10  Oct 2008

Read  part of Sophie's World, the surprising best-seller from 1995 which is really just an introductory philosophy textbook, in the guise of novel.  The book says that Baruch Spinoza (1632-1671) was one of the first of the first proponents of pantheism, namely  the theory that God and Nature are one in the same.  Pantheism rejects the view that there is a "personal god" that listens to prayers and rewards/punishes people.  Spinoza believed that people cannot comprehend all of God/Nature.  He was also a determinist in the sense that he thought that God/Nature was ruled by a set of laws and principles that we cannot fully fathom but that govern our lives and cause us to have feelings and make decisions.  He believed that good and evil were both natural aspects of the universe, and that there is no inherent right or wrong, except to the extent that human happiness should be maximized.  Einstein is perhaps the most famous modern adherent of the principles of pantheism.

4 Oct 2008

Read The Chilling Stars, by Henrik_Svensmark, a science book with a controversial hypothesis:  that earth's historical temperature fluctuations (including global warming)  are due to the rise and fall of the amount of cosmic radiation reaching the earth's lower atmosphere.  The theory is that more radiation generates tiny specks of particles in the air, which serves as starters for condensation, hence more clouds ... so more radiation means more clouds means cooler temperatures, and vice versa.   The book says that there are several forces that cause the amount of radiation to fluctuate:  (1) earths  magnetic field getting stronger or weaker (stronger field -> less radiation);  (2)  the sun's magnetic field strength fluctuating (stronger -> less radiation reaching earth);  and (3)  the movement of the solar system thru the Milky Way galaxy (passage thru a dense-star region -> more radiation from those stars, especially when passing thru a region with active stars).  The author says he was ridiculed and ostracized by most other scientists who had a vested interest in the greenhouse gas theory of global warming.

1 Oct 2008

Read In Flanders Fields by Leon Wolff (1958).  A balanced description of a key 1917 battle in WW I (sadly, there were more than one:  Somme and Verdun were other, equally tragic episodes).  A rather disturbing account that indicts the British war leaders, especially General Haig.   Prime Minister David Lloyd George tried to stop the useless battles, but failed.  Lloyd George said "If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and can't know. The correspondents don't write and the censorship wouldn't pass the truth. What they do send is not the war, but just a pretty picture of the war with everybody doing gallant deeds. The thing is horrible and beyond human nature to bear and I feel I can't go on with this bloody business."  

The book ends with a quote from Carlyle's Sartor Resartus:

... there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain 'Natural Enemies' of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men; Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them: she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending: till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightaway the word 'Fire!' is given; and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcasses, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot.

Reminds me of that Pink Floyd song Us and Them:  

Forward he cried from the rear
and the front rank died.
And the general sat and the lines on the map
moved from side to side.

20 Sept 2008

I wrote a cool utility program called DiskZoom, here.   The genesis of the program is that I ran out of disk space, and needed to free-up some space.  I knew I had tons of large, old files out there, but finding them would be difficult.  I googled around to see if there were any tools that would help, and I stumbled upon OverDisk -  it was an okay program, but I thought I could do better.  I was motivated because I'd never written a pure Windows program before (until now, all my programming was in Unix, or VST, or VB).   So I sat down to write it:  took about 40 hours, but I've got v1.0 ready to go.   

The fun part was exploring all the low-level Windows disk/directory functions.  I just used the "old" Win32 API, although they also have an object-oriented API available, but you have to link-in a lot more garbage to use it.   The zipped DiskZoom executable is only 70KB.

Publicizing DiskZoom will not be easy.  I've got it sitting here on my site, but now what?  I uploaded it to downloads.com, but they want you to pay $$, and if you upload for free (like I did) they generally make your product impossible to find.   And you're not supposed to create Wikipedia pages for promoting products.   About the only hope I have of anyone ever finding DiskZoom is if Google or Yahoo indexes my site, and then someone types in the precise set of search terms that align with my DiskZoom page's contents.   Oh well, I hope some poor soul with a full disk happens upon it and finds it useful.  

