To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.
- George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose (1946)
Metablogging II
Quote of the Day
The game of life, is to keep the SF’s score low. If you do something bad in life, the SF gets two points. If you don’t do something good that you should have done, the SF gets one point. You never score, so the SF always wins.
Allegedly from Paul Erdős . The SF is, of course, the Supreme Fascist.
Omniscience
Leszek Kołakowski in “My Correct Views About Everything”:
True, I was almost omniscient (yet not entirely) when I was 20 years old but, as you know, people grow stupid when they grow older, and so, I was much less omniscient when I was 28 and still less now.
I’m glad it’s not only me, then.
Huh?
Sorry, only more politics. Guantanamo commander on prisoner suicides:
Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.
“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said.
“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”
What? I’m rather reluctant to start crying “fascist”, but this just sounds like a slightly skewed world view right there. Next thing you know, we’ll be worrying about the ragheads putting fluorine into the drinking water, thus corrupting our precious bodily fluids. For a neat geometric interpretation of how such craziness might work, see the excellent David Brin: Altruistic Horizons.
Privacy Stock Phrases
Bruce Schneier on the value of privacy supplies some great stock answers to the privacy debate’s killer phrase:
“If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Ambition
I had a passion for the content of physics, but I was also possessed by a hungry ambition for its earthly rewards. Both passion and hunger persisted over the years, despite the inevitable disappointments. Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future Tsung-Dao Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France.
This is from My Life as a Quant. Me, I’d be content to just be another Emanuel Derman by now, and I’m still in university.
Depressing Quote of the Day
Age is of course a fever chill
That every physicist must fear.
He’s better dead than living still
When once he’s past his thirtieth year.
- Paul Dirac
Let’s see, that leaves me with an expected productive work life of… minus one year? Gladly, Leon Lederman thinks that the observation that Dirac so eloquently versified won’t hold in the twenty-first century. The Onion reference is also funny.
Your Mother
From the recently revived and still great bash.org:
* andy Quit (Quit: Your Mom is so dumb that she tried to minimize a 12 variable function to a minimal sum of products expression using a karnaugh map instead of the Quine-McCluskey Algorithm.)
Gladly, I’m rather sure that my mom would never attempt to do that.
Exactly.
Thomas Sowell in a Washington Times article commemorating Rosa Parks, via Cafe Hayek:
People who decry the fact that businesses are in business “just to make money” seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
It’s a brilliant condensation of something that a lot of people don’t seem to get. I understood the principle, but my explanation usually ended up being a bit more long-winded and complicated.
Things You Don’t Want To Read
…when trying to add a minor modification to a piece of Lisp code you want to use:
;; This is of course an overkill, but Lisp is such a fun ;; language... Test yourself, read this! ;-) ;;
Yeah, sure. Would anyone in the know care to fix this so that I can use
arbitrary MediaWiki URLs
with it?
In other news, I’m not dead, only drifting through my life aimlessly, without
major emotions towards either end. No interesting discoveries, no catastrophes,
no endorphin explosions. Even the fact that I got myself a
X40 to replace my aging A31p looks only mildly exciting.
I formally submitted my resignation from my job at
great deal since the decision behind this was made some time in late 2003, but
it still feels significant since I’ve been with the company from our common
humble beginnings (me freshly graduated from school, the company consisting of
the founders, another employee and me) in 2000. A lot of things have changed
since then, not all for the better, but it’s definitely too early to
links on that one, it’s all there, somewhere…).
At least until the end of the year, I’m resolved to be a full-time student
and find out whether there’s any future for me in physics. I damn well hope so,
because I got tired of doing software qua software some time ago, and there’s a
lack of other perspectives out there – the only other thing I consider both
interesting and promising for a decent amount of bread-winning is economics, and
I doubt I’ll go very far there if I can’t handle the mathematics in my physics
courses. There, I said it. I’m dreadfully afraid of the mathematics courses.
Rationally, I’m pretty sure I can handle it, but there’s a number of things that
worry me. First: the last time I regularly dabbled in mathematics any more than
skimming papers or playing with algorithms was back in school, and that’s six
years gone now. I had thought that it might be a good idea to buy some
introductory text books and attempt to work from them before I actually start
university, but my progress so far has been rather disappointing, which didn’t
exactly achieve the relief I had intended. People I’ve talked to have assured me
that trying on my own is one of the harder paths to take, but I’m still a bit
shaken by that result.
On the good side? I desperately cling to the memory of doing rather well in
school (probably worsening my
complex), and I still get a lot of evidence that I’m not entirely stupid.
When I look at myself today, however, I see a lot more insecurity about my
intellectual capacities than I did five years ago. I have a hard time
determining how much of that can be attributed to the fact that I’m vastly
better educated now than I was then, and how much is actually "intelligence
decay", whatever its reasons may be, but I figure that I’ll just have to
take the leap and find out whether the current me is still competitive in the
realm of abstract reasoning.
Was that interesting? Well, at least I feel better after writing it down.
