*Best Of*: September 2003 Archives

I don't know anything about Salman Sharif other than that he ran a violent resistance group that planned and executed a nearly-successful assassination of a prominent politician. Doesn't sound like a very nice guy, does he? Well his target in 1996 was Uday Hussein.

It was obviously against the law of his country for Sharif to attempt to kill Uday, but I have a rather hard time condemning his actions; Uday was responsible for thousands of deaths in the past, and would certainly be responsible for thousands more in the future. Uday hadn't broken any laws -- his word was the law -- nevertheless, I believe that an attempt to kill him was morally justified. It wasn't attempted murder, it was attempted justice.

Someone please help me make a distinction between Salman Sharif, and Paul Hill. I want to be able to, but I'm having trouble. Yes, it sounds like Paul Hill was a little crazy, but let's isolate his intent from his motive. He may have been motivated by "God telling him what to do", but his intent was to kill people responsible for murdering babies, so that they couldn't murder any more.

[Note: even if you're pro-choice, consider how you could draw a distinction without resting on your belief that an unborn baby is not a human.]

I like symmetry, and it pleases me aesthetically that much (most? all?) of the universe is conceptually symmetrical. For example, addition and multiplication are commutative and associative:

x + y == y + x
x * y == y * x
x + (y + z) == (x + y) + z
x * (y * z) == (x * y) * z

It always bothered me that division and subtraction weren't commutative and associative, until I realized that neither of those operations is truly a fundamental mathematical concept; both are combinations of two other operations. Subtraction is addition with negation, and division is multiplication with inversion. Thus, conceptual symmetry is maintained.

Please understand that the symmetry I'm talking about is very high level. Addition is symmetric, and so is capitalism -- you put work into the system, you get benefits out. Socialism is so awkward and absurd to me because it attempts to break this natural symmetry by disconnecting work from reward, and it fails for just that reason. I hope my meaning of conceptual symmetry is clear from these examples, because I'm not sure I can define it more rigidly at this juncture.

Conceptual symmetry depends a great deal on how we humans connect and relate concepts together. If a concept does not balance symmetrically, then it is generally the case that the concept is not well-formed, and does not represent reality. SDB gives a perfect example of a malformed concept when he writes that:

There's the old saw about the irresistible force and the immovable object and what happens when the irresistible force is applied to the immovable object. (The question turns out to be nonsense. It's logically impossible for both to exist in the same universe, so it's logically impossible for them to ever meet. Therefore it makes no sense to discuss what would happen if they did.) In our universe it turns out that every force is irresistible and no object is immovable. Any object, no matter how massive, will respond to any force, no matter how small. The response may be miniscule, but it isn't zero.

It's an interesting mental exercise to consider what would happen if an irresistible force met an immovable object, and the question may appear symmetrical on the surface. The fact that the question is actually nonsensical within our universe, however, demonstrates that the concept behind it is not actually symmetrical. Force and mass are entirely different concepts that cannot be symmetrically related by the "moves" operation.

(Here is an interesting mental exercise: what if there were immovable objects? It would require some sort of universal static friction. Such a universe would not have Newton's three laws of motion. Another, even more difficult exercise: imagine a world in which addition and multiplication were not commutative. (You can't do it.))

As I start to write this, I'm not planning on making fat jokes, so if one creeps in, forgive me. I used to be overweight as a kid and a teenager, but I took control of my lifestyle when I was 18 and lost around 70 pounds over the course of a few years. I did it the old-fashioned way: by changing my diet, and by exercising. I don't have a lot of sympathy for fat people who act like they can't help being fat.

So then, "Overweight workers say they're often overlooked".

''This is one of the only groups where an employer could say, 'We don't want fat people,' and get away with it,'' said Massachusetts Representative Byron Rushing. ''Fat people are still targets. Professional comedians can still make fun of them, and fat jokes are still being passed around.'' ...

Protests by groups like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance as well as a flurry of recent lawsuits have led to greater awareness of the problems the overweight face in the workplace. Some of the lawsuits seek to create new legal ground by arguing that obesity ought to be seen as an impairment under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

For the vast majority of fat people, their "disability" is not primarily physical: it's mental. The fat that hinders their activity is merely a symptom of their lack of self-discipline.

Yes, some people are biologically more inclined toward being fat than others -- so what? Some people are more likely to get addicted to alcohol than others, but when someone does become an alcoholic we still know it's their fault. Same with being fat. If your arm gets blown off by a terrorist, you're disabled. If you simply can't muster up the willpower to resist stuffing your face with creamy lard, you're just addicted to food. Also, comedians will make fun of you, because they're insensitive.

Unlike racial discrimination -- and even religious discrimination -- discrimination based on being fat is entirely within your control. It would be absurd to tell a black guy to lighten his skin (and it wouldn't gain him acceptance even if he did, *cough*Michael Jackson*cough*). But if people make fun of you for being fat, or for not knowing how to read, or for terrible body odor, or for having no sense of style... there's something you can do! Lose weight, get hooked on phonics, use deodorant, watch "Queer Eye".

Sixty-one percent of Americans are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those, the CDC says 35 percent are moderately overweight and 26 percent are obese. The findings, from a National Health and Nutrition Examination survey, sounded an alarm when they were released in 2000, but the hubbub did little to change poor perceptions of overweight people or spur the creation of new laws.

