Three-Toed Sloth

Assorted Link Roundup, May 2008

Without style or grace.

Wolfgang Beirl explains why financial engineers (like the ones I've been teaching this semester) are also known as "rocket scientists". There are connections here to Wolfgang's thoughts on telephones and the foundations of statistics.

Man's role in changing the face of the Earth dep't.: Ben Fry's map of the 48 contiguous states, showing only streets and roads. Everything else, astonishingly, emerges from that. (Via Unfogged.)

The radical right revives the theory of magical kingship propounded by Sir J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough, in which the health of the land is sympathetically tied to the character of the ruler, as an account of the American presidency, and correspondingly prophecies doom, doom, DOOM! should Hillary be elected. Illustrated with kittens. Note: WorldNetDaily, unlike the Landover Baptist Church, is not a parody. (I've mentioned them before.)

Speaking of signs of the apocalypse, Thomas "The Baffler" Frank is now writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal. (Via Aaron Swartz.)

Mind Hacks offers two neurologically-themed tattoos, observing of the second that it produces "a markedly different effect, despite the fact it resides in the same location".

Steve Laniel and Tom Slee review Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. You have probably already seen or read Shirky's talk "Gin, Television and Social Surplus". His social history is over-simplified, and I get a bit leery of my own response to things which push my buttons so thoroughly, but nonetheless — preach it, brother Clay, preach it!

Brooks Simpson, in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center, briskly shreds various lies about the US Civil War and the Confederacy propagated by modern apologists for "treason in defense of slavery". Via Abiola Lapite, who has a good post on the genetics of height.

Sierpinski cookies (via Dave Feldman).

Because I am a mean and vicious person, I take great pleasure at reading Kathy G. toy with someone who pretends to know something about economics (1, 2, 3, 4). G. is a public-spirited person, so when she says "I write about economic theory because I believe it is Really. Fucking. Important. Bad economic models make for bad economic policies.", I believe her. But I enjoy reading her for the sheer pleasure in the evisceration. Similarly, I think that in a juster world, Camille Paglia would now be remembered only as the occasion for this 1991 Molly Ivins essay.

Kit Whitfield explains the concept of a "Macho Sue":

A disagreeable variant of Mary Sue, often found in action films, cop shows and the more battly kind of science fiction. While Mary Sue is a fictional character who bends the universe around herself with her amazing specialness, Macho Sue bends the universe around his manhood. He has a particular ability to get away with behaviour that would be considered bad in a woman — to the point of behaviour that would be considered typically female by a misogynist if displayed by a woman.

These traits usually involve poor self-control, such as outbursts, tantrums, sulks, and a refusal to take responsibility for his own behaviour towards others when he's upset. It's not uncommon for Macho Sue to be prejudiced, or at least suspicious of the unfamiliar, and he's almost always unusually disrespectful to others; he has a particular propensity for taking an unreasonable dislike to somebody on sight (only to have it validated later). When thwarted, he tends to be affronted as well as frustrated, in a way that suggests neither he nor the narrative think it right that anyone but him should ever get their way. The story tends to throw straw men at him by way of obstacles, but they're never shown as equally masculine, and thus are without any heroism of their own. Macho Sue is emotional, but with such an assumption of gendered authority that nobody questions the manliness — in the rightful sense of 'adulthood' — of his behaviour.

She instances (the characters played by) John Wayne, but, oddly enough, neglects to mention Achilles.

Further on the literary-critical vein, a remarkably funny, yet thoroughly horrifying, review of a set of novels I will not be reading. It ends thus

The PALADIN OF SHADOWS series is arguably the most horrifying series of books I have ever read. It has a hero I can't stand, politics so strong they're comical, and sex scenes that are downright horrifying. And I cannot stop reading it. I am going to buy every single one, and if Ringo ever comes out with a spin-off featuring Katya as Cottontail the Bionic Whore, I will buy that too. Because dammit, there's bad, and then there's so bad you have to memorialize it for future generations.

but you really need to read what comes before it to get the full effect. The reaction by the author of the books in question is — startling. (Via Kate Nepveu.)

Thematically not-unrelated, an experiment with a famous comic book author. (For the record, I liked Ronin well enough when I read it as a teenager, but generally haven't seen what there was to get excited about in Miller's work; at most a "lower and distorted form" of a general theme.)

Second in our series of great moments in Afghan Buddhism: the earliest known oil paintings may be from Bamiyan (via Matthew Berryman).

You should read Existence Is Wonderful. She changes my mind about things.

I become more and more convinced that one of the keys to understanding our intellectual life is the Skolnick Effect. It is hard to understand the success of neuromarketing otherwise, for example. It's not that functional brain imaging can't be scientifically useful (I'm involved in some projects myself), but the level of the usual study which gets popular attention is to tell us, on the basis of tiny samples, that some part of the brain is differentially activated by thoughts of attaining money, chocolate, justice and sex and/or dirty pictures. (That last link in particular offers a glimpse into a remarkable clusterfuck of bad science journalism amplifying sloppy thinking.) At this point what you are really learning is that there isn't a straightforward mapping from our psychological concepts to paticular brain regions, which is something the neuropsychologists have been trying to tell you for quite a while now. You can even say it with math, but that doesn't seem to make people any more inclined to listen.

