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've been spending the past month getting interested in abstract logic puzzles again. I've been trying to arrange my thoughts on the matter to avoid a complete core dump of geeky squee. This will happen someday. In the mean time, know that I've been a tricksy little spider traversing the web for puzzle sites.

Which is where I came across this:


Think of words ending in -GRY. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third word? The word is something that everyone uses every day. If you have listened carefully, I have already told you what it is.

[...]

There are only two: angry and hungry. The rec.puzzles archive offers a large collection of words that end in -GRY, but none of them could be considered even remotely common. There are many generally unsatisfying "trick" answers to the problem, which depend on a specific wording of the question or that the question be spoken instead of written. There seems to be no agreement among puzzle historians about which form is the original, or even the age of the problem. In any event, it is apparent that the frequent mutations of the puzzle statement over the years have erased whatever answer was intended by the original author. The usual trick is to play on the expression "the English Language", you are then asked for the third word - which is of course Language! QED.


As you can no doubt tell by the sterling prose and sparkling wit, the first five sentences of the answer were written by me and copied verbatim without permission (AFAIK) or attribution from the rec.puzzles FAQ. This doesn't bother me so much. It's not like I'm directly harmed by it, and I suppose that FAQs are in a murky area where they are written to be freely distributed but arguably not so much to disassembled and repackaged in such a way that the author becomes anonymous. The FAQ itself doesn't (or at least didn't in 2001, which is the latest version that Google seems able to offer -- did my successor totally fall off the web or something?) have a distribution guidelines paragraph that would clarify the sorts of abilities and rights that were expected, although it was clearly written in the modern era and does not explicitly declare itself to be in the public domain. And, while it wouldn't have been difficult for a puzzlemaster to figure out, it's not immediately evident that I am the one of the three editors over the lifespan of the FAQ to write that particular piece of text.

What really chaps my hide is that Kevin Stone somehow managed to plagiarize my words without reading them, because the final sentence jumps over to the LOL NOOB you didn't see the invisible quotation marks when I wrote that there were three words in "the English language" dumbassery. What part of "generally unsatisfying 'trick' answers" and "depend on ... the question being spoken and not written" wasn't clear? He seems like a fine fellow who respects attribution and WOULD credit me if I asked for it, but it's not like I want to be associated with the answer as written. *sigh* I feel like tracking down Karen Lingel and sending her over to Kevin Stone's house with a ball peen hammer to elucidate him, which is not as unpleasant as other criticisms of his solution.
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!

Poll #1063 What do you put in your hole?
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 3


Which is funnier?

View Answers

"Shut your piehole!"
0 (0.0%)

"Shut your cakehole!"
1 (33.3%)

They are equally hilarious
1 (33.3%)

They are equally ... what is the opposite of hilarious?
1 (33.3%)

Huh. I just saw a puzzle that I've never seen before. And it's one of those gems that makes you say "THIS is why combinatorics is so cool; learn how to count around the thing that is hard to calculate." Actually, while writing this I just thought of an even cooler proof than my original proof, which was pretty cool in its own right.

Morpheus and Neo each have a pile of fair coins. Morpheus has x coins, Neo has x+1. They flip all of their coins. What is the probability that Neo has more coins heads up than Morpheus?
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.
I keep on thinking "Oh, I'm late to this story, so I'll keep my thoughts to myself." But, damn, the story has legs, so in I'll jump.

The one thing that I have no interest in is whether James Crowley is a racist. I don't know the answer to those questions (nearly nobody does), and moreover I don't care. Like Jay Smooth says, it's the Bermuda Triangle of conversations. If he is a racist, then he should have the professionalism to leave it at home when he is an on-duty police officer. And even if he would have arrested a white law-abiding person of interest in a felony investigation who was uncooperative and belligerent, then he shouldn't. Let's hold him accountable for his specific actions instead of laying out a rhetorical snare so broad that he and the Cambridge Police Department can slip out of it.

