Foyled

Creative Deconstruction

2011-12-19T17:49:00.002-05:00

Creative Deconstruction

The article about Steve Jobs by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (November 14, 2011) portrays him as a "tweaker," someone who perfects other people's inventions by making a series of small (and fanatically perfectionist) improvements in them. Gladwell argues that tweakers have historically been as important as visionary inventors. Without debating that point, pro or con, I'd like to call attention to an analogy that struck me when I was reading Gladwell's story about how Jobs perfected the commercials for the iPad. He wound up screaming, in his usual charming way, that he hated what he had seen so far, the screams being directed at the guy who was generating ideas about, and prototypes of, iPad commercials, James Vincent. Vincent finally shouted, "You've got to tell me what you want," and Jobs shouted back, "You've got to show me some stuff, and I'll know it when I see it." (Quotes on p.~34 of Gladwell's article; he got them from Walter Isaacson's recent, timely biography.)

What I was struck by is how closely this fits the "standard model" of how creativity works --- or doesn't quite fit. According to the standard model, attested to by introspection from geniuses of various sorts who have wondered where their great ideas came from, creativity requires a random generator of ideas, and a filter that "knows a good idea when it sees it." With all due respect to these geniuses, all smarter than me, what has always seemed ridiculous is the idea that their brains contain the equivalent of monkeys and typewriters generating essentially random stuff. If James Vincent were just a random idea generator, Jobs would have gotten nowhere. The fact is, few people in the world could have replaced him, and not just because few good ad-copy producers could tolerate a Steve Jobs as well as he apparently did. Similarly, it may seem to Henri Poincaré that the ideas he had to shoot down before coming across a genius-level insight were just stupid, but I and many other people would be thrilled to have an idea as good as the ones he rejected. So the standard model is really a homuncular theory, in the sense that it posits a little guy inside every genius who is almost a genius, who collaborates with his or her "conscious self" as Vincent did with Jobs. As such, it strikes me as worthless.

On the other hand, it suggests that many tweakers are really goaders and recognizers, who drive really smart people to produce ideas that the tweakers can put forward as their own (often, as in Jobs's case, with inadequate credit to the goadee). A homuncular theory of tweaking is not question-begging, because there are a lot of people like Mr. Vincent who can play the role of homunculus just fine, although we are as mystified as ever about what their fine minds actually do. (2011-12-19)

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

2011-07-26T00:44:00.006-04:00

I watched Obama's speech about the debt-ceiling crisis tonight, and Boehner's "response." Of course the Republican speech was misleading and not to the point. The point is that the refusal of the Republicans to accept a deal that involves any tax increases has led us to the brink of catastrophe, and Boehner never mentioned tax increases. But Obama's speech was also incredibly self-serving, shallow, and misleading. And I like Obama.
According to the New Republic, previous deals to raise the ceiling have involved about an 80–20 percent mix of spending cuts and tax increases. (Since the Reagan administration.) There have been many such deals, under both Democratic and Republican presidents. George W. Bush raised the ceiling 7 times. When the Republicans hold the White House, they never make a fuss about the debt ceiling, and of course the Democrats don't make trouble for them. The Republicans were so complaisant only to avoid political trouble for their own party, not because Bush was a frugal President; he was madly increasing the deficit any way he could think of. To be fair, the Republicans are now being dragged to extremism by their Tea Party fringe, who claim to have hated Bush's extravagance as much as Obama's. Without fear of primary challenges, the leaders of the Republican Party would have made a deal a long time ago.
Here's what I disliked about Obama's speech:

He spent half the speech describing his own proposal and how reasonable it is. Well, yes, it is reasonable in the sense that to reject it the Republicans would have to be rabidly insane.^insane Unfortunately, the fact is, they are. Now what, Mr. President?
He mentioned almost as an aside that he would support a proposal by Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader. He did not say what this proposal was or why he would support it. He may as well have added, "I'm mentioning this because I promised Senator Reid I would, and I'm a man of my word."
He used the word "default" several times to describe what will happen next Wednesday, August 3, 2011. In the middle of that string of occurrences of the word, he added qualifying phrases, so that he said things like "default on our Social Security obligations." But "default" with no qualifiers means "default on one's debts." In fact, it's quite odd to use the word "default," and hit it again and again, when talking of inability to make payments you merely promised to make.
He praised Americans in our history who "put country above self, and set personal grievances aside for the greater good [;] who held this country together during its most difficult hours; who put aside pride and party to form a more perfect union." One of the problems he mentioned that had been solved by these Americans was slavery. What speechwriter knows so little about history; and does Obama read these orations before he delivers them? Because I'm pretty sure he knows that slavery required a Civil War to solve, and that we actually remember some of the people who fought it better than those who tried to avoid it.
I can't think of a case where a President requested use of the public airwaves for such a blatantly partisan political speech. Perhaps my memory is just blurry. Networks lose money on these Presidential interruptions, not to mention the even-less-often-watched rejoinders from the opposition party. We missed half tonight's Closer for this crap, but a lot of people didn't. The networks no longer cover political conventions very well because they're essentially free ads for the parties. Soon they'll be saying to Presidents, "Just put the statement on your website."

The President's only idea was for people who want a compromise to tell their Congressmen they do. And I'm sure they will, right after The Closer, unless there's something good on TV. The people who write letters and e-messages are the same as those who vote in primaries, the tiny fraction of the populace who are holding us hostage.
Here's why it's so reckless to use the word "default" for partisan purposes: The United States is not going to default on its debts next week. I'm sure some in the Tea Party don't see a problem with actual default, but it would be an even bigger catastrophe than the one they've cooked up for us this time. What will happen next Tuesday is that the government won't be able to pay salaries, Social Security payments, Medicare reimbursements, and other day-to-day expenses that are normally handled by short-term borrowing. One payment it can afford to make, and surely will make, is the interest on its current debts. We don't owe Social Security payments to their recipients. We don't even owe salaries to soldiers, and so forth. It would just be very nice if we could pay them.
Nonetheless, the government will have to tighten its belt catastrophically quickly. If we could literally not borrow another nickel, the budget would be instantaneously balanced. The soldiers would be brought home from Afghanistan, and most other places the U.S. has troops stationed. Social Security would come to an end. Medicare would be tapered off. Etc. One can't predict what exactly will be cut because that's up to the executive branch, i.e., the Obama administration.
The current crisis in Europe revolves around belt-tightening by the Greeks that either will or won't happen. (If it doesn't, the Euro is toast.) The austerity the Greeks would face is nothing to what will happen here next week if we don't raise the debt ceiling. Unemployment will skyrocket if the government stops paying so many people all at once. You can fill in the rest: another Great Depression.
If the debt ceiling is not raised, and these disasters start to unfold, public opinion will swing sharply toward a demand that it be raised, even if a deal means raising taxes. But the damage might have been done. Even though the U.S. will keep paying its loans through next week, and even if the debt ceiling is raised a few days later by a chastened Congress, the world's faith in our political system's ability to function will have been shaken. Our credit rating will suffer, and U.S. debt will be sold short by speculators around the world. People who hold massive amounts of dollars and T-bills will start to unload them. The resulting positive feedback loop will run until our bonds become so cheap investors start to believe their true value has been reached. In this new world, it will become hard for the U.S. government to borrow money. When the government tries to borrow money (i.e., sell bonds) it will be competing for the same money other borrowers are, such as corporations, so the price of money will shoot up for everyone. The result: another Great Recession if we're lucky, but probably worse, since the Tea Party will make it impossible for Obama to spend any money bailing banks out or stimulating the economy. The FDIC will not be able to keep up with the number of bank failures, and will itself declare bankruptcy. Your faith that your $100K bank account is "insured" will evaporate.
Because of the way speculators' minds work, these economic processes may start before the magic date, August 3, 2011, but that date may be viewed as a convenient marker for when the U.S. economy and constitution broke down, as December 7, 1941, is a convenient marker for American entry into World War II.
I say "constitution" because our complacent assumption that our political system is infinitely resilient may turn out to be one of those beliefs that is unquestionable until it becomes false, such as that southern whites would never support the Republican Party. The political system collapsed once before; people have just forgotten how it turned to dust over a period of weeks when Abraham Lincoln was elected. Of course, that was over the issue of slavery, which the Founding Fathers tried to sweep under the rug, and which was fated to come back and destroy the Constitution. It was saved only by a war and the determination of Lincoln and the Republicans to put the Union back together and make slavery unconstitutional once and for all.
If our grandchildren ask, What issue led up to the Crash of 2011?, what will their parents say? Is there anything as momentous as "slavery" that can be blamed? Or is it all trivial: "Historians blame it on television, which made it impossible for someone as ugly, as articulate, and as competent as Lincoln to be elected."^{other-culprits}

End Notes

Note insane The Republicans reject the current package because it includes tax increases. Here's what the "tax increases" consist of: some tax reforms that the Republicans claim to be in favor of that would close all tax loopholes; plus the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2013, which is already scheduled to take place. Refusal even to consider accepting these proposals is either incredibly stupid or a devious plot to blackmail the country into making those tax cuts permanent. Either way, it's reckless to the point of insanity.
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Note other-culprits To be fair, here are some other causal agents to blame: (1) The awful automatic filibuster, in which one party only has to say the word "filibuster" in order to force the other party to find 60 votes to cut off debate. This innovation, which people speak of as if it's been around forever, dates back only to 1992! Both parties like it, because all senators like it, because it puts so much power in the hands of individual senators, who have to be stroked to the point of physical bliss to agree to be the 60th vote. (2) The alignment of the civil-rights movement with the Democratic party, which was responsible for the flipping of the South as mentioned above. As Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, and others have pointed out, the shift of southern whites to the Republicans consolidated conservative voters in a bloc and wed it to some very rich people determined to wreck the New Deal. The southern whites have never hesitated to use the threat of doing something crazy enough to destroy the Constitution to get what they want; but prior to 1970 all they wanted was what the Democrats gave them, namely mastery of the southern not-so-whites. Now they have the money to ask for a lot more. (3) Computer scientists, my colleagues, who put principle aside in order to study the fascinating computational-geometric problem of gerrymandering Congressional districts to the point of absurdity. The resulting one-party districts have done more than anything else to make incumbents invulnerable — except to primary challenges, so that they must shift to the extremes to avoid such challenges. As with derivative securities, the whole system would not work without innovative algorithms, and finding hackers to devise them is no problem at all. No one stops to think that they may be enriching themselves in the short term at the cost, taking a slightly longer view, of destroying the country. Our ethical intuitions, mine not excepted, are stunted.
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Ground Zero Zeroes

2010-08-22T17:47:00.001-04:00

Ground Zero Zeroes

The controversy over the "mosque" at "Ground Zero" is so intense that I find myself compelled to add a comment.

First, it's a "community center," which absolutely everyone insists on calling a mosque. Granted, among many other things that it is, it's technically a mosque, but the people building it call it a community center, so why keep correcting them?

But even if it were a mosque with neon-lit minarets a mile high, it is not in the least tactless or offensive to build it two blocks from the World Trade Center site. Tact is a non-issue here.

Everybody disagrees with me on this, and is likely to continue disagreeing with me, but some truths are so self-evident that a decent respect to the opinions of mankind demands that one tell mankind it is making a mistake.

We are being such big crybabies about September 11. We have been incredibly lucky, since the Civil War, in having almost no bombs dropped on us. Pearl Harbor is an exception, and the World Trade Center attack is an exception, but consider all the countries we have bombed, shelled, and occupied part or all of in the last 150 years.

My first reaction to September 11, when people said Nothing Would Ever Be the Same Again, was, Right; now we know how it feels to have death come out of the sky without warning and take some innocent fellow-citizens of ours. This will connect us to the victims of our bombings and make us deliberate carefully before bombing more people.

