^zhurnal - v.0.09

Fourier Transforms (FTs) map information from one space to another. The best examples are from the world of music. Consider, for starters, a note --- a single pure tone. On the one hand, it's an oscillating pressure wave in the air, a wiggle on an oscilloscope or phonograph record groove, a sequence of numbers stored on a CD or in a computer's memory. That's the tone in the time domain. But the same information can also be represented as a note on the musical scale: a static description of the frequency and amplitude and phase, essentially timeless. "Play me an A440." That's the tone in the frequency domain.

FTs are magical mathematical transporters that take data back and forth between frequency and time universes. They work for complex chords and sequences, the same way that an orchestra can turn sheet music into a symphony (and, inversely, a Mozart can hear a performance and write it down). FTs also work on images (think holograms), on quantum mechanical particles (think wavefunctions), on interstellar signals (think radio astronomy), on voices (think digital cellphones), and on a host of other things. FTs are vital for signal processing, noise reduction, and efficient information transmission.

But FTs are also horrendously expensive to compute --- or rather, they used to be, pre-Tukey, pre-FFT. Take 1,000 numbers, perhaps representing 0.1 second of ordinary speech. To Fourier Transform them by the obvious method takes about 1,000 * 1,000 * 1,000 operations = a billion multiplications and additions. That's marginally possible, today, with fancy computers. But it's not cheap, it doesn't fit into a handset, and it doesn't scale. The computational cost gets worse like the cube of the number of samples that have to be processed.

But there's a better way. Mathematicians discovered that the FT process was full of regular patterns and could be decomposed into simpler sub-steps. The 1,000 by 1,000 FT matrix of a million numbers can be factored into 10 pieces --- 10 clever sparse matrices that multiply together to give the original FT, but that each are mostly full of zeroes. (Multiplying by zero is easy!) A billion operations collapse into only ~10,000. And the factoring trick scales up; it grows slowly, like N*log(N) instead of exploding like N cubed. A million numbers can be transformed in ~20 million operations instead of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Amazing savings!

That's the Fast Fourier Transform, aka FFT. Dedicated mathematicians figured it out, published it in their obscure journals, and moved on to prove other theorems. A few decades later Tukey and colleagues rediscovered the FFT and realized how valuable it might be --- with the newly-developed programmable digital computers to do the arithmetic. The rest, as they say, is history.

John Tukey did many things besides uncovering the FFT. I was lucky enough to meet him ca. 1990 and showed him some of my work on user interfaces for free text information retrieval --- key parts of which he had anticipated and implemented 30 years earlier! (See "KWICs & Chinks & Chunks", the ^zhurnal entry of 31 January 2000, for the story of the JWT-^z encounter. See also "FTIR Desiderata" and "FTIR Philosophy" for more about the subject, and consult the FreeText archive at http://www.his.com/~z/c/ for annotated C source code, compiled executables, and implementation examples.)

John W. Tukey --- creative, helpful person. Requiescat in Pace.

- Monday, July 31, 2000 at 05:55:32 (EDT)

There are no simple solutions. The natural bureaucratic path --- building walls between the two worlds, insisting on rigidly-defined "requirements", and pushing projects to meet predefined milestones --- almost guarantees failure. Fine code has to evolve from a collaborative venture involving programmers and users in close communion. It takes time and money, creativity and perseverance, deep thought and mutual respect.

- Saturday, July 29, 2000 at 13:55:56 (EDT)

• 7 January 2000 --- Questions, Big & Small:
  • Could one design a game associated with philosophizing and this sort of discussion?
  • Recent recommended readings: Amatai Etzioni's The New Golden Rule and Communitarianism ... Elie Wiesel's The Sunflower ...
  • Does "Moore's Law" of exponential progress apply to technology in general, not just chips?
  • Are we now emerging from a dark age? Or is the upward trend only for a thin patina of humanity? (re improvements in health, literacy, wealth, etc.)
  • Are there "too many choices in the US"? Too much individuality?
  • Are there computationally intractable problems associated with consciousness?
  • To what degree are parents lords of their kids in a family? What rights and responsibilities are involved?
  • Mindless standardization ... excessive focus on process rather than content ... over-formalism ....
• 14 January 2000 --- mostly Promises:
  • Y2k post mortem ... what lessons were learned?
  • Recent readings: Minsky's Society of Mind ... Moral Calculations ... The Winner Take All Society ... Ethics and Social Justice ... James Carville's Stickin' ...
  • Loyalty and its proper place ... promise-keeping ... must one keep promises to someone after they are dead?
  • Utilitarianism and the need for extraordinary types of numbers ... infinitesimals ... varieties of the infinite ...
  • What's the basis of ethics? Absolute good? A social compact?
• 21 January 2000 --- mostly Emotion:
  • loyalty ... honesty ...guilt ... fear ... resentment ... jealousy ... embarrassment ... anger ...
  • Why do so many people believe in conspiracies?
  • How are emotions related to compulsions to drives?
  • Is it true that "internal state doesn't matter --- only action"?
  • Can emotions be rational? --- e.g., justifiable anger ... sensible fear in a dangerous situation (versus stupid fearlessness) ...
  • How does the amount of "credit" for an action depend on one's motives in doing it? How should it depend?
  • International law ... war crimes ... the end of nationalism ... revisionist history ... rise and fall of civilizations ... patterns, seen in retrospect ...
• 28 January 2000 --- mostly Random Readings:
  • What to read in order to provoke good discussion? "Pick a great book, not a poor book on a great topic."
  • Martha Nussbaum and others: collected essays on Cosmopolitanism vs. Patriotism --- tradeoffs between being a citizen of the world (or cosmos) and having loyalty for one's homeland
  • Edmund Burke vs John Stuart Mill ... Plato's Republic ... Locke ... Montesque ... Gary Wills' Inventing America and the Founding Fathers ...

