Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

This wouldn’t be much of a story except for the mental picture of the French getting all tied in a knot over sandbagging some wine (and of course blaming it, at least in part, on those damn Americans). How is it that a bottle of cote-du-rhone goes for $1.40 there and $9 here? Anyway, I also found it amusing–althought slightly exasperating–to read descriptions of putting chardonnay, champagne, and pinot noir into the fuel tank, nevermind that all the good tasty bits that make any of them wine are completely removed by the time the ethanol comes out.

So the small-government right and the big-government left are equally exhausted. The only appealing political platform is good government.

A great idea to rally behind. Unfortunately, between the legions of what’s-in-it-for-me voters and those who aren’t savvy enough to differentiate good public officials from bad (whether by analysis of rhetoric or performance), I fear that there won’t be enough collective gumption to vote proper people into office and accept the necessary sacrifices to move us from current state to ‘good government’.

What saddened and irritated me about the Field’s decision was the absolute triumph of cold corporate mentality over any sense of cultural goodwill. The management decided that the intangible specialness felt by generations of Chicagoans simply couldn’t compete with the possiblity of the masses of non-Chicago management and shareholders could save a fraction of a penny per share in advertising costs. Instead, they absolutely know that I would rather save $1 per year with a much more nationally homogenized set of offerings. Wow, in the face of such amazing consideration of the wants and desires of the Chicago consumer…why would I want to give these people my business again?

Once again, Cassini provides us fantastic imagery!

A good if longish rant on how the idealistic approach to politics favored by single-issue groups (and Third Parties, in my view) is fine for generating discussion but a terribly impractical method for making that final decision in the ballot booth:

That’s all this single-issue, not-single-issue argument is about. That choice, right there, and how to make it. It’s not about “disrespecting” people, or “abandoning” people, or “not understanding the severity” of the issue. It’s about the fundamental problem with representative democracy: if you’re not your own representative, you’re by definition going to have to figure out who should be. And it’s a brutally imperfect process.

Scary that there’s enough demand for the book for a major house to publish it.

And why not? Much of medical and pharmeceutical research amounts to finding ways to concentrate or control naturally occurring compounds and processes to affect human physiology in beneficial ways. If the natural operation of some creatures can do exactly what we want in certain situations, why shouldn’t we use these ‘medical devices’? The eww factor should only apply when such critters show up in uncontrolled ways.

Aha, it’s not just psychosomatic then. Methinks that a firmer understanding of the mechanisms by which this works could have great potential for medicine, especially for the treatment of pain.

Always interesting to read research that yet again confirms that people’s cultures and personalities have significant effects on how they observe the world. (It underscores how much training is required to even approach looking at anything ‘objectively’.) On the other hand…why does this continue to surprise people? Taoism and Buddhism (among others) have been pointing out this effect for millenia, and quantum theory has laid it out more ’scientifically’ for nearly a century.

Um, okay, anyone who says that Chicago’s being midway down the liberal-conservative spectrum is ’surprising’ hasn’t really paid attention to this town’s politics over the last century or so. Democrats control the town because ward-machine politics gets things done, and the Dems got there first. The ‘liberal’ tendency towards lots of public services exists because providing those services helps bring in the votes. Chicago Democrats have never really staked out policy positions that strayed very far from moderate, especially in comparison with their party brethren on the coasts.

It has been established beyond doubt and accepted by many researchers, that the placebo-controlled randomised controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy

Wow…that’s pretty much an admission that homeopathy is doomed to fail any tests that follow our silly ‘conventional’ ideas of how logic, science, evidence, and data analysis. Well then, if a controlled and randomized study isn’t appropriate, what pray tell is an appropriate method?

Astounding how many questions can be answered and annoyances allayed by actually bothering to read the documentation.

Glad to see they’re at least pretending that the recent edict won’t be a complete top-down dictatorship of the hyper-PC. However, even this will probabaly turn into a mess…consider my alma mater. A look at the tragic history of the Illini tribes shows that the University’s athletic moniker is essentially their last vestige. If there’s no one left to give blessing, is the school therefore denied any successful appeal? On the other hand, if there’s no one around to approve or protest, who is the team name offending? And if it’s more ‘generally offensive’, why stop at college sports teams? Should GM be forever banned from any association with college sports (or the dollars of the righteous) due to its appropriation of Pontiac? What about place names in the U.S. and Canada, often named after tribes and chiefs who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away? Shouldn’t the NCAA flee the state of Indiana altogether?

