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26 Jan 2004 — Orders of desire

I’ve been obsessing over the primaries all last week when I should have been reading the parshah, so rather than compose a drash about it, I’m going to borrow somebody else’s. The following is paraphrased from Rabbi Yehudah Schnall, one of my teachers at Darche Noam. He offers an answer to a question which commentators have argued about for centuries: if God “hardened Pharoah’s heart” to prevent him from liberating the Jews, how is this consistent with the doctrine that every person has free will? What is this “hardening the heart,” anyway?

Rabbi Schnall, who has a doctorate in philosophy, says that some philosophers distinguish between “first-order desires” and “second-order desires.” For example, an alcoholic may want to drink (first-order desire), but at the same time want to not want to drink (second-order desire). Generally speaking, when someone feels a conflict between a first-order and a second-order desire, he or she will identify himself or herself with the second-order desire. “I want to stop drinking, but I just can’t.”

Now, consider Pharoah’s response to the plagues. Anyone in his position could see that the cost of the plagues’ destruction outweighed any benefit from keeping the Jews enslaved, and be tempted to free the Jews for the greater good of the Egyptians. But if Pharoah didn’t believe that freeing the slaves was the moral thing to do, he would feel coerced into doing it, and he would wish he had the strength of character to tell Moses to take a hike. “I am the absolute ruler of the most powerful nation in the world,” he would think, “a deity in my own right, and these descendants of Jacob deserve to be my slaves. If I were a better Pharoah, I wouldn’t let myself sully the honor of Egypt by freeing six hundred thousand slaves just because my ex-courtier claims to be their god’s prophet and shows me a few magic tricks.”

And so, the Eternal gave Pharoah enough willpower for that second-order desire to remain in control. At any time, Pharoah was free to recognize God’s moral sovereignty, free the Jews, and end the plagues. But he chose otherwise.

23 Jan 2004 — A victory for free trade

The DVD Copy Control Association has finally admitted that CSS, the encryption system built into DVD players, is not a trade secret, and therefore DeCSS, an open-source program that cracks the code, can be redistributed without any legal penalty.

Before the DVD CCA caved on this issue, you could only manufacture a DVD player with the studios’ blessing if you signed a blood oath pledging that, in exchange for a license for the decryption system, you would frustrate your customers by:

1. not exporting the unencrypted video stream in a digital form, and Macrovision-protecting any analog output from the player
2. disabling the “fast-forward” and “menu” buttons for certain parts of the DVD, such as the ads that play when the disc is loaded
3. enforcing the “region coding” system, so you can’t play cheap Indian DVDs, newly-released American DVDs, and obscure European DVDs on the same player

Update: According to ZDNet, the DVD CCA says they may file patent infringement suits to keep DeCSS underground. (First it’s a trade secret, now it’s patented. Neat trick, eh?)

22 Jan 2004 — Third-rate electronic burglary

So if the server containing confidential memoranda by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee—the memoranda that Republican staffers spent a year reading and leaking—was running some version of Windows, can we call this scandal “Gatesgate?”

21 Jan 2004 — Where was the boiling oil?

OK, now that my wife and I are the last geeks on this planet to have seen Return of the King, I have a question for the SCAdians and Tolkien fans in the audience.

Both The Two Towers and ROTK portray sieges of walled cities (Helm’s Deep and Minas Tirith, respectively) where towers are used to get the orcs over the walls. Why didn’t the defenders of either city pour boiling oil on the attackers as soon as they reached the walls?

1. Oil is much more expensive in Middle-Earth than it was in medieval Europe
2. Everybody knows that orcs are fireproof
3. Those articles on siege warfare that I read in Dragon back in middle school cannot be trusted

21 Jan 2004 — Remodeling to serve you better

If you’re reading this blog over LiveJournal or another RSS syndicator, I’d like to point out a new feature on the main page. In the upper right, under the ta shema headline, there’s a list of links to pages that I found amusing, insightful, or otherwise worth reading, but aren’t worth the pixels for a full blog post. If you read the page in a newish browser, holding the mouse pointer over a link will also pop up a box with a brief quote or comment.

