July 2003 Archives

I thought it'd be fun to burn some more processor cycles, so I whipped up a Most Commented-On Posts page that lists the 50 posts with the most comments. It's based on a method by Lynda over at ScriptyGoddess, and there's plenty more cool stuff over there if you fellow bloggers want to take a look.

David Bernstein over at the Volokh Conspiracy writes about what he calls the Palestinians' "suicidal fantasies":

In my view, the fact that the Palestinian public has apparently made the release of cold-blooded murderers its first priority--ahead of the security fence, new settlement activity, travel restrictions, employment in Israel, and a host of other concerns that do not involve releasing cold-blooded murderers--shows that the Palestinian public is not yet ready for a peace agreement. The average Palestinian in the street apparently still sees blowing up children in a pizzeria as heroic resistance, and as long as that is true I see little hope for a lasting peace agreement.

He's right about that, but I think he's misjudging the motives of the Palestinian public. The Palestinians are being manipulated by their leaders (and the leaders of some Arab nations), many of whom don't want the conflict in Israel resolved. David notes that the Palestinians are only a thorn in Israel's paw compared to Iran, al Qaeda, and (potentially) Pakistan, but as long as the Arab despots of the world can keep twisting it they can prevent those civilized nations that are sympathetic with the Palestinians from wholeheartedly supporting Israel.

The Palestinian public is continually deluded by its leaders, just as most Arabs have been for decades; the Arab rulers depend on this delusion to stay in power. If the conflict in Israel is ever resolved, these dictators will have to either address the real problems facing their people, or find another scape-goat. It's not a fantasy for them, it's a strategy -- but it's still suicidal.

I sure hope someone is working on combining these two news stories:

1. A 2000-year-old jar of cream has been discovered in an archeological dig in London. The cream still shows prints from the fingers of a hypothetically beautiful Roman babe.

2. Canadian scientists have developed a new method for extracting DNA from fingerptints. Good work, Canada.

This probably won't get reported anywhere else, but I expect we're less a year away from the birth of the first Rome clone, as I'm going to call them. Soon we'll be able to clone some Visigoths too, and I'll name the eldest "Clonan the Barbarian".

Naturally we'll make them fight each other in our cloned Colosseum.

Oscar Jr. is onto something with his idea of "comment squatting". However, I'd like to expand on that; we need a whole new paradigm for comments!

As it is, the comment sections on blogs that have them act like a single thread on a message board. If there are a lot of commenters things can quickly get confusing and disorganized, or even degenerate into flame-wars. That's no good! In fact, most of the big-name bloggers refuse to allow comments on their sites for just this very reason.

What to do? My proposal is simple: replace the comment thread with an entire message board dedicated to that single post. Users could create threads on the board for different sub-topics, thereby preventing confusion. The blogger could even appoint administrators for the boards to help him keep things civil.

Most blogs would only need a single Master of Comments, since most of us don't get enough feedback to really have to worry about administration. As for the big boys, I have no doubt that Glenn, Steven, Eugene, and the rest could find dozens of suitable volunteers, with minimal extra effort on their own parts. Andrew already has something of the sort going; he's got an assistant to handle and publish comments that readers email to him.

What about clutter? you ask. Easy, I reply. Most blogs dump everything more than 7 days old off into the archives; when a post moves off the front page the associated forum could simply shut down, if desired. Lock it, delete it, or even migrate each individual thread into a large master-blog-forum where it can live or die on its own. The possibilities are endless.

Of course, in a sense, hundreds of little blogs already act as comment sections for the top dogs; why complicate matters? People like interactivity! Introducing a forum-based comment section would lower the cost-of-entry for would-be commenters, and potentially increase the utility of blogs to casual readers who would like to respond but don't want to take the time to set up a blog of their own.

