mac_the_mike

New Blog

2009-08-18T00:20:26Z

From now on, I'll be blogging at http://mackthemike.wordpress.com/.

Also, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MackTheMike

Blog Hosting Options

2009-08-17T14:39:13Z

In the course of playing around with Twitter and investigating how it can interact with blogs and RSS, I've come to discover that Live Journal is lacking several features that other free blog hosting services offer, especially RSS support.

Other blog hosting services allow you to syndicate your blog, which means that people who use RSS readers can keep up with your blog conveniently. LJ doesn't offer this. LJ will act as an RSS reader for a limited selection of feeds that LJ has picked -- or for any feed if you have a paid account -- but it won't send a feed of your posts to a non-LJ RSS reader. WordPress and Blogger both offer this.

WordPress and Blogger also both offer much more options for customizing your page. You can change themes and add wigets to your page.

I suppose LJ relies on the ad revenue from people coming to their site for their business model and they don't want people reading LJ journals in someone else's RSS reader. I don't know why Blogger and Wordpress can offer these features and LJ can't, but I think I'm going to switch.

LJ does offer a feature which lets you automatically post a journal entry to Facebook if you're logged into Facebook when you post to LJ, which I'm about to try, but right now I'm leaning towards switching to another hosting service.

I'm currently playing with both WordPress and Blogger. Let me know what you think!

Twitter

2009-08-15T20:32:23Z

I've had a Twitter account for some time now but haven't really figured out what Twitter is for until this week, but I think I've kinda got it now. Twitter is a hybrid between an RSS reader and Facebook for people you don't know.

I think the main reason I haven't used Twitter much is that I've been using an RSS reader. Both Twitter and RSS readers allow you to access information from a large variety of sources on one convenient page. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of all the major news sites and blogs that I'm interested in. Back before I used an RSS aggregator, I would check each site individually each day, now they are all summarized for me on my Google Reader page.

Twitter performs a similar function. Most news organizations and bloggers have Twitter accounts and they post each new item to their Twitter feed. The advantage of Twitter over RSS is twofold. First, setting up a Twitter account is easier to do than publishing your blog with RSS, so more people use it. Second, the search feature of Twitter allows you to find posts based on subject matter by people to whom you do not subscribe. So if you want to know what's going on in Iran, you just search for 'Iran'.

Because Twitter is (slightly) easier to set up than RSS, more people use it, which includes various celebrates, so it's easy to get the scoop on some very narrow subjects. I follow Adam Savage, and Grant Imahara from Mythbusters, so I get updates on what's going on with one of my favorite shows. In this respect it's similar to Facebook, which allows you to keep up with your friends, except that Twitter doesn't require the person you are following to friend you, so you can follow people you don't know.

What I still don't get about Twitter though, is why I, a non-celebrity , would want to post to it. I have posted a few things, but since no one I care about is following me that isn't also a friend on Facebook, I don't see the point. For now, I'll just be a Twitter lurker.

Link of the day

2009-08-07T15:59:15Z

http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/

Nice visualizations.

Sotomayor's Hearings

2009-07-19T18:35:40Z

A consensus has congealed on the Right that the Sotomayor hearings went about as well as they could have. They really went better for the Right than anyone could have reasonably expected. There was never any doubt that Sotomayor would be confirmed to the Supreme Court, so blocking her nomination was never a goal of the Republicans. What the Republicans instead accomplished in the hearings was obtaining from Judge Sotomayor agreement on several key philosophical points regarding the nature of judging and the proper role of the Judiciary in the American form of government. Judge Sotomayor testified that she believed in impartiality, judicial restraint, respect for precedent, deference to Congress in policy matters, and the rule of law as understood to mean the neutral application of the Constitution, statutes, and precedents to the facts at hand. She rejected judicial activism, Legal Realism, the notion of a "living constitution", the use empathy in judging, and the whole ideology that judges ought to place a thumb on the scales of justice in favor of preferred outcomes.

Many of the positions she took on these issues in the hearings stand in stark contrast to her previously published writings and speeches, which had evinced a paradigm soaked in a racialist, post-structuralist critical legal theory. Judge Sotomayor in the hearings explicitly renounced her previously expressed beliefs that appeals courts are an appropriate place to make policy, that a wise latina woman would make better legal judgments than a white man, that American judges should refer to foreign law, and that judges should take their own ethnic, racial, and sex characteristics explicitly into account when arriving at conclusions in matters of law.