19 Sept 2008

Whoa.  Just saw a great, great move:  Unconditional Love.    I can't believe I've never heard about it before.  Funny, touching, visually inspirational.  Reminds me of the surprise and warmth I felt when watching Strictly Ballroom or Harold and Maude or The Life Aquatic.  The most surprising thing about the movie was that Jonathon Pryce sang all his own vocals, though that makes sense since he starred in the musical Miss Saigon.

Speaking of Jonathon Pryce, a long time ago I saw this hilarious British farce, Consuming Passions, and Id love to see it again, but it is not available on Netflix :-(

16 Sept 2008

We are in the midst of a large banking crisis.  Many banks, wall street firms, and mortgage companies are struggling, some going bankrupt (AIG insurance, Countrywide lending, Merrill-Lynch).  The root cause is that lenders, mostly home lenders, made loans to house buyers who could not afford the loan.  These loans were called "sub-prime" loans and were generally characterized by:  mortgage payments that were smaller than the monthly interest;  balloon payments;  low or no down payment; loan principle was nearly the full cost of the house (or more!).  

These loans were highly risky, and no reasonable lender would have made them.  Why did the lenders make them?  In one sentence: because the federal government was interfering with the free market.  Normally, when a lender makes a bad loan, they are stuck with the consequences, and lose money.  Loans are frequently sold between companies (either to other lenders, or to investors that treat them as bonds or any other interest-bearing investment).  When a loan is risky, the selling price is driven down to reflect the odds that the borrower may default.  The selling price should have been low on the sub-prime loans because they were so risky.

Enter the federal government:   They created two non-profit lending/investment companies:  FannieMae and FreddieMac.  These are quasi-governmental organizations (much like the post office;, or the Smithsonian Institution; or the NEA) that have no motivation to stay solvent.  The intention behind their creation was good: to ensure that lower-income folks can buy homes.  The problem is:  FM and FM bought risky sub-prime loans from lenders at HIGH prices, ignoring the risk.  Thus, commercial lenders (banks, CountryWide, etc) could make a risky loan, keep the start-up fee (usually around $1,000) then sell the loan immediately to FM.   No reasonable or for-profit organization would pay full price for these loans, but FM/FM did.  And they bought lots.   In fact, nearly every lender in America resold its loans to FM/FM.   So, when home owners started defaulting on the loans, FM/FM was stuck with tens of thousands of loans, secured by land worth less than the loan.   

Naturally, the federal government stepped in and gave FM/FM cash to bail them out.   Countrywide and the other original lenders are laughing all the way to the bank:  they've pocketed the loan start-up fees.   The taxpayers are stuck with the bill.  

Where did the money go?   Who benefits?  This transfer of wealth went from the middle class to who?  There were several beneficiaries:   The original lenders made commissions on risk loans; the home borrowers get to keep houses they cant afford (at least they tend to be lower-income); and investment companies like FM, FM, AIG, and so on get bailed-out by the federal government.   AIG is a private, for-profit  insurance company and they are getting cash from the government.

This is very, very reminiscent of the Savings and Loan bail-out of the 1980s:  Savings and Loans made unsecured loans to the friends and relatives of the S&L owners; the borrowers kept the money and never repaid the loans;  the S&Ls went bankrupt; and the federal government stepped in and gave cash to the S&Ls so they could shut-down and pay-off all the people that had money in savings accounts.  In that case, the money was transferred from taxpayers to the friends and relatives of the S&L owners.

Also, this is similar to the 1998 bailout of LTCM, a hedge fund run by and for the super rich.  The federal government organized a multi-billion dollar bailout, lest the collapse of LTCM trigger a world-wide panic.    See a pattern here?