Boy was I wrong. We rushed headlong into a pointless war in Iraq, for no reason that can be made clear, except possibly to prove that George W. Bush was more macho than his father. We didn't take into account all the people that might die in order to accomplish this goal or others (such as attacking when our troops were ready, rather than risk having the WMD inspectors prove that Bush and Cheney's pretext for going to war was hollow, thereby wasting a perfectly good mobilization). Meanwhile, the September 11 attack itelf seemed to simply reinforce our feeling that for us to be victimized is so shocking — so undeserved — that everyone should feel sorry for us, and especially for the relatives of the Sacred Dead. We and they should be treated with kid gloves for … how long? Decades, apparently.

Compare us with the Germans, who were so tortured by guilt after World War II that they completely suppressed all their feelings about the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by Allied bombing until about ten or twenty years ago, when it finally became acceptable for authors like W.G. Sebald to write about them.

Of course, the Germans should have been tortured by guilt. And we shouldn't? Not even a tiny bit? After Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After Haditha? After imposing overly casual rules of engagement which allow airstrikes no matter how little our troops know about the people shooting back at us (who may just be enemies of our local warlord)? But we always find a way to quickly forget, find a scapegoat for, make excuses for, or just never notice these things, in order to preserve the idea that we are always victims, never victimizers.

One thing I was sure of after 9/11 was that we were seeing the start of a new era of terrorism, where it would become so easy to kill hundreds and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, and so hard to stop the killers, that we would have to accept it as routine, a part of modern life, like auto crashes. I was right, I think. Bali, Spain, Britain, and other countries have suffered lethal attacks. (In the case of Britain, at least, top-level police work has foiled some terrorist plots, but unfortunately not all.) The United States has been ridiculously lucky. The plot to blow up the Los Angeles Airport in 2000 misfired only because the guy bringing the explosives across the Canadian border acted "hinky". People laugh at exploding underwear, but that scheme could just as easily have worked properly and killed everyone on Flight 253. Sooner or later our luck will run out.^bad-luck There are going to be more Ground Zeroes, and we can't spend time building and guarding a memorial to every one.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not recommending that we change a thing about our foreign policy or our military tactics if we don't want to. But then we should toughen up. We are justly proud of the young men and women we train to fight and die for us. Shouldn't we show them something to be proud of on the home front? The soldiers are out there trying to beat out the coal-seam fire of terrorism before the fire spreads here. When a spark lands on us in spite of their best efforts, don't we owe it to them not to roll around on the ground in agony crying out, "Why us, Lord? We're not involved with any of that stuff." Can't we show a little stoicism, a little sensitivity to all the pain to people besides us that war causes in the world?

To return to the topic du jour, it's just embarrassing when we feel threatened and hurt by nothing but a building that might remind some people that Muslims killed their brother. The people building it are apparently true-blue Americans who have always condemned the September 11th attack in the strongest possible terms. They were apparently naive about the political furor their community center would raise across the entire country. Rational people just have trouble anticipating what the right will exploit.

When I heard that Barack Hussein Obama had publicly defended a Muslim community center near Ground Zero, I thought, That is the bravest, dumbest thing a politician has done in a long time. Now he's backing away somewhat. Breaking news: President Obama disappoints his admirers by attempting to placate the opposition. He never learns, in spite of repeated lessons, that the Republican disinformation machine is implacable. Given an opportunity to tell Americans that they are right to keep our wounds about September 11 fresh, they will monomaniacally repeat it until it becomes self-fulfilling.^evil-tactics See how evil Muslims are? They deliberately rub salt into those wounds! You can't trust them! Boo-hoo-hoo! They are so beinng mean to us, who never hurt anyone!

This country embodies many ideals, not least the ideal of religious tolerance. Wouldn't it be great if we said, or if our President could say for us, "We are willing to fight — and even suffer the occasional terrorist attack — for those ideals"? But apparently all we are willing to do is send our army out to do our fighting for us, so long as the dying is kept far from our shores.

End Notes

Note bad-luck Just think of all the nuclear weapons out there, many of which we summoned into existence with our crazy belief that a nuclear arms race could be a rational component of foreign policy.
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Note evil-tactics I don't mean to imply that Democrats are any more ethical when it comes to negative ads and smear tactics; they're just less efficient.
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Tidbits

2010-03-21T17:14:00.003-04:00

2010, A Time Odyssey

I like "2010," as a name for a year. I could never accept "2009"; it always seemed implausible; odd. I felt little temptation to keep writing "2009" on checks when the the year turned over. I welcomed "2010" like an old friend.

I do admit to writing 20010 now and then. "Two thousand and ten."

Well, we're done with that way of describing years. It's "Twenty ten" from here on out. People may have looked at me funny when I said "twenty-oh-eight," but those days are over. And there was a year in between 2008 and 2010, or so some people say.

Mug Shots

My favorite tea mug is the one with the painting by Winslow Homer of a chain of boys, holding hands, running through a yard. It's my favorite because some people say I'm still a little kid, so I sometimes think of myself that way. Even before it was transferred to a mug, it was one of Homer's more dreadful paintings. The boys look like cardboard cutouts. He was wise to focus on seascapes.

My second favorite, when the little-boy mug is in the dishwasher, is the one with a copy of "Irises," by Vincent van Gogh, signed "Vincent" in the corner. It's one of my favorites because my middle name is "Vincent." Close friends call me Vinnie. I have thought of a pet name for this mug: Vincent van Mugh, pronounced to rhyme with "Hugh." I can't think of a good name for my Homer mug.

PHP and Javascript

Two languages I have never known much about have caught my attention lately: PHP and Javascript, the former because of an interest in Drupal, which is written in it, and the latter because I wanted to add some visual effects to an existing web page. As one so often discovers with these scripting languages, they are appalling. No one would think of designing, say, a web browser without consulting experts, but apparently people think all it takes to design a programming language is the ability to write a program. PHP looks like it was designed by a sysadmin who wanted a hack to scriptify his CGI, which, in fact, it was.

Javascript was designed by slightly more knowledgeable people, but it has some of the same problems as PHP, including weird, bug-encouraging scoping rules and insane automatic coercions. (Example: new Boolean(false) creates an object that is automatically coerced to a Boolean — to wit, true.) It's almost impossible to get a type error, at compile time or run time, in either language.

However, Javascript has some unexpected charms, including the totally unexpected treatment of functions as first-class objects. (PHP is a miserable crock in this department.) It's also refreshing that arrays are actually objects. It's as if some refugee from the Java design team who lost battles on these issues sneaked over to work on Javascript and got their way at last.

Cancel the South American Campaign

I received an invitation to a party recently through "Evite," which is supposed to be to "invite" as "email" is to "mail." Unfortunately, in Portuguese and Spanish, "Evite" means "Avoid!" So I don't predict a huge international success for evite.com.

Charity Stops at Home

2010-01-15T22:58:00.001-05:00

Charity Stops at Home

Anyone who has ever donated to a charity knows that the punishment is swift and sure: The charity begins to dun you constantly for more money. It's a reasonable strategy for them, because people who have given money before are the most likely to give again. Maybe not right away, but with a few more dunning messages, reminding the soft-hearted target that there is suffering and injustice in the world, the target will surely give in.

The question is, How do we cope with this? The pile of paper mail from charities in our front hall grows at the rate of half a centimeter a day. If e-mail had thickness, the pile of trashy e-communications from charities would be sticking out the side of my laptop. They arrive faster than I can delete them. Then there are the phone calls. Fortunately, we can now usually identify them because our phone displays the originating number, and it's usually a toll-free call. Of course, we have to run for the phone to verify this.

Fortunately, we can make a particular caller stop by asking them to stop calling us. They usually respect that. (You do have to answer the phone once.) You can make a respectable charity stop sending you e-mail. But I know of no way to make the flood of paper mail stop. Actually, I don't really want it to stop. I just want it to slow down.

I have thought about various approaches, and here is one that might work:

The next time you get a piece of mail from a charity, use the postage-paid envelope to send the following letter back:

Dear Committee for Saving Everyone Everywhere,

Thank you for your mail alerting me to the plight of the penguin people of Patagonia. I shall certainly be able to spare $100 for their cause. I am, in fact, willing to give you $200 a year for such causes. I think it's reasonable for you to contact me twice a year. So here's the deal. In six months I will send you the $100, provided I do not hear from you before then. With every communication I receive from you, I agree to pay you $100, but if I get N pieces of e-mail before I send you anything, then I will wait N/2 years before sending you the $100N dollars. Got that? If you send me 1 piece of mail in the next six months, that will make 2 (given the one I just received). So you have to wait 1 year to get your $200. But if I receive another piece of mail before the year is out, you will have to wait 18 months to get your $300. And so forth.

I am looking forward to a long and productive relationship, where just as I send you your $100, I receive the next piece of mail alerting me to the need for the following six months. All it takes is a little will power on your part, holding off on sending me a request until I have had time to react to the previous one.

If you exceed your quota, I will respond with a reminder of what the policy is and how long you will have to wait to receive your next payment. I hope this information will help you control yourselves.

Sincerely, etc.

You should feel free to change the amounts and time intervals. You might send $1000 a year provided they contact you once a year, or $50 a month if they contact you once a month, and so forth.

Now, of course, I doubt that any one person's adopting this strategy will have much effect. They won't change their practices until there is a mass movement of charitable donors determined to force them to change. The idea is simple. Spread the word! Eventually we can reduce the flood of incessant, annoying, tree-destroying, guilt-inducing, space-devouring mail.

A Tour of Newhallville

2009-08-03T22:10:00.001-04:00

A Tour of Newhallville

The following is adapted from a letter to the president of the New Haven Preservation Trust in response to an invitation to join his organization.

Dear Mr. S_______,

The receipt of your letter of July 13 reminds me of my intention to write to you about one of your walking tours, conducted during the Festival of Arts and Ideas in June.

I went on the Newhallville tour. I was very curious about this part of the town, because I live in East Rock, which is part of the Newhallville Police District. East Rock has had problems with crime in recent years, but they pale when compared to those of Newhallville.

Our tour guide was a white man, somewhat older, or at least more wrinkled, than I (I am almost 60), who had the misfortune of having to conduct the tour in the rain. I had been wondering if I would be the whitest person there, given the ancestry of much of the population of Newhallville, but in fact there was only one person with obvious African ancestors. All us curious whitish people stood under the overhang of an office building attending to our guide. We were blocking the entrance to the building, so, soon after I arrived, the guide shepherded us down Munson Street. Given the rain, the gas-powered edgers mowing a very wet park lawn, and the traffic on Munson, which increased in volume as the afternoon progressed, it was hard to hear the man. But I caught most of what he said.

All he wanted to talk about was the rise and fall of the industrial base. Having gotten us a block from our starting point, he waved in the direction of the actual residential area of Newhallville and told us those were the houses built for the workers who worked in the factories that were later boarded up. Then he trundled us right back the way we had come, back under the office-building porch, where we stayed for the rest of the "tour," oblivious thereafter to the rush-hour traffic noise and the people entering and exiting the building. We looked out over the edge of the abandoned industrial area. There was a construction site directly in front of us, and diagonally to our right a block of factory-and-warehouse space now partly converted to apartments, all part of the "Science Park" project, an attempt to revive the economy of the abandoned area. (I don't know if the label "Science Park" is technically correct when applied to all the redevelopment projects, but it seems to be the name in general use.) Our hose rambled on about Yale's attempt to invest in the area, its constant changing of course, the constant shifting of who owned what, and who cared about what. The bottom line is that, in spite of the construction activity in front of us, and the bustling traffic we were blocking going in and out of the office building sheltering us, Science Park was barely limping along.

I had not come to hear any of this. Most of it I already knew, but when he dropped references to the current companies invested in the area, he assumed we knew who they were and what nefarious motives they might have. This stuff was lost on me.

