July 2007 Archives

Not that many people are linking to me, but I shamelessly "borrowed" the button technique used by Newsbusters and applied to my posts.

"Innumeracy" being the numerical equivalence of "illiteracy", it's astounding to me that most Americans probably wouldn't even recognize the word (thought most numerate people would be able to figure it out pretty quickly). That said, American Thinker is right that the defining quality of a "nerd" is numeracy, not "whiteness" as argued by some social scientist.

The article does not mention the true common characteristic of nerds: they are numerate, i.e. conversant in the language of mathematics - an odd omission for a linguist. This omission can be explained by the fact that Berkeley-style multi-culturalism is threatened by numeracy, the development of which is the hallmark of Western Civilization and the historical wellspring of western economic and military success. Consequently, it is incumbent on multi-culturalists to discredit whenever and wherever possible those who are numerate.

It troubles me to hear people denounce math and proclaim its uselessness in their lives... imagine anyone making the same claims about reading and writing! Sure "math is hard", but achieving basic functional numeracy is well within the ability of an average person, just as is functional literacy -- and numeracy is just as important! Consider: Jesus said more about money than about almost any other topic, and no one can handle money wisely without being numerate.

People who reject numeracy will not thrive in our modern civilization and have the most to gain by tearing it down. Parents who want their children to succeed should focus as much on math as they do on reading, or maybe more considering how poor most primary-level teachers are at basic math.

(HT: Instapundit.)

Update 070801:

To clarify, my point isn't that everyone should love math or be great at it, just that people should have an appreciation for numbers and a basic understanding of how they affect our lives.

The World Gospel Mission missionary group is looking for virtual missionaries to share Christianity in the Second Life game/community. From their email:

World Gospel Mission (WGM) has developed nearly 100 years of experience in the mission field by evangelizing the world beginning in China in 1910 and today has 300 missionaries and support staff serving on six continents and in more than 17 countries. And now WGM is the first to use this extraordinary missionary expertise to evangelize the “Virtual World.” WGM is the first to develop a comprehensive training manual, “Ambassadors to LindenLand Handbook,” to equip missionaries to evangelize “Second Life,” a 3-D virtual world inhabited by over 8.3 million residents from around the world. Second Life has grown into a prosperous online community where goods are bought and sold, people meet people, and members can even build their own houses. But, what about the spiritual aspects of the virtual world? Hubert Harriman, president of WGM, is available to discuss the challenges and the successes of evangelizing cyberspace as it relates to “Second Life.” Harriman can answer the following intriguing questions: How did you determine a need to evangelize cyberspace? How many missionaries do you have at Second Life? How do you train missionaries to evangelize online without getting caught up in the pitfalls of the online culture? Have you ever had any conversions to Christ online and how do you know they are real? What are your plans with Second Life? Do you intend to build an online church and hold services? What is the future of such online communities as they relate to missions work?

Interesting endeavor! (I know nothing about WGM's theology.)

One of the benefits I've found to living in a small city is that I can call City Hall and actually talk directly to the bureaucrats who make the decisions that affect my life. For instance, I just got off the phone with the guy who runs the Traffic Projects department of the Engineering Division of the city. His direct phone number was posted on the city's website, and he was willing to listen to my complaint about a new traffic light that was recently installed along my commute route.

The fact that I could get right to the person who could address my problem made me incredibly happy, and I was careful not to waste his time after telling him that the light cycles red along the main thoroughfare so long that the street sometimes backs up onto the highway during rush hour. The delay isn't really significant, only 30 seconds or so each way, but I told him that it appeared to be an unnecessary impediment to the flow of traffic. Even though he didn't think it could be fixed at the moment (because right-turners were triggering the inductor in the street and triggering the unnecessary light changes) it was still gratifying to know that my complaint was heard by someone who seemed eager to do his job well.

I wrote about lead-tainted Mexican candy a couple of years ago, and now there's even more evidence linking lead exposure to criminality.