I am sorely disappointed by Crowley. I don't have all the facts either, but assuming that the most charitable version of the story is the incident report that Crowley filed (the quotations that follows are directly from that report), it portrays an abuse of power in at least two different areas. The first is a failure to identify yourself when asked. By Crowley's own admission, he "began" to supply the information several times and then switched to a refusal to answer because "I had provided it at his request two separate times." In other words, he knew that he had not provided the information. So you pull out a piece of paper and a pen and write down your name and badge number and the incident report number and hand it to him; you've provided the information even though he's still yelling at you. The second is what clearly seems to be a deliberate escalation to get him arrested instead of defusing the situation. Advising someone "to calm down", um, never works, the repeated tactics to move the conversation outside is evidently necessary because someone isn't engaged in disorderly conduct if they're in their house, and FFS you can defuse the situation by getting in your car and driving away along with the rest of the law enforcement community that is backing you up. The police are the majority of the disorder in the neighborhood, and the fact that you couldn't defuse the situation short of arresting and handcuffing a middle-aged man who needs a cane to walk speaks very poorly of you and the department that trained you.

But I don't get Gates either. I'm not going to tell the African American community or anyone else that the police are your pals, because they're not. They're not my pals either. Neither are they our masters. What they are is a necessary tool to allow us to live in a free society without it devolving into anarchism or barbarism. When a neighbor suspects that your house is being burgled and they send the police to investigate, that is a good thing. Not good like a trip to Disneyland, but good like a trip to the dentist. There is some discomfort, and maybe there are some demeaning instructions if you care to think of it that way, but it's someone who is on your team. And when I say "on your team", I mean both that he wants to keep people from breaking into your house (again), and he wants to get off your property as soon as possible. And the more efficiently you show him your ID and chuckle about how you were breaking into your own house, the sooner you get on with your day and he gets back to the doughnut shop. If you're feeling particularly sociable, you can thank him for arriving so quickly and wish him luck in catching a real criminal next time, or even introduce yourself to your neighbor who is standing outside. If dealing with a police officer doesn't leave you in a sociable mood, then don't. But the fact that this took more than three minutes (plus whatever he had to pay Charles Ogletree) is entirely on Gates' shoulders. There is a huge plate of problems between law enforcement and minority communities, but unloading on the beat cop standing in front of you right now doesn't seem like an auspicious way of creating a better world.

The whole thing seems like two guys having rough days who decide to play an alpha male heirarchy contest. The African-American man plays the "do you know who I am?" card, the preening cop calls the bluff and loses. Then in the next round, the President weighs in but is batted down by the police unions. The only really good idea I've heard is that Obama has invited Gates and Crowley to the White House for a beer. Maybe he should declare August to be National Calm Down And Share A Cold One With Someone Who Pisses You Off Month.
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.
Alas, [personal profile] rivka doesn't crosspost her livejournal stuff to dw and I don't want to get another lj account just to respond to her posts (as thoughtful and marvelous as they are), but I was struck by her article here referencing this thesis (in PDF form) by Paul Lockhart (evidently a private high school teacher with the cache to teach an elective math course) that the high school mathematics curriculum in the United States has no redeeming values at all. Of course, his conclusion is nearly entirely correct, but his dualistic over-reaching and insipid straw-man dialogs are far more amusing than persuasive. His argument glorifying his research-focused methods and lambasting the soul-killing of everyone else seems to say "My students are able to see so far (due to *my* training, natch) in spite of the fact that giants are standing on their shoulders." Meh, it lacks that intuitive ring, which really strikes at the heart of whether Lockhart is the sort of mathematical leader we want to lead us into the next generation.

It's hard to have this conversation without an agreement on what mathematics IS, and what mathematical skills we need from the general population. This won't come without a struggle, and the way we do things now reflects our lack of consensus. Math is traditionally the language of both accountants and engineers, who each use their own fields with their own language. And you would work your way up the tower until you hit the limits of either your talent or leisure time and that would determine whether you were qualified to be a laborer, a manager, or an expert in some field like surveying or astronomy or what have you. This has served us for centuries all the way up through the time that Generation X (including me) was in high school, with the prize that people who have mastered calculus could train to study science and engineering in college.

