MemeMachineGo!

I’ve been receiving spam whose texts have obviously been generated by a Markov chain, with text from Foundation stories as input, to evade Bayesian spam filters. Each had just one line of text before the payload in an image.

Subject: your toy nation. This no Foundation, will doesn’t it none the if, you

you see that my first appearance standing. Before you’ve been Your truth of half goes to those caught it was almost every The

Subject: course, is HARI SELDON you, so? Pirenne, sipped at the system,

course of the words the visiplate). course that Trantor, adjournment rang out what them or all of

Subject: of the populace undoubtedly. SELDON; said no I’m referring to what

of the real thing, Hardin continued I would not one of Anacreon? Not of). There is merely the Jump was no promises attention to

Given that I read it in an email client with a Bayesian spam filter, it worked.

Truly, Asimov’s words will live forever. Their precise order may suffer.

The first derivative of daylight over time, or why the autumnal equinox gives me the blues.

The Autumnal equinox is in a couple of weeks, and during this time the days are getting shorter at the fastest rate they will all year, with the biggest change right on the day of the equinox. This graph is intended to compare the rate of change of the number of hours of daylight at two times during the year. At the Summer Solstice, light blue, there are a few days when the length of the daylight changes very little. But at the Autumnal Equinox, shown in dark green, the slope is very steep, showing that the amount of sunlight we get in a day is falling quickly. This has great implications for anyone with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder).

The world would be more interesting if more teachers subscribed to this simple tenet.

The teachings of Grand Master Masaaki Hatsumi echo through my head as he entreats me to attack a blackbelted disciple with a practice sword. “Always be able to kill your students,” he says.

Some nations can and do functionally move up the expiration of your passport.

Some countries require that your U.S. passport be valid not only for the duration of your visit, but also for three to six months after your entry or return from their country. […]

Brazil, Ecuador (including the Galapagos Islands), Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Paraguay, Romania, Singapore chop six months off a passport’s validity; Cambodia, Denmark (including Greenland), Fiji, Switzerland chop off three months.

(And there’s worse.)

Many Middle Eastern and African countries will deny entry and refuse to issue a visa if your current passport contains an entry or exit stamp from Israel. If you are in this situation, you should apply for a new passport.

=v= In response to a complaint about a typo:

The website was over halled when the web designer was super tiered. I agree, that does not make sense. I will work to correct that.

I will not make a joke about super-tiered web architecture.

Berkeley celebrates Indigenous People’s Day on the second Monday of October. This is variously sneered at for its political correctness or even labelled a salvo in a war against white people. Criticizing Columbus Day gets one quickly labelled a revisionist historian, at best.

Columbus Day Celebration? Think again…

Cuneo [one of Columbus’ crew] further notes that he himself took a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his personal slave, a gift from Columbus himself, but that when he attempted to have sex with her, she “resisted with all her strength.” So, in his own words, he “thrashed her mercilessly and raped her.”

While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, a story made up by Columbus - which is to this day still taught in some US schools - to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of these people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: “It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell…Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold…”

Columbus and his men also used the Taino as sex slaves: it was a common reward for Columbus’ men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: “A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand.”

However, the Taino turned out not to be particularly good workers in the plantations that the Spaniards and later the French established on Hispaniola: they resented their lands and children being taken, and attempted to fight back against the invaders. Since the Taino where obviously standing in the way of Spain’s progress, Columbus sought to impose discipline on them. For even a minor offense, an Indian’s nose or ear was cut off, se he could go back to his village to impress the people with the brutality the Spanish were capable of. Columbus attacked them with dogs, skewered them with pikes, and shot them.

Eventually, life for the Taino became so unbearable that, as Pedro de Cordoba wrote to King Ferdinand in a 1517 letter, “As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth… Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.”

