What Were They Thinking?

My web hosting service, like most such services, provides a facility for me to view this site's statistics, such as how many times the site is visited, which pages are the most popular, etc. (In case you're wondering, my site doesn't generate a huge amount of traffic, but there does seem to be a more-or-less regular readership. Thanks, Mom!)

In the very detailed report which my hosting service delivers to me on a daily basis, one of the more interesting headings is called "Search Strings". Did you know that when you type a search term or a set of search terms into Google, or Yahoo, or wherever, your search strings can be passed along to any page that you access by clicking on the links that the search engine displays to you? I didn't know that, either, and apparently the details of how your search terms are encoded into the referring page's URL vary with each search engine, so my hosting service can't deliver a comprehensive report of the search terms which have led people to my site. Still, the ones which do arrive provide an interesting glimpse into the minds of at least some of my visitors. (For example, that most people still haven't learned how to use quotes to group their search terms. But I digress.) Judge for yourself:

• "asian religious text that predicted the tsunami tribe moves to": Looking to convert?


• "dell sony bank of america boycott abortion": Ah, yes. Dell, Sony, and Bank of America. Bring them down, and you end the scourge of abortion forever!


• "george bush on the issue of evolution the verdict is still out": It's hard to tell where this person stands on the issue, but at least he knows where George stands.


• Current Favorite - "help me humiliate my husband": Sorry, lady, I can't help you.

Working Definition of Reality

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away".
         -- Philip K. Dick

Another Triumph of American Arms

A car carrying a father, a mother, and their children was stopped by US gunfire yesterday as the car approached an Army foot patrol. The mother and the father were killed by machine-gun fire; several of the children were wounded. There were no weapons on or in the car.

Here's a question, especially for the Republicans out there: As the children in that car heard the bullets flying all around them, as they watched their mother die and their father absorb "so many bullets that his skull had collapsed, leaving his body grotesquely disfigured", what emotion do you suppose they felt? Might it have been ... terror?

Let Freedom Reign!

So some children saw their parents gunned down in front of their eyes, but hey, says the US military, it was their own fault. And there, in microcosm, is the whole fucking war: blow some shit up, kill a bunch of people, blame them for their own deaths, and when they resent that, push the boot down harder. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat...

"But we're not there as conquerors -- we're there as liberators," I hear you saying. Sure, we just liberated some kids from their parents, just like we've liberated thousands and thousands of Iraqis from their loved ones, their homes, their security, their health, and their lives. You think that makes them love us?

If you voted for W, you voted for this. Are you enjoying your war?

No, Dice



I just saw this ad online. I assume that it was meant to impress coders, but it had the opposite effect on me. I looked at this ad and I saw seriously broken code.

This code seems to have been meant to look like one of the C-derived object-oriented languages: C++, C#, Java, or JavaScript. It's broken in a lot of ways:

• Confusion between assignment and comparison. The test clause will never work the way it's intended to work. In fact, it's one the most common errors newbie coders make! Instead of
  threshold == salary_sucks (comparison)
  the code is written
  threshold = salary_sucks (assignment)
  which will set threshold to the value of salary_sucks, and evaluate to the value of salary_sucks. So unless threshold and salary_sucks are both booleans, the code will never compile (ah, the days of C are over), and even if it does, it will generate a warning, because it's usually considered bad style to perform an assignment as a side-effect of a test. (After all, when someone else examines your code later, it's often hard to tell whether that's what you intended, or if you just forgot to type the extra '='.) So, instead of comparing threshold and salary_sucks, if salary_sucks is a boolean, it will simply branch based on the value of salary_sucks.


• Reserved word as a variable name. goto is a reserved word in C++, C#, Java, and JavaScript. No sane coder would use it as a variable name, even in a language where it wasn't reserved, because goto has a long and storied history of controversy.


• Evaluation with no effect. Evaluating suck.it.up will probably have no effect at all, since it's just evaluating an object member and throwing away the result. If the object member is defined as a getter with some side-effect that is hidden from the caller, that's different, but that would also be really bad style.


• Syntax error. There is no end keyword in C++, C#, Java, or JavaScript. That's just a syntax error.


• Bad Logic. Worst of all, the logic in the ad copy is really broken. In plain English, it says, "If your salary sucks, go to Dice.com. Otherwise, suck it up." But it doesn't make any sense to say "suck it up" to someone who's making a great salary! (does it? Suck up the bucks, I guess...)

I thought about rewriting the code to express a more coherent idea, and do it with plausible code, but this is the best I came up with:

if (You.canWriteCode()) {
   You.writeCode();
   You.salary = BigBucks;
} else {
   You.writeAdCopy();
}


Tell Me Again What They Died For?

A philosophical question: if a deceitful pretext for stampeding a country into war falls in the forest, and the major media don't pay any attention, does it make a sound?

With practically no media attention, the Bush administration has finally called off even the pretense of finding the Weapons of Mass Destruction which were the reason Bush told us we had to rush into war in the first place. (See the transcript of Bush's 2003 State of the Union address; scroll down about 2/3 to find the lies about Iraqi WMDs).