Worse, the journalists — and even many of the scientists — seem incapable of separating "implemented in the brain" from "innate". (A recent offender, via Abiola. [It wouldn't surprise me in the least if some sense of social hierarchy is innate in human beings — with all the disclaimers about what such statements mean hereby incorporated by reference — but the point is that the results reported are completely irrelevant to the question of innateness.]) I realize we have thousands of years of ingrained ideas about mind-body dualism and human nature to work through here, but honestly, people, could we at least get into the eighteenth century? All our thoughts and actions involve our brains somehow; detecting them in the brain with current technology says nothing about their being innate, unless you want to seriously say that the rules of chess are hard-wired into our genomes. But if I pursue this further I will get into the bog of free will, and the idiotic conclusions about it people draw from weird experiments...

(Meanwhile, the fact that people can get papers in Science out of the astonishing prediction that territorial ethnic conflict requires the geographic proximity of (self-perceived) ethnic groups, and is rare in locales where one group is an overwhelming majority, suggests that there is a version of the Skolnick Effect involving toy-model simulations.)

The newly-risen Fafblog shows that prophetic parody is the only way to keep up with the real news.

Carlos Yu has, sadly, stopped blogging. I feel a bit bad because I always liked his stuff and rarely told him so. I will miss very much the only blogger capable of writing about ancient Sanskrit plays featuring "creepy horny drunk carnivorous beggars covered in human ash, accompanied by hott chick acolytes, carrying around someone's skull, asking you for money" (parenthetically adding "I think they used to squat in Tompkins Square Park"); the grand unified theory of wingnuts; Garry Wills; paleobiochemistry; football and other pure products of America; and God knows what else. I hope that, like Fafblog, he will one day return.

A while back, Brad DeLong linked to a parody of Thomas Aquinas's proofs of the existence of God, Five Ways of Proving the Existence of Santa Claus. This is ridiculous, of course, but really not much more so than such serious topics treated by the Angelic Doctor as the relation of the saints to the damned (the saints in Heaven will see the suffering of the damned perfectly; will have no pity towards them; and will in fact rejoice in their suffering); whether the weeping of the damned will be corporeal (yes, but there will be no tears); and whether the damned will be in material darkness:

The disposition of hell will be such as to be adapted to the utmost unhappiness of the damned. Wherefore accordingly both light and darkness are there, in so far as they are most conducive to the unhappiness of the damned. Now seeing is in itself pleasant for, as stated in Metaph. i, "the sense of sight is most esteemed, because thereby many things are known."

Yet it happens accidentally that seeing is painful, when we see things that are hurtful to us, or displeasing to our will. Consequently in hell the place must be so disposed for seeing as regards light and darkness, that nothing be seen clearly, and that only such things be dimly seen as are able to bring anguish to the heart. Wherefore, simply speaking, the place is dark. Yet by Divine disposition, there is a certain amount of light, as much as suffices for seeing those things which are capable of tormenting the soul. The natural situation of the place is enough for this, since in the centre of the earth, where hell is said to be, fire cannot be otherwise than thick and cloudy, and reeky as it were.

Some hold that this darkness is caused by the massing together of the bodies of the damned, which will so fill the place of hell with their numbers, that no air will remain, so that there will be no translucid body that can be the subject of light and darkness, except the eyes of the damned, which will be darkened utterly.

On which note, I have a final exam to give.

Linkage; The Commonwealth of Letters; Minds, Brains, and Neurons; The Natural Science of the Human Species; The Beloved Republic; Afghanistan and Central Asia; The Dismal Science; Math; Learned Folly; The Running-Dogs of Reaction; The Continuing Crises; Philosophy; Psychoceramics

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, April 2008

Richard Bookstaber, A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation

One part "financial crises I have known" to one part general thoughts about market dynamics, and in particular the difficulties that arise due to complexity, "tight coupling" of markets, and leverage. The stories are going to be familiar to most people interested in the subject. The latter are interesting but under-argued. This is true even when I agree with him, about, e.g., the limitations of statistical modeling in financial markets. (The pages on Gödel's Theorem, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and chaos were painful, but also completely logically independent of the stuff about finance.)

This may get a full review later. For now I'd just say that his main recommendations — avoid complex and novel financial instruments, avoid leverage, and avoid trying to optimize to current conditions, in favor of responding adequately to a wide range of situations, including ones you can't currently anticipate — are not bad as words of wisdom, but he has no hint as to how they could be implemented under current conditions, i.e., in the actually-existing capitalist financial system he describes.

This interview with Andrew Leonard in Salon serves as a decent summary.

