Waiting for mademan

Speaking of the price of education, a few months ago I watched some low-budget crime movie that I already otherwise forgot, but it had the young hero straddling between his two lives as a mafia hoodlum and a student in the prestigious Columbia University. One scene showed him in a lecture hall during student group work, and he didn't take the bait of vapid college discussion on cultural relativism, but asked the other students to divide their annual tuition fee by the number of their lecture hours, and ask themselves if they think they are getting good value, with the professor depicted playing on her BlackBerry in the background. Bit of a shame that the movie didn't develop this theme any further. I wonder how anyone can seriously argue against the signaling model of education. If I had to learn something and had a budget of $200/h to do so, the last thing I'd do is spend that money on lectures. I'd hire some ABD, or somebody who didn't make the tenure track in that field and doesn't want to move to Podunk, for $50/h to work as my private teacher, and I would at the same time hire some graduate student in India in the same field (that would be what, $5/h?) to read through all the books and other material and summarize them for me before I read them.

The kilobit universe

Lex Luthor famously noted that some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story, while others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe. My link compilations occasionally feature posts that I decided to include for their titles alone, even before I actually read the post bodies that had been perfectly summarized in the witty title. With actual literature the same rarely happens, but sometimes I get lucky, for example, with my commute read for today, "We Need To Talk About Kelvin". A fun book and educational to boot, it explains the physics behind macroscopic everyday truths that we can observe with our own eyes, such as the translucent reflections in glass, the steady heat of the sun on our faces, the dark coldness of the night sky in an infinite universe, plentiful iron amply available, how it is much easier to break things than to put them together, the sky in Chiba City on the TV tuned on a dead channel, how randomness seems unavoidable, and the complete absence of space aliens buzzing around our planet like the electronics geeks currently in Vegas.

Gale force

I actually didn't get the pun on the title "Math Hysteria" until I started writing the blog post about it, but at least that took me less time to get than the pun in "CitiKitty". Sometimes I am just so very slow. For example, the book referred a few times to the mathematician David Gale, who I didn't know was the inventor of Chomp, but I had to look up his Wikipedia page to realize that it's "Gale" as in the "Gale-Shapley algorithm". But as history amply teaches us, great genius is often accompanied with madness. Surely my readers are familiar with the biopic docudrama starring Kevin Spacey. It takes a truly diabolical mind to not merely come up with a mathematical proof to demonstrate everybody that capital punishment is wrong, but to sacrifice your own life in pursuit of truth and equality. Although at least the movie version failed to make a convincing case about this, since on one hand, it proved too little, but on the other hand, too much. If somebody intentionally tied himself to the middle of a railroad crossing, swallowed the key and pretended to desperately try to get away as a train ran over him, would that similarly "prove" that railroad crossings need to be abolished?

Mathhole

I had "Math Hysteria" as a commute read, collection of columns by Ian Stewart written in style and spirit of Martin Gardner's famous columns in Scientific American. I can't help but appreciate somebody who can breathe new life to the most cliched lateral thinking problem in existence, tiling the chessboard with two opposite corners cut off. And almost all these topics were new to me, for example, the question of whether a polyhedron with its edges infinitely stiff but its corners flexible joints is rigid, and if not, can its volume change when you press on it. In other words, it is possible to create bellows out of a polyhedron? Another column illustrated that the children's game of dots and boxes is actually mathematically very deep, very similar to go endgames in the sense of combinatorial game theory. I recall once reading about protocols to divide cake (either literal or metaphorical) fairly among n people (the case n = 2 easily solved with "one cuts, other chooses"), but even that gets trickier if in addition of each person being satisfied with his share being at least 1/n, no person will envy anyone else for his share that he perceives to be larger.

But what goes on really?

I decided to write my own overhead slides for the non-major mass programming course where I am but one professor among many, to better fit my own teaching style. Self-made is always more fun anyway, and so far this has been a surprisingly painless process, as I just imagined myself teaching before a class and wrote down the highlights of the stuff that I'd say. (I am still working on how to best incorporate this idea: dare I use the expression "on the pleasant side of the barbed wire fence?") However, I am not entirely sure why Google Docs presentations change themselves while I am not looking at them, and why it is so very difficult to save them as PowerPoints. (Then again, it's not like anything Microsoft has ever done has been compatible even with itself.) Anyway, so I was writing this slide for a future lecture on pointers and dynamic memory, and in a flash, suddenly understood the real purpose of that stupid advice, found even in some textbooks, to always assign p = NULL; after each release operation free(p); This nonsense is like that famous "no brown M&M's" rider of Van Halen, in that every time you actually see such superstitious ooga booga in somebody's code, you know that that programmer doesn't really understand anything about pointers and memory management and how dangling references happen, so you need to go through his code extra carefully.