I don't think the software yet exists to manage forums in the way I've described, but that's a mere technicality; there's great forum code out there that can be adapted easily enough. As blogs become journalism the Crowd will want to get more involved, and most of the major blogs are, in a way, less interactive than print publications that run letters to the editor. This new vision for comments -- or something like it -- is essential for the next stage of our blog-olution.

Update:
I wrote a response to Bill's post earlier this week on another hurdle that blogs must overcome before they supplant journalism: they've got to make money. Without revenue, blogs will continue to churn out quality punditry, but little true reporting.

What do these people have in common? They're both named Charles Taylor.

What do they not have in common? The guy on the left is "president" of Liberia and has been indicted for all sorts of war crimes. The guy on the right is my population genetics professor at UCLA who I hope to have on my PhD dissertation committee, and has not been indicted for even a single war crime. Both have worked in Africa, but the guy on the left spends his time brutally oppressing an entire country, while the guy on the right applies artificial life simulations to important humanitarian causes, like controlling malaria.

By digging beneath the surface, it's often possible to make this kind of astounding differentiation, despite initial similarities. Even though both men are named "Charles Taylor", one is a vicious killer and the other is a brilliant scientist. Sometimes certain groups will try to "sex up" surface similarities because they don't want you to recognize the underlying differences; it's important to carefully examine claims that two people or groups are equivalent.

Homework: Can anyone think of any real-world examples of this sort of deception, perhaps relating to American politics or international relations?

Class dismissed.

Donald Sensing discusses two essays about Public Displays of Patriotism (PDPs); the first by Trent Telenko, and a response by Sgt. Stryker. Trent disparages those who feel "oppressed" by PDPs, and then Stryker takes him to task, writing that many vets don't like ostentatious displays of patriotism either.

I mostly want to respond to Stryker by reminding him that those who have served in America's military probably have a much keener, more focused sense of patriotism than the rest of us will ever know; I can certainly understand why many PDPs may appear gaudy and exhibitionistic in their eyes. I imagine that a cop watching Law & Order or an astronaut visiting Space Camp feels similarly.

Still, if I may speak for all the patriotic Americans who haven't served in the military: we're trying our best. We want to honor you, we want to honor our country, and we generally try to do so as well as we know how. I'm sure that putting a flag up on my front porch seems childish to the men who draped the Stars & Stripes over Saddam's statue in Baghdad, but it's all I've got.

The Democrats have long insisted that they will not offer a candidate to replace Governor Davis, and that Davis has the full support of the party. I've written about Davis' lack of honor and the difficult strategic issues that each party as to deal with; despite the DNC's formal line, here's the trial balloon I've long-expected the Democrats to float: "2 Democrats in Congress Urge Feinstein to Enter Recall Race".

Two Democratic members of Congress publicly urged Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Tuesday to join the race to replace Gov. Gray Davis, ending what had been a united effort by Democratic elected officials to stand with the governor in the recall election.

The statements came from U.S. Reps. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) and Cal Dooley (D-Hanford).

Both said that, although they oppose the recall, Democrats need someone to vote for in case Davis loses. ...

"It is no secret that Gov. Davis is in trouble, and I seriously doubt that he can survive the recall effort," Dooley said in a statement. "We, as Democrats, need to get behind a strong candidate.

"It is unfortunate that the recall effort qualified for the ballot," he added, but "it is foolhardy for Democrats to gamble that Gov. Davis can pull this out."

There is no way that Gray Davis is going to survive the recall election as governor. Although the Democrats seem to be in suicide mode all around the country, I will be astounded if the party holds its current line; I expect they're waiting to see how this proposal plays out in their focus groups.

Many people see Democratic Senator Feinstein as a lock to win, if she runs, but I'll go out on a limb and predict that she won't. She has expressed contempt for the recall petition concept itself, and is getting a bit old to start a vigorous campaign. On the other hand, the campain will only be 59 days long, and it's likely to be her last opportunity to run for higher office.

