The REAL Value of a Scientific Education

Came across this unusual piece today from the UK Daily Mail.

Dmitri Krioukuv, a physics professor at UC San Diego, upon receiving a $400 ticket, ostensibly for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign (i.e., the notorious "California stop"), set to demonstrate his innocence...by writing a four-page proof, which was subsequently published.

The paper, dubbed "The Proof of Innocence Paper: A Way to Fight Your Traffic Ticket" used arguments about linear vs. angular velocity.

The judge was, apparently, more convinced by Professor Krioukuv conclusions - "the cops' perception of reality did not reflect reality" - than the local CHP officer, dismissing the ticket.

I was at best a B- student of physics in college, so I'll have to rely on the "hope the officer fails to show" approach.

Hope Springs Eternal

Last night, while most of us in the US were sleeping, the 2012 Major League Baseball season got underway...in Tokyo, Japan.

For whatever reason (I suspect money is among them), the Oakland Athletics played a "home" game versus the Nintendo Mariners, er, Seattle Mariners in the Tokyo Dome.  Whatever.  I'm just happy that baseball is back.

Today, my Toronto Blue Jays beat Baltimore, 9-3.  Now, beating Baltimore during the season is not really news-worthy, so doing so in March is even less remarkable.  But with the win, Toronto is now 21-4 in Grapefruit League games.  They started 2-2, won 10 in a row (something they've not done in many years during the regular season), lost twice on the same day in two split-squad games, and proceeded to run another nine game streak.

21-4.

The most wins the Blue Jays ever had in any Spring season was 21, back in 1989.  The team went 21-10.  It's virtually assured that Toronto will win one of the remaining games, and top the 21-win record.

That 1989 season was in the middle of a very solid run of success for Toronto.  Between 1983 and 1993, the team never won fewer than 86 games, posted five AL East pennants (should have been six - a historic collapse in 1987 put Detroit into the playoffs) and two World Series championships.

The 1989 Jays went on to win the AL East, and then lost to the Oakland Athletics, who were in the midst of their own powerful run, featuring the "Bash Brothers" of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco, as well as future HoF outfielder Rickey Henderson.  Oakland went on to sweep the Giants that fall in the Bay Area Series.

It's only Spring, the standings do not really matter, and the team could come apart faster than you can say "Kyle Drabek just didn't have it (again) today," but looking over the past 25 years, only one other team  has posted a better performance than the 2012 Jays, and that was the 1997 Florida Marlins, who finished with a 26-5 record.

If you're curious, Florida beat the Cleveland Indians in the '97 Series.

It's been a long, dry spell for Blue Jays' fans, but this Spring, I feel a certain optimism that I haven't felt since Roberto Alomar left in 1994.

Let's play ball!

Guns, Guns Everywhere

Robert's got a quick hand.
He'll look around the room, he won't tell you his plan
He's got a rolled cigarette
Hangin' from his mouth, he's a cowboy kid
And he's found a six-shooter gun
In his daddy's closet, with a box of fun things 

I don't even know what

But he's coming for you, yeah he's coming for you. 

The oddly up-beat song "People Pumped Up" describes the story of a teen and a poorly-hidden gun, with not so-subtle, sinister undertones of what is about to happen/what has happened.

I was reminded of it reading the tragic story unfolding in Orlando, Florida. Apparently, a 17-year old kid called Trayvon Martin was out in the early evening to buy a package of Skittles candy and a bottle of iced-tea.  According to the story reported in many locations, a member of the local Sanford, FL neighbourhood watch thought Martin to be "suspicious," called 911, was told to leave the follow-up to the police, ignored that advice and trailed after Martin in his car, gun in hand...

This country has a long history of truly senseless killing, but this one strikes a nerve on several levels.  There are elements of race and class to spice it up (though the alleged shooter, George Zimmerman is Latino), but what it amounts to is one more person, carelessly brandishing a gun, thinking he is Charles Bronson.

