Matthew Daly

I like living in the future. I was reading a blog a few weeks ago that reminded me of Heaven & Earth, the most excellent Scott Kim puzzle game that never got the publicity it deserved, so I dug out my copy and replayed it. Then, hitting the end, I had to Google to verify that the victory screen was actually the end and not an Easter Egg for a further challenge, which led me to a forum where someone was giving love to Bug Brain.

Wow. I've never had the opportunity to play much with practical logic circuit design. Electronics books get esoteric in a hurry (even when they're written for kids) and math books stay abstract. I've always wanted a platform that combined the relevance of robotics with the puzzle-oriented worldview of games like The Incredible Machine. Evidently, someone wrote this game for me in 2000 but didn't go to the trouble of telling me about it.



This is an example of an intermediate-level puzzle, designing an artificial brain for a worm that is supposed to crawl forward until it hits a door, and then back up for a few seconds (to allow space for the door to swing out), and then return to the forward crawl. The brain contains input nodes (the red circle, which fires if the head is currently against an obstacle) and output nodes (the four blue circles, which direct the motor skills for raising the middle segment, lowering it, grabbing the ground with the head segment, and grabbing the ground with the tail segment when they are charged). The green circles represent neurons, which do the very elementary computation of measuring whether the accumulated charge of all of the incoming synapses (which can be individually weighted and even negatively weighted to inhibit charge) and send a charge down all of its outgoing axons if the total is greater than a threshold you define. You can use that mechanism to create the common logical gates: the two neurons in the middle of the brain are an AND and OR gate, and combined with the two supplemental yellow nodes they form the logic of an XOR gate. In addition, you can set synapses to slowly lose their charge over time, which let you form natural constructs like the feedback loop in the upper left that allows the brain to briefly "remember" that it bumped its nose a few moments ago and the two neurons with mutual decaying inhibitors in the lower left that form the cadence that it steps to. As the worm "chapter" progresses, you get control of more input and output controls and have to design more complex brains that ultimately have you negotiating a 2-D landscape filled with obstacles to find mushrooms that you can sniff out.

The game is far from perfect. The learning curve can be very steep for some problems, and while there are hints and even full solutions available you just wind up building the author's model instead of conceptualizing your own. It would also be nice if you could "chunk" common components like this XOR gate into a single "bundle" of neurons because it can get tricky to read the brains as they grow. The game contains a final module that hit on the real apparent strength of neural networks, which is their capacity of adaptive self-programming, but the examples they give are either simple or don't solve their problems dependably. But the biggest flaw is that it's such a delight that it's over too quickly.

I have just finished a slice of my second scratch cake. It's not so much that I needed a month and a half to recover from the butthurt of my first scratch cake as that I just don't like cake as much as pie and therefore don't care to make it for myself but also don't want to inflict loved family members with more experimentation.

It worked out much better. Properly melting the baker's chocolate and using fresh baking soda resulted in a product that was authentically cakelike. (Or is every cake intrinsically "cakelike"? I've heard it argued that a female cannot do something that is unfeminine.) I looked hard for a completely different frosting recipe and tried this. I probably shouldn't have been so desperate as to try an unrated recipe, because I don't know if it failed to thicken because I did it wrong or because it isn't a great recipe. But it turned out to be a fairly credible chocolate sauce that I drizzled over the cake, so no great loss. It'll be a pleasant dessert for the next few days.

And this topic reminds me that I need to perform important research FOR SCIENCE!

So, if you've taken the weekend off from the Internet, you may have missed out on EA's marketing campaign at Comic Con. Evidently, their marketing framing for Dante's Inferno is to tempt their fans into artistically committing a different sin every month in exchange for prizes. This month, the sin is Lust, the bounty is costumed representatives [1] at Comic Con (and not just EA's reps, who could have grudgingly given consent for the certain indignities that were to follow, but any rep at the con), and the prizes eye-rollingly involve the words "hot girls", "chest", and "booty". I won't even bother linking to the firestorm, because it is all predictable. People are angry, EA is shocked that they could be so misunderstood, apologists think that the protesters have no sense of humor or perspective -- there is nothing fresh. I'd join in the anger, except that I hate doing it because I suspect that it just makes EA seem even more rebellious to the sort of person who was actually going to buy the game in the first place. I won't buy The Sims 3, for what it's worth.