19 Jan 2004 — Deanophobiaphobia

It would be bad form to say this on the campaign trail, but the ideological distinctions between the major Democratic Presidential candidates are almost trivial. Dean has been cast as “the anti-war candidate” simply because he didn’t support the blank check that Congress wrote the President in the fall of 2002. Lieberman is supposed to be the most conservative Democrat in the race, but his 2002 Americans for Democratic Action rating is 95%—as compared with 85% for Kerry and 30% for Zell Miller (the DINO from Georgia). Any one of these guys would make a better President than Dubya, and any one of them, if elected, will have to compromise his agenda to deal with Republicans in Congress. Thus all the chatter about “electability.”

I submit that despite widespread fears to the contrary, Dean is the most electable Democrat in the race. Consider:

• Rove is going to find some way to smear whatever Democrat is nominated, and he is very good at making such accusations stick, no matter how unfair they are. Consider the 2002 Senate race in Georgia, where Republicans accused Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in the Vietnam War, of being insufficiently patriotic—and they won.
• A well-functioning mass media would call foul on any candidate who tried to sling mud like this, and keep the voters focused on the candidates’ actual positions and records. No sane Democrat can rely on the press behaving this way in 2004. Consider how, in the 2000 race, reporters were more interested in repeating the lie about “Gore claimed he invented the Internet” than in using sixth-grade arithmetic to check Dubya’s budget proposal.
• In order to counteract this kind of operation, any Democratic candidate will need a very, very good organization to get his message out in spite of whatever the mass media says about him.
• In the past two years, Dean has encouraged an unprecedented number of Democrats to open their wallets and volunteer their time for him. Dean followed this path from “Howard who?” to “the man every other Democrat is trying to beat” without the sort of media lionization that Gary Hart enjoyed in 1984, or that John McCain enjoyed in 2000. You can’t attribute this success to Dean’s liberalism or anti-war credentials: Kucinich, who is far more liberal and anti-war, hasn’t got nearly as much support. You can’t attribute it to geeks like me being brought in through that newfangled Internet thing: the SEIU, a union for people who vacuum the cubicles of geeks like me, has endorsed Dean. Quite simply, Dean is a very good politician with a very good campaign manager.

The anyone-but-Dean folks in the Democratic Party have a nightmare: Dean gets nominated, he runs a campaign that fires up hard-core Democrats but alienates Middle America, and leads the party to a crushing defeat. This fear is not entirely unfounded, but I have my own nightmare, which goes something like this:

• On the first ballot of the Democratic convention, Dean has a plurality, but not a majority, of delegates, and the majority are firmly in the anyone-but-Dean camp. On the second ballot, some other candidate gets the nomination. Dean pledges to work with the nominee and encourages his followers to do the same.
• Deaniacs in the trenches find themselves hobbled by a campaign organization that isn’t quite sure what to do with them. (Recall that when Clark finally threw his hat into the ring, some of the grass-roots folks in the Draft Clark movement found themselves shoved aside.)
• The Republican spin machine turns its slime machine from Dean to the Democratic nominee, and the media follows suit. The nominee finds himself constantly on the defensive, with Bush constantly setting the agenda for how the Democrats are portrayed.
• Bush wins forty states.

Hopefully, neither of these nightmares will come to pass.

God bless America—and please hurry!

14 Jan 2004 — I’m well-informed! Whod’a thunk it?

At chez yesh omrim, we don’t have much time to watch TV (except for Buffy DVDs), reception is lousy when we do watch, and we have better things than cable to soak up our money (e.g., the DSL line through which this very page is transmitted to our loyal readers and RSS syndicators). The Pew Internet Project confirms that I’m not missing anything.

In the course of a very long poll, they asked respondents what news sources they learn regularly from, and then asked them to identify which Democratic candidate was an former general and which was a former House majority leader. Of the respondents who regularly learn something from the Internet, 39 percent got both questions right. This beat every other option on the list, including NPR (36 percent), Sunday political TV shows (31 percent), and nightly network news shows (20 percent).

