Corpus Hypercubus

I stumbled across this site through the Presurfer. (Kuriositas). It has the best flash animation of a tesseract rotation I've seen. If the "au shucks, bumpkin" style of the site's explaination bothers you, skip it and go to mathworld and get the grown-up's version.

Patrons at the Met

Another round-up. I know I have some thoughts of my own, but I'll be darned if I can sus-out where I keep them. The media, ding an sich, isn't any help. Finding something that isn't cut and paste (usually from an advertiser) is a job that doesn't seem worth the effort when the weather is nice and summer days are long. One suspects that Lanier's criticism of the wired had its genesis on a day like today. The first two links are about science and the inside baseball aspects of attribution.

• Higgs is the hot topic at ICHEP: Everyone’s catching Higgs fever, even French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The elusive particle – and the race between the experiments at Fermilab’s Tevatron and those at the Large Hadron Collider to discover it – have made headlines for years, but the frenzy reached new heights in the run-up to the International Conference on High Energy Physics.
• The $2 billion error: It’s a sordid but rather entertaining story (would make a decent screen-play), and I stumbled on to it whilst Merrill Goozner’s history of the modern pharmaceutical industry “The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs”. Not only did the sequencing error set back Genetics Institute in the race to patent the synthetic manufacture of EPO, but Genetics Institute had actually stolen the sequence from Amgen in the first place.

The next three links question the accepted view by taking the cover off the memory hole and peering inside.A lot of us are old enough to remember some of these things for ourselves, but ...

• Think Again: These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan. Former presidential candidate John McCain has called his own foreign-policy views "a 21st-century policy interpretation of the Reagan Doctrine."
• The American Establishment: This article addresses what should be a puzzling question: Why did Barack Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court? Not only has Kagan never been a judge, but, far more problematically, she has over the course of a 25-year legal and political career taken almost no public positions on any significant legal or political questions.
• You must be Joking: Seriously, I hear from time to time that our nation's opinion leaders are sincere. That they aren't being deceptive, disingenuous, dishonest, but are merely stating valid opinions that, if you took a step back and thought about them, are a perfectly reasonably approach to an important problem or issue.

The next two are about Israel and the politicians who use it as chum around campaign donation season.

• An Alliance In Search Of A Reason To Exist: There is almost nothing in Frum’s argument that comes from the last twenty years, and much that has happened in the last twenty years weighs against continuing the alliance in its current form. First, as Millman says, the Cold War is long over, and whatever strategic advantage Israel provided back then disappeared along with the Soviet Union.
• Locus Sanctus: Whatever else one wants to say about the proposed Islamic center or the Cordoba Initiative, one thing that ought to be obvious right away is that this is a matter to be decided by New Yorkers, especially by the people who live in the immediate vicinity. The local community board supported this project almost unanimously, which should make the protestations of a politician parachuting in from the other side of the continent as irrelevant as they are ridiculous.

Here is one that almost everyone suspects. Them that got, get.

• No to Oligarchy: This upper-crust of extremely wealthy families are hell-bent on destroying the democratic vision of a strong middle-class which has made the United States the envy of the world. In its place they are determined to create an oligarchy in which a small number of families control the economic and political life of our country.

The last two are about Korea and by extension China. As the fight to keep the tax breaks for the rich intersect the campaign season, I'll bet the war debt owed China doesn't get much play. Instead we can look forward to tough talk, preserving our freeedoms, and the necessary expansion of our security apparatus (temporary, only temporary) needed to grow our way out. After all, magical thinking has always worked in the past.

• South Korea reels as US backpedals: As United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates this week met in Seoul with their Republic of Korea (ROK) counterparts Yu Myung-hwan and Kim Tae-young in an historic "2+2" summit, the Cheonan sinking in March, the defining crisis that was supposed to highlight the relevance and effectiveness of their relationship, instead cast an ugly shadow over the event.
• Reassessing China's Role in North Korea: Once again, North Korea is playing brinksmanship and escalating tensions by raising questions about its willingness to instigate armed conflict with South Korea. And once again, the United States is trying to persuade China to take a stronger stance toward the North.

I suppose the short of it is to keep your own backyard clean, and your house in order cuz the rest of the world will go on its merry way, with or without you.

Not Everyone is Here to Help

Ratings agencies refuse to rate collateralized asset securities

Gosh, can you imagine being held responsible for your own work. When has a cook ever been blamed for a burned dish? The agencies have every right to take your ball and go home. Our freedoms are at stake.

That darn Hypno-Toad

They've faced down humans time and time again, but Fred Phelps and his minions from the Westboro Baptist Church were not ready for the cosplay action that awaited them today at Comic-Con. After all, who can win against a counter protest that includes robots, magical anime girls, Trekkies, Jedi and...kittens?

Being something of a cynic, I wonder how much the local media has to pay to get a genuine Fred Phelps dilemma in their market? For an org that doesn't live in this world, they seem to have mastered our legal industry. Since they picketed a military funeral, Fox has gone south on them. People's discovery of humor has sent MSNBC the same way and all that remains is a local Lucy Luscious to do a minute's color commentary running up to the advertisments. Poor Fred's Q ratings have gone way down. I imagine him as a coot in a rocking chair muttering about his headline draw, "in the old days."