But I'd like to add something deeper. This isn't the first time in recent memory that someone has thought of a catalog of sins (here evidently as the Nine Circles of Hell, more often as the Seven Deadly Sins) as an anti-Christian scavenger hunt for the purpose of liberalizing ourselves from the esoteric superstitions of our ancestors. There is some sort of charm in the cultured dastard who feels that it is wasteful to not objectify women enough so long as you don't objectify her too much, along with being just prideful enough to assert your rights or wrathful enough to seek social justice. It is a dangerous game; when you consider it a virtue to stray from the path, you will quickly lose sight of it and soon not even realize how far you have strayed from it. To give an object lesson, EA's perspective on lust is so deranged that they thought that exposing their convention reps (and those of other companies) to statutory lewdness was "in the spirit of good-natured fun" (quoting from their "apology"). Do you or I look as ugly to those around us when we attempt to wave off our gluttony or intemperance as a mildly irreverent but cherished part of our culture? I am a proponent of the more traditional view that sin is what keeps us out of right relation with our neighbor, our Creator, and ultimately with ourselves, and that you worship impropriety and injustice when you celebrate anything other than the ideal even if it is an unattainable selflessness. I don't believe that the nature of sin has changed in 500 or even 2500 years to the degree that we should see ancient warnings as no more than historical curiosities, much less avenues for exploration. (Naturally, I am not talking about the warnings that clearly are ill-conceived. There can be a natural discussion about the inherent sinfulness of homosexuality, but none about envy; I believe you can see the difference.)

[1] This sentence is the only one in which I will write the phrase "booth babe", a phrase I dislike with a passion. I believe that the term itself is no small part of the marginalization of costumed representatives and the desensitization towards the degrading abuses that they are forced to suffer. They are a critical part of the enthusiasm that a convention team wishes to generate for their projects, and among the respect that they deserve is a job title that respects that prominence.

So I went and laid out my argument a few days ago that high school mathematics education in the United States is not what any rational person would choose to implement if she were solely responsible for rebuilding it from scratch. I hope it didn't come across as an indictment that the asylum is being run by the inmates, but rather that it is a case of collective action where a community of rational individuals cannot be fairly expected to seem rational when considered as a single entity. It requires a more delicate analysis to untangle where we're headed in such a hurry and how we got into the handbasket. I hope that I illuminated a few pieces of that puzzle in my previous post.

Still, I am reminded of my eighth grade social studies teacher. When you made an argument in his class, he would pepper you like a four year-old with a mantra of "So what?" until you either reached a conclusion worthy of your data or (more often) broke down in tears. So, let's move on in that spirit. High school math is FUBAR; so what? Who cares? What do we do about it? I say: not much. Let's slap a disclaimer on it, supplement the ways in which it does not meet our individual needs, and spend our lives focused on more pleasant things.

I mean, truly, what branch of the high school curriculum isn't FUBAR? Science promotes the same dead recitation of the experiments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries without teaching the pleasures of research (plus it's not like anyone is claiming that the Bible contradicts the Quadratic Formula). English class is about studying only six stories a year, all by dead white men two of whom are always Shakespeare and Dickens. History is a cobbling of complex stories into oversimplified narratives that overlooks anything that gets in the way of "the moral of the story". The treatment of math is starting to look more comfortable. The only reason pure mathematicians have a stick up our collective asses is that the Death March to Calculus is only a part of the beautiful story of the "true math". It would be like if you were a Jordanian who adored the courageous outreach of Queen Rania and had to endure a larger world in which people thought that she was pretty hot but no Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

Also, it's not new, and it's not dire. If this were the death knell for math, math would have died thirty years ago. I'm not actually even convinced of the unstated assumption that it is the role of formal education to teach students to love a field of study. (If it were, would the students fail if they didn't care for the topic?) In point of fact, there are currently many more vectors for the math bug than there were fifty years ago, and more than there were when it bit me twenty-five years ago. Here are some of them:

- Books. Martin Gardner wrote an amazing survey of recreational mathematics for Scientific American from 1956-81, and that has been collected into quite a few books that I greedily devoured in my formative years. Raymond Smullyan wrote fictional adventures that involved accessible but deep forays into non-elementary topics like combinatorial algebra and decidability. Kids today have access to these books (perhaps second-hand, admittedly) and a greater access to the layman-friendly works of John Conway and the fiction of Dennis Shasta.

- Programming. Computers are computational devices, and very usually one is brought to learn coding techniques with mathematical studies. I remember in high school that we were tasked with writing programs to estimate pi by a series of different algorithms and come to decisions about which were the fastest and most accurate. Project Euler is a much larger catalog of problems requiring a combination of mathematical investigation and algorithm design skills.

- Puzzles. Abstract logic puzzles of the sort that Nikoli produces on a commercial level and folks like the World Puzzle Championships craft at the OMGWTFBBQ difficulty level, and they existed to a lesser but still regular extent in my teenage days. Some of the puzzles are actually number-based to various degrees, but they're all mathematical. You're investigating an abstract environment that is unfamiliar to you and developing and refining heuristics to address the problems that you face there with increasing productivity. The specific tactics that you discover for each individual puzzle don't have much utility on their own, but the strategies for researching and formally codifying logical structures is a necessary skill for survival in our real world.

