Interesting Stuff

The Senate has passed a bill to regulate military interrogation. This bill, if made into law, would keep the military from torturing prisoners of war. It would regulate the military so that we would no longer have problems like the human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and Quantanamo Bay. It would finally lay down consistent rules about what constitutes abuse of prisoners. Unfortunately, Bush has promised to veto it, since it would… umm… acknowledge that our enemies have basic human rights, too? The great thing about this bill, though, is that for the first time that I’ve noticed, both Democrats and Republicans have put aside their differences to pass a bill that both helps people and is genuinely (sadly) needed.

Consecutive hours spent last night/this morning working on this week’s PLs assignment: 15
Amount of assignment that is currently done: optimistically, about a third of it.

Fuckity fuck fuck fuck… X-P

I recently switched the email address listed on facebook from my HMC account to my HMC-CS account. So guess what facebook does? It switches my “contact email” but not my “school email.” It then deletes all of my friends. Yes, I’m going to have to eventually go through and find everyone again. This is going to be quite annoying. If you’re reading this and are on facebook, don’t list me as a friend yet; the email address thing is still wrong, and I have no idea if the friends list will be deleted again before this gets corrected.

Tonight was a Tuesday. With two days of grading due on Thursday (really, it was due this morning, but Reid and I aren’t going to turn it back in until Thursday) and a PerCog test tomorrow, keeping in mind that I’ve got class tomorrow morning at 9:00, I spent my night drinking mudslides and gin and juice, watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and eating Mix Bowl until 1:30. This is the semester I’m supposed to die of pain, but I still seem to be able to have fun. We’ll see about tomorrow, though…

This morning in the shower, I finally solved an Algorithms-related problem that has had Reid and me stumped for a week (no, this is for fun; far too hard to be asked on a homework set):

Find positive, C-infinity, monotonically increasing functions f(n) and g(n) such that
f(n) is not in O(g(n)) and
g(n) is not in O(f(n)),
or
Show that no such functions exist.

Note that C-infinity means that not only is the function continuous, but its derivative is continuous, and the derivative of that is continuous, ad infinitum.

Can anyone else find an answer (hopefully simpler than mine)? It’s cheating if you look at Reid’s door.

It’s only mid-September, and I’ve already pulled my first all-nighter of the semester. This really can’t be good…

The US is considering beginning pulling out of Afghanistan (how many participles can I string together?) as early as this Spring! This would be great. I think the country is finally starting to pick itself up, despite all the problems with a constitution. Here’s hoping!

In other news, I’m not yet sure how I feel about John Roberts. From what I’ve heard, he seems like he’d be a pretty great Supreme Court Justice. However, I’m a little worried that most of his writings will not be released, so no one will be able to see most of what he has done in the past, and I’m equally worried that he hasn’t really expressed any of his views on anything except court cases that have already been decided (and his views on those are that the cases are already decided, so we should just uphold the previous rulings). If he actually approaches new cases with such an open mind and lack of opinion, that would be absolutely fantastic. I think it’s equally likely, however, that he could have views that would surely keep him from getting confirmed, but the Republicans have locked away all evidence of these views and Roberts himself is smart enough not to bring them up. This could go either way, but if he can be trusted, he’d be pretty great. Here’s hoping!

It seems that the government is now considering making our official policy that we should be able to perform a pre-emptive strike with nuclear weapons. Granted, this has not yet been made an actual law/policy, but I find it really scary that they’ve even been considering this since at least March. Why is our nuclear policy so screwed up? We’re considering restarting development of nuclear weapons that can penetrate into underground bunkers, yet we can’t make a nuclear power plant (which would be both safer and more environmentally friendly than a coal-burning plant), because it would be far too dangerous. We’re afraid that Iran will somehow turn its civilian-grade uranium processing plant into a military-grade plutonium plant, but we see nothing immediately wrong with nuking an entire country because a couple non-governmental people living in it were simply thinking about doing something we don’t like. WTF?!

On a slightly more light-hearted note, here are 25 hilarious quotes about Hurricane Katrina and how the beaurocracies are screwing up relief efforts.

Also, there was an attempted ban on media coverage of the hurricane and the New Orleans area, over privacy concerns. Thankfully, CNN is suing and has won at least the temporary ability to go in and report, citing its tastefullness in covering Afghanistan, Iraq, and the tsunami in Asia. This sounds surprisingly like the government trying to hide its mistakes (note the parallels to my rantings on closed-source software and the GRE). Go CNN!

I’m not really this angry, I just get a bit worked up over all the stupid things happening in the world today.

It’s now all but official. The government can detain people indefinitely, without charging them, without giving them a trial, even if they are an American citizen arrested in America. Ironically enough, today China agreed to improve its human rights record.