The Israelis are building a 300-mile-long wall around Jerusalem to protect themselves from Palestinian terrorist attacks from the north and south. While meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday, Bush expressed "concern" about the wall. Four days ago, President Bush met with Palestinian "Prime Minister" Mahmoud Abbas and called the wall "a problem".

It seems like the real problem is that Palestinian kids keep jacking up on crack, strapping on bombs, and blowing themselves up at Israeli birthday parities.

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, whom the Bush administration has snubbed in favor of Mr. Abbas, says the barrier is a new "Berlin Wall" that will divide Palestinian areas into ghettos.

East Berlin was a ghetto because its government made it that way. Arafat and Abbas are the Palestinian government. Do the math.

Jails have walls. Zoos have walls. Not every prisoner is dangerous, nor every animal, but you don't want them just wandering around, especially when it's hard to tell the difference. Palestinians aren't prisoners or animals, but many of them are devoted to wreaking as much havoc in Israel as possible. Unfortunately, it seems like the Israelis are forced to wall themselves in because President Bush would prefer that they make peace with the lions rather than hunt them down and kill them.

Update:
I highly recommend Setting the World to Rights' Short History of Israel for anyone who feels that Israel and the Palestinians share equal blame for the current situation, or who simply wants to know more about the recent history of the region.

Steven Den Beste is right, I am surprised to find Master of None added to his slowly-rotating blogroll. (There's got to be something that rotates slowly, and doesn't carry lots of other connotations, that I could have used as a metaphor, but I can't think of anything that fits. First I had "blog rotisserie", but that implies I'm being cooked; galaxies rotate slowly, but they're huge and have billions of stars.)

SDB finished his post with "[DWL!]", so I'll just thank him here for pointing some new eyes in my direction. Thanks! I'm flattered.

Those of you with the new eyes: welcome! Make yourselves at home. Take yer shoes off and relax; I'll try to think of something entertaining... let's see... where'd that dancing monkey go? Anyway, take a look around, comment on everything, and ya'll come back now, y'hear?

I've used my incredible mental powers to look into the near future, and Frank J's worst nightmare is about to come true.

I suggest you stock up on bananas.

It has been brought to my attention that my night color scheme sucks. If anyone out there is willing to take a look at the style-sheet and suggest some alternate colors, I will be your best friend forever.

John Callender at Lies writes that many advocates of the battle in Iraq see our invasion as a direct result of 9/11. This is true. He goes on to say, however, that because there as been little evidence of a direct relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda (he might say no evidence) that this reasoning cannot be used to justify the invasion.

However, there can be no denying two facts:
1. Saddam did have direct relations with other terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. He funded terrorist attacks within Israel, and facilitated these groups' operations all around the world.
2. Saddam's oppression of the Iraqi people was a part of the vast swamp that encourages and contributes to the Arab Muslim terrorist mindset. If, as many leftists claim, such terrorism flourishes due to repressive dictators that the USA has propped up, eliminating one of those dictators directly addresses one of the "root causes" the leftists are so fond of.

Furthermore, don't forget that after the US entered WW2, our first step in Europe was to invade Morocco. Why would we do such a horrible thing? What did Morocco do to us? For strategic reasons, Morocco was a sensible place to start our counter-offensive against the Germans in North Africa. Similarly, Iraq was the low-hanging fruit among our enemies (and they were our avowed enemy); even if I concede a lack of direct connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, there's no shortage of indirect connections.

Even though different people had different motivations, they all led towards the same intent: topple Saddam Hussein. Some of those motivations may have been selfish, or logically flawed, or noble, or anything, but the cumulative effect of them was widespread and irresistable. Though different people may have had different reasons, everyone agreed on what had to be done, and so it was.

My own personal reasons are based on the overall War on Terror, and so I justify our battle in Iraq on those grounds. The liberation of the Iraqi people is an important step towards our victory in the greater war; not merely because I think everyone deserves to live free (although I do), but because until the Arab Muslim world is free we will continue to be in danger.