I doubt that any Senators truly believe that Sotomayor has changed her judical philosophy. Nominees commonly try to spin their pasts at confirmation hearings in order to appear more acceptable to the Senate. These "confirmation conversions" are hardly evidence of a change of heart. But what stands out about these hearings is not only how thoroughly Sotomayor seems to have rejected her past views, but how little she apparently needed to do so. With 60 Democrat votes in the Senate, Sotomayor could easily have won confirmation by reaffirming and defending her past comments instead of distancing herself from them. She would have lost some Republican votes by doing so, but so what?

So why did she do it? I suspect the reason is that while Sotomayor's pre-nomination views are in the mainstream of the Democrat party they are deeply unpopular with the American people. The average American wants judges to be impartial and to apply the Constitution and statutes as they were written, and not substitute their own policy preferences and identity politics for the rule of law. So while Sotomayor could have easily been confirmed while defending left-wing judicial philosophy, doing so might have created a backlash against the Democrat party at the precise time that party is trying to enact the most radical legislative aganda since FDR.

Republicans badly lost the last round of elections, but as the Sotomayor hearings show, Conservatives haven't lost the battle of ideas; and that gives one cause for Hope, and in 2010, maybe even Change.

Lost

2009-05-18T20:15:26Z

Some thoughts on the season 5 finale of Lost and predictions for next year.

Yesterday's Enterprise: Here's my prediction for the season 6 premiere of "Lost": Open with the flash of light at the Swan station as the bomb goes off. Cut to the familiar flashback of Jack on flight 815. There's that bit of turbulence we've seen in flashbacks so many times before. Jack looks worried. The pilot comes on the intercom to announce that everything is fine. They're just flying through a rough patch. Then... nothing. No additional turbulence, no plane being ripped apart. Just a normal flight. Cut to LAX. Flight 815 has arrived. Passengers begin to deplane. Locke in a wheelchair. Kate in handcuffs. Boone and Shannon. Ana Lucia. Eko. Libby. Artz. Froggert. Nikki and Pallo. Charlie. Jack walks off. He sees Ana Lucia. "That flight was pretty rough. You look like you could use another tequila and tonic," he says. "The airport bar's right over there," she replies. Cut to the airport bar. Ana Lucia is being handed a drink by the bartender. All we see of the bartender is a hand -- a woman's hand -- an African American woman's. Suddenly, there's a tremendous flash of light. The airport windows shatter behind Jack and Ana Lucia. We see a mushroom cloud form over LA. Cut to the bartender. It's Whoopi Goldberg in a funny outfit and huge hat. In fact, it's Guinen. "This isn't right" she says. "It's not supposed to be this way."

Miles and Smokey: There's some connection between Miles and the Smoke Monster. They both seem to have the same ability to read dead people. In the episode "Some Like it Hoth" Miles explains to Hugo that while Miles knows facts that he could only have obtained from a particular person who was dead at the time, Miles does not talk to dead people -- unlike Hugo who does. Miles tells Hugo that a dead person's brain has stopped working, therefore the dead can't engage in conversation. All that's left of the deceased is who they were and what they knew at the time of death. This ability of Miles' to extract information from the brains of the dead seems to be similar to what the Smoke Monster can do. Smokey has appeared in various guises throughout the series: as Christian to Jack, as Boone to Locke, as Yemi to Eko, as Alex to Ben, as Locke to everyone. What do these characters have in common, Christian, Boone, Yemi, Alex, and Locke? They are all dead, and all their bodies are on the Island. This may be why Locke had to die, and why his body had to come back to the island -- so that Smokey could take his form in order to manipulate Ben into killing Jacob. Note that it was Smokey-as-Locke who caused Locke to die. Smokey-as-Locke told Alpert to tell the real Locke that he had to get the other 815 survivors to come back to the Island and that in order to do so, Locke would have to die. That prophesy is what caused Locke to attempt suicide. The flaw in my theory is that it does not explain Walt's appearance to Locke, Hugo's vision of "Dave", or Kate's vision of the black horse. Neither Walt, Dave, nor the horse are corpses on the Island.