John McGowan, American Liberalism

Unapologetic advocacy of modern liberalism as an attempt to provide equal and, crucially, effective freedom to all. Liberalism tries to achieve this by creating institutions which make arbitrary, unaccountable, unchecked power ineffective, because powers are checked and balanced by other sources of power and made to answer for theirs actions to those over whom power is exercised. (This distinguishes it from anarchism, whose ideal is simply to eliminate power.) The means by which these things are achieved are secondary, and evaluated pragmatically, by their effectiveness and side-effects in given conditions as compared to available alternatives. (Liberalism, though he doesn't put it this way, becomes in his hands a general ideology of the second best.) Seen thus, there is a clear line of descent between the 18th century liberalism of (most of) the American founders and the modern ideology, with the main development being taking seriously the bit about all men being created equal.

McGowan tries very hard here to reach the general educated public, rather than fellow academics, and almost succeeds. (There are turns of phrase which make it obvious that he's read his post-structuralists, but they're not unreadable ones.) The ideal book along these lines would be something at the level of, say, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, and McGowan isn't there, is still a little too committed to academic forms, but this is clearly a labor of love, and I hope it will succeed in being influential.

(I confess, though, that I don't get why he thinks cell phones are worse for involvement in the public sphere than land-lines. The reverse, if anything.)

John McCleary, A First Course in Topology: Continuity and Dimension

Well-written textbook of topology, with a historical flavor (but modern methods), and an emphasis on (as the subtitle suggests) the problem of showing that dimension is invariant under continuous and invertible mappings (homeomorphisms). The reader needs a solid grasp of basic real analysis, linear algebra and abstract algebra.

William R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800--1850

A very solid historical work, though it presumes a fair degree of familiarity with the Protestant sects of early 19th century America, and even with the political history of New York. (I lose any right to review this by the fact that I had to look up the Holland Company, and was boggld by what I found.) Though he does not put it this way, a big part of his thesis as to why much but not all of western New York was so susceptible to religious and semi-religious fads then was that the pure products of Yankeedom go crazy. He makes this very plausible, in a way which nonetheless manages to be sympathetic to the enthusiasts.

Some remarks about feminine weaknesses, and the places where he seems to blame the Civil war on, of all people, the Abolitionists, are distasteful, but also a sign of the moral progress separating us from 1950...

David Ruelle, The Mathematician's Brain: A Personal Tour Through the Essentials of Mathematics and Some of the Great Minds Behind Them

An eminent mathematical physicist's take on mathematics and mathematicians. It manages to be sane, pragmatic, thoroughly unromantic, and yet highly enthusiastic for the subject. I actually think anyone who remembers high school math could follow everything; his trick, here, is to start with that sort of stuff and explain how mathematicians generalize it, why they generalize it, and especially why they generalize it in certain ways and not others. — Despite the title, this is strictly psychological, with negligible neuroscience. Given the utter lack of useful neuroscientific data about mathematical thinking, this is sound.

Draws on his "Conversations on mathematics with a visitor from outer space" (PDF), but with all traces of Gallic whimsy removed. (They would probably have become unbearable at book length.)

Matthew Yglesias, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats

Young master Yglesias finally delivers on that early promise with a book, which, mercifully, is not about blogging and not just a collection of his blogging. Rather it is a sustained, sober, well-written argument in favor of robustly and forthrightly re-embracing the tradition of liberal internationalism, which tries to create institutions that will channel international affairs in peaceful directions and restrain raw power, in order to create a better world for all, including the powerful. As against this we have various strains of nationalist and/or imperialist viciousness and idiocy. Yglesias argues for liberal internationalism and against other ideologies on grounds of morals, practical benefits (the life of a hegemonic power being nasty, brutish and short), and sheer political expediency for the Democratic party, since the alternative hasn't been working out all that well. (He also offers up some brisk but sincere mea culpas.) I would have preferred more argument about morals, e.g. reminding people that the point of our country is not supposed to be a thousand years of crushing global military dominance, but suspect my own impulses in that direction.

Can be read in a day, if you're stuck on planes. Highly recommended if you're in to this sort of thing.

Warren Ellis and Salvador Larroca, Newuniversal: Everything Went White

Comic-book candy. — OK, it deserves a little more than that. From time to time Timothy Burke complains about how astonishing things happen in comic books, which ought to transform the world, but somehow life goes on exactly as before. This series starts from a world slightly askew from our own, where the appearance of superhumans does, in fact, change things.

Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue

Sequel to The Atrocity Archive. More lightheartedly chilling Lovecraftian spy fiction, from the perspective of the geeks in IT. Only, this time, haunted by the ghost of James Bond.

John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action

"And now abideth liberty, individuality, and the critical use of intelligence, these three; but the greatest of these is intelligence." (Not an actual quotation.)

