Linguistics, Dancing, and a Few Good Books

11 September 2002

Let me preface this entry by saying that I really do have sympathy for those of you out there who lost someone close in the attacks a year ago. The rest of this entry does not apply to you.

Furthermore, I suppose that there may exist people who spend their lives in a constant state of debilitating sorrow for all the murder and other bad things that go on in this country and in the world. If you are such a person, the rest of this entry also does not apply to you.

If you're not in one of those two groups of people, and you're still spending today making a big deal about the GREAT TRAGEDY where SO MANY PEOPLE DIED, the rest of this entry is just for you: get over yourself already. Already in the last few days I've been hearing you gear up for it, with anticipatory strains of woe. You've already sponsored interminable talks with titles like, "how the world will never be the same" and "remembering the thousands that died one year ago". You and people like you are going to make today positively dreadful, not getting any work done and making it difficult or impossible for the rest of us to do so. Never before a year ago, and not really since, did you ever spare a single thought for all the people murdered out there for whatever stupid reasons people murder other people, but just because these people had the luck (ooh, ok, that was a bit sarcastic even for me) to be killed in the company of so many others, you now go on and on at length about how they need to be specially remembered.

Right now, I know exactly what you're thinking. "What kind of awful person would say such things! Thousands died! We will never forget this day! It will live on in... in our memories forever!" Really? Here's a quick quiz: I want you to name the date that Pearl Harbor was bombed. What? You can't? Yeah, life goes on. Let's put this all in some more perspective...

A year ago, 2,801 people died in the attacks. (cite: CNN) That's a lot of people. Now, I don't know how many people were murdered in 2001 because I couldn't find it, but in 2000 there were 15,517 murders in the US (cite: FBI, as quoted in a Boston Globe article). Three years earlier, in 1997, there were 18,209 murders (cite: CNN). Extrapolating, I feel safe in saying that there were at least three times as many people in the US last year who were murdered by someone other than the terrorists. Even adding in the deaths from the attacks (which were, after all, murders) likely wouldn't even bring the total up to a five-year high. This fairly callous analysis is mostly just to demonstrate the hypocrisy of those of you out there mourning the deaths of a couple thousand people you have no connection to, while totally ignoring the deaths of more than ten thousand others.

Well, the terrorists certainly got your attention. And if you believe Bush's post-attack rhetoric about their motivations ("they did this because they were jealous of our freedom, and wanted to take it away")---which I don't, but I'll play along for a minute---boy howdy did it ever work. Despite the basic futility of trying to defend against someone who is willing to commit suicide to accomplish something, we have destroyed many freedoms in the name of security. For the most part (there are exceptions), we are just as insecure as we were before, except that we endure more inconveniences, indignities, privacy violations, and assorted rights violations than we have at any other point in recent memory. I could riff on this topic for hours at this point, but that'd make this too long (if it isn't already). Maybe in a later entry. For now, you can read this AP summary.

I have to say, though, as irritating as I find all the bleeding hearts that have been materialising in the days leading up to this anniversary, at least they aren't trying to sell me anything. If I see one more ad for a 9/11 commemorative, I'll just scream. The leaches are out in force on this one, selling everything from books, to watches, to purses, to coins and medallions; I am hard put to think of anything more crass or tacky than trying to make money off this event (or any other murder, or death in general, for that matter).

Well, I'm tired of typing now, so I'll wrap up. Basically, if you're going to be contemplative today---which is healthy, to a degree---don't forget to contemplate all those other people you didn't know who got killed in the last year. I'll close with a link to last Saturday's entry of Chris Baldwin's excellent comic Bruno, which nicely summarises my whole feeling on the matter.

(PS: It was December 7th, 1941.)

"I blame Martin Luther." --Fr Henry Bodah

Posted 4:58 AM [+]

Ha-ha! Just downloaded Chimera, a Mozilla-derivative browser for Mac OS X; it doesn't seem to have the problems with blogger that Omniweb has, so now I can write these from my laptop. It does have font issues yet, though, and so I probably won't use it for my main browser. I might get into the nightly-build cycle, for the fun of it---it just might become my new distraction for late at night when I don't want to work on my thesis. Oh wait! That's my blog. Sorry, forgot.

I just discovered that in 10.2 Save dialogs, filenames with numbers in them are listed in numerical order, not alphabetical. Thus asdf10.txt comes after asdf9.txt. I haven't explored it much yet, so I'm not positive how it works, but I'm totally thrilled. Inordinately so, in fact.

"Telling people to 'zip up' is never proper unless they are exposing themselves." --Miss Manners

Posted 1:06 AM [+]

09 September 2002

I have just spent the last, oh, hour or so reading the weekly blog "The Story About the Baby", and I've spent much of that time laughing, choking, and/or spraying mouthsful of Coke onto my monitor. Run, don't walk, etc., etc.

I haven't posted in a few days because the net connection to our house was down, and I was much too lazy to schlep the three blocks to the CIT to actually check my mail or post to the blog. Instead, I obliterated the damn Babylonians and am currently working to ensure that Persia meets the same fate. The year is 1910 and I have Modern Armor and Mechanized Infantry on my side: hear me roar!

Also over the weekend, I finished reading a book called The Turing Option. I picked it up in a used bookstore in Philadelphia; it caught my eye because its authors were Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky. For the non-initiated, Marvin Minsky is a big name in the field of artificial intelligence, and is incidentally my academic grandfather---my advisor's advisor. Harry Harrison, on the other hand, is a really funny author of various sci-fi books, and is probably best known for his Stainless Steel Rat series.

The book takes place in 2023, and it was written in 1992. This is important to note, because in a problem universal to sci-fi (though perhaps worse here than usual), there are places in the book where an explicit or implicit prediction has gone screamingly wrong. Mentions of a still-active Warsaw Pact, for instance, are impossibly jarring. Frequent references to computers with "thousands of megabytes" fall a bit flat, both for the assumption that that would be impressive and the failure to use the correct term "gigabyte" (which was already in use in the early 90s, so they really missed the boat there).

That said, it really was a good book, and worth reading. The premise is that science is on the brink of discovering true machine intelligence, and there are a number of interests who wish to have that information and are willing to go to astounding lengths to acquire it and keep it secret. The book thus ends up being a mystery novel of sorts---how did the crime happen, and who done it?---while spending a great deal of time on some very well-informed speculation on the nature of intelligence and the necessary components of any replication thereof. More credence is given to the Cyc database than I usually am accustomed to, but that may be a function of when the book was written: ten years ago, a lot of people believed pretty strongly in Cyc or something like it as a necessary foundation for any true machine intelligence. I wonder what Minsky thinks of it now.

Also worth noting, if you do read the book, are the extra chapters of the book, that weren't published, that Minsky has put on his web page.

"Jon, didn't you say the table was granite? You don't need coasters unless you plan to set core-temp lava or dildos vibrating at the resonant frequency of quartz on top of it." --Eva Schillace

Posted 9:26 PM [+]