federalism and gay marriage

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Don Herzog over at Left2Right has a nice post on the supposed reasons to oppose gay marriage and their mutual incompatibility. He says there are three basic arguments:

1. Family law belongs to state governments. But it’s outrageous for state courts to rule that gay marriage is constitutionally required. That decision belongs to the people or legislatures of each state.
2. “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” That’s Art. 4, sec. 1 of the Constitution. If one state marries gays, it looks like other states would have to recognize those marriages.
3. Same-sex marriage is wrong, period. Marriage must be between one man and one woman.

Now if you are a strong proponent of federalism, then (1) makes sense. However, many people hold (3) but then try to argue (1) while at the same time saying there should be a constitutional amendment to prevent the situations arising from (2).

In fact, I was at a party last year where I was arguing this case with someone and it was clear that they thought (3) but instead were making some specious claims about the state having a vested interest in making babies. When pressed further on that they retreated to (1) with a sprinkling of (2) for justification. I viewed it as a minor success that I could talk them out of the constitutional amendment.

Of course, an arsenal of counter-arguments is only half the battle. But arguing the benefits is much easier, I think. Unless you’re CNN of course. Sometimes the Daily Show makes me hate the world.

good-bye money

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I ordered two math books from amazon so that I don’t have to enter into a recall war at the library with the other person who seems to want them so badly. I’m really digging the one I’m reading now though — Differential Geometry and Statistics. It’s got a gentle introduction to geometric concepts when dealing with things like fitting statistical models to data and will hopefully will give me a more sophisticated view on modeling. It’s way easier to read than Amari’s monograph on the same subject, which has a whole chapter devoted to a complex theoretical apparatus with no examples. Saying things like “the curvature looks like this function, which we call the Fisher information” is not nearly as helpful as “remember the Fisher information? It looks like this. This turns out to be a special case of the a general concept called the curvature.”

I need to read the material bottom-up. Or sideways, depending on where you think Statistics is relative to Differential Geometry. Actually, since it’s geometry, we’re trying to free ourselves from the tyranny of coordinates, so “up” and “sideways” are pretty meaningless altogether.

public defenders

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An article at Left2Right reminded me of the movie Slam which I saw recently. Compared to the defenders discussed in the article, that one seemed competent and honest, if a bit hopeless and mean. Essentially he told the protagonist to plea bargain or else, which is a tactic, not an argument. But the article is right — don’t blame the PDs, but blame the underfunded system that drives people away and encourages grifters.

yawn

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In case the old jive filter still amuses you, someone has written Gizoogle. According to its version of my homepage:

This was one of tha first projects I worked on at Berkeley spittin’ that real shit. We present a way of sippin’ a priority queue fo` optical data, where pimpin’ is not feasible.

Actually, I don’t find this sort of thing that funny after about 30 seconds.

too many problems

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… and not enough solutions:

  • Matching source and channel models for large sensor networks : I want to characterize when a fully-distributed set of gains can “match” a linear/matrix observation model with a linear/matrix communication channel model. I think it’s a broad class, especially as the number of gains (which is the number of sensors) increases.
  • Dense sensor network scaling laws: under some better constraints, it should be possible to show that the total capacity does not scale with the network size for dense networks.
  • Causal jamming relays: a new take on relays as potential jammers. You can’t trust anyone.
  • Fast distributed consensus: not quite sure where this is going, but it has to do with creating a speedy algorithm for calculating the average of a function on a graph.

There are, of course, other problems, but unless I write these down I’ll be liable to forget them when the next shiny object comes along.

maybe we can get along

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I recently installed Ubuntu on the computer I use at work, and am so much happier than I was running Windows. Ubuntu is a more user-friendly version of Debian, which is a godsend for laptops, since the installation process does all the hardware detection for you. I had tried Debian and getting X to work was a real pain. I then switched to Fedora Core 3 and decided it made me feel like I was in a straitjacket. Ubuntu is “just right” for me I think. Also, the releases have amusing names, like “Warty Warthog” and “Hoary Hedgehog.”

While browsing for extra LaTeX plugins, I came across the following:

arabtex (3.11-5) [universe] — Arabic/Hebrew macros for TeX/LaTeX

Arabic and Hebrew, eh? Maybe we can all get along.

LaTeX templates for conference posters

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I hacked together a LaTeX template for conference posters for the Wireless Foundations Center. After searching around on the web I couldn’t find a package that was (a) easy to use, (b) allowed for arbitrary layout, and (c) supported many different poster sizes. So I hacked together 2-3 other style file ideas from other people and made this template and associated style file. I’ll try and add features over the summer, but that’s a really low priority right now.

I’m using the package to make a poster for tomorrow’s day conference at Stanford and it’s going pretty smoothly, so I think it’s reasonably usable.