I see dead people: Hugo's experience with the dead is quite different than Miles'. Hugo has visions of the dead in which he holds conversations with them, and even plays chess with the dead. Interestingly, the dead people with whom Hugo talks are also, as in Miles' case, always people who died on the island. Hugo has seen Charlie, Ana Lucia, and Eko. Are Hugo's visions manifestations of the Smoke Monster? Hugo's visions have all occurred off Island. We don't know whether Smokey can leave the Island. I think Hugo's visions are something else. All the dead people Hugo has seen are people who would not have died had 815 not crashed. If detonating Jughead at the Swan station in 1977 prevented 815 from crashing in 2004, then Charlie, Ana Lucia, and Eko would all be alive in an alternate time line. Perhaps, Hugo is seeing manifestations of those people from an alternate reality, as if their consciousness have somehow leaked through the barrier between realities. Alternately, perhaps Hugo's visions are manifestations of a smoke-being, but a different one than is on the island. Perhaps both Jacob, and the black-shirted man who wants to kill Jacob have their own smoke-being, each one capable of assuming the form of a dead person whose body is on the island, but only Jacob's smoke-being can be off-Island. Note the lack of overlap between the dead people who have appeared as visions on the Island (Christian, Boone, Yemi, Alex, and Locke) and those who have appeared off-Island (Charlie, Anna Lucia, Eko, and Libby). [Update: I had forgotten that Christian appeared to Jack off-Island] Perhaps each corpse on the Island falls under control of either Jacob, or his black-shirted opponent.

Backgammon: Way back in Season 1 (in the pilot, I think) Locke teaches Walt how to play backgammon. Locke tells Walt that backgammon is an ancient game, older than chess, and that it pits two opponents against each other: one light and one dark. This struck me as foreshadowing at the time. And now with the Season 5 finale, we know what it foreshadowed: Jacob wearing a white shirt, and his opponent wearing a black shirt, engaged in a centuries long disagreement. The man in the black shirt, upon seeing the sailing ship (the Blackrock?) on the horizon, asks Jacob "You're still trying to prove me wrong aren't you?" Wrong about what, I wonder. What's their disagreement? Mr. Blackshirt seems to be a fatalist. "They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same," he insists. Jacob, on the other hand, is a progressive. "It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress". Jacob is a big believer in free will. He tells Hugo that Hugo can chose whether or not he will get on flight 316 back to the Island. He tells Ben that Ben has a choice whether or not to kill him. This attitude stands in sharp contrast to that of Locke (both before and after resurrection) who is constantly talking about people's destinies, and what is "supposed" to happen. Supposed by whom? Again, a clue can be found all the way back in the series' pilot episode. Charlie writes on his four bandaged fingers, four letters: F, A, T, E. Fate versus free will, a cycle of doom versus progress -- that's the debate between Mr. Blackshirt and Jacob, and all the events of the series consist of moves by one side or the other in a cosmic game of backgammon to resolve that debate.

Childhood's End: What is this final "end" to which Jacob refers, and before which everything else he believes to be mere progress? The biggest end looming in the Lost mythology is the end of the human race itself. The Valenzetti equation predicted a 100% chance of the human race ending in the near future. But the end of the human race doesn't have to mean the death of the human race or even the death of any individual humans. Humanity might end by evolving into something else, something better. A post-human future. Aaron might be the first of these post-humans to be born. The conflict between Mr Blackshirt and Jacob might be a conflict over this future with Mr. Blackshirt believing that humanity can't change, that we are intrinsically corrupting, and that the best we can hope for is to muddle through our cycles of violence over and over again, hopefully never acquiring enough power to totally destroy ourselves. That's why Mr. Blackshirt wants to keep people away from the Island and the tremendous power it hides. That's why Mr. Blackshirt employs the Smoke Monster, a security system designed to protect humanity from itself by protecting the power of the Island from people. And that's why he wants to kill Jacob. Jacob believes that humanity can change, that we can choose not to be destructive, and that the power of the Island can be a catalyst to usher in a new post-human race. Jacob keeps bringing people to the Island in the name of progress towards this goal. The clock is ticking. Now that humanity has nuclear weapons, we don't need the power of the island to kill ourselves. If we don't evolve soon, we may not make it to the threshold.

Reduction in force

2009-01-28T22:56:43Z

I was riffed yesterday. I got a pretty good package so there's no immediate risk of starving to death. The most important thing I have to do now is answer the question "What do I want to do?" I can't really start a focused job search until I know that answer. Of course, if another semiconductor industry engineering job just fell in my lap I'd take it, so I'll probably start looking there. But there's a reason my company is cutting back. Semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. isn't the booming business it once was.