Although crime did fall dramatically in New York during Giuliani's tenure, a broad range of scientific research has emerged in recent years to show that the mayor deserves only a fraction of the credit that he claims. The most compelling information has come from an economist in Fairfax who has argued in a series of little-noticed papers that the "New York miracle" was caused by local and federal efforts decades earlier to reduce lead poisoning.

The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children's exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.

What makes Nevin's work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

"It is stunning how strong the association is," Nevin said in an interview. "Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead."

I don't find this hard to believe (though the WaPo's connection of this issue to Rudy Giuliani is interesting...). Lead is bad, especially for kids, and this itself isn't news: lead poisoning may even have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

Missouri's Secretary of State, Robin Carnahan, has severely misrepresented a proposed constitutional amendment intended to ban racial and gender discrimination by focusing narrowly on the effect the ban would have on existing affirmative action programs. The text originally submitted by the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative says:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to prohibit any form of discrimination as an act of the state by declaring:

"The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting?"

And the text as written by the Secretary of State for the official ballot:

Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:

* ban affirmative action programs designed to eliminate discrimination against, and improve opportunities for, women and minorities in public contracting, employment and education; and

* allow preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin to meet federal program funds eligibility standards as well as preferential treatment for bona fide qualifications based on sex?

It's totally inaccurate for the MoSecState to describe the amendment as banning affirmative action "designed to eliminate discrimination..." because in fact all affirmative action would be banned. The inclusion of this phrase is intended to bias the reader against the amendment, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters would be in favor of a racial- and gender-neutral government. Since when does the secretary of state play politics in the execution of her official duties?

Just finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and I must say that the ending of the series was, in my opinion, brilliant. Quite an enjoyable read, and I wouldn't say that I'm a particularly fervent fan. Now that it's over I'm sad to see the story end (as I always am with such tales).

My favorite character, by far, was Severus Snape -- tragic, noble, brave, and desperately misunderstood.

Stephen Moore at the WSJ has a great interview with Charles Schwab -- I didn't know much about the man, but my respect for him has grown immensely.

Creating wealth is what Mr. Schwab has come to regard as his "life's pursuit." He's accomplished that not just for himself--his stake in the company is estimated at $4 billion--but also for the millions of small investors who first came to be owner-capitalists by opening a Schwab account. So who better to discuss the future of financial markets and investing than the man who revolutionized the brokerage business? ...

I ask him what he means by his favorite term, "democratic capitalism." He replies that the stock market today is "an open tent for anybody to come into." Ever the salesman, he adds: "For as little as a thousand dollars, you can open an account at Schwab. I mean, it's not a big barrier to entry."

Mr. Schwab pioneered the use of the Internet and helped create the concept of the online brokerage firm. This innovation has enabled investors to behave like informed consumers by leisurely shopping around online for mutual funds tailored to their particular financial circumstances.

It wasn't always like this. When Mr. Schwab started his firm after working in insurance, banking and financial consulting, the mutual fund industry was just getting off the ground. "There were a few high-load mutual funds that charged a 9% sales load" (or fee) he recalls, shaking his head. "The investor had a huge cost to get in and out and faced a big spread between the bid and the ask [price]. There were big commissions on the top of that, to boot. There was all kinds of friction in the system to prevent small guys from investing."

Mr. Schwab sweat those transaction costs out of the process so that even small traders could have a go at it. Brokers have become "commoditized" agents, he likes to say. Schwab's fees on its money-market funds are as low as 0.4% and they keep shrinking.

Mr. Schwab and others like him have done more to improve the quality of life around the world than the United Nations could ever dream of. Perhaps only Norman Borlaug stands taller than the financial wizards who make modern prosperity possible.

My brother sent me an article claiming scientific evidence for the idea that obesity is a socially-contagious disease.

The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased one's chances of becoming obese by 57 percent.

There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less of an influence than friends. It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away - the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese too.

The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say, but since most people were gaining, not losing, over the 32 years, the result was an obesity epidemic.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others' perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.