There has been a rebellion against that model of education over the past ten or fifteen years, and quite a bit of it was well-deserved. The main problem (as I see it) was that we have been holding people in high school for the same length of time regardless of their ambition. When high school lasts for eight periods a day for four years whether you're training for a prestigious diploma or a lesser one, one might well ask what the sense is of anyone signing up for the lesser one besides the obvious conclusion that educators can't be bothered to challenge everyone. Plus, of course, mid-level bureaucrats had far too much power to limit the potential of women and minorities through the self-fulfilling argument that they didn't seem like the sorts of folk who could become engineers.

So now everyone is on the pre-college math track, which is probably great except that we didn't actually change the curriculum when we made that decision. The train is still making all of the local stops even though everyone is going to the end of the line, resulting in a fair amount of busywork that makes little sense in the broader context. For example, one spends quite a bit of time learning strategies for factoring polynomials in "Algebra II" that never get applied outside that cocoon because virtually all polynomials in "the real world" are irreducible. If we were to take side trips for the sake of showing off the breadth of mathematics, would that really be a part of anyone's plan?

And, needless to say, we haven't talked about the elephant in the room which is whether the four years of high school math should be obligated to shoot its entire wad in the name of satisfying the prereq for college freshman physics. Some of my best friends are engineers, but there are other things to be too. There are some mathematicians (including me and evidently Lockhart) who would argue that mathematics is bigger than the science of creating abstract models of physical phenomena for the sake of making better and simpler scientific predictions of real-world behavior, and should be broadened to consider the entire range of intellectual strategies to solve problems. Ordinary folk in my experience can get by without the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus but would be well served with some discrete topics like logic and graph theory. But it would take a larger mathematical revolution than I've ever experienced or even read about to knock calculus off the top of the mountain.
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.
So, Sarah Palin is resigning as governor of Alaska in time for it to be the water-cooler keg talk at everyone's Independence Day parties. I'll say right off the bat that I have contempt for anyone who quits an elected office mid-term for some reason other than being elected or appointed to higher office or being driven out by scandal in such a way that indicates that you have lost the confidence of your constituents. Just deciding that you're tired of it, or perhaps calculating that you want your protege to have the comfort of incumbency is highly disrespectful of the people who voted for YOU. I'm glad to say that it doesn't seem to happen very often; the last time that I recall this happening at a national level was Newt Gingrich deciding that he would resign from the House after just winning an election because he didn't want to be Majority Leader after the Republicans lost seats, but even then the worst that could be said is that his district had to pay for a special election and the winner would be at the bottom of the seniority ladder.

I hope that she actually does take the opportunity to return to public life and that this isn't just a Ross Perot-esque stunt to allow her to stay in the news without having to answer any of the questions or have a legacy of trying to balance a state budget now that oil is in no hurry to get back to $140 a barrel. I know many don't, but I feel bad for her; she's a small-town politician (and what is Alaska but one of the largest small towns in the world?) who is unprepared to campaign across the nation, and she wouldn't have been placed in that situation so early in her life (if at all) if John McCain hadn't decided to use her career as collateral on his fairly desperate gamble. She could have turned down his offer, but I think most people wouldn't have. But my pity has its limits, and deciding that she actually can run for President of the United States on her own terms is likely to exhaust it.
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.
I have said that I'm frustrated with the double standard that we don't take domestic terrorism as seriously as -- um -- imported terrorism, and that we don't take Christian-grounded, pro-life, and white supremacist domestic terrorism as seriously as Islamic-grounded, pro-environment, and black power domestic terrorism. The evidence that I cited in the above article was based on the inequity of the charges filed against two different guys, and it was compounded later when James von Brunn was charged, like Scott Roeder and unlike Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, based strictly on what he did and not on the emotional effects his actions had on the wider population.