Another tidbit of good news from the poll: 13 percent of white respondents learn something “regularly” from the Internet, and 18 percent learn something “sometimes”. For black respondents, the respective numbers were 11 and 30 percent.

via BuzzMachine

13 Jan 2004 — You beast, you

When Pharoah asked the midwives why they were letting the Jewish boys live, they claimed that “the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, because they are lively [chayot]” (Exodus 1:19). The Talmud (Sotah 11b) explains: “They are being compared to wild animals [chayyot],” which, as Rashi (s.v.) observes, don’t need midwives.

The Talmud goes on to list verses where children of Israel are compared to animals, such as “Judah is a lion’s cub” (Genesis 49:9). I think one could read the same pun on a different level. The midwives are appealing to Pharoah’s ethnic prejudice: “You know those Hebrews. Just like animals, they are.”

13 Jan 2004 — Reproductive immunology and halakha

(Updated to add proper attribution.)

A pregnant woman’s immune system, which normally treats any unfamiliar cells as a potential threat to be attacked with overwhelming force, has to know not to attack the fetus inside her body. Many scientists are studying the process the immune system uses to make this distinction, especially since, as this Nature article points out, failure of the system may be one cause of infertility.

In 1989, a young British woman had her ninth consecutive miscarriage. Her marriage broke down shortly afterwards. But within months of finding a new partner, she had conceived again and the pregnancy went without a hitch. Her daughter is now a healthy and lively nine-year-old.

Reproductive immunologists suspect that the woman’s immune system took offence at her first choice of partner — over-reacting to tissues carrying his genes and expelling the fetuses he fathered.

My wife, who pointed this article out to me, observed that this (1) puts an interesting spin on the Talmudic rule (which is hardly ever enforced, even in black-hat communities) that if a couple has been married for ten years and not had a child, they should get divorced; (2) may explain why her allergies went away while she was pregnant.

13 Jan 2004 — In exile, even within the Land of Israel

When Jacob’s funeral procession crossed the Jordan River, his sons immediately began a seven-day period of eulogies and mourning for him (Genesis 50:10). The text goes on to say that the Canaanites “said, this is a solemn Egyptian grief; therefore, [the place] is called Grief of Egypt, over the Jordan River” (50:11). In Egypt, Jacob’s children had to be separated from the Egyptian population, because Egyptians hated shepherds (46:34). But upon entering Canaan, they’re treated as Egyptians.

I’m reminded of a complaint by some of the Soviet Jews who immigrated to Israel, back when there was a Soviet Union, and when applying for an exit visa marked a Soviet citizen as a traitor to the motherland: in the Soviet Union, they were Jews rather than Russians; in Israel, they were Russians rather than Israelis.

09 Jan 2004 — The Bush immigration plan: Potemkin populism, again

OK, everyone and his editor has pontificated about how the Bush immigration proposal is an attempt to convince more Hispanics to vote Republican, because if the Republicans don’t pick up more non-white voters in the long term then they will lose one election after another, etc., etc., etc. Nonsense.

Remember Medicare prescription drug reform, the White House’s last attempt to curry favor with an important voting bloc? Here is how it’s not winning them votes:

• Back in June, 56 percent of adults in a nationwide poll trusted Bush “a great deal” or “a moderate amount” when it came to setting Medicare policy, and 55 percent had the same trust in Congressional Democrats.
• In July, when Bush’s plan was being debated in Congress, 70 percent of adults thought the plan should pass.
• In December, after Congress passed it, 32 percent of all adults polled approved of it, and 38 percent disapproved. In the same poll, 47 percent of adults aged 65 and older, and 46 percent of adults 55–64, disapproved of the plan.
• In another December poll, 56 percent of adults aged 65 and older were “very concerned” that the program didn’t go far enough, and 58 percent were “very concerned” that it gave too much to the pharmaceutical industry. Only 30 percent were concerned that it would cost the government too much.