Maybe the problem here is that so many Americans are fat. Don't you all realize that the Europeans are making fun of you? There are only two options: bomb Europe, or lose some weight. I'm impartial.

Look, America, I understand that food is yummy. Sometimes I want to eat a whole truckload of cheesecake, and it's really hard to resist. But guess what? I don't eat it. Sometimes I feel like sitting around on the couch all day, eating Fritos and watching the Simpsons. But guess what? I marshal my mental faculties, throw off the lethargy that so easily besets me, and I go out for a walk, or a run, or I lift some big metal plates up over my head. It's takes about 30 minutes. Then I go back and lie on the couch, watch Simpsons, and eat fruit or something.

While there is little data available detailing the extent of size bias, Deidra Everett, secretary of the New England Chapter of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, believes there have been a few changes in society's view of the overweight. ''Society has changed its image a little when it comes to smaller large people [huh? maybe "small or large"],'' Everett said. ''It is more accepted now that a woman can be a size 12 through 18 and still be fit. Also, in the media, the whole extreme leanness [trend] is not as popular as it was six or seven years ago. So, the media is trying to show that curves can be OK.''

No one has a problem with luscious curves, the problem is when your whole body is just one single curve. This is commonly called a "sphere", and it doesn't count as an affirmative answer for when people ask you whether or not you're "in shape".

At most workplaces, she said, little has changed. Everett, who, at 36, weighs 460 pounds and is 5 feet 10 inches, knows firsthand. She said prospective employers have pursued her aggressively over the phone, and then suddenly changed their minds after meeting her. Stunned by her appearance, the recruiter will scan her body, pausing at the fattest part, and then look away.

''Eventually, they'll get back to your face and give you this nervous smile that says, 'Oh, dear!' They don't know where to look. They become flustered and there is not a lot of eye contact,'' she said. ''I can't understand how people can be so judgmental without knowing who I am. It makes you feel terrible.''

Yes, people are mean. Heck, I've been mean in this very essay. I'm an anti-fattite, I guess. Until the Museum of Tolerance adds that new fat wing they've been planning, I recommend that if you find yourself in situations where people can't even look at you without becoming flustered and uncomfortable, you're probably too fat.

You should consider that maybe the problem isn't the genetic predisposition of humans to use peer pressure to discourage harmful behavior -- maybe the problem is you. Give in to the peer pressure. The negative, "terrible", feelings you're experiencing may be for your own good.

I was never as fat as Deidra Everett, but I suffered social consequences when I was overweight. Which do you think helped more?

1. "Hey baby, yeah I'm fat, but you'd go out with me if you weren't so judgemental without knowing who I am. It makes me feel terrible. Help me advance fat acceptance."

2. Lose weight.

If you guessed #2, you're right. You can't control what other people think, but you can control how fat you are. Instead of wasting time making pro-fat organizations, go to the gym. Stop eating twinkies. As our corporate masters say, "Just Do It".

Most people pretty much take language for granted, and don't even think about it unless they're confronted with someone doesn't understand them, and can't be understood by them in turn. In such a case, we say that the other speaks "a different language" than we do, but what does that really mean?

Does the other have incomprehensible thoughts in their head that we can't understand? No; internally, all (normal) people think in pretty much the same manner, with the same general streams of consciousness, and the same general methodology. There are cultural differences, some of which relate to language, but the underlying structure of human thought it fairly universal. The difficulty that arises with someone who speaks a different language is merely that although we could understand the thoughts and ideas of the other person, we can't correlate the sounds they are using to the ideas they are trying to relate. (Incidentally, how do children correlate the language they hear with the reality that surrounds them when they initially learn to speak? That's a rather large open problem for neurologists, psychologists, and computer scientists.)

Attempts have been made to create language-independent representations for the foundational level of thought, and one of the most well-known is called CD: Conceptual Dependency. The purpose of conceptual dependency structures is to represent a concept at a fundamentally low level; this representation can then be processed by a computer, or can be translated into any human language.

It isn't as simple as it sounds! For example, here is a slide excerpted from the PowerPoint presentation I linked to above. It displays a (possible) representation for the sentence "Jan kicked the cat.".

Yes, sentence examples in artificial intelligence are always mildly violent or sexual. Draw your own conclusions. This graphical depiction of a conceptual dependency isn't simple to explain (view the presentation), but that should give you the flavor. CD is very versitile, and any concept that can be expressed in spoken or written language can be built into a dependency structure.

So what? Well, these structures can be encoded digitally and fed into a computer program that can analyze them and extract meaning from them. For example, many pieces of software have been written that use CD to read short stories, and then answer questions such as "Who was the main character?" "Why did the knight kill the dragon?" and that sort of thing. Some systems can even read stories, and then generate their own stories based on what they learn from their reading. "Generate a story about bravery." (The stories aren't usually very good.)

What's more, CD can serve as an intermediate step in language translation. Rather than building a X*X translation engines that can translate every X language into every other, 2X engines can be built: X to translate a language into CD, and X to translate CD into each language. The idea doesn't work perfectly yet, but the concept is sound.

Human language is a fantastic tool for sharing the information that's otherwise trapped inside our brains, but don't be fooled into thinking that language is the same as thought. Thought and language are closely related -- and most people actually do think in streams of language -- but by isolating them we can reach a greater understanding of their interaction and operation than we can if we are forced to consider them together.