Interesting Stuff

Starting the day after tomorrow, I will be on a road trip with some friends to the east coast. Most importantly, I will be spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square, though we’re also going to Boston, Washington D.C., Niagara Falls, Chicago, Toronto, Pittsburgh, and the rest of New York City as well (not necessarily in that order). I shan’t update during these next two weeks or thereabouts, so don’t expect anything from me.

In deference to the great enjoyment afforded me by the television show Jeeves and Wooster, I have begun to read the stories upon which the episodes were based, in the form of The Jeeves Omnibus by P.G. Wodehouse. While not exactly funny, these tales are immensely entertaining. The one blot on the Wodehouse escutcheon, however, is his debonair employment of obscure persiflage. This veritable patois made me reach eftsoons for my dictionary, which I have kept open for the nonce. Wodehouse’s Britishisms are easy enough to decipher, but his vocabulary provides a greater challenge. His writings are quite amusing nonetheless, and I highly recommend them.

For the Firefox users among you, I’d like to use the previous paragraph as a plug for the dictionary tooltip plugin. Once this is installed, you can double-click on a word to find its meaning, searching any of about a dozen different online references. It even claims to be able to translate from different languages, though I haven’t been afforded a chance to try that part out yet.

Today, the Bush administration attempted to defend its domestic spying program, claiming that when Congress gave the President authorization to use military force in the War on Terrorism (back when we were actually fighting a justifyed war against Afghanistan), it implicitly gave the Presidency authorization to do wiretaps and other intelligence gathering (since wars need intelligence to figure out what the enemy is doing). I feel silly asking this, but are we still officially at war? Certainly we’re still in the War on Terror, the way we’re also still in the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty, last time I checked. However, I don’t think that implies that we can use domestic wiretaps to spy on druggies or poor people. Moreover, I’m surprised that the administration claims that the FISA board is too slow. I had heard that they could do things fast, but I didn’t know that they held emergency meetings at 3AM to do things that fast. On top of that, the government is certainly permitted to spy on people for up to 72 hours before getting FISA approval. I still don’t understand how anyone can justify sidestepping FISA completely by saying that the court is too slow.

On a much happier note, all of Britain now allows gay civil unions which afford pretty much the same legal rights as marriage. Today, Sir Elton John married his long-time partner under this new law. I don’t usually care about celebrities, but I think this is pretty fantastic.

This entry has been edited for accuracy. The old version equated the current Sony DRM with the old Sony DRM rootkits, but they are two separate pieces of malware. This paragraph has been changed to correct this error. See the apposite comments for more information. It now appears that the CDs with Sony’s DRM technology on them (the CDs with rootkits have been recalled, so you luckily can’t get them any more, but other DRM’ed Sony CDs are still out on the market) will install their software even if you do not accept the EULA. Woah. This has definitely crossed some new sort of line that it hadn’t crossed before (and the old DRM rootkits had crossed several lines already). I hope Sony gets what’s coming to them…

On the terrorist front, the Bush administration appears to be afraid to defend its enemy combatant policy in front of the Supreme Court. One of these cases, in which a US citizen has been held without charges for 3 years on suspicion of planning to detonate a dirty bomb (he was recently charged, though these charges made no mention of such a bomb), has finally been appealed to the Supreme Court. In response, the Bush administration has attempted to move him to a civilian jail, rather than the military prison he is currently being held in (this would nullify any ruling that would otherwise be appealed to the Supreme Court). The Bush administration also tried to overturn a ruling which stated that the government could hold such people indefinitely (although this seems counterproductive at first, such an overturn would also keep this from going to the Supreme Court). The Bush administration’s actions on this case give the impression that they are afraid that the Supreme Court will rule against them in favor of basic civil liberties, and the administration appears to be trying their best to weasel out of this and continue holding citizens indefinitely. I really hope this hits the Supreme Court soon.

