The Molehit Project

My understanding of terrorism

2006-02-06T13:43:00.000-08:00

Since TMAC and I are the only fully-actualized men here who are capable of displaying a range of feelings (you're my boy!), I've decided to write a series of posts titled My understanding of... I had a couple more planned, but I've forgotten what they are now. I hope I remember in time to write them.

So, my understanding of terrorism is as follows. Most (if not all) of the times in war, you're trying to get the enemy to stop fighting. The traditional way of doing this is by killing a lot of their soldiers. This changes their understanding of the cost/benefit of the war, and causes them to retreat/surrender. (Assuming, of course, you don't trigger the deadly "Fuck you!" mechanism which causes them to fight even harder. This isn't the only way of convincing the population to give up, however; dropping an A-bomb can also do the trick, by again changing the perceived cost/benefit ratio.
I think terrorism is another way of changing that balance in peoples' heads, by taking the fight to the people. You can thus win the war, without--pardon the tired idiom--winning a single battle.
If you value a soldier's life and a citizen's life equally, this seems like a good tradeoff. If England could have suicide-bombed Vienna and gotten them to back down then, we wouldn't have had WWI and we would've saved a bunch of lives. Yay!
Unfortunately, terrorism also greatly lowers the requirements for attacking. In a big war, each country involved has either a really strong, despotic leader, or a country's (more or less) worth of support. If someone is in a war, then you know they have at least some popular support somewhere. There is a large number of people who think this war is a good idea. With terrorism, you only need like ten guys who think the terrorist attack is a good idea. Also, in a war, there is a country to attack back, and obviously, terrorism doesn't usually have any retaliatory target. "Bill and Tom just blew themselves up and killed some Americans, what are we going to do about it?" "Nothing, it was just two guys and they're already dead."
So, terrorism costs almost nothing to do. It seems really really hard to defend against and allow non-terrorists to live any sort of normal life. It seems the best idea is to just ignore it, or at least, view it in perspective. We never declared a war on household falls, but it regularly kills way more people than terrorism. Not to be that guy, but when people act scared, the terrorists wins. They're achieving their goal of instilling fear and retreatedness in our citizens without having to fight a real war to do it.
So, I think we should take the cool dude approach. Here's a sample conversation:

Terrorist:"Hey, what about that time we fucked up the Twin Towers?"
Bill America:"What?"
T:"You know, we blow up those towers!"
B:"Oh, yeah, the towers."
T:"Yeah! We killed like 3,000 people!"
B:"Oh, that was you?"
T:"Yeah! Fucked you up!"
B:"You know, obesity killed like 500,000 Americans last year, and we don't even give a fuck. So you got ways to go dude."
T:"Gah! Next time, we'll blow up New York!"
B:"(Distractedly.) Oh, cool. Tell me how that goes. Look dude, I gotta run. Oprah's on."
T:"I give up!"

You see how easy it is? How easy it could be? God, we'd totally win.
Anyways, that is my understanding of terrorism (and how we can stop it.)

Thoughts?

Emotionally Affecting Things

2006-02-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

I think I tend towards emotional stability (don't cry over much, stone cold mother fucker, etc.) However, there are a few things that just kill me; if I read/listen to them alone, or Heaven help me, alone and tired, I always at least tear up. I'm not really sure what it is about these things especially, but I am curious to know if other people have certain things that really sadly set them off. If so, I'm curious to know what they are.

Mine are, in no particular order:

1)Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Have you guys heard this?! Oh my God, the fourth movement kills me. When the women soloists come in, it's really nearly the best thing ever. Totally wrenching.

2) http://www.cnn.com/interactive/us/0601/gallery.mine.letter/content.1.html
This is a link to a picture of a note written by one of those miners who died in Virginia. He wrote it on the back of an insurance application after he knew they were all going to die.

3) http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=lowry_24_5
This is a link to an article written by a secular humanist whose wife died of cancer. God, I tear up just thinking about the last paragraph. Also very nearly the best thing ever.

My sweet idea for a war movie

2006-01-29T19:11:00.000-08:00

(Please ignore the previous few weeks of silence, MHP is back in a big way.)

One common problem with war movies, IMHO, is that it's obvious from the beginning that the main characters are going to be... main characters. You know in Saving Private Ryan that the story is about Tom Hanks, Tom Sizemore (eeeh), Matt Damon, etc. You know that Tom Hanks isn't going to get shot in the face thirty seconds into the movie; it's Tom Hanks, and the movie's kind of about him. (Aside 1, the best part about _Deep Blue Sea_ (ie, the only good part) was where Samuel L. was torn in half by a shark 40% of the way into the movie. Great surprise.) (Aside 2, Doug Hofstadter in _GHB_ talked about how it's hard to be surprised in mystery novels. If it looks like it's about to be wrapped up, and there's still a hundred pages left, it's not really about to be wrapped up.)
So, my idea for a war movie (taking some cues from _The Things They Carried_, which is totally great, is too have the movie be a series of little vignettes. The movie would start by following some big star (probably Christian Bale, because he's the best) as he talked to his men about charging up some hill or whatever. Well, they start up the hill and BAM, Christian gets his head shot off. But the shot doesn't stop, it just starts following the guy next to him, and he kills some bad guys or whatever, but then gets nailed, so the camera just goes over to the next guy. Eventually they take the hill, and the guy it's currently on gets like twenty minutes of story before he dies and the camera just keeps going. (I should mention that the entire thing would be shot in Shaky-cam. Of course, I really believe a law should be passed requiring all filmed media to be shot in Shakycam or mockumentary style.) The whole gist is that you would really have no idea what's going to happen to the guy. _Saving Private Ryan_ was really good or whatever, but the only suspense was "Is Tom Hanks going to die a poignant death or will he instead survive in a poignant manner?" My movie would have real suspense, and it would be really interesting to follow a guy around camp for twenty minutes and then see him get blown away.
Of course, there would be some greater narrative arc kind of tying the stories together. Are there any movies like this out already?

