ScienceNow has an article about a new result in number theory on the distribution of arithmetic progressions of primes, that is, sequences of primes who differ by a constant number from step to step. The reason I post it here is they used ergodic theory to prove the result, although the peer review jury is still out on its correctness. That’s the problem with mathematics sometimes — you get stuck in your own esoteric corner and it’s hard to validate results.
tocharoi
Back when I took Sanskrit, our professor mentioned other related languages in the Indo-European language family, and my interest was piqued. I picked up a copy of Baldi’s book on IE languages, and one of the ones that came up that I had never heard of was Tocharian, a language with some documentary evidence in Central Asia. A guy from my class actually ended up taking Tocharian, masochist that he is. I always wanted to learn more, but was too lazy to do the painful linguistics paper reading until this essay came to my attention. It’s worth a skim, just to learn something about ancient Central Asia, a subject which is rarely dealt with in general history courses.
where there’s a will
George Will, alumnus of my high school, Pulitzer prize-winner, and conservative jerk, is undoubtedly a good writer. Consider this piece from the Post:
Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.
It has the comforting cadence of a proverb, is wittiy, and cuts deep. The whole essay is worth reading — he takes Bush to task for his “us-white-people” comment.
Nineteen sixty-two
Made it from 1953-1962 in my journal abstract marathon. It’s interesting to see how many ideas that come up nowadays were vaguely formulated so far back in the past. It’s also interesting to see how lon it took for terminology to become finalized. Common concepts in my field such as mutual information were not pinned down for a while, and there are editorials calling for this or that to be well defined and for definitions to be fixed. There’s a hilarious editorial by Doob, who criticizes the way in which results start out as intuitive and appealing but incorrect, and in the bloody iterative process of making them mathematically rigorous they lose their applicability, a criticism which is still valid.
The most depressing thing for me is that very simple results that we do for homework in classes now were once considered worthy enough for publication in a journal. That’s progress, and it is good. But it’s getting harder and harder to tell an interesting story I think.
raising the bar
Here’s a quote I came across during my new mission. It’s by Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory, in an editorial called “The Bandwagon”, published in IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 1956.
Continue reading
neue projekt
I have a new plan to read or skim the abstracts of every paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. And then form a list of ones that I think are worth taking another look at. A sort of exhaustive literature search, if you will. I’ll post an update in a month after I get past the first decade.
abuse
From the Financial Times, via Crooked Timber:
The chilling photographs show US soldiers forcing prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison to simulate sex with each other and to pose naked with US men and women in military uniforms. Others show a detainee with wires attached to his body in an attempt to convince him he might be electrocuted, and naked prisoners stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written in English on his skin.
I looked at the photos (warning: pretty graphic) this morning and it put me off my lunch. At the risk of conflating unrelated issues, the president seems to think that the US is a country for white people:
There’s a lot of people in the world who don’t believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren’t necessarily — are a different color than white can self-govern.
I can’t tell if Bush is using the “royal we” or if he’s promoting the “democracy: it’s not just for white people” line. In any event, it’s always good policy to call your critics racists when you don’t want to admit you made a mistake. Given those photos, it seems that some of those people whose beliefs he rejects are the ones on the ground bringing democracy to Iraq.
I would love to believe that those photos are not representative of systematic problems, but Amnesty International disagrees. Who is providing training to these interrogators? Who should be held accountable for these abuses?
One of the soldiers facing court martial, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, reported that “We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things…like rules and regulations, and it just wasn’t happening.”
Apparently he’s a reservist who works as a corrections officer. I suppose that the procedure for military prisoners is different, but is that an excuse for these abuses? Here’s Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Perhaps some more training is in order. Or we can just turn the whole mess over in June and make it someone else’s problem.
anchor
The Anchor Song by Bjork is ridiculously simple, but somehow captures part of the essence of German cabaret music that I love so much. Perhaps it’s the simple horn lines, the very song-ness of it of the structure, or just Bjork’s voice. But I could honestly listen to it over and over again. In fact, I’ll do that.
no, it’s my SQL
I converted everything over from Berkeley DB to mySQL, and things seem to be happy now. Of course, I had to learn a little bit about mySQL, but learning more about databases can’t hurt, can it? Can it?
LLLLLICHY
[Note: posting will continue until the database thing is sorted out — I suppose I will lose all new posts or something horrible like that, but oh well.]
Over at dsquared there is a very humorous argument that is just the fodder I need to put my anti-war opinions on a sounder rhetorical footing. It is an analysis of the similarities between OCYWRSHSHIP and LLLLLICHY, where
OCYWRSHSHIP = OF COURSE YOU WOULD RATHER STILL HAVE SADDAM HUSSEIN IN POWER, and
LLLLLICHY = LALALALA I CANT HEAR YOU.
His basic argument is that pro-war “liberals” such as Hitchens use the
OCYWRSHSHIP to gain the moral high ground and stave off the debate, which if fought on the basis of their own professed ideologies, they would lose. This runs dangerously close to pointing at others and saying “well, you’re just afraid of losing the argument,” that doesn’t make the criticism of the rhetorical tactic invalid.
An Ergodic Walk 