Eventually, Columbus and later his brother Bartholomew Columbus who he left in charge of the island, simply resorted to wiping out the Taino altogether. Prior to Columbus’ arrival, some scholars place the population of Haiti/Hispaniola (now at 16 million) at around 1.5 to 3 million people. By 1496, it was down to 1.1 million, according to a census done by Bartholomew Columbus. By 1516, the indigenous population was 12,000, and according to Las Casas (who were there) by 1542 fewer than 200 natives were alive. By 1555, every single one was dead.

Christopher Columbus and the Indians

From his base on Haiti, Columbus sent expedition after expedition into the interior. They found no gold fields, but had to fill up the ships returning to Spain with some kind of dividend. In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

The chief source-and, on many matters the only source of information about what happened on the islands after Columbus came is Bartolome de las Casas, who, as a young priest, participated in the conquest of Cuba. For a time he owned a plantation on which Indian slaves worked, but he gave that up and became a vehement critic of Spanish cruelty. In Book Two of his History of the Indies, Las Casas (who at first urged replacing Indians by black slaves, thinking they were stronger and would survive, but later relented when he saw the effects on blacks) tells about the treatment of the Indians by the Spaniards. It is a unique account and deserves to be quoted at length:

“Endless testimonies … prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives…. But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy; small wonder, then, if they tried to kill one of us now and then…. The admiral, it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians…”

Las Casas tells how the Spaniards “grew more conceited every day” and after a while refused to walk any distance. They “rode the backs of Indians if they were in a hurry” or were carried on hammocks by Indians running in relays. “In this case they also had Indians carry large leaves to shade them from the sun and others to fan them with goose wings.”

Revisionism in defense of accuracy is no vice. I’m proud that my town calls the second Monday in October Indigenous People’s Day in preference to Columbus Day. I’m not pround that in my nation it’s a radical position.

(And, yes, I know full well that some of the societies of the indigenous people of the Americas c. 1492 included terrible violence. Outside of the straw men of right-wing commentary on the subject, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in denial of that.)

Here’s a good essay on the reaction to Stephen Colbert’s White House Correspondents routine.

So, you’ve got a bunch of responses saying that either a.) Colbert bombed or b.) Colbert “crossed the line.” (Thanks Fox!)

A quick explanation is in order. At some point — a crucial point in a young comic’s life — one realizes that the response of the audience just doesn’t matter. I am exaggerating only slightly. But somewhere out there on the road you have that one miserable show, using all the material you used for every other show, and you realize that audience feedback is critically important, but it is not defining. A MONTH of bad shows is a different animal altogether, but I trust you see my point.

In various circumstances as a road comic, I have seen every comic you can imagine, at some point or another, suck it. Hard. Seinfeld, Leno, Belzer, Ellen*, Ray Romano, pick ‘em. Sometimes you just don’t gel with an audience, but at that point you’ve been doing it long enough not to suddenly think the five years of good shows were somehow flukes.

But I have seen plenty of people “bomb” who left me breathless with the genius of their writing. Larry David, who a fair number of even the conservative culture mavens love, was notorious for his spellbinding nightclub routines that comics standing in the back of the room marvelled at but audiences hated. Garry Shandling famously worked open-mike nights for something like SEVEN YEARS before he was able to meld his brilliant writing with something audiences could relate to.

If Colbert “bombed”, it was because the audience didn’t like him. And you know what — they WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO. We have been treated to toothless feel-good comedy for so long, we have forgotten what the court jester’s job was: he was the only guy who could mock the King. And, seeing as we now have a President who acts like a King, it’s only fitting that Colbert revive the tradition in its truest form. If I remember correctly, the toady court followers were also fair game for the Jester, and we could hardly call the modern media anything less these days, can we?

(MemeMachineGo!: boldly unafraid to blog about yesterday’s news.)

I believe that men and women can someday achieve equality.

Fhionna Moore and colleagues at the University of St Andrews, UK, analysed questionnaires from 1851 heterosexual women between the ages of 18 and 35. They found that as a woman’s level of “resource control” increases — in other words as they become more financially independent — so does their preference for physical attractiveness in potential partners.