9 Sept 2008

The publisher of my favorite poster, Theodore Gray, started selling a new product, where he prints-out your name with the elements here.   Neal Olander is cool:  Ne Al -- O La Nd Er.  Unfortunately, Stella cannot be rendered with element abbreviations :-(

Read a book about North Korea:  bizarre regime!  Speaking of revolutions (see 6 Sept below), if anyone should revolt, it is the people of that country.  This brings to mind a crazy building they have in their capital, Pyongyang:  they build a huge hotel ..1,000 feet high, with seven revolving restaurants at the top.  They ran out of money, and it stands empty, decaying in the middle of their city.  What an eyesore.  What do the people think?  

I thought of another fun project:  I could create a poster that illustrates famous mathematical concepts:  formulas, theorems, puzzles.  I'll have to see if such a poster already exists.

6 Sept 2008

Les Miserables ... great novel, great musical.  Never saw the musical.  Never finished the novel. But I have heard excerpts from the musical, and there is no denying the stirring effect of the "Do You Hear the People Sing?" finale.  I'm sure most people in the audience, at that moment, resolve to go home and begin righting wrongs and fighting oppression (a good night's sleep cures them of that :-)  But I've always been puzzled:   The novel takes place in 1815 to 1830s, and the "revolution" scenes are in 1831/1832.  What revolution are we witnessing?  The French revolution was in 1789 ("let them eat cake" and the guillotine).  One would think that such a phenomenally successful musical would be based on, say, the 1789 revolution, or the Russian revolution, or the American revolution, or the Chinese revolution, or Ho Chi Mihn.  What exactly was the revolution of 1831?   Wikipedia says it was an anti-Orleanist revolt of June 1832.  I suppose what happened was that the play was written by Frenchmen for French audiences, who would understand the 1831 revolution.   As the play became successful outside France, the lack of understanding by the audiences was probably a concern to the producers, but in the end proved inconsequential.   In the novel:  the story line, characters, and plot make the details of the revolution rather unimportant.  But in the musical, the stirring music makes the revolution much more prominent.   I'm just a bit puzzled that the musical resonates so strongly with audiences despite the fact the audiences are unfamiliar with the revolution being depicted.  

This disconnect reminds me a bit of Fidelio by Beethoven: I saw a production of it set in some anonymous Latin American banana republic:  The opera was inspirational in spite of the fact that it was in an anonymous country at an anonymous point in time.

5 Sept 2008

Great article on Strunk and White.   Here is my favorite line, from White's introduction:

 His rule 11 was 'make definite assertions'.  ... He scorned the vague, ..., the irresolute.  He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.  I remember a day in class when he ... croaked "If you don't know how to pronounce  a word, say it loud!  If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!"   Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?  Why run and hide it?

4 Sept 2008

I'm thinking about a new project I can embark on:  publishing self-help legal guides on the web.   This is something I believe strongly in, and it is an idea whose time has come.  I'd probably focus on Washington state, although Idaho could be a candidate too.  California already has lots of self-help info.  For Washington, I see there is already a site that gives guidance on probate and guardianship:  http://www.wa-probate.com/ , published by a Seattle attorney named Richard Wills (a retired attorney from California).   The Washington State Bar web site, of course, contains no self-help information at all.   Since probate info is already available, maybe I could publish will information?  or perhaps small claims court?

2 Sept 2008

I have a new hero:  Carl Malamud.   He is an advocate for open government and his organization public.resource.org has scanned several key government documents (building codes, civil codes, medical billing/insurance terms/codes) and made them available on-line (mostly California?).   Some states copyright those laws, and charge citizens for books (or CDs) of the laws.  That is highly undemocratic, and I knew it happened for Building Codes (e.g. the Electrical code, which is managed and published by a private industry group, but included in California law "by reference") but I had no idea it was also done for other laws.   Apparently LexisNexus is a big player in this field.  Clearly he will win in court, but he'll face a lengthy battle.   Even such fundamental legal documents as supreme court decisions and federal appeal court decisions are only available in hardcopy books, copyrighted by Westlaw and a couple of other companies.   Malamud's organization is trying to scan those and make them available online.

Supporting http://public.resource.org  is the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Creative Commons.

I believe that Washington state's code is available on the internet, but certainly its Building Code is not.