I don't understand why there aren't any huge, screaming front-page headlines in newspapers across America:

NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION IN IRAQ
It Was All Bullshit
Just In Time For Inauguration
Sorry About All The Dead People
"But It Got Me My Second Term," Bush Quips
At the exact same moment when the media are still in a full lather over the broadcast of the 60 Minutes story about Bush's missing year in the service (neatly summarized by Kos), they are completely unconcerned about the parade of lies promulgated by Bush to justify his splendid little war. You couldn't even find the story on the New York Times without digging for it. You'd think that when the administration finally gets around to telling us it was all bullshit, that'd be a big story. Apparently, if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Because, after all, nobody died and mountains of money weren't squandered because of CBS's less than careful sourcing of their story; while, in fact, thousands have died and hundreds of billions of dollars have been pissed away on the basis of Bush's lies. Is it such a big surprise? The media are controlled by the Right, and they have their agenda. They got their war and they're not going to let any inconvenient facts spoil the party. So just like they let Bush off the hook when it comes to his service in the Texas National Guard, they're going to let him off the hook for lying us into a disastrous quagmire in Iraq.

So here's my question now: If the WMDs are finally, officially bullshit, what the fuck are we doing in Iraq?

A lot of people think it was all about oil. I'm sure a lot of people stand to make a lot of money from Iraqi oil, but I don't think that was enough. After all, what's in it for George? Well, how about a second term? Bush's own biographer claims that Bush intended to invade Iraq from the very beginning of his term, with the expectation that a war would goose his popularity and get him a second term.

Looks like George got his wish. Lucky us! (Especially 1,300 lucky dead Americans and 100,000 lucky dead Iraqis!)

Will George W. Bush ever, ever, be accountable for anything he has ever done in his life?

Just Theories

You may have heard of the recent flap in Georgia over biology textbooks and the insistence of the school board on placing stickers on the books, declaring that Evolution is "a theory, not a fact."

It's an indication of how deeply dishonest this line of argument is that it explicitly relies on the reader NOT to understand the difference between colloquial use of the word "theory" ("n:An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture") and its use in science ("n:A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena."). The only people who advance a dishonest argument are people who can't win with an honest argument. So I guess it's just petulant of me to point out that Evolution is a theory AND a fact.

Instead, in the spirit of helping out school boards everywhere, I would like to propose that we should add warning stickers to a whole bunch of things we teach schoolkids. Herewith, some suggested sticker language:

• Newton's Theory of Universal Gravitation. ("It has never been proven that all material objects in the Universe attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Students should approach this material with an open mind and consider alternative explanations.")


• The Germ Theory of Disease. ("Germs are just a theory, not a fact. Students are encouraged to consider alternative explanations for diseases, like evil spirits and God's wrath. Stay away from unclean sinners. Remember that AIDS only afflicts evil people.")


• Dalton's Atomic Theory. ("Nobody has ever seen an atom. Remember, it's just a theory. If it was a fact, we'd have it on good authority from the Bible. But the Bible doesn't talk about atoms, does it? NO! So never mind what some pointy-headed professor tells you.")


• Number Theory ("LIES! LIBERAL LIES! DON'T LISTEN TO THEM! YOU'RE GOING TO BURN IN HELL FOR ALL ETERNITY FOR BELIEVING IN NUMBERS!")

(Late update, 13-Jan-2005: It appears that the stickers will have to be removed. Score one for the Constitution, reason, and common sense. Savor the moment -- it won't last long.)

Thanks For Clarifying That, Fred

Does God Hate Bile-Spewing Asshole Fundamentalist Preachers? I don't know. I'm just asking.

This is what Fred Phelps has to say about the South Asian Tsunami -- not only was the tsunami a punishment sent by God, but gloating is apparently encouraged:

Filthy Swedes went to Thailand - world epicenter of child sex traffic - to rape and sodomize little Thai boys and girls.... We sincerely hope and pray that all 20,000 Swedes are dead, their bodies bloated on the ground or in mass graves or floating at sea feeding sharks and fishes or in the bellies of thousands of crocodiles washed ashore by tsunamis.

Can you imagine having this prick over for dinner? Right -- neither can I. He can't be much fun, unless you're serving Lobster.

Not One Damn Dime Day

Those of us who were dismayed at the upcoming $50 million coronation of Emperor Dyslexicus I (aka God's Own President) are starting to get serious about finding new ways of expressing ourselves. After all, we're all but shut out of Official Media, there is only One Party left, and it's been made clear that God hates those of us who don't belong to the GOP and to the One True Church. Meanwhile, our debt is soaring, Social Security is about to be eviscerated, (something the GOP has been wanting to do for sixty years!) and we're going to have another tax cut for the super-wealthy! Oh, and did I mention the war? The "War On Terror" is a lie and a scam, and the war in Iraq is only a part of the "War on Terror" in the sense that it is enabled by the same set of overarching lies. Yet a slim majority (or something close to that) of voting Americans bought the lies. What can we Progressives do?