My daughter used to come for drum lessons at the home of a famous musician who lived just about a block beyond the houses the guide had waved at. I would have liked to have known more about that area, if there was anything to know — anything written down in places available to us old white people. I also would have liked, in spite of the rain, to have actually walked somewhere. Many of the people in the crowd had umbrellas, and had come to do some walking. It would also be useful to have the tour conducted by someone who lives in the Whalley Avenue area, which was easily reachable on foot from where we stood. I shop there, but the tour made it seem like faraway, alien territory, which may be the impression some suburbanites in our group came away with.

The only thing I learned was where the name "Newhallville" comes from. Oh, and the fact that the failure of the Farmington Canal to make it through the district was the historical and symbolic beginning of its bad luck. Other than that, it seems that Science Park was the only important thing that ever happened there.

Sincerely,

Airlie Foyle

On First Looking into Stambaugh's Heidegger

2009-01-24T11:16:00.001-05:00

On First Looking into Stambaugh's⁰ Heidegger

Sometimes a purely intellectual work calls forth an aesthetic response. One has only to think of Escher's lithograph Relativity, a deep visual representation of the celebrated artist's superficial understanding of Einstein's equally celebrated theory. Recently, I have been reading Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, a weighty philosophical work, hugely influential on the German and French intelligentsia since it was first published in 1926, and gallicized by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1943. However, I have found it difficult to finish Being and Time, let alone formulate an adequate intellectual response to it.

Thus I have fallen back on poetry, and was inspired to compose the two poems that appear below. I realize that most of my readers are educated enough not to require an explanation of the philosophical and historical references, but for the benefit of the minority, I've included endnotes to explain some of the more obscure allusions. Besides, in the opinion of many experts the endnotes in such works as Eliot's The Waste Land, Nabokov's Pale Fire, and Roget's Thesaurus are vital to their artistic integrity.

Without further ado, my poems:

Ode to Being

Though he'd agreed to a Sein und Zeit¹ edit,

Herr Heidegger'd known he'd regret it,

For someone in Mainz,

Consumed with Da-seinz2

Is rumored to've actually read it.

Ode to Time³

"The Führer stopped returning my calls,"⁴

Mused Heidegger, "How it appalls!

If he'd dropped Being and Time

Behind enemy lines,

The Will would have triumphed⁵ über alles!"⁶

Notes

Note 0 Joan Stambaugh's 1996 translation of Being and Time (State University of New York Press) is a big improvement on the classic Macquarrie and Robinson translation (1962).
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Note 1 The German title of Being and Time, which may be loosely translated as "Being and Time."
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Note 2 Literally, "there-being," one of 205 kinds of Being introduced on page 1 of Being and Time. Da-sein is special, in that it is the mode of Being that people exhibit in the course of … you know, being. I added the "z" so it would rhyme better.
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Note 3 The intended sense of "time" is not so much Heidegger's time-as-horizon-of-Da-sein, but world-historical, or welthistorisch, time.
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Note 4 Martin Heidegerr became Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, about the same time as Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and joined the Nazi party a few months later. He participated in the dismissal of many Jews from the faculty. He resigned from his position in 1934 when it began to dawn on him that Hitler had not read anything he had written.
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Note 5 Reference to The Triumph of the Will, the film about the Nazi Party Party Congress of 1934 made by beautiful German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Really, she was very good-looking, in an Aryan sort of way.
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Note 6 The German national anthem is titled "Deutschland über alles." Actually, it isn't, but that's what many people call it. Contrary to popular opinion, in the song, "über alles" does not mean "over everyone," as in "crushing everyone under the weight of our might," but "above all," i.e., "Germany above all," or "Germany first in our hearts." In my Ode, I mean more the thing about crushing. And, you've got to admit the rhyme is clever, or would be if "alles" had one syllable.
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Why, As For Me, Do I Dislike It So Masterfully ...?

2009-01-03T18:55:00.009-05:00

I must apologize to my blogger readers for the dreadful formatting errors that plague my posts.
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Actually, I'm not really apologizing, but cursing blogger for many of its infuriating mannerisms and its interfering "templates."
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I prepare my contributions with care, then run them through some transformations to make Blogger happy, mainly converting all "left-bracket-p-right-brackets" and "left-bracket-/p-right-brackets" to newlines. That's where the trouble appears. These appear in four different ways: As newlines in the "edit html" portion of the blogger editor; as paragraph boundaries in "Compose"; as paragraph boundaries in "Preview"; and as nothing at all in the actual blog, which comes out as one gigantic paragraph.
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My latest theory is that this has something to do with the many different newline formats in the world, but my attempts to toss extra control-Ms and control-Js into what I paste into Blogger have led nowhere.
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If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to hear them. Perhaps if I find a cure I can go back and make all my previous postings look readable.
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P.S. The plot has thickened. This post looked just fine until I put in some explicit html character entities (you know, the things with ampersands, like the thing you have to type to get an ampersand; I can't actually type one at this point for fear my computer will melt down). Even when I removed the entities, yielding the "left-bracket-right-bracket" crap a few paragraphs back, blogger remembered and refused to forgive me. So now this post has double-vertical-bars wherever a paragraph boundary should be. But in "Compose" and "Preview" the boundaries are right where they should be.

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logician

2009-01-03T13:57:00.016-05:00

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logician^seuss

The problem with geniuses is that there's always the possibility that they're having a joke at our expense; or that their seemingly profound sayings are actually the gropings of a dimwit upon which we project our conceptions of what a genius would say. More than occasionally it has seemed to me that Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most respected, or at least discussed, philosophers of the twentieth century, may fall into the latter category.

Wittgenstein was canonized early for his work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Vienna Circle worshiped him, even though he refused to meet with them or acknowledge their existence. He was a protegé of Bertrand Russell, who brought him to Cambridge, where he reigned as the respected Delphic Oracle for the rest of his life, even though he published nothing. Many of his notebooks were published after his death, the most notable being Philosophical Investigations.

The Tractatus^bib is mainly renowned for its oracular (the word is inescapable) pronouncements, such as

6.52	We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and this itself is the answer.

Oooh. Actually, I rather like that one.

And of course, the immortal

7	What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence.

Although a better translation might be, "About that whereof you cannot speak you must remain silent." Yes, all the paragraphs are numbered, to make them easier to quote and/or seem more profound. There's a Dewey Decimal-kind of system, so that 6.52 is a "comment" on 6.5. So we have

5.6

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world

…

5.63

I am my world. (The microcosm)

5.631

There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas

If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.

Whaddya think?

The parts of the Tractatus that aren't quoted so much are about logic. These parts form most of the Tractatus, and what they have to say about logic is mostly wrong, which raises the question why we should attach much significance to the profundities that supposedly follow from the logic.

Wittgenstein supposedly introduced truth tables in this work, so he gets credit for that, although the uses he puts them to are now generally forgotten. (He had an argument with Frege about whether T and F were objects (Frege) or just entries in truth tables (Wittgenstein). Nowadays we let them play both roles, so Frege won that one.)

But here are some of the mistakes he made: He repeatedly asserts things like, "When the truth of one proposition follows from the truth of others, we can see this from the structure of the propositions. [5.13] … 'Laws of inference,' which are supposed to justify inferences, as in the works of Frege and Russell, have no sense and would be superfluous. [5.132]" His alternative to rules of inference is to imagine all the elementary propositions about the world being lined up, after which all formulas about them could be constructed in advance. Even without complexity theory, this is a hard idea to swallow.^semantics

How about (5.1): "Truth-functions [truth tables] can be arranged in series. That is the foundation of the theory of probability." I don't think anyone ever followed up on this bizarre suggestion.

Then there's the convoluted technique of 6.1203 for checking whether a formula is a tautology. It involves drawing lines between formulas and truth values, but I couldn't get it to work; for any nontrivial formula the links rapidly congeal into an unreadable mess. Now, it is probable that this paragraph has been hailed as the seed from which has sprung tableau-based methods for theorem proving, but it is a flimsy foundation for the later announcements that "… in a suitable notation we can in fact recognize the formal properties of propositions by the mere inspection of the propositions themselves [6.122].… there can never be surprises in logic [6.1251]. … Proof in logic is merely a mechanical expedient to facilitate the recognition of tautologies in complicated cases [6.1262]."

It's odd that someone so aware of Russell and Whitehead's work in Principia Mathematica would think that proving theorems in logic was so straightforward (granted that there is a lot more to PM than proving logic theorems), especially considering that Wittgenstein includes first-order logic in his claims. He explicitly grants at one point that there might well be an infinity of elementary propositions, as well as of the "names" of objects that the propositions are about. So: "Mathematics is a method of logic [6.234]. … Indeed, it is a consequence of this method [equation solving] that every proposition of mathematics must be obviously true [6.2341]."

But the biggest blunder in the Tractatus is its treatment of equality.

4.241

When I use two signs with one and the same meaning, I express this by putting the sign '=' between them.

So 'a=b' means that the sign 'b' can be substituted for the sign 'a'.

…

4.242

Expressions of the form 'a=b' are, therefore, mere representational devices. They state nothing about the meaning of the signs 'a' and 'b'.

The problem with this superficially plausible idea appears as soon as you consider a formula such as ∀x(f(x) ⊃x=a), which Wittgenstein does in paragraph 5.5301. For here x is not a "sign" whose "meaning" is the same as that of a, but just a placeholder for some arbitrary object, which or might not happen to be a. The formula says that all objects that have property f "are a," i.e., equal to a. Or, in his words: "What this proposition says is simply that only a satisfies the function f, and not that only things that have a certain relation to a satisfy the function f." But the clause after the comma in the quoted sentence is simply wrong. As Kripke says somewhere, the "certain relation" in question is merely the smallest reflexive relation, a perfectly well defined entity. It may sound useless, but Wittgenstein has provided the perfect example of its usefulness. We're all familiar with others, such as specifying of a sequence S that S_i=S_j ⊃ i=j, which is the standard way to say that the elements of the sequence are distinct.

(One way to see the point is to invert the implications, so that we get formulas like ∀x(x≠a ⊃¬f(x)). Now "≠" seems like a perfectly good relation, or at least it's not obvious what's wrong with it. This formula says the same thing as before, only in the form, "Anything but a does not have property f." Wittgenstein's comeback would probably be that all such syntactic transformations do not change the underlying proposition, which is "obviously" always the same.)

The reductio ad absurdum of Wittgenstein's position on equality is where it gets him with existential quantifiers. In what follows I use a more modern notation than his for the formulas:

5.532

… I do not write '∃x,y(f(x,y)∧x=y)', but '∃x(f(x,x))'; and not '∃x,y(f(x,y)∧¬(x=y))', but '∃x,y(f(x,y))'.

(So Russell's '∃x,y(f(x,y))' becomes

'(∃x,y(f(x,y))) ∨ (∃x(f(x,x)))'.)

…

5.5321

Thus, for example, instead of '∀x(f(x) ⊃ x=a)' we write '((∃x(f(x))) ⊃ f(a)) ∧ (¬∃x,y(f(x)∧f(y)))'.

And the proposition, 'Only one x satisifies f( )', will read '(∃x(f(x))) ∧ (¬∃x,y(f(x)∧f(y)))'.

Like many of Wittgenstein's proposals in the Tractatus, this one sounds superficially plausible, but is completely unworkable. The problem is that it makes substitution into contexts with bound variables almost impossible. There is a useful little lemma in formal logic that states that if Q does not contain a free occurrence of x, then '∃x(P ∨ Q)' is equivalent to '(∃xP) ∨ Q'. But this is not true in Wittgenstein's world. Suppose P is just 'P(x)' and Q is 'N(a) ⊃ ∃y(R(a,y)'. In the version with wide quantification over x, the second quantifier is inside the first, and therefore (I guess, who really knows) it must become

∃x(P(x) ∨ (N(a) ⊃ (R(a,x) ∨ ∃y(R(a,y)))))

if it is to be equivalent to the version where the first quantifier has narrow scope.

