Author Archives: Anand Sarwate

don’t blame Canada

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According to the NY Times:

Still, since President Bush took office, the economy has lost more than 2 million jobs, the worst performance since Herbert Hoover was President.

I was a little surprised to find such a critical statement hidden inside this piece, which otherwise tried to paint a rosy picture of the situation — unemployment dropped, but not by a whole lot. Perhaps this is a case where you see the editors wielding the red pen liberally but leaving little scraps hinting at what’s really going on. This is a cue for me to start doing close readings of every news story I read, but that seems a bit tedious. On the other hand, I could just bring my own bias to reading the story and hunt down the anti-Bush bits.

On the other side, the BBC seems to take pleasure in silly swipes at Dubya.

middle chulym

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I’ve always been fascinated with linguistics and different languages. I’m sure many kids invent their own language or secret writing system. I wish I could find mine, I seem to remember it being really cool. The fact that there are so many different natural spoken languages is amazing to me, far more than are even written down. I read today in Science Now (non-free reg. required) that:

Scholars have found a previously unrecorded language spoken by Siberians living along the Chulym River, 450 kilometers north of Western Mongolia. Known locally as “Ös,” it has also been provisionally termed “Middle Chulym.” The language is thought to belong to the Siberian Turkic family of languages, which are very different from Slavic languages like Russian.

The full article is here if you have a subscription. I think Ös is a much better name than Middle Chulym, but whatever the language is, I think it’s incredible that these people have been living peaceably in Siberia without anyone noticing they speak an entirely different language.

The article goes on to talk about Russian linguists’ early studies of these languages (in the Communist era) that were politically motivated to erase the ethnic heritage of groups living in Siberia. This policy was also extended to Mongolia, where they outlawed the writing of Mongolian in its traditional script. They only started teaching the script again in 1994, with limited success, according to a friend of mine who spent a year there teaching English. However, it does make for some pretty wicked looking tattoos.

more than projections

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Le Monde Diplomatique has a number of interesting maps available. The introduction is a nice short essay on cartography and the politics of mapmaking, and then there are a series of maps, some more confusing than others. I’m sure Edward Tufte would have some critiques. But all in all, it’s pretty informative and a good read. LMD is a pretty lefty publication, so it’s naturally got its bias, but they do a good job of covering stories that are missed by the “mainstream” press.

obsession

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I think I am obsessed with professionalism in performance groups — people need to be quiet backstage, even if the audience chatter is loud, and they should not mess with the curtains, play with the handicap elevator, and so on. I think it’s a comment on our ADD society that a group of 16 people cannot just stand still and concentrate on the performance to come for 10 minutes. God forbid they have to sing a piece for 10 minutes, I think some might wander off to the bathroom halfway through. Ranting aside, however, I think our performance today was pretty decent, although Poulenc is probably still spinning six feet under.

Marat/Sade rehearsals highlight this problem of people remaining quiet and focussed, although there some fault has to be given to the way in which rehearsal time is (not) used. We go for 4 hours and mostly stand around. In such a visual production, where stage images convey a lot of information to the audience, having bodies to fill the space in rehearsal is important. People start to resent “having nothing to do,” however, and there’s a limit to which you can practice the 3 gestures you have with no context while something else is going on. I’m not sure there is a way to balance the needs of the production against the needs of the actors, but it is true that everyone can get up to 3 units, no matter how many lines they have, and that should pacify psople to some degree. A little sugar to sweeten the deal.

more xhml nonsense

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I went and validated my new homepage as XHTML 1.1 Strict blah blah blah. The funny thing is that the little image they give you when you validate your CSS is not XHTML compliant, since the <img> tag doesn’t have the proper ending delimiter />. Those W3C people are tricky…

safari woes

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Perusing through Davy Hyatt’s blog, I came across his statement that “Safari has draconian XML error handling,” which may explain why I’ve had so much trouble getting sites I’ve designed to look right in Safari. However, anyone who claims Safari’s CSS support is perfect should read Mark Pilgrim’s error tracker. Safari does some weird things with CSS.