There is a precedent for eliminating copyrights on public laws:  in Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791, the United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, met en banc “because of the novelty and importance of the issues” presented before the court:   “The issue in this en banc case is the extent to which a private organization may assert copyright protection for its model codes, after the models have been adopted by a legislative body and become 'the law'. Specifically, may a code-writing organization prevent a website operator from posting the text of a model code where the code is identified simply as the building code of a city that enacted the model code as law?”  In an exhaustive opinion that carefully traced the reasons why our laws must be public, the Honorable Chief Judge Edith H. Jones stated the conclusion of the court:   “Our short answer is that as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder's exclusive prerogatives.”  Unfortunately, that decision was a 5-4 decision, so it was not a sure thing.

This is reminiscent of a situation several years ago where a friend's father died in Idaho.  The friend wanted to do a simple probate  for the estate, but the state's probate documents were not publicly available.  Idaho lawyers had managed to suppress the forms, so that bereaving relatives were forced to hire a probate attorney in order to access the courts (lawyer's fee is 1% of the estate).  At least in California, the Nolo press makes all common court documents available, although you do have have to purchase them at a bookstore.   Now that things are moving online, we can hope that all commonly needed court documents will be freely available on the internet.

17 Aug 2008

Read the book The Selfish Gene (Dawkins, 1976).    Outstanding science book for the layman, where he presents the thesis that "survival of the fittest" and evolution are best understood by looking at individual genes as the units of survival, rather than species (or individuals).  His arguments are compelling, and he uses the argument that the genes are (blindly, unintentionally) engaged in a competition to see which genes can reproduce themselves most successfully, most widely.  He presents plants and animals as unwitting "vehicles" that merely provide temporary homes for the genes.  And what happens when these temporary homes become conscious and realize that they contain genes?  Why, we start manipulating the genes to our own advantage:  We tailor them so we can live longer, live healthier, live happier.

Read The Vital Link: The Story of the Suez Canal (1968) a rather cheesy history book, but I was struck by the figure of President Gamal Abdel Nasser.   He was a great man:  he led the 1952 Egyptian revolution, which ousted the corrupt monarchy; he established a democratic republic in Egypt; he evicted the French and British colonial companies that ran the Suez canal;  he created an Egyptian organization to manage and operate the canal (much like Panama did in the 1990s); and he tried to establish a union with other Arabic countries in the Mideast - the United Arab Republic - although it only lasted a few years.

16 Aug 2008

Read the book The Case For Mars (Zubrin, 1996).    Very bold proposal to get humans to Mars:  somewhat bucking the NASA bureaucracy:  they want HUGE expeditions, with lots of massive hardware, lots of astronauts.  Zubrin is a bit of an iconoclast:  he says that you only need a few people (certainly not a pilot or captain or doctor); and that current technology (e.g. Saturn V rockets) will work.  His key proposal is to first send an unmanned rocked to Mars and it contains  (1) a large tank of Hydrogen;  (2) a couple of large empty tanks; and (3) a machine that generates methane and water from the Carbon Dioxide that is present in Mars' atmosphere (5H + CO2 -> H2O + CH4).   It would be powered by a nuclear reactor.   Humans would then follow several months later, on a small, lightweight vehicle that doesn't contain any fuel for the return journey.    His plan has very few parts, and he doesn't use the space station, or the Moon (as a stopping point).   His proposal is very well set-out, but he points out (and I can believe him) that many rice bowls in NASA would be insulted by his proposal, so lots of entrenched interests argue against it (the Space Station advocates, the Astronauts, the engineers, the new-technology advocates).  This book is 12 years old, and I'm supposing that his ideas are still on the back burner, since I haven't heard much about is proposal, which he dubs "Mars Direct".