Pigs in the field

I got a bit confused when a couple of students separately asked me if it is okay to use laptops to take notes in my class. Well, seeing that the fact that they still have to drag their meatsack bodies physically to the lecture room at the specific time (which today happens to be 8AM, which will certainly be a lot of fun when the weather gets more wintery) is already surreal enough, so I guess I'll just have to live with such a medieval mindset. Then last night, as I was on a break from the intro lecture and slowly strolling in the hallway, I heard some a prof in another classroom bellow that he won't tolerate laptops when he is talking, and he can tell when a student is doing something else than listening to him. I stopped and perched my ears to listen some more: had I accidentally wandered into some junior high? As far as I am concerned, as long as the student doesn't bother me or other students, they can do anything they want on their laptops whenever there is a lull in the communication from me to them. Especially in the adult school (and I am so old that I can remember a time when even an 18-year-old was considered an adult), if somebody really pays a grand for the privilege to sit in a course and then doesn't listen to what I say, that's entirely up to him.

Plus the back end

About the start the first lecture in the mass programming course where I am but one professor among many, and for the first time, my lecture has been assigned to one of the theaters in the cineplex next to the university. I have to admire such efficient use of expensive downtown real estate, but this also makes me wonder all the more about the mystery of how college can be so expensive. Later today, any student can go to the same theater to watch Tom Cruise run and shoot his way from one thrilling adventure to another for two hours for $10, if even that, but how much more does that same student watch me yammer for the same two hours with  not quite as snappy dialogue and action? There is just something fundamentally wrong in such a lopsided equation of value and cost. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever any more why any college course should cost more than $100, including the electronic textbook. Once people realize the full extent how deep the hand of the education industry has been in their pockets, anything that we now think of as prevailing "anti-intellectualism" is going to be small potatoes next to that rage backlash.

Facta Informatilkka

Too bad nobody has yet developed an autocomplete for writing in general, so that you would start writing a sentence and this autocomplete would guess what you mean to say and offer the rest. But we can simulate this by looking at each sentence one word at the time and measuring how quickly on average it becomes possible to correctly guess the rest of the sentence. I wonder if some linguist has already done this for samples of various writers and inferred something from the results. I could also think of a software tool that measures how clear your writing is from how often this guess about the rest of the sentence goes completely wrong. Or how concise your writing is, in that it is rarely possible to guess the rest of the sentence before you have actually read the whole thing. Of course, like all problems in life, even this one will eventually succumb to Moore's law. Meanwhile, here is the Weekend Issue of the "magazine" in which I am both the editor-in-chief and the crank writing to the reader's letter page, and everything else in between.

• Amerika: "Leftist"
• Cafe Hayek: "Two Caplan Gems"
• Chicago Boyz: "The Dangers of Demonology" (it's just obvious projection when liberals say that conservatives are "medieval" and "fascist", when they themselves have a pure a medieval mindset and hysterically fear a shadowy cabal of usurious "international bankers" who suck the blood of the people)
• Counting Cats in Zanzibar: "The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel"
• Jack the Insider: "Space Wasters Wasting Time" (unfortunately, politics does not seem to have the "time-space tradeoff" well known in computer science)
• Andor Jakab: "This Is Why I Don't Give You A Job" (also known as the "If I can't fire them, then I won't hire them" principle... but spunky little Hungary sure seems to gone downhill from the short period of freedom between the Soviet rule and becoming an European welfare state)
• A Neighbourhood of Infinity: "Lossless Decompression And The Generation of Random Samples"
• Nick's Blog: "Damn Cool Algorithms: Fountain Codes"
• Quizzing the Anonymous: "Why Is Life Unfair?" (answer)
• Street Boners and TV Carnage: "The Chuck Zito Test"
• Tim Worstall: "Strange Newspaper Questions We Can Answer: Why Isn't There a Grindr for Lesbians?" (I thought there was, and it is called "U-Haul")
• Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "Putting the Econ into Econometrics"