I think we're going to just have to go back to Square One. We're at a stage of learning where our power lies and how to use it. Therefore, a lot of ideas will be generated, including such ideas as The Buy Blue Movement (covered in a previous post). A related idea, which just came across my email queue, is Not One Damn Dime Day, set for January 20th. I'll let the man speak for himself:

Not One Damn Dime Day - Jan 20, 2005

Since our religious leaders will not speak out against the war in Iraq, since our political leaders don't have the moral courage to oppose it, Inauguration Day, Thursday, January 20th, 2005 is "Not One Damn Dime Day" in America.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day" those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.

During "Not One Damn Dime Day" please don't spend money. Not one damn dime for gasoline. Not one damn dime for necessities or for impulse purchases. Not one damn dime for nothing for 24 hours.

On "Not One Damn Dime Day," please boycott Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target. Please don't go to the mall or the local convenience store. Please don't buy any fast food (or any groceries at all for that matter).

For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down.

The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it.

"Not One Damn Dime Day" is to remind them, too, that they work for the people of the United States of America, not for the international corporations and K Street lobbyists who represent the corporations and funnel cash into American politics. "Not One Damn Dime Day" is about supporting the troops. The politicians put the troops in harm's way.

Now 1,300 brave young Americans and (some estimate) 100,000 Iraqis have died. The politicians owe our troops a plan - a way to come home.

There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. No left or right wing agenda to rant about. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" you take action by doing nothing.

You open your mouth by keeping your wallet closed.

For 24 hours, nothing gets spent, not one damn dime, to remind our religious leaders and our politicians of their moral responsibility to end the war in Iraq and give America back to the people.

Please share this with as many people as possible.

I support Not One Damn Dime Day wholeheartedly. Money is definitely a language the Republicans understand. I doubt our Great and Dear Leader will notice, or care, even if a lot of people join in NODDD. But as we grope for new ways to have a voice, we will have to try out a lot of different things. Maybe this will work, maybe it won't. But the alternative is meek acquiescence as our country is destroyed by a pack of radical fanatics.

All Hail Robosapien!

Robosapien is more than just the coolest toy of 2004. It's a huge breakthrough in product design, if not applied robotics. Although Robosapien isn't as impressive in terms of its absolute capabilities as the Sony Qrio robot, it has the distinct advantage of being on sale to the general public. You can't buy the Qrio at any price, although the Qrio would likely set you back, well, who knows how much? Maybe a hundred thousand dollars? It all depends on how many Sony could produce, and how quickly they'd like to earn back their substantial investment. You can buy an Aibo right now, but that's going to cost you anywhere from $500 up to $2,000, depending on which model you buy and whether you buy new or used. (Just search eBay for "Aibo").

The breakthrough of Robosapien is that a very impressive set of robotic functionality has been crammed into a package that sells for less than $100 on a toy-store shelf. It's not a very sophisticated robot, and it doesn't do a lot of things people might want a robot to do. But when you match real capabilities with real prices, Robosapien is a winner because it does what it does at a price point people are willing to pay.

Remember the Atari 2600? I can tell you from personal experience that it wasn't much of a computer. There are cheap pocket calculators being sold today with more horsepower than the Atari VCS. In 1977, though, it was a big deal. For most of the million or so people who bought the Atari console, it was the first computer they'd ever had in their homes. And they bought it for about $200. Sure, you could buy an Apple II for about $1,500 stripped, or more like $2,500 for a really useful configuration; and the Apple II was definitely more versatile, though both machines are puny by today's standards*. (The two machines shared the same microprocessor, the beloved and much-lamented 6502) But it was probably the Atari which blazed the trail, started the market, and showed the way. I'm sure a lot of people noticed, by the 2600's example, that it was possible to build a product with a microprocessor in it, and people would buy them in the millions.

The reason we have such great computers today is because somebody started the ball rolling with an inexpensive product, with minimal capabilities, which jump-started a market. Once it became clear that a set of technologies could be packaged and productized and sold at a profit, successive generations of products could be developed in a snowball of increasing price-performance ratios. I believe we are at or close to that point with robotics today, and that in 30 years, we may look back at Robosapien as one of the initiators of the robotics snowball.

There's one other reason I love Robosapien. I admire Mark Tilden, the engineer behind Robosapien. A professor of mine used to say, "An engineer is someone who can do for a dollar what any fool can do for ten." Mark Tilden is a real engineer. Hats off to him, and all hail Robosapien!


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*(By way of comparison: a typical Apple II ran at 1 MHz, had 48K of memory, and had a disk drive with a capacity of 140K. The computer I'm typing this on runs about 2000 times faster, has 10,000 times the memory, and a disk drive with a capacity about half a million times as large -- not to mention a much higher-resolution display, Internet access, and a whole host of features unavailable on the biggest of big iron in the 1970s -- all for a price point roughly equivalent to the Apple II, in 2004 dollars to boot!)