Brian K. Vaughan et al., Ex Machina: Tag; Fact vs. Fiction; March to War; Smoke Smoke; Power Down

Comic books. Actually, I read these back in February, not too long after the first in the series, but forgot to mention them here. I suspect I can guess where this is going, but even if I'm right I want to see how they get there.

Margaret Maron, Up Jumps the Devil; Killer Market; and Home Fires

More unreasonably charming mystery novels about murder in increasingly-exurban North Carolina. Series fatigue will doubtless set in eventually.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur

May Day 2008: Strike Against the War

What follows is a letter my friend John Burke has been circulating to friends. John used to blog as "reprieved" a.k.a. "rootlesscosmo", but gave that up. I wish he'd start again; but in the meanwhile I have his permission to reprint this.

I well remember how indignant a lot of antiwar people were at US organized labor's late, feeble, and sometimes dead wrong positions during the Vietnam War. Much of the then AFL-CIO leadership supported the war (though this support grew less vocal as the war dragged on under a Republican administration); so did a lot of union members, notably the building trades "hard hats" who waded into an antiwar rally in Manhattan in 1969. There were exceptions, including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) on the West Coast and, eventually, the United Auto Workers and a number of public employee unions; there was a labor coalition against the war, which formed a contingent at rallies, bought ads in the print media, and lent support to antiwar candidates.

What there wasn't, though, was any use of labor's economic strength--the strike weapon--to express opposition to the war, and that baffled and irritated some antiwar activists, especially those who didn't know much about labor law or labor history. (I know this doesn't apply to a lot of the recipients of this message; feel free to skip ahead if this is familiar material.) In particular, students from middle-class families weren't aware that under the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, the use of the strike weapon for any purpose except in disputes about collective bargaining agreements is explicitly prohibited. They also may not have grasped the context of Taft-Hartley, which--though labor opposed it and Truman vetoed it, only to be overridden by a Republican-majority Congress--set in stone the main outlines of the postwar, Cold War-era "social compact:" labor would save job action for "pork chop" issues, confine its political action to endorsing candidates, impose a "loyalty" test on union leaders (which led to the expulsion of the Left-led unions from the CIO in 1949) and become a partner in the worldwide struggle against Communism. In return, major corporate employers would recognize unions and accept contracts that included regular productivity and cost-of-living increases; there were occasional disruptions in this cozy arrangement, but strike activity fell sharply from the big upsurge in 1946-47 and stayed low until the "stagflation" and mass layoffs that began in the mid-70's.

So job action against the Vietnam War would have been not only a challenge to the law but a sharp break with the postwar social compact, at a time when that compact's real meaning was thrown into sharp focus: labor was called on to support a Third World military intervention against a Communist-led liberation movement, at a moment when that intervention was producing a flush of prosperity and job growth. (Harry Bridges of the ILWU, when he launched a campaign to recruit new members from high-unemployment communities in response to the growth of war-related Pacific shipping, admitted ruefully that it was blood money.)

But the social compact started falling apart in the 1970's--the war turned out to be a large part of the reason, though I've promised myself not to use the word "dialectical" in this brief survey--and Reagan shredded it after 1980. The Cold War is over, the steady-growth postwar economy is over, union density as a percentage of the workforce is down from 35% to 13% (and less in the once-powerful industrial sector), anti-labor policies have been entrenched at the NLRB for many years, and neither the Carter nor Clinton administrations achieved labor's goal of legislative reform. (How hard did they try? Good question.)

In short, the deal that undergirded labor's qualified support for the Vietnam War has fallen apart.

The postwar social compact was a tradeoff; the other side went back on the bargain. It's time for labor to begin reclaiming its full range of tactical options in support of a robust participation in political life, on an agenda of labor's choosing without the artificial constraints imposed by Taft-Hartley. This will be, inevitably, a gradual process, and it may get ugly; I don't think there are any US Attorneys dumb enough to try to indict the ILWU leadership, but I may be being too generous. (It's a grave failing of mine.)

In any case, the first big crack in the ice is the ILWU's planned coastwide work stoppage tomorrow,

http://maydayilwu.googlepages.com/ which will also coincide with and support an immigrants' rights rally (and it certainly is refreshing that the immigrants' movement has reclaimed May Day as a day of workers' action; sure, the sectarian Lefties will try to hop aboard the bandwagon, but who cares?) I'll be marching tomorrow, with my United Transportation Union button on, prouder of the labor movement, my movement, than I've ever had a chance to feel in my life. Hope to see you there.

The only thing I have to add is that when John says "my United Transportation Union button", he means "the button of the union I belonged to during the more than a quarter century I worked on the railroads".

Manual trackback: Chaotic Soliloquy; Stripes with Plaid

The Continuing Crisis; The Progressive Forces

Putting the CART before the Horse-Race

Finally, from Amanda Cox at the Times, a decision tree students can believe in (click for full size):

Now, if I wanted to be a hobby-horse-riding pedant, I would compare this to a regression of vote-share on these covariates, and ask you rhetorically which one was easier to understand, and which gave more of a misleading impression of being more than a summary description; but I'll save that for the poor souls who take data mining in the fall. (This is from the 16th; it would be interesting to see how it changed after last Tuesday. Not that I'm bitter.)