And there's more than this, of course, but it's certainly more than enough to pique the interest of someone who is earnestly searching for it. And there is so much injustice in the world that I simply can't get myself worked up over the issue that these avenues of research have to be found instead of spoon-fed from a licensed teacher and you don't get "credit" for doing it. It'd be nice if there were more respect and support for this sort of learning, but for all I know it's even more beautiful because it is done out of personal curiosity rather than that it was a homework assignment.

Of course, I can make pies. Three honest no-fooling different kinds of pies. But my family, they deserve even better than that. So I decided that I would bring a scratch cake to our Independence Day get-together. It's a cake, what could be hard?

( What, indeed? )

Of course, my people are a noble and fearless folk, and probably about half of them have made their own first scratch cakes before, so they eat it and praise it.

In other news, I gave my high-school graduating cousin paperback copies of a world atlas and Strunk and White, as I couldn't decide to be confident enough to give her a leather-bound copy of either. She gave the latter that withering teenager look that could only have meant "What the hell is a strunk?" because for some reason we don't teach kids that style guides are extant and essential for college. But she flipped through it and read the back jacket endorsements and all of the college graduates in this half of her family and concluded that it was "cool". So I win this round of Matthew vs. Teenager.

I got a piece of mail over the weekend that left me scratching my head and thinking that maybe I should blog about it because AKICODW, to coin a phrase. And today I now have a new entry in the "most curious letter I have ever received" category.

The first one first. I bank with a local credit union, and am highly satisfied with the lack of drama and headgames that commercial banks can tend to provide. When I started my relationship with them probably ten years ago, one of the decisions that I made was that I wanted my ATM card to not have debit card powers, to reduce my hassles should the card be stolen and because I already had a credit card that I could use for purchases. That turns out to be the sort of simplistic life choice that has brought me peace over the years, first when my wallet was lost and then again when the stories have erupted about skimming at TJ Maxx and hackers modifying ATMs and the ridiculously lax data protocol that debit cards use and how they seem to be the number one vector for identity theft. I try not to be anxious about this sort of thing, but I could go either way on debit cards and ultimately prefer not to have one.

So I just get a letter from my bank encouraging me to upgrade to a debit card because it's so convenient and cash is so last week and all that. Except that they're so dedicated to it that they're willing to offer me a $10 gift card to make the switch. And I suppose I'm inclined to take that deal because I doubt I'd ever use it in an unsafe place and of course there are anti-fraud protections should the worst ever come to pass, but it's left me very curious about why my bank is so eager to have me on board. They wouldn't offer me such a nice incentive unless they were going to make it back someday; is that from me or are they hoping on collecting $10 worth of service fees from all of the times that I use the card to do my grocery shopping or whatever?

And now for the main event. A woman in town whose name I don't recognize just sent me a handwritten condolence note for "the loss of your loved one" and going on to speak about the peace that the Bible provides at a time like this, adding in a few of her favorite verses of reassurance, and a Jehavah's Witness tract. And that would be surreal enough on its own (although sweet in that off-center but earnest Jehovah's Witness way), but I actually don't know which loved one she is thinking of. And no contact information, aside from the return address on the letter, so it's not drawing me closer to their church even if I did happen somehow to be in mourning. I'm not expert on forensics, but if this isn't a handwritten letter someone went to a lot of trouble to make it look like one.

Wow. Having written all that, I decided to check out the local online obituaries for the lulz, and it turns out that an unrelated (or at least very distantly related) Thomas Daly passed away in the suburbs last week and was survived by his son Matthew, who is not listed in the phone book. I guess I have to get used to the fact that my name isn't all that unusual, but I didn't realize that I'm not even the only one in the county. I hope he is doing okay, although I think that I will spare him this very impersonal condolence letter.

Something happened to me twice over the weekend that has been puzzling me, and with any luck it will happen again so I want to be better prepared and you know what they say about all knowledge.

My parents had their annual "start of summer" party that coincidentally celebrates their birthdays on Saturday, and a friend of theirs from out of town who was not able to attend that party came to our family dinner on Sunday. I had made two pies for the party and we had the leftovers at the second event. The pies came out fine, meeting my hopes that I would finally after all of these years be able to create some form of "potluck" food on demand.

Anyway, at each of these events, a woman (let's say aged 55-68 for the sake of argument) came up to me and asked "How did you make this?" And I, being shy and unprepared, gave a rambling 20-30 second overview of the recipe, and it was clear that she was disengaged. In one case, it became a briefly teachable moment about how I really don't need to freeze the butter to make the crust.