Day 1

2009-01-28T11:57:39Z

"It's a new dawn
It's a new day
It's a new life
For me
And I'm feeling good"

--"Feeling Good" by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse

Twitter

2008-12-31T03:20:12Z

My twitter name is 'mack_the_mike', or as the twitterers seem to say "@mack_the_mike"

I'm really not sure what twitter is for yet, but I'm trying out.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

iPod Touch

2008-12-28T19:40:36Z

step_journal</lj> got me an iPod Touch for Christmas and I absolutely love it. It's basically an iPhone without the phone. I've been trying out a lot of free apps. My favorite app so far is "Remote" which allows me to control iTunes on my desktop remotely from my iPod, so I can sit on the couch and choose songs or playlists for the computer in the next room to play on the speakers. Also, the web browser is really amazing. Regular web pages are easy to view even on the small screen. Every other mobile device I've seen really only works well with web pages designed for mobile devices.

The biggest problem with the Touch is that now that I've used it, i really want an iPhone so that I can use all these great apps even when I'm not in an accessable WiFi network. My two year Sprint contract doesn't run out until February 23rd, and I'm not willing to pay the $200 fee to terminate the contract.

The Idle Down

2008-12-23T17:46:35Z

The factory I work at is idling down from now until January 6th, so all the employees are taking mandatory vacation. (Well, a handful are staying for "fire-watch" which is just like it sounds -- they just walk around the factory all day looking for anything catastrophically wrong such as a fire, or burst water pipes, etc, but I'm not on fire-watch.) Fortunately for me, I have enough vacation left in my "time-bank" that I'm on a paid vacation. Some people have to take an unpaid leave of absence. My enchanting wife already used up all her vacation this year on things like our wedding and honeymoon, so we can't go out of town together. I'll just have to get things done around the house.

Cable management: I routed all the sundry wires in our home office so they are less obtrusive to anyone who happens to look under the desk. I also bought about a gazillion dollars worth of cable turtles at the Container Store to take up all the slack.

Finish moving in: When I moved out of my apartment when I got married, a lot of my stuff went into storage because I didn't have time to sort through it all to decide what I should keep and what I should throw away, and didn't have time to find a place for the rest in my wife's condo, so now I have about 150 cubic feet of stuff to go through.

Taxes: May as well start pulling documentation together for 2008 taxes, filling out schedule D, calculating capital losses, etc.

Finish all those partially read books that keep piling up:
- The Philosophy of Battlestar Galactica
- The Metaphysical Club
- The Forgotten Man

Learn a skill: I'm thinking I should learn Microsoft Access.

Oppose Religious Bigotry

2008-12-06T22:24:14Z

An interfaith group called the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has taken out a full page add in the New York times denouncing "[t]he violence and intimidation being directed against the LDS". The signers of the ad include people both for and against Prop 8 who are nevertheless united in opposing some of the tactics being used against Mormons who engaged in the public debate over Prop 8 on the pro side.

You can add your name to their statement here.

Prop 8 Intolerance Reaches Texas

2008-11-30T21:33:23Z

The wave intolerance that started in California over that state’s voters’ approval of Proposition 8 has spilled over into Texas with the publication by an Austin-based web site (warrenandderrick.com) of a blacklist of Texas companies whose employees contributed money to the Yes on 8 campaign. (Hat tip Michelle Malkin). While the blog post in question explicitly states that the bloggers are not going to try to tell their readers how to spend their money because “What you do with your money, is your choice” this claim is quickly belied by the “blacklist” (their description) itself which, in the case of a former Los Angeles Dodgers infielder who supported Prop 8 and now lives in Texas, exhorted readers to “Show your support for equality by refusing to purchase Dodgers merchandise, memorabilia, and tickets.”

The publication of this blacklist in Texas has followed on the heels of successful intimidation campaigns in California against businesses and organizations whose associates chose to support Prop 8. According to this LA Times article, after the publication of a list showing that a manager at the El Coyote Mexican Café had donated $100 to Yes on 8, a mob of 200 protesters gathered outside the restaurant yelling vulgarities at the clientele to the point where an employee of the café was worried about even coming to work. This blog contains an eyewitness account and video of a meeting the restaurant had with the protesters in the hopes of preventing a boycott of the café. The manager who had donated the $100 to Yes on 8 is driven to tears in the video and has to be literally supported by friends while she stands to issue her apology lest she fall over. That’s how frightened she is. The restaurant owners are intimidated into making donations to pro-same-sex marriage groups to propitiate the mob. Threats of boycotts also caused the director of the LA Film Festival, Richard Raddon, to lose his job according to Variety. The CEO of Cinemark, Alan Stock, is also under pressure. There’s a Facebook group dedicated to boycotting his employer.