Good to see that some people are putting some advanced ideas into something that too often gets lost in the debates about war

We spend a lot of money on training people and conducting war, We have to put what’s needed into helping these people when they come back.

At this point in time, I don’t think there’s any doubt that robotic missions provide a much better cost/benefit ratio for science and engineering than do manned missions, so I would strongly prefer that NASA direct its (taxpayer) funding in that direction. But of course such cold reasoning can be thrown out the window when it comes to privately funded ventures–if some people with tens upon tens of millions of dollars to spare think a few moments of almost-orbital flight are worth the cost, who are we to argue? For NASA to provide seed money, coordination, and encouragement for private ventures to develop new vehicles seems like a wondeful idea. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to more routine manned missions is the efficiency, safety, and cost of propulsion technology, so expanding the base of people who will experiment and explore–even (especially?) if for reasons of vanity and thrill–might improve things more quickly than the centralized, bureaucratic process that is current NASA rocket science.

Wow, rather than try to address the issues that lead to the filing (and granting) of frivolous and contentious patents, rather than expand upon our valuable first-to-invent concept, what goal does Congress set for revising the patent system? Change the rules so as to reduce the number of lawsuits that can happen. A brilliant example of treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease if I’ve ever heard one–not to mention why logical-, techical-minded people get so exasperated with politicians and lawyers.

It seems to me that the ability to sift through unstructured data and drawn meaningful content from it–especially emergent properties rather than mere induction or deduction–is a key element of artificial intelligence, perhaps even more so than the venerable Turing Test. Somewhat ironic here that after decades of academic AI studies, an important step forward may have come out of the simple desire to cut costs.

Life, however, is lived on a slippery slope: Taxation could become confiscation; police could become gestapos. But the benefits from taxation and police make us willing to wager that our judgment can stop slides down dangerous slopes.

And people sometimes thik that politics and law will lead to clarity and simplicity? Ha.

Executive privilege has its place, but it’s really unfortunate how its extent all depends upon the political climate rather than a more holistic debate on its merits and limits. Really, any public official should expect that any discussions and deliberations made about public issues–on taxpayers’ time and money–are to be public knowledge; anyone who can’t deal with that should go instead into private enterprises where disclosure can be as broad or narrow as employment contracts specify. Certainly there are a few situations–ongoing criminal investigations, specific information that could compromise public safety, etc.–where withholding information is in the public interest, but any such cases should be provable to an independent entity (judge, arbitration panel, whatever) and limited to the minimum time necessary; no one, not even the President, should be able to self-certify information as ‘privileged’ without the possiblity of independent review.

Given its importance in European and American cultures, the Bible–and the ways in which it is interpreted and used–is most certainly a valid topic for study; in that light I would have no objections to elective courses in public schools. Yet the rumblings from otherwise supportive parents that the current implementations reflect a very particular sectarian bent indicate that, despite protestations of the course creators, the current efforts are less about education and more about proselytizing. Besides, if it’s really For the Children’s Education, given that the course covers material that the kids should already know pretty well, wouldn’t it make more sense to explore other religions–gee, I dunno, understanding the Koran springs to mind–either in comparision with the Bible or on their own merits? I’d love to see how the Bible-course advocacy groups would respond (squirm?) in the face of that idea.

So, according to some federal agencies and business types, when we find that nature doesn’t want to fit with our views of how it ’should’ work to be convenient, the answer is not to adjust our views but instead to ignore actual reality. Lovely. UC’s Steve Allen (who has put together some nice, if technical, summaries of leap-second issues) puts things in nice perspective:

If your navigation system causes two planes to crash because of a one-second error, you have worse problems than leap seconds.

Perhaps I’m being too provincial, but how can a story about overzealous tow trucks not even briefly allude to Steve Goodman? Kinda scary to read how little oversight there is over these practices.

At first I wondered why the not-really-disappearance of Ronnie Woo Woo rated big attention from the local papers. Isn’t there enough pithy news going on? Since it didn’t supplant harder news (well, it did in Red Eye, but that’s pretty fluffy anyway) it occurred to me that these sorts of stories are actually decent fare: they add that little bit of local color that makes an area unique. Many towns have their local celebrities and quirky personalities…but as anyone who’s attended a few Cubs games over the last several years knows, there’s only one Woo.

Washington loves farce the way Vienna loves the waltz. It once extravagantly inflated a sex act into the impeachment of a president, and it has now reduced the momentous debacle of the Iraq war into a question of what Rove or someone else said to a reporter on the phone.