Local interest note: Ms. Cox will be judging the final-project posters produced by the students in Prof. Nugent's graphics and visualization class (36-315), next Friday, 2 May, 12:30 to 1:20 pm in Porter Hall 125C. Friendly, non-psychotic visitors are welcome.

Via Flowing Data, via K. (Owing to the silly limits of the Times archives, I can't find the direct link to the story!)

Manual trackback: A Well, With Two Buckets

The Beloved Republic; Enigmas of Chance

From Your Lips...

I swear I had nothing to do with this; blame them.

Via Bill Tozier.

Complexity; Learned Folly

Voting will continue until morale improves (Public Service Announcement)

If you (1) live in Pennsylviana, (2) are registered to vote and (3) are not sure about where to vote, what to bring, etc., votesPA.com has the information you are looking for.

Manual trackback: Cranial Darwinism.

The Beloved Republic

Chaos, Complexity, and Inference (36-462): Lecture Notes

This page will be updated as the semester goes on, if you want to use this RSS feed to track them. Alternately, lecture notes will be linked to on the course syllabus, which includes the readings.

Lecture 25 (April 22): Inference on networks

slides

Lecture 24 (April 15): Contagion on networks

slides

Lecture 23 (April 10): Collective phenomena and self-organization in agent-based models

slides

Lecture 22 (April 8): Agents and Agent-Based Models

slides

Lecture 21 (April 3): Complex networks 2

slides

Lecture 20 (April 1): Complex networks 1

slides

Lecture 19 (March 25): Inference from simulations

slides; R

Lecture 18 (March 20): Special problem-solving session for homework 2

partial solutions; R

Lecture 17 (March 18): Error Statistics and Severe Testing

slides

Lecture 16 (March 6): Heavy tails 4, testing and evaluation

slides and R

Lecture 15 (March 4): Heavy tails 3, estimation

slides

Lecture 14 (February 28): Heavy tails 2, origins

slides

Lecture 13 (February 26): Heavy tails 1, basics

General R files for the next several lectures

slides; R

Lecture 12 (February 21): Self-organization 2

slides

Lecture 11 (February 19): Cellular automata 2/Excitable media

slides

Lecture 10 (February 14): Cellular automata 1

slides

Lecture 9 (February 12): Self-organization 1

Philip and Phylis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten

slides

see also: Pattern Formation in Cocktails

Lecture 8 (February 7): Determinism and randomness

Henri Poincaré, "Chance" (from Science and Method, 1908)

slides

Lecture 7 (February 5): Information theory

slides

M.C. Hawking, "Entropy", from Fear of a Black Hole [lyrics; mp3 (radio-safe Brief History of Rhyme version)]

Ray and Charles Eames, A Communications Primer

Lecture 6 (January 31): Inference for Markov chains and related processes

slides

Note: Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Markov Chains

Lecture 5 (January 29): Symbolic dynamics; stochastics from dynamics

slides

Note: More on the Topological Entropy Rate

Lecture 4 (January 24): Attractor reconstruction and nonlinear prediction

slides (see slides for R examples).

Note: Nonlinear prediction, nearest-neighbors, kernel methods

Lorenz time-series generator, written in Perl.

the Lorenz time series used in the lecture

Lecture 3 (January 22): Attractors

slides; R

Lecture 2 (January 17): More chaos

slides; R

The Arnold Cat Map Movie (starring Marlowe the Cat, directed by Evelyn Sander)

Lecture 1 (January 15): What is a dynamical system? What is chaos? What is a simulation?

slides; R

Corrupting the Young; Complexity; Enigmas of Chance; Networks

"Thou Shalt Not Follow a Multitude to Do Evil"

From William R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800--1850 (reprint; New York: Harper, 1965, pp. 81--82):

The whole tribe of Yorkers exhibited a trait which bears on the nature of Burned-Over District credulity. It ranks in importance with the canniness and moral intensity customarily attributed to Yankees and relates to both, but has been less noticed because it is difficult to define and isolate. Against the "holy enterprise of minding other people's business," which produced a marked community-mindedness, these folk balanced a stubborn intrspection in the fashioning of personal beliefs, which recognized no authority this side of Heaven. Frank curiosity, pride in independent thinking, a feeling that action should be motivated by sound logic and never by whimsy, a profound skepitcism of any rationalization looking to less than the supposed ultimate good of society, and, once arrived at, an overweening confidence in one's own judgment — all these attitudes differently demonstrate the same trait. The mores of the community must definitely be observed when established and agreed upon, but in practice they remained forever open to challenge and subject to revision. No apology was required for unorthodoxy dictated by conscience in conference with Scripture; rather, any difference from custom created a compelling obligation for the individual to press toward conformity with his own new light.

