstream these days, and frankly some of it went over my head. There is you jazz though, and I guess some Latin, and some other stuff I would only know was there because someone else told me. Granted, it was combined in the more or less hip-hop vernacular, which may turn off some people who probably would otherwise find it interesting (we won't mention the vulgarity...). Increasing its cool points was Furtado's international (especially immigrant) sensibilities and the profusion of non-English lyrics. She seems to view herself as an immigrant, even though she is not first generation. I do not see that as a bad thing, however. Oh, yes, and, of course, the last selling point for her album was the fact that, in the vernacular, "it rocked" (albeit in a distinctly hip-hop way, which was no loss for those of us bored by the offbeat). The frequently-played single "Turn off the Light!" best epitomized that tendency of the album.

The new album has more of the same, but with a little more refinement. I like its politics though. "Fresh off the Boat," celebrates immigrants (though in a way that could potentially be taken as offensive if you didn't know in advance how Furtado feels about the subject - though still I think she walks a fine line), with a nice hip-hoppy (I think I just made that up) musical intensity. Many may have heard the single "Powerless" on the radio; that song is alright. It has a confrontational message (bonus points!) and is sufficiently slick musically, if perhaps a little dull than we could hope for from Furtado, but such is life. "Forca" is good too, for the record. And, again, lots of international sensibility.

So, if you haven't, take a listen to Folklore. And keep an eye for more from Furtado (which may be a while, given the gap between her last two albums). Hopefully she won't sell out!

(Though, given that she signed with DreamWorks before her first album some may say that already happened, alas. At this point I should mention that I sympathize with those who want a complete boycot of the major labels to protect independent artists and labels, and in an effort to take back radio. I find boycotting the labels increasingly hard to do, though. I am afraid some music released on it is not too bad, if not always quite Beethoven. Buy used? Stick to Beethoven? I don't know. The best solution, of course, is to make your own music, and then we won't have to worry about. When everyone is a producer, there are no consumers to be taken advantage of.)

Well, on the topic of movies, I was listening to the director and writers' commentary for the WarGames DVD while working. I love WarGames. Now, it is definitely not among the top ten films ever made, but it has its moments, and from the perspective of a computer scientist and mathematician it has to be even better. Plus, it gets points for actually making a useful point about nuclear war in an interesting way. Now, as far as the computing technology goes, there are definitely some literary licences taken, but if you assume an artificial intelligence of the magnitude portrayed in the movie were possible anywhere near the era where it is shown (and in fact twenty years later we are still working on it), most of the rest of the problems are nitpicks. What is interesting from the artificial intelligence perspective is the idea of the machine learning, which is possible at some level, and the fact that they use tic-tac-toe to teach it, which is very cute. It is even more interesting from a game theoretic perspective, since it really cuts to the heart of the whole matter: in tic-tac-toe or nuclear war, the problem is you can always force a draw, so who wants to play anyway? Joshua's climactic line is excellent: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." If I ever teach a class on modern history, sociology, economics, game theory, decision science, or artificial intelligence, my class is watching this movie.

Incidentally, I found WarGames especially interesting since I had been discussing yesterday how useful applied math was at describing general principles like this. Specifically I cited the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoner's dilemma is that if you have a band of people all arrested by the police, the police will want one of them to confess. Well, if all the suspects hold out and stick to their story, they all get off lightly. If one sells out, then that individual gets off worse than if they all had stuck to the story, but better than if someone else had sold them out first. The problem is that the best outcome occurs if all cooperate, but the temptation, of course, is to minimize risk and try to beat everyone else to selling out. Well, so all of this is related to decision criteria I studied way back in a decision science class (well, I was getting credit for probability from it, but whatever) about decision criteria such as minimax or maximax (optimistic: pick whatever option has the largest possible payout, regardless of the odds) or expected value (use the probability of each outcome to weight the value of the outcome). Each has their own advantage and disadvantage, but the point is it helps to know that there are different ways of deciding things, and they all have their own unique properties. So while talking to my sister about it she mentioned having studied about min-max principles in sociology. I also brought up artificial intelligence - that was where I had first seen some of these. And that takes me back to where I started. Perhaps more significantly though, all of this is good in economics. Where you might notice that the current economy pretty much relies on that aforementioned prisoner's dilemma: the maxim that competition is always preferable to cooperation which is blatantly stupid but more or less assumed throughout capitalist economics (which is actually how we got on the topic in the first place: the history of the game of Monopoly, which it turns out is related to an earlier game the whole point of which was to show how bad capitalism was. Amazing how everything in my life just seems to come together in one neat little mathematical package.)

So, I think my point here is all of that applied math turns out to be good for something. And by the way, this part of math is really easy: practically no calculus, and you can do all the arithmetic on a calculator or computer. Most of it is comprehensible to someone with no more than a background in algebra, though, as always, more math is always useful, but even if you don't have a strong background you can still get alot out of it. Look at optimization or decision science and graph theory. It will give you power (I would have linked to NACME's "Math is Power" campaign, but its over so... so just go to their website and buy the poster instead).

[Warning: The above was written by a raving math lunatic who doesn't really know anything about economics - so take that part of it with a grain of salt.]

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