Patching Song Lyrics

2006-01-05T19:46:00.000-08:00

Hey team,

First of all, I had a great New Years for everyone who was there. Thanks a ton, Jason.
Secondly, I'm going to try and post stuff more often on here again.
Thirdly, content:

I'm a big fan of rap, as I'm sure many of you are too. Regardless, I think I have a couple good improvements to scattered lyrics. Not replacing the whole song or anything, just a few choice lines. I'm going to present them as you would a source code patch, where added lines are prefaced with a +, and deleted lines are prefaced with a -. Other lines are presented normally.

1) Black Star is great, but they have this one really whack, vaguely homophobic line:

Cats who claim they hard be mad fags,
so I run through 'em like water through sand bags.

Mad fags? Come on, Mos. I improve it thusly:

-Cats who claiming they hard be mad fags,
+Cats be claiming they hard while their dicks sag,
So I run through 'em like flood water through sand bags.

Furthermore, I think "Lose Yourself" is easily Eminem's best. I especially like the quicker lines:

And these times are so hard and it's getting even harder
Tryin to feed and water my seed, plus
Teeter-totter caught up between trying to be a father and a prima donna

Really good, right? Well, let's see what happens when you add comic book references!

And these times are so hard and it's getting even harder
Tryin to feed and water my seed, plus
-Teeter-totter caught up between trying to be a father and a prima donna
+Teeter-totter can't ever decide if I'm Spiderman or Peter Parker

Boom! Rap magic! I think he even dressed up as Spiderman in one of his videos.

Anyways, do you guys have any lyric improvements?

Radeon Linux IBM Thinkpad Infinite loop Blue Screen of Death BSOD

2005-12-15T14:07:00.000-08:00

Normal people, feel free to ignore this post, I fixed a problem on my laptop and I'm trying to publish the solution. I'm sure Google will find this. I'll put up some real posts soon, I'm busy packing for home tonight.

Thanks.

My IBM Thinkpad R51 started crashing in Linux and BSODing in Windows XP (it's a dual-boot.) The BSOD screen would say something like

//
// The driver for the display device got stuck in an infinite loop. This
// usually indicates a problem with the device itself or with the device
// driver programming the hardware incorrectly. Please check with your
// display device vendor for any driver updates.
//

This is apparently a problem with these laptop Radeon cards.

There is a lovely fix for this in Windows XP. It is here:
here

Basically, you tell Windows to use this card as a PCI card, as opposed to an AGP one. (My hunch is that this kills graphic performance, but I don't play any graphically intense games on my laptop anyway, so I haven't really noticed it.) This solution works great for Windows, but I was really digging the Linux and wanted a similar fix.

Well, it turn out there IS an equivalent fix, and predictably, it involves editing a text file. Boot your Linux into safe mode. (This was really easy on my Ubuntu machine, it was just another GRUB option.) If you can't boot into safe mode, boot normally, and just try and do this quickly before it crashes (I believe it's a heating issue, so you should have a little time.) Open xorg.conf in your favorite text editor (I used emacs, but most things should work. vi, nano, etc.) You may have to/should do this as root, I'm not sure. I did it as root, and it worked for me. It's in the /etc/X11 directory. Find the device section. Mine looked like this:

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility 9000 (M7 LW)"
Driver "ati"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Just before the EndSection line, add this line:
Option "BusType" "PCI"

Make sure the spacing is the same as for other items. (Use TABs to line it up nicely. I don't know if this is critical or not, but there's no reason not to line it up.) Save the file, and restart the X server (or just reboot, but apparently Linux people are so proud that they don't have to reboot regularly like Windows people that they would encourage restarting the xserver. Whatever that means.)

It should work now. It's probably slower, but whatever. It's better than crashing constantly. This worked for me, I hope it works for you too. I think the worst case scenario is that it may stop the xserver from running at all, and then you can probably just take it back out. You may want to backup your xorg.conf before trying this. Good luck!

Oh, thanks a lot to this website, this is where I found the magic option command:
here

That's it.

You're probably an asshole if...

2005-12-05T13:18:00.000-08:00

You probably shouldn't judge people, but I can. Why? Because I'm very good at it.

Specifically, I'm compiled a very short list (which I will add to later) of comments one can that are indicative of them being an asshole. Please note, this is strictly a correlative relationship; saying these phrases doesn't MAKE you an asshole, it merely reveals you as THE ASSHOLE YOU PROBABLY ARE. These statements may seem innocuous, but they're not. Here's a few:

"I don't care if someone is white, black, yellow, purple, or polka-dotted..." Whenever someone uses ridiculous colors to describe people (purple, polka-dotted, etc.), they're usually an asshole. These statements are often elaborated into something like, "I don't care if someone is white, black, yellow, purple, or green, as long as they put in a hard days work. But, the problem with these Mexicans is that they..." See, now it's clear that the guy (or girl) is an asshole. But, I predicted (judged) this already, just by the content of the first sentence.

"I don't care what someone does behind closed doors..." This is similar to number one, and is usually followed with "... but there's no reason to do/show X in public." Probably an asshole.