Cross goes on in a footnote to add that "Certain angles of [this trait] survive the generations of Yankee descendants, and my discussion of it is based in part upon observation of acquaintances, my family, and myself".

The Beloved Republic; Psychoceramica

The End of the Age

Vanquished, the hero sails into the west, but legend says that he will return when his people's peril is most dire. (The legend does not say whether that was a promise or a threat.)

(Photo via Warren Ellis, who got it from English Russia)

Linkage

Solvitur ambulando

A: Hey, you over there, the one walking! You're doing it wrong.
B: Excuse me?
A: You're only using two feet! You should keep at least three of your six in contact with the ground at all times.
B: ...
A: Look, it's easily proved that's the optimal way to walk. Otherwise you'd be unstable, and if you were walking past a Dutchman he could kick one of your legs with his clogs and knock you over and then lecture you on how to make pancakes.
B: What? Why a Dutchman?
A: You can't trust the Dutch, they're everywhere! Besides, every time you walk it's really just like running the gauntlet at Schiphol.
B: It is?
A: Don't change the subject! Walking like that you're actually sessile!
B: I don't seem to be rooted in place...
A: It's a technical term. Look, it's very simple, these are all implications of the axioms of the theory of optimal walking and you're breaking them all. I can't get over how immobile you are, walking like that.
B: "Immobile"?
A: Well, you're not walking properly, are you?
B: Your theory seems to assume I have six legs.
A: Yes, exactly!
B: I only have two legs. It doesn't describe what I do at all.
A: It's a normative theory.
B: For something with six legs.
A: Yes.
B: I have two legs. Does your theory have any advice about how to walk on two legs?
A: Could you try crawling on your hands and knees?

Disclaimer: A is the one with the weird Batavophobia, not me.

Manual trackback: Vukutu

Learned Folly; Enigmas of Chance

Behold the Masses (Next Week at the CMU Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Publicity for a talk at CMU next week. Of limited interest if you're not free and in Pittsburgh at 4 pm on Monday the 14th.

We are very happy to have Nathan Eagle, of the Media Lab and SFI, as our seminar speaker next week, talking about the extremely cool work he's been doing on some extremely large social networks.

"Inference in Complex Social Systems: Insights and Applications from the Behavior of the Aggregate"

Monday, 14 April 2008, 4 pm, Porter Hall 125C at Carnegie Mellon

Abstract: I have used mobile phones to continuously gather information including proximity, location, and communication from 100 human subjects at MIT. Systematic measurements from these people over the course of nine months has generated one of the largest dataset of continuous human behavior ever collected, representing over 300,000 hours of daily activity. Additionally, in collaboration with several European and African telecommunication companies, I am currently analyzing the call logs of entire countries - dynamic social networks consisting of up to 250 million nodes and 12 billion temporal edges.

In this talk I describe how this type of data can be used to uncover the structure in behavior of both individuals and organizations, infer relationships, and study social network dynamics. By combining theoretical models with rich and systematic measurements, we show it is possible to gain insight into the underlying behavior of complex social systems.

While results such as uncovering scaling laws from the communication patterns of hundreds of millions of people will certainly be one emphasis in this talk, of equal importance is how this data can enable applications that improve our society. I will demonstrate a variety ways these insights into our own behaviors can be used to develop applications that better support both the individual, organization and society.

The talk is of course free and open to the public; come if it sounds interesting (unless you're like some people who attend talks in Santa Fe [not that Nathan's work is remotely comparable to Sheldrake's]).

Networks; Enigmas of Chance; Complexity

He Is Risen

Fafblog has returned to us. Long live the new era of Fafno-Gibletsian rule over the cosmos!

Linkage

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2008

I slacked off on posting this until mid-April, if anyone cares about why it's out of sequence.

Joss Whedon, Fray

Comic book. Mmm, candy.

Simon Oliver & c., Exterminators, vol. 1: Bug Brothers

Comic book. LA low-lives hold the line against the forces of chaos, embodied by vermin and large corporations. A bit of a come-down for the combat myth from Python, perhaps, but I'll be reading the others.

Sandra McDonald, The Outback Stars

Aussies in space, after a never-quite-spelled-out ecological collapse on Earth, with mysterious ancient alien artifacts and naval-procedural elements. Mind-candy.

Warren Ellis et al., Apparat: The Singles Collection

Four "issues" from four different otherwise-nonexistent comic books, each imagining a different line of descent from early twentieth-century pulp fiction to sequential graphic story-telling, without the invention of the superhero genre. Angel Stomp Future revisits the future-shock and technology-driven social liquification of Ellis's glorious Transmetropolitan; it's more deliberately shocking that Transmet (which is saying something), but not as good (which says little). (That sentence also applies, mutatis mutandis, to Ellis's stand-alone City of Silence.) Frank Ironwine is a detective/cop story, almost a dry run for the (excellent and continuing) Fell. Quit City descends from aviator stories (by way of confrontation with personal, and perhaps I should add metaphorical, demons); Simon Spector from old detective serials like The Shadow. They're all not just clever exercises in genre bending and para-literary archaeology, but also well-told and well-drawn tales.