I'm personally a lot less concerned in the racial angles (NY Times columnist Charles Blow at the week-end weighed in with his typical equanimity in a piece subtitled "The burden of  black boys in America") than in asking why guns are so readily available, and why this weekend warrior felt empowered to ignore the local police, cruise around his block with a weapon, and ultimately shoot a 17 year old boy whom he outweighed by 100 pounds?  What makes America so reliably violent?

Despite the fact that crime has fallen spectacularly in the past decade to levels not seen previously in my lifetime, we continue to hold on to the fear that The Giggler is lurking in the shadows, and to the fantasy that we are Paul Kersey, with a handgun at the ready to defend against the out-of-control thugs.

Zimmerman, who ironically is the one in the story with an actual arrest record for a previous run-in with the cops (Trayvon Martin has a clean rap sheet), after being admonished by the police to leave the policing to them, grumbled that "these *expletives* always get away."

The Sanford DA at first was not going to prosecute Zimmerman, stating that there was no evidence to support an arrest. Florida has recently passed a "stand your ground" law that permits deadly force when one feels threats to person or property.

Predictably, that has drawn an outcry.  I find the reaction to be too close to mob rule for my tastes - the prosecutor should not be goaded into arresting a person whom he thinks is not guilty to placate an angry group.  That is little removed from the sort of vigilanteism that was pervasive in the past.

But the facts in this case cry out for some sort of justice, up to re-examining the ease with which we carry guns.

And use them on each other.

PS - the state of Florida has today impaneled a grand jury to examine this case.  This is one of several steps that we should be taking.

如果經過不要錯過 ! (Well, I'm Impressed Anyways)

Recently, my wife found and installed on my 'iPhone' a small application that allows me to enter text into various applications (email, instant message, Facebook) in a variety of type faces.  Amongst the available options are Cyrillic (don't speak Russian), accented Latin characters (très utile si vous avez un ami qui parle français), and most amazingly, full-form Chinese characters.

I'm old enough to remember the days when Asian character sets for products like Aldous (now, Adobe software, I think) PageMaker had all sorts of problems using "double-byte" characters to display properly.  Later, Windows OS allowed for alternate character sets using more or less the same platform.

Entering the text required one to enter a phonetic spelling called "pin yin", which resulted in the display of various character choices, and then to select the desired character.  It was slow, cumbersome, and often resulted in text that would get confused when downloaded to your printer, which had to decode the non-native characters.

Needless to say, they were not "True Type" fonts.  (If you're younger than 30, look it up).

Today, my phone allows such an approach, of course.

The really amazing part, to a tech dinosaur like me, anyways, is that one can actually enter the characters by tracing them onto the touch-screen of the phone.  The software will attempt to recognise the word you've "written" with finger tip or stylus, and then embed it.

That in itself is impressive - there are literally thousands of Chinese characters, many with tiny differences between them (for example compare the two words 精 and 情.  The left ("jing") and the right ("qing) mean totally different, unrelated things).  The software does not always get them right, of course.  But I find it is far better than the handwriting recognition software that I encountered on my Palm Pilot a decade ago, which could not reliably detect the difference between the number "4" and the letter "P".

(confession: I've handwriting that fairly could be called "awful.")

I am not sure how this has been accomplished - a simple read is that the fuzzy logic has improved enormously.  Additionally, Chinese characters, unlike English letters, are comprised of small pieces, and there is a logic as well as a frequency/pattern in their use and construction.  For example, the quite complicated word for "bay" ("wan") 灣 is comprised of not fewer than five larger bits - the "water" radical "shui" (氺) represented as the three lines to the left, two instances of the word "mi" (糸) - threads - that "tie together" the character "yan" ( 言) the character "yan" (words), all mounted above the word "gong" (弓), or "bow."

So,

灣 = 氺 + 糸言糸 + 弓


I am not sure that that is how native speakers learnt to read and write, but as a foreigner who is strongly influenced by patterns (my day job is making mathematical models), it made sense to me as I sat with my 遠東漢英/英漢詞典 ("Far Eastern Chinese-English/English-Chinese Dictionary) twenty years ago.

It's an impressive marriage of new technology and a 4000 year old cultural artefact.

一帆風順!

What's in a Name?

"What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Even back in the time of Shakespeare, the utility and meaning of words was discussed.

Listening to the ridiculous saga of Rush Limbaugh and what he said about professional activist Sandra Fluke (aside: could a better name have been created by the best writers in Hollywood clustered around their Macbooks?  I don't think so), I have become increasingly irritated.  Not so much by the crapulence of Limbaugh's remarks or the faux outrage of the left, though both add a certain additional level of nausea to the mix.

No; by the crushing deployment of silly cliches and talking points.  

So, a modest proposal.  

Let's try a moratorium on the following words and phrases that, I humbly propose, have gone well past their sell-by-dates.

War on :  From the 1960s, we've had "wars on"

1. poverty
2. drugs
3. terror
4. science
5. religion

To this lexicon, we've added the "war on women" to the mix, which essentially means, Republican opposition to any policies that involve women and which the speaker doesn't like.  The meme is now in heavy rotation among Democrats and left-wing chattering heads.  It's almost as if Chris Matthews gets paid a dime each time he says it.

There's no "war on women" any more than there is a "war on Christmas."  Let's declare an armistice to the fake battles.  We can have the signing ceremony on the deck of the HMS Pinafore.  Bill O'Reilly and Ed Schultz can attend the signing ceremony.

Occupy :  The "Occupy Wall Street" movement was a silly, though perhaps necessary and relevant protest to the bailout culture, which used tax money to prop up criminals who wrecked the economy.  Setting aside that the "occupation" was in a public park blocks from the NYSE, but OK.

The movement quickly went from poignant and appropriate to ridiculous and cliched.  Watching privileged trust-fund kids "occupying" Princeton down the road was an exercise in narcissism.

Please; occupy a shower, and then a job.

Nuance:  One hears, ad nauseum, about how "nuanced" Mr Obama's positions are.  The dubious attacks on Libya - justified by more or less the same logic that Mr Bush used to back-fill the reasons for the attacks on Iraq (brutal dictator, bringing freedom, coalitions of allies) - are excused by Democratic apologistas. Frank Bruni (a former food critic who has followed Frank Rich from esoteric whiner to policy "expert") described how the president is "infinitely more nuanced" in how he arrived at his decisions than Bush.  Not sure how "nuance" can be quantified - maybe he considers Bush had one, and thus any figure in the numerator, divided by a naught in the denominator yields the figure? Tom Freidman (another NYT columnist) describes the president's policy towards China as "nuanced."  Blah blah blah.

Hemming and hawing and waiting for the poll figures to come in, while your propagandists concoct a logical cover in case things go south is not "nuance."  It's political cynicism.

Double Down: A relative newcomer, slung around by both left and right faster than "Brandi" can shuffle out the cards at Caesar's.  Basically, what is meant here is that your political opponent has made some decision that you don't like, and rather than (surprise surprise) proclaiming how brilliant YOU are, decides to stick with his decision. President Obama "doubles down" on his health care reform in pushing for contraceptive mandates.  Rick Santorum "doubles down" on his opposition to abortion by commenting on JFK.

Politics is not '21,' and neither of these guys as an Ace showing against a six.  Please; let's shuffle another deck and move on.

Doesn't Believe in Science: The most absurd of the lot, IMHO.  It's an attack that's been used both by the left (usually, with respect to climate change or evolution) or recently, the right (to describe President Obama's opposition to the Keystone XL project).  

"Science" is not a matter of faith.  There are axioms.  There are theories.  There is the gathering of evidence.  I do not have to "believe" that addition is reflexive and subtraction is not.  Every time someone accuses another of not "believing in science," I want to make the person kneel and repeat Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem 10 times and ask Alan Turing for absolution.

Hip: It used to mean the bones just below the waist.  Then it entered the lexicon to describe someone who did not live in the suburbs and drive a minivan.  It's used today, frequently, to describe the president.


What, exactly, makes Mr Obama "hip?"  I saw him warbling "Let's Stay Together" with Al Green a while back, and let's just say, I do not think Caesar's Palace is going to build a theatre for his exclusive performances following his exit from the White House.


A guy who wears dark blue denim jeans that look like his mom ironed them is not "hip" just because he happens to be well... you know...

Pour, Oh Pour the Pirate Sherry

The 29th of February has come and gone.  Leap year.

In celebration of that day, I offer the following song from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta "The Pirates of Penzance."  It's one of my favourite plays, and one of the threads in the story is that the protagonist (Frederick) has finally come of age.  He was bound as a small child in an apprenticeship to a band of daffy pirates until he reaches his 21st birthday.

Well, as the fates have it, it is discovered that he was born in a leap-year, and thus will not be freed from his indentures for many more birthdays.

Here is a sing-along to celebrate, courtesy of YouTube impressario Lukas McCormack.

A terrible disclosure Has just been made. Mabel, my dearly-loved one, I bound myself to serve the pirate captain Until I reached my one-and-twentieth birthday –

I’ve just discovered That I was born in leap-year, and that birthday Will not be reached by me till nineteen forty!

The NBA in Black and White (and Now, Gold, Apparently)

I don't follow the NBA at all, really, and don't much care about the games, let alone the implicit politics of the league.  When the over-paid adolescents who play the game went on strike against the overly-wealthy adolescents who own the teams, I didn't miss the NBA, even a little bit.

Recently, though, living in the greater New York metro area, it's tough not to be aware about the somewhat odd sensation of the Knicks ' Jeremy Lin, who joined the team after having been waived by the Golden State Warriors in December, and failing a try-out with Houston, had more DNP (did not play) games for most of the truncated season than games he had appeared in.

Then, among other things, Baron Davis, the team's starting Point Guard, was hurt, and Lin went from the end of the bench to something of a sensation, scoring 25, 28, 23, 38 (against the Lakers and Kobe Bryant), and 20 (the final two on free throws to win the game) points.

The performance, according to some sources, is the most points a player has had in his first five starts since the NBA-ABA merger.   Lin has become something of a sensation since, rocketing to the top of various internet blogs and "Twitter."

Not bad for a guy who received exactly zero college scholarship offers, who played his NCAA games at Harvard (yes - that's not a typo), a school that has not even been in the NCAA tournament in more than half a century, was undrafted, and cut twice in the space of a month.

It's a terrific human-interest story, but now, has drawn a sour comment from a Daily Beast blogger called Buzz Bissinger.  Mr Bissinger, as certain folks are wont to see, has distilled the whole phenomenon down to white racism.

No joke.  Jeremy Lin, a Chinese-American, represents a totem of white bigotry against black basketball players.

Mr Bissinger, quick to dismiss Lin's performance, points out that five games do not make Jeremy Lin the next Michael Jordan.  He points out that Lin is hardly the first guy to go undrafted and make waves, listing among others, John Starks and Ben Wallace.  Furthermore, he offers the cheap shot that Lin "has no outside shot," dismissing his pair of tres against Kobe with a glib "I know he made two three-pointers Friday against the Lakers, but so can some schlump picked out of the crowd at halftime to win a restaurant coupon to Applebees."

What a brilliant observation from an allegedly professional writer.

Well, no one I've seen has said that Lin is the next anything.  No one is suggesting he is headed for the NBA Hall of Fame, or indeed will not go straight back to the bench once Davis and Carmelo Anthony return.  I would bet that Jeremy Lin, if asked, would in fact be damned happy to be the next John Starks, who had a 13 year NBA career.

So what motivates Buzz Bissinger's animus towards Jeremey Lin?

And sorry, because people hate to hear the cold truth, but there is a factor of race: if he were African-American, would there be the same type of hysteria—oops, I’m sorry—Linsteria? Nope. He would be perceived as a potentially very promising black player, but because of the eternal and wrongheaded assumption that all professional black athletes are naturally gifted, there would be none of the linsteria.

For the past 20 years, the NBA brass and fans have been craving a Great Hope, and Lin has become the latest candidate. Yes, he is Asian-American and his ethnicity should not be mitigated. From what he said in an interview withTime, he took his share of shocking racial abuse when he played opposing Ivy League teams. 

But I don’t think fans are going wild over him now because of his breaking the Asian-American pro-basketball barrier. They like him because he is talented and exciting, at least so far. They also like him because he is light-complected and, in his Christian beliefs and prayer penchant, echoes much of white America.

There you have it.  He is being embraced because, well, he's basically white.

I recall Rush Limbaugh being essentially run out of town on a rail making the same sort of comments about a quarterback of somewhat marginal ability being hyped because he was black.

Incredibly, Bissinger goes on to comment that

Some speculate that Lin wasn’t drafted because he is Asian-American, but that’s ridiculous: pro franchises would draft a kangaroo if he could hold on to a rebound and not put it in his pouch and get whistled for traveling. Lin tried out for eight different teams after his senior season in 2010.

Really?  So the fact that Lin, who was the MVP of the Palo Alto High School basketball team that won the California Central Coast championship in 2005 (In California, there are not "state" championships - in a state of 30 million people, that becomes somewhat of a logistical challenge), ended up at Harvard because Berkeley, UCLA and USC and other more traditional basketball powers would not even give him a place on the bench had nothing to do with his ethnicity?  At the time, we were living in Los Altos, California (the next town down the 101 from Paly), and there was, to put it mildly, surprise that no local schools wanted him.  One of the best players in the entire Bay Area, and no one wanted him.

There was a famous story where Lin went to an AAU workout, and the coach looked at him and said "Volleyball practice is tomorrow."

Incredibly, Bissinger winds up his misguided diatribe complaining that the adulation for Lin is misplaced, and that offers as evidence that LeBron James and Kobe Bryant are simultaneously among the best and most reviled players in the league.  His argument is that neither has been "charged with a crime."

I know that a lack of a criminal record is not high on my list of criteria when evaluating my choice of role models.  It would seem to my that once upon a time, it was a minimal, but necessary, criterion.

I don't know how good Lin really is, or how long his fame will last.  But I find it ridiculous that buffoons like Buzz Bissinger need to apply their own idiotic racial prisms of black and white to *every* issue, no matter how misguided or inappropriate.  I hope Jeremy Lin, Harvard graduate, quiet Christian, and quintessential underdog goes on to a good if not great career.

Is It Safe to Come Out Again?

The Super Bowl was last night - won of course by the New York Giants, 21-17 over the New England Patriots.  Not to rub salt in it, but it seems that one Boston team is taking cues from another in how to lose, painfully, and in the final minutes, to a rival from New York.

Didn't watch much of the game.  I don't much care for football, and never have.  Never been to an actual professional game, and I think have seen exactly one of the Super Bowls since the Chicago Bears' embarrassing "Super Bowl Shuffle" song and music video made a sort of star from an enormously fat man who shares a name with a large, kitchen appliance.

A couple of thoughts on the "action" last night, such as it was.

1. The NY owner described the game, in a post-game interview as "one of the greatest games ever."  I wonder, though.  Is a game with a close final score necessarily "great?"  I know the Giants won on a score with roughly a minute to go, but the game seemed to feature many dropped passes, a 'safety' that resulted from a pretty dumb play by the New England quarterback, and a bunch of field goals.  The scoring pattern included nine points for New York (9-0), seventeen unanswered points by New England (17-9), and then twelve straight by the Giants, putting the final margin at 21-17.
   
   Not sure that that's a "great" game.
   
   
   
2. Is it just me, or is it silly and pretentious for Dan Patrick to refer, repeatedly, to the Super Bowl trophy as "the hardware?"
   
   
   
3. The New England coach (Bill Belichick) really looked like a guy who was on his way to coach a bunch of Pop Warner players.  Unwashed hair.  Ill-fitting, and frankly somewhat dirty-looking "Champion" brand logo sweat shirt.  He looked sort of like a bum, actually.  I guess the days of Tom Landry are really over.
   
   
   
4. The ads (one of the main draw-cards for the game, some alleged to cost $15 million for one minute) were pretty boring, and not at all innovative.  The Jerry Seinfeld Acura NSX commercial notwithstanding, to call them vanilla would be an insult to the most popular ice cream flavour.
   
   Most of the buzz today is about the politics of an ad by Chrysler, about how we are at "halftime in America," whatever that metaphor means.
   
   
   
5. Speaking of ads, what was Honda thinking, using Matthew Broderick (convicted of vehicular manslaughter some years ago) in a car commercial?
   
   
   
6. Best line I heard for the whole night came from my younger brother James, who (upon seeing pop music's Portrait of Dorian Gray doing the half-time show), "Bea Arthur looked pretty good for a 90-year old woman.  Wait.. What?  That was Madonna?"
   
   
   
7. Now that the foolishness of football is over, we can start our focus on something a lot more important.
   
   Pitchers and catchers report to Spring camps in about three weeks.
   

Woo hoo!

First They Came for My Sugar Crisp...

Tip of the hat to Reason magazine, who alerted me to the latest bit of creeping soft socialism masquerading as medical science.  It seems that a researcher at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) has completed a "study," and published it in the respected journal Nature, in which she has identified sugar as a toxic additive that must be closely controlled through government action. 

WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE

In her report titled "The Toxic Truth About Sugar" (I'm not making that up), Laura Schmidt, in collaboration with UCSF endocrinologist Robert Lustig, argue that as a society, we need protection from "the health harms of sugar," much in the same we we are 'protected' from similar threats represented by booze.


Professor Schmidt describes herself as a "Medical Sociologist," which is in and of itself a bit odd.  But in reading her arguments to CNN, she makes the following claim as one of the central pillars of her point:

More people on the planet Earth are dying from chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes than anything else. This is even true for developing countries that have turned a critical page on health: People in those countries are now more likely to die from the "diseases of affluence" than from the "diseases of poverty" like malaria and cholera. Major risk factors in chronic disease, of course, are alcohol, tobacco and junk food consumption.

(emphasis added).


Now, I know the epidemiological data around obesity, particularly in the U.S., and do not deny that too many Americans - and an alarming number of children - are fat.  Type 2 diabetes is a large and growing threat.


But one logical conclusion of the highlighted text above implies is that as fewer people in poor countries die of illness based in poverty, they ought to live forever.  It's a denial of the reality that we are all going to die at some point of something.  Even busybody researchers at UCSF.  


The "solutions" that Dr Schmidt advocates are not at all surprising to me, having lived most of my adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area, the world's epicentre of aggressive, nanny state junk science.  Sugar must be taxed and regulated, in her own words, "taxing products, setting age limits and promoting healthier versions of the product."  Mixed in is the all-too-familiar "corporations are the root of all evil" meme, blaming corporate marketing for limiting our ability to make "good choices" about food.


Not once is it mentioned that what's in a lot of these products is not, in fact, traditional "sugar," but rather, high fructose corn syrup, something that is a DIRECT consequence of government meddling.  The annual "Farm Bill," and USDA budgets (talk about the morbidly obese) provide generous, market-distorting subsidy for corn production.  


Perhaps a start would be to STOP using tax-payer funds to alter basic free market dynamics?  


I'm old enough to remember not only Sugar Crisp cereal (when "sugar" was not a dirty word), but Sugar Smacks as well.

Also on The Hit List?

I'm also old enough to remember a time when parents actually lived up to their obligations of controlling what came into their homes, and how much of it their kids could eat.

A time when my parents - and not an increasingly intrusive government - said "No."

Does it Come with a "Bail Out" Warranty?

Today, I discovered an an odd item for sale on eBay.  A seller in Chicago has put on the block a 2005 Chrysler 300C driven by President Obama during his time as an Illinois state senator.  There is even a title to demonstrate the authenticity.

The auctioneer has set an opening  bid of $1,000,000.

Aside from the fact that the alignment likely pulls hard left, the car has obvious value.  

If you can't pay the reserve, you reckon that the feds will bail you out?  Are you "too big to fail?"