The prophecy says no MAN can slay the wolf

Some low-budget TV version of Robin Hood once saw Robin and his merry men pursued by samurai, and a few of the medieval villagers wore sunglasses. It seems surreal now to think how distant the era just a few decades ago when something like that was considered laughably stupid is from our time, in some sense just as far away as the actual medieval times. As the afternoon sun pleasantly heated up the apartment, we enjoyed pizza and watched "Red Riding Hood", that original "Twilight". The medieval village haunted by a werewolf thinks it's safe to go back in the water after the successful hunting party, but... hey, is that Gary Oldman? So, Gary arrives with his troop of black and Asian warriors to spoil the celebrations (a rave where Amanda Seyfried lezzes out a bit to attract the attentions of the alpha male, an experience young adult female audience can probably identify with) by informing them that the wolf is still on the prowl. (Plenty of all sorts of metaphors in this movie.) The rest of the film went pretty much the way I assumed it would, although I did doze off in a couple of spots. Somehow the story also involved a witch, so Gary Oldman turned into a maniac witch hunter inquisitor, avoiding the dumbest things I feared there would be but still reminding me of one famous quote of C.S. Lewis.

Tornado got Old Yeller

A few people have linked to Matt Yglesias commenting a study that found out that most people would not kill their favourite pet for a million dollars, the final nail to the coffin of all "studies" that ask people what they say they would hypothetically do, as opposed to looking at what they do in reality, especially when the socially acceptable correct answer is obvious to any non-autistic person. Of course that is all just posing and not really thinking through the offer, but if, for the sake of argument, we actually took these answers as serious, the inescapable conclusion is that these people think that their pets are more important and deserving than thousands of poor people whose lives they could massively improve with a million dollars. Sure, you can argue that things closer to you are valuable to you by the virtue of being closer. Fair enough, and in general, I agree. However, I will never again want to hear you complain that capitalist society is totes "unequal" and doesn't do enough for poor people, domestic or foreign. Why the hell should I, since you already declared that you literally consider these people lower than animals?

Pulling it off

After I had bought myself another GTA area transit pass for the next week now that the semester starts again, I suddenly understood something I had wondered about earlier, why these GTA passes come with stickers that say that the pass is valid only after this sticker has been removed. I could not see the point for such stickers (I am suddenly reminded of that famous quote by Chesterton about the gate on the road), but I then realized that their purpose is to prevent vendors from giving out these passes to their friends and families to travel for free, and then at the end the week, collect them back and return them to the transit officials as "unsold". Because I always buy my passed from the transit system itself, I was unable to see this possibility. It wouldn't make sense to manufacture passes with and without stickers (I am now reminded of that puzzle of drive-through ATM's with braille keyboards), and besides, even the transit system itself needs to prevent employee pilfering. Strolling there I realized how very essential one-way operations are for society to exist, and tried to imagine a non-entropy society where every physical action was always reversible with equal energy.

Everyone in the position

• Blunt Object: "Tax Something, Get Less of It — Not Always in the Way You’d Expect" (the Sorbus Squad always finds a way)
• CBS News: "Microsoft Patents 'Avoid Ghetto' Feature for GPS Devices" (surely also voting pattern data could be used to improve the accuracy of this algorithm)
• Chronicle of Higher Education: "The Magical Mind of Persi Diaconis"
• William Briggs: "We Are All Dogmatic"
• Cheap Talk: "Blogging Something I Know Nothing About"
• Martin Durkin: "The Greens: A Warning From History" (as the ancients said, vestigia terrent)
• Fred on Everything: "Urinals" (it seems Fred has found himself living inside Palomar)
• Gene Expression: "The Poverty of Multicultural Discourse"
• Gyre & Gimble: "Two" (well, Isaac Asimov did point out that two is an impossible number...)
• Maverick Philosopher: "Paradoxes of Illegal Immigration"
• Polite Dissent: "What's The Point..." (ha ha, indeed)
• Roosh V: "50 Things I Learned Last Year" (whereas I think I learned pretty much nothing... but we'll see how the year 2012 turns out)
• Software, Systems and Solipsism: "On Problem Complexity and Artificial Constraints"

It all adds up

Watching the Crime Story set in the sixties Vegas reminded me of something else I meant to write about after the recent Vegas trip but forgot, but better late than never. Sitting at one pai gow table while sipping my "free" drink, I realized there that casinos differ from almost every other type of business in that each individual transaction (that is, a single hand) doesn't leave any receipts to document what happened and how much money changed hands, so all they can do is at some point take out the one-way cash box and count the bills in it to find out how they did. To meanwhile prevent employee theft, all actions that are allowed to happen are designed so that they maintain some invariant. The pit bosses and the eye in the sky enforce that these invariants are maintained, and these invariants automatically maintain the correct balance at the table and prevent unearned money from disappearing in the pockets of a crooked dealer or his confederates, exactly the same way that, say, the red-black invariant in a red-black tree automatically keeps the tree structure balanced without the tree manipulation algorithms ever having to actually explicitly measure this balance.