Margaret Maron, Southern Discomfort and Shooting at Loons

Sequels to Bootlegger's Daughter (discussed here). Continues in a light-hearted, quirky-semi-rural-stories vein, which ought to clash with the fact that they're really stories about poverty, attempted rape and multiple homicide (Discomfort), and the collapse of traditional livelihoods and the values they supported (Loons), but, somehow, doesn't.

Phil Rickman, The Fabric of Sin

Latest in his Merrily Watkins series of "procedural ghost story" mysteries. A haunted house story, involving family feuds, the fiction of M. R. James, and people with obsessions about the Templars. Less of a supernatural element here than usual, everything is satisfactorily explicable as people being either creepy or creeped out. (Previous installments: here, here, and here.)

Jorge Cham, Piled Higher and Deeper, Chapter 3: Scooped

If the idea of a comic strip about the travails of geeks in graduate school appeals to you, then you are probably already reading Ph.D. Comics, but should buy this anyway, as a contribution to the fund for the support of cartooning roboticists. If, on the other hand, that sounds dreadful, reading this would probably only confirm your darkest suspicions about the lumpentechnocracy.

A. E. Stallings, Hapax: Poems

Highly formal (sonnets!) but also very good poems, many with classical themes, ranging in tone from the funny ("XII Klassikal Lymnaeryx") and the drily amusing ("Dead Language Lesson") to the darker "old standards" of transience and loss (e.g. "Arrowhead Hunting") — or amusement and sentiment, as in "Last Will". The "Antiblurb" on the back cover may give some idea of the contents:

This is not necessary. This is neither
Crucial nor salvation. It is no hymn
To harmonize the choirs of seraphim,
Nor any generation's bold bellwether
Leading the flock, no iridescent feather
Dropped from the Muse's wing. It does not limn,
Or speak in tongues, or voice the mute, or dim
Outmoded theories with its fireworks. Rather

This is flawed and mortal, and its stains
Bear the evidence of taking pains.
It did not have to happen, won't illumine
The smirch of history, the future's omen.
Necessity is merely what sustains —
It's what we do not need that makes us human.

Some other poems are available online here and here, and there's a version of "Recitative" (not in this collection) charmingly illustrated by R. Kikuo Johnson.

Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur

Career Advising Day

Attention Conservation Notice: Another thousand-odd-word rant about reactionary idiots pretending to be scientists.

Contemplating the writings of the now-deservedly-forgotten Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the late, great Peter Medawar was driven to observe that "Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought." (Whether that is a trained incapacity is itself a nice question.) Some of those people, owing to those tastes, pursue careers in academic research; the problem for them is that they are not actually very good at what they are supposed to do, which is come up with novel, insightful, important, precise, and accurate findings. Suppose that you are such a person, and that you do not want to switch to some other line of work to which you might be better suited. What to do?

Perhaps the best thing which could happen to you would be to run across a new and controversial theory which speaks to you at a deep level, both intellectually and temperamentally. If you are what William James called "tender-minded", like Teilhard de Chardin, then Medawar has already mapped out your trajectory, though nowadays the Templeton Foundation would likely be involved. If instead you are what James called "tough-minded" — "materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, sceptical" — then edification-through-obfuscation is not an option, but it wouldn't even occur to you. Instead, you take your theory and you write papers about it, where you make claims about lots of hot-button topics, especially sex and current political controversies. The papers seem to carry the signs of rigor, but are actually deeply fallacious — maybe you see this, but are so convinced the conclusions are right you don't care, or maybe you're so convinced of the conclusions you can't see the errors. (There is some peer-reviewed venue where you can publish almost arbitrarily sloppy papers, so getting into print won't be a problem.) Then — and this is the key — you start promoting your papers, and find that more salacious and provocative your spin on them, the bigger the response. Your possibly-unconscious shamelessness about publishing rubbish will not only give you an advantage in sheer publications over other mediocre scholars who happen to have an intellectual conscience, but will also get you media attention. The reason it will get you media attention, and credibility with the media, is that they will see your institutional affiliation and your peer-reviewed papers, and so you become not just another crank but a Serious Scholar Contributing to the Debate. The whole package — carelessness, provocation and publicity — is wonderfully self-reinforcing, so you write even more careless papers, with yet more provocative conclusions, which you push even harder. (As a wise woman once said, "No one ever forgets how to do something that's worked for them in the past.") With a bit of luck, book contracts, magazine columns, etc., will follow in their train. Your career becomes like two drunks supporting each other as they stagger down the street: neither crappy academic research nor media presence could stand up on their own, but together they can lurch and shamble in glorious, glorious inebriated freedom, bellowing about the fierce joys to be found in facing what's revealed by the harsh light of your pseudo-scientific prejudices.

Ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished others, I give you Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, the Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology, a man who has leveraged an inability to do data analysis or understand psychometrics into an official blog at Psychology Today, where he gets to advocate genocidal nuclear war as revenge for 9/11. He seems to mean it, rather than be fukayaming.

His argument — to the extent that it is an argument and not just a wish-fulfillment fantasy — has to do with his earlier attempt to explain "why most suicide bombers are Muslims". Leave to one side whether his attempted explanation is coherent, two things strike one on reading that. The first is his near-total disconnection from the literature on, precisely, the causes and motivations of suicide bombing — no Sageman, no Pape, the only mention of Scott Atran (an actual evolutionary psychologist, and very aware of the problems with the kind of crude ad hominid argument Kanazawa pushes) basically misses Atran's point, etc. The second is that the fact he is trying to explain something which isn't true: the tactic was pioneered [Update: a poor choice of words; see below] is and long has been heavily used by the decidedly non-Muslim Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This is well-known to anyone even slightly interested in understanding this horrible practice; Kanazawa doesn't even try to explain it away. But facts like these don't matter when the real goal is some combination of, on the one hand, constructing and projecting a fantasy ideology, and, on the other, sheer self-promotion.

I don't know of any systematic data on whether James's distinction between tender-minded and tough-minded thinkers really holds up, but at the level of casual empiricism it's pretty persuasive, and I fall very much on the tough-minded end of the spectrum. I find that sort of position persuasive, but at the same time it takes only a minimal amount of self-knowledge (certainly that's all I've got) to realize that it exposes one to certain characteristic errors or temptations. One of them is self-congratulation at being, precisely, so tough-minded. And one prominent expression of that is a delight in one's superior ability to perceive things as, supposedly, they really are, stripped of sentimental ornament; more than that, a delight in imagining how the tender-minded will be shocked by having to confront these realities. It is especially a delight in reductionism, not as a productive if not inevitable explanatory strategy, but as a series of "nothing-but" claims. This is one of our characteristic forms of wishful thinking, just as much devising imaginary consolations for real sufferings is a characteristic of the tender-minded. With these thoughts in mind, I invite you to read the conclusion of Kanazawa's article on suicide bombers:

Maybe the Muslim suicide bombings are not "terrorist" acts, as the term is usually used. Maybe it has nothing to do with Israel or the American and British troops. Maybe it's all about sex, as everything else in life is. Men do everything they do in order to get laid (Kanazawa, 2003). Maybe young Muslim men are no exceptions.

Satoshi, mon semblable, mon frère: whoever she is, I really hope the sex is worth it.

Obligatory disclaimers:

1. I am agnostic, and uninterested, as to whether Kanazawa, like one of Thorndike's cats, developed these habits by trial, error, and environmental reinforcement, or whether, like one of Köhler's chimpanzees, it came to him in a flash of insight that he could reach the seemingly-unobtainable prize, if only he stacked publicity atop bullshit.
2. Of course, Kanazawa has a perfect right to express whatever opinions and beliefs he might have (within the usual limits of the laws of libel, etc.). Moreover he ought to have the right to pursue whatever lines of inquiry seem to him most promising. Reciprocally, the rest of us have every right to criticize his research as idiotic, ideological rubbish.
3. I actually think there is a lot to be said in favor of evolutionary psychology, but if anything that only makes it more important to stomp on things like this.
4. I cheerfully admit that "I hope we catch the bastards who did this and nuke them till they glow" was one of my first reactions to seeing the pictures from 9/11. (The very first was that I was being shown some kind of disgustingly tasteless viral marketing for a disaster movie.) This sort of reaction is not a sound basis for making policy, and I leave it as an exercise to explain why on evolutionary grounds. I would still like to see us catch the bastards who did this, however.

Credits: Kanazawa's blog found via the appropriately dumbfounded reaction of Michael Meadon. I owe the insights, and much of the phrasing, of my second paragraph to a correspondent who prefers to keep their name out of this.

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Learned Folly; The Continuing Crisis; The Natural Science of the Human Species; The Running-Dogs of Reaction

Follow the Oil Money!

Via Skye Bender-deMoll, an old acquaintance from Santa Fe days, a lovely little example of network mapping and the visual display of quantitative information in the service of the public good: Follow the Oil Money. This website lets you track the network of campaign donations from the oil industry, in its various tentacles, to U.S. politicians, with nifty pictures and charts.

As Skye explains, while all this information is a matter of public record, available from the FEC, working with that data is surprisingly hard. (I didn't appreciate just how hard when I wrote this.) Skye and his collaborator Greg Michalec have done a really impressive job of making this accessible. The result is good for hours and hours of entertainment and enlightenment, even if you think that it's all about constitutionally-protected and democratically legitimate freedom of speech, in the form of dollars, on the part of the companies. (Incidentally, if you do think that, please contact me about exciting business opportunities in Lagos.)

It would be fascinating, if perhaps scary, to see a parallel website for military contractors.

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