Jim called me up again the other day, and we played bridge both today and yesterday. It’s quite obvious that I’ve gotten rusty (before yesterday, my last sanctioned game had been with Jim back in August). We took second-to-last and dead last, both with 41% games, though today’s game played better than it scored. Our defense was rock-solid (with one horrible, stupid, blatantly notable exception in which I doubled our opponents’ game-level contract, and although we could easily have set them by two tricks, they ended up making it). Our offense was mediocre, but our bidding was pretty good, I daresay. We’re trying out some new things in our conventions, however, which are working out alright. Both today and yesterday, we played a control-showing step response to two clubs, which is actually quite clever (imo, better than the point-showing step response which I swore by back in sophomore year). Today, we also used a forcing 1NT (the perfect response to Sheri’s insistence upon weak jump-shifts – I have to show this to more people even if we don’t play 2/1) and upside-down attitude carding (statistically better than regular attitude, but more confusing. For instance, you now show a doubleton by playing the high card first if you’re on lead but the low card first if you’re following suit). Now, I need to get Jim to learn Puppet Stayman and Raptor Notrump, and we’ll be playing exactly what I want to play, except possibly for a different discarding system. Jim lent me his copy of Hand Evaluation by Mike Lawrence, which I look forward to reading.

A Notable Hand From Tonight →

I returned from dinner this eve to find a stocking hung on my door handle. In it were a bunch of snacks and candies, a bottle of sparkling cider, and a note from Hayden, Ace, and Aaron wishing my a happy break. After all the crap I’m trying to do before Friday, this just made my week. Thanks, guys!

The good news: the president of Diebold resigned after enough problems with the ethics of his company, his products, and his personal business dealings. I maintain that if people are hell-bent on electronic voting (and I personally am hell-bent against it), the system should be transparent and open-source so that anyone can both verify that it is correct and formulate improvements to the system.

The bad news: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran claims that the Holocaust never happened. This is significantly less forgivable than claiming that Israel is a blot in the middle of the Arab world that should be wiped off it. It makes my blood boil to hear people say things like this. I might be able to understand the claims if the Holocaust had happened centuries ago, but some of the people who were in it are still alive today! Is President Ahmadinejad actually trying to claim that my grandfather did not get shipped to France to fight the Nazis? Is he claiming that 20 million Russians did not actually die in some fictional “World War,” and have merely been hiding in their basements lo these past sixty years? He certainly seems to be purporting that everything from Kristallnacht to Auschwitz is an elaborate hoax. Argh!

The ugly news: I have 3 tests to take, a 10-page paper to write, 4 assignments to grade (with 20-ish people turning in each one), 7-ish ACM problems to code up, and 3 more grad school apps that need to be finished this week. I wish I could say I’m almost home, but I’m not.

Up until now, I’ve been thinking the US has been making a big stink about Iran’s nuclear programme over nothing: just another superpower hoping that their enemies will not be given their inalienable right to improve their lot. However, I’ve been reading more on the subject, and it looks like there may very well be a sinister undercurrent to Iran’s drive for nuclear research. It’s a bit conspicuous when you step up your nuclear research while at the same time calling for another country (within missile range, no less) to be wiped from the face of the Earth. I kind of like the Russian deal, which is that Russia will supply Iran with reactor-grade nuclear fuel to be used in Russian-designed power plants, and Iran will return the spent fuel to assure that it is not diverted to make weapons. The US doesn’t seem to be going for that either, however, and I’m still confused as to why not. Whatever happens, it should finish up in a few more months.

Here’s the weird thing, though: suppose that Iran is actually doing this to be able to nuke Israel. If they hit Jerusalem, this will make Muslims, Christians, and Jews all angry, and since Iran wants to stay on the good side of at least the Muslims, I doubt that will happen. So suppose that Iran nukes the rest of Israel, and leaves Jerusalem alone. This would have absolutely catastrophic effects for Iran as well as Israel, because the rest of the world would be so surprised, appalled, and outraged that nearly every major country in the world would declare war on Iran and conquer it. Surely Iran doesn’t want to be conquered. Wiping out Israel in such a manner would also wipe out Iran itself. Consequently, I doubt Iran is planning to nuke Israel. Therefore, I believe that it is in Iran’s best interests to not nuke Israel. However, if this is the case, why try to develop nuclear weapons at all? To be used in some sort of blackmail/coercion? To counter any country that tries to invade (I don’t think Iran needs defenses to repel any invading countries any more; that ended about a decade ago with Iraq)? Making nukes to repel any aggressors who wouldn’t invade unless Iran builds nukes seems unnecessarily circular, and would only hurt Iran. Why would they do this? Perhaps they really are just trying to build power plants? But if that’s the case, why aren’t they being more cooperative with other countries? Something isn’t adding up in all of this.

O’Reilly and his fellow right-wing conservative religious bigots are now claiming that Christmas is under attack by people who want to be more inclusive and use phrases like “happy holidays” and “winter break.” Apparently these are anti-Christmas sentiments, and FOX and O’Reilly are advocating boycotting any store that uses them instead of explicitly saying “Christmas.” How is it that these people are so highly regarded that they have radio shows, “news” shows, and widespread public support!?

Hey – if you’re going to use Powerpoint (or Beamer or Prosper, or any other slideshow-making program), please, please follow these rules:

Don’t read your slides to me. If I can get this information from the slide, I will. If you read your slides to me, I’m going to start ignoring one or the other, and I like visual things, so I’ll start ignoring you. Use the slides to supplement what you’re saying.

On a related note, don’t put too much text on your slides. A rule of thumb that Dodds seems to use is that for every complete sentence, you need at least one picture. If your slide contains 3 full-length paragraphs, it feels cluttered, and becomes hard to focus on. Ideally, the slide will have a list of 2-5 sentence fragments reminding the presenter about what they are supposed to talk about.

Spend 1-3 minutes on each slide. If you skip through a slide in 5 seconds, it probably wasn’t necessary. If you spend 5 minutes on a slide, it’s probably too complicated.

Only use Powerpoint when it will enhance your presentation. If a slideshow will not help your talk, don’t make one! Saying “it’s the standard; everybody makes one” is no excuse. When I saw security guru Bruce Shneier give a talk, he started out by saying something to the effect of, “I used to have a Powerpoint to go with this talk, but it wasn’t very useful, so I took it out.” For this comment alone, he got a huge ovation.

It seems like everyone is confident that they can use powerpoint well, when actually around 95% of people cannot. Last night, I had this very discussion with my PerCog partner while making our presentation. She had her heart set on a Powerpoint presentation, with her main reason being that everyone else uses them. I stressed several times that we shouldn’t just read the slides to people, and at the end she said she’d make an introduction slide after I left. You know what’s on it? I shall paste the text below:

“[…] Bouhuys, Bloem and Groothuis asked whether music affects our actual perceptions of the facial expression of emotions of other people (5). […] Music had a powerful effect. For example, after listening to depressing music, subjects judged neutral faces to more express rejection/sadness and less invitation/happiness, despite the fact that such emotions were actually not present in those faces.”

I’m almost positive that during our presentation, she will read this verbatim to the class. We also have 3 slides on which we will probably spend less than 5 seconds each. Argh!

See what happens when the US advocates a policy of pre-emptive strikes? Now, Binyamin Netanyahu is advocating a pre-emptive strike against Iran if they haven’t been dissuaded to stop their nuclear reserach in a couple months. Although he is no longer prime minister of the country, he was back in 1996, and I think it likely that he could get elected again if he really wants to. His opinion carries a lot of weight in the Israeli government.

Right. I have to get back to Algorithms grading, so I can then get back to PerCog, so I can then get back to grad school apps, so I can get back to clinic, so I can get back to ACM, so… fuck. No sleep for Alan again.