- Thursday, July 27, 2000 at 06:29:54 (EDT)

• 4 February 2000 --- mostly Books:
  • What does "right to life" mean? What is "life"? Is abortion an ideal philosophical problem because it brings together so many complex and conflicting issues?
  • What limits can one legitimately impose on the behavior of other people?
  • Some recommended readings: A Knock at Midnight ... the sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. ... George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia ... Paul Veyne's Bread and Circuses ...
  • When is it OK to lie for a good cause? Never? To prevent great evil? (See Lying by Bok.) What are the gradations of truth?
  • How should one react to good beliefs which are sincerely held, but for bad reasons? Is sincerity enough?
  • How about beliefs which are disruptive or hurtful or repugnant to various people? Possible examples: The Bell Curve ... E. O. Wilson writings on sociobiology ... recent Darwinian explanations of rape ... Camille Paglia on bacchinalianism/paganism/feminism ...
  • In-Your-Face-ism --- overdramatization of beliefs, strident presentation, exaggeration to get attention....
• 11 February --- mostly Government:
  • People are complex ... look at Jefferson and his struggle with slavery
  • "The fantasy is the enemy of the do-able."
  • A challenge is to be responsible, to meet one's obligations, to accept blame for shortcomings ... "The buck stops here" proverb ... organizationally, this is hard to do, especially in high-profile situations when "the yipping of the press" oversimplifies and unfairly points fingers at those who are trying to do the right thing in a complex world.
  • Can political speech be regulated? How about lies? How about commercial speech? What can be done about huge concentrations of wealth and power? Can anonymity, facilitated by technology, provide a counterweight?
  • What's the appropriate level of government? What fraction of the economy should flow through government channels? And what are appropriate rôles of government? Antitrust? Antidiscrimination?
  • Look at ancient Greek society ... its democracy, and its treatment of women ... readings on "moon & cherry blossoms & fish & geishas" ... fascinating social glimpses of social aspects which aren't often explored.
• 18 February--- mostly Patience:
  • Is change good? What is "good"? How relative is it?
  • Is there a real difference between "Gen X" and earlier generations? Must young people nowadays be managed differently as employees? Are they fundamentally less loyal, patient, persistent, etc.? (Or are all these just clichés?)
  • Book Built to Last, about enduring and visionary companies --- interesting reading ... suggestion that what's critical is to preserve fundamental values and principles, but change strategies and goals as needed ...
  • A new organization, especially one with a clear mission and lots of resources and smart people, doesn't need to be introspective ... but after a few decades we "... need a real dialog about who we are and why..."
  • A successful and enduring organization tends to be exclusive or exclusionary ... and people who work there tend to have a bimodal longevity distribution: <5 years or >25 years ... since those who don't fit are washed out early, while those who remain have a powerful loyalty to the corporate culture.
• 25 February --- mostly Society vs. State:
  • George Will comment: "People are self-indulgent by nature." So is it the job of the State to promote social virtues? Would everybody be "profligate and indolent" if not driven?
  • How can the battle between Individual and Community be resolved?
  • Should Society, not Government, be the driving force for moral behavior?
  • Have social standards of morality declined? (Witness tabloid TV, Internet trash?) Or have things always been this bad?
  • "Boy, this stuff is weak tea!" --- a philo-spouse's comment on the results of searching the Web for a particular substantive topic. On the other hand, "There are nuggets in the schlock" ... but "it's a lot easier to find your way to the good stuff in a paper library" ... and "the ordering is very powerful --- the ultimate tool is the Dewey Decimal System" ... though admittedly it's only a one-dimensional categorization.
  • Three bureaucratic shibboleths:
    • collaboration
    • risk management
    • flexibility
    All good things, to be sure, but the trick is not to just talk about them but to implement them properly.

- Tuesday, July 25, 2000 at 20:56:21 (EDT)

"Long ago in my student days I had thought about it. It struck me as inconceivable that I should be allowed to lead such a happy life while I saw so many people around me struggling with sorrow and suffering. Even at school I had felt stirred whenever I caught a glimpse of the miserable home surroundings of some of my classmates and compared them with the ideal conditions in which we children of the parsonage at Günsbach had lived. At the university, enjoying the good fortune of studying and even getting some results in scholarship and the arts, I could not help but think continually of others who were denied that good fortune by their material circumstances or their health."

"One brilliant summer morning at Günsbach, during the Whitsuntide holidays --- it was in 1896 --- as I awoke, the thought came to me that I must not accept this good fortune as a matter of course, but must give something in return.

"While outside the birds sang I reflected on this thought, and before I had gotten up I came to the conclusion that until I was thirty I could consider myself justified in devoting myself to scholarship and the arts, but after that I would devote myself directly to serving humanity. ... What the character of my future activities would be was not yet clear to me. I left it to chance to guide me. Only one thing was certain, that it must be direct human service, however inconspicuous its sphere."

Schweitzer explored working with the homeless, with orphans or neglected children, and with former criminals --- but was frustrated by the impossibility of doing much outside official channels and existing organizations. He was driven by his personal religion (Christianity) and philosophy to serve as an individual. When he discovered the desperate need for medical care in the Congo, he told his friends and relatives that he was abandoning his career as a concert musician and theologian to become a physician. They were dumbfounded and tried to dissuade him. Schweitzer comments, tongue in cheek, that "The attitude of people who did not try to explore my feelings, but regarded me as a precocious young man not quite right in the head and treated me with correspondingly affectionate ridicule, represented a real kindness."

Albert Schweitzer then gets to the core of the matter: Who should make such personal sacrifices?

"As a man of independent action, I have since that time been approached for my opinion and advice by many people who wanted to risk a similar venture. Only in comparatively few cases have I taken the responsibility of giving them encouragement. I often had to recognize that the need 'to do something special' was born of a restless spirit. Such people wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those that lay nearest did not satisfy them. Often, too, it was evident that they were motivated by quite secondary considerations. Only a person who finds value in any kind of activity and who gives of himself with a full sense of service has the right to choose an exceptional task instead of following a common path. Only a person who feels his preference to be a matter of course, not something out of the ordinary, and who has no thought of heroism but only of a duty undertaken with sober enthusiasm, is capable of becoming the sort of spiritual pioneer the world needs. There are no heroes of action --- only heroes of renunciation and suffering. Of these there are plenty. But few of them are known, and even they not to the crowd, but to the few."