In the book, he makes a point that I've been thinking about but have not articulated:  He wonders why technological innovation has stalled since around 1980.  He points out that from 1900 to 1980 we had incredible technological explosion on our planet:   automobiles, telephones, radio, nuclear power, televisions, computers, internet.    But something has stalled since then:  we don't have flying cars, mag-lev trains, hologram communication, fusion, movie-phones, tele-portation, pollution-free energy, or colonies on the moon.   And he is right:  we have stalled, as if we have hit the limits of human innovation.   (His point in bringing this up is to bolster his argument for Mars colonization:  he claims that establishing a settlement on Mars will open a new frontier, and prompt humanity to become incredibly inventive to solve the challenges the settlers will face).    But there is one technological innovation happening now that is revolutionary:  Genetic engineering.

Read an article today about "dead zones" in the oceans ... places that are oxygen starved (hypoxia).  The article blames algae abundance, caused by fertilizer run-off.   I just don't get the connection: algae does photosynthesis and produces oxygen.   I'm not sure how algae would harm fish and other animals in the ocean (or lakes, as is often claimed inland).   Okay, I did some quick web research (meaning "unreliable" :-) and it says the problem is caused because the algae die, and then fall to the ocean/lake floor, and the decomposition process consumes oxygen.  I'm still not persuaded.  I would think that the oxygen the algae produce while alive would exceed any oxygen consumed during decomposition.   And how is the oxygen consumed?  Are bacteria eating the algae corpses and somehow using oxygen in the process?   And what about other ocean plants, like seaweed (say in the Monterrey Bay) ... as the seaweed dies and decomposes, why isn't that sucking-up the oxygen on the ocean floor?

4 Aug 2008

Saw the movie The Battle of Algiers.  Great movie shot in 1966, four years after the Algerian war of independence.  The Algerian author  Saadi Yasef hired an Italian film company to make a movie about the revolution, and the result is an outstanding black-and-white movie.  Half documentary, half fiction, well-paced.  Surprisingly, it is balanced to show the French point of view, and to emphasize that both sides engaged in unethical behavior.  

3 Aug 2008

Skimmed the book The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments, by G. Johnson (2008).  Very, very nice book for the layman, though the absence of graphs and formulae make it a bit shallow for the scientist.  The experiments are:

1. Galileo:   Gravitational acceleration is constant, not proportional to weight
2. William Harvey:  The heart pumps blood throughout the body; arteries and veins carry the same blood, with and without oxygen.
3. Isaac Newton:   Light is composed of multiple colors, and behaves like a wave;  illustrated by prisms
4. Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier:  Discovered oxygen and hydrogen, and showed that oxygen is used for combustion and respiration
5. Luigi Galvani:   Electricity is the primary force used by nerves to give movement to muscles
6. Michael Faraday:   Electric current gives rise to a magnetic field
7. James Joule:    Related gravitational work (weight dropping) to heat rise in water (via paddles);  conservation of energy; interchangeability of energy types
8. A.A. Michelson:   Light travels at a constant velocity, regardless of relative motion of source and observer
9. Ivan Pavlov:    Training dogs to salivate by the sound of a bell
10. Robert Millikan:    Measured the charge of a single electron, with the famous oil drop experiment

2 Aug 2008

Grade inflation seems to happen in all spheres of human activity.  Consider the following: 

• Rock Climbing:  climbs were initially graded 5.1 through 5.10 (latter being hardest) in the 1970s.  Then "unclimbable" climbs were conquered, and scores of 5.11, 5.12, 5.13 etc were invented.
• College grades
• Movie reviews on IMDB
• Computer games reviews:  top-ranked games on Metacritic are all recent releases, such as The Orange Box, Bioshock, GTA 4, Gears of War.   

There seem to be two phenomena here:  (1) grades handed-out for new items get higher over the years; and (2) for a given item, the grades start high (as early reviewers tend to be more enthusiastic) then gradually decrease as more critical reviewers weigh-in.  Phenomenon (1) is perhaps justifiable, if one considers the grades in an absolute sense, and one believes that products are getting better over the years (e.g. movies are getting better because of better special effects technologies; Likewise, for rock climbing, new training and equipment make climbs feasible now that were impossible in the 1970s).