"I just think..." People who say this kind of thing are usually A) Not really thinking, and B) If they are thinking, they're thinking of something that shouldn't be prefaced with "just." It's often like, "Now, I don't know about all of you, but I just think that it's ridiculous to call Christmas trees 'holiday trees'." That's a reasonable side to argue, I guess, but it does require an argument. This kind of "Aww, shucks, I just think..." bullshit isn't going to fly.

"PC" or "politically correct." The only time these phrases are used is as strawman for some self-avowed straight-shooter. Stupid shit like, "Now it may not be 'politically correct' (cue double-quoting finger gesture) to say that we should let kids carry Bibles into schools, but gosh darn it, I..." Notice the thing being argued against here (rules against personal Bibles in school) doesn't even exist.

I encourage you to leave any of your own in the comments!

On an unrelated note, Emily and I listened to Christmas carols last night, hung lights, and decorated our holiday tree. I'm all for removing any and all public/governmental references to "Christmas", but I hope people keep decorating (which I'm sure they will.) Even secular humanists enjoy lights, snow, eggnog, and carols!

And finally, check out this Python code I wrote today:

if not goodFeature:
badFeatures.append(feature)

I love code like that; Python's the best.

The benefits of not living in a fraternity...

2005-12-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

Are not at all clear to me. Are there any? More specifically, are there any benefits to not living with a group of close friends? I don't think there are any. Let's compare my current living situation with my previous one at DX:

Cost: My rent is $700 a month with utilities. If you include groceries, it's $750 - $800. I don't know what it was at DX, but I think it was cheaper.

Time spent doing menial activities: Much higher now. I have to cook, do dishes, occasional vacuuming, occasional pickup. Before, I spent 20 minutes a week cleaning and an hour in meetings that were usually only semi-menial.

Cleanliness: I live in a cleaner place now, but I don't really care.

Company: Living with Emily is great, it really is. But I would include mates in my dream fraternity, so Emily could live there anyway. On the negative side, I now live with one friend (the Monster), instead of (realistically) tenish. I think how big a shame this is can't be stressed enough. It sucks, it's terrible. For every bummer I no longer have to live with (Jay, etc.), I don't get to live with two friends and two warm acquaintances. Not a good trade at all.

Food: It's better now, but I have to cook or pay for it. It's not worth it, I'd prefer the soul-numbing convenience of LE.

Entertainment: I've been to a number of really fun hangouts/parties here. And it's certainly nice to not have to entertain freshmen etc, but I still give the nod to DX.

So, from these first six comparisons, it looks like DX has 5, apartment has .5 (because cleanliness isn't a priority.) Those aren't good odds.

So, I propose the abolishment of single-dwelling houses. Instead, let's look at the advantages of a household for five singles/couples/families.

Price: It'd be way cheaper.
Specialization of space: You wouldn't need a dining room/study room, or a living room/computer room/tv room/game room. A house/building big enough to support all of those people would have to have enough rooms for such specialization.
Hire a cook: Cooking's fine, but doing dishes is the fucking worst. We'd higher somebody to do this.
Friends: You'd be surrounded by friends! It'd be great!
Childcare: Presumably, many people would eventually have kids. The kids could all hangout, and you could have the other people babysit.

You'd have less privacy, sure. But how much privacy do you really need? You only read need privacy to fuck around, and DX proved how much fucking around could be had with minimal privacy.

Am I missing something here? I really think this would be a better solution than what we have now.

Oh man

2005-11-30T09:14:00.000-08:00

So, this team in France just did a facial transplant for a lady that had her face tore off by a dog:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4484728.stm

So that's pretty weird or whatever.
But get this:

The face has to be taken off a living (but presumably brain-dead) donor. Furthermore, when taken off a ventilator, people can sometimes start breathing on their own again, etc. So, they could take the face off your brain-dead sister, pull her off the ventilator, and SHE KEEPS BREATHING. You just took the face off a living person! That's so fucked up!

But, if it helps just one little girl born without a face (thanks for nothing, Tyler), then won't it all be worth it?

Quickie

2005-11-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

First of all, FireFox 1.5 is out. Everyone should download it. ( www.getfirefox.com ) . This one will automatically update, so it may be the last FireFox you ever need to download.

Secondly, I had a dream last night where I told people how sweet A History of Violence is. It really is a sweet movie. My dream came true!

Thirdly, is anyone/everyone down with a New Years in Chicago?

Fourthly, look at this dictionary.com entry for "cognitive dissonance": here How apropos!

Fifthly, everyone knows that in firefox you can hit Ctrl-L (to go to the location/address bar) and type "dict dog" to get the definition of "dog", right? It's very handy.

Sixthly, Wil Oldham and Mates of State are both really good.

New Videogame Consoles

2005-11-21T06:35:00.000-08:00

This post doesn't have any kind of moral issue, real or imagined, in it at all. For that I'm deeply sorry. I did see Schindler's List again last night. Isn't it a brilliant film?

This post is going to be about videogames, but I'm going to try and keep it interesting for non-gamers as well.
Moving on, for those that don't know, the new Xbox (Xbox 360) comes out on Tuesday. The idea is that all three console makers (Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo) will release new consoles in the next 12 months. Their hooks?:

Xbox 360 (Microsoft, sequel to Xbox):
Made for hi-def TVs, good sound systems, etc.
Really good graphics.
Xbox Live (more on that later.)
Streams movies from your desktop, plays songs off your iPods, etc.
$400

PS3 (Sony, sequel to PlayStation2):
Made for hi-def TVs, good sound systems, etc.
Really good graphics. (Possibly really really good graphics.)
Probably interfaces well with other Sony products, but not with non-Sony products.
~$400

Revolution (Nintendo, sequel to GameCube):
NOT made for hi-def TVs, good sound systems, etc.
Good graphics.
Good online stuff.
Can play download NES, SNES, and N64 games (for a fee.)
Really innovative controller (it knows where it is in 3d space, knows which way it's being tilted, etc.)
~$200 - $250.