Update:
The post originally said "Monaco", but as SDB points out, I meant "Morocco". No wonder my Google search for the date we invaded Monaco turned up nothing.

On June 25th, 2003, CNSNews ran a story about a member of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition who called NASCAR "the last bastion of white supremacy". NASCAR fans were furious of course, but this is Standard Operating Procedure for Jackson's group: he calls people and companies racists and then waits for them to pony up the dough to shut him up. In point of fact, NASCAR was a "platinum sponsor" of Ranbow/PUSH's annual conference, having donated more than $250,000 in recent years.

So, did NASCAR bend over and take it, as Jackson no doubt expected? Hardly. CNSNews is now reporting (no permalink) that NASCAR has cut off all funding for Rainbow/PUSH. My hope is that this is the beginning of the end of Jackson's shake-down game.

As I wrote in the comments of my "Separate But Equal" post yesterday, there are a lot of people who profit greatly by holding blacks down. No, it's not corporations or rich white men. Think: who gains the most from racial politics and stirring up ethnic divisions? Could it be millionaires like Jesse Jackson, who have built their careers up by crying "racist" at every opportunity, and have built their fortunes by exploiting the cause of common men? Perhaps.

Why not link to another story you've all probably read already? Economist Tyler Cowen at the Volokh Conspiracy briefly explores the potential costs and benefits of establishing a market for betting on when terrorists will strike. Basically, Tyler thinks that the main danger of such a market would be an excess of accurate information that might lead to panic.

Tyler is quickly becoming one of my favorite Conspirators, and he has written some excellent posts on macroeconomics as well.

Update:
More by Glenn Reynolds of course. I try not to read Instapundit until I'm done with all my other sites, because otherwise I'll have a hard time thinking of something to write about that hasn't already been done.

I always hesitate before linking to blogs that are vastly more popular than mine; I mean, what are the odds that you're reading this, but managed to miss SDB's defense of his previous strategic overview of the War on Terror?

His critics are calling him a raving lunatic-idiot, and there are only two cases in which a person will resort to such ad hominem attacks: when the person being attacked is so obviously in the wrong, and their position so clearly devoid of merit, that there's just no reason to respond rationally; and when the attacker has no logical, coherent ammunition of his own. Clearly the attacker would always like his listeners to assume the former, but more often than not that's just a bluff, and the true situation is actually the latter.

SDB uses a lot of words, but the real meat is near the end:

Many on the left are still spending their time mooning those of us over here who've been advocating war. And it's becoming apparent that they are frustrated by the fact that it doesn't seem to be having any political impact.

They're also deeply worried because we advocates seem to be getting a lot more attention. For instance, in the Yglesias comment thread, Peter Jung says, "Den Beste is a raving psychotic, and it is alarming that someone of his ilk is allotted space on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal."

When someone tries to use a strategy which is dictated by their ideology, and that strategy doesn't seem to work, then they are caught in something of a cognitive bind. If they acknowledge the failure of the strategy, then they would be forced to question their ideology. If questioning the ideology is unthinkable, then the only possible conclusion is that the strategy failed because it wasn't executed sufficiently well. They respond by turning up the power, rather than by considering alternatives. (This is sometimes referred to as "escalation of failure".)

Attempts by the leftists to show how emphatically they oppose war don't seem to be having any impact. Invective and ridicule has failed to discredit those of us who have been advocating war. (And that's puzzling, too. In college, denouncing someone as being "conservative" would instantly discredit them and silence them. Why hasn't that been working in the debate about the war?)

So they're turning up the intensity of the ridicule and invective. If they can somehow find the right magical ad hominem characterization for their opponents, the opponents will vanish and take their dangerous messages with them. (So if "conservative" doesn't work, maybe "psychotic" or "racist" will.)

By refusing to consider the idea that they might need to engage in cogent debate on the issues, including making attempts to present credible alternatives, they're taking themselves out of the game.