And for we who must stay behind? For us, he echoes and expands some of the thoughts voiced by George Elliot in the closing pages of her novel Middlemarch. Albert Schweitzer counsels:

"Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.

"The hidden forces of goodness are alive in those who serve humanity as a secondary pursuit, those who cannot devote their full life to it. The lot of most people is to have a job, to earn their living, and to assume for themselves a place in society through some kind of nonfulfilling labor. They can give little or nothing of their human qualities. The problems arising from progressive specialization and mechanization of labor can only be partly resolved through the concessions society is willing to make in its economic planning. It is always essential that the individuals themselves not suffer their fate passively, but expend all their energies in affirming their own humanity through some spiritual engagement, even if the conditions are unfavorable.

"One can save one's human life, along with one's professional existence, if one seizes every opportunity, however unassuming, to act humanely toward those who need another human being. In this way we serve both the spiritual and the good. Nothing can keep us from this second job of direct human service. So many opportunities are missed because we let them pass by.

"Everyone in his own environment must strive to practice true humanity toward others. The future of the world depends on it."

- Sunday, July 23, 2000 at 16:06:38 (EDT)

• 3 March --- Community:
  • Is it always wrong to use nuclear weapons? Can something like a technology be intrinsically or categorically wrong?
  • Are Communitarians wimps? (Is it bad to be a wimp?) What do Communitarians stand for? --- moral suasion, perhaps, in between conservatives and liberals?
  • Are people good "by nature", or bad "by nature"?
  • If you could get away with something (e.g., the perfect crime), should you? Would you?
  • Should people be stopped from hurting themselves? How can one balance costs to individuals vs. costs to society?
  • Justice vs. Law --- "good" vs. "good for something" ... Plato vs. Aristotle?
  • "Responsibility is doing the right thing when you're not being watched."
• 10 March --- the Constitution:
  • "It's much easier to prevent something from happening than to cause it." --- checks and balances, for example....
  • What's the importance of individuals to history? How much depends on having the right person in the right place at the right time? Were the Founding Fathers --- Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, et al. --- special, and if so, how?
  • Should we attempt to understand the original intent of the Framers, or should the Constitution be a living document, reinterpreted as times change?
  • Based on the rhetoric associated with flag-burning protests, "One would think that the sky was dark with the smoke from burning flags."
• 17 March --- Organizations:
  • What's the distinction between a puzzle and a problem?
  • A big bureaucracy grown up around a noble charter is "Hypocrisy paying tribute to virtue."
  • See the recent business book Built to Last for comments on "big, hairy, audacious goals" and how important they are for forming an organizational culture that will endure.
  • An interesting parlor game: imagine you are staffing a Mars mission --- whom would you pick for the crew to best embody the soul of your organization? (The bureaucratic committee-style answer: choose one from each group or branch. Duh!)
  • The best mission statement ever seen --- by a tank commander, who at the close of every day would ask: "Am I better prepared, through fire and maneuver, to close with and destroy the enemy?"
• 24 March --- Foreign Policy:
  • Privacy vs. Safety --- what's the trade-off? By monitoring everyone moment-to-moment, one could virtually eliminate crime (or at least quickly identify and catch any criminals). Is it worth it?
  • See the January 2000 issue of Commentary magazine --- twenty short, thoughtful essays about foreign policy
  • The Federal bureaucracy "reflects the Administration --- which currently has a diffuse (at best!) coherence" in its foreign policy.
  • The obstacles to organizational reform "are not technological, they're sociological".
  • It looked crazy to the Europeans for the US to have a "morality-based foreign policy" in the 1970's and 1980's ... but that policy turned out to be right!
  • The key is "working in the white spaces" of the organization chart --- between the boxes --- to bring about improved collaboration, agility, and all the other important priorities.
• 31 March --- Information & Ethics:
  • "We don't know what we don't know." A big organization has far more implicit, tacit knowledge than it can possibly bring to bear on a problem --- unless ways can be found to get around bureaucratic barriers.
  • How can one manage huge amounts of data, maintain archives, be responsive to questions, find nuggets of critical new information, preserve privacy, keep audit trails, and control access appropriately?
  • "If you believe that you are an ethical person, but you support those who may not be, are you still ethical?
  • "Can you have a good organization made of bad people?"
  • Legal gamesmanship: label everything you do "attorney work product" to make it immune from evidence discovery proceedings by courts ... don't write things down ... encrypt and claim to have forgotten the key ...
  • Putting oneself in the other person's place is the great touchstone of ethics. But beware false symmetries! (Sometimes the other person's place isn't what you think it is.)

- Saturday, July 22, 2000 at 06:28:13 (EDT)

But it's a huge leap from a toy problem to even the tiniest real-world situation. Knowing the configuration of a single-cell organism isn't enough to foresee what it will do. Uncertainties cascade; infinitesimal disturbances ripple and grow. External forces like the absorption and emission of infrared photons (heat!) randomize the details of the system. Gross properties remain unchanged, but critical fine structures shift and flow ... and forecasts fail.