There's a less obvious philosophical problem, too. We've gone to all this trouble to avoid having to mention the harmless little predicate '=', but we end up having to think about equality constantly. In fact, basic predicate calculus does not treat equality as a built-in constant. You must define it by adding axioms. That raises the question whether equality can be defined by axioms. That is, in all models of these axioms does '=' refer to a predicate recognizable as equality? If you do want to think of '=' as a logical symbol (akin to '∀' or '∨'), then you can use "first-order logic with equality," and simply stipulate that '=' refers to the relation {⟨ο,ο⟩ | for any ο}. Wittgenstein's approach makes all these issues impossible to avoid, or to deal with explicitly.

In his defense, when he wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, nobody really understood these issues very well. Tarski's theory of truth was still ten years in the future, although Skolem had already published what is now known as the Skolem-Lowenheim Theorem.

But Wittgenstein fled from formal logic. He repudiated the whole idea that if you expressed everything in a perfect language you could avoid mistakes. Well, who can blame him for that insight, whether or not you find his later philosophy as profound as most philosophers think. Perhaps, though, he took a look at how technical formal logic was getting and decided he just couldn't deal with it. He decamped so speedily and completely that no one seems to think of his early work in the context of logic at all.

Notes

Note seuss With apologies to Dr. Seuss. If this note is puzzling, you are among the benighted many who believe that his work began with The Cat in the Hat, which was actually about where it came to an end.
[Back]

Note bib All quotes from the translation by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, 1961, Routledge and Kegan Paul. The original German version was published in 1921, and had a perfectly ordinary German title, which could be translated, "A Logico-Philosophical Treatise." The Latin translation must have been inspired by the feeling that we had another Newton or Russell on our hands.
[Back]

Note semantics Okay, I guess you could say that Wittgenstein was groping toward a semantic, as oppose to proof-theoretic, approach to logic, which makes him, again, a pioneer. It's his insistence that there's only one, obvious approach that seems so strange.
[Back]

The 43% Solution

2008-09-23T19:24:00.006-04:00

Humans have a taste for meat, which means that as countries develop economically a larger and larger fraction of their diet is meat. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of grain to feed a cow, grain that could be used to feed people who are not lucky enough to be on the income elevator. Growing and processing that grain takes energy, and hence increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus making global warming worse. Instead of feeding people, we then feed a cow, and give the cow to people. So if you eat a cow, you are depriving people of food and polar bears of habitat. (Not to mention aggravating the cow-fart problem.) The world's population is expected to stabilize in a few decades, but by then it will have doubled. It's hard to imagine that all of those people will be able to eat as we do.

If enough people stop eating meat, the problem will go away. The demand for meat will fall, and so will the price of grain. As poorer nations develop, they will perhaps not find the eating of meat so attractive. Being vegetarian to make all these good things happen, rather than for health reasons or to avoid killing animals, is called economic vegetarianism. Now, what are the odds of a lot of people becoming vegetarians? Pretty slim.

Nonetheless, every time I bite into a burger or a steak, I cringe at the thought of all the grain that went into the cow that I'm eating. So I have decided to become a 3/7 vegetarian. That is, I will eat meat four days a week. I have a simple system: I eat meat on Wednesdays and weekends, counting Friday as a weekend day. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday I abstain, or, more positively, I eat yummy, yummy vegetables.

What about cheese and eggs? They're produced by animals. Don't worry! They're okay! For one thing, becoming a vegan is a lot harder that becoming a vegetarian, even fractionally. But it just seems reasonable to me that it takes less grain to produce 1000 kcal of cheese than 1000 kcal of meat because you get to use the same cow again; you don't have to build one from scratch.

Perhaps this will be the start of a movement. It's not hard, people! You don't have to eat tofu and TVP; you can maintain your unhealthy lifestyle with ice cream and pastry if you want. And if you do eat tofu on Monday, you have just 48 hours until meat is on your plate again.

Pedestrian Ethical Quandary

2008-08-12T13:37:00.003-04:00

I sent the following letter to the "Ethicist" column of the New York Times Magazine. He didn't deem it worthy of publication; and who can blame him? So into the blog it goes …

My son and I are engaged in a seemingly trivial ethical argument about the etiquette of pushing the "pedestrian walk" button at an intersection. In some parts of the country, notably New England, where we've spent most of our lives, the "Walk" light will never come on unless some pedestrian pushes a button, usually big, round, and somewhat tarnished, but, with luck, functional. One then has to wait for the correct point in the cycle: If you're trying to cross at the corner of Broad Ave and Main Street, the pedestrians might get to go only after the cars on Broad have had their green.

Here's the ethical question: Is it okay to cross after pushing the button if there are no cars coming but the Walk light hasn't come on yet? I say No: By pushing the button you've made a back-up reservation for a time period when you can walk, just in case you don't get a chance earlier. It happens rather often that the opportunity arises to get across the street without the need for the Walk light, because there's a lull in the flow of cars. By pushing the button and then not using the time slot you've reserved, you've made someone else, the motorists who have to sit there watching a deserted intersection with brightly lit Walk lights, pay for your guarantee that you'll get a chance to walk.

My son says, Go ahead and walk! Once you've pushed the button, the motorists are going to have to wait, so what good does it do anyone for the pedestrian to be delayed? To add to the plausibility, suppose it's raining. How does it help the drivers for the pedestrian to get wetter?

Of course, the obvious answer is that one shouldn't push the button if the odds are that it's unnecessary. At some streets and times of day you know perfectly well that nine times out of ten you won't need the button. But sometimes one pushes it by habit or miscalculation, and then this ethical conundrum looms.

We realize that this question involves a trivial amount of inconvenience to the people involved, but if you multiply it by the many thousands of intersections blessed with these buttons, perhaps the issue may seem more pressing.

Sincerely,
…

Warning: Making Ice

2008-06-29T21:24:00.006-04:00

There are a few people who still use old-fashioned ice-cube trays — including me. I mean the plastic kind that you fill yourself and then twist to get the ice cubes out. (I suppose the even older kind with a complex system of metal levers and partitions are still around.) I think the reason people prefer the hi-tech version connected directly to the plumbing is their nervousness at the prospect of water expanding out of control.

When people fill ice-cube trays, they often put little more than a little puddle in each plastic cup. The reason is that they have heard that water, unlike most materials, expands when frozen. I hate to be anticlimactic, but the amount of expansion in volume is about 10%. Two cubes that differ in this volume are impossible to distinguish unless placed side by side, because the linear dimensions of the big one are only 3% larger. However, in a cup of an ice-cube tray, because the sides are almost vertical, except at the bottom and top, the height will in fact increase by about 10%. This still isn't very much, especially considering that there is a bit of space at the top for it to expand sideways into.

But as I was watching my daughter refilling an ice-cube tray the other day, moistening the bottom of each cup, it occurred to me that what people visualize, if they haven't done the math, is ice exploding out of control, sort of like the Incredible Hulk. From each little plastic cup in the tray, an iceberg will emerge capable of sinking the freezer as though it were the Titanic. "More," I said to my daughter. She splashed a bit more water in. "More," I said, wrestling it from her and proceeding to fill each cup almost to the rim.

Poor child; she grew up in a house with an automatic ice maker, and is ill-equipped for the real world. But it's a parent's duty to train each child to deal with the myriad threats the world poses, and I do not shrink from my duty. There are many things I cannot shelter her from out there, but one of them is a tray full of those dinky ice cubes of every size except "large."

Brain Bubbles

2008-03-21T21:43:00.004-04:00

My sister-in-law recently sent my spouse and me a pointer to a a video by a neuroanatomist, referenced in TEDBlog. My beloved played this thing, and I heard the speaker, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, start to describe the brain and its hemispheres, the right one, which "functions like a parallel processor," and the left, which "functions like a serial processor." With growing apprehension, I heard her say,

Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment…. It thinks in pictures …. Information in the form of energy streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems, and then explodes into this enormous collage …. I am an energy being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family….

This is the problem with having two computers in the same room; sometimes one spouse starts to run an audio the other really didn't want to hear. (Hey, who knew that the Voyeurweb tittie cam even had audio?) As Dr. Taylor waxed more and more ecstatic about the right hemisphere, I tried to stifle a rising urge to shout, "This is utter crap!," but I was not successful. Meanwhile, an essay on one brain hemisphere must be followed, as the night the day, by an essay on the other:

Our left hemisphere … thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details…. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to the external world. It's that little voice that says to me "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home…." It's that calculating intelligence that … reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am; I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate, I become a single, solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me, and separate from you….

At this point I had to leave the room, because I really couldn't interrupt my spouse's session with Dr. Taylor with a spell of badgering about how absurd the good Dr.'s descriptions were.

Dr. Taylor is a neuroanatomist, who, according to her website, "specializes in the postmortem investigation of the human brain." Fine; I'm sure she knows her way around dead brains like the back of her hand. But her knowledge of the living variety has apparently been garnered from the same pop-psych books that just about everyone seems to have absorbed and believed unquestioningly. You know the type: They promise to help you unleash the potential of your right brain, which processes information "nonlinearly," and so can help you think outside the box.

There is a grain of truth in these theories, and that is that in most people language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. Damage to certain areas results in linguistic deficits that are by now somewhat predictable, although by no means understood.

That's about all we know that is relevant to the issue at hand, regarding differences in processing abilities in the two hemispheres. In particular, spatial reasoning and other sorts of nonverbal abilities do not show any asymmetry; they are, as far as anyone can tell, carried out by tissue distributed across both hemispheres. The mechanisms of consciousness, described in authoritative tones by Dr. Taylor, are still controversial, but all the proposed "neural correlates" of consciousness do not show the sorts of asymmetries she takes for granted.

Indeed, the only reason that I have ever been able to glean for the near-universal opinion that the left hemisphere is "serial" and the right "parallel" is the assumption that language is serial in a way that other human capacities are not. This assumption is derived from the obvious fact that words are spoken, and heard, one at a time, and that deciphering the meaning, and intelligibility, of a sentence depends upon assembling the words into sentences that preserve the order in which the words were uttered. At a cocktail party, you may or may not succeed in isolating the words one person is saying, but if you don't you will hear a meaningless babble.

Furthermore, many people are insecure about, shall we say, their "debating skills." They may have strong opinions about, for instance, capital punishment, but faced with an argument that conflicts with those opinions they often just get frustrated. I say "they," but I think everyone has been in this position at one time or another. It's comforting for us to think that we have arrived at our opinion "holistically," whereas our opponent is good at thinking "linearly." The opposing argument is, after all, stated in the form of an argument, whereas what we have is a cloud of opinions that we feel must be justified somehow. Wouldn't it be great to think that there are merely two styles of thinking, each valid in its own way, and that the one we use transcends the stifling linearity of argument and arrives at a deeper truth while at same time connecting us to all the other "energy beings" who agree with us?

When you add it all up, it's a mighty slim set of reasons to believe some patent absurdities, which I will try to refute:

The left hemisphere does not "think in language." The ability to produce and understand language may or may not reside entirely in the left hemisphere, even if much of it does, in most people. But to suppose that the thinking required to understand language is itself transacted in language is a ridiculous case of circular reasoning.
The brain is a parallel processor, all over. It has billions of neurons that generally find something to do most of the time. This is just as true of the left hemisphere as the right. Think about it: In a sizable fraction of people the language areas are in the right hemisphere; if a child suffers an injury to their left hemisphere, the right one can often adapt. Would that mean the right hemisphere turns serial?
There is nothing serial about language, or at least what we normally think of as "linguistic thinking." The standard example of "linear" thinking is a mathematical proof. But even if a proof is linear, that doesn't mean the thinking required to find or understand the proof is linear. At the very least there are many blind alleys in searching for a proof, and you can't really understand the proof without reproducing some of that search.
People who claim that language is "linear" are overlooking poetry and fiction. Texts in these forms are sequences of words just as much as proofs are, but no one would believe that writing or understanding a poem is just a matter of grasping one word after another.
We do not become "separate...individuals" because an inner voice says "I am." To believe that is to believe that there weren't any separate individuals until the evolution of language. I'm guessing individualhood is as old as the first cell. Of course, consciousness didn't come along until later, but most of us believe that dogs and chimpanzees are conscious, and they don't have inner voices speaking English to them.

