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28 Feb 2007 — Fact-checking a fact-checker

(I've got to blog about this before my distinguished homonym does...)

The letters section of the latest New Yorker includes the following “Editors’ Note” (the hyperlinks are my own):

The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, “Know It All,” by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site’s articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as “a tenured professor of religion at a private university” with “a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law.”

Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia’s management team because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page. At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia administrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was recently hired by Wikia—a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia—as a “community manager”; he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay’s invented persona, “I regard it as a pseudonym and I don’t really have a problem with it.”

Updated to add: Apparently, according to some Wikipedians, it's OK to lie about your credentials on your user page because (a) it helps disguise your true identity from Bad People; (b) all Wikipedians are equal, regardless of how many formal degrees they have, so no harm is done by a Wikipedian who lies about how many formal degrees he has.

19 Feb 2007 — The jig is up

Now that members of the Texas and Georgia state legislatures [PDF] have caught on, I suppose there’s no point in denying it any more. Yes, indeed, modern cosmologists and evolutionary scientists are blindly and unscientifically following kabbalistic teachings that the world is billions of years old. Likewise, we crafty Pharisees are responsible for hiding anti-Biblical kabbalistic doctrines in the guise of Copernicus’s theory of heliocentrism and, later, Einstein’s theory of relativity. It’s all true! They found us out!

Also, that stuff about the banks? They got us dead to rights. Next time your mortgage payment comes due, just make the check out to me and send it over here; you’ll get faster service that way.

via eyelid on weirdjews2

18 Feb 2007 — The people have spoken, damn them

John McCain:

I don’t know what the other options are, because if we fail here [with the President’s “surge” of additional troops in Iraq], I think it’s going to be very difficult to maintain the support of the American people.

Bertolt Brecht:

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

30 Jan 2007 — Keeping us informed about the Middle East

Does anyone else notice something, umm, missing from this AP article about Israel’s first Muslim Cabinet minister? Did the reporter and editor just have too much to drink that day, or something?

(PS: on the general topic of Israeli Muslims in public service, see the Head Heeb on Ali Yahya, the first Arab to win the Israel prize and the former Israeli ambassador to Finland.)

24 Jan 2007 — Frivolity

There are many Deep and Meaningful and Significant things I would like to ramble about at great length, which of course is one reason why I haven’t posted anything here for six weeks. So here’s a shallow and insignificant thought for the day.

Our microwave oven has a button touch-sensitive blob labelled “ADD MINUTE”. If you push it, it doesn’t actually add a minute to the cooking time; it adds thirty seconds. But if the timer is already above a certain threshold, or maybe when you push the button enough times in rapid succession, each press does add one minute to the cooking time.

But now I have a vision of the world’s most concise microwave-oven interface (imagine putting this on one of those itty bitty cubes): two buttons touch-sensitive blobs, “+” and “✕”. If you press “+” the time on the clock goes up by ten seconds, and if you press “✕” the time on the clock triples. So thirty seconds is “+✕”. One minute is “++✕”. Five minutes would be “+✕✕+✕”. (From what I’ve read about ternary arithmetic, I suspect that making “✕” use any factor other than three would make the average button-pushing sequence longer, but I’m too lazy to work out a proof.)

I release this innovative user interface into the public domain for the benefit of microwave-oven users everywhere. Please, don’t be too effusive in your thanks.

P.S.: As long as I’m on the topic of weird number systems, I direct your attention to golden-ratio base, a system for representing numbers in base φ (or, if you’re a Da Vinci Code fan, base PHI). Since φ+1 = φ², any integer can be represented by a finite sequence of base-φ digits, even though φ is irrational. There must be some practical use for this, but I haven’t thought of one yet.

04 Dec 2006 — Let freedom ka-ching

Years ago, our President famously informed us that the terrorists “hate us for our freedom”. Given all the shenanigans of his Administration, one might well wonder: which freedom, in the President’s opinion, are we hated for? The freedom to elect our leaders? The freedom to wear T-shirts criticizing them at their campaign events? The freedom to keep our telephone conversations private? The freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention?

But now it’s all clear. The terrorists hate our freedom to bilk the taxpayers.