- Thursday, July 20, 2000 at 17:14:19 (EDT)

• 7 April --- Politics & International Law:
  • The late Julian Simon's collected writings: interesting contrarian views of economics and politics, but (especially visible in the preface to the book) much bitterness at having been ignored, misunderstood, and maligned.
  • "Is it OK to nuke your own people?" What should be the reaction of other countries to genocide, atrocities, or other "internal" activities in a nation?
  • "Cultural differences" excuse some differences in laws and customs in various countries --- but can one draw a line beyond which people can't be allowed to go?
  • A classic argument against public sewers: "everybody has the right to struggle" ... Social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer et al.
  • Deterrence works especially well for a demonstrably crazy person who has the power to make hugely destructive, credible threats.
  • What are the real international "sources of power"? Consider:
    • economic productivity (capital investment + human workforce strength)
    • technological savvy (creativity + education)
    • natural resources
    • democracy (political stability + openness)
• 14 April --- Secrets & Society:
  • Rôle of intelligence (e.g., "spying"): not to be the first to find out and report on something, but rather to be the first to understand it --- so that policymakers can be prepared for important events, and governments can act more (nearly) rationally.
  • Risk of false alarms: "cry wolf" too often and be ignored when there's a real threat.
  • "Gather/scatter" is a common and critical operation in computer science (pull together disparate data elements, massage them, and then route them out again) --- is there an analogous need to "gather & scatter knowledge?
  • Where do large-scale creativity and technological productivity come from? For instance, why did supercomputers arise in the US and not elsewhere? Was it just because Seymour Cray happened to be born there? Did advanced computer technology need cross-fertilization from many areas to develop, and that kind of interdisciplinary interaction existed mainly in the US? Was manufacturing know-how and quality control an essential element in which the US had strength?
  • Demythologization --- when secrets are revealed, the mystique is gone and some things become harder to do. Is that good or bad?
  • John Rawls and metrics for a just society: should one maximize the average outcome for people over the whole nation? Or maximize the minimum (i.e., raise the floor for the worst-off members)? Or minimize the maximum (i.e., soak the rich)?
  • What if democracy and freedom made a society poorer --- would we still choose them? That is, are democracy and freedom good in and of themselves, or are they just means to achieve greater wealth?
  • What is the "unstable equilibrium between freedom and power"?
  • Will technology decentralize life? Is technology the savior or the villain?
• 21 April --- Libertarianism:
  • "He was correct but I was right!" --- the difference between being narrowly correct and having large-scale good judgment
  • Authority vs. Jurisdiction --- geospatial boundaries within which powers are allocated and limited
  • Virginia Postrel's "The Future and Its Enemies" --- kinder, gentler libertarianism? ... Friedrich von Hayek ... Hilary Putnam ...
  • "Use" vs. "Give" : the distinction between temporary loans and permanent transfers --- how can it be applied to information? This is related to the tug-of-war between control & productivity ... between minimizing risk & accomplishing the mission
  • Key challenge: ask good questions --- and then reinterpret them to make them better questions
• 28 April --- Technofuturism:
  • Is technology a juggernaut --- inexorably moving forward, destroying everything under its wheels?
  • What's the future (if any) of humanity? Will people be replaced by machines?
  • Recent readings: Konrad Lorentz On Aggression ... Charles L. Mee A Nearly Normal Life ... John Seely Brown & Paul Daguid ... Howard Gardner ... David Berlinski The Advent of the Algorithm
  • Things are much better now than 50 years ago, and much better here than in (many? any?) other countries ... so why do we kvetch so much?
  • The seductions of over-quantification: "if you can't measure it, it's not real" when thinking about non-quantifiable things
  • "Engineers are like computers --- garbage in, garbage out!"

- Tuesday, July 18, 2000 at 21:56:45 (EDT)

- Monday, July 17, 2000 at 10:49:04 (EDT)

Metaknowledge --- the ability to understand problems, to know:

• what issues are globally the most important;
• which questions can be answered and which ones can't;
• how to approach various types of problem;
• what degree of accuracy is needed for a solution to be "good enough";
• how much effort to devote to each aspect of the larger task;
• what alternative paths are available if a preferred route is blocked;
• who has seen a similar challenge before and can help figure out this one;

- Saturday, July 15, 2000 at 16:25:57 (EDT)

• 5 May --- Aphorisms:
  • "The Future of Humanity is that nobody shows up."
  • Inadvertent loop-closing is the curse of our age. (anecdote: an airline offered "spouse flies free" and, a few months later, decided to send thank-you notes to those who had gone along on business trips --- but flew into a sudden downdraft as thousands of notes reached husbands and wives who hadn't traveled...)
  • The seeming solution to Artificial Intelligence: "Throw another rule on the barbie!"
  • Could good aphorisms be generated algorithmically? What are the critical factors --- contrast, surprise, juxtaposition, apparent self-contradiction, ...?
  • Debate: is intelligence just a matter of having enough computing power plus the right structure? (i.e., is the computational theory of mind correct?) Or are there Oracles or other "magic" in there somewhere?
• 12 May --- People:
  • See the article in the 5 May issue of Science by Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund, re altruism and feedback loops
  • "Blamestorming" --- our tendency to find somebody to punish for anything that goes wrong ("She was the kind of person who felt that for everything that went wrong, somebody had to be blamed ... and it was her responsibility to find that person.")
  • How can knowledge be gathered and shared effectively in a large organization? (What are the differences between large and small companies?)
  • How can "communities of interest" be formed to match people's needs (without massively wasting their time)?
  • Bureaucratic problem-solving challenge: find the person who knows the answer, but who may not know that s/he knows...
  • How can collaboration and sharing be rewarded in an "information economy"? ("A lot is known about how not to do it!")
  • How can one recruit the right people for a job? One can screen for obvious bad characteristics, and it's easy to turn people away. But how can one recognize and hire the long-term assets, the folks who will form the backbone of an organization, who will learn the corporate culture and then help develop it further and pass it along to the next generation?
  • Perhaps instead of a mere "interview" one should live with people for a few weeks --- that would make it harder to fake honesty and conscientious behavior.
  • How can a large organization promote risk-taking and individual initiative ... yet not fall for those who are charismatic, tell a good story, and then move on before their failures become obvious?
  • A big secret of life: internal rewards. Don't depend on recognition and praise from others as a motivating factor. ("If your rewards aren't internal, you're doomed.")
• 19 May --- Bureaucracy:
  • Is the problem the pay system? Too many layers of management? Too many filters that prevent mavericks from doing mischief, but thereby damp out creative energy?
  • How can homes be created for "orphans" --- unconventional ideas, projects that don't fit into the standard mold?
  • It's not hard to list twenty critical problems we may have to deal with during the coming decade. We need to have people working on those twenty problems, not just devoted to answering today's mail and putting out today's fires. ("But those people will never be promoted!" --- "Yes; we're a prisoner of the inbox." --- "Maybe 50% of the staff should be prisoners of the inbox.") Of the twenty key problems we can envision, perhaps only a handful will actually turn out to be real. But we can't identify those in advance --- so we need to be working on all twenty.
  • The big organizational difficulty is connecting long-range thinking (R&D) with the rest of the outfit, so that researchers don't go off on irrelevant tangents.
  • Metaknowledge is essential --- an information organization has to be able to find the top expertise to answer unanticipated questions, and has to do it quickly.
  • We must escape the old paradigm of "knowledge is power" which leads to a culture of knowledge hoarding, selfishness, lack of sharing. ("The Peasant Mentality: bring the other fellow down to my level" --- as opposed to a philosophy of helping everybody move up, while avoiding envy)
  • When people leave (quit or retire) they should be required to write a "lessons learned" essay --- to "compose their own obituary" --- guidance for those who are to follow, both what to do and what not to do. (Maybe everybody should do this every year?!)
• 26 May --- Justice:
  • "First, do no harm" should be a guideline for politicians, not just doctors.
  • "When is the job to break the rules?" When laws conflict, how does one choose which one(s) to follow?
  • Civil disobedience didn't come up in John Stuart Mill et al. --- see Gandhi lectures on liberation philosophy, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter for a Birmingham Jail
  • Can there be a "just war"? How can conflicts be resolved?
  • Different people have different hierarchies of rules; so do different cultures.
  • "Every decision worth thinking about is a conflict between two good things."