A wonderful day when women can feel as pressured to be financial successes as men have been, while men can feel as pressured to be beautiful as women have been!

In the annals of the 21st century department, light flies backwards… faster than light!

“Theory predicted that we could send light backwards, but nobody knew if the theory would hold up or even if it could be observed in laboratory conditions.”

Boyd recently showed how he can slow down a pulse of light to slower than an airplane, or speed it up faster than its breakneck pace, using exotic techniques and materials. But he’s now taken what was once just a mathematical oddity — negative speed — and shown it working in the real world.

“It’s weird stuff,” says Boyd. “We sent a pulse through an optical fiber, and before its peak even entered the fiber, it was exiting the other end. Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward, linking the input and output pulses.”

So, wouldn’t Einstein shake a finger at all these strange goings-on? After all, this seems to violate Einstein’s sacred tenet that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

“Einstein said information can’t travel faster than light, and in this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light,” says Boyd. “The pulse of light is shaped like a hump with a peak and long leading and trailing edges. The leading edge carries with it all the information about the pulse and enters the fiber first. By the time the peak enters the fiber, the leading edge is already well ahead, exiting. From the information in that leading edge, the fiber essentially ‘reconstructs’ the pulse at the far end, sending one version out the fiber, and another backward toward the beginning of the fiber.”

The introvert advantage:

Introversion is a loaded word. Just look it up in the dictionary and here’s what you’ll find:

Introversion: The state or tendency toward being wholly or predominantly concerned with and interested in one’s own mental life […]

Doesn’t sound so good, does it? Sounds downright narcissistic. […] For decades, psychologists subscribed to the notion that introversion was a low-grade pathology. Although introverts make up something like a third of the world’s population, it wasn’t uncommon for psychologists to write clinical definitions of introversion that went something like this:

“Introversion is normally characterized by a hesitant, reflective, retiring nature that keeps itself to itself, shrinks from objects, is always slightly on the defensive and prefers to hide behind mistrustful scrutiny.”

Extroverts, on the other hand, were treated as paragons of mental health:

“Extroversion is normally characterized by an outgoing, candid, and accommodating nature that adapts easily to a given situation [and] quickly forms attachments.” […]

It would be nice to see a glut of extroversion self-help books on the market—books like: Mastering the Art of Concentration: The Extroverts Guide to Blocking Out Superfluous Sensory Input or From Small Talk to Real Talk: How Not to Bore Introverts at Parties.

Cary Tennis suggests an introvert dating manifesto:

Whereas we are both introverts and do not care for small talk, finding it on the whole a trivial and demeaning pursuit; and Whereas we have spent our lives feeling inadequate to the task of small talk when in reality we feel that small talk is simply stupid and unattractive and do not care to participate in it; and Whereas rather than openly attack the majority for indulging in small talk we have patiently tried our best to imitate it, however unskillfully, and have never received our due for such selfless and humiliating attempts to make extroverts feel less uncomfortable with their shallow and meaningless lives; and Whereas neither one of us really cares whether the other can skillfully imitate the small talk of others anyway; and Whereas being highly intuitive we perceive plenty about the other person without having to go through the tedious process of a rote question-and-answer conversation, which moreover we would find nearly obscene in its deadly obtuseness; and Whereas we are two free human beings freely choosing to associate in the manner that suits us both; and Whereas we feel confident that if we spend some time together we will, being each of us intellectually nimble, in due time find ample ground for conversation;

Therefore be it resolved that, finding some initial interest in each other, we will commit to spending a sufficient amount of time together without either of us forcing upon the other any conventional, preconceived notions, with particular care not to assume any of the rote behaviors associated with the “dating” mode, and pledge moreover to give due consideration to any and all modes of togetherness including silent trips to the library, the viewing of movies without comment, mutual reading, meals taken in relative silence, long drives during which little is said, and, further, given that our thoughts, when voiced, often are of a complex and many-faceted variety requiring relatively lengthy elucidation, we pledge that should such thoughts begin to be voiced, the one who is listening will provide the one who is speaking ample and necessary time in which to complete such thoughts, and will provide such periodic promptings as might be necessary to reassure the other that in spite of the radically compressed norms of extroverted conversation he or she is not in fact going on too long but is actually enlarging on the subject in a manner that is exceedingly pleasing in its richness and detail.