Phenomenon (2) is well-known, and in fact the IMDB movie ranking includes the formula it uses (a "true bayesian ranking") that is supposed to counter the effect of "movies with few reviewers tend to be further away from the mean than those with large numbers of reviewers".   In fact, as I look at todays IMDB "top 250 movies of all time" I see The Dark Knight (just released last week!) at the top of the list, above The Godfather, Seven Samuri, and Citizen Kane. 

Computer games are quite a bit different from movies, because the absolute quality is improving on a year-by-year basis, as hardware and software improves.   So Doom III is much better than Doom I:  even though Doom I was a much more influential game, it seems hopelessly outdated by today's standards.

I predict that computer game scores will have to adopt an extended scoring system, like rock climbers did, because the computer game scores are now clustered up near 9.6, 9.7, 9.8.  Next year, all the good games will get scores of 9.9 and 10.0, and the following year, they will have to permit scores of 10.1, 10.2 etc in order to continue.  Or, they could just cut all existing grades in half (9.0 becomes 4.5) like some countries with hyper-inflation have done.   

29 July 2008

Just read a book about Isaac Newton.   One line from the book:  "Newton discovered gravity, formulated the theory of light, and invented calculus.  Then he turned 26."   The book says that he  was convinced that the gravitational attraction of a uniform sphere is equal to the attraction of a point-mass of the same weight.   The book says he was so convinced about it, that he actually invented integral calculus to prove it.  Which he did.   I've tried several times to prove the same thing using a simple proof, but I couldn't.  I finally looked in a physics book that had the proof, and indeed the proof requires integration of a rather hairy formula.  

28 July 2008

Washington state governors race primary election is soon, and I just got the voters information pamphlet.   Candidate Mohammad Hassan Said has a Candidate Statement that will surely draw lots of hate mail:  "I would like to sound the alarm, that AIPAC and the Jewist Zionist Lobbies who represent less that 2% of the American People are using the Unites States through their mighty powers in the News Media, Financial Institutions, Hollywood and Entertainment Industry, ... and Congress as proxies to wage war against any country perceived to be a threat to Israel".    This is a taboo subject in America, and I've only heard a few prominent people approach it:  Ralph Nader, Ted Turner, Jimmy Carter, Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, maybe Mike Gravel.   I'd love to see the email that Said receives!

27 July 2008

I volunteered to coach an elementary school math team "Math Is Cool" (http://www.academicsarecool.com/competitions.php).  Not sure if I'll get to do it: the prior year's coach may or may not return next year.   In any case, I came up with a list of topics, though they'd have to be geared to 4th and 5th graders:

• Fibonacci numbers
• Graph theory:  bridge problem and 5/6 vertex overlapping graphs
• Mobius strip
• Logic (liar's island)
• Binary numbers, computers, hex
• Paradoxes, proving 0 == 1
• Trigometry - surveying
• Rubik's cube
• Famous numbers (pi, e, i, infinity, etc)
• Archimedian solids
• Prime numbers
• Calculus
• Probability
• Statistics
• Causation vs. Correlation
• Forumlae for areas and volumes

Apropos of kids learning math:  an article in Science journal last week analyzed test scores and shows that girls are just as good as boys at math.  This old wives tale is a slow one to die.

National Geographic this month has an article on ancient Persia, and claims that the US Post Office motto ("neither rain, nor sleet, ..") comes from Greek historian Herodotus, who was describing the Persian's royal communication system, a kind of pony-express along Persia's royal road (circa 500 BC).  Wikipedia says that the NY post office's engraving is "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,"  whereas Herodotus' words are "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds", so I guess the word "courageous" was dropped.

23 July 2008

I was at Costco a couple of years ago, and in the DVD section, they were selling Angels in America, which shows a picture on the cover of an angel hovering over a man.   In this conservative part of our country, I wonder how many customers bought it, only to be surprised that it is a film about AIDS, showing gays in a positive light.