- Wednesday, July 12, 2000 at 21:59:54 (EDT)

• 2 June --- Politics:
  • Is current politics totally rotten? ("I thought I had gotten cynical enough --- until I saw the political pandering going on today!")
  • Is the root of the problem money-raising? ("Congress will do anything for money.") Perhaps the process in other countries is less bad?
  • Maybe strict term limits on everyone would help?
  • Could a bad person make a good leader?
  • Can someone "rise through the system" and still be able to change it when s/he gets to the top? Or would one inevitably be corrupted by the process of getting there?
  • Look at how gambling has been embraced by the State: is it a tax on the poor (or foolish?), or is it a voluntary contribution?
• 9 June --- Evolution:
  • Has anything really changed in human nature over the millennia?
  • Is there now just a thin veneer of "acceptable behavior" imposed, sitting on top of an unchanged system of internal beliefs? (In particular, are human males still the same sexist animals they have always been?)
  • Do societies "evolve"?
  • What is "progress", anyway?
  • Are there places (perhaps the more sophisticated bureaucracies?) which are "models for the future" in their embracing of diversity, multiculturalism, and basic fairness to all? (e.g., in their deliberate suppression of racism, sexism, etc., are such experiments ahead of the rest of society?)
  • How can "good" choices diffuse through society? Must there be many cultures, perhaps (Galapagos-island-like?) isolated from each other, to permit evolutionary drift and large-scale experimentation?
  • Are the key social problems low productivity, under-employment, and an unfair distribution of income (or wealth)?
  • Could "some bright Abraham Lincoln" arise in the Third World and trigger a great step forward there?
  • Is the magic of the United States based on the fact that "there are no secrets to what we're doing"? (i.e., explicit Constitution, openly debated and known laws, (relatively) fair enforcement of the rules, etc.)
• 16 June --- Science and Art:
  • Is science a "social construct" --- arbitrary? Or is it based on "something out there"?
  • Where do new ideas come from? What are the roots of creativity?
  • Is it necessary to master the fundamentals before you can be good at any craft? (e.g., must all great artists first learn how to draw?) Or could one skip ahead and still be good?
  • "Can one be a great performer and not a composer?"
  • Are the best books mainly the ones which ask good questions and make unexpected connections?
  • Is action sometimes a mistake? ("Don't just do something, stand there!")
  • How critical is a basic level of mathematical literacy? (Remember the books How to Lie With Statistics and Innumeracy)
  • Can psychological test results (e.g., Myers-Briggs personality typing) be correlated with creativity, analytic skills, or other useful talents?
• 23 June --- Generational Differences:
  • Is there a real change in "Gen X"? Is there now a focus on making money, rather than patriotism or other large-scale contribution to society?
  • Why do people come to work in a given place? What makes them stay? What makes them successes or failures?
  • How can someone learn mission-critical skills without time in the trenches? What about the important jobs that take five years to begin to get good at?
  • Can a large organization thrive by offering internal opportunities for change? (things such as rotational assignments, sabbaticals, temporary tours of duty in other areas, etc.) Or must modern outfits prepare themselves to have the best people come and go on short timescales? If so, how can continuity and "corporate memory" be preserved?
• 30 June --- War, Politics, and Technology:
  • Is it morally acceptable to threaten enemy civilian populations (e.g., "strategic bombing"?)
  • How about the Asian proverb re deterrence: "Kill the chicken in front of the monkey!"?
  • Are politicians becoming "personally responsible for the smallest of events"? Is this foolish behavior for those who should be national leaders?
  • Are we now "trembling on the threshold of wait-until-the-next-Administration"? --- and therefore incapable of significant action?
  • Is it true that, in a few years, "everything that people are concerned with today will be seen as swatting gnats"?
  • Is technological advancement inevitable? Or is technology "simply tools" --- not something that "advances"?
  • Is technology driven by motivations --- by the needs which must be met?
  • What unintended consequences are associated with technological progress?

- Tuesday, July 11, 2000 at 06:01:37 (EDT)

Should such an attitude apply to life before a doctor pronounces the death sentence?

- Sunday, July 09, 2000 at 09:26:09 (EDT)

- Saturday, July 08, 2000 at 08:25:08 (EDT)

Good explanations of fundamental phenomena don't answer all questions on larger scales. People and their activities aren't simply reducible to their genes, for instance. Contemptuous claims that we're just big lumbering robots, puppets dancing to the strings pulled by our DNA, don't hold water ... any more than the opposite arguments that our minds are transcendent entities, independent of physical bodies and their underlying chemistry. Life's more complex than that, both ways.