The truth is, we know remarkably little about how the brain thinks, in spite of much recent progress in neuroscience, and hullabaloo about techniques such as fMRI. Nonetheless, people like Jill Bolte Taylor love their preconceptions, and it will be a long time before they stop speaking as though there were evidence to back them up.

Windchill Is Baloney

2008-03-09T16:14:00.003-04:00

The temperature (Celsius) today in New Haven is 5, but it "feels like" 1. Why? Because it's windy: Winds are in the range 33 kph to 50 kph, and the gusts are rattling my poor old windows as I type.

Now, what good does it do to tell me that it "feels like 1?" It makes the weather more dramatic, and meteorologists usually have little drama to report. Plus, there's some scientific basis for the equivalence of 1 degree and no wind with 5 degrees and the wind at hand.

The problem is that the equivalence of today's weather with "1 degree and no wind" does me no good unless I have access to a meat locker with a thermostat so I can adjust the temperature, stand inside the meat locker, and see what 1 degree and no wind feels like. If I simply take "feels like 1" at face value, I will imagine what it was like on previous occasions when it has been 1 degree out. Some of them were windy, some less so, but even when it was moderately windy there were some corners, like the notorious corner of Elm and Church, where it was really windy. Boy was that cold!

If I took all this seriously I would be left with the impression that it is not "really" 5 degrees; in some scientific sense it's really 1. Hey, it's colder than you thought! Better bring your scarf and earmuffs! Which is absurd. If we know how cold 1 degree is, then we also pretty much know how cold 5 degrees is, and if there's wind gusting to 75 kph and we're planning on walking past the corner of Elm and Church, we know we're in for a blast. Telling us what it "feels like" is pointless.

So, weatherpeople, take those windchills away! Be content with the thought that we like you when you're undramatic. You're like Grandma; we love her, but we love her more when she sits quietly in the corner than when she drinks a bit too much and gets her motorbike out. Telling us windchills is like Grandma dressing in a miniskirt; a little bit of nondrama that is at best misleading.

Republicans are Dumb and Evil

2008-02-29T01:49:00.002-05:00

Have you ever noticed that Republicans, when talking about taxes, claim that every dollar taken from a person's hands and given to the government is a dollar misspent? The person who earned that money has better uses for it than the government, and when he or she spends it it will operate more efficiently as a spur to economic growth than it ever could in the government's hands.

Then, when Republicans are talking about immigration, what's their #1 issue? The illegal immigrant's failure to pay taxes! Actually, they should be pinning medals on those brave noncitizens who manage to play such a productive role in society by paying almost no taxes (not zero, of course, because of sales taxes), and thereby creating more jobs than the rest of us

Now that the inconsistency has been pointed out, I'm sure the Republicans will rush to fix it, one way or the other — or when they stop fooling most of the people most of the time.

2008-02-24T18:20:00.003-05:00

Top 10 Mistakes Found in "Personal Statements" by Chinese Applicants to
Graduate Study in Computer Science

[We're in the midst of graduate-school-application season, so this
little guide, which has been making the rounds, may be useful to some
applicants — next year.]

Anyone who has spent a year or two reading applications to
graduate school can attest that many of the "personal statements"
found in these
applications can be a little weird. The title at the top of this list
mentions the
Chinese, but these mistakes are made by applicants of every
nationality. (It should also be pointed out that many Chinese
applicants are excellent students who become academic stars in the
U.S.)
The only reason to single out applicants from the Middle Kingdom is that
there seems to be a best-selling "personal statement style guide"
whose influence can be seen in a high percentage of the applications
from that country. The writer of this guide should be taken out and
… retired peacefully to the countryside.

Some of the advice below sounds rather specific
to Computer Science,
but it's likely it can be adapted to other disciplines.
Anyway, without further ado, in no particular order,
here are the pitfalls one should
avoid when writing the "personal statement":

Telling the story of your life, especially
talking about how you've loved computers since high school (or the womb)
and how much joy and satisfaction you get from CS.

Bragging about getting into a top-notch university, winning
awards, etc.

Failing to talk about your research goals.

Listing all the things you've done that were someone else's idea,
without mentioning any that were your idea.

Mentioning only the successes attained by projects you've
participated in. (Most projects fail to
accomplish some of their goals, so it sounds weird to have one triumph
after another.)

Equating research ability with persistence, diligence,
perseverance, and similar traits.

Emphasizing your abilities as a team player, especially on a team
having nothing to do with research (e.g., student government, sports).

Talking about what you're willing to do, not what you
want to do

Listing all the well known algorithms you've implemented, unless you
discovered and fixed some significant bugs while doing it.

Bragging about all the reading you've done. (Don't list the
books; show that you've assimilated them.)

It may sound as if the list above is mainly about what not
to do, leaving the applicant puzzled about what he or she
should do. So, here's some positive advice: First, you
should have some research experience as an undergraduate, so if you're
thinking of going to graduate school find a faculty member willing to
mentor you and give you something to do at least a year
before you apply to graduate school. (Obviously, not
everybody can follow this advice; if you are applying two years after
graduating then you probably can't.) Second, think about what kind of
research you would like to do, but don't just think. Read
the literature in the area and figure out what's going on and where
the interesting issues are. Third, make up some specific research
goals. They can be modest or bold, but they should be well informed.

Now write about what you've learned, what you've done, and what
you'd like to do. Don't give in to wild-eyed speculation.
(Promising to prove P=NP
or write a program that can pass the Turing Test will make you sound
like an ignoramus.) Whatever you write
will be made obsolete by your first year's experience in graduate
school, but that's okay. You want to sound as much like a
first-year graduate student, and as little like a sophomore, as possible.

Boycott the Iowa Caucuses!

2008-01-04T20:38:00.001-05:00

The presidential-election process in the United States has reached a point where almost everyone admits it is insane. Theoretically nominees are chosen by conventions in the summer, but since the 1960s the conventions have been rubber-stamp affairs, certifying the candidate who won the most delegates in the primaries. At some point New Hampshire became the state with the earliest primary. In fact, the primaries were scheduled in a more or less east-to-west pattern, with California coming last. California elected a big chunk of delegates, so the issue was often not decided until after its primary, in June.

But the exigencies of fund-raising in the TV age drove states to push their primaries earlier. We all know the story: candidates need buckets of money to pay for TV ads, so they must spend as much time raising funds as meeting voters. If you fall behind in the fund-raising race early, you will lose traction in the early primaries, lose more credibility with the money people, and spiral downward to oblivion. Worse, the press seems incapable of covering any aspect of the campaign except the money race. So the set of viable candidates decreases fast, leaving even large states with pointless primaries if they happen to come after, say, the second wave. The inevitable consequence was that states got into an "arms race," moving their primary dates earlier and earlier to stay relevant. New Hampshire insists on being the earliest, which has led to ridiculous squabbles and byzantine intrigues. Now the New Hampshire primary is held in January (January!), followed by a huge gob of them in one big wave in early February, including California and New York, and it's hard to hope that there will be much to decide after that. So that means we have a gap from February until late August when the nominees-presumptive will be twiddling their thumbs.

What can be done about this mess? Short of a constitutional amendment, it's hard to think what. I don't quite understand how the primary system got through the constitutional filter in the first place. How can a state forbid a party from choosing its nominee any way it wants? If only we could go back to the system that chose Truman, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and Lincoln as their parties' nominees. It was supposedly less democratic than the contraption that replaced it. Assume it is; is that necessarily a bad thing? The problem with the modern age is that representative democracy has been replaced by direct meddling by the public in the doings of its representatives. We can see what's happening on the House and Senate floor in real time, and we can mobilize our lobbyists electronically to coerce our elected officials to block whatever initiatives our group abhors.

The presidential-election calendar got off to its "official" start yesterday, with the Iowa Caucuses, some silly process that, because it isn't a primary, is permitted by New Hampshire to occur a few days earlier than the majestic New Hampshire election. No doubt in 2012 some candidate will find an even sillier non-primary in an earlier state, and, by making a stand there, cause it to become the new "official" start of the Presidential-election calendar.

Well, I am boycotting. I refuse to listen to the results of the Iowa Caucuses, and to the analysis by commentators about what the results mean for the presidential race, as if they themselves ere not the ones who determine what they mean. (Never is the passive voice more dishonestly used than when it is used by the media.) Perhaps if we all shut our eyes and ears for a few days every four years, the Iowa Caucuses will just go away, and some earlier event, occurring in the year before the election, will not raise its ugly head.

After that, we can set our sights on New Hampshire.

McDermott on Passing the Turing Test

2007-09-13T12:10:00.002-04:00

I often find the writings of Drew McDermott to be amusing and occasionally insightful. One example is provided by the little blurb you get to by following the link above. The topic is the Turing Test, which you might think had been sucked dry, but he manages to wring out a few novel thoughts (or perhaps just thoughts I haven't seen before).

In passing he mentions Hawkins and Blakeslee's much ballyhooed On Intelligence, which it would be nice to see thoroughly trashed, but he manages only to toss in an insulting adjective in his allusion to it. Perhaps someday I'll pick up where he left off.

Tips for Graduate Students Negotiating with Faculty Members

2007-07-19T13:40:00.000-04:00

I have noticed that when a group of graduate students is meeting with a group of faculty members, the students tend to recede into the background, and become an unheard audience at an impromptu faculty meeting. The effect can be avoided only by making sure only one professor is present, who then cannot help but talk to the students.

The phenomenon is reminiscent of the way men often (less often than formerly) ignore women, but it stems from somewhat different sources. Faculty are usually rather older than students; they know each other better than they know the students (who are, on their time scale, "just passing through" the college); they share esoteric information that the students would need, in some conversations, to fully grasp the issues under discussion. And, yes, they may look down on students, although just as often they fear that these young, vigorous people, better informed about recent developments in the field, are about to eat their lunch.

Of course, the main reason students may feel cowed, especially when a possibly life-changing issue is on the table, is the difference in power between the faculty and the students. The student can't help feeling that if the people on the other side of the table wanted to, they could kick them out on the street and make them work for a living. And, under some circumstances, they could and they have. The power difference is not illusory.

However, the students must take some of the responsibility for their reticence. Most graduate students have voluntarily postponed their adulthood by staying in school. There is a striking difference in behavior between the typical grad student and one who has returned to school after years in the real world. The latter type seems more grown up; they know better what they want and how to get it. Whereas those who have spent every year since age 18 in the university have gotten into the habit of deferring to faculty members in all things academic. Foreign students (who for some reason it is now politically correct to call "international") are often at a disadvantage because they don't speak the language used in the college as well as the faculty do. And, although I hate to say it, this is usually their fault. Students who invest little effort in learning the local language because they have so many other pressing demands on their time will end up paying for it with a lot more effort and time later.^lang Some of this effort will be spent in negotiating with the professoriate without being able to communicate clearly.

Is it important to be able to negotiate? After all, as an undergraduate you didn't have much to do but get high marks, and you must have gotten pretty good at it. But in graduate school things get more complex, more like real life. There is a smaller group of relevant fellow students, who form coalitions that start to want things from the university. But even laying that aside, finding an advisor is a series of negotiations, and so is working with the person you get stuck with. Picking a dissertation topic is perhaps the most important negotiation; if you blow that one, you may pass many sad years.