See the pattern? The more time voters had to read the fine print on the scheme, the less they liked it; the ones who were purported to benefit the most liked it the least; the most common reasons for not liking it are reasons to vote Democratic in the next election.

And with the immigration proposal, there’s already plenty of fine print to not like. The amnesty (in all but name) offered to undocumented workers is a crock, because it requires their employers’ cooperation. Right now, the occasional INS raid is just a cost of doing business for companies that hire illegal aliens, and as this American Prospect article illustrates, it’s not much of a cost. So why should the employers give their workers the right to complain about their boss and not get deported?

(Yes, the senior Administration officials made some noise about improving their enforcement efforts against illicit employers. I’m sure Dubya will offer Congress an INS budget with enough “internal enforcement” to make a difference, right after No Child Left Behind is fully funded and Air Force One is escorted by flying pigs.)

Bush’s proposal also includes a new visa category, allowing employers in any industry to bring in temp workers from abroad, after the usual certification that no American resident can be found to do such-and-such a grueling job for the miserably low pay being offered. Who has been lobbying for such a plan? Not the Hispanic voters. As the Prospect reported back in July:

The Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC) includes 34 employer associations from industries including hotels, health care, construction, janitorial services, meatpacking, amusement parks, retail stores and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Its agenda has some elements that immigrant-rights advocates and unions also support, such as a legalization program for undocumented workers and repeal of employer sanctions, which make it illegal for an undocumented worker to hold a job.

But the heart of its agenda are the following two points: “short-term: an effective h-2b-like program,” and “long-term: an employment-based visa that could be converted to permanent residence.” EWIC co-Chairman John Gay says most industry groups would prefer the second alternative — creating a whole new visa category for permanent contract workers because the H2-B program is set up for temporary, seasonal employment. “But it’s possible that this aspect could be changed,” he speculates.

The coalition combines both legalization and guest-worker proposals because it believes that guest-worker expansion alone would never get the needed 60 votes to defeat a filibuster in the U.S. Senate. “Organized labor would go ballistic,” Gay says. “That’s why we’re for the whole enchilada.” Before September 11, such a compromise was being discussed in the back rooms of Congress.

(Read the rest to find out how aggressively our government is not protecting the foreign temp workers we already have.)

So a President who muffed his attempts to pander to seniors and to steelworkers is now trying to sell an “immigration reform” plan that Hispanic voters are unlikely to buy, that will piss off his conservative base because of the amnesty provision, and that will give disgruntled high-tech workers further motivation to work for his defeat. How much more unelectable can—

Hey, look! A lunar base!

08 Jan 2004 — Remember, these are the people who run your country

Excerpt from the transcript of “senior administration officials” briefing reporters on Dubya’s new immigration-reform proposal:

QUESTION And the last thing is, do you mind just elaborating a little bit on the point you made about the rights — that you said that they will be able to come out of the shadows and have rights that U.S. workers do as far as wages and employment? Do you mind just spelling out how that would work?

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Right. These people will obviously be on the books, if you will, as opposed to in an underground economy. They’ll be legally here, working legally here. They’ll pay payroll taxes, Social Security taxes and the like. As they rent property, they’ll pay property taxes and buy property and so forth.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: They’ll pay sales taxes when they buy things.

Well, that’s a relief. I’ve always been concerned about how people who entered the United States illegally have been evading the sales taxes that we citizens have to pay.

07 Jan 2004 — PARSE! PARSE! O.K.! (Apologies to Dr. Bronner)

Mark Pilgrim had a sidebar link to an example of why you should use a real HTML parser, instead of a hodgepodge of regular expressions, to strip out unwanted and potentially dangerous tags/attributes from HTML that you receive. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, because:

1. When I set up Word Pirates, a site that allows anyone to complain about “pirated words” whose meanings are being distorted, I didn’t do anything to filter the HTML that was received from the outside. Days after the site went live, somebody posted a line of Javascript that redirected it to a porn site.
2. It reminds me of one of my pet peeves…

In my current job, my most recent project involved a conversion script. One of our products uses a GUI generator tied to a particular database system, using a proprietary language to describe how the input forms on the screen would look and what database fields each screen field was connected to. We want to use a new home-grown GUI system, which is (in theory) database-independent and uses an XML-based language (of course) to convey the same information. My predecessor had written a Perl script to convert from one language to to the other, but the script didn’t do the whole job; my mission was to improve the script where possible, run it over a hundred or so forms, and then manually clean up as many of them as my co-worker could throw at me.