7 July 2008

Read The Revolution: A Manifesto by Ron Paul (2008).   Im not too familiar with him:  3rd party candidate for president, just dropped out.  Libertarian congressman from Texas.    His book is well-written and concise and has a lot of great ideas.  Here are his major points, divided into two groups:  those I support, and those I oppose.  Here are his policies that I agree with:   

• Mainstream politicians refuse to discuss many important issues (such as federal deficit, pre-emptive wars;  illegal spying) in a meaningful way;  instead - as a diversionary tactic, politicians discuss trivial details that _sound_ important but are smokescreens to avoid discussing the real issue (e.g. they'd rather ridicule a few pork-barrel projects, rather than having an uncomfortable debate on the national debt).
• The federal government is vastly exceeding its constitutional authority, violating the 10th amendment (e.g. regulating education; public funding for arts) usually relying on the commerce clause or the "general welfare" clause.
• The U.S. should withdraw our troops from most of the 120 (!) foreign countries they are in, especially the mid-east
• The U.S. should adopt a non-interventionist (not to say isolationist) foreign policy (only respond when directly attacked); no empire-building
• All foreign aid should be stopped
• Social security should be optional (or permit donor to select investment)
• The federal deficit should be paid-off, and we shouldn't borrow
• We should stop propping-up Israel with financial aid (although continue supporting it morally)
• The war on drugs is wasteful and ineffective and should be abolished
• Federal funding for arts (NEA) should be abolished
• Federal funding for education should be abolished
• Marijuana should be legalized, especially for medical purposes
• The federal government should be smaller
• More power should return to individual states
• Only Congress should be able to declare war (Korean "conflict" set a bad precedent, followed  by Vietnam and Iraq)
• We should immediately withdraw our military from Iraq and Afghanistan
• Our constitution should be strictly interpreted;  if circumstances have changed since the constitution was drafted, then an amendment should be adopted to reflect the changes (rather than a judicial re-interpretation)
• Politicians refuse to discuss or acknowledge the motivations of terrorists (instead, they focus on ultra-patriotic sound-bites such as "they hate us for our freedoms")
• The President should avoid executive orders and signing statements, and should defer to Congress's legislative intent
• The Patriot act (and related changes to the FISA) is a violation of the 4th amendment protections (due to warrantless wiretaps, and the like) and should be rescinded: the government should never spy on its own people
• The government works for the people, and should never impose burdens on them without their express consent
• Welfare and entitlement programs should be abolished, and replaced with state programs or volunteer efforts

Here are Paul's policies that I disagree with:

• Environmental (federal) laws should be abolished and replaced with state laws or civil (nuisance / tort) lawsuits
• Military service should be voluntary (no draft)
• The dollar should be tied to gold
• Income tax should be abolished, especially individual income tax
• Abortion policy should be decided by states
• Prayer in school should be decided by states
• Racism should be addressed by individual states

This thin book is silent on a few important topics:

• Lobbyists and special-interest influence in DC
• Term limits
• Gun Control
• Campaign finance reform
• Consumer protection (Paul is silent on this, but it is safe to assume that he would - like most Libertarians - abolish consumer protection laws and instead rely on civil lawsuits)

One of the key points of Paul's book is that both major parties in America agree on all these issues!   As a consequence, when debates occur (between politicians, or by media or pundits commenting on the nation) they focus on side issues, rather than the substantive issues.   Examples:  they debate flat-income-tax vs progressive-income-tax (rather than debate existence of income tax).  They debate staying in Iraq for 1 year vs 5 years (rather than debate whether we should be there at all).  They debate whether telephone companies should be immune from lawsuits regarding illegal wiretapping (rather than debate whether the government should wiretap without a warrant).

8 May 2008

Read the poem The Second Coming by Yeats, written during WW I:   

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

5 April 2008

My homage to Richard: 

Richard consumes very little.   He never lies.   He doesn't compromise.   He is very dedicated.

He was born around 1956, in North Hollywood, Calif.   Richard went to high school in North Hollywood, where he ran track and learned to play piano.  He also surfed and rode skateboards.   One of his best friends was Steve Bush, who lived a couple of doors down from Rich in their apartment complex.   They liked Creedence Clearwater revival.