There are two key things to keep in mind:

You are an adult. You have the same right as any other fool to be heard in any discussion you take part in.
In almost all cases, students have more power than they think and the faculty less.

Point one I've already alluded to. If you act and talk like a grown-up, people will eventually treat you like one. This may take some patience, and the ability to control your temper. If you make a remark, and it is ignored, you may have to make it again, even interrupt the person who began speaking on some random topic after your last deeply insightful remark. Without being a jerk, go ahead and interrupt. Just copy the way they're treating you. I know this may sound scary, but if you're lucky you'll have at least one other grad student, postdoc, or even visiting scholar as a model. Observe what they do.

The task is made slightly more difficult by the desire of some academics always to be the most flamboyant and outrageous character in the room. Actually, such a person can be found in many human groups, which is okay, in moderation, because they can be entertaining. But they are tiresome to negotiate with. For one thing, they are perfectly willing to stray off the topic at hand in order to make a brilliant observation. When someone does this (for effect, or perhaps because they haven't quite grasped the topic at hand), point out the navigational error and guide them back.

The flamboyant types can also be tricky because they sometimes get belligerent, or pretend to, just for the hell of it. I don't know how to deal with people like that in a dark alley, but in polite society the best way is to become more polite. The thing about academics is, if you back up your position with an argument, they have to take it seriously. The guy in the dark alley might pull a gun on you, but in academia the argument is the gun.^machismo

Point two: Students have more power than they realize. For one thing, they will usually have allies among the faculty. If the person or group you are dealing with is being unreasonable, there are usually other faculty nearby who will appreciate your position, or at least be willing to talk you out of it without foaming at the mouth. But if there aren't, then there are people outside your immediate vicinity. There are deans and provosts and associate and assistant deans and provosts, people whose job is to question every decision the faculty make. There are even shadowy figures beyond that circle, including the dreaded Press. The deans and provosts definitely don't want anything ever ever appearing in the Press, and so they will hasten over to the department in a trice if something suspicious seems to be happening. The faculty are perfectly aware of this, and they want the deans and provosts to hear of some complaint as little as the deans and provosts want the press to hear of it.^blog And that means that whatever subgroup you are negotiating with, even if it's just one person and that person is your advisor, is vividly aware that they can't just decide to screw you. If someone forgets this in a moment of rashness, they end up causing problems for other members of the department, and losing credibility.

On the other hand. You can get screwed, although you have to contribute to your own demise. If you contact the press at the first sign of trouble, or air a blogful of complaints on the first day you arrive at school, you are asking for trouble. The problem is that you are kissing your allies goodbye. Even the Administration people who would usually rush over to help would be glad to see you go, because you have already fired your big guns; they have nothing more to fear from you. (Well, you could sue them, but don't count on getting anything for the vast sum you will spend.)

The surest way to get screwed is to write a bad dissertation for a professor who has left your department. If the advisor were still around, you might have a champion, and might get through. Once he or she is gone, if the faculty decide your work is just too awful, you won't be able to negotiate your way out of it. The moral of that story is to write a good dissertation, or be sure your advisor has tenure and a solid marriage or civil union.

But I digress. One final observation that may be more on point. Among n faculty members there are famously at least n+1 opinions. This works in your favor if you get a bad deal from a subgroup and want to appeal to the entire faculty. Correspondingly, it works against you if you get a good deal from a subgroup. Anyone who has sat on a committee knows that no matter how carefully it crafts an agreement, no matter how many objections are anticipated, it will be rejected or rewritten when brought to the entire faculty. So don't get too excited after your get two friends together and convince some subcommittee that allowing the graduate students to sell coffee and doughnuts in the front lobby would be a great idea. Your work has just begun.

Note lang Some people learn languages better than others, of course. But usually the younger you are the easier new languages come, another ability the faculty may envy in the students.
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Note machismo Male faculty may find this a sad commentary on their masculinity; women are fortunately not playing this game.
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Note blog And now blogs are adding a whole new dimension. What department wants its name to be part of a URL that also includes "ihate" before the ac or edu bit?
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Unusual Lisp application

2007-07-05T19:31:00.001-04:00

Here in New Haven, Connecticut, a single company seems to have a monopoly on parking. What's remarkable are their signs, which point to a clear influence of Lisp technology on operations. Here is a particularly fine example:

Granted, the angle-bracket prompt is out of place, and it is perhaps poor practice to give a name like (p) to such a crucial function, but in all likelihood these are mere tactics to avoid revealing trade secrets to competitors.

temp

2007-04-28T14:56:00.000-04:00

Programming peeve of the day: No one should ever use a variable named temp. The standard (but by no means only) context for this practice is the idiom for swapping the contents of two settable locations (variables, for instance):


let temp = loc1
in
   (loc1 := loc2;
    loc2 := temp)

in some hypothetical imperative language. Why temp? Why not prev_ptr_value? or pre_tax_profits? The usual rationale is that the variable has a short lifespan, so it's "temporary." Or perhaps that its value will be moving on shortly. If that makes any sense, we should adopt the same policy for all variables. We can give them names such as perm or likely_to_last, or perhaps valid_for_several_million_clock_cycles. If you think this is a step in the wrong direction, then the next time temp occurs to you as a fine name for a variable, spend a few extra seconds to find one that reminds the reader of your code what information is whizzing through your variable, not its expected flight time.

Adoption vs. abortion

2007-03-05T22:29:00.000-05:00

A pregnant teenager is confronted with three choices:

A Allow the embryo to become human and give it up for adoption.
B Allow the embryo to become human and keep it.
C Prevent it from becoming human (i.e., have an abortion).

Note that I've avoided any presupposition that a new embryo is human, or that it is separate from the mother in some way, or that destroying it is killing anything.

From an ethical standpoint, it is certainly not obvious that C is better than A, or even permissible given the possibility of A. What's odd is that many episodes of popular TV shows hinge on the theme that A is much worse than B. Young mothers who can't separate from their newborn babies are presented as heroic, and those who can are portrayed as monsters. If I were an intellectual, I might speculate that this is an expression of our national guilt over abortion. It's only by making A look really, really evil that those who have chosen C can feel some relief at the choice they made. It's taken for granted that B, while noble, is foolish; rather than get oneself into having to choose between the morally terrible A and the practically terrible B, it's far better to take path C. (By the way --- advice to those who chose A: don't watch any TV show involving a pregnant teenager.)

Yet another annoying thing about telemarketers

2006-09-16T14:08:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder why, when you pick up the phone, there is sometimes a pause for a second or two before someone comes on, and that someone is always a telemarketer? It's because the marketing companies have automatic dialing machines. These dial numbers at random until they someone picks up, then connect that person to one of their operators. The purpose is to save money. The wages they pay the operators, low as they are, are still their major cost. If they can have a machine do the dialing, instead of a person — and more important the waiting while the phone rings — they can save pennies that add up to lots of dollars.

Well, that's nice, but it means that you have to wait two seconds for an operator to be found. Sometimes one of them doesn't show up, because the autodialer happens to get too many hits at once. When that happens you wait longer, possibly until the machine hangs up on you. Worse, you start to worry that someone is stalking you. Then there are the times when your voicemail answers the phone. Either the autodialers can detect that or the telemarketer operators are trained not to leave an apologetic message, because the most that happens is a blank message on your voicemail. Which you have to listen to and erase, while thoughts of stalkers flit through your brain.

Isn't it nice to know that your angst and wasted time are helping telemarketers save a lot of money? Maybe, if you meditate on the number of them working for charities since the federal "no call" list was created. Then again, those organizations supposedly representing the police, whose administrative costs are 85% of their revenu, are classed as charities. In any case, I feel the need to strike back. And there's a simple way to do this: When the telemarketer calls and asks for you (usually mutilating your name), say "Just a minute," and set the phone down as if you're going to get the person they asked for. Hey, perhaps if they think "Foyle" is pronounced to rhyme with "school," then I really am going off to look for "Mr. Fool." In any case, I don't find him until the phone starts beeping, demanding to be hung up.

The beauty of this approach is that it strikes right at the root of the problem: If we can find a way to waste the operators' time, then the goal of saving labor costs will be foiled. The telemarketers will give up on autodialers, and we can all live happily ever after.

My wife thinks this is mean to the operators, who are innocent Bengali women just trying to make a decent living. I figure you probably develop a thick skin pretty quick in the telemarketing game, and having to listen to the background noise in my house for 30 seconds is probably one of the more restful ways they get hassled. So, until someone thinks of a better way to retaliate, I'll be asking telemarketers to "Wait just a sec, while I go find him," as often as I hear that little pause.

Europe's True Colors in Lebanon

2006-08-29T23:28:00.000-04:00

It is, alas, not surprising, but it is sobering, to realize that Europe (and, of course, most of the United Nations) are not that upset at the prospect of Israel's destruction as part of the final solution of the Middle East problem. I don't see how else to interpret the way the Security Council's resolution ending the recent Lebanese war has played out. The resolution calls for Israel, Hizbollah, the government of Lebanon, and various UN members to do various things. No one is following through. Why? Because everyone responsible for making Hizbollah live up to its promises (including Hizbollah itself) have cheerfully decided to

Not insist on the release of the two Israeli soldiers whose capture ignited the conflict

Not disarm Hizbollah

Not end Hizbollah's occupation of southern Lebanon

One might say, Oh well, the worst that can happen is that Israel will eventually realize that everyone was kidding about enforcing the UN resolution, and be forced to accept the status quo ante, no worse off than before. The problem is what this suggests about the eventual situation in Israel's neighborhood. A precedent will have been set that when Israel withdraws from an area, it becomes a permanent base for staging attacks on her. The same is true for Gaza. I suppose someone opposed to Israel's policies might argue that when Israel withdraws from the West Bank, then all of this hostile activity will cease. Hizbollah and Hamas will become peace-loving political organizations, and stop shooting rockets into Israel, and launching other offensive operations. But can anyone seriously believe that?

The truth is that Europe and much of the rest of the world can easily foresee that eventually Israel will be surrounded by dedicated, well-armed enemies. They can foresee that these enemies will be satisfied only when they have pushed the Israelis into the Mediterranean (the survivors, I mean). They can foresee that, and it doesn't bother them very much. It makes the blood of the average American run cold. The reasons for this difference one can only guess at, but it's hard not to conclude that the history of the Europeans' oppression and genocide against the Jews is relevant.

I'm not saying that Americans are saints compared to the Europeans. When it comes to discounting the lives of innocent bystanders, we are champs. Every night the news carries the number of Iraqi civilians killed that day by sectarian conflicts and the number of American soldiers killed. Where is the statistic on the number of Iraqi civilians killed by American soldiers? Apparently these deaths are irrelevant. Even the deaths of innocent civilians killed by Israel in Lebanon get more attention. (Although it is rarely mentioned that many of them were cut to pieces by cluster bombs supplied by us — and possibly used by the Israelis in violation of rules we imposed when we sold them the weapons.)

The Europeans are quite upset about all these civilian casualties among the Arabs, as they should be, but my point is that nobody but us cares much about the Jews. "Big news!" my Jewish friends would say (including my Jewish wife). When in history have the Jews had any friends? Well, they have the U.S. now, and they need to have somebody. It's true that the Israelis have killed too many civilians in Palestine, and mistreated even more. But there's an ultiimate difference between the goals of the Israelis and the goals of the Arabs in Palestine. The Jews don't want to annihilate the Arabs. If the Arabs were to scale down their violence as the Israelis scaled down their occupation, isn't it obvious that peace would eventually come about? If you're skeptical, then isn't it obvious that the Arabs should give it a shot? It's within Hizbollah's power (or Iran's power, if they control Hizbollah) to impose a moratorium on rocket attacks on Israel while the Israelis withdraw from the West Bank. Until the recent war, the idea of trying this hadn't crossed their minds, and it seems clear why: their goal is, and has always been, to destroy Israel. The slightest sign of weakness by the Israelis is taken as encouragement to step up their attacks.

