Ok people, most everyone around these parts graduated from college and those that didn't are scrappy in the brains department. It's time we stopped misusing common words. Note that I said "it is time", as opposed to "its time", as in: As far as proper usage of the language, its time has come.

You know what I'm talking about. You're sitting at the computer, less than one second of typing time away from Merriam-Webster.com or Dictionary.com, and you misuse a word despite knowing you only have a vague grasp of what it means.

I'm not an English Nazi. I'm against English Nazism (I'm against the German kind too). If you're correcting someone's improper usage even though that person has expressed themselves clearly and their meaning properly applies to the situation, you are detracting from the conversation. If someone misuses a word like sedulously, ok...I might gently point it out, but I'm not going to hold it against them. At least they're reaching to expand the ol' vocabulary.

On the other hand, sometimes misuse makes the conversation vague or opaque. Sometimes the word is just so common that misspelling or misusing it grates on the listener to the extent that the point is lost...your statement becomes about how ignorant you are instead the topic of conversation. I'm talking about people that have graduated the fifth grade and still swap loose (tighten that nut) for lose (better luck next time). There definitely not using they're dictionaries, their. Oops, that should have been they're/their/there (note that middle one is t-h-E-I-r).

What about when English Nazis go wrong? Who corrects them? Well, I'm about to. (Are you going to complain that I ended that sentence with a preposition, English Nazi? Before you do, make sure every case can be accounted for. I think you know what I'm talking about. Clearly I'm making you mad, so stop sitting around. For or against me on this, you should come out. If you think you're right, it's time to act up. Ah well, if you didn't catch it before when I did the exact same thing at the top of the second paragraph, why should I pay attention to you now?)

Read the following example passage.

Good data is elusive on the genetics of hair color. One of the problems with studying the topic of hair color is that individual genetic studies usually contribute very little data to the understanding of hair color inheritance. So it is not yet possible to grasp why a parent that has blond hair and a parent that has brown hair can produce a child that has black hair because hair is associated with largely unstudied sections of the human genome. Because genetic studies typically have a primary focus elsewhere, information on this issue of hair color is sparse. Common statistical techniques requiring a large sample space cannot be applied to the data; there is simply too little available to make a strong case.

Ok, is there anything wrong with the above passage? Did my use of data as a singular noun bother you? If it did, you, sir, are an English Nazi, and worse, you're wrong in correcting me to boot. (I might have chosen to state this differently: "Your wrong is in correcting me to boot.")

Data, as used above, is indeed singular. It's true that the etymology of the word comes from the plural form of the Latin word datum, and that it maintains this proper usage if you are referring to several data points and they must maintain their identity as individual entities in the context of a particular sentence. I'll bet you rarely use it this way without including a definitive measure word, though, because even you think it sounds clumsy. Moving on, let's rewrite the above passage under the guidelines of English Nazism, no aggregative singular forms allowed:

Good data are elusive on the genetics of hair color. One of the problems with studying the topic of hair color is that individual genetic studies usually contribute very few data to the understanding of hair color inheritance. So it is not yet possible to grasp why a parent that has blond hair and a parent that has brown hair can produce a child that has black hair because hair are associated with largely unstudied sections of the human genome. Because genetic studies typically have a primary focus elsewhere, information on this issue of hair color are sparse. Common statistical techniques requiring a large sample space cannot be applied to the data; there are simply too few available to make a strong case.

"Wait," you say, "I didn't mean you should apply the same rules to hair and information that I'm insisting upon for data!" Well, why not? English is already complicated enough. I think I have the right to ask you to be consistent if you're going to change what is currently recognized as proper usage.

But, ok, let's say I go along with you on this one. Let's say that data is somehow different from hair and information (despite your utter lack of support for this bizarre idea). Let's look at the last sentence of the passage and do a little compare/contrast. I would say this is correct:

Common statistical techniques requiring a large sample space cannot be applied to the data; there is simply too little available to make a strong case.

...and you say it's:

Common statistical techniques requiring a large sample space cannot be applied to the data; there are simply too few available to make a strong case.

It seems your insistence on incorrect grammar has actually changed the meaning of the sentence, or at the very least, made it vague. Too few available what? Is there not enough data, or are there too few statistical techniques available? In the original sentence it is obvious that "too little" refers to too little data because "too little" cannot modify statistical techniques or any other plural, for that matter. If you're going to insist that data is plural, then you can no longer say things like too little data, very little data, or too much data. This would be like using too little to modify any other plural, as in too little screws, which is definitely grammatically incorrect. If you do say it, people are likely to misinterpret your meaning as too-little screws, in other words, each individual screw is too little to do the job: Why won't these boards stay together? Too-little screws. The fix is to use the same number of bigger screws, not more of the too-little ones...that won't help.

The last vestige of the English Nazi's argument clings to the idea that, if we accept data as both a singular and a plural form, how can we possibly know which is the proper form to use? Well, it depends on context, just like you can be both singular and plural. If you're speaking about one datum (an individual fact or proposition) here and one datum there, and they must retain their identity as individual entities, then you may use data in its plural form: This datum and that datum conflict; these two data are at odds. (Note that without the "two" you're back in vague-land. Without that "two" the listener is likely to wonder if you're making reference to all of the data, or still talking about those two points.) In every other case, if you're wondering how to decide, use a measure word instead to make your meaning explicit.

What's a measure word? It is a word, often implied instead of explicitly stated, that organizes a number of entities into a grouping. Consider this statement: My hair is blond. The implied measure word depends on the context; usually, I'm talking about my head of blond hair (that's why it would be as improper to say, "My hair are blond," as "My head of hair are blond."). Similarly, when I speak about data it is most often in reference to a set of data. If saying "the data is..." makes you uncomfortable, go ahead and imagine "the data set is..." If you're talking about two sets of data which must maintain their separateness, go ahead and explicitly state the measure word and talk about "sets of data" so as to avoid confusion for yourself and your listener.

What I'm really getting at here is the usage of data as a collective noun. If the data under discussion is being referred to as a collective whole, then it's singular and can take on all the properties of a singular word. If the individual members of the data set are actually what's being referred to, then it can be used as the plural form. Examples follow.

• The jury is arguing. What argument is the jury, as a whole, making?
• The jury are arguing. I hate it when they argue amongst themselves. What point in particular is causing the problem?
• This family is staking its claim. If they wanted to, the family could stake their claims. But they've decided to stick together as a unit, and therefore it is, as a group, only staking one claim. And that's good...I like to see families stick together.

Data is a particularly frustrating example of English Nazism; that's not to say there aren't valid complaints about the way some people pluralize. There is no excuse for speaking about more than one virus as viri or worse, virii. It's viruses. On the other hand, just because it's proper to say octopi doesn't mean octopuses is wrong, just don't spell it octopusses. And when people refer to a computer as a box, as in I run a Linux box and a Windows box..., they should not conclude the thought: ...so I have, in toto, two boxen. Then again, whenever I see "boxen" it's obviously intentional and hilarious (alluding to the plural of ox), so in that case it's fine. On the other hand, the absolutely proper usage of "in toto" where in total would have sufficed is as infuriating to me as I'm sure it is to you, unless the person is making a joke.

If that example does not engender English Nazism, here's one that does. It's common to refer to an abstract person as in the following sentence: Before a person speaks, he should first think. The politically correct will try to correct this; he should be written instead as he or she. I reject this...in reference to the abstraction of a person, I see no problem with the assumption that person is male. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that the he in this sentence does not refer to maleness at all. It is clear to even the simplest mind that the person referred to could be either male or female and the sentence still holds true; to assume the writer is actually referring only to males is to intentionally misread it.

Now we've all heard the story of the boy driving with his father when they have a big accident. Both are rushed to the emergency room whereupon they are whisked away into surgery. The surgeon, upon seeing the boy's face, exclaims: "We need to get another doctor in here. I cannot operate on my own son." If you haven't heard this little parable, no, the boy does not have foster parents, he was not adopted, he was not driving with a priest, and he doesn't have two fathers. The surgeon is his mother.

This story, though, does not illustrate that we are a sexist society that can only remedy our situation by applying the clumsy he or she construct wherever we would normally use he. Instead, it only illustrates that we are minimally observant, and that, for whatever reason, most surgeons are male and we happened to notice...therefore unless explicitly stated otherwise we generally tend to assume surgeons are male (and no, the reason most surgeons happen to be male and whether that in and of itself is due to sexism in our society, while a potentially rich and perfectly valid topic of discussion, is not germaine to this discussion on semantics). I would point out that feminists are just as likely to be taken in by this story as even the most chauvinistic of men. Clearly, if one's sexist tendencies were the sole reason one might find this story confusing, only the sexist would be confused by it. Imagine a world in which there exists such a simple litmus test for sexism, racism, or whatever other -ism you can think of.