So, the plan for Microsoft and Sony is to compete with each other on horsepower. They are each trying to gain more control over the current gamer population. Conversely, Nintendo is trying to expand the population (and gain control of the new gamers it brings in.) So far so good.

Ok, I'm sorry, I'm totally going to change this post now. The above stuff still stands in case anyone is curious and wanted a 30 second rundown (my recommendation is wait 9 months and then get a Xbox 360 or Revolution depending on your preference and wallet-thickness.) Anyways, I like reading about game development, etc. Furthermore, it seems to me that there are a lot more Charles Thickens in the world than there are gamers. (I'm going to use you, Charles, as the canonical person who doesn't really play videogames, but has a couple that he/she likes and enjoys playing it with friends. Especially when Futures are involved. I think Todd may also fall into this category.)
So, what features should a game designed for Charles Thickens have?
1) Charles has to be able to control it. I don't know if easy is exactly the right word, but it's the best I can come up with. For example, Mario Kart is easy to control. It's (basically) got a Go button, a Break button, a Shoot button, and a joystick to steer. This isn't many buttons, obviously. Perhaps more importantly, though, these controls make sense and correspond with real life. Charles knows how to drive a real car. Intuitively, playing Mario Kart is no more difficult than driving and occasionally pressing another button. In contrast, Halo is hard to control. It has a Shoot button, a Punch button, a Switch Guns button, a Jump button, a Crouch button, a Grenade button, a Zoom button, a joystick to move around, and a joystick to look around. That's a lot of button (although, to be fair, you can ignore the Crouch and maybe the Zoom button and still do alright.) Furthermore, they are very easy controls to screw up. You can Switch to a worthless weapon. You can stick a grenade to yourself. You can start looking at the sky and not be able to figure out how to look at the ground again. You can Jump off the ledge and die. All of these make Halo very difficult (and frustrating) to learn. Lesson for game design? Don't allow inextricable situations, and make the path to extractedness self-evident. If you're stuck in a corner in Mario kart, what do you do? "Hold B to go in reverse." If you're stuck in a corner looking at the ceiling in Halo, what do you do? "Push forward on the joystick. No, the right one. Oh, your controls are reversed, so press down on it. No, not so far, now you're looking at the floor. Ok, there you go. Oh, you swapped out your good gun. Press Y to switch guns. Oh, I guess you threw away your good gun. Go find a rocket launcher, and when you're over it, hold X to pick it up. But make sure you don't fire it when you're near a wall or looking at the floor or you'll kill yourself instantly." That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much.
2) Charles has to be able to compete. If Charles and I played Halo, he would never kill me. Never. I'm not even good at Halo. During a game of Mario Kart, though, while I still may win, Charles would definitely get some hits in. If we play five times, he may only win one of the races, but two would be close, and he would hit me with a shell every race. Charles has to be able to plan and achieve interim goals (not getting lapped, not getting fourth place, etc.), even when he can't achieve his ultimate goal (winning the race.) He also needs to get small amounts of satisfaction during the game itself ("Oh man, I totally got you with that shell!") Even if he isn't winning now, he has to see that it is possible for him to win. Lesson for game design? Make a continuum of goals that Charles can achieve, and make the rewards dramatic. (Charles will be more excited to blow the leader end-over-end 150 feet into the air than he would be to just puncture the leader's tires, even if the effects are the same.)
3) Charles has to be able to improve. If you stay an amateur at anything, it sucks. Charles needs to be able to see himself improving as he continues to play. He needs to come closer to winning, and he needs to be able to beat newcomers. Lesson for game design? The game can't be completely random. Better players need to generally perform better. There also can't be any asymptotic skill increases required. For example, don't allow super-items that are very difficult to learn, but once mastered, allow a person to totally dominate the game. Charles will never learn that item, and so will eventually stop improving.
4) Charles can't need to know the maps. Again, a veteran of map Foo in Halo will destroy a newcomer to the Foo arena. The veteran will know where the rocket launcher is, where the invisibility is, where the big tank is, etc. This isn't the case with Mario Kart, and this opens it up to Charles Thickens. Thickens will never learn the maps; but if they all follow the same pattern (go down the track but watch for various obvious environmental hazards), he will still be able to compete. Lesson for game design? Achieve variety in your maps by making them visually distinctive but functionally similar (the sand worm in the sand stage fulfills the same role as the semis in the highway stage or the yetis in the snow stage.)
5) Charles needs to be able to employ consistent strategies. The basic strategy for Mario Kart is: race down the track collecting items. If you collect a blue shell, fire it. If you collect a red shell and are trailing someone, fire it. If you collect a green shell and someone is right in front of you, fire it. If you collect X, do Y. It's not exactly context-free (because you have to know what is going on around you), but you're not worried about other player's strategies (it doesn't really affect you, and they're using the same strategy as you anyways.) The strategy for Halo is much more complicated. It's something like: run around the map collecting guns. If it's map X, Y, or Z, it's critical to get to the middle and get the rocket launcher. Otherwise, try to get a shotgun and a sniper rifle. If someone has the rocket launcher, run away, unless they've fired four shots or are person A, B, or C (we know they suck with the rocket launcher.) Watch out for person D, he always goes for the invisibility. If you have the machine gun, and they have the pistol, jump around while engaging, unless you have the overshield, then just strafe left and right. Generalized: if you have weapon W versus person P with weapon W_p, and P = a, b, c, or d, and you don't have the overshield, and P has fought with someone else (especially e) in the last 30 seconds, or you're next to a health pack, engage. Else, run away. Halo strategies are non-monotonic: you can keep adding qualifiers to the current situation, and Chucks optimal strategy changes. The non-monotonicity of Mario Kart is much less than that of Halo. Lesson for game design? Don't allow a bunch of qualifiers ('unless', 'or', 'but not with') to creep into your optimal strategies.