GSA Administrator Lurita Alexis Doan, a Bush political appointee and former government contractor, has proposed cutting $5 million in spending on audits and shifting some responsibility for contract reviews to small, private audit contractors… “There are two kinds of terrorism in the US: the external kind; and, internally, the IGs have terrorized the Regional Administrators,” Doan said, according to [notes from an August staff meeting].

via MyDD

01 Dec 2006 — Dept. of curious coincidences

I was browsing through some data that my company had acquired from our good friends at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and came across a reference to some place in Iraq called “Ḩayy Sab`at `Ashar (17) Tammūz”. What’s that? I wondered. A name left over from the days when the Jewish people, exiled in Babylon, had fresh memories of the destruction of Jerusalem?

I asked an Iraqi co-worker to translate the name, and it turned out to be more prosaic: “Tammūz” is modern Arabic for “July”, and July 17th is the day that the Ba`ath party came to power in Iraq.

If Aish ha-Torah wants to use this in their next round of Discovery seminars, I want royalties.

19 Nov 2006 — I'd be happy to live anywhere else

Yesterday's Globe had an article (link will probably rot tomorrow) about how Allston, Massachusetts has been honored by inclusion in The Absolutely Worst Places To Live In America. The book—whose author, a Boston College alumnus, can speak of Allston from personal experience—refers to my neighboring neighborhood as “a melting pot of upper-middle-class white kids eager to experience a brief taste of rebellious semiurban squalor” full of “faux Irish pubs, garbage, vomiting in the shrubbery, drunken brawling, late night/early morning car alarms”.

This reminded me of the first two years of my marriage, when we lived in a basement apartment at the corner of Allston and Kelton streets. One morning we woke up to find a pool of vomit on the path leading to our door; judging from the residue along the outer wall and windowsills, it had come from someone living four stories up. Unfortunately, I was unable to rouse the perpetrator by pounding on his back door (at 10:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning), so I left a note of complaint with the landlord, complete with a diagram of the splatter marks. (To be fair, the landlord was letting us have the apartment at below market value, which, considering what market value was back then, was a sorely needed favor.)

I guess if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.

17 Nov 2006 — Immigration, then and now

Alan Dershowitz, in The Best Defense:

During the late 1930s [my synagogue] decided to hire a professional rabbi to conduct services; one was brought over from Europe, but the congregants were not satisfied. After two weeks the newly hired rabbi was fired, given a small amount of severance pay, and sent on his way. A new rabbi was brought over from Europe, but he, too, was unceremoniously fired in a matter of weeks. This process continued until dozens of rabbis had passed through the “turnstile shtible” or the “Rabbi-of-the-Month Club,” as it began to be called. Everybody in the neighborhood understood this charade for what it was: a small-scale rescue operation designed to save European rabbis who were endangered by Nazism. For nearly a decade it succeeded in circumventing the restrictive immigration laws, by claiming a “need” for imported rabbis to lead the congregation.

Civil disobedience in the age of globalization:

I woke up to the news that “our” imam was arrested last night by Homeland Security…for obtaining “religious worker” visas for Pakistanis, who then came here and worked as gas station attendants or in other secular jobs, in violation of the terms of their greencard. In other words this is a story about a bunch of immigrant Muslims who are guilty of being not religious enough... I’m guessing he did it, and if so I applaud him. He found a back door way to get young men out of an impoverished dictatorship where Islamist extremism is an ongoing issue and into the leafy suburbs of Massachusetts where they found full-time jobs and a supportive community. Too bad he got caught.

P.S.: I find it interesting (but not terribly surprising) that the Globe article covering the arrest says virtually nothing about the folks who broke the law by hiring these guys in spite of their visa status.

13 Nov 2006 — The graphic designer's revenge

How did the American Library Association get away with using the original Mac OS menu font on their Bill Gates poster?

13 Nov 2006 — Place your bets, gentlemen

Senator Joe Lieberman (Lieberman-CT), formerly Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT), told Meet the Press that he was not ruling out the possibility of becoming Senator Joe Lieberman (R-CT), a move that would give the Senate back to the Republican Party.

On the one hand, he owes a lot of Republican machers for the work they did helping him win this election. On the other hand, once the dust clears from his defection, he would probably get a lot less media attention as just another moderate Republican than he does now as a maverick Democrat.