What I said is true, but it might be that the formal charges are not the biggest part of the story. Both von Brunn and Roeder will be imprisoned for the rest of their lives if convicted, and von Brunn might even score the death penalty. On the flip side, terrorism charges against Roeder would probably be pretty futile since it requires finding twelve people in Kansas who all agree that placing abortionists on the defensive is intolerable. And hate crime charges against von Brunn might be hard to prove; if an Anti-Semetic white supremacist goes to a Jewish place and shoots the guy who held the door open for him, can you prove that Stephen Johns died because he was an African-American? That might be tough, and it's not quite like an assault or vandalism case where a hate crime conviction will increase the penalty. I suppose that District Attorneys are better than I at the cost-benefit analysis of the charges they can deliver, and perhaps I owe them a degree of deference.

But there does seem to be a problem in our will to suppress those terrorists that some of us agree with. I'm seeing a lot of articles on Google News about how powerless we are to confront "lone wolf" terrorists. This article from Fox News is typical of the "aw-shucks what can you do" school of thought. And everyone who has been paying attention for the past eight years knows that it's bullshit. We CAN investigate everyone who has ever donated money to an Islamic charity. We CAN add a byzantine layer of bureaucracy onto airport security that detains people based on their names and forces all of us to not travel with liquids just because this one time we sorta heard that terrorists were figuring out how to MacGuyver a bomb from innocent-looking ingredients. And we CAN aggressively interrogate suspects to learn about their plans and education and colleagues and their plans, even when we know we've disabled an entire "cell". I know that we CAN do these things because we HAVE done these things, and I don't even have reason to believe that we've stopped yet. What we lack is the will to apply the methods that have paralyzed Al-Qaeda for the past eight years to decentralized extremist coalitions that continue to kill Americans with impunity. Personally, I think that we should find a happy medium between the barbarism of extraordinary rendition and the coddling of allowing a prisoner the platform to continue to spread unsubstantiated fearM like he was Osama bin Laden himself, a happy medium that treats all prisoners and all potential victims of terror equally under the law.
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?
1. The Obama administration on Wednesday appointed a compensation czar who will have broad discretion to set the pay for 175 top executives at seven of the nation’s largest companies, which received hundreds of billions of dollars in federal assistance to survive.

By my informal count, it seems that the Obama administration now has more czars than pre-Revolutionary Russia. Can anyone explain to me why a term for dictatorial Slavic autocrats would have so much traction in the administrative charts of the White House? Obama has run with this ball, but as I recall this whole silly thing started with the drug czar back in the Reagan's day. I just don't know, but wouldn't "Associate Vice President" be more intuitive and less serving to the forces of totalitarianism?

(ETA: Apparently my belief is not only true but John McCain made the joke first a few weeks ago. There were 18 czars in the history of the Romanov Empire and arguably 28 in the White House. In Obama's defense, the appellation "czar" is generally applied by the media and they seem to hold ordinary bureaucratic titles in mundane life, generally "Special Envoy to..." or "Special Representitive for...".)

2. Those loutish transgender-beating disk jockeys are gearing up to apologize. I haven't followed this too closely, but I haven't seen anything that isn't chasing the wrong story. Getting them to apologize is foolish, because anyone can apologize insincerely and they probably are sincerely sorry that they crossed the line so far that it put a temporary crimp in their advertising budget. They can't say anything that could possibly have the same emotional weight of the harm they caused. At the same time, firing them is dumb-witted, because they'll just get a job somewhere else and keep up their schtick with a new persecution complex angle, and the radio station will just fill their slots with the same edginess to retain their audience.

Following the companies that advertise with them is closer. But you know what? I've seen a list of the companies that yanked their advertising, and I'm not impressed. There is nothing progressive about distancing yourself from someone you shouldn't have been close to in the first place. Do you think that those ten companies won't be back when the attention dies down, or that they aren't still paying for ad buys on the shows of their intellectual peers in every other California radio market? To be perfectly pointed, why wouldn't they be glad to affiliate themselves with the loosest cannons so that they can look like heroes for publicly ditching them at the "right" moment? I want to hear about the businesses that are desperate for the 18-35 male demographic but sufficiently values-based that they won't pay a shock jock's salary to get to them.

3. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor Wednesday to blast Democrats for setting a start date on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing. First of all, kudos to CNN for doing the legwork to show that a 50 day gap between nomination and the start of Senate hearings is quite ordinary; that is the sort of fact-checking that I expect from the news media. Second, I'm just bugged by what seems like the Republican notion that there's no reason that this shouldn't take a really long time. The happy they get from keeping a Senator from taking his seat for over five months now is probably what is driving them to want 8 Supreme Court justices for as long as possible. But it makes you look pretty slow-witted if you can't even imagine doing a fairly well-defined job in four months. Orrin Hatch says "I've been informed that there have been some 4,000 decisions. My gosh, that is going to take some time to go through those decisions." If you're a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and it's been over two weeks since a nomination and you *still* don't even know how many rulings the nominee has made, that's no one's fault but your own. Besides, we live in the future; you can crowdsource the review of her writings for red flags and have the results you want in three days, and nobody believes that you haven't already done this.

4. Carrie Prejean finally de-crowned for failing to live up to her contractual obligations to promote literacy or do boat shows or whatever the hell is expected of her. It was kind of amusing to watch Donald Trump's embarrassing declaration that Prejean and her views were notable because she was so hot and that "Ew, no!" was somehow advancing the national debate on the issue of marriage equity. It seemed obvious to me at the time that Prejean would take the validation that she was bigger than state pageant coordinator Shanna Moakler and jump to the conclusion that she as also bigger than Trump, and I wondered how long it would take him to learn that himself. Actually, it was sooner than I thought. Now the only question is whether more people will ignore her upcoming book or his next beauty pageant. Its hard on me because now I'll have twice as many things to ignore, but I will soldier on.

5. Our well-regulated militia is back in high gear, shooting a security guard at the Holocaust Museum. I can only imagine how angry the accused suspect is that his fellow white supremacists are denouncing him for "hurting their cause" when he was just, you know, following through on it. My recommendation to hate groups like Operation Rescue and Stormfront is that they make far clearer to their followers that they are nothing but talk if they don't want to suffer further embarrassing setbacks like more innocent people dying.

EXTRA-BONUS SIXTH THOUGHT!

6. Have you guys taken the time to try Pepsi Throwback? Holy crap, that stuff is tasty! I'm not even convinced that cola used to taste that good. Get on the ball, it won't be around for long.
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?
It's a very strange story that nobody quite seems to understand yet, but evidently Malcolm Smith has lost leadership of the New York State Senate. There seems to be a lot of false news about the Republicans regaining control because two of the three rogue Democratic senators switched parties and that the old Minority Leader is now in charge. From where I'm sitting it looks more like all of the Republicans and two of the rogue Democrats voted for one of the rogue Democrats for President pro tem, and that no one has yet announced a change of party.

It's just been a mess all around. Again, the popular story has been that the entire session has been about gay marriage and that the Gang of Three insisted that it not come up for a vote and that's why it wasn't going to be passed this session, and then Governor Patterson forced Smith to break his word to overcome HIS dismal ratings. But there is another story, that the Legislature came under one party control for the first time in forty years and they still waffled on passing political reform. To give an example, the average Democratic senator gets a little over $2.4 million in slush money to pass around their district in exchange for endorsements, while Republican senators get around $267 thousand apiece. The injustice of punishing taxpayers who aren't represented by lawmakers who caucus with the majority is something that minority Democrats wailed against, but I suppose it must have made sense when they were the ones wearing the pants and living in the farmer's house. Malcolm Smith couldn't keep his word either to the voters or to the members of his caucus, and I'm not fully sad at the news that he's out of power.

The bad news, of course, is that now it is virtually certain that we will not have a vote on liberalizing our marriage laws this year. That's a damned shame, because we really have a bad sense of how many people are on the fence, so the Democrats might regain a Gang of Three-proof majority after next year's election and *still* not have enough votes to get it through. That'd be an easier task if we had an official nose count. On the other hand, I think we've got a good enough sense of the challenge that lies ahead from what we've been through. And, just maybe, a legislative body with a Democratic majority but bipartisan leadership will spend the next year serving the citizens instead of the apparatchik.