Ok, I gotta get some work done, so I'm cutting this off. I wanted to get into what it would take for Charles to go out and buy a videogame console and a single player game, and to actually go home and play it, but I've run out of time. So, I'll just pose it as a question to Charles (and Todd) and any other very casual game players out there: What would it take for you to go buy a console and single player game for yourself? How much could it cost? What would the game have to be like for you to spend that amount of money?

Does anyone want emails from this site?

2005-11-16T12:41:00.000-08:00

Hey, I forgot,
I get emails whenever anyone leaves a comment on this blog. Does anyone else want to get these emails? It probably averages 2 or 3 comments a day. Let me know if you do, I don't think you can sign up for them, but I can set up a gmail filter to send them to you automatically.

Thanks.

I want one of these things

2005-11-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

Man, this looks so awesome:

http://www.gbax.com/indexgp2x.html

After next quarter starts, if I can promise myself that I'll actually do some development for it (and not just play SNES ports for a week) I'm so going to buy one.

Also, I'm on facebook now, although I think everyone who reads this blog knows that already. I'm registered as a Northwestern student. If you're not my friend yet, don't be offended (although I can't imagine you would be), I ran out of friend invites.

Also, it looks like I'll be going home on Dec. 11 or 12. Hopefully I'll be at DePauw for the first couple of days.

Finally, would anyone be interested in a New Year's Eve party up in Chicago/Evanston?

Bizarre Australian Suit

2005-11-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

So this gal was born with a host of birth defects because the doctor didn't diagnose properly the pregnant mother's rubella. So, the daughter is now suing the doctor for "wrongful life." Apparently this isn't the first time this type of case has been brought up.

WEIRD.

http://www.courttv.com/news/2005/1110/harriton_ctv.html

Registering Sex Offenders

2005-11-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

I found this website recently:

Map Sex Offenders

Go ahead, I'll wait while you see if there are any registered sex offenders living around you. (I don't, by the way.)

You've been able to look up local sex offenders for awhile, but I don't think it's ever been so convenient. You can even register for it to warn you when a new sex offender moves to your area!

I think I'm really against this idea, for the following reasons. I'm going to try and do it as Wittgenstein would have, if I remember correctly. Lines beginning with numbers are mine, lines beginning with letters are counterpoints to me. I'll try to indent as appropriate.

1) The current laws are totally inconsistent; as far as I know, we don't do it with any other type of convictions. This, I think, could have the following explanations (or some combination thereof):
A) Sexual offenses are different because they're worse than all other crimes.
1) While being raped/molested is obviously a very awful experience (I've read A LOT on how awful it is,) it seems obvious to me that there are worse crimes, namely murder. I just kind of assume that everyone basically agrees with me that murder is worse than sexual offenses, so I won't labor the point.
B) Sexual offenses are different because of their extremely high recidivism rates. (Sexual offenders are more likely to commit more sexual offenses than burglars are to burgle more homes, for example.)
1) I really don't know the numbers on this at all, but I get the impression that sexual offenders have higher-than-usual recidivism rates. One could make the case, then, that a convicted sexual offender is more dangerous than a convicted murder on average. (I think that may be an interesting point to try and make.) Regardless, we're left with convicted sexual offenders either being too dangerous to live around, or not too dangerous to live around. If they are too dangerous, then we need to keep them in jail. We need to adjust the statues regarding sexual offenses, and make them tend towards life inprisonment. We also need a lot of studies demonstrating how sexual offenders are incurable. If they're not too dangerous, then we shouldn't require them to demonize themselves to their neighbors.
A) There's another possibility: They raise the danger of that neighborhood some undetermined amount, and people need to be aware of that possibility.
1) However much they raise the danger in a neighborhood, it seems likely that their amount of danger isn't qualitatively different than the dangers induced by murders, burglars, car jackers, drug dealers, etc. It's silly to pretend that a guy who slept with a seventeen year old is more threatening to his neighbors than a triple-murderer.
C) Sexual offenses are differernt because they creep the hell out of everybody.
1) I agree, sexual offenses are universally creepy as hell. But a lot of people are also creeped out by homosexuals or minorities. Presumably, we'd all be against a "Fags in your Neighborhood!" website, so I don't think creepiness is a good indicator of anything.
2) The current law has the following negative side-effects:
1) It demonizes sexual offenders
A) Good, they are bad people.
1) Well, if they're bad people, we should put them in jail longer. As a society, we've all agreed that jailtime is the proper punishment for major offenders.
2) It has the effect of exposing more poor people to sexual offenders. Nice neighborhoods will quickly find out about a sexual offender, and can effectively force him out. Alternatively, a wealthy family can move away when a convicted offender moves in next door. A wealthy family is also more likely to find out about a convicted offender moving next door. Thus, poor people are disproportionately exposed to sexual offenders. I'm sure they would be without this law as well, and there's no reason for the law to further this discrepancy.