But I'm still faced with the impression that this was a Deborah Tannen moment and these women were trying to establish a supportive network and wound up mystified that I would presume to lecture a mature woman about how to make a banana cream pie. So, if this is a conversation that you (or the person next to you) has been in, what sorts of responses would have been more in line with the original intent of the question?

My cousin is graduating from high school pretty soon now. We couldn't be prouder, as you might expect. She's a popular, clever student-athlete, exactly the sort of person that I'll feel good about handing the reins of power to in thirty years. She's headed off to Niagara University in the fall, which is renowned for special education training and is far enough away without being too far.

I have a notion about a graduation gift for her, which is largely formed by the fact that the only gifts that had any sort of penetration into my memory were reference works. My favorite aunt gave me a copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, my favorite uncle gave me The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary, and someone I don't recall (perhaps our family lawyer? Why were none of these books inscribed?) gave me The Concord Desk Encyclopedia. That was over twenty years and three major moves ago, but these books are still on my shelf. Brewer's is a complete treat, especially as I would never have heard of it had it not been given to me.

So, I'd like to pass that along to the next generation, except that it's a little hard to figure which reference works maintain their relevance in the Internet Age. As much fun as encyclopedias are, I suspect that they are still anachronistic. Brewer's is a good candidate, of course, but it's a bit esoteric. I'm leaning towards The Chicago Manual of Style as being something that is important but still nice to have in hardcopy. Or maybe a historical atlas. What do you think?

Another thing that has been flitting through my mind is a mix tape of college dance party music as seen from the long view. When I was in college, we danced to a combination of modern music and the "classics" like Shout and Time Warp and Keep Your Hands to Yourself. I don't want to advance the argument that our music is better than their music, but there is always room for the best music of every era and a properly equipped student should reject classic rock from a position of aesthetics rather than ignorance. Again, what did you dance to in college that you wouldn't be ashamed to recommend to a modern teenager?

Here's Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal in a nutshell: a coal company loses a $50 million lawsuit over a reneged contract with a mining company and appeals it. But the state supreme court had an unsympathetic judge who was up for election, so the coal company CEO spends $3 million (evidently more than everyone else in the race put together) against the incumbent, who loses. This newly elected judge overturns the verdict. The plaintiff cries foul, arguing that the judge should have recused himself if only on the suspicion that he would be beholden to his largest contributor.

The Supreme Court agrees with the plaintiff. Would you believe me if I told you that it was a 5-4 ruling?? What, you would? Well, smarty pants, I'm sure that you wouldn't know that the minority would be made up of Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts ... uh, you knew that too? Wow, either you are psychic or 88% of our highest court is made up of sock puppets for ideological purity.

Scalia's dissent is particularly baffling. "What above all else is eroding public confidence in the nation's judicial system is the perception that litigation is just a game, that the party with the most resourceful lawyer can play it to win, that our seemingly interminable legal proceedings are wonderfully self-perpetuating but incapable of delivering real-world justice." Yes, people don't like that an expensive lawyer can give the upper class better results than an inexpensive one can give the middle class, but how do you get from there to the concept that we should therefore overlook the ability of the plutocrats to go beyond that and just buy a judge who will overturn a jury verdict?

The part the really bugs me is that the "just a game" and "incapable of delivering real-world justice" is spotlighted by this 5-4 ruling. I am very welcoming of the notion that elected judges should be presumed to be above bias for their contributors and that the gears of appeals courts would ground to a halt if every $100 donation was considered to be a bribe. We have a respect for freedom of public campaign fundraising in the United States (even for judicial elections in some places with some restrictions), and I don't want to trample that. So you issue a ruling saying that there is a line somewhere and it is fuzzy and you don't want to say that it's $10,000 because then rich people would know that they and their children and business partners can all safely give $9,999 and future courts would have to reconsider your edicts when inflation brings your limits down to working-class donors. But, for the love of all goodness, four Supreme Court justices can't agree with the majority that the judge should recuse himself when standing in judgment over a guy who gave you three million dollars? I suppose I shouldn't target Scalia when my real gripe is against Chief Justice Roberts for not crafting a 9-0 ruling that states that the ruling is very narrow and not open season on contribution-based appeals.

And, like always, I am grateful to justices like Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Conner. There are folks on the bench who are more likely to deliver the votes that make me happy, but I'm satisfied when a thoughtful center-right judge considers a case and delivers an opinion that doesn't insult my intelligence even if it goes against me. I think the nation would have been better served throughout its history had it always been filled with nine people like that instead of being a trailing indicator of the political outlooks that held the White House.

In lieu of having anything insightful to say about the scandal that might take down British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, I will point out that it would be a shame if this earnest anthem became history instead of current events. Granted, it isn't "Kenya" or "Mango", but I love me some Weebl songs.