The Nation a few days ago carried an interview with a Lebanese who said something like, Of course Hizbollah isn't going to honor its promise to disarm. We can't trust the Lebanese army to defend us against Israel; their units collapsed when the Israelis attacked, while the Hizbollah units fought well. The Nation correspondent saw nothing odd about this statement. But it's absurd. Israel has never had any reason to attack Lebanon; if Hizbollah were disarmed then the border would be peaceful. Their target in the recent conflict was Hizbollah itself. The argument that Hizbollah is good at defending things is circular when the only thing they are defending is themselves. Whoever the Nation talked to was obviously a disingenuous apologist for the militant Shiites. The only argument for not disarming Hizbollah is that annihilating Israel and killing Jews is too important a goal for any commitment to honesty to stand in the way.

The Europeans know that the Islamist militants holding the reins in the Middle East feel this way. They just don't particularly care.

Anti-Literacy Program

2006-05-06T13:23:00.000-04:00

Literate programming is a paradigm for writing and
documenting programs in which the documentation is primary. The
"source" for the program is an essay about how it works, in which all
the code is embedded. The code segments are placed in whatever order
makes sense for the exposition. A program called the tangler
then extracts those segments and puts them in the proper order; you
can think of this as the first pass of the compiler. (Why Donald Knuth,
the inventor of literate programming, did not choose the term
"untangler" has always been a mystery to me, but
perhaps he was deliberately trying to point out that the order
compilers want is not necessarily the best. As a Lisp programmer,
I've never felt that constrained by the compiler, so the point is lost
on me.)

Meanwhile, the essay can be written as ordinary text, HTML, or LaTeX.
Writing it in a WYSIWYG system such as Word would be more of a
challenge for the tangler, but that's not what I want to talk about
here.

I have flirted with literate programming for the last couple of years,
and wrote a Lisp-based system ("LitLisp") to support it. I don't
recommend my system, really, but the manual is available in case
anyone is interested in looking at it.

My conclusion after writing (or at least documenting) several programs
using literate programming is that it just doesn't work. Here are my
reasons:

During program development, I tend to build a partial solution to a
problem, then realize it's wrong and discard it or turn it inside
out. It's very hard to force yourself to write a bunch of prose
during this process; not only is the writing mostly wasted, it
slows down your thought processes.

It may or may or may not be unnatural for the only copy of a
program to be a paper about that program. It is certainly
impossible for it to be the only paper about it. For this
reason, LitLisp allows two paradigms: the main representation is
the essay, from which the program is extracted; or the main
representation is the program, from which the essay may quote. If
done right, the reader can't tell which paradigm was used. But
this seemingly attractive idea requires the code in the paper to be
marked up with all possible fragments one later quotes in some
paper or other. (Remember, paper #1 is the only stable
representation of the code to be quoted in paper #2 or #14.)

A paper about a complex algorithm often presents several versions
of the algorithm, starting with a sketch, and gradually adding
complexity, until something like the final version is reached. How
do we express the actual algorithm this way? In some cases the
preliminary version of a program can be presented as the final
version with some segments postponed to a later section. But there
are many cases where some of the program fragments are "fake," in
the sense that they appear in the paper as if they were part of the
final program, but in fact they aren't. The literate-programming
system must incorporate devices for indicating "versioning"
information (e.g., that this segment is version 3 of a function,
with pointers to versions 2 and 4). I gave up on LitLisp before
trying to implement this.

Perhaps this objection is due to my being mired in obsolete habits,
but here it is anyway: I find it hard to think of the original
essay as the "real" program. It's easier to look at the
unscrambled version, which appears in the order God meant programs
to appear in. Making a change to the program then requires going
back to the essay and finding the place in the essay where (e.g.)
you put the damned special-variable declarations. If one yields to
the temptation to make a little change in the program and fix it in
the essay later, one is on the road to perdition. I once forgot
for several weeks that I was committing this sin, and had to
painstakingly merge lots of little program changes back into my
essay.

There is a tension between two purposes of one's essay: to
enlighten humans or to document the program. If you try for both,
then you run into the temptation to hide big boring chunks of the
code. LitLisp provides facilities to do that, but using them means
departing from the basic literate-programming idea. The hidden
parts of the program can be seen in the source for the essay, but
not the essay itself. That means you have to work with two
documents, one of which (the source) looks suspiciously like the
unadorned code one was trying to avoid.

One word: CVS! Has anyone ever even attempted to use literate
programming in concert with a group of collaborators? I have trouble
imagining this scenario, but I would like to hear from anyone who
tried it or actually made it work.

Yegging Me On

2006-04-22T18:06:00.000-04:00

I just can't stay away from Mr. Yegge's critique of Lisp. What is it about critiques of one's favorite language that makes one feel so righteously indignant? Perhaps it's some primordial fear that our favorite language will be taken away from us. Sort of like the basic fear by aged monolingual English speakers in Miami that as Spanish grows in visibility they will be unable to make themselves understood. As an aging almost-monolingual English speaker, I can easily imagine myself in their position and feel panic. The feeling that Lisp might vanish is very similar.

Anyway, putting these feelings aside, let me address one more little Yeggish point —

This is a problem. It's not a little teeny one, either. The Lisp communities (yeah, there are a bunch) are going to have to realize that if Lisp is ever going to be massively successful, it needs an overhaul. Or maybe a revolution. Contrary to what some might tell you, it doesn't need a committee, and it doesn't need a bunch of money. Linux proved exactly the opposite. Lisp needs a benevolent dictator. Lisp needs to ditch the name "Lisp", since it scares people. And Lisp needs to learn from the lessons of the 45 years of languages that have followed it.

At this point I begin to scratch my head. The point he started to try to argue was that Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp. But an acceptable Lisp would be an "overhaul" of the current language. As the paragraphs before the one quoted show, the overhauled Lisp would not have the "worthless spec" the current one has, it would not have CLOS, it would not have macros, and it would have a different type system. It would have a dictator (its own Guido van Rossum? or Larry Wall?). It would reflect 45 years of history somehow. And it wouldn't be called "Lisp."

To which I respond: Would we really want a Lisp that was an acceptable Lisp in this sense?

There is a lot I don't like about Common Lisp. None of it has much to do with Yegge's rather general observations. The only specific point he made that I agree with is that case-insensitivity is a big mistake. What were the Common Lisp people thinking? It might have been difficult to convert legacy code then, but it's not getting any easier, and sooner or later Lisp will change. Franz is already agitating for "modern" mode; I've adopted it, and I can't believe that it isn't spreading faster.

There are plenty of other flaws in CL. Brooks and Gabriel wrote a critique in 1984, when CL was proposed, that hit several nails on the head. I've posted a couple of essays (NIL Considered Harmful" and FORMAT Considered Ugly) on my website about flaws in CL, and I wrote the Nisp package because I think, contrary to the Lispish conventional wisdom, that static typing is a good idea.

But in spite of all that, Lisp embodies several good features that (a) I like, nay, passionately love; and (b) are so essential to the language that removing them would make it not Lisp any more:

S-expressions
Programs expressed as S-expressions
Macros
The read-eval-print loop

Let me elaborate.

S-expressions are symbols, strings, and numbers, plus lists of S-expressions and (why not?) arrays of S-expressions. That's their abstract syntax. Their concrete syntax is:

Symbols, strings, and numbers What you would expect.

Lists: (e1 ... eK)

Arrays: #(e1 ... eK) (Actually, this is just the 1-dim case, but let's not worry about that.)

The thing to notice is that the abstract syntax and the concrete syntax are essentially the same, so that S-expressions provide the same thing XML that provides: A notion of hierarchy that is representable and parseable before the hierarchy is classified as being an instance of this or that particular syntactic category, data structure, or whatever. (But S-expressions are more concise than XML, at the expense of being less general in some ways.)

It's important that programs are S-expressions, but not just Lisp programs. The JScheme system, by Ken Anderson, Tim Hickey, and Peter Norvig, is an implementation of Scheme in Java that allows java to be called from Scheme, using what it inventors call Javadot notation. The expression object.field becomes (.field$ class). The expression "new class(a b)" becomes (class. a b). This notation was developed prior to the addition of generic classes and methods to Java (version 1.5). It is now possible in Java to write, for instance, "(new List<String>())" to make an empty list of strings. But it's clear that augmenting the notation in an elegant way is not going to be difficult, because the S-expression notation allows us to capture the hierarchical structure of the Java expression without constraining how we do it. We might write (List< String)), or ((<> List. String)). I leave it to the JScheme people to arrive at an extended notation that actually fits their original conception.

Another example is the Common SQL notation developed by Lispworks. When sending an expression to the database, the expression might look like (select [Researcher] :from [SampleAreas]). (This notation depends on hacking the syntax of the character '[' as well as using S-expression notation.) In other languages you have to send SQL expressions as (brace yourself) strings. To construct what is obviously a hierarchical expression involving data objects, one must discard the hierarchy and the objects, convert both to strings, and send the result to the database, which will then invert the process, recovering the hierarchical structure. S-expressions are an obviously better idea.

Now for macros. Let me first observe that macros are not the only useful consequence of the fact that Lisp programs are S-expressions. Another is quote. It's easy to write Lisp as a package or class in Java, until you come to a point when you need to translate, say, (setq x 'foo). You suddenly have to allocate a new static variable Q_foo somewhere and bind it at static-variable initialization time to the symbol foo. This is a real buzz-kill.

But the existence of macros is the really good reason why programs should be S-expressions. The debate about whether this power is a good thing is not important. We are not debating here. We are explaining what Lisp is. Macros are a non-negotiable item. For one thing, if they were repealed, anyone could reintroduce them. (All you need to do is introduce a preprocessor before the compiler; introduce your own version of 'defun' that runs the preprocessor.)

Even Scheme has macros, although they are of the "hygienic" variety. I don't think I've ever written a hygienic macro; by chance, all the interesting ones seem to be un-hygienic. Nonetheless, I still have all my fingers and toes. The desire to restrict the syntactic transformations a macro can perform is in keeping with the general atmosphere around Scheme, that there is one right way to do any given thing, and until the Central Committee announces what it is, we should avoid doing that thing. Yegge recommends that the Lisp community elect (or suffer the ascension of?) a dictator, but anyone can decide to live under the benevolent rule of the Revisedⁿ Report on Scheme. I gather this particular dictator is not appealing to him, and I wonder what the odds are that the next one will be either.

Finally, the read-eval-print loop. Some languages besides Lisp, or their IDEs, approximate it, but for various reasons they can't quite get to the right idea: a playground where lots of pieces of code are lying around, and you can work on whichever one catches your fancy next. It's like the shell in Unix, except the shell is more of an oil refinery than a playground. But once you're in Lisp, there's no reason to go back to the shell. It's like Emacs; correction: Emacs is like it; correction: Emacs is it, because Emacs is basically a special-purpose Lisp.

Obviously, the Lisp idea is not for everyone. But one must acknowledge that there is such a thing as the Lisp idea. John McCarthy once said that Lisp seemed to be a local maximum in the space of programming languages. Most successful languages are. It's a characteristic of local maxima in high-dimensional spaces that small steps in any direction can plunge you into the depths. Mr. Yegge's casual suggestions about Lisp reforms are actually more likely to be high dives into the lower rings of hell.

2006-04-21T23:07:00.001-04:00

I just can't stay away from Mr. Yegge's
critique of Lisp. What is it
about critiques of one's favorite language that makes one feel so
righteously indignant? Perhaps it's some primordial fear that our
favorite language will be taken away from us. Sort of like the basic
fear by aged monolingual English speakers in Miami that as Spanish
grows in visibility they will be unable to make themselves understood.
As an aging almost-monolingual English speaker, I can easily imagine
myself in their position and feel panic. The feeling that Lisp might
vanish is very similar.