Alright, I'm sick fo writing this.
I see two solutions, I think I'm fine with either. One is to stop requiring sexual offenders to register. The second is requiring every criminal to register. Perhaps you could go to threatlevel.gov, type in your address, and it would give the threat level for that address. It would be an aggregate of known criminals in your area, the number of crimes each criminal has committed, and the amount of crimes committed in that area. It would make a sweet Google Maps extension. Actually, the more I think about it, the more fucked up an idea that is.

So, I propose doing away with sexual offender registeries. Any thoughts?

Any arguments against human cloning?

2005-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

I can't think of a single reasonable argument against human cloning. I can't even come close. The best I can come up with is "It would be a big waste of money." Which, I guess, vanity cloning would be a big waste of money. But so are a million other things.

Has anyone heard any good arguments against human cloning?

Puns

2005-11-11T11:55:00.000-08:00

Our Hero's blog recently linked to a Christian music website that was setup like "If you like Nickelback, you might like Christian music rock group X"

I thought that since the four people that visit this site are all big music fans, it might be funny to come up with punny names for religious analogues of popular groups.

I'll get us started with the hottest Jewish rapper to come out of Sinai-town in a long time: KanYHWH West! Pwn4d!

The Root of the Problem:

2005-11-10T12:01:00.000-08:00

Our Hero, I think the problem with your Hero philosophy is that it ignores Mead's Axiom:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world... INDEED, IT IS THE ONLY THING THAT EVER HAS!

I guess if you define "small group" to be "group of one," then your Hero philosophy can skirt unscathed by her battle axe of logic and scimitar of wit. Lucky for you!

I'd love to make a shirt that begins with Mead's quote and then continues with "But only in the most literal sense. You could just as well say that tiny motions of atoms is the only thing that has changed the world. Furthermore, the failure rate of 'thoughtful, committed citizens' is through the roof. If you're really want to change the world, you're better off dollar-for-dollar buying as many lobbyists as you can. Finally, Margaret Mead was probably a phony and definitely comes from the same school of hucksterism and revisionist historians that have cursed us with all the muddle-headed luddite sociologists we see running around today. So there!" That would be on the front.

On the back would be an incisive political cartoon. It would be Mead, dressed as a licentious flapper hand-feeding maggot-infested meat labelled "LIES" to a bunch of Samoans. The Samoans would be roaming America, shitting the lies back onto our soil. Wherever they were shitting, saloons and whorehouses would be springing up. This would be symbolic of how Mead was actually a moralless woman; determined to justify her own immorality, she fed lies to the Samoans, who unwittingly parroted them back to her. She could then return to America to trot out lies about the rights of women in other countries.

Really, though, from skimming her Wikipedia article: she went to Samoa, studied women, came back and wrote some books about it. Everybody got up in arms because Samoan women were supposedly down with casual sex, etc. But now, some people are saying she made most of it up. It's not clear. Regardless, it's not fair to get down on her for bringing up the idea of women's rights. It is fair to get down on her for making horrible quotations and for possibly fabricating all her evidence. I guess. We should probably all lay off her, what with her being dead and all. Would you make fun of the dead on a spaceship crashing into the Sun? I JUST DON'T KNOW!

My moral philosophy and moral philosophy chooser

2005-11-08T15:07:00.000-08:00

Hey team,

For one of my classes, we had to write an interface that would help users perform a selection task, such as choosing a new car or university. I chose to try and sketch a system that would help users choose an appropriate overarching moral philosophy.

In the course of the assignment, I ended up writing ten pages about what I think about religion, the moral system I try and live by, and the thinking that has gotten me to this point. It's kind of scattered in general, and I ran out of time to go back and clean it up. Still, I like my Crashing Spaceship philosophy, and I'm really interested in what other think about it.

It's a Word document, if you can't open it, email me and I'll email you the text or something. It's too long to cut and paste it here.

The paper

Simulated dog

2005-11-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

I recently bought Nintendogs, which is this puppy simulator for the GameBoy. It didn't work very well, so I took it back, but it did make me wonder how hard it would be to simulate a dog. If you try to simulate a person, you have one (well, lots really) very big problem: language. If you simulate a person, everyone will want to talk to it, and we're nowhere near having that working. But you can't talk to a dog. Or, you can, but it recognizes a very limited vocabulary and often doesn't seem to react very well to words it does recognize. This would be perfect for a computer.
So, I think a desktop computer could simulate a dog living in a virtual world successfully. You could have a little microphone and talk to the dog and everything. The graphics wouldn't look totally right, but they would be pretty close, and in five years could look as real as the real thing. So, that could be kind of neat.
It'd be a lot cooler, though, or at least creepier, if the virtual dog acted like a dog that you know. You could send your pet, say, to a clinic where they observed the dog for the week. They could specifically model the virtual dog to be like your real dog. They could get general temperment as well as specific behaviours (my dog likes playing with bubbles for example.) With some motion capture, they could even get the walk, sit, etc. motions down correctly. My hunch is that for 10 grand or so, they could make a pretty convincing simulation of your real dog. So, initially, the dog simulator may be a full-blown program. You run fakedog.exe, and it's basically a game where you play with the dog. There's no reason, though, that you would need a whole separate game for the dog. You could just have the dog always on the desktop. You could have the dog barking at new windows, chasing the mouse cursor, sleeping on the Start button, etc. You could even get on your friends computer, "whistle" for your dog over the internet, and have your pet come bounding onto your friend's computer to play with their dog. When you were ready to leave your friend's house, you could load the dog into a "car" (a normal USB flash drive) and take it back home again. Perhaps the dog could even develop enemies or rivals, so that whenever you talk to DogDude420 on AIM, your two pets get in a fight and you have to lock your dog in a room. Perhaps you and your friend's dogs could have puppies. (A 95 year old Bob Barker: Don't forget to spay and neuter your fake dogs!)
Of course, the more the dog is allowed to interact with you and other dogs, the smarter it needs to be, and the more it needs to resemble your real dog. So, the programming company would need to develop more and more detailed tests of your dogs' brain to provide realistic responses. (Even if the company wasn't trying to simulate an exact dog, they may still need to study real dogs to generate real dog-like behaviour.) The company may even get to the point where wire up a dog's brain, to see exactly which inputs fire exactly which outputs. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this: at some point, the fake dog is going to become arguably as real as any other dog. Can you imagine how weird this would be?
I will come up with and least ten totally weird things that could happen from simulating dogs very effectively (in no particular order.)