But what’s the purpose of boycotting the employer of a supporter of Prop 8 if the company itself takes no position on same-sex marriage? The number one company, for example, on the Texas blacklist is Dell even though the computer manufacturer takes no position on Prop 8 and supports local gay rights groups. The inclusion of Dell on the list is based solely on the contribution by one (non-executive) employee to Yes on 8. The only purpose that I can think of for the boycotts is to create a disincentive for companies to employ people who oppose same-sex marriage. In other words the purpose of the boycotts is to make Prop 8 supporters lose their jobs. This could obviously have a tremendously chilling effect on political association. Can you imagine what it would be like if your boss were to look up your political associations before your annual review, or if job interviewers were to check the political leanings of prospective employees?

The illiberalism of the boycotters and blacklisters is, frankly, stunning to me. The funds donated to the Yes on 8 campaign, after all, are used entirely for persuading the electorate of California that their position is correct. The funds are used for speech: for television and radio spots, for websites, for pamphlets, yard signs, for petition drives. Obviously a lot of people in California and elsewhere oppose Prop 8 (6,246,463 Californians voted against it, after all), but in a healthy democracy that opposition ought to come in the form of making better arguments to a larger audience, not in the form of getting your opponents to shut up out of fear for their livelihoods. The Warren & Derrick blog's blacklist post asserts that "one of the best ways for us to make our message against hate be heard is to speak loudly with our wallets and pocket books." Wrong. The best way to make your message be heard is to speak out with, you know, your actual voices and writing. Actual speech is better than symbolic gestures in form of boycotts because actual speech can contain an explanation of the reasons you hold the opinions you do. Actual speech can contain references to facts and evidence and logic and even emotional appeals and poetry. Boycotts are purely negative. They exclude their target from the social and economic community, and while boycotts may shut off the expression of opposing views, they can never convince anyone of anything.

What's really surprising to me though is that the case for toleration even needs to be made in 2008. John Stuart Mill made the definitive argument in his classic essay "On Liberty" in 1869. One would think that an historically oppressed minority such as the gay community would be especially sympathetic to Mill's arguments. One would, apparently, be wrong.

Another disturbing aspect of the boycott movement is its tinge of religious bigotry. Many of the targets of intimidation have been Mormons, including the woman at the El Coyote Mexican Café and guy who lost his job at the LA Film Fest. The Austin American-Statesman article on the Texas blacklist reports that

Some gay activists have even gone as far as to push for a boycott of the entire state of Utah, because the Mormon Church was one of the biggest contributors of money and volunteers to the Yes on 8 campaign.

Americablog.com is urging skiers to avoid Utah's slopes this winter to make a statement against the state and the church, which is based in Salt Lake City. In Hollywood, meanwhile, some are suggesting the annual Sundance Film Festival, which starts Jan. 15, should be moved from its longtime home of Park City, Utah.

After the recently concluded presidential election campaign which brought out so much anti-Mormon vitriol against Republican candidate Mitt Romney, my eyes have really been opened about how much religious bigotry is out there.

Blog of the Day

2008-11-18T12:45:10Z

The Fly Bottle

Cocktail of the Day

2008-11-16T23:54:09Z

The Gilroy Martini.

Facebook

2008-11-15T23:09:41Z

I've finally given in and joined facebook. In the last two weeks I've probably had a dozen friends either mention it in conversation or inivte me to join by email.

Since I'm also on Linkedin, MySpace, and LiveJournal, this is getting to be a lot of sites to keep up with. I may cancel my MySpace page. Facebook and Myspace seem to be good at the same sorts of things. Neither is very good for blogging, so I'll probably keep LiveJournal.

St. Pat's Day

2008-03-25T01:27:39Z

The Greenville St. Patrick's Day Parade pics are up!