The script that landed in my workstation was an inspiring piece of work. When it processed the forms it received as input, it used regular expressions to identify key words and syntactic constructions. Statements in this proprietary language usually ran across multiple lines, so the script resorted to this sort of technique:

 foreach ($line) {   # ...   if (/foobar (.*) begin/) {     $foobar_arg = $1;   }   # ...   if ($foobar_arg) {     # ...     $flag = 0 if /foobar end/;   }   # ... } 

(Observe how, if someone had written a form in the original language that said foobar(baz) { instead of foobar (baz) {, the script would become quietly confused and output gibberish.)

Meanwhile, on the output end, I had a two-hundred-and-thirty-line for-loop, containing a two-hundred-line for-loop, which added little bits of text to three different strings as it navigated through a two-dimensional array of the names of keys of multilevel hashes, and then concatenated these strings into an XML file at the very end. Unless, of course, the input had triggered some obscure bug and the script generated invalid XML. And I was proud of myself for refactoring the script until it only had twenty-six global variables. Etc., etc., etc.

This project bore a strange resemblance to one of my first projects at my previous job, where I had to extend a Perl script that took an XML file as input and generated a PostScript page with the same information … using regular expressions to take apart the XML, instead of using the perfectly adequate XML parser that comes free with Perl, so that an extra space or carriage return would throw it into complete confusion.

You see, about thirty years ago, a bunch of smart people realized that they had better things to do than construct and debug such monstrosities every time they had a new language to interpret, so they invented lexers and parser generators. Every widely-used language has at least a few of these things, free for the taking, that you can use to describe what a language looks like and where to find information in its statements, instead of taking it apart line by line and using regular expressions to perform abominations in the eyes of God and Larry Wall. But hordes of coders out there seem committed to reinventing the flint and steel all by themselves in their own caves, instead of staggering over to the cave that already has a fire going and grunting “Ogg please borrow Zippo lighter.” If I had faith in the efficiency of the free market, I would be comforted by the knowledge that as long as so many others were creating these messes, I could make money cleaning up after them, but … well.

Of course, as XML hype continues to overtake the world, such convoluted and ignorant use of regular expressions will become rarer and rarer. Instead, we can look forward to convolted and ignorant use of DOM and SAX. Rapture!

07 Jan 2004 — If God had meant for Man to fly, He would have given us wider Eustachian tubes

We spent December 25–30 in California, so that my mother and her partner could see the little one on her own turf. The experience taught me a valuable lesson: If you are about to get on a plane and you recently had a cold, even if you feel fine, take a course of decongestants. It’s amazing how little it takes to make one’s eardrum feel like the lid of a vigorously shaken beer bottle. Ow. Ow. Ow.

But aside from that, and our toddler’s failure to switch time zones, and his frustration at trying to fall asleep in one of these accursed half-size hotel cribs, and his waking up every ten minutes on the overnight flight back, it was a fun trip, really. Which is why I got back to blogging so promptly after our return.

07 Jan 2004 — Good Pharoah or bad Pharoah?

Pharoah to Joseph and his brothers, in Genesis 45:20: “Don’t be concerned about your possessions [when you move down here], because you will have the bounty of all the land of Egypt.”

Me: “Very clever—by encouraging them to leave their possessions behind, Pharoah is making Jacob’s family more dependent on him.”

My wife: “No, he’s giving them a chance to save face. They can say that they’re coming empty-handed at Pharoah’s request, and not because the famine has impoverished them.”

The commentators in Torat Chayyim, at least, are silent on this question. What say ye?

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