Posts from — April 2007

I sorta hate to admit it, but I like Gatorade’s Propel “Fitness Water”. I only allow myself to have one after doing something reasonably athletic, so hopefully it’ll be a positive influence.

I hadn’t realized it was that much more expensive around here (it’s several cents higher in this area, last I checked). Luckily I don’t do any driving most days.

(from lifehacker)

A blog collected a list of 72 “reasons” behind the Va Tech killings, with links citing the source where the blame is given. The more absurd ones are pretty fun to read.

Jon Stewart interviews/debates John McCain (quicktime)

Worth a watch. Stewart is harder on McCain than most other guests, and Stewart has an advantage because of the audience and he can undercut his opponent with humor, but I think his questions were really good.

I’m just finishing up watching the first episode of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. The episode is called Buying the War and it’s about media complicity in the road to the Iraq war. It’s an amazing documentary, and I really hope you take some time to watch it. The link above has full video for free.

Watching this is sorta like watching a Star Wars prequel. The whole time you know something terrible is going to happen.

It reminds me a lot of an argument I had with Kym Murphy a long while ago (not an angry argument, more like a debate), where I claimed the average newspaper was more liberal than the average American, but she argued that the issue was more complex: a problem of complicity between the government and media. In retrospect, she was completely right, unfortunately.

I especially liked this quote from Moyers (from a radio interview):
“It’s not [journalists'] responsibility to tell both sides of a story, it’s their job to say what’s actually happening.”

Today at lunch, we ended up spending a fair amount of time pondering and debating Curry’s Paradox. None of us were able to explain it very well even by the end of lunch, and some didn’t think it was meaningful. After reading a couple of web sites, I now understand it, so I’m going to try to explain it in logical symbols.

Here’s the paradox:
“If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists”

Obviously the Santa part can be replaced with any statement. I’ll borrow some notation from the wikipedia entry to show the proof.

Let X be the sentence in quotes above (in other words, if X is true, then the sentence is true, if not then the sentence is false).
Let Y be the existence of Santa Claus.

The sentence can then be written:
1. X → Y
since this means that X implies Y, i.e. if X is true, then Y is true.

thus this is true:
2. X = X → Y

and the identity
3. X → X
is always true. (This means “if this sentence is true, then this sentence is true”)

Since we know what X is, we can perform substitution from #2 and get another true statement:
4. X → (X → Y)
It’s hard to translate this part into a sentence, which is why I think it’s hard to describe this without logic symbols. The best I can do is “If X is true, then the statement ‘if X is true then Y is true’ is correct”.

Now, simplifying this to X → Y seems like it shouldn’t be too hard, based upon the English translation of #4. Contradiction does this: Let’s say that X → Y is false (HTML doesn’t have a symbol for → with a slash through it). If X → Y is false, then there must be some case in which X is true and Y is false, thus breaking the implication. However, if X is true, then the previous statement (X → (X → Y)) tells us that Y must be true, thus a contradiction ∴
5. X → Y.

Looking at the definition in #2 and the statement in #5, we can now say:
6. X
.. in other words, the sentence X is true.

Using #5 and #6, we can also say:
7. Y
.. and thus we have proved Y to be true. If we set Y to be a contradiction (such as (Z ∧ ¬Z)), the paradox is created. QED

OK, that’s enough of that for now.

HTML sometimes makes it hard to write stuff like this, but I do like how ∴ is written ∴.

I got an email in my yahoo mail account with the words “cheap viagra” in the subject. How do these not get caught by the spam detector? Way too much spam gets through there.. my days on yahoo are numbered.

Meanwhile, they released a lyrics site, which is pretty cool.

Slate has a good article about Gonzalez’s testimony. The most important part is at the end:
“One of the finest moments comes when Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., busts out a big, big chart. Which happens after almost everyone has gone home. The chart compares the Clinton protocol for appropriate contacts between the White House and the DoJ on pending criminal cases with the Bush protocol. According to Whitehouse, the Clinton protocol authorized just four folks at the White House to chat with three folks at Justice. The chart had four boxes talking to three boxes. Out comes the Bush protocol, and now 417 different people at the White House have contacts about pending criminal cases with 30-some people at Justice. You can just see zillions of small boxes nattering back and forth. It seems that just about everyone in the White House, including the guys in the mailroom, had a vote on ongoing criminal matters.”

The chart:

Finished a couple of books I had been reading off-and-on for a while:
Real Ultimate Power: The Official Ninja Book - Girts got me this book for my birthday. It’s based upon http://www.realultimatepower.net/, and is surprisingly well done. The caricature of the narrator is what makes it entertaining: he’s a boy about 12 years old, obviously obsessed with ninjas, angry at his parents, and confused about most other things. The end of the book is surprisingly heartfelt, though not in a bad way, I think

Number: The Language of Science - I bought this book a while ago in a book shop, since at the time I wanted to read something analyzing math as a whole. This book had an endorsement quote on the cover by ALBERT EINSTEIN (seriously), so I had to go with it. My favorite chapter was definitely the first, which discussed the evolution of numbering systems and the types of operations each type of system afforded. There was a lot of stuff I just hadn’t thought about before, such as how hard it is to do arithmetic with roman numerals as opposed to arabic numbers. The chapters that followed covered the development of a variety of core mathematical concepts such as algebra, the connection of algebra and geometry, sequences, irrationals, imaginaries and infinities. Some of the discussion was too pedantic for me to find interesting, but some of the proofs were explained very well (the book isn’t proof-heavy, nor symbol-heavy fwiw). It’s a good read if you’re into that sort of thing, but reading the first chapter or so might be a better bet if you’re just curious.

Next on my list: The Audacity of Hope (already started)

Since it’s raining again tomorrow, I’ll probably be reading a bunch more…

This blog post makes an important point:
“MoveOn.org can decide to make political hay out of McCain’s gaffe, but we all pay a price for it. We legitimize taking moments out of context and seizing upon the least sympathetic interpretation. We tell politicians that they’d better stay on message 24/7 and never stick their arms outside their cage. We exult in a smarmy self-congratulations as if none of our moments would make us look bad if posted to YouTube.”

Jokes taken out of context, the price of haircuts, and malapropisms are distractions that lower the level of discourse when time is spent on them when it should be spent on actual issues.