The prestige

Time to watch some more of the second season of Crime Story while digesting the delicious Chinese food I chomped down with J-Dog before going for the takeout rotis, and finish up the material for the next semester now that I know exactly what courses I am supposed to be teaching. Nothing that I haven't taught for a decade or at least thereabouts, but one can always think up more interesting and educational exercises and examples. I mean, if these people honestly have to pay what is now over a freaking grand to sit in the course, I don't have many good excuses to slack off in the delivery. How the hell can college be so expensive in this age when everything, especially information, is becoming almost too cheap to meter? In a sane world, one college course would cost about a hundy, but based on the emails I occasionally get from the union, charging these people tons of money is social justice so that guys like me get paid $130/hour just for talking about stuff that I'd talk about for free as long as you like. It's a bit like the transit strike up in York, still going on after eleven weeks as it's starting to get freezing. You'd probably need at least a Master's in social justice to explain why these union workers getting another hefty raise trumps some poor single mom fighting the elements to get to her minimum wage job waiting tables and scrubbing toilets.

Leeward

Since I haven't seen my imaginary hip black friend J-Dog for some time, I headed out to his more vibrant neighbourhood for some delicious ethnic takeout food for tonight and tomorrow. We rapped a bit (I am just too white and tired to think up a more current verb) about what was going on, then parted our ways, and I decided to this time go for some rotis from a new-to-me place that was run by a trio of young women. Waiting for my food that I had specifically asked should not contain any MSG, I glanced through some local Caribbean newspaper that seemed rather strange, a bit like all those local Desi newspapers a couple of years ago until they suddenly became more like mainstream newspapers, and especially its editorial cartoon made very little sense to me. But the food smelled great, so I'll find out tonight if I should switch from my usual roti provider. I paid by the credit card that these days has a chip and requires the PIN, which makes me more confident to use it everywhere, but when the handheld machine asked for a tip, I typed in zero percent. I am honestly drawing a blank (heh, I first mistyped that as...) whether I am supposed to tip for takeout food that I pick up myself, especially when the proprietor of the restaurant is the one handing me the food (I read somewhere that you never tip the owner).

Dis-criminations

Okay, one more post on the topic before lunchtime. A new campaign against rape is making the rounds (even including one gay couple so that it's not "heteronormative"), illustrating the paradox why such an approach is taken only to prevent rape but not other crimes so that, for example, a campaign against burglaries or robberies would sternly inform the would-be liberators of property that breaking into somebody's home or snatching his bag is wrong even if that somebody owns more money and material wealth than you and thus clearly needs it less than you, to counter the "stealing culture" currently prevalent in media that tells people that taking what you want by force is okay. But surely somebody has already photoshopped new posters with obvious extensions of this principle to other types of crime such as, say, drug dealing, home invasion or carjacking. Outside the dark waters of crime, I could also think of another obvious parody of this campaign, featuring some "99%" Occupest with the accompanying text going something like "The power of state is not for stealing. When that big corporation refused to hire me despite my expensive Puppetry Studies degree, I didn't camp out to demand legislators to force them to pay me money anyway."

Forcing the more privileged to share their wealth

Writing the previous post about who the rapists mostly tend to be as evidenced by actual crime statistics, as opposed to some liberal wet dream episodes of Law & Order: SVU, I was reminded of Mao's famous observation of the masses of people being the "sea" where the guerrilla swims in, or analogously in this topic, where the rapist swims in. Without these masses to disappear in, or to give him shelter after the fact by covering for him and even threatening the accuser and the witnesses, the rapist would be instantly caught by the numerically and materially superior police force. But to explain the mystery of why the ultra-left Sweden currently boasts the highest rape rate in all Europe, perhaps Olle and Bosse are only acting to be all "sensitive" and "enlightened" to lure in chicks in style and spirit of this old article. "Hey babe, don't be so traditional and uptight..." or however you say that in Swedish. On the other hand, since leftism and liberalism are based on the twin ideas of the collective making all decisions over an individual and taking by force what they can't have, is it really such an impossible stretch to believe that many leftists might resort to force to take the female bodies that they can't otherwise have?