ETA: Here is a memo from the new majority leader outlining the new rule changes. They might be the same empty promises that will be undone the moment Tom Golisano gets on his private jet back to Florida, but it would be honorable if they became the model for doing business in the capitol. And, to be upfront, one of the reforms is that a bill can get a vote if a majority of members request it.
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.
The edits that I made during my stewardship of the rec.puzzles FAQ had one over-arching theme. The document that I inherited was quite ordinary by Usenet standards, being largely about how to quickly become familiar with the posting culture of the community and avoid what over the long term were a fairly predictable series of faux pas. For a newsgroup based on puzzles, this tended to a large part to be a catalog of popular elementary brainteasers that were not to be discussed on the group.

Once the FAQ became my responsibility and I took the time to reflect on it, it struck me that this attitude was unjust. Sure, some people posted the problems because they were clueless asshats who couldn't be bothered to read the backlog before jumping in with their own contributions, but there were others who genuinely didn't know the answer to the questions, and to them the FAQ was just the first half of a puzzle book when they were ready for the damned spoiler. My revelation was that if these were frequently asked questions and I was the FAQ maintainer, then it was my job to answer them. Over time with plenty of feedback, I devised concise formulations of the questions and answers that would be satisfactory to both the neophyte and the pedant that they wouldn't feel the need to ask after reading the FAQ.

And the result was highly satisfying. I had expected that there would be fewer threads on the verboten subjects, and there were. But I had not expected that those threads that did pop up would be shorter and friendlier, and they were. The reason for this is that we no longer had a neophyte trying to answer the question and doing it in such a poor manner than people felt the need to post their own corrections and then the merry-go-round was back up to full speed. A brief, well-written answer in a clearly marked place that represented the consensus of the community was a valuable treasure. It has always struck me that the late 1990's saw a significant drop-off in the popular analysis of the "Monty Hall Paradox" as a fight between two equally compelling but different conclusions, and in my more prideful moments I wonder whether I played a role in testifying that the correct solution was more intuitive than the wrong one.

--------------

I bring up this story because a small part of me dies every time I see Buzzword Bingo applied to discussion of controversial subjects online. Sure, I get that stupid people are so stupid that they say twenty-four stupid things. They are mockable, and it is easy and crowd-pleasing to mock them. But I challenge you, as one who has been there, to see if you agree with me that there is a deeper pleasure in spending those few hours impersonally addressing twenty-four misunderstandings and establishing that as a bedrock of your community's sentiment that both your critics and allies can reference more quickly than they can debate.
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.
I bought a spice rack probably over ten years ago when I started realizing that kitchens can be used for more than boiling water and microwaving burritos. It came along with eighteen bottles of herbs and spices. Of course, I have to bear my share of the blame for buying an eighteen-slot spice rack, but at the end of the day I suspect that I am sadly provincial AND they were needlessly esoteric or perhaps taking unfair advantage of the Marjoram Glut of 1997.

Let us review these bottles. Ones in parentheses are not part of the original set, and sit in separate bottles above the rack.

Well-understood: Chopped onion, garlic salt, onion salt, oregano, parsley, sweet basil, thyme, (cinnamon), (dill weed), (nutmeg)

Opened but probably only used once for a specific long-forgotten recipe: Bay leaves, fennel seed, savory, (cayenne powder)

Never opened: Allspice, celery seed, coriander seed, dill seed, mustard seed, marjoram, peppermint, spearmint

So, in celebration of spring cleaning rituals and the simplification of life, I'm in a vague mood to start acknowledging that my spice rack is not the House of Lords and some of these hereditary peerages might need to be wiped out to make room for exciting twenty-first century e-spices. Not even the things I use a lot are immune; I can chop my own damned onions and I think that I will be replacing the garlic and onion salts with their respective powders.

Any nominees for expulsion and membership would be most welcome.
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