So why should I listen to you, PC Nazi? You didn't seem to mind when I referred to you as "sir" in the paragraph above between the two passages concerning usage of the word data. Besides, languages have a long history of noticing gender. How would you apply your Nazism outside of English? Would you argue that Latin, Spanish, and Italian should do away with gender-based noun declension? You sad, strange, silly little man.

That being said, in my mind the jury is still out on the singular use of they. Occasionally it seems right to use they in reference to the abstraction of a person. It seems to emphasize the abstractness of the referent...it seems to drive home the point that any one of us could fit the bill and the message still holds true. If you strongly disagree, I wonder if you disagreed as strongly when you ran through the third paragraph of this very essay. I'll bet most of you will have to go back and reread that paragraph to see what it is you so readily accepted on the first read-through.

Besides obviously proper and improper usage, there are words that don't really lend themselves to this kind of analysis. For example, consider whether the following is improper in any way: I quickly scanned the police report to see why the deputy had been out in the field for a full two hours. It used to be that this would have been improper use of the word scan, which meant "to examine closely" (scan still retains this definition). What happened to this word, which now also has a conflicting definition, "to look over or leaf through hastily"? I'm betting that technology is to blame for that second conflicting definition. When the first grocery store checkout scanners came out, the technologists probably titled them scanners because they closely examine UPC symbols--that they do so rapidly is nice, but cannot be the point of the original title or else they would have been called skimmers. But to a customer, the scanner was a jump forward not because it was marginally more accurate than a checkout clerk, but rather because it was vastly faster. So the association was set in people's minds, and who's to say whether this kind of evolution is not allowed? I remember throughout my youth being corrected on this by librarians and English teachers, but as it happens I was correct and they were wrong; I was just ahead of my time in recognizing this as a necessary evolution of the language.

Then there is usage that has become proper that I cannot bring myself to use. Consider the prefix bi-. Does this mean "two" or "half"? Well, what does bisect mean? It means to divide into two parts, or cut in half. So this doesn't help us nail it down because it's ambiguous as to whether the bi- signifies two-ness or half-ness. What about bisexual or bicycle? I would argue that, in these two cases, it is clearly two-ness being expressed...half-ness just doesn't make sense in the case of a bicycle, since unicycles and tricycles exist and the comparison is clear, and I don't even want to know what your perception of bisexuality is if an interpretation based on half-ness makes sense to you. This leads me to think, for the sake of consistency, I should consider bi- prefixes to refer to two-ness. This approach does not exclude any case which might also be construed as half-ness, for all such cases can just as validly be interpreted as instances of two-ness as in the case of bisect. The reverse is not true.

Ok, so we're agreed, then. Words prefixed with bi- imply two-ness, and rely on the stem of the word to define the thing that has taken on two-ness. Bisect, for example, means to section, or divide, into two parts. The fact that a bisected object is associated with halving, as opposed to doubling, has to do with the fact that the object is being sect-ed, and nothing to do with being bi-ed.

What about biennial, then? What should this mean, twice per year or every two years? Well, the stem -ennial means "year", and bi- means "two", so I arrive at an expected definition of "occurring every two years". Bingo--that's exactly what it means.

What about biannual? The same argument applies, right? Wrong! Well, not wrong, but not necessarily right. This word can mean either "twice per year" or "every two years" (likewise with biweekly and bimonthly). Arrrgh! How fickle! But, I am forced to admit that there is simply no other available way we could, in a single word, refer to something that happens "twice per" some period of time, so I'll grudgingly let it go.

Except...there is such a word available to us, and it doesn't have an alternative, conflicting definition! Furthermore, it has no connotation of two-ness associated with it, so the teeming masses are not susceptible to misunderstanding it. I'm talking about semiannual, semimonthly, and semiweekly. Everyone knows the prefix semi- implies half-ness, and thus endeth the confusion. The problem, of course, is that the imposter definitions for the bi-words have already snuck in under the radar! Well I, for one, refuse to acquiesce, and I will continue using biweekly to mean every other week and semiweekly to mean twice per week. If you don't understand what I mean when I say biweekly, tough. Everyone will suffer the ambiguity at every turn until they see fit to dispense with the bad definition as I have. (There is hope, it seems; my preferred usage is predominant.)

So far I have discussed mainly semantics. Of greater importance are situations when a person conveys a completely different idea than what is intended, a much more egregious misuse of the language. I invoke the poster child of such misuse...yes, I'm talking about irony, and not the kind that's like brassy or goldy except with iron.

The principle definition of irony is: "the use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning." I would argue that this definition allows an interpretation to eke through that does not capture the spirit of irony; merely expressing a meaning that is "different from" the literal meaning, to me, is more sarcasm, or juxtaposition, or something, but not irony.

What's the difference between, say, sarcasm and irony? Well, sarcasm only requires difference between what is expressed and what is literally meant, and it must include the intent to ridicule or otherwise wound. Irony, in my mind, requires more than simple difference between what is expressed and the literal meaning; the difference must be one of opposition. Additionally, irony may or may not be used to ridicule or wound...sometimes it's just used for humorous intent. An example: a sign very near a laser source that reads, "Do not look into laser with remaining eye." This could only weakly be interpreted as ridiculing anyone...the focus is not on cutting down the poor soul who just lost an eye. It's funny because of the idiocy of the person who posted a warning sign, which ostensibly exists to prevent injury, in a place that is so likely to hurt someone that the sign itself acknowledges it.

The word irony is so misused, I fear the concept may require a college education to properly grasp. I award people some points for effort when they misuse the term but get close, where perhaps sarcastic or sardonic would be better choices. I do not have such a forgiving attitude when the person clearly has no idea what they're talking about. I have known people that use ironic when they really mean funny. I challenged one such usage where the person said, "Ha ha! That guy got hit in the nuts. That's so ironic!" Upon further questioning, this person explained, "No, it is ironic because the reason he got hit in the nuts is that he was trying not to...if he'd just stayed where he was, he would've been fine."

Nice try, bucko. That's just bad luck, or perhaps ineptness, but not irony. To clear the bar of irony requires conscious, carefully directed thought. If the effect of all that careful consideration is the opposite of what's intended, that's irony. I would hardly call an automatic response of the nervous system (that is, jumping to a location one considers out of the way of an oncoming softball) careful conscious planning. But how can I hold him responsible when Alanis Morrissette makes a million dollars off a song that is ostensibly about several ironic situations...except it gets the definition completely wrong, and none of the situations described in the song are actually ironic. Her careful plan to write a song about irony resulted in a song that is about everything but irony. One might expect the public to chide such a thing. Instead fans welcomed it based on the same misunderstanding of the term. Maybe she's satirizing her own fans' ignorance. More likely, she's totally unaware that her attempt to raise irony-awareness is deeply flawed due to her own ignorance of the concept. Now that's irony.

Should you use a serial comma when writing a list: bags, bushels, and baskets vs. bags, bushels and baskets? Yes, I say you should. I know everyone will say it's perfectly acceptable either way, but if you typically don't use it, you might find yourself in the following situation. You've written a treatise throughout which are several lists. You come to one list in particular in which you would like to imply certain groupings of two: bushels and baskets, packages and boxes, and bags. Uh oh...now what? If you leave out that serial comma, as you have been doing all along, your reader will think you meant to group bags with packages and boxes. If you leave it as it appears above, then the reader will likely be confused and reinterpret all of your previous lists, lacking the serial comma, as an implied grouping. Oh, what to do, what to do? You're screwed...you should have taken my advice. Besides, what if I was against the serial comma and I decided to dedicate this essay to "my parents, Ayn Rand and God"?

What about good/well? Well, I don't know about you, but I feel good and I'm looking well! That is to say, my fingers work well enough to feel things, and my eyes work well enough to see. In everyday parlance, though, I have no problem with saying, "I feel good," even though technically it ought to be, "I feel well." On the other hand, people who say, "You're looking well!" actually mean to say, "You're looking good!" They are being pretentious by calling attention to the fact that they're speaking "proper English"...except they're showing off improper English. Err on the side of understandability. Always remember: sedulously eschew munificent prolixity, obfuscatory redundancy, and unmitigated hyperverbosity. I'm likely to forgive you if you go wrong in one direction...I don't look so kindly on pompous asses who don't know that about which they talk.

Time for some rapid fire...buckle up.