Spring Forward

2008-03-09T21:49:16Z

Warning: Be careful tomorrow on your way to work. The hour of sleep people lost on Saturday night due to Daylight Savings Time causes more taffic accidents on Monday morning.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2JhMmQxNjRkNjljZTdmNDM5MzFhNjcwMDc0YjE4ZDE=

What's worse, DST doesn't even save energy, rather it wastes it.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/83073

(hat tip

flex727

Hillary's Momentum

2008-03-06T12:31:21Z

So how much good has it done Hillary to win the Texas and Ohio primaries? The election futures market says she's increased her chances of winning the nomination by about 15%, but that only brings her up to about a 30% chance of winning.

Gary Gygax is dead

2008-03-05T13:30:01Z

R.I.P.

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9885383-1.html

Torchwood

2008-03-05T01:36:04Z

I've been watching the BBC show "Torchwood" since it premiered about a year ago. There's always been something that struck me as a little odd about the show that I've only just now identified: "Torchwood" is show about a secret agency defending Britain from alien threats apparently written by people opposed to the British government and its national defense.

I suppose I should back up and explain that "Torchwood" is a sort of British version of "The X-files" about a secret British agency, called 'Torchwood', tasked with dealing with alien threats. However unlike "The X-files", in which the alien presence was mostly just hinted at and never concussively proven, in "Torchwood" the existence of aliens is well established, at least to the agents. The back story, told in the show "Dr. Who", is that Torchwood was created by Queen Victoria after she discovered that a werewolf terrorizing the Scottish countryside was, in fact, an alien being. Prior to "Torchwood" being spun off into its own show, the secret organization was consistently portrayed on "Dr. Who" as being a dangerous, nefarious organization. A typical plot involved Torchwood conducting secret experiments that had the unfortunate side-effect of opening up a gateway to an alternate reality through which an invasion of Cybermen nearly took over the earth (Don't worry: the invasion was thwarted by the good Doctor and his drop-dead gorgeous assistant). We learn in that episode that one of the higher-ups in Torchwood was desirous of using the alien technology acquired by Torchwood to re-establish the British Empire (boo, hiss).

Now this is all well and good for a cheesy sci-fi show. One has to have bad-guys in melodramas after all, and the out-of-control government agency is a time honored template for an antagonist. Think the CIA in the "Bourne" trilogy -- a secret organization whose very secrecy allows it to sneak past the normal checks and balances of responsible government. When the show "Torchwood" was spun off, the writers made it clear that the new Torchwood (the one featured in the spin-off) differed from the old, nefarious, Cybermen-summoning Torchwood in being outside the government. This fact is so important to the show that they repeat it every episode in the introduction: "Torchwood -- outside the government, beyond the police." I initially assumed that the writers were continuing in their use of the out-of-control-secret-agency antagonist template, and that, a la "X-Files", we would learn in due course that Torchwood was part of some larger conspiracy at odds with the values of the protagonist agents in its employ.

Placing the secret organization outside the government would certainly seem to facilitate that sort of plotline, but no. Nearly two seasons into the show and there are no indications at all that Torchwood is under the control of darker forces. And it's not as if the plots of the episodes haven't provided plenty of opportunities to go down that road. One show this season had the agents abducting a woman and subjecting her to a painful mind-probe, without a court-order, in order to extract information from her. Dialog indicated that she had no recourse to the legal process to stop the mind-probe or regain her freedom -- no habeas corpus rights at all. Now, it did turn out that she was an alien spy gathering intel in preparation for an invasion, but they didn't know that when they tortured her; moreover there was no indication that the writers disapprove of that sort of thing.

As far as the audience is aware, Torchwood is a wholly benign organization, so why place Torchwood outside of the government? It would seem so much more natural as government agency. Well, I think I’ve figured it out. In the last episode shown on BBC America, Torchwood uncovered a plot by a branch of the British government to conduct secret, fatal medical experiments on hapless, uninformed subjects in an attempt to develop a cure for basically everything. Torchwood shut the project down (without revealing the plot to the public) even though Torchwood knew that the program was approved by the elected government. In other words the British government was the villain in this episode. This turns the out-of-control government agency template for antagonists on its head. The government agency isn’t dangerous because its activities are hidden from responsible elected officials who are accountable to the people through elections. On the contrary, the agency is dangerous precisely because it’s under the control of the government. The writers seem to have made Torchwood “outside the government, beyond the police” not in order to make it seem less legitimate, but more so! It’s as if they came up with the idea for a show about a government agency composed of noble people trying to do the right thing, but couldn’t go through with it because the notion of a good government agency seemed so implausible to them.