Welcome to Real Life, where sincerity alone counts for just two things, and Jack just left town.

Wow, it's pouring outside. It may be no big deal to you easterners (anyone who lives more than 10 miles from the Pacific), but it's pretty amazing to me. I was getting ready for bed, minding my own business, when a crash of thunder cascaded through house; I could feel the earth tremble beneath my feet.

I paused, and looked around. The heavenly barrage hadn't been preceded by a flash of lightning, and I quickly felt ridiculous when I realized I was watching expectantly for one to follow. Nothing. Mostly silence; raindrops falling in my new aluminum gutters.

Good thing I didn't wash my car. That's how life is sometimes, isn't it? Metaphorical junk piles up everywhere, and you've got to deal with it, right? Ah, screw it; do it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or just wait a while and maybe it'll rain and all get washed down your shiny new gutters.

Although I'm not a geek... well... maybe I'm am little geeky. I give you:

The Degree Confluence Project which seeks to visit every integer latitude and longitude degree intersection on earth and photograph each location. I need a digital camera and a GPS receiver. Unfortunately, it looks like most of the civilized world has been done already. Good thing I live in Los Angeles. (Via Mutated Monkeys, who inspired this post.)

The Wooden Periodic Table of the Elements which is an actual table with receptacles for collecting every (known) element. The creator has samples of every element with a half-life of greater than 1 year. Yes, I'm jealous.

Geocaching, the sport where YOU are the search engine. People hide stuff at GPS locations and then post the coordinates to the site, allowing you to go find them. Yet another reason to get a GPS receiver.

Action Squad, the website of a Minneapolis-based urban adventure team. They sneak around old buildings, caves, mental hospitals, &c., and photograph their missions. It reminds me of my undergraduate excursions through the steam tunnels under UCLA. Hey Matt, do you still have the map we made of the tunnels?

Debuting the new Education category, here's a fun little item about a new high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students in New York.

"This school will be a model for the country and possibly the world," Principal William Salzman said in an interview at the facility that will boast a new science lab, 60 laptop and desktop computers donated by IBM, additional classrooms and a new cafeteria.

Salzman, a former Wall Street executive, was most recently assistant principal of guidance and business information technology at Brooklyn's Automotive HS.

Salzman said Harvey Milk will be an academically rigorous school that follows Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's mandatory English and math programs. It will also specialize in computer technology, arts and a culinary program.

"This is a not a touchy-feely situation," Salzman said. "We intend to have 95 percent of our students go on to college. We have a lot of talent coming into the school. We want to steer these kids in the right direction."

I think this is a great idea! If the school works out well, maybe we can create a whole parallel society for those people. They can have their own bathrooms and water fountains, their own special sections on the bus, and their own seperate neighborhoods. It'll be fabulous.

Update:
Via Drudge I see that blacks want their own schools, too. Gosh, they complain no matter what we do.

Candace and Cypren have a couple of posts up about guns, and so as a public service I went and found an op-ed by Steven D. Levitt, Professor of Economics, University of Chicago, who writes that swimming pools are more dangerous than guns.

What's more dangerous: a swimming pool or a gun? When it comes to children, there is no comparison: a swimming pool is 100 times more deadly.

In 1997 alone (the last year for which data are available), 742 children under the age of 10 drowned in the United States last year alone. Approximately 550 of those drownings -- about 75 percent of the total -- occurred in residential swimming pools. According to the most recent statistics, there are about six million residential pools, meaning that one young child drowns annually for every 11,000 pools.

About 175 children under the age of 10 died in 1998 as a result of guns. About two-thirds of those deaths were homicides. There are an estimated 200 million guns in the United States. Doing the math, there is roughly one child killed by guns for every one million guns.

Thus, on average, if you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.

We've got to stop the swimming pool industry, they don't even have a flimsy amendment to stand on! Studies have shown that swimming pool manufacturers specifically target the most vulnerable members of our society with their deadly product. How many precious little ones must be sacrificed on Poseidon's altar? Won't someone please think of the children?