Mary Midgley makes some balanced and insightful insightful comments on this topic in Chapter 4 of Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature:

"... Anyone who speaks of a small part as doing something that can only intelligibly be done by the whole grinds his logical gears, producing a frightful noise that obscures all the implications of what he is trying to say. (Very few scientists treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes.) If I claim that this carburetor won the Monte Carlo Rally, or that Eclipse's left hock won the Derby; if I say that my small intestine has digested my lunch; if the boy soprano's family remark that he has just sung the Messiah --- we speak confusedly. It was Cæsar, not just Cæsar's brain, that crossed the Rubicon. And what took the decision to do it was again Cæsar, not his HLC [hypothalamic-limbic complex] or his cerebral cortex.

"People find it hard to grasp this point because they see it as antiscientific. Must not the real account of what is happening, they say, be the physical one? Are we not speaking only indirectly or superficially, if not superstitiously, whenever we describe an event in any other term than as the movement of electrons? Is not everything else in some way unreal?

"Asking different kinds of questions produces quite different kinds of answers; they are usually not reducible to one another, though they must be compatible. Slicing the world in different directions reveals different patterns. Jelly rolls, sliced downward, have a spiral structure. Sliced across, they have stripes. Stripes are not reducible to spirals, nor vice versa, and will not become so by further analysis. Both are real, and the two patterns can be related if we understand the relation between the two slicing angles. In just the same way, other things are real as well as electrons. Brains are also real --- but so are the colors we see and the pains we feel, though they could never figure in books on physics or neurology. And someone with a moral conflict has a real conflict --- granted that it is not unreal in the way that conflicts can be so (that is, fictitious, imaginary, or self-induced). All real features of the world can be studied directly, on their own terms. They do not have to be approached indirectly, by finding their mirror images in a pattern studied by physicists."

Midgley goes on to explain how the DNA of living creatures can be both worthy of reverence (as part of an awesome, wonderfully complex system) and yet not any more worthy of reverence than the beings whom we interact with on a macroscopic scale. She concludes by critiquing the logic of those who try to use an ersatz "scientific" viewpoint (e.g., "a chicken is only the egg's way of making another egg" applied to genetics), in a game of intellectual one-upmanship, to cast scorn on real-world thinking:

"... It can lead, with startling ease, to a confident belief that all the concerns of daily life are somehow "unscientific," that the scientific thing to do is always to find some extremely remote standpoint and insist that only what is seen from it shall count as reality. Middle-sized phenomena, such as we must always deal with in our lives, are dismissed as beneath explanation, while the scientist makes off with the speed of light, either to use his electron microscope on ultimate particles, or to gaze through his telescope at remote perspectives, in terms of which indeed the individual counts for almost nothing. Now both these things must be done, but they are no more scientific than working on patterns seen in the phenomena immediately before us. The scientific temper is one that looks for the appropriate method in each field, that carefully distinguishes different sorts of questions for differing treatment. To become obsessed with a method for its own sake and try to use it where it is unsuitable is thoroughly unscientific.* And the purpose of all explanation must be, ultimately, to illuminate the chaotic world with which we are actually surrounded. That is what we have to explain."

For additional Mary Midgley comments see the ^zhurnal entries of 1 June 2000 and 10 May 2000.

- Thursday, July 06, 2000 at 04:52:47 (EDT)

"The best practice, and the most rapid appreciation of [J. M. W.] Turner, will be obtained by accurately copying those [drawings] in body-colour on grey paper; and when once the method is understood, and the resolution made to hold by it, the student will soon find that the advantage gained is in more directions than one. For the sum of work which he can do will be as much greater, in proportion to his decision, as it will be in each case better, and, after the first efforts, more easily, done. He may have been appalled by the quantity which he sees that Turner accomplished; but he will be encouraged when he finds how much any one may accomplish, who does not hesitate, nor repent. An artist's time and power of mind are lost chiefly in deciding what to do, and in effacing what he has done: it is anxiety that fatigues him, not labour; and vacillation that hinders him, not difficulty. And if the student feels doubt respecting his own decision of mind, and questions the possibility of gaining the habit of it, let him be assured that in art, as in life, it depends mainly on simplicity of purpose. Turner's decision came chiefly of his truthfulness; it was because he meant always to be true, that he was able always to be bold. And you will find that you may gain his courage, if you will maintain his fidelity. If you want only to make your drawing fine or attractive, you may hesitate indeed, long and often, to consider whether your faults will be forgiven or your fineries perceived. But if you want to put fair fact into it, you will find the fact shape it fairly for you; and that in pictures, no less than in human life, they who have once made up their minds to do right will have little place for hesitation, and little cause for repentance."

- Monday, July 03, 2000 at 21:44:54 (EDT)

Well, it's a wee bit more complex than that....

- Saturday, July 01, 2000 at 20:24:59 (EDT)

One part of the answer: while folks are young, encourage them to minimize their education. Let them form cliques which fight against personal growth, self-defined groups to tease those who study hard. Tell them not to struggle against difficulties. Push them toward the easiest classes, toward just getting by. Make their schools inferior: don't pay for good teachers, adequate facilities and equipment, modern textbooks, or decent learning environments. Let it be clear to these erstwhile students that they are second-class, that most of them are not going to do well, and that they've just got to serve their time before they can escape.

The antilearning subculture that develops is a key driver in a larger social system of unemployment or low-paying jobs (no qualifications for anything better) and personal discrimination ("justified" by retrospective statistics). Once the feedback loops and disincentives get well-established, only a few individuals will break out via exceptional strength of will and herculean effort.

In contrast, imagine what would happen if, for a single generation, huge investments could be made to demolish the antilearning box on the flowchart. How would a society react to millions of smart, eager, highly-educated young people --- utter stereotype-breakers --- when they began appearing in the workforce and moving up in their organizations? Jails would begin to empty, neighborhoods would begin to improve, and countless positive experiences would begin to smash negative prejudices.