Previously, Introvert identity politics.

Galileo Was Wrong,’ claims geocentrist writer.

The Earth is at the center of Robert Sungenis’ universe. Literally. Yours too, he says. Sungenis is a geocentrist. He contends the sun orbits the Earth instead of vice versa. He says physics and the Bible show that the vastness of space revolves around us; that we’re at the center of everything, on a planet that does not rotate. He has just completed a 1,000-page tome, “Galileo Was Wrong,” the first in a pair of books he hopes will persuade readers to “give Scripture its due place, and show that science is not all it’s cracked up to be.” Geocentrism is a less-known cousin of the intelligent design, or anti-evolution, movement. Both question society’s trust in science, instead using religion to explain how we got here - and, in geocentrism’s case, just where “here” is. […]

For several years the Web site of his Catholic Apologetics International (www.catholicintl.com) offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could disprove geocentrism and prove heliocentrism (a sun-centered solar system). There were numerous attempts, Sungenis said, “some serious, some caustic,” but no one did it to his satisfaction. “Most admitted it can’t be proven.” There’s also no proof that the Earth rotates, he said.

But what about Foucault’s famous pendulum? Its plane of oscillation revolves every 24 hours, showing the rotation of the planet. If the Earth didn’t rotate, it wouldn’t oscillate. Nope, Sungenis said: There just may be some other force propelling it, such as the pull of stars. What Foucault’s pendulum does prove to Sungenis is that science is full of things that cannot be proven. And in the absence of proof, the Bible has answers. “If you see the Earth as just a humdrum planet among stars circling in a vast universe, then we’re not significant, we’re just part of a crowd,” Sungenis said. “But if you believe everything revolves around Earth, it gives another picture - of purpose, a meaning of life.”

I found the shape of earth: opinions differ tone of this article to be very scary. At first, I thought it must be a hoax — I mean, his name is an anagram for True Subgenius (well, almost.) But, no, it’s apparently sincere.

Lucky is as lucky does.

Professor Wiseman executed a ten-year study to determine the nature of luck, and published his findings in a book called The Luck Factor: The Scientific Study of the Lucky Mind. Among other things, he experimentally studied the lottery winnings from people who count themselves as “lucky” and compared them to those who are self-described as “unlucky,” and found that one’s perception of their own luck before a lottery has no bearing on their likelihood of winning. Naturally this outcome was no surprise, because lotteries are driven purely by random chance. But in another test, the good professor asked participants to count the number of photographs in a sample newspaper, and subjects who has described themselves as “lucky” were much more likely to notice a message on page two, disguised as a half-page advertisement with large block letters: STOP COUNTING–THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.

Visual Complexity is a way cool compendium of ways information has been displayed.

This graph shows that it’s not a bad first approximation.

=v= Share and Enjoy:

“I’m Mark Foley and I approve of this text message.”

Remote-controlled headless zombie flies stalk by night, the movie!

In an extreme demonstration of this principle, flies expressing P2X2 in the TTMn-PSI-DLMns group of thoracic neurons were decapitated. The headless bodies stood characteristically motionless (Yellman et al., 1997) in the open arena until illuminated and then took flight on circuitous, collision-prone trajectories.

A caption notes:

Photostimulation experiments were performed in a cylindrical arena (diameter 8 mm, height 2 mm) that could be homogeneously illuminated with 355 nm laser light. The arena was covered by a glass ceiling in (A)-(C) but left open in (D), as decapitated flies do not spontaneously walk, jump, or fly, making their confinement unnecessary.