After high school, he attended Community College in North Hollywood for two years, specializing in meteorology.  He got a really heavy-duty thermometer at this time and continues to use it, to this day.    During his CC years, Richard went on two lengthy hikes:  Tahoe-to-Yosemite, and the John Muir trail (Yosemite to Mt. Whitney).  These hikes were with his friends Mark Mitchell, Steve Bush, and Randy Gaebler.

Richard transferred to UC San Diego in 1976, and graduated in 1979 with a degree in Mathematics.   He continued hiking during this time.   Richard and his roommates painted a mural on the interior wall of their on-campus apartment of a dodecahedron.  Richard calculated the coordinates of all the vertices (about 100, since it was hollowed) with a calculator.

About this time, Richard performed perhaps his most amazing feat of physical endurance:  he rode his bicycle, solo, from North Hollywood to San Diego in one day.   After visiting with Neal Olander for a few days, he then turned around and rode back up in one day.    This is remarkable for several reasons:  It is about 130 miles each way; the traffic is horrible; he wore tennis shoes rather than bicycling shoes; he did not have toe clips or cleats; and Richard's bicycle was a piece of shit: heavy and slow (although it did have ten speeds).

After college, Richard got a job with the USGS, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  He worked as a computer programmer in a division of the USGS that specialized on measuring and mapping the strength of gravity over the earth.   He lived in a room rented from co-worker Rich Stroud, and they become good friends.   Richard did not own a car during this time (in fact, he did not get his first car until many years later when he moved to Los Angeles) and he rode his bicycle to work every day, even in freezing, windy Cheyenne winters.  While in Cheyenne, Richard bowled a lot, and even rolled a 299 once.   

Richard took some time off work in 1984 and went on two lengthy trips with friend Neal Olander:  a hitch-hiking trip from San Diego to Alaska (via Wyoming) then back down to San Diego (via the Seattle ferry).   Then a second trip to Europe on bicycle.  They bicycled about 9,000 miles in Europe, then flew back to New York and started riding westward to California.  They were struck by a car in Ohio, and - though not seriously injured - they terminated the trip and took the bus back to California (via Boulder, Colorado).   Just as well, they were starting to get on each other's nerves :-)

Richard continued to work in Cheyenne, then moved back to Los Angeles to marry his wife Marta, who he knew from his earlier years in L.A.   Their daughter Dana was born around 1988 and she is currently enrolled at UC Santa Cruz.     Richard got a job working for a company in Los Angeles that sells software services to support political candidates (email, polling, demographics).    He has worked there for about 15 years.    

Richard is in outstanding physical shape, frequently riding his bicycle to work, and working out with sit-ups, and running.   He enjoys gardening and working on his home.

Richard got into caving (spelunking) around 2003, and advanced to the point where he started leading caving trips.

Richard recently measured his house's electricity usage on a daily basis for a year.  He discovered that air-conditioner use in the summer is his family's biggest energy usage.

Keywords:  Richard Nathan Collier.    Richard Collier.   Rich Collier.   

He has his own web page at  http://www.gomonarch.com/rich/Emotional/Rich/index.html

21 March 2008

The  Tree Of Life page I created a few months ago is proving more popular (well popular is perhaps too strong a word for 100 hits a day) than my previous leader, the Animalia page.   In fact, the Tree of Life got mentioned on StumbleUpon.com, and resulted in thousands of visits earlier this month (in the figure below, a single page is about 20 "requests" so the peak was about 8,000 page-hits per day): 

In addition, it got mentioned in  the blog j-walkblog.  I think that caused the minor traffic blip around March 13th.

31 Jan 2008

I sent in a heartfelt testimonial to a software company, and it was published:   PowerGrep Testimonials.  Im always happy to help out fellow software engineers.

29 Jan 2008

Read "A history of Pi" (Petr Beckman, 1971) and it says that, in addition to Galileo's imprisonment in 1633, Giordano Bruno (1548 - 1600) was burned at the stake by the Catholic church for insisting that the earth goes around the sun.  I need to research that and get more details.