1) Websites may become "dog-friendly" and offer virtual stores to the pets of people shopping online. You may see a normal Amazon.com website, but your simulated dog perceives a huge store, full of interesting things to see and sniff. If you're shopping for dog toys, perhaps your simulated dog could provide some advice by what it is most interested in.
2) Speaking of dog toys, there would be a boom in the sale of simulated dog toys. You have to keep that fake dog busy somehow, and a simulated PetCo tennis ball may be just the ticket.
3) Harddrive crashes bring owners to emotional lows as their very lifelike dogs are last in the crash.
4) Related to the previous utiliarianism post, do-gooders will set up big servers for people to drop off unwanted dogs. The crazy cat lady next door will have a basement full of computers keeping alive 100s of thousands of simulated cats.
5) Divorces and breakups will be easier with simulated dogs. Instead of fighting for custody of the one animal, each partner would simply get a copy. They would each get to keep the dog and if they ever get back together, it seems likely that the two clones would get along famously.
6) New viruses will appear, targeting the owner's computer through their simulated pet.
7) Celebrity pets will be a big business. Who wouldn't want to let their dog play with Paris' little dog Tinkerbell? Better yet, each customer would only being playing with a copy of Tinkerbell, so Paris gets to keep her dog.
8) The fake dog could lead any sort of amazing life. I expect that humans wouldn't deal well with being a swashbuckling pirate one day and walking on the moon the next. We would begin to think that something was up. I don't believe a dog would (or could) have any such suggestions if it did the doggie equivalent. It could be chasing rabbits one minute, take a nap, and then wake up in its owner's arms near a fireplace. If the dog was confused by this change of location, it wouldn't really be able to manifest its confusion to the owner/player. Perhaps as long as the owner doesn't know of the simulated animal's discomfort or muddled-ness it wouldn't matter, because these animals only exist to please their owners.
9) There will be a lobby group (PETSA?) that encourage parents every Christmas to not buy simulated dogs for children who are not ready for them.
10) There will be at least one person's homework, one Word file somewhere that really is eaten by an overzealous simulated dog.

Any other weird possible outcomes?

Is typical human omnivorism ethically defensible?

2005-11-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

I've been an on-again off-again vegetarian for awhile, but I recently read an article (the Wikipedia entry, actually) on factory farms, and it REALLY made me want to be a vegan. Unfortunately, it turns out that being a vegan is 100 times harder than being a vegetarian. So, the result is basically me feeling bad at every meal while I stuff more cheese (mmmmm cheese) down my throat.
It seems to me that all of the animal rights arguments against eating meat also apply to not drinking milk, etc. I think we can all agree that A) treatment of "factory farm" animals is, in general, appalling and B) we wouldn't treat pets (dogs or cats) in the same way we treat cows and pigs.
Of course, skinning a live cow serves a purpose that skinning a live dog doesn't serve: it gives us meat, and more specifically, cheap meat. But my hunch is that there are other, less noble reasons for treating farm animals so poorly. First of all, few of us have any kind of emotional connections with cows, pigs, etc. None of us had pet cows growing up, and so we never think "Man, that could be Bessy I'm eating." We also never really see the way farm animals are treated; PETA have turned themselves into a bunch of wackies, and when they show us mistreatment of animals, even I tend to think they've sensationalized it. Few people really have a sense of what goes on in a factory farm, because it's usually presented by extremists on either side. Finally, the concept of meat seems to really have been abstracted. It's tough to reconcile the cute docile cows you see in fields with the brownish substance that LE serves you. Not many people actually eat tongues or eyeballs or anything that looks remotely animal anymore.
So, it seems to me that one of the following is true:
A) We are overly protected of dogs and cats.
B) There is a difference inherent between pets and farm animals that allows us to treat them very differently.
C) Farm animals are a necessary casualty in service of some greater good.
D) We're a bunch of hypocrites who don't care about brutality that we don't see with our own eyes.

My hunch is the answer is D, but I'm really not sure. It could also be A. But I'm pretty sure it's not B or C.
I just realized I just got to something of a coherent point, so now might be a good time to sum up what the hell I'm talking about. It's actually kind of narrow now that I think about it.
My claim: People are apparently willing (as shown by their continued purchasing of cheap meat) to allow a certain amount of violence to be perpetrated against farm animals that we would not allow to be committed against dogs, cats, or the like. Therefore, at least one of the above statements (A, B, C, or D) must be true.