If my conjecture is correct, what does that say about British public opinion about the legitimacy of democratic governance that a secret agency would be considered less respectable by virtue of its accountability to elected officials?

Next up: flying pigs

2008-03-04T14:16:08Z

Two very unusual things happened this morning. It snowed in Texas in March, and I am a registered Democrat.

I voted in the Democrat primary this morning, which under Texas' rules means that I am now registered as a Democrat for the next year and will be unable to vote in any Republican primaries in that time period. I voted in the Democrat primary instead of the Republican one because the Democrat nomination for President isn't settled yet; whereas the Republican nominee is pretty much determined to be John McCain.

I voted for Hillary Clinton both because I think she'd be a slightly better President than Barak Obama and because I think she'd be easier for John McCain to beat in the general election.

John McCain

2008-03-03T04:27:42Z

John McCain had a "town hall" meeting at Texas Instruments last Thursday. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. He spoke for about 20 minutes. I wasn't able to record the whole thing but I got some good clips:

gates of Hell

Thanks for serving

I have major disagreements with John McCain, but with respect to the two most important issues facing us in this election, the Global War on Terror, and the economy, he's head and shoulders above his remaining opponents. He's also a man of tremendous personal honor and it it was a privelege for me to be able to see him in person.

"Lost" Theory

2008-01-31T19:58:42Z

The season priemere of "Lost" is on tonight, so I thought I'd publish my "Lost" theory. I think that as formulated below, the theory has a major mathmatical flaw, but this is, after all, just science fiction. So, with that said, here goes:

Here’s my grand theory of “Lost”. It’s all about some peculiar consequences of time travel.

The first thing to note about time travel is that it creates a causality loop. If you travel back in time to 2004, your memories of 2006 can be the partial cause of your actions in 2004. Obviously the events in 2006 were partially the effect of events in 2004, including your actions in 2004 as a time traveler from 2008. So events in 2004 are the partial cause of events in 2006 which are the partial cause of events in 2008 which are, through time travel, the cause of events in 2004. One of the implications of this is that if you follow the chain of causality around the loop you can arrive at the same date an unlimited number of times.

There was a time travel movie with Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour in which Christopher Reeves’ character finds a pocket watch in an attic in an old house. He travels back in time with the watch to a time when the house was new and then leaves the watch in the attic. That means the watch could have been through that loop any number of times. It could be thousands of years old when our version of Christopher Reeves picks it up. Since any given date can occur multiple times. You can think of them as having numbers such as 9/24/2004.1 and 9/24/2004.2, etc.

Self referential systems like this can have strange properties. (Hofstader’s “strange loops” from Godel, Esher, Bach). Specifically, the phenomena of constructive and destructive interference can occur. Consider the sound made by striking the rim of a fine crystal wine glass. The impact of your finger creates vibrations in the glass in a broad spectrum of frequencies. These sound waves travel around the glass lay on top of themselves. Some of the waves cancel themselves out. The nth iteration of a wave with a particular wave length might be pushing the glass molecules towards the center of the glass at the same time that the (n+1)th iteration pushes the glass molecules out. Other frequencies reinforce themselves. If the glass circumference is 7 inches, then a wavelength of 7 inches will reinforce itself, as will all integer multiples of that frequency (3.5” wavelength, 1.75” wavelength, etc.) The clear sound we hear are those frequencies.

A causal loop can also have constructive and destructive interference. Suppose a time traveler from 2008 decided to prevent the Great War by saving Archduke Ferdinand, and he went back in time and indeed stopped the assassination. By doing so he prevents anyone in 2008 from even worrying about the effects of WW1, because WW1 never happened. But that, of course, means that the time traveler never goes back in time to stop the assassination. The time loop cancels itself out. Other trips one could take might be self reinforcing. If you wanted to be the cause of the assassination of Ferdinand, for example, you might create a self reinforcing time loop.