"You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you," Christakis said.

I doubt that perception is the major influencer of weight gain or loss... from personal experience, fat friends want to go out and eat crap all the time, whereas skinny friends want to eat healthy and have fun in physically active ways. Either way, there's on doubt that the friends you pick have a large influence on you -- food for thought!

DARPA's building a war-fighting equivalent of Deep Blue named Deep Green, and I think computer-augmented command structures are the wave of the future.

According to the DARPA call for ideas (available in full here (pdf), Deep Green will include technologies called "Sketch to Plan and Sketch to Decide", "Crystal Ball", "Automated Course of Action Generation"" and "Blitzkrieg".

The idea is that within three years DARPA will be able to run wargames using human headquarters staffs, but that the Deep Green equipped staffs will have only a quarter as many personnel. Performance will be graded by judges who don't know whether a given team was Deep Green equipped or not. ...

"The long-term vision of Deep Green is for options to be generated by both the commander and the computer... so that some options are generated by humans and others are generated by machines. Initially, DARPA expects the machine generation of options to be centered on making clever mutations of the human-generated options..."

One of the most fruitful directions of artificial intelligence research is writing software that augments the abilities of human decision-makers. AIs that can suggest options to generals and estimate outcomes will be invaluable in the battlespace of the future, largely because they'll have far more information awareness than a human staff could ever achieve.

Yesterday I met two incredibly strange guys. The first I call "One-Bite", because he eats everything in a single bite. I watched him take a bagel-half, cover it with cream cheese, and then stick the entire bagel-half into his mouth at once and eat the entire thing in one bite in the middle of the conversation. Everyone else paused, recognizing the surreality of the act, but One-Bite just kept on as if nothing had happened. Later I saw him make a taco at the buffet and shove the whole thing in his mouth at once. It was bizarre and vaguely nauseating.

And then there's the Human Water Balloon. When we met in the morning he was a normal-looking guy with little discernible gut. Over the course of the day, however, I watched him suck down dozens of sodas and never go to the bathroom. By the time evening came he had a huge distended belly hanging over his belt. I would have sworn this was impossible if I hadn't seen it myself.

Forget the theological implications (of God using a Mac...) and be mildly amused at God's email inbox. (HT: Robb.)

Just watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled "Tapestry" and it was excellent, one of my favorite ever. Also, very appropriate consider the day we've had....

The Pirate sent me a disturbing link about animal brothels in the Netherlands... uh, great. The sad thing is that both Democrats and Ron Paul would probably favor legalization of such establishments in America.

Neither Denmark nor Norway has a prohibition on sex with animals, as long as the animals do not suffer.

On the Internet Danish animal owners advertise openly that they offer sex with animals, without intervention from police or other authorities, Danish newspaper 24timer reports.

In correspondence with the animal owners, the newspaper was told that the animals involved have many years of experience and that the animals themselves wanted sex. The cost to the client varied from DKK 500-1,000 (USD 85-170).

I can say with some certainty that no Republican candidate for president other than Ron Paul would allow such a thing.

My brother send along an article about an online random number generator that can supposedly supply truly random numbers instead of the pseudo-random numbers us computer scientists are used to.

The work on QRBG [Quantum Random Bit Generator] Service has been motivated by scientific necessity (primarily of local scientific community) of running various simulations (in cluster/Grid environments), whose results are often greatly affected by quality (distribution, nondeterminism, entropy, etc.) of used random numbers. Since true random numbers are impossible to generate with a finite state machine (such as today's computers), scientists are forced to either use specialized expensive hardware number generators, or, more frequently, to content themselves with suboptimal solutions (like pseudo-random numbers generators).

The Service has begun as a result of an attempt to fulfill the scientists' needs for quality random numbers, but has now grown to a global (public) high-quality random numbers service.

Incredibly useful for a host of applications. I'm going to download a huge batch of random numbers right now!

Can someone with a blog try sending me a trackback? I'm not sure if they're working properly. Thanks!

Update for Mark: