I am … unhindered by talent

My recent post on linguistic origins (and the cool comments that followed) brought to mind a really interesting book I read some 20 years ago: The nine nations of North America.

I think I got this as a gift from Bud, and while it’s been decades since I read it, the basic ideas still stick quite clearly, which is saying something given my sift of a brain. Quite happily the entire(?) book is available on-line. To quote the opening chapter:

Forget about the borders dividing the United States, Canada, and Mexico, those pale barriers so thoroughly porous to money, immigrants, and ideas.

…

Forget the maze of state and provincial boundaries, those historical accidents and surveyors’ mistakes. The reason no one except the trivia expert can name all fifty of the United States is that they hardly matter.

…

Consider, instead, the way North America really works. It is Nine Nations. Each has its capital and its distinctive web of power and influence. A few are allies, but many are adversaries. Several have readily acknowledged national poets, and many have characteristic dialects and mannerisms. Some are close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar economy; each commands a certain emotional allegiance from its citizens. These nations look different, feel different, and sound different from each other, and few of their boundaries match the political lines drawn on current maps. Some are It’s valuable to recognize these divergent realities. The layers of unifying flavor and substances that define these nations help explain the major storms and excursions through which our public affairs pass.

While one may disagree with his details, the idea is really interesting and carries much truth. My experience in Oregon, for example, was that there was a very substantial split on many levels between the thin green strip along the Pacific and the great dry region farther inland.

One of the most useful concepts I got from the book was the importance of boundaries between regions as places where ideas collide and commingle. In other words, that’s where the action tends to be. Living in Austin, TX, was an interesting example. There we had the Bread Basket (mid-west) of my youth in North Texas merging with MexAmerica (even more evident in San Antonio), all within spitting distance of East Texas and the beginning of Dixie. This position led to a wonderfully fluid mixing of cultures that was readily evident in things like music and food and was an important part of why it was such fun to live there.

Wikipedia has a short, but helpful, page on the concept. The book is apparently out of print, but appears to be widely available in used form, and the book web site suggests that it may be reprinted soon.

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Trent Reznor has released his new single (”The hand that feeds”) for free on-line. This, by itself, is hardly big news (although it’s cool). The really spiffy part is that he’s released it in Garage Band format, so people can remix, fiddle, and rearrange to their heart’s content. Kinda like what Jay-Z did with his Black Album (hence the excellent Grey Album), but even more open.

The possibilities here are really huge. The trick, though, is to let the artists do their art thing with minimal crap from the record companies, and that’s not gonna be easy.

Thanks to Aaron I. for pointing me to this way nifty factoid.

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There seem to be a vast ocean of “surveys” that are all the rage on places like LiveJournal these days. Most are pretty silly in a not terribly funny way (”Answer 10 questions and we’ll tell which Canadian province you’re most like”), but this one was mildly amusing. You answer a bunch of questions about your use of American English (that’s there just to annoy WeatherGirl) and they indicate where your linguistic influences come from.

Their analysis of me is pretty accurate; they certainly picked up the mid-western bias. One might expect more “Dixie” given that I grew up in Texas, but Northwest Texas where I grew up is more Texas than Dixie, and has heavy ties to the lower mid-west accents. That, combined with parents who grew up in Chicago and California, and nearly 20 years in non-Texas places, has made my accent pretty non-Dixie.

Now I need to get WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy to do it and see where they come out.

In breaking news, WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy did the survey as well. Read on for their results…

Read the rest of this entry »

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In the late 1940’s Alan Turing wrestled with the thorny problem of how we’d recognize (computer) intelligence if it walked up and bit us. His answer was his famous Turing Test, which essentially takes the position that if a computer program can consistently fool us into thinking it’s a human then we have to agree that it is intelligent.

Some clever ducks at MIT have turned this on its head to demonstrate the lack of intelligence among certain groups of humans. 3 MIT grad students wrote a program (SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator) which:

…is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

The papers so generated are filled with long, vaguely coherent phrases of buzzwords and jargon, as can be seen from this splendid abstract:

Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and publicprivate key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

On its own, this would be a reasonably clever, the nerds’ equivalent of a nifty party trick. These folks, however, took it to the next level and actually submitted two SCIgen papers to conferences for review. They cleverly picked on WMSCI 2005, where one can assume the reviewing standards can’t be too high given that they had 2904 papers at their Orlando conference last year! (How in the world can they possibly provide comprehensive review of that many papers?!? The working assumption is the conference exists primarily as a money making venture for its organizers and a vacation opportunity for its participants.)

They in fact succeeded in bamboozling WMSCI and got one of their SCIgen papers accepted! The SCIgen folks immediately started celebrating their victory and raising funds to attend the conference, where they intended to give a randomly generated talk. WMSCI has, not surprisingly, pulled their paper after learning of its provenance. Their web site has this lengthy response to the situation, with the primary “justification” being that the paper was accepted as a non-reviewed paper. Apparently none of the reviewers assigned this paper actually responded, and the organizers seem to have a policy of accepting papers that receive no reviews.

They justify this at some length by going on about the value of not having reviews and allowing posterity and reference counts sort it all out. This is an idea that has some merit, and plays key role here in the world of blogs, where there is no peer review before the fact (anyone can publish whatever they want). In this case, though, it comes off as a fairly lame excuse, especially since they tried to get reviews and just failed to receive any.

Apparently a letter from a conference organizer included this remarkable statement:

I am not sure how unethical are these bogus submissions, and if there is some way to detect all of them in a large conference.

Leaving the ethics aside for the moment, I would think that if one’s reviewing process was unable to successfully identify wackiness of this order, then there are fairly serious problems. I’ve been marking calls for submissions from these conferences as junk mail for several years now, and this certainly makes me feel better about that :).

All this reminds me of a cool CACM article from 1997 entitled “The Ultimately Publishable Computer Science Paper for the Latter ’90s: A Tip for Authors”. The conclusion from that gem was:

Blah blah blah Internet. Blah blah blah blah. blah blah blah blah Web. Blah blah. Blah blah Java. Blah blah blah blah. Yadda yadda yadda.

A key difference, however, is that the CACM editors understood the joke when they accepted that article for publication.

Emily started all this by pointing me at this CNN article. Thanks!

The SCIgen folks will even allow you to generate your own papers. Sub-Evil Boy and I now have a paper entitled The Influence of “Smart” Technology on Algorithms co-authored with Albert Einstein, Paul Erdös, and Isaac Newton. I now have an Erdös number of 1 - Hurrah!

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I’ll explain it when you are older pointed me at this devestating (in the most literal sense) smoking cessation ad. Be warned, though, that this is pretty in your face (in the best sort of way). I actually made squeaky “Oh, my god!” noises the first time I watched it, and still wince on subsequent viewings.

I can’t ever see this being shown on television, especially not during kids’ programming when it could really make a difference. It would be so terribly American, however, if networks would show this but shun the UCC ad.

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Pitchfork is reporting the sad news that the Delgados are splitting up. While their later albums are nice, I’m still way partial to their first release, Domestiques, which I learned about from John Peel’s 1996 Festive Fifty. “Under canvas under wraps” is a great song even 10 years on.

Thanks to the band for sharing their music, and best wishes in whatever follows.

Currently listening to: “Voy A Llorar” by Caballeros Del Norte from the fine little disc A Taste Of Tex Mex.

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When we decided in January to move from the single family news site to that plus three separate blogs on a new domain, everyone came up with cool name (WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy) but me. I’ve never had a nickname that stuck, and when pressed didn’t come up with one.

After a few months of this, though, it’s clear that “I am … unhindered by talent” is a weak title for the blog, and Phi is a downright terrible name for me. You can’t google for the damn things (esp. “Phi”), and “I am …” conflates the name for our radio show and our domain name with my blog in ways that are at best confusing. (I’m conceding a lot of ground to the family here, but I love them, so we can share the cool name.)

Since my theme got all murphed up by the transition to WordPress 1.5, now would presumably be a good time to change the name, especially since I’m not exactly on a ton of blogrolls at the moment (3 that I can think of).

WeatherGirl and I have contemplated this for something approaching a minute and a half, and have come up with a handful of options for your consideration and discussion:

• Leave things alone.
• Maybe change the title to simply “Unhindered by talent” and hope the family doesn’t object.
• Lone Radical on the Prairie. A name a student came up with shortly after we moved here. It’s not really accurate, though, since there are lots of excellent wackos here in the wide open spaces (Pharyngula’s just down the hall!).
• Free Radical on the Prairie. A variant on the previous option that has some cool layers that I like.

A quick check suggests that both the “radical” suggestions are quite google-friendly.

It’s also unclear what to do about the URL. Leave it alone and press on? Certainly http://UnhinderedByTalent/FreeRadicalOnThePrairie would be insanely long and annoying. Thinking about these kinds of things makes my head hurt, which suggests that I really don’t care all that much :-).

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Turns out that Paul Nelson has written on his blog about his visit to UMM.

I continue to be amazed at how damned pleasant he is about all this. The guy looked pretty exhausted to me at the end, and while I love a good intellectual tussle as much as the next ego-laden academic, it all takes energy and motivation to tilt at windmills like this with nothing more than Proof By Insufficient Imagination as backup.

It was also disappointing that he nicely listed many of the key concerns raised (minor issues like “How can intelligent design be tested?”) yet didn’t respond to any of them, or even provide pointers to other writings that address these questions. Not a terribly effective way to convince what he acknowledges is a highly skeptical scientific community. Sigh.

I’ll take this opportunity to comment on one particular weakness which wasn’t addressed in Q&A (I had my hand up, but time ran out) or Pharyngula’s nice summary. Toward the end, Nelson argued that “there wasn’t anything magical about time”, and that simply having eons of it wasn’t enough to make cool and remarkable things happen. He then wandered into a bizarre demonstration of attempting to balance a pen on its tip, arguing that he could try this for millions of years and never get it to balance. The great thing, though, was that in doing so he totally undercut his own point, noting that eventually the tip might wear flat or the table might develop a divot, making it easier to balance.

Sure, in deep space time doesn’t buy you a whole lot because, well, there’s not a lot happening. (Although I’m sure that folks that know far more about deep space than I could point out lots of cool things that are happening there.) But we’re not talking deep space. We’re talking a highly variable environment over both large amounts of time and significant regions of space. Given variability and competition (both of which exist in abundance), time buys you more than my small mind can possibly imagine. Time (with variation) is everything. Nelson needs to spend some time at the Grand Canyon (or any of a zillion other similar features) to really appreciate the power of time.

I’m not inclined to justify Nelson’s blog with the link (which probably isn’t entirely fair, but life is complex). I’ll happily point at one of our students who has the link, though :-). Not surprisingly, I discovered all this via Pharyngula.

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We’re apparently hard on electric kettles. Certainly we use them a lot as we make a lot of tea in our house. As a result we’ve gone through several electric kettles recently. When we bought the last one we looked at several kettles with thermostats so you could get 180F for green tea and 212F for black, but none of the few we found looked like they’d do the trick, so we ended up with a nice “traditional” (boil and stop) kettle.

Today when I should have been doing something more productive with my time I discovered that what we may have wanted (but didn’t know it) was a spiffy Japanese kettle (a denki poto). Looks like these things keep your water up to temperature all day long so you get essentially instant hot water at the temperature you desire. Sounds pretty keen.

And just to bore the tar out of everyone, I can even trace the exact route that brought me to this point:

• Pharyngula lists But she’s a girl… on his blogroll.
• BSAG is blogging about a recent trip to Japan, and commented on their nifty high-tech toilets, with a pointer to a more detailed piece by imomus.
• While extolling the virtues of Japanese toilets, imomus also waxed eloquent about Japanese kettles, but was grumpy that he couldn’t get one built for German electrics.
• An anonymous commenter went digging and found a U.S. web site for Zojirushi, one of the major Japanese manufacturers of such devices.
• Zojirushi then have a page devoted to electric kettles fitted for U.S. electrics.
• From that page there are links to U.S. retailers that sell such nifty devices, including SunPowerUSA and AsiaChi.

Ain’t the Internet swell?

No idea if we’ll actually buy one of these, but they do look cool and it would be neat to look into it a little more.

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Sub-Evil Boy had to write a “What my father means to me” essay as part of some state-wide competition in schools (winner gets to throw out the first pitch or some such). There’s plenty of the nice stuff (”He means a lot to me”) mixed with some odd stuff that sounds semi-planted (”Without him I wouldn’t have learned how to play certain sports” - huh?).

My fave, though, is:

Sometimes he is forgetful and does some pretty weird things that creep the bajezzers out of me.

Pure (Sub-Evil) genius. And the truth.

Now that’s something to be proud of.

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