Economically, what's the payback time for such a space-program-scale investment? (I estimate less than 50 years, counting productivity enhancements and savings on welfare.) Morally, what excuse is there for not making it? And in the meantime, personally, individual acts and choices by every one of us can push the system toward greater justice for all, bit by bit, day by day.

- Friday, June 30, 2000 at 19:48:58 (EDT)

Then for an instant a sliver of sunbeam
Slips through a rift and reflects from a pool,
  Scatters off facets of gold.

Light breathes on a mirror of ice and then focuses
Down to a point, at a droplet that hangs
  Poised on the never-yet-seen.

Two ponderous, pendulous, crystal stalactites
Touch, clasp, and fuse --- and the pattern is changed.
  New threads appear in the stone.

As neurotransmitters bridge gaps in a cortex,
Water's course shifts; pathways open and close.
  So thinks the mind of the cave.

- Wednesday, June 28, 2000 at 12:11:05 (EDT)

"Fix, then, this in your mind as the guiding principle of all right practical labour, and source of all healthful life energy, --- that your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may be only the praise of a shell or a stone; it may be the praise of a hero; it may be the praise of God: --- your rank as a living creature is determined by the height and breadth of your love; but, be you small or great, what healthy art is possible to you must be the expression of your true delight in a real thing, better than the art. You may think, perhaps, that a bird's nest by William Hunt is better than a real bird's nest. We indeed pay a large sum for the one, and scarcely care to look for, or save, the other. But it would be better for us that all the pictures in the world perished, than that the birds should cease to build nests."

"Now, there are many truths respecting art which cannot be rightly stated without involving an appearance of contradiction, and those truths are commonly the most important. There are, indeed, very few truths in any science which can be fully stated without, such an expression of their opposite sides, as looks, to a person who has not grasp of the subject enough to take in both the sides at once, like contradiction. This law holds down even to very small minutiæ in the physical sciences. For instance, a person ignorant of chemistry hearing it stated, perhaps consecutively of hydrogen gas, that it was 'in a high degree combustible, and a non-supporter of combustion,' would probably think the lecturer or writer was a fool; and when the statement thus made embraces wide fields of difficult investigation on both sides, its final terms invariably appear contradictory to a person who has but a narrow acquaintance with the matter in hand."

Context: Fésole (or Fiesole) is mentioned in Milton's Paradise Lost; it's a hill above Florence, Italy. Bill Beckley's introduction to a recent edition of the book notes that Galileo observed the moon from Fésole itself, and in Florence lived Giotto, Botticelli, and various other important Renaissance artists of Tuscany. John Ruskin's romantic mysticism associated that region with beauty and creativity.

- Sunday, June 25, 2000 at 08:28:16 (EDT)

This "art" was mainly grandstanding cruelty-for-publicity, sure, and it semi-succeeded ... as so many scandalous acts have always done. But the experiment was woefully incomplete. A real artistic statement about the value of animal life could have been made by a simple extension: electrify one in every N blenders, so that instead of the fish being pureed, the human who clicks the switch gets fried. Zzzaapppp!

What value of N would make the situation a toss-up for the button-pusher? Is the thrill of whipping a fish worth a one-in-a-billion chance of electrocution? And extending art to everyday life, how does the joy of eating cooked beast-flesh compare to the risk of catching mad-cow disease, or salmonella, or a host of other parasites? And that's just looking at the human side of the equation. Does suffering of an animal count for anything compared to pleasure of a person? Where's the balance point?

- Saturday, June 24, 2000 at 10:16:17 (EDT)

A couple of examples may add light. For starters, suppose you need to figure out the average over the past 365 days of something like a temperature or a stock's price. You add up 365 numbers and divide by 365; boring but feasible. To find the answer tomorrow, however, instead of adding up the latest 365 values you can save work by taking the previous total, subtracting out the initial number from a year and a day ago, and adding in the current value before doing the division. (Ignore leap-year issues!)

Another, more subtle demonstration of the same kludge: "continued fractions" are infinite quotients of the form 1+1/(2+1/(2+1/(2+ ...))) --- fractions that crawl down forever. (They look prettier when written out as a big fraction with ever-shrinking horizontal bars, but you get the picture.) Lots of important numbers have brilliantly simple continued fraction representations. The one above, for instance, is just the square root of two ( = 1.41421356...). The base of the natural logarithms, e ( = 2.718281828...), has the continued fraction series 2+1/(1+1/(2+1/(1+1/(1+1/(4+1/(1+1/(1+1/(6+ ...)))))))). Continued fractions are superb for finding the best ratios to represent complicated numbers, like 22/7 for pi (or better yet, 355/113). They've got lots of other important uses too. (Enough motivation --- cut to the chase!)

But actually evaluating a continued fraction looks ugly. It seems to require picking some point in the nested parenthetical hierarchy to cut off the series, and then crawling up from there, converting denominators, taking reciprocals, adding terms, etc. Plentch! Doing it bottom-up is not only slow. It also means that you have to recompute the whole mess just to add a single new term. But there's an alternative: the subbookkeeping trick works magic to let you evaluate top-down, as far as you like. You just keep track of a couple of subtotals that combine to make the fraction at each stage.

There's a generic moral to this story (and it's not just the fact that "subbookkeeping" has more double letters in a row than any other common English word!). When a job gets unæsthetic and repetitive, look for a way to factor it into sub-jobs. Then seek covert components --- hidden variables --- that can carry along the information you need to axe the redundant effort. Sometimes, given luck and cleverness, there's a pleasant surprise.