If you don't know when to use than vs. then, then you're dumber than a squash and I can't help you.

Here's one I don't really care about, but it's probably worth something to someone. I.e. means "in other words," e.g. means "for example". It's good to know the difference, e.g.: you probably won't get this, i.e., you're just too dumb.

It's chAmping at the bit, not chOmping at the bit. Also, it's my old stAmping grounds, not my old stOmping grounds.

A thing cannot be very unique. It's either different from everything else, or it isn't. Uniqueness does not vary depending on whether it's very different or just a little bit different.

I might say there are a myriad of examples of improper usage in this essay, but why would I want to when I could just as easily, and more simply, state that there are myriad examples? (Certainly this essay isn't long enough to provide myriads of examples.) In my opinion, myriad is an adjective that is also a noun, it is not a noun that can also be used as an adjective. The noun form should mostly be left to the skilled wordsmiths, such as when Samuel Taylor Coleridge writes "Myriad myriads of lives." Most of the time, the of is just dead weight, so listen to Occam and toss it overboard.

There. I know I feel a whole lot better, don't you?

Hold up, religious zealot! Don't get all offended. It's true...religion is irrational. You're the one linking the word "irrational" with a negative value judgment...I'm just speaking the truth.

What about the big three? Can anyone make a logical argument that Christianity, Islam, or Judaism are rational pursuits? (I don't feel the need to address Hinduism, which relies on a vast mythology that is widely regarded from within the religion itself as allegory, nor Buddhism, which openly and specifically addresses the concept of rationality itself as being an obstacle to enlightenment.) This is simple to answer, as it happens. Do any one of these not require the believer to make a "leap of faith"?

As in the mathematical discipline of the same name, logical reasoning can lead to any statement at all, true or untrue, if even the smallest inconsistency is allowed to creep in. Here, look:

x = 1 (line 1)
x^2 = 1 (2)
x^2 - 1 = 0 (3)
(x - 1)*(x + 1) = 0 (4)
x + 1 = 0/(x - 1) (5)
x + 1 = 0 (6)
x = -1 (7)

At the beginning of this proof, I set x equal to 1. Following a sequence of perfectly valid mathemetical operations, x comes to equal -1. Therefore, 1=-1. Right?

Of course not. A small logical inconsistency snuck in there, resulting in the logical error. And if you didn't catch it, that means you went along with it because it seemed reasonable...you willingly made a leap of faith in the correctness of the errant step that resulted in a small but unfathomably significant flaw. If that small flaw is allowed to remain as truth in your system of reasoning based on the above proof and your leap of faith, though, I can build an entire mathematical framework based upon it that can result in whatever statement I like, all without having to introduce even one more error.

So, ok, if you don't know yet I'll tell you; where'd you make your leap? Take a closer look at line 5. See the right side of that equation: 0/(x-1)? This is the problem...see, I've already defined at the beginning that x=1. So if I evaluate line 5 of the "proof", it becomes obvious what's wrong: 0/(x-1)=0/(1-1)=0/0. You can't divide by zero.

So, you see, a tiny, tiny bit of irrationality injected into a whole lot of rationality can result in a situation in which I can convince most people that anything of my choosing is true, provided they're willing to accept that 1=-1 based on my proof above. And accept it they must, absurd as it is, because it's mathematically "proven".

I'm not saying that irrationality is necessarily bad. In fact, it's quite likely that in many cases irrationality serves our purposes. It's probably true that we have, over millions of years, evolved many irrational behaviors, instincts, and beliefs because nature selects for survival, not rationality (all you have to do is look at a duck-billed platypus to figure that out).

Of course, this does not mean that all irrationality is good, either. Now that you, along with every other religious person I've ever spoken to on this topic including priests, deacons, rabbis, and imams agree that religion depends upon a "leap of faith", a step of the mind "beyond reasoning", I'd like to solicit a bit of feedback.

Can you identify exactly what philosophical axiom you hold as a result of your leap of faith? What is the simplest, most fundamental statement you hold as true that serves as the basis for the framework of your religious belief system? What is the "line 5" in your religious "proof"?

I'd like to reiterate that I pose this question not as a snarky passive-aggressive attack on religious belief, but rather as a philosophical survey. I realize that everyone, religious or not, if they care to trace the lineage of logic of their worldview fully enough, must hold a set of axiomatic beliefs that rest upon a firm bedrock of faith. I believe my senses generally don't lie to me. Descartes believed he existed because he was conscious, sentient, and could direct his thought processes (I can direct my own thought processes to a degree in my nonexistent body that is present only in my mind during dreams...for me his "I think therefore I am" belief is not a good axiomatic belief to hold).

So I want to know: what is the most fundamental statement you can make that rests upon no reasoning other than sheer faith that specifically allows for religion to enter your world?

Bush did not lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This bears repeating; Bush did not lie about WMDS in Iraq.

Anyone who doesn't know this by now does not want to know it. While there was disagreement about how to handle Iraq, everyone was in agreement that Iraq either had or was dangerously close to having WMDs. There is no doubt that Iraq did indeed have, and use, WMDs in the past. There is no doubt that Iraq had chemical and biological WMDs when inspectors were banned from the country, and these stockpiles were unaccounted for as of the beginning of the war. And there is no doubt that Iraq had several cozy relationships with terrorist groups that want to hit the US.

Bush acted on information believed by Democrats and Republicans, President Clinton, Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin, and the United Nations. It's true he was the only one to act. It's not true that he was the only one that believed there were WMDs. That there was a serious doubt on this issue that ran across such a broad spectrum as the aforementioned list of believers is more than enough for me.

It is true that there is something fishy about the oil-for-food money situation in France. It is true that key UN people were possibly benefitting from this soon-to-blow scandal. It is true that Russia and France stood to benefit much by preventing the overthrow of Hussein's regime in the way of oil due them.

Bush did not lie about the connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Read it again: Bush did not lie about an Iraq-Al Qaeda link. The Bush Administration did not say that they collaborated specifically on the 9/11 attack. That Al Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attack and that Iraq and Al Qaeda were generally linked over the previous 10 years, though, is more than enough for me. That any support Iraq gave Al Qaeda indirectly supported the 9/11 attacks by freeing up more of their resources and time is more than enough for me. That Iraq supported any terrorism at all is more than enough for me.

Doesn't this mean we have to attack North Korea? China? Iran? Saudi Arabia?

No, it doesn't. That's the great thing about being the good guy. We can pick off the bad guys in whatever order we choose, at our own pace, and using any of the methods available to us, whether it be mild protestations or economic sanctions or all-out war. We can legitimately do what we want because we're the good guys.

Since the television went back to normal scheduling after 9/11, I've grown tired of hearing, "Dissent is patriotic! Dissent is patriotic!" You know what else is patriotic? Patriotism.

If you were one of the people that clapped after watching Fahrenheit 9/11 in the theater, don't respond to this entry. This post isn't for you; it's only for people who can deal with facts and change their minds.

I have hit upon the solution to the abortion debate.

Sounds crazy, doesn't it? One of the most controversial and viciously debated topics of our day, and I have solved it. Pretty heady moment, I must admit...give me a second to take it all in.

Walk with me down the path of enlightenment on this one. You, the anti-choice adherent, must overcome one and only one obstacle to sell me on your argument. You must leave religion out of it. You must not argue based upon terms you cannot define or personal beliefs with only religious support. If you believe abortion is murder, that means you believe that a fetus is a life. If you believe a fetus is a life, then you believe you know when life begins. If you believe you know when life begins, then I submit to you that that belief is based upon your religion and your belief in some kind of god or religious text. In other words, you are trying to form public policy based upon your god.

The problem with this approach is that America does not have a theocratic government. It's right in our Constitution...you can't form laws based upon what your god tells you is right and wrong. Because if you can do that, then so can I, and I just happen to be a devil worshipper, who believes that life begins at 100. See the problem?

Don't be so smug, you anti-life abortion monger. I see you over there snickering away in the corner watching the anti-choice crowd struggle to convince me that "Science" generally agrees with them (which it doesn't--don't insult me, anti-choice people...I know science, and its definition of "human life" includes tumors, cancer, warts, boils, and pimples, all of which you would hack out in a second and let die). You anti-life believer, you want to legislate your belief that the fetus is not alive. In doing so, you, my friend, have the exact same problem as the anti-choicer. Simply: you have no friggin' idea when life begins either.