Who wants to lay odds?

via AP

13 Nov 2006 — How the Internet is transforming commerce, part DCCCLXXVII

(Let’s see if I’m sufficiently recovered from chagim-plus-new-baby to get back to blogging…)

We’re trying to reintroduce the baby to bottle-feeding, and we were wondering if he’d be more likely to suck on a different kind of nipple. So I did an amazon.com search for “nipple” and this (warning: NVSFW) came up second in the results.

I am amused by the contrast between the “Product Description” section and the “Customers who bought this item also bought” section. Somebody should tell the vendor that there’s really no point to being coy about who their customers are.

13 Nov 2006 — Computers were invented to keep track of boring things

One reason I haven’t been doing much blogging recently is that I’ve been spending a lot of time learning Haskell, a computer language with a number of intriguing features. Since I have previously remarked on weaknesses in Java’s type system, I thought I would start by remarking on Haskell’s type inference. Unlike many of the language’s other intriguing features, this one is easy to demonstrate and its benefits are easy to explain.

Consider this Haskell program:

main = do str <- getLine
          let n = read str
          putStr "Twice that is "
          putStrLn (show (n * 2.0))

Like C, C++, and Java, Haskell is statically typed: every variable has a type that is known at compile time. Unlike those other languages, though, you don’t have to explicitly declare the type of a variable when the compiler can figure it out. The compiler knows that str is a string, because that’s what the standard library function getLine returns¹. The read function is polymorphic and can translate a string into any of a wide variety of Haskell types, but the compiler can still figure out the type of n, because it shows up later as an argument to *; since 2.0 is a floating-point number, then n must be one as well.

sethg@henbane:~/Desktop/hs$ ./a.out
3.5
Twice that is 7.0
sethg@henbane:~/Desktop/hs$ ./a.out
42
Twice that is 84.0
sethg@henbane:~/Desktop/hs$ ./a.out
0x10
Twice that is 32.0
sethg@henbane:~/Desktop/hs$ ./a.out
fred
Twice that is a.out: Prelude.read: no parse

I realize that programmers get into fervent religious wars over the question of static vs. dynamic typing, but I think I can avoid getting roasted by either side if I point out that if you have to use a statically typed language, it would be nice to use one with type inference. Why should we humans have to keep track of those tedious details if the computer can do it for us?

PS: Notice how in the code, the read function appears before the call to print the phrase Twice that is, but in the output of the running program, the error message from read appears after that phrase. That’s lazy evaluation, another intriguing Haskell feature….

¹ Actually, getLine is type IO String. Explaining how the output of this function gets bound to a variable of type String would require explaining Haskell’s monadic IO system, which I’m not ready to do just yet.

01 Oct 2006 — A prayer and a legal declaration for Erev Yom Kippur

Excerpt from Tefillah Zakkah:

Knowing as I do that hardly anyone is a righteous person who has not sinned against another one, either financially or physically, in word or in deed—this makes my heart tremble within me, because Yom Kippur does not atone for interpersonal sins until the offender appeases the victim. Regarding this, my heart is broken within me and my bones shake, because not even death atones. Therefore, I offer prayer before You that You pity me, and give me favor, kindness, and mercy in Your eyes, and in the eyes of all humanity. So I hereby completely forgive anyone who has sinned against me, either physically or financially, or one who gossipped about me, or even lied about me. So too, anyone who harmed me physically or financially. And for every sin that one person can commit against another, except for money that I could collect in a court of law, and except for someone who sins against me and says “I will hurt him and he will forgive me”—except for these, I completely forgive; and let no one be punished on my account. And just as I forgive everyone, so too may You put my favor before everyone else, so that they will completely forgive me.

12 Sep 2006 — Things Yenta never had to worry about

In Amazon Women on the Moon, there’s a skit where a woman is about to invite her date into her apartment, but first she asks for a driver’s license and credit card. Moments later, her fax machine spits out a long list of her would-be lover’s past misdeeds, and after reading the report, she kicks him out. “Three times,” she cries, “you told a woman you loved her just so you could have sex with her!”

That movie came out almost twenty years ago. These days, of course, you have more sophisticated ways of checking up on your dates. Which is all very well and good, until someone uses this technology to falsely accuse a man of having herpes.

via The News Blog

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