The value is incredible

I don't remember why I first added "G Manifesto" on my reader stream, but this morning I watched "The Cuba Prostitution Documentary" they linked to. A bit more serious in spirit than, say, Roosh's travelogue in Medellin, although I don't know if this can really be 100% genuine, since these people don't seem to much react to the presence of camera. But it's certainly an interesting preview of the life that liberals and greens have in mind for us. I also see why Cuba is such a popular travel destination for the middle-aged ponytail sandal-wearers as described in the article "Men I'm Over: The Ones Who Use a Laid-Back Hippy Persona to Cover Up That They Are Uptight Control Freaks" that one commenter helpfully suggested. Just like I suspect that living in denial about their closet homosexuality is far more common among the lefty males than among us on the right, I also suspect that, as unintentionally revealed by their fantasies of shadowy conspiracies of rich Nazis who routinely kidnap, rape and murder women, obvious psychological projection in its refusal to acknowledge the real world if I have ever seen one, most of the real-world rapes are committed by liberals. For example, the left's very own utopian model society Sweden currently boasts the highest rape rates in Europe.

Atomic fallout

I started watching the second season of Crime Story. Even though filmed in the eighties, the Fremont Street could still play itself in the sixties in the era when men were made of steel and nuclear explosions were still the height of cool. The dialogue has some comical lingo such as the euphemism "neighbourhood girl" and the expression "cleaner than a Chinese laundry". That Michael Mann fella sure seems like scenes where two unsuspecting undercover cops sitting in a parked car are annihilated with military-grade heavy weaponry. Just like everything else that preceded the mainstream Internet, this show is also slow-paced enough (and my Mac screen is wide enough) that I can run the video on one window, and during all the lull time, temporarily switch my attention to the web browser, this way creating a strange mixture of old and new.

• Altucher Confidential: "I Hate Feeding My Kids"
• Brooklyn Ink: "Soft Porn, Hardening Hearts" (seeing the first photo, I was instantly reminded of that one Family Guy skit)
• Cheap Talk: "Averting Your Eyes"
• Vedant Misra: "The Best (Of The Best)^4", "Elevator Algorithms" (hmm... there's an idea for a programming project / contest if I ever get to teach an AI course again)
• Programming in the 21st Century: "A Programming Idiom You've Never Heard Of"
• Raganwald: "Five Things Roger Ebert Taught Me About Criticizing Programming Languages"
• Rhymes With Cars and Girls: "TV Doesn't Pay"
• Slate: "The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See"
• Ultratechnology: "Introduction to Thoughtful Programming and the Forth Philosophy"
• Xtranormal: "So You Want To Get a Ph.D. In Theoretical Computer Science" (sure, the animation quality is not quite yet at the level of Tintin, but hey, it's the content that matters)
• Zunguzungu: "A Nation of They"

Just like... the big mushroom!

Half an hour with the morning coffee, and suddenly the Google Reader starred list is like that monument in the end of "2001", full of stars. I wonder, how many days does it take today's average person to read as much text as Plato read in his entire lifetime? I don't know, but I plan to spend the rest of this suddenly very cold week to find out, before the next semester starts.

• Business Insider: "108 Giant Chinese Infrastructure Projects That Are Reshaping The World" (but it was only a couple of years ago when Dubai Was Nuts)
• Command Center: "Esmerelda's Imagination"
• Le Cygne Gris: "Why I Don't Care About Poor People"
• Defunct: "Why Ad Blocking Is Not a Moral Dilemma" (if everyone simply stopped paying for bits like I have sworn to do, all these petty problems would vanish overnight)
• John Derbyshire: "Pick-Pocketed in Peckham" (again, recall "A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece")
• EconLog: "The Bell Curve or The Bimodal Distribution?"
• Forbes: "10 Things Our Kids Will Never Worry About Thanks to the Information Revolution"
• Abtin Forouzandeh: "Pay Your Programmers $200/Hour"
• Kevin Kelly: "Beyond The Uncanny Valley"
• Daniel Lemire: "Are You A Gold Prospector, Or a Construction Worker?"
• Megan McArdle: "Why Can't Hollywood Get Washington D.C. Right?"
• McSweeney's: "Fading The Vig: A Gambler's Guide To Life" (although contrast these delightful stories of the "guys and dolls" of our age to Honest Abe's grim eliminationist view of gamblers)
• MoneyMamba: "No, Really: What Is Your Time Worth?" (I will never stop shaking my head at people who drive across town to wait in line for gas that is cheaper by five cents a liter, often with some $3 cup of coffee in their hands)
• Raptitude: "There Are No Clean Slates, And You Don't Need One"
• Slaughterhouse 90210: "We Exist Because of Suburbia" (and how!)