- Wednesday, June 21, 2000 at 16:34:51 (EDT)

Malcolm Gladwell's recent book The Tipping Point: Why Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference is a good example. It's an engagingly fast read, smoothly-written, full of striking metaphors and case studies. (Some pieces of the book were published earlier as essays in the New Yorker.) In brief, Gladwell argues that many social phenomena --- crime waves, fashion fads, teen suicides, success and failure of businesses --- are (like the spread of disease) governed by nonlinear relationships, and so they can be profoundly affected by slight shifts in a few parameters. (Hard to disagree with that!) The book describes several elements which may be key to understanding social epidemics:

• transmissive personality types:
  • "Connectors", who know and interact with lots of people
  • "Mavens", who gather, organize, and share information
  • "Salesmen", who communicate persuasively
• sticky ideas --- things which are addictive, physically or psychologically, and which thus persist
• small groups --- ~150 people or fewer, the maximal size for continuous tight bonding and communication

But The Tipping Point never quite gets past storytelling to the essential next stage of knowledge. To build a theory, one must:

• link --- take critical concepts and put them together into a system, with cause and effect relationships, feedback loops, sources and sinks, delays, etc.
• quantify --- assign numbers (if only tentatively) to nodes, coupling factors, and timescales
• predict --- apply the model to new situations and see how well it works
• refine --- modify and improve the theory based on experience

- Tuesday, June 20, 2000 at 20:36:35 (EDT)

Flame tongues lick red
  Red coals die black
Black ashes blow
  Foundations crack

Green leaves dry brown
  Brown hairs go gray
Gray hills erode
  Sands sift away

- Sunday, June 18, 2000 at 20:11:01 (EDT)

The Game evolved from that. The first to call "Buick!" gets 5 points, and whoever then confirms the observation gets 2 points, with an additional bonus point going back to the initial spotter. (Wags then try to confirm the confirmation and argue that they deserve half a point for that; they are ignored.) A false call incurs a -5 penalty, with +5 awarded to the one who catches the mistake. A blue Buick, aka a "Bluick", is worth double. No score for parked cars. Special credit for naming the model ("LeSabre", "Skylark", etc.).

In actuality, the Game has always been more conceptual than real. Nobody keeps track of points beyond a single trip, if that long. It's the silly fun of the play, not the outcome, that matters.

- Saturday, June 17, 2000 at 14:04:02 (EDT)

- Wednesday, June 14, 2000 at 06:08:21 (EDT)

But most of the time, alas, celebrities can't pull their own weight. Creative energy and insight in one field don't transfer to another. Fame fades over time, though the bearer may not realize it. Worst of all, overconfidence after one success leads to misjudgment and underestimation of risk in a host of new areas.

A company can pay a lot for a few hours of big-name time --- and the recipient of such cash faces a strong natural pressure to say something, regardless of ignorance about a particular problem. It all adds up to danger. Better to get the real scoop from those who know, the insiders, the low-profile but savvy people who have the respect of their peers ... not the ones who give the best sound bites to network news mikes.

- Tuesday, June 13, 2000 at 06:32:32 (EDT)

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognized that the number of the legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week, or even of a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?

- Sunday, June 11, 2000 at 17:12:03 (EDT)

Sure, it sounds stupid ... nobody would have any reason to stock their own refrigerator, everybody would have to leave their house unlocked, naughty people could near-trivially spoof the system by modifying sensor code and broadcasting false data, and it's utterly vulnerable to denial-of-service attack by a few clowns. Pfluhghkh! But this is precisely the silliness that passes for reality in so many starry-eyed newspaper puff pieces for so many erstwhile high-tech start-ups.

Reporters haven't learned to ask for a even simple systems-analysis of what's proposed. Instead, it's all hype ... so any articulate shyster who can spin a cute yarn and grab an eager writer's attention gets coverage on the front page of the business section. No equations needed, or wanted. Hardly any code to write either. A demo can be faked up or patched together out of scripts and existing software modules. What tomfoolery! And yet many people fall for it, time and again.

It's the "tell me a story" syndrome that we humans are, by nature, so susceptible to. We don't think about:

• scaling --- the way in which small systems slow down or break as they grow orders of magnitude larger;
• feedback loops --- the second- and third- and beyond-stages of a process, wherein changes in one part react back, through a chain of events, onto that part itself;
• incentives --- the imbalance between what's in it for one person (or group) and the costs that others must implicitly pay;
• reliability --- including security against malicious attackers and robustness against random perturbations (e.g., power glitches, software bugs, etc.); and
• privacy --- the human value of having "a room of one's own", a sphere within which a person can maintain control and avoid meddlesome intrusion (or profiteering) by others.

- Friday, June 09, 2000 at 19:12:51 (EDT)

- Thursday, June 08, 2000 at 17:25:55 (EDT)

And those of us near the top of the priviligentsia pyramid? Pick a few arguable gifts: rich, white, male, urban, English-speaking, heterosexual, powerful, well-connected, sleek, smart, sophisticated ... --- what obligations accompany such luck? Is one's chief duty to maximize personal utility? To acquire control over more resources? To grow in fame? To build memorials? Or are there other proper ends in life?

- Wednesday, June 07, 2000 at 06:05:57 (EDT)

• Gold production in California peaked, sending silver prices up and driving silver coins out of circulation in the US.
• In an apt coincidence, Wells Fargo (bank) and Smith & Wesson (guns) were founded, as was Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.
• Roget's Thesaurus was first published. So was the best-selling novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (a dramatic critique of slavery) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The sale of slaves was outlawed in the District of Columbia.
• Safety matches were invented in Sweden by Johan Lundstrom, and the safety elevator was invented in the USA by Elisha Graves Otis.
• "Uncle Sam", the cartoon personification of the USA, appeared for the first time in The New York Lantern.
• The Duke of Wellington and Lady Ada Lovelace died, as did the Prime Minister of Austria-Hungary, Felix, Fürst zu Schwarzenberg. (see the ^zhurnal entry of 26 October 1999 for a noteworthy Schwarzenberg quote)
• The London Convention was signed, putting an end to the war between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein.
• Napoleon III began his reign as Emperor of France; Camillo Benso di Cavour became the Piedmontese Prime Minister; Millard Fillmore finished his term as President of the United States.
• Commodore Perry visited Japan, beginning the end of that nation's isolation from the rest of the world.
• A propellor was used on a balloon, creating the first airship.
• The state of Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance law in the USA.

- Sunday, June 04, 2000 at 21:51:05 (EDT)

- Saturday, June 03, 2000 at 10:59:02 (EDT)