The key point is that the number of iterations of the self reinforcing loops will far surpass the number of self-cancelling iterations. Possibly infinitely more iterations. This is where the strangeness really begins. Suppose the inventor of the time machine financed his creation with the money he won in the Mega Millions lottery in 1998. This time traveler goes back in time to a point several years before his winning lotto drawing – not with any intention of changing anything, mind you – just as a tourist at, say, the last Beatles concert. Chaos Theory tells us that even small changes, such as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, can have large effects later on. So by going back to 1966 and just breathing, our time traveler changes the random atmospheric conditions that the little ping-pong balls see in his lotto drawing decades later, essentially re-randomizing the drawing. He has only about a 1 in 15 million chance of re-winning the lotto, right? Except that for each of those 15 million losing lotto drawings, no time machine is ever invented and each of those 15 million time lines occurs only once. But, that one time in 15 million when the lotto hits the same numbers, that time line forms a loop and is repeated ad infinitum. So when the time traveler arrives in 1966 what are the odds that he is in a version of the past that is self-cancelling? 15,000,000:∞ against. In other words zero. The odds of being in a self-cancelling time loop are zero. This effect might even apply to small paradoxes, courtesy of the Butterfly Effect. If the time traveler has a memory of the Kansas City Royals winning the 1985 World Series, then anything he might do in 1966 has a zero chance of preventing the Royals from winning the 1985 World Series.

The upshot of all this is that the normal rules of probability do not always apply to time travelers. Even probabilistic natural laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics wouldn’t apply in cases where a paradox is at issue. Imagine what this law might look like to our hypothetical do-gooder time-traveler who wishes to stop the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. No matter how well prepared he is, or how committed to the cause, something always stops him, no matter how unlikely it might seem. It will appear to our time traveler to be bad luck, to be fate, to be a curse. He might be walking down a street in Serbia in 1914 and suddenly get struck by a freak lightning bolt on a sunny day. To a non-time-travelling observer in 1914 such an occurrence would look very strange indeed.

Which brings us, at long last, to “Lost”. My theory is that our castaways are in a time loop -- a time loop that has already been through thousands or gazillions of iterations. All the strange coincidences in our protagonist’s back-stories are the result of constructive interference in the time loop. The ends of this loop must extend well before any of our protagonists were born, because their whole lives contain these coincidences. The coincidences are all things that would be highly improbable in the absence of the time loop but are occurring in order to rectify a time traveler’s concerted attempts to change his past. And who is trying to change the past? Dharma for one. Alvar Hanso set out to change the coefficients of the Valenzetti equation to prevent the end of the world. One of the ways he tried to do so is to take advantage of a temporal instability on the island to create a time machine and change events in the past. But it can’t be done. The 815ers were sent to the island by fate at least in part to stop the Swan Station operation in a manner that doesn’t cause a paradox. Locke had to be there to push the button while Desmond was away. Desmond had to come back, and be induced to turn the destruct key after Locke lost hope and stopped pushing the button. When Desmond traveled back in time and wanted to marry Penny, the time-traveling woman in the jewelry store explained to Desmond that it was his fate to go on that sailing race and go to the island because he had to turn that key. When Desmond learned that Charlie was going to die, there was nothing Desmond could do to prevent it. It’s fate. Which by the way, is what was written on Charlie’s knuckles in the first episode: “fate”.

In addition to Dharma, the other consequential time traveler is Jacob. Jacob is from the distant future. And he’s not a human. He’s a post-human. You see the end-of-the-world predicted by the Valenzetti equation is not the physical destruction of the world a la Alderan after the Death Star. It’s the end of the world for humanity specifically. The end of humanity does not come from nuclear war or disease, but from evolution. A new species of people descends from us and replaces us. Jacob is one of them. And the Others are a group of people dedicated to midwifing this new species into the world. That’s why they are following Jacob. Jacob is himself caught in some terrible paradox trap. Only when the circumstances that produce the potential for this paradox are eliminated will Jacob be freed. The 815 survivors will play a crucial role in that.

So what’s different about these post-humans? They are the people with special powers from “Heros”. “Heros” and “Lost” are part of the same story arc. Jacob is a time traveler like Hiro, or like Peter.

July 12th, 2007

2007-07-13T03:23:45Z

There are two things worth noting about today's date.

· July 12, 2007 is the date of the alien invasion in Robert Heinlein's 1951 sci fi classic The Puppet Masters, which leads me once again to ponder: Where are all the flying cars everyone was supposed to have in the 21st Century?

· Today is also the negative first (-1st) anniversary my marriage to step_journal. step_journaland I have settled on 7/12/2008 as our wedding date, based on the availability of Winfrey Point for the reception. Our first date was at Winfrey Point for a charity ball, so we really wanted the location for our reception. Winfrey point is always booked a year in advance.