Anyway, putting these feelings aside, let me address one more little
Yeggish point --

This is a problem. It's not a little teeny one, either. The Lisp
communities (yeah, there are a bunch) are going to have to realize
that if Lisp is ever going to be massively successful, it needs an
overhaul. Or maybe a revolution. Contrary to what some might tell you,
it doesn't need a committee, and it doesn't need a bunch of
money. Linux proved exactly the opposite. Lisp needs a benevolent
dictator. Lisp needs to ditch the name "Lisp", since it scares
people. And Lisp needs to learn from the lessons of the 45 years of
languages that have followed it.

At this point I begin to scratch my head. The point he started to try
to argue was that Lisp is not an acceptable Lisp. But an acceptable
Lisp would be an "overhaul" of the current language. As the
paragraphs before the one quoted show, the overhauled Lisp would not
have the "worthless spec" the current one has, it would not have CLOS,
it would not have macros, and it would have a different type system.
It would have a dictactor (its own Guido van Rossum? or Larry
Wall?). It would reflect 45 years of history somehow. And it wouldn't
be called "Lisp."

To which I respond: Would we really want a Lisp that was an
acceptable Lisp in this sense?

There is a lot I don't like about Common Lisp. None of it has much to
do with Yegge's rather general observations. The only specific point
he made that I agree with is Lisp's case-insensitivity. What were the
Common Lisp people thinking? It might have been difficult to convert
legacy code then, but it's not getting any easier, and sooner or later
Lisp will change. Franz is already agitating for "modern" mode; I've
adopted it, and I can't believe that it isn't spreading faster.

There are plenty of other flaws in CL. Brooks and Gabriel wrote
a critique
in 1984, when CL
was proposed, that
hit several nails on the head. I've posted
couple
of essays( a NIL Considered
Harmful" and
FORMAT
Considered Ugly) on my website about flaws in CL, and I wrote Nisp because I think,
contrary to the Lispish conventional wisdom, that static typing is a
good idea.

But in spite of all that, Lisp embodies several good features that (a) I
like, nay, passionately love; and (b) are so essential to the
language that removing them would make it not Lisp any more:

S-expressions

Programs expressed as S-expressions

Macros

Read-eval-print loop

Let me elaborate.

S-expressions are symbols, strings, and numbers, plus lists of
S-expressions and (why not?) arrays of S-expressions. That's their
abstract syntax. Their concrete syntax is:

Symbols, strings, and numbers What you would expect.

Lists: (e1 ... eK)

Arrays: #(e1 ... eK) (Actually,
this is just the 1-dim case, but let's not worry about that.)

The thing to notice is that the abstract syntax and the concrete
syntax are essentially the same, so that S-expressions provide the
same thing XML that provides: A notion of hierarchy that is representable
and parseable
before the hierarchy is classified as being an instance of this or
that particular syntactic category, data structure, or whatever.
(But S-expressions are more concise than XML, at the expense of being
less general in some ways.)

It's important that programs are S-expressions, but not just Lisp
programs. The JScheme
system, by Ken Anderson, Tim
Hickey, and Peter Norvig, is an implementation of
Scheme in Java that allows java to be called from Scheme, using what
it inventors call Javadot notation. The expression
object.field becomes (.field$ class). The expression "new class(a b)" becomes (class. a b). This notation was developed prior to the addition
of generic classes and methods to Java (version 1.5). It is now
possible to write, for instance, "(new List<String>())" to make an empty list of strings.
But it's clear that augmenting the notation in an elegant way
is not going to be
difficult, because the S-expression notation allows us to capture the
hierarchical structure of the Java expression without constraining how
we do it. We might write (List. (<> String)), or
((<> List String)). I leave it to the JScheme people to
arrive at an extended notation that actually fits their original conception.

Another example is the Common
SQL notation developed by Lispworks. When sending an
expression to the database, the expression might look like
(select [Researcher] :from [SampleAreas]). (This notation depends on hacking the syntax
of the character '[' as well as using S-expression
notation.) In other languages you have to send SQL expressions as
(brace yourself) strings. To construct what is obviously a
hierarchical expression involving data objects, one must discard the
hierarchy and the objects, convert both to strings, and send the
result to the database, which will then invert the process, recovering
the hierarchical structure. This
expensive and error-prone process is then compensated for by the
practice of generating queries in advance and saving them on the
server side. S-expressions are an obviously better idea.

Now for macros. Let me first observe that
macros are not the only useful consequence of the fact that Lisp
programs are S-expressions. Another is quote. It's easy
to write Lisp as a
package or class in Java, until you come to a point when you need to
translate, say,
(setq x 'foo). You suddenly have to allocate a new
static variable Q_foo somewhere and bind it at
static-variable initialization time to the symbol
foo. This is a real buzz-kill.

But the existence of macros is the really good reason why programs
should be S-expressions. The debate about whether
this power is a good thing is not important. We are not debating
here. We are explaining what Lisp is. Macros are a
non-negotiable item. For one thing, if they were repealed, anyone
could reintroduce them. (All you need to do is introduce a
preprocessor before the compiler; introduce your own version of
'defun' that runs the preprocessor.)

Even Scheme has macros, although they are of the "hygienic"
variety. I don't think I've ever written a hygienic macro; by chance,
all the interesting ones seem to be un-hygienic.
Nonetheless, I still have all my
fingers and toes. The desire to restrict the syntactic
transformations a macro can perform is in keeping with the general
atmosphere around Scheme, that there is one right way to do
any given thing, and until the Central Committee announces what it is, we
should avoid doing that thing. Yegge recommends that
the Lisp community elect (or suffer the ascension of) a dictator, but
anyone can decide to live under
the benevolent rule of the Revisedⁿ Report on Scheme.
If that would make Yegge happy, then happiness awaits him any time he
wants to reach out and take it.

Finally, the read-eval-print loop. Some languages besides Lisp, or
their IDEs, approximate
it, but for various reasons they can't quite get to the right idea: a
playground where lots of pieces of code are lying around, and you can
work on whichever one catches your fancy next. It's like the shell in
Unix, except the shell is more of an oil refinery than a playground.
But once you're in Lisp, there's no reason to go back to the
shell. It's like Emacs; correction: Emacs is like it;
correction: Emacs is it, because Emacs is basically a
special-purpose Lisp.

Good Help is Getting Hard To Find

2006-04-20T00:30:00.000-04:00

Just so I can say I posted to my blog more than once ....

Why is the help facility on Blogger so rudimentary? For instance, it doesn't tell you how to start posting.

When you figure that out, you soon encounter a button called "Republish." Why would I want to do that? What does it mean? I haven't figured it out yet, but it may or may not be necessary in order for edits to show up on the actual blog.

Maybe there's a book I'm supposed to order from Amazon before I actually get started in my new blogging lifestyle. Now that I'm on the way to becoming a famous blogger, I'm sure plenty of comments will come pouring in letting me know.

Lisp: Paul Graham? Too many Lisps?

2006-04-18T22:44:00.000-04:00

I didn't mean to create a blog.

I read a critique of Lisp in another blog, and felt moved to respond. But the space for the comments seemed so cramped. It seemed like a bright idea to create my own blog and defend my favorite programming language at length. (As if I don't have a million better things to do.)

The critique was by Steve Yegge. He said several things, but let me mention two: that Lisp's recent increase in popularity is due to Paul Graham; and that there are too many Lisps to choose from.

The first seems absurd to me, but I don't know how to evaluate it. I thought Lisp was making a modest (very modest) comeback because Java had made garbage collection respectable; or because of the not unrelated fact that computers have gotten so fast that some of Lisp's inefficiencies (and Java's, and Python's) can be overlooked. Enough intro-CS courses expose students to Scheme that the idea of Lisp keeps rippling through impressionable young minds.
John McCarthy once said that Lisp seems to be a lucky discovery of a local maximum in the space of programming languages. Plenty of people are happy finding the top of that particular hill. Others have slightly different objective functions.

I've never met Paul Graham or heard him speak. I gather he's exciting to listen to. If he's helped keep fuel in Lisp's tank, that's great. But I think comp.lang.lisp has been a greater source of inspiration for people coming into the Lisp community, as have ALU, Cliki, and other such.

Another point Mr. Yegge made was that there are too many Lisps to choose from, making life difficult for the beginner (as compared to the beginning Python programmer). I've noticed that there are too many GNU/Linux versions out there. Sometimes that's just the way it is.

However, in the case of Lisp there's a deeper point to be made. It's in the nature of Lisp that it grows in many directions simultaneously outside of central control. I have myself posted a macro package called YTools
that transforms Lisp into a streamlined power demon or into an unreadable mess. (People differ on this issue.) I have another called Nisp that adds strong static typing to Lisp. I find I can't get along without these tools. Other people have other tools that they make available, some of which have caught on with a wider community although most have not.

The situation is not different with other programming languages, except that in the case of Lisp tool packages make syntactic extensions to the core language. If this whole idea gives you the willies, stay away from Lisp. If it sounds intriguing, you might still want to stay away, because Lisp can be addictive. I never program in any other language if I can help it. (My job involves teaching intro programming, which requires me to write simple Java programs, which I find fun. I've occasionally had to write some C or C++ code to run on a robot. I once had to hack Latex2HTML to fix some bugs, which convinced me that programming in Perl was something I should try to avoid if possible.)

There is a portability problem with Lisp, although in my experience it's not quite what one might expect. 90% of the bugs I find when porting from one CL to another are cases where the original implementation was too forgiving of departures from the language standard. A program that's worked fine for years can be ported to a different implementation where you find out it's buggy. I don't know what to say about this except that (a) I've learned that keeping a suite of tests around for any piece of software is a good idea; and (b) YTools and Nisp at this point have been ported and tested on Allegro, CMU Lisp, CLISP, and Open Macintosh CL. Getting them cleaned up was an exercise in anality, but they certainly are superstable as a result of the exercise.

	Ode to Being
Though he'd agreed to a Sein und Zeit¹ edit,
Herr Heidegger'd known he'd regret it,
	For someone in Mainz,
	Consumed with Da-seinz2
Is rumored to've actually read it.

	Ode to Time³
"The Führer stopped returning my calls,"⁴
Mused Heidegger, "How it appalls!
	If he'd dropped Being and Time
	Behind enemy lines,
The Will would have triumphed⁵ über alles!"⁶

Foyled

Creative Deconstruction

Creative Deconstruction

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.

End Notes

Ground Zero Zeroes

Ground Zero Zeroes

End Notes

Tidbits

2010, A Time Odyssey

Mug Shots

PHP and Javascript

Cancel the South American Campaign

Charity Stops at Home

Charity Stops at Home

A Tour of Newhallville

A Tour of Newhallville

On First Looking into Stambaugh's Heidegger

On First Looking into Stambaugh's0 Heidegger

Notes

Why, As For Me, Do I Dislike It So Masterfully ...?

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logician

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logicianseuss

Notes

The 43% Solution

Pedestrian Ethical Quandary

Warning: Making Ice

Brain Bubbles

Windchill Is Baloney

Republicans are Dumb and Evil

Top 10 Mistakes Found in "Personal Statements" by Chinese Applicants toGraduate Study in Computer Science

Boycott the Iowa Caucuses!

McDermott on Passing the Turing Test

Tips for Graduate Students Negotiating with Faculty Members

Unusual Lisp application

temp

Adoption vs. abortion

Yet another annoying thing about telemarketers

Europe's True Colors in Lebanon

Anti-Literacy Program

Yegging Me On

Good Help is Getting Hard To Find

Lisp: Paul Graham? Too many Lisps?

On First Looking into Stambaugh's⁰ Heidegger

Ludwig the Thick-Headed Logician^seuss

Top 10 Mistakes Found in "Personal Statements" by Chinese Applicants to
Graduate Study in Computer Science