The truth is, we simply don't know at what moment life begins. The awful truth is, it probably doesn't begin at a moment. Life most things in the universe, it is most probably a spectrum over time. A fetus edges toward babyhood, becoming a truly sentient, conscious being long after having entered the world, and starting the inexorable slide towards harsh awakedness even before conception. Oh yes, the spectrum is wide and all-encompassing, and will flout your best efforts to find that one point at which the mythical light switch is thrown. The truth is, it's a continuous motion, not the flick of a switch, toward life. Too bad for you.

So what are a rational people to do? Well, let me ask you a question. I present you with an iron box that is locked and tell you that the box either has a ball in it, or it does not (I wanted an example that wouldn't require a Ph.D. to grasp, see?). So, leaving you in that state of knowledge, I then ask you to form some kind of belief about the state of the inside of the box, with respect to whether it includes a ball or not. Would any rational person commit to one side or the other in this thought experiment? Do you really think that we could call a person intelligent who decided to glom onto a fervent belief that there's a ball in there? Or the mope who decides that he's going to live his life based upon the idea that the box is empty?

Both are begging to be turned into fools. The rational mind simply admits that the current information is inadequate, and it's not sensible to form an opinion one way or the other. Therein lies the rub of my argument, friends. We do not know how to ethically gauge when it is ok to terminate a pregnancy and when it is not. And it is not a good idea to simply say, well, let's play it safe, let's assume the fetus is alive/there's a ball in the box. That's silly.

Regardless of whether you think there's a ball in this box or not, though, I think we can all agree that the least knowledgable (and trustworthy) people in the room when it comes to this particular box are politicians. Why should they get say over how to handle this? Shouldn't it be a board of medically trained ethicists? If only we kept a group of people like that around to make these kind of tough decisions on a case-by-case basis for just such a scenario rather than having the uninformed pass laws. If only it were that simple, right?

Wait, though...we do have exactly that! It's called the medical board, and each state has one. And it oversees the individual actions of each individual doctor, and makes such calls on a regular basis. And they're even willing to admit they don't know for sure, they don't have all the answers, and they're struggling along as best they can based on the current state of knowledge. And that's what we pay them to do. So why not let them work?

The answer, my friends, is to simply repeal all law concerning abortion and let the doctors decide on a case-by-case basis. Doctors that make the wrong decisions that are out of line with the state's medical standards will be called on the carpet and punished, as the system is supposed to work. And no one has to pretend they know when life begins and no one has to spend any more federal tax money trying to convince others of this obvious falsity. And best of all, no one has to bring god into it.

It's astonishingly simple--the system would work just fine if we left such medical decisions up to the doctors and the informed authorities presiding over those situations...so let's just let the system work.

Well, I've decided that political discussion is dead in America. And you know what killed it? Political correctness.

It's not that much of a leap, is it? Political correctness has had a chilling effect on intellectual debate and discourse in this country. At some point in the 90s, it became "incorrect" to say certain things or hold certain opinions. I remember hearing the two letters "PC" for the first time in my Junior year English course in high school, and it rubbed me the wrong way almost immediately. I'm only now beginning to crystallize why I felt such a twist in my gut...it squelched discussion of certain topics and placed high barriers to discussion of nearly all topics for fear of invoking the out-of-favor phrase du jour, marking oneself as an unenlightened ignoramus.

The other day I read that Americans are less engaged in discussing politics than ever before. Is it any wonder, when a simple verbal misstep has the ability to cast one as a racist, sexist, homophobe, etc? Already controversial topics went off-limits altogether over the last ten years or so, and the effect has been a slowdown in the free flow of ideas. The two sides have drifted farther apart, and the nation gets more divided. The sensible majority begins to feel more and more abandoned as the centers of the two major political parties drift ever further to the extremes.

And we're left in our present state, where one must express one's views about controversial issues with such caution it is often easier and safer to simply not say anything. The left is largely the perpetrators of this blight on our ability to communicate, and they have suffered the most damage because of it. How? Because critical analysis isn't required of one's opponent...it's enough to simply parse the person's language to form snap judgments about the quality of their ideas. (This kind of language fascism from the people who brought us the idea of "ebonics" at the height of the PC craze...oh, the irony.) Political correctness elevated knee-jerk reacting to the same level as critical thought in many ways. This, of course, means that over time, the knee-jerks will lose the debate.

And, oh, how they have lost. The White House is full of neo-cons, the Democratic Party is in disarray, and the far left are absolutely irate that news analysts like Bill O'Reilly have an audience. But it is you, far left person, that allowed all of this to happen, when you gave up convincing through rational argument and distanced yourself from the mainstream. And it is you who deserve to writhe in pain as you're forced to witness the reintroduction of thought derail your efforts to hijack the conversation.

I've been collecting some sigs now for a while...whenever I run across one that's particularly funny, I jot it down. What better place to post the fruits of this labor than where I picked up most of 'em? So, without further ado...

Initiative comes to thems that wait.

Anticipation comes to those who wait.

If I seem shortsighted, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of midgets.

My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. --Steven Wright

Sedulously eschew unmitigated hyperverbosity, obfuscatory redundancy, and munificent prolixity.

My English teacher once told me that two positives don't make a negative. Yeah, right.

What part of "You don't understand anything" don't you understand?

Occam's Razor explained: you find a pinecone lying on the ground under a pine tree. (1) It fell off of the pine tree. (2) It was planted there by invisible space aliens in conjunction with the Illuminati acting in strict accordance with the Masonic doctrine of the Coming of the Pine Cone King. Choose (1).

"You can't see the forest for the trees." "Exactly! So what say we get to work moving some of them trees!?"

You are free to do as I tell you.

telepathetic - being such a loser that it can be spotted from a mile away.

Dyslexics of the world: UNTIE!

Anarchy: it's not the law, it's just a good idea.

We are sorry, you have reached an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone ninety degrees and try again.

Kill two birds with one stone: feed the homeless to the hungry.

If you were everyone but one person I would listen to everyone else.

Take thee this thing covered with that stuff and give it unto that guy, that he may do things with it.

The time to panic is not the time to panic.

Error Downloading the Internet: Insufficient space on drive C: for the Internet. Insert disk in drive A:.

I'm not interested in getting into semantic discussions about how many angels can dance on a head of split hair. When I say something, I mean exactly what you think I mean. Pedantry city is ---> that way.

Religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy...and unhappy.

"Faith" means not wanting to know what is true. --Nietzsche

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. - Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk I have a workstation...

Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.

There are 10 types of people in the world - those that understand binary, and those that don't.

"Why should I go on living in this unjust, inhumane, technology dependent world where one marginally sane person can't even delude himself enough to believe that one person can make a difference as nameless, faceless forces seem to conspire against my every hope and dream, leaving me spiritually ravaged and consigned to work at the drive-in window at Wendy's? Also, are Cheetos really made with real cheese?" -- actual question submitted to Cecil Adams, of The Straight Dope

ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.

I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.

There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.

To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.

vi VS emacs arguments are pointless and a waste of time. vi is the best.

Down with self-referential sigs! Use sigs like this one instead.

wit.soul = brevity;

Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into the conversation, even if I don't know what it means.

Imagine a bicycle. How many dimensions does it have? Surely, it's a 3D object, right? Ok, ok, 4D if you count time. That means it's comprised of particles that each have three degrees of freedom (orthogonal possible motions), x, y, and z.

But wait. Is that really true? A particle in Euclidean three-space only has three degrees of freedom? What if it's not symmetric about its center point (a bicycle-shaped fundamental particle, for instance)? This kind of particle has FIVE degrees of freedom, I'm counting. It has x, y, and z, but it also has two rotations, without which its exact position in 3D space cannot be specified. (Or am I wrong, is it three rotations? I played with a cube for a few seconds and convinced myself that only two are required to achieve any orientation--did I get this right?)

To be a bit more formal about it, let's construct the 3D bicycle-particle space, in which each and every point, the ordered set of numbers (x, y, z, theta, phi) represents the position of a bicycle-particle. The first three numbers in this ordered sequence specify the point in three-space that is equally far from every point making up the particle on the average. The second two represent the rotation about this point of the particle in the x-y plane, and then the x-z.

That's if we're talking about a fundamental particle that doesn't have any spatial symmetries (you're thinking if you split a bike down the middle, it's left side and right side are symmetrical--you're wrong though--the pedals are not, and the chain and gearwheels are necessarily only on one side, so a bike has no spatial symmetries).

This leads me to wonder...how do we know that, for example, quarks aren't like this? Why do we think of them as spheres, which are symmetrical in every direction, and then assign them all these weird properties like charm or strangeness or color? What if they're just like bikes, and these weird properties are nothing more than a degree of freedom in theta and phi (remember, quantum particles can't choose from a continuous spectrum in their degrees of freedom, they can only choose discrete states). What if color and strangeness and all of that is simply the discrete states of rotation in phi and theta? Why make this more abstract and complicated than it needs to be if one model is as good as the next?

I figure I must be wrong. I figure that someone, somewhere must have already thought of this and will have a good enough understanding to explain it to a layperson such as myself. I'm somewhat less confident they'll run across my journal entry here and actually do so.

Back to the bicycle (the big one, not a bicycle-shaped particle). If we assume it's made up of spherical particles that are exactly the same regardless of how they're oriented, then a macroscopic bicycle is indeed a 3D object (forget time already...jeez!). Every particle has three degrees of freedom, therefore the bike's position can be fully specified by a long set of three coordinates, one set for each atom, or electron, or quark, or whatever, in the bike.

Hang on a second, though...we know we're talking about a bicycle here. Let me ask: if we know it's a bike, then we know these sets of points we've listed must be confined to some kind of structure. Using the above technique, we can fully specify the position of ANYTHING in three-space. Which is great, if we're dealing with everything...but we're talking about bikes here, and we don't want sets of points that represent other things...only bikes are allowed in our space.

If that's true, then we know that we don't have to specify each and every point in the frame. We can specify one point relative to the bike (including rotations) instead of each and every particle making up the bike. That's a heck of a lot less writing...but it's inadequate. The previous way, with the long list of points, we could specify a bicycle in any position. Now we have some assumptions built in, over and above the fact that it's a bike. We have to assume that all bikes have their handlebars oriented relative to the frame in the same way. We can't have a bike with the handlebars turning to the left represented in our space. Similarly, we have to assume the pedals are in a particular position relative to the frame, the wheels too. Anything else that moves on a bike in some way independent of the frame.

Or...we could simply add more numbers to our ordered set. We specify the point that is on average equidistant from each particle making up the bike using x, y, z, theta, and phi. Then we specify the angle of the handlebars using psi1, the front wheel psi2, and the rear psi3. Similarly, any other variables we wish to introduce can be added to the ordered set so that any bike can be fully represented in our space such that no part of its position is left unspecified. Still a heck of a lot less writing than moles of ordered triples!

The number of elements making up this ordered tuple could be considered the dimensionality of the bike. We could record the position of the bike completely by recording each of these as independent variables against time, and there would be no information missing over the entire duration of the ride about the position of the bike, while we've freely allowed the rider to make do anything during the ride a bike can do. The bike is a so-called "free particle" in this space. It is only constrained by the fact that it is a bike, that the handlebars and fork interact with the frame in an assumed way, that the wheels interact with the fork and frame in an assumed way--these aspects are fixed because the sets of particles making up a wheel always relate to the rest of the structure in a way that makes the bike a bike. These constraints give the bike its structure, its "bikeness".

But in order to do away with tracking each particle of the bike independently, we've launched ourselves into a multi-dimensional space. Now the rotation of the handlebars, the front wheel, and the rear wheel are all orthogonal directions in addition to the position and orientation of the frame (5 more dimensions, the original x, y, z, theta, and phi). In exchange, we've fully specified, by defining this space, what it means to be a "bicycle"...which conglomerations of particles qualify as bikes and which do not. And more importantly, we've done so without using redundancy--each number in that ordered tuple is absolutely required so that no aspect of bikeness is left unspecified for any "point" (or bike) in the space.

I recently had the idea that coding is sort of like building spaces. Just as I describe the space containing all possible bicycles above, coding the interface of an object specifies an n-dimensional space. Actually, I think it might even define two spaces--the n-dimensional space of problems and the p-dimensional space of solutions...and more yet: a mapping between them.

Take a simple function in Java: double add(double x, double y) { return x + y; }. This method takes x and y, adds them together, and returns the result. The parameters form the problem space--x and y are free to vary independently, and form an ordered pair in that 2D space. The solution space is 1D, the value that is returned. add() is a simple case, it might be a class with several methods specified that creates a very complicated problem space. One thing that's neat about object-oriented programming is that it allows the programmer to let the class itself define an object which represents the point in the solution space, rather than having to return the result immediately like add() does, an object can accumulate state over many the many dimensions of that particular solution space.

This is just a fledgling idea in my mind, so I won't continue here at length, but suffice it to say that I already see problems. For example, in the add() function above...x and y do not quite describe the problem domain accurately if you assume they represent a 2D free particle...they don't; they represent a constrained particle. Imagine if x were the maximum value allowed in a double, and so was y. There is no mapping into the solution space becaues the returned double would overflow. In fact, if one of these variables is at a maximum allowed by double, then any positive, non-zero value in the other is not allowed, so the constraint is quite significant. We could reformulate the method so that x and y are floats, and therefore the solution space provides a mapping for every possible point in the problem domain, but this shrinks the size of the problem domain our function can address considerably beyond what need be. In many cases, it'd be better just to acknowledge that the 2D point in the problem domain must be constrained.

I feel that this idea is somehow valuable and can be developed into a sensible means of specifying APIs that are complete and consistent, yet provides a mapping over the maximum region of the problem space. Imagine representing a bicycle in code, for example. Interfaces might specify a frame and a handlebar-fork assembly, and a Bike object could mandate how these different interfaces interoperate to form a bicycle. This way of thinking could allow me to formulate interfaces much more concisely than I currently do, leaving much more extensibility.

One quick example...most mountain bikes nowadays have suspended front ends, meaning a shock system built into the fork. Clearly, this adds one more degree of freedom to a bicycle...you can't fully specify a bike's position if it has one of these forks without a number representing the compression of that front shock assembly. So, should the interface representing the fork specify this?

No. If that interface is used by the Bicycle object to coordinate how it plays with the frame, then it's totally irrelevant whether it is a suspension fork or not. The Bicycle object that mandates how these components work and play together couldn't care less--when the handlebar-fork assembly turns relative to the frame, nothing different happens from the Bicycle class' standpoint whether it's a suspended fork or not. Then again, maybe I need to do a bit more thinking on this, because the bike as a whole will respond differently over rough terrain (otherwise, what's the point of the suspended front end anyway?).

Hmmmm...

Hey all,

I've been busy working lately for an anti-spam company (I'm fighting for the good guys!), so it's been a while since I posted. I've been reading some maths books lately and I thought I'd post an interesting insight I had lately.

Ever thought about the fourth dimension? Not time, I'm talking the fourth spatial dimension. Well, I assume so cuz you're reading slashdot. Ever thought about how to visualize the fourth dimension? I have...unsuccessfully for the most part. But no more. I now have access to the color axis. What is the color axis? Let me 'splain.

Two objects cannot share the same space at the same time, more specifically no point in space may be occupied by more than one object at a time (quantum mechanics not withstanding). Let's restrict the experimental space to a plane for easy visualization. If you take two coins and lay them on the table, you cannot push them into each other such that they occupy the same part of the table surface. How do you know that this is what you're attempting to do? Easy, you can map out the boundaries of these coins in the x-y plane.

Now let's bring the third dimension into it, but not completely. By this I mean, let's assume that your perception is limited to the table surface, and you're trying to contemplate the third dimension even though you're not capable of perceiving a direction that's perpendicular to the two with which you're already familiar. This is where the color axis comes into play. Let's allow you to move the coins into the third dimension if you like, and establish the following convention: the more below the table, the more blue the object, the more above, the more red the object. Let's position the plane at the far end of this spectrum at the blue end (just for fun--you don't have to if you have need to move things down below the plane).

So you're looking at two blue coins. You push one along the color axis in the red direction, and it gets purple. If you keep pushing, it'll get red, but you don't need to go too far, just enough to get it up off the table. At this point, you push the coins into each other and you're surprised to see that they pass seemingly through each other. But, upon reflection, you realize that in three-space, they're not in the same space--they're in different planes because one is red and one is blue.

Neat, huh? Now imagine a knotted rope in three dimensions, with a simple granny knot. To undo this knot, given a fourth spatial dimension, you do not need to pull it apart the normal way. You can simply grab an overpass (that's the part of the rope that goes the underpass, the other part of the rope that forms the knot), pull it into the fourth dimension until it grows red (the rest of the rope is blue). At this point, you simply pass it through the underpass--they're not in the same space because they're different colors, remember? Then, once you've got it underneath the underpass, you pull it back along the fourth dimension until it's blue again like the rest of the rope. Ta-da. Knot undone.

That's neat-o. How come in high school when I was in all those advanced math classes looking at 386 programs simulating a rotating hypercube, no one ever thought of using color when you run out of dimensions? Even on a 2D monitor surface, this could make things a lot clearer.

How do you make a line? You drag a point along a path, leaving a trail to its original spot. A square? Drag that line perpendicular to its length, the same distance as its length and it sweeps out a square. A cube? Grab the square and drag it perpendicular to the plane of the square, sweeping out a cube. A hypercube?

Drag the (blue) cube, the length of one of its sides, along the fourth axis, sweeping out a hypercube. Two cubes, one red, one blue, connected by edges that go from blue to purple to red. Leaves me wondering what a hypersphere looks like...

Below is a post I coopted from another discussion board to which I post. This post is a response to a user "Magnum", whose point was that private schools work better than public schools in America, and this should be fixed. I got the sense from his post that he was for fixing public schools, but one of the ideas he presented in his post was that the public school system cannot accomplish this with a simple patch here and there; his position was that something more fundamental needed fixing. I seized on this idea to make a point that I've long felt about this issue.

(I've altered my post slightly in the transfer to improve my argument.)

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Magnum makes an interesting point in his post...private schools are not simply better than public--they are systemically better. In other words, the conditions in which they exist require that they be better in order to survive. There is no such push towards excellence in the public schooling system. In fact, it's the opposite. The public school system fosters an environment where the teacher's union garners a lot of power, and the teacher's union is to blame for much of what is wrong with public education.

Here is one such idiosyncracy of the current public schooling system. School disctricts are divided into two categories: districts that run K-12 or K-8, and districts that only run 9-12 (high school). High school teachers generally want to teach in high school districts, districts of the second category. These districts have more aggressive pay increase schedules, and reward higher education with significantly more money. Advanced degrees in districts of the first category garner less of a wage increase (who cares if a 1st grade teacher has a PhD or a Bachelors--at that level, many BA's will be better suited to the job anyway). The teacher's unions have lobbied hard for this system because it is a group that is literally ruled by committee--the teachers themselves--and that's the best compromise they could come to for those districts.

You guessed it...poorer communities cannot generally support a separate high school district, and that's often why they are not able to attract good high school teachers. They're enslaved by a system of teacher compensation that won't allow it.

I've often heard supporters of the public education system say that teachers ought to get a small percentage of each of their students' salaries. (This happens to some degree via taxation, but by the time the funds have worked through so many levels of government there is no direct relationship.) If you believe this, you might want to consider that private institutions function exactly in this way, except on a slightly higher level of granularity. Like universities, these schools accept donations from satisfied parents and alumni (and if you don't think that teachers who engender such donations get rewarded, you are mistaken).

I don't think we can fix our public education system and make it fair, because it is the system itself that is flawed. People worry that moving to a fully privatized system of education is a mistake because only rich people will be able to afford it. The truth is, there is no environment for less expensive private schools, but if we did away with public schooling, there would be and they would spring up to fill the void. Does anyone really think that public education is costing the average family less, going through all those levels of government inefficiency and anti-competitive unions and the like, than if they were to just pay a private school directly?

Even so, I understand the poorest of the poor would still not be able to afford any private school, no matter how cheap. My solution to this would simply be to tax private schools like any other business, and reinject those taxes back into the system in the form of scholarships for low-income families. Needless to say, these taxes should be targeted--they should most definitely not go into the general tax coffers so politicians can debate how much of it they want to release for these scholarships, how much overhead should be extracted from these dollars, etc. People need transparency and visibility on this, and a 100% funding from this targeted taxation could easily be administered for no extra bean counting costs.

Another source of funds for these scholarships: the income-education taxes that every citizen now pays would be recognized separately, and families with children under 18 or in school (college included) would be rebated for this amount. This leaves every person with no children paying into the system what they currently pay into it. This seems fair and square to me--it increases no one's taxes, more importantly no one's overall costs of education (in fact it would likely drop them), people with children get help for putting them through school, and people without children pay a fair amount for getting to live in an educated society.

In this alternate world, there is reason to think that local communities would become far more involved in their education systems. Even now, when people's hands are tied by government and the only real way they can contribute is by voting to increase local taxes, that's exactly what they do. Indeed, this is the only kind of tax increase that's regularly been passed by popular vote, so don't make the mistake of thinking that people don't care. This is perhaps the one issue that people care so much about, they'll willingly sacrifice as long as they can see the fruits.

These ideas are not just off-the-cuff...like Magnum, I feel this issue is very important for our country. We should not be underperforming as much as we are with respect to the rest of the world. If there's any lesson we can learn from that alone (and other research that's been done in this area), more money does not necessarily equal better education. We need a system based on promoting personal responsibility in students for their educational careers. We need students to feel as though they have something real at risk if they don't excel, and though that's a little more uncomfortable for everyone, no one ever does anything great when they're comfortable coasting along.

_______________________

Well, I've finally decided to do it. I'm going in for the Java Certification Exams. They're up to five tests at the moment: the Programmer, the Developer, the Web Component, the Business Component, and the Enterprise Architect. I'm planning on doing them in this order: Programmer (have to, it's a prerequisite for all the others), Developer, Business Component, and then maybe I'll do the Web Component and down the road I'll consider the Enterprise Architect, depending. Basically, the tests break down as follows.

The Programmer exam certifies you know the basic Java language. The Developer exams (there are two parts, a programming exercise done at home--no time limit--and an essay to prove you actually wrote the code) prove you can actually use the language and basic J2EE to do something useful. The Web Component exam tests your knowledge of web app front-ends...JSPs and all that. The Business Component exam certifies you know J2EE, and especially EJBs, in depth. Finally, the Enterprise Architect ties it all together and proves you can design an entire system from basic requirements that ties all these technologies together into a cohesive whole.

I'm generally on the path toward doing architecture in my career, but I don't feel any special need to conquer that test in the next year or two timeframe. I can see myself being certified on all the others by 2005, though. This is shaping up to be a year of tests for me, it seems, as I'm also thinking about taking the GRE and Comp Sci subject tests for grad school. Basically just keeping another option open, depending on how this economy recovery continues, I might find myself in grad school in fall 2005--who knows?

In any case, if you've taken any tests mentioned herein and have any helpful suggestions, please feel free to comment and pass on the knowledge.

This post was in reply to a story about Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science. The main points of the story (and the ensuing /. discussion) seemed to revolve around the fact that much of the book was not new research and the negative reaction of the scientific community to his claims of founding a new way of looking at things.

I was a little surprised to see that no one really addressed the egos of all the players involved in these events (plenty of posts talked about Wolfram's ego, to be sure, but few mentioned that egos played a part in his book's rather cool reception by his peers). Also, no one had broached the fact that he could not publish his work to the general public without rehashing much of what had been done before, so, to me at least, it was expected that much of the content would not be new research.

_______________________

I read through the majority of the 310 comments on this story (310 as of this moment) and I can't believe no one has touched on an important aspect of the scientific community's backlash against Wolfram's book: he end-ran them.

He may be egotistical (I read most of ANKOS and I did not find his constant self-laudation very charming), but so are many people in science and math. In what other fields can one prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the significance of one's own contributions? The Huxleys and Jungs of history could never have felt quite the same tinge of accomplishment as Einstein must have, because literature and psychology have no such measure of the value of an idea. So there is more to scientific self-puffery than just ego, it is a very human thing for humans to fall into this trap when they have managed to make a real, recognizable contribution. (Earlier in this thread, in fact, I saw someone taken to task for Newton's ever-misunderstood "on the shoulders of giants" as a symbol of his--Newton's, that is--humility...which it was not, though arguably so.)

So I think we can all agree, if on nothing else, that Wolfram's ego is definitely not the only ego involved here. Instead of publishing his ideas in the framework of the mathematical and scientific research communities, he chose to publish his findings to the world-at-large. This, in and of itself, can be seen as an immensely egotistical act (one I'm glad of, though, as I'll explain). By doing this, he is essentially saying that his ideas are so great they are likely to be misunderstood (the plaintive cry of many a genius) by his peers and relegated to the back shelf until the community catches up with him. He's confident he's hit on some seed of truth, and he wants to spur the world to cultivate it so he can live to see its fruits...probably so he can hear his praises sung while still living. Not very selfless.

His feeling that his genius is too great to be contained by the research community is felt by every other member of that community, but they lack the means to do anything about it. ANKOS (the book, not the science) is quite enough of an affront to these people for them to bring the full weight of their intellectual wrecking ball to bear on Wolfram's tome. Certainly this is not true across the board, but just as certainly there is at least some venom reserved for him out of animus.

The problem with all this demogoguery that inevitably follows great men around is that the focus very quickly falls upon the men involved instead of the ideas. (One thing we all must admit: Wolfram is a great man. Keep in mind that I'm using "great" in the sense of the gravitas of his ideas. In this same sense Hitler was one of history's terrible greats, as the grand sum of his ideas had enough weight to sweep an entire nation to madness. In fact, in this sense I supposed Hitler was a much greater man than Wolfram; if Hitler's ideas swept a community to madness, Wolfram's ideas only achieved anger. :-) ) So to Wolfram's serious detractors, I hear you with a suspicious ear, while fairness requires that I simply ignore Wolfram's own self-congratulations. If only all such commentary were passionate only toward ideas and dispassionate towards men, it would not take history so long to sift through the idea pile.

We ought to judge people for the most part based on their actions and the results of those actions, not their motivations. Wolfram may have end-run his community out of ego, but I believe the effect in this particular case to be positive. Look at it this way: he has taken the time to introduce these ideas to an entire generation of laypeople. This may present the work in a form that is undesirable to academic researchers, but it certainly does not preclude them from judging those ideas. The upshot is, it's an inclusive strategy that makes the work accessible to everyone. What's bad about that? I've always clung to Asimov's notion that science may be confined to the research lab, but in the realm of ideas everyone has a potential profit and should be given a share.

This is why I am willing to forgive Wolfram whatever shortcomings of this work. Like him or not, like his reasons or not, none of us would be having this discussion right now if he hadn't acted the way he did. I wouldn't know about the many things within his book, not to mention the dovetailer algorithm or Zuse, the products of this discussion; instead I'd probably know the outcome of another episode of My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance (of course this is hyperbole...seriously, folks, whoever's watching this show, stop it!--and if you're a Nielsen household, well...shame on you, sir). The ideas he introduced may not be his own, as some of his critics charge, but still the ideas have been introduced and I trust that history will sort them under their proper headings.

In my mind, this accounts for the prevalent accusations of plaigerism on Wolfram's part. In the worst case his claim on many of the ideas contained within ANKOS is ambiguous, despite his aggressive implications he never does come right out and say they're his. Wolfram certainly did nothing to help his case in the matter...still, we should be impartial in the offing: for the most part his book "plaigerizes" in much the same way that a scientific paper "plaigerizes" all of the work on which it rests. The difference is, a paper intended for the research community expects each member of the audience to be well-versed in the supporting research and to be helpful in pointing out such mistakes, treating them as inadvertant. Wolfram's audience is not so well-versed and such background must be assimilated into the main body of the work many levels deep; if every scientific paper were under the same requirement, I think such inadvertant mistakes would be far more numerous.

Additionally, I find it quite believable that many of the ideas Wolfram devised on his own were simply already discovered. After all, for more than the last decade he has closed himself off from his peers, and peers are the best resource for this kind of information ("Good idea, Stephen, but Zuse already said this 50 years ago.") So it is very possible that he simply thinks he has contributed some things that were already previously discovered. Again, in regular scientific research, papers often hit on notions that have previously been discovered without citing them out of ignorance of the previous work--this is forgiven because it happens to everyone. Wolfram is getting no such consideration, and I think in at least some cases it is due him.

Overall, I'd say this book is far more beneficial to the layperson than to science in general, but this benefit is enough for me to justify a degree of respect for Wolfram. He is brilliant and he's simply trying to leave a legacy, which his ego no doubt feels is his birthright. This is often the case when the tiny car of ego has an engine of vast intellect powering it. The only difference between Wolfram and every brilliant scientist is this: every scientist wants to be the next Einstein; Wolfram is simply making his grab for the brass ring by unconventional means.

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This post was in response to a question concerning the introduction of generics in the Java 1.5 'Tiger' release. Someone wanted to know why an ArrayList reference with parameterized type Number couldn't refer to an ArrayList that was instantiated with parameterized type Integer. After all, it seems like a perfectly valid thing to do--a list of integers is indeed a list of numbers, is it not?

(By the way, the first line of my post refers to the fact that the post to which I'm responding had tried to type in an angle brackets directly instead of using the escape codes--< and >--so they were stripped out by /. as an unknown tag.)

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I'm guessing that you dropped some text between angle brackets, and what you meant to say was something along the lines of:

ArrayList<Integer> s = new ArrayList<Integer>();
ArrayList<Number> t = s; // does not compile

It is indeed true that, though s contains only Integers, which are all indeed Numbers as well, you cannot make this assignment. The reason is that, though Integer extends Number, the new types you've created (ArrayList<Integer> and ArrayList<Number>) using the genericized code have no such inheritance relationship with each other that would allow such an assignment.

In generics, when you instantiate a genericized class and specify a type parameter, you're effectively creating a new type. In the example of the ArrayList, an ArrayList<Integer> extends whatever object that ArrayList does, and implements all of its interfaces, but it does not extend ArrayList itself or any type-parameterized variant of ArrayList.

sev

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To this, I received a reply explaining a slightly different take, which I had considered already (I have taken the liberty of correcting a few misspellings and mistypes in the original):

The reason this can't be allowed is very simply: Look at this:

ArrayList<Integer> s = new ArrayList<Integer>();
ArrayList<Number> t = s; // Does not compile, but assume it would.
t.addElement(new Float(10.5)); // t should ONLY contain integers. Not good.
Integer i= s.elementAt(0); // Class cast exception.

Allowing t=s would ruin the entire "You are sure your collection only can contain what it say it contains, and we check that at compile time"

I replied:

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Subject: Example Given Is Neither Necessary Nor Sufficient

I too thought of this as a possible means of explaining this situation, but rejected it . The explanation you put forth here does not satisfy because the same argument could be applied to Integer[]s and Number[]s.

Alas, the corresponding array code does indeed compile, and it is well-defined and unambiguous:

Integer[] i = new Integer[3];
Number[] n = i;
n[0] = new Float(1.1);

There's no reason in generics why the compiler couldn't have been designed to similarly accept code if you replace the above arrays with type-parameterized ArrayLists. The same arguments that apply to this array code (in terms of allowing it to compile but rejecting it at runtime) are every bit as valid for parameterized types. Obviously, a different direction is required for generics to work, though, if the whole point is to provide the same capability but fail at compile-time.

sev

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This is the first post I made to the /. community that seemed to generate a decent amount of discussion. I was even told by one respondent:

Sir, you have NAILED IT!!!

IMO your description of your experiences and thoughts on this matter is exactly the sort of material that the developers of the Linux desktop and distro need to see. You need to get a website somewhere, put this up and point people to it - this mini-essay should NOT get lost in the bowels of Slashdot.

What can I say? It's all about the fans... :-)

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I've talked to several non-linux users about why they don't use it, and I'm not talking about the die-hard MS supporters. I'm talking about people that have tried it at one time or another, ran it for a while, and just gave up on it.

Why did they give up instead of switching over to it as their primary desktop? Answers ranged over several salient (if not because they're real, at least because they're perceived) problems.

Die-hard linux people see variety as a good thing. That's true, and it's not true. Variety always has to be put in context, especially if there's a lot of it. Here's an example that even die-hard linux people can understand (assuming you're not chefs too). Let's say I'm making salsa and I send you to the store to pick up some heat. You don't know the first thing about peppers, and it just so happens I live next to a produce mart the likes of which you've never seen before. To choose from are: jalapenos, habaneros, anaheim, chipotle, ancho, pablano, thai, serrano, scotch bonnet, etc. What are you likely to do? That's right--grab the jalapenos, cuz that's what you've heard of before, even though they're probably not the best solution. Some die-hard linux people would argue, hey, if your goal is to help your buddy out, you'll head over to your favorite bookstore and read up, and then head back to the produce mart armed with this newfound knowledge. To these people I say, you are truly a die-hard fan of linux if you didn't get this point.

This is the pressure novices feel at every turn with linux, not just from what OS to install, but what is the install process? (Depends on the distro you've chosen.) How do I install an application? (Ibid.) Which application do I install if I want, say, an email client? (Good luck wading through all of the available options.) Why is it that everytime I head over to my buddy's house, he always knows about all this crap that I've never heard of, and he's got this smokin' setup that I wouldn't have the first clue how to begin assembling? How does one even keep up with all the choice that's available?

All frustrations that don't happen with Windows. You only rarely head over to a buddy's and see him running Mozilla instead of IE and think, hmm, I'd like that and didn't know about it. 99% of the time, you're both running the same media player, picture editor, etc, and if you're not, there's only a small handful of well-known choices to choose from.