I don’t know much about programming languages, but I can see immediate benefits and costs of being strict about rendering only good XML, but is that really wise, given the wide range of people providing content nowadays? I tend to hand-code most of my HTML, and I’m too lazy to read up the XML spec so that I can cross every t and dot every i. I suppose it’s time for me to run everything I’ve written through a validator.

no longer a travesty

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Thankfully, this blog is no longer the number one hit for “ergodicity” on Google. But in the event that people come here anyway, I present some definitions, courtesy of Wikipedia, Richard Durrett, and others.

The ergodic hypothesis says that averaging over time and averaging over the statistical ensemble are the same. So let’s say I have some box spitting a random number every second. If the random process controlling the box is ergodic, then I can find certain quantities — for example, the average — by either averaging the observed variables that I see, or by calculating the “theoretical” average from the statistics governing the box.

We would, of course, like most real-world systems to be ergodic, since we can then measure them and make estimates based on the measurements. The hope is that these estimates will (in the limit as you get infinite data) converge to the “real” value. Of course, this leads to an existential bind, because we have no idea if there is a “real” underlying value.

It’s a tricky thing, ergodicity, and getting to the bottom of it reveals a lot about how we view the randomness in our world, the assumptions we make on it, and how we try to control it.

bottlecap collections

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Now, I do use iTunes, but haven’t bought anything from their store. I also don’t drink Pepsi. But if I did, I would probably consider Tune Recycler, which will take bottlecaps and redeem them for songs from indie labels and help all those indie rock kids trying to make it in this harsh and angst-ridden world. Each bottlecap also gets Apple more money for its iTunes store, which may or may not be your bag, depending on how you feel. But it’s a cool idea nevertheless. It reminds me of microcredit schemes for some reason. More on that later.

penguins of the world unite

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I heard and read on the BBC today that the UN is concerned about the ownership of biotechnogies devolving from Antarctica. I didn’t even realize the UN had a University down there. But the whole notion of large corporations raiding the ecosystem and patenting genes and proteins from research done by the UN is pretty odious. I think someone should go and organize a grassroots resistance among the penguins. One big union of all the flightless aquatic waterfowl. They have nothing to lose but their chains!

and on the seventh day

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Everyone seems to be blogging about this piece of news (NY Times, free reg required) from Georgia, where they have stricken the word evolution from the curriculum, and toned down references to the age of the Earth. Full decision is here. I’m sure these people are pissed off. The original article is at Creative Loafing, which has some other juicy tidbits. The Georgia Superintendent of Schools, Kathy Cox, said people associate evolution with “that monkeys-to-man sort of thing.” Here’s a good one:

Cox has already caught flak for a history curriculum that, in high school U.S. history classes, starts in 1876, ignoring biggies like the Civil War. In world history courses, students won’t cover anything earlier than 1500 — you know, material like Socrates and Roman civilization.

After reading Roger Pennock‘s book, Tower of Babel, I am even more horrified than before. Young Earth Creationism, as he calls it, is about the most backwards form of creationism there is. These people not only deny evolution, but probably believe that dinosaurs were a big joke of God’s, or that they represent species who didn’t make it on the Ark.

Intelligent Design Creationism, a second “alternative” is a philosophically poor alternative to the methodology of science. It succumbs to the fallacy of “if I can’t explain it, it must be magical,” thus drawing an imaginary line between the inexplicable and the understood. Because we cannot exhibit the immense complexity of biological systems through natural selection and random mutation, they must have been designed by an intelligent creator. Many people don’t have a problem with this intellectually impoverished logic. If you stop and think about it, it’s just what the Raelians think, but everyone regards them as nutcases.

The biggest problem with intelligent design creationists is the attitude towards science that they propose. The line that they draw is akin to the line funding agencies are starting to draw between “sexy research” and “pointless research.” Rather than investigating a combination of fundamental principles and applied programs, the trend is increasingly to fund those proposals which will have an immediate application. But to really understand how to cure a disease, you need to know how it works, and for that you need a fundamental understanding of biological processes. Advocates like Christopher Reeve and Michael J. Fox use their celebrity status to help fund scientific research, but also promote their own agenda — Parkinsons becomes “more important to cure” than Alzheimers. By allowing those with little scientific knowledge to control the direction of scientific research, we run the risk of derailing scientific progress here.