Refutation of B: My problem with B is just that I can't think of any real differences, and I haven't heard of any that anyone else has thought of. Some potential differences that could affect things would be intelligence, feeling of pain, etc. I can't imagine any of these applying to farm animals, however. I hear pigs are pretty smart, and while cows and chickens are probably not all that bright, it seems pretty clear that they possess a desire for life, fear of machines, desire for fresh air, etc. While there is precedent for killing farm animals and not pets, this precedent certainly isn't known to the animals themselves. No cow consoles itself with "Well, this is what I was born for" as an uneducated worker shoots a steel bolt through its head and cuts its legs off while it's still alive and kicking.
Refutation of C: I'm pretty convinced that in America, at least, noone's life is depending on dirt-cheap meat. Especially if we moved to a system where most Americans ate little or no meat, the prices on veggie stuff would drop even further. If it's life or death, then I'm definitely in favor of saving the human at the cost of the animal. I definitely don't think that's the case here in America though.
On A: Sometimes I'm concerned that I'm unfairly emphasizing human goodness. I really don't want to get into the mindset that "humans have evolved past our omnivorous heritage" or something, because I don't want to imply humans are better or more advanced that other animals. When I fawn over my own dog (or see others do similar), sometimes I think that we just have too much time on our hands and our affection for animals is over the top. More often, though, I think that animals are a lot like us ways that relate to killing them: fear, desire for self-preservation, etc. While pigs obviously don't think "Oh God, no, I've got a sow and piglets back home," it's entirely possible, I think, that they can perceive the situation as negatively as prisoners being led down death row. That's a really strong claim, in retrospect, but I don't really know why it wouldn't be true.
On D: This post is going on really long, so I'll try and make this quick. I think most people don't realize (or fully understand) what is done to the animals that provide their meat. I think this area is ripe for a corporation (hopefully Taco Bell) to step in. I think they should make commercials out of real video taken from factory farms. Something like: "This is where their meat comes from:" [shots of pigs standing knee-deep in shit, of dead cows being dragged out the back of a 110 degree catttle truck, of cows mooing as their legs are hacked off, of little chicks getting their beaks burnt off so they can't go crazy and peck each other, of roosters being thrown alive into dumpsters until they're eventually crushed to death by the roosters above them, you get the idea.] "This is where our meat comes from:" [shots of cows, pigs, chickens running around in a field. Maybe a touching scene where a farmer stroking a happy cow's nose and making sweet promises while his partner shoots the cow in the back of the head.] I really think these commercials can be really effective.

Ok, I'm really sick of writing this so I'm going to stop. I'm going to go on the record that eating octopus makes me more upset than eating other animal. So, I think I'm just a subjective moral judge as I'm accusing everyone else of being.

My car got its window broken last night

2005-11-05T06:12:00.000-08:00

Random event:
The Monster took the van to the bowling alley last night, and when she came back, the entire passenger window had been broken. It's really random, but nothing was taken (including her purse which is good.) I remember the time I left my car idling unlocked at Best Buy for a half hour and nothing was taken. Capricious!

Yay for pidgin philosophy!

2005-11-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

(I don't believe "pidgin" really works here, but I don't know a better word for relatively-uninformed but sincerely interested vaguely philosophical questions.)

So, here are three questions that I think are interesting:
1) An oldie but a goodie: Would you rather be friends with A) A guy who got drunk in high school, drove home, and killed somebody (due to his drinking.) or B) A guy who had very good reason to believe that person C was a bad person (rapist, murderer, etc.) Guy B believes that C will never be brought to justice, so he follows C home and murders him. I would be tempted to go for B, but it's a hard question (I think).

2) Assuming we live in a purely naturalistic world, is it possible to waste your life?

3) Let's just assume that (again) we live in a naturalistic world and that utilitarianism is basically right. (I understand utilitarianism to be, at its core, the idea that it is morally good to increase the amount of happiness in the world.) I don't know anything about brain chemistry really, but I think that for our purposes, we can imagine that happiness is nicely correlated with the amount of chemical H in the brain. It seems clear that there is nothing especially "happy" about the mythical chemical H. Rather, it is simply the way that chemical H is interpreted by our brains that makes it the "happy" chemical. It also seems possible that other animals may have a similar but different chemical that makes them happy. (Dogs have Dh, cats have Ch, etc.) So, the specific chemical has nothing to do with happiness, really. Rather, any chemical, properly interpreted, could promote happiness in the utiliarian sense. So, could we write this into a computer program? Could we define simulated creatures that interpret the value of a certain variable (Vh) as happiness? Would it be morally good to have a basement full of computers quitely humming away and driving up the happiness of a million simple agents? Boy, it doesn't seem like it, but I haven't thought of any good argument beyond knee-jerk "that sounds silly."

Any thoughts?

Salud

2005-11-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

Okay. This is the first blog I've made under my own name.
The first one I've made under my own control entirely without anyone else telling me what to do in certain places.
Some of the stuff I like very much. Some of the stuff I quite like. and I don't hate any of it, so I've settled for this... web presence.
I can't decide which post to start with, so I won't start with any of the posts I've already started.

So, this is my blog. It's not going to be about anything particular (politics, evolution, technology, etc.) I'm going to try and keep it from being my emo musings, though. I'm going to try and write posts that I think are interesting or funny, with the idea that others (probably only people I know in person) may also enjoy it. I have no idea how often I'm going to update it, but I will try and do it a few times a week.
Also, I just bought www.themolehitproject.com and have a really basic website up there. I'm mainly only going to use it for posting files (projects I do here at NU, etc.) Unfortunately, many of the interesting projects aren't really runnable by laypeople. (They're not really programs as much as executable pieces of code.) So, I'm not sure how often I'll update the .com or how useful it will be to other people. If you're going to check a page, check this one first. If I update anything at www.themolehitproject.com, I will be sure to mention it here.

Finally, you don't need to reigster for anything to post comments (although I think you'll need to pass a "I'm a human" test.) So, please feel free to post.

Thanks a lot!

Hello, world!

2005-11-02T19:04:00.000-08:00

Foo bar baz gnar.