The next barrier to installing/using linux on a long-term basis with these folks is what I call the "annoyance/showstopper" problem. Eventually, usually sooner than later, these people run into something that's either really annoying (they can't get X to run at a desired resolution, for example), or a really serious problem that impedes their ability to move forward (they can't connect to the web). They also don't really know where to look for help, or even how to find out where they should start. I myself ran into a problem years ago with RedHat, I simply wanted to upgrade the asteroids game, but the web of library dependencies that had to also be updated made it hardly worthwhile. Eventually, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work--I finally got to the end of a long dependency chain and discovered that, no matter what I did to upgrade this particular library, it wouldn't go in because it was replacing a basic graphics library that is used by virtual terminals. Because it was always in use, it couldn't be replaced, even in single-user mode. So I know this frustration well...even I was asking, how great can this OS be if a simple game can't easily be upgraded, and then it turns out when you finally commit yourself to an afternoon of hunting, it simply can't be upgraded at all? The bigger issue here for most users is, why should I have to know about library dependencies to upgrade a game, why are virtual terminals relevant to the problem I'm having, and what is a virtual terminal anyway? (The point is, whatever it is, it's totally unrelated to what I was trying to do, and most people find this incomprehensible.)

This has been fixed now with apt-get (and a subsequent RedHat bug fix), but these kinds of problems still abound. Furthermore, when graphical tools are introduced to aid the management of driver installs, program updates, etc, they just show up with no explanation when you install a new distro from the ground up, or if you're still using an old distro, you don't ever see it unless you put it on yourself.

I've also heard users express what I like to call the "critical mass" problem. The thinking goes, in Windows, you learn about directory structures, a few commands to navigate around, a few basic apps for looking at files, opening programs, etc...at some point you hit a critical mass of knowledge where you just innately know how to move around and navigate new programs. With linux, an equal investment of time does not suddenly cause a "click". I myself have been using linux and various desktops for years, and I have to say I agree. Of course this has a lot to do with the history behind linux and linux apps, but for an illustration of the point, just think about vi vs. emacs. It's possible to attain master level at either one of these, and still know absolutely nothing about the other. On the other hand, in Windows, you play with just a few programs, and that gives you at least the ability to play around with other programs with a semblance of confidence.

You're saying, hey, RTFM. But I think the linux culture of RTFM-type responses is part of what these users are objecting to. They don't want to RTFM. They feel that the product should be well-designed enough that most of what they want to accomplish should be apparent without having to read any doc. They're right.

A quick thought experiment. How many linux users, even experts, can install an app they've never seen before (only know the basics of what it's for) in linux and start using it productively inside a few minutes without ever cracking any documentation? I know I do this in Windows all the time...I don't claim to be a linux expert, but then again, after a decade of regular (though not intense) use, I think it is reasonable to have that expectation.

That example may not have resonated for some of you. Ok, then, think about a piano. Anyone, even a child, can figure out the piano if given a chance to hit a couple of keys. That's Windows. They hand you the keys and you hit a couple and soon you're banging out simple tunes. Linux is more like, you're presented a vast array of piano concertos and told to figure out how to use a piano based on listening to and watching these performances. Assuming you've never seen a piano before, you might first look at the orchestra and say, ok...but which instrument IS the piano, then? To which the other person says, RTFM, and hands you a dictionary. To start with, though, all this person wants to do is play Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Don't get me wrong, people. I like linux and what it stands for. I think that someday, it will take over the desktop. But not before it becomes more usable from bow to stern than Windows. The die-hard linux people need to wake up here, because they're in the best position to solve this problem...there are a LOT of places where linux is worse than Windows, and hiding behind the philosophy of choice or the culture of RTFM only ultimately hurts the platform.

sev

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Hey all,

I've decided to keep the most interesting bits of my /. contributions alive in my journal, mostly for lack of a better use of it. These entries in my journal will all show up with subject lines beginning with "POST:" followed by the title of the original post.

Hopefully, I'll still have enough time to make contributions to the journal besides just regurgitating stuff I'm saying in other places.

So my gf and I go to a local sushi restaurant. It's been a long day, a long week even, so I settle in and start perusing the menu for a good sushi combo plate and some sake to match.

Much to my surprise, despite several sake bottles prominently displayed behind the sushi bar, the menu says: "sake, (S) $4.00, (L) $7.00". I ask the waitress, "Is only the house sake available, or do I have a choice?"

"Welr," she says, "We huv arotta sock-ee at-tooly. Yoo can haf which-uh eva yoo wan."

After a few more repetitions, I finally understand what she means. (Incidentally, I am not embellishing the accent in order to be racist, but rather, to make the point that I had at least as difficult a time understanding her--probably more--than you are having deciphering my attempts at literary encryption.) Ok, great, I think. "Can I see the sake menu?"

"O-waa. We no-a haf a sock-ee men-ru foar yoo."

"Huh? You don't have a sake menu at all? How do people order sake here?"

"Welr, we haf un--umm--er sock-ee menu, but alr in Japanees!"

"Ok, well, but I want sake and I don't read or speak Japanese. Surely, the owner of this restaurant must have foreseen this possibility. What provision do you have in place for dealing with just such a circumstance?"

"Welr...erm, hmm...welr, I cud-a jes telr yoo how--which sock-ee. Whotr kinna sock-ee yoo like? Uh-swee, uh-dride, uh-thik?"

"Uhh....sorry?"

"Um, err...sol-ee. Uh-swee, uh-dry-idda? Whotr kinna sock-ee? Acks-pan-siv, or...?"

"Oh, oh! I see...what kind of sake. Hm, I like unfiltered, mildly sweet, with round fruit flavors like banana or mango. I don't want to spend too much, though, so do you...err...ahh..." I'm looking at her now, she has a sort of glazed, struggling look about her as she's trying to grasp what I'm asking for. "You know what? Forget it, I'll just have water." And the meal went downhill from there.

Am I alone in asking that restaurants should meet some minimum level of service for all English-speaking patrons? After all, we are in America. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-immigrant. As an abridged Dennis Miller might put it:

We're all immigrants if we go far back enough (unless you're pure Indian--uhh, sorry, not supposed to use that term anymore. Ahem, "casino-owner American"), and I think that isolationism is equal parts self-loathing and mistrust of others. That doesn't mean we should stop teaching Locke and Thoreau in favor of the poetry of some Javanese goatherd. And yes, this country's founding fathers were a bunch of dead, white men, but those very same men set things up so that other cultures could come sit at the table, so they shouldn't piss in the finger bowls. In return for unfettered economic opportunity and no government death squads, all I ask is that immigrants try to get along with their new step-motherland and not be resentful if there's a set of house rules already in place. The favor of inclusion deserves the courtesy of assimilation. Make the effort. It's poor party manners to come live in this country and then throw a hissy fit because the parking signs aren't posted in Hmong.

And I will add to that little rant that if you're going to open a restaurant in America (engaging a little of that unfettered economic gain), especially if you are against the idea of America legislating English as the national language, then don't make that kind of legislation necessary by presenting better options to non-English speaking patrons. What is a menu, after all, other than a device whereby customers can gauge the number and quality of items available for purchase, along with the cost of those items? But I didn't have to explain this--the restaurant owner must have known that a sake menu is a great convenience and felt it was necessary to provide such a convenience...for Japanese speakers only, though!? I don't know if he wanted to make me feel unwelcome or not, but that's exactly what he did.

Also, one more thing, might I suggest: don't keep it all in the family. Use some of your newfound revenue-generating power to hire at least one American kid. He'll be worth his weight in gold when it comes to advising on cultural matters such as those addressed above, and if push comes to shove, he can at least run down the list of sakes without me having to ask him to repeat himself over and over again.

I heard Canada (the French half) passed a law a while back making French the national language (of that half...I know, so much for national--leave it to the Canadians). Any sign displayed in public has to have French as the primary mode of communication, meaning it must be at least twice as large as any other language on the sign. At first I thought, hmm, that's probably not for us. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it makes. After all, I wonder what happens when there's a fire in Chinatown...does that fire department have to have someone that reads Chinese and knows how to translate the name given in the 911 call to the characters on the sign? Maybe they just go by addresses. I hope they don't just wait for the flames to get big enough to see over the horizon.

Anyway, back to the main point. The whole idea of putting a menu only in Japanese really blows my mind. It's just a shade away from having the menu in English, but refusing to give it to anyone who doesn't know Japanese. (What's the functional difference as far as the customer experience is concerned? I can see a bunch of sake, but I can't have any.) If this doesn't resonate with you, think about the reverse situation--a restaurant has menus available in several languages, but refuse to show anyone the non-English versions. "You don't speak English? Too bad!"

I daresay an anti-foreigner business would cause a protest.