Given the chronic funding problems of many school districts, held hostage as they often are to the magnanimity of local property owners, is it really any wonder that the threat of further funding loss posed by No Child Left Behind act standards would lead to districts’ cooking their performance numbers? Minimal national standards for education are a good, noble thing, but the rather draconian methods of the current law are more likely to improve the performance of creative accountants than children. To hold the administrators (and teachers?) accountable, at the price of their jobs, for their students’ performance over x number of years would seem to be a more effective use of the punishment style of legislation. Moreover, I really don’t think that any sort of top-down mechanism, whether tax breaks for exceptional teachers or public executions of failing districts’ adminstrators, is going to make any significant difference in the quality of American education unless and until the onus is put on parents to get personally, actively, and continually involved in pushing their children to become effective, eager students.

Restoring the faith of the world–and our own citizenry–that the USA stands for nobler principles than mere realpolitik would probably do as much, if not more, to ensuring the nation’s safety than any war effort. It’s sad, really, how straightforward the required policy changes would be if only the neocons and assorted partisan hacks in the current administration would only have the vision to see the larger benefits.

There may be a need to detain for extended periods persons who pose a clear and present threat. But the authority to do so should come from Congress, not a president’s whim. Any such statute should set out clear criteria for detention and establish some independent periodic review to determine whether detention is still warranted.

Seriously, I (and probably others too) would be much more willing to give the executive branch broader latitude to preemptively deal with people who could cause wide destruction if I could be assured that an independent review process were there to halt the excesses and correct the mistakes. No power of the government over the individual should ever be beyond review. Is that really too much to ask?

I remember how astonished I was about a decade ago when on a trip to Goddard I learned that nearly all of the Space Shuttle program was run by a NASA contractor. Government agencies are often terrible at running big projects efficiently, but when it comes to science and engineering–projects whose benefits are often intangible and invisible except in hindsight–they are better than the private sector simply because, in lacking the pressure to show some ROI after X quarters, they can base their decisions on the merits of the project. Perfectly? Well, no, but even some freedom to choose metrics based in nobler goals than simple profit is a huge improvement IMHO.

See the reports that members of Congress read (er, well, at least receive)

Wiki to help the Windoze masses migrate to more sensible user-privilege allocations

Star Wars as parable for a society that wants its experts to provide a comfy, carefree life but is simultaneously distrustful because it doesn’t care to really understand them. Perhaps a cynical and pessimistic stretch to our current America, but a fun and interesting thesis nonetheless.

Since the investigators didn’t ‘officially’ invoke the Patriot Act–merely channeled its spirit–then the administration’s recent protestations that the FBI hasn’t used the Act is technically true, I suppose. But to continue opposition to removing the offending provisions on the basis that they haven’t been used is brutally twisted logic. It’s truly sad that such hubris no longer surprises me.

A well-written piece, but it seems to attack a straw-man argument. In my view the more important aspects of opposition to what we’ve done in Iraq are that the Bush administration went in under false pretenses and with woefully inadequate, ideologically-based planning.

…American politics has been characterized by two phenomena: the increased activism of the Christian right, especially in the Republican Party, and the collapse of bipartisan collegiality. I do not think it is a stretch to suggest a relationship between the two. To assert that I am on God’s side and you are not, that I know God’s will and you do not, and that I will use the power of government to advance my understanding of God’s kingdom is certain to produce hostility.
By contrast, moderate Christians see ourselves, literally, as moderators. Far from claiming to possess God’s truth, we claim only to be imperfect seekers of the truth. We reject the notion that religion should present a series of wedge issues useful at election time for energizing a political base. We believe it is God’s work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree, and to overcome the meanness we see in today’s politics.

As long as a significiant fraction of the population holds beliefs along these lines, there’s hope for this country yet (even if polticians haven’t gotten the memo yet).

More advisory bodies like New York’s Task Force on Life and Law seem like a great idea to help strike a proper balance between competing–and often diametrically opposed–views on how we legally cope with highly personal life-and-death issues. They might at least allow for more reasoned, sober analysis and less stridency.

Using wave-function collapse to refute certain aspects of time travel. Nifty way to establish the obvious. Of course, its conclusions take away much of the incentive for time travel in the first place. Will that maybe lead to an end to the debates about this time-travel nonsense?

More clear Paul Graham thinking, indicating that internet blacklists are fundamentally prone to abuse. Contains perhaps the most succinct definition of terrorism I’ve seen in a while:

This is, strictly speaking, terrorism: harming innnocent people as a way to pressure some central authority into doing what you want.

Would that more people kept that in mind before bandying the term about.

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