Summer fun, or backyard killer?

Update:
Thanks for the link, Ankfray Ajay. I don't think this post will get as many hits as "No More Hot Teacher/Student Sex", but we'll wait and see.

I've determined that I'm not a geek. You may think it's strange that I'm getting a PhD in artificial intelligence and still don't consider myself a geek, but let me explain.

I like technology, but I'm not enamored with it. I don't have a laptop, and I have no real desire to get one so I can blog from Starbucks. I have a PDA, but it's several years old and the batteries aren't even charged. My cell phone is a three-year-old Nokia that doesn't have a color display or digital camera, and can't download ringtones. I did build my own computer, but I hate fiddling with it. I know very little about Linux, and have no desire to install it on anything: not my PC, not my Xbox, not my PS2, not my microwave.

I liked Blade Runner and Snow Crash, but thought they were both overrated. I haven't read Fark in months (too long), and I haven't read Slashdot in over a year. Not since I started getting into blogs, anyway. Oh yeah, I do have a blog, but I don't think that qualifies me as a geek just by itself.

I do know that there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't. I don't play first-person shooters anymore (although I did write Quake Superheroes, and I'm using the Q2 engine for my PhD work), and I haven't liked a real-time strategy game since Age of Empires 2. And I hardly played that.

I don't download music. I don't use IRC. I don't have a network of any kind set up in my house. I've only been to a couple of LAN parties, and I got bored pretty quick. I did use an exclusive-or in the title of a recent post, however.

So what am I? I'm an engineer. Now, some engineers are geeks, and some geeks are engineers, but they aren't equivalent. The geeks I know revel in technology, but many of them have no real desire to understand it or create anything of their own. The engineers that create the technology the geeks adore are probably geeks themselves, but not all engineers fiddle with gadgets and gizmos.

I haven't quite pinned it down yet, but I think of myself as a philosopher-engineer. That's why I got into artificial intelligence; I want to understand the human mind, language, culture -- the building blocks of humanity. I considered going into psychology, but after taking several psych classes (undergraduate and graduate level) I realized that it's a very soft science, if it's science at all. I want to quantify intelligence, but psychologists just want to hypothesize endlessly.

I respect geeks, and I know a lot of them, but it's just not who I am. Sure, the toys are fun, but to me they're only a tool for studying the deeper issues of existence, and not an end unto themselves.

Via Donald Sensing, read this touching account of a 9/11 widow's visit to the troops in Iraq.

Also, to stand in contrast to the pathetic limousine leftists we're all so used to, I'd like to recognize Robert De Niro, Kid Rock, Rebecca and John Stamos, Wayne Newton, Gary Sinise, Lee Ann Womack, and the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders for also visiting the troops. For more info on who is participating in various USO tours to support our soldiers, check out the USO Tours and Events page. It looks like Blockbuster Video is partnering with USO as well.

Yes, this information will affect how I spend my money.

I don't know what this means, but The Turth Laid Bear's Blog Ecosystem ranks me #196 when sorted by visits per day, and #664 when sorted by in-bound links. So, possibly Master of None is more popular with non-bloggers than with my fellow bloggers? Of possibly you people need to get off your lazy butts and put up links to me?

Ah, just kidding, I'm in a feisty mood today. And I'm trying to avoid going to work. But, I really should go. Sigh. Stupid work, be less worky!

I do get a lot of hits from Google searches though (because I use lotsa big words). More analysis of the traffic/link question by Oscar Jr.

Update:
Don't forget my linking policy! If you link to me, I double-plus-good guarantee that I'll link back to you! But wait, there's more! If you act now, I'll also send you, absolutely free, one of the hundreds of stray cats from my neighborhood! You only pay shipping. For international orders I'll throw in a couple of crows so that your new pet arrives well-fed. You'll also be enrolled in the Stray of the Month club, at no additional charge.