Article link w/ pictures and video

He ain't got no pulse

Image - FreakingNews,com

Our former VP, Darth Cheney, has suffered a 5th heart attack. Make your own Borg jokes. Predictably, some media sources have excoriated others for even mentioning cost: "..war hero..", "..outpouring of venom..." Below are a few cost estimates, arrived at by old-fashoned averaging of multiple sources.

• $ 100 K - Cost of Device
• $ Half Million - Estimated current bill
• $ 55 K - Previous mild heart attack
• Lifetime bill - Top Secret, National Security, eyes only
• $ 34 Million + amenities - Estimated current worth
• Tapayer (you) - Footing the bills

In a related development, Congress is working to balance the military budget with caps on VA healthcare expenses. The anything goes lifetime medical plan for themselves and their families remains untouched.

Wednesday Evening

Here are a series of links that all seemed to cross my radar almost simultaneously. The first has to do with polls, specifically the 538 Poll. They claim to use Beysian methods to extract meta-data from published polls to .. well, blow more smoke I guess. On the various poll websites there is a kerfluffle regarding landline vs. cell, various weighing methodologies, and enough sigmas, deltas, and probability densities to induce MEGO. A much more pertinent question is who designs the questions, the client or the pollster, do the polling compainies know the desired result (read: cui bono) before or after submitting the bill, who the heck do they poll (have you ever been contacted, your family, your friends?) and how often are these numbers invented on the fly by journalists looking to add some scientifical gravatas to a partisan fluff piece?

• John Zogby's Open Letter to Nate Silver: John Zogby wrote an open letter to Nate Silver that is typically seen as an expression of emotion and clash of egos. But in my view, the deeper reality it revealed between the lines was that 538 has created a real business model problem for pollsters.

Now, while Israel is away from the penumbra of the frothing-mouth crew, some of the more informed opinions are having their say.

• Enforces consensus, jettisons democracy: I have the unenviable task of telling you tonight about the state of the State of Israel. In short, it's not good. I've been following Israeli politics since I was a teenager in 1967 and I don't think I've ever felt more alarmed and depressed about what is happening within Israel.
• Discrimination against Arabs in Israel: The possibility of filing civil suits in cases of discrimination in public accommodations is a relatively recent development in Israeli law. It has developed in both case law and statutes. In the last decade, Israeli courts have applied the constitutional right to equality to relationships between private parties through the use of private law doctrines. (pdf.)

The next set is about good old-fashioned class war. As a small town farm kid, I was made aware that some coasted and some had to work hard to break even. This isn't news to most, but possession of the proper accent and vocabulary, mannerisms and assumptions, and a name or two to drop go a lot further than hard work or acumin in greasing the rail and getting your shot. Cranky attitude to be sure, but the best and brightest seem to have a consensus about their own significance that isn't shared by reality at large.

• The Roots of White Anxiety: But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
• The Trouble With Meritocracy: For anyone with an appropriate skepticism toward meritocracy and its works, there’s an obvious critique of my suggestion, in today’s column, that America might be better off if our top-flight colleges welcomed more students from demographics — the white working class, rural America, evangelical Christians, etc. — that are currently viewed with suspicion and hostility by the highly-educated elite.
• The American Ruling Class: When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use.
• The Class War We Need: The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system.

Congress has just reviewed the use of Predator Drones along the southern border. This doesn't feel right to me for several reasons. Giving some enforcement hire the ability to play video games, with real world consequences several states away, from a bunker in Nevada? Face it, gamers excel in slipping out from underneath adult supervision. That's part of the game. The establishment of a regular patrol area will mean the establishment of fixed communication and command functions. Perfect for crackers who need some time to break in. I would think that some in the military would see this as a potential security hole for their own weapons. The crash and burn rate for UAVs is currently about 10 times that of manned flights, and they cost a bundle. If one police agency has them, everybody needs them. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

• A hidden world, growing beyond control: The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
• Jaysen A. Yochim, Major, US Army: The Vulnerabilities of Unmanned Aircraft System Common Data Links to Electronic Attack. (pdf)

And finally the Front Porch Republic, a multi author blog that sways between grounded common sense and some of the most inanely dense philosophical claptrap you've ever decided to skip over.(but I like it anyway)

• The Information Age Springs a Definitive Leak: Funny enough, the barking message is on the blank side of a sign that originally advertised a local Reggae Music Festival. On the furiously adapted re-use side however, it now proclaims : “NUKE THE OIL SPILL”. So much for bongs and a funky back beat, this new age has a more emphatic solution: atom-splitting bombs.

The Greater Good

This week's SF Weekly (July 21, 2010) contains a list by Benjamin Wachs titled Ban-Wagon. The jist of it lists things our city government might ban for the dreaded Greater-Good.

• Pension Reform
• Things that look like guns
• The 49ers
• LOLcats
• Humor that isn't empowering
• Sex that doesn't offend the Midwest
• Things that are labeled "organic," but aren't organic enough for us
• Books: We all know they're going to die eventually anyway
• Intolerence
• Straight white guys
• Gendered pronouns
• Coffee beans without a romantic origin story

Now I'm sure that this is Irony. I mean the adults on the Circus of Supervisors would never ... Surely the Mayor would want to appear level-headed for his campaign .. A bit of self-depreciation from the chattering class? .. If the same powers that know when to give us rain (when you're out from underneath the awning) have any sway in this matter, Brucecorp's Bay Guardian will take this vital story and run with it.

Back in the real world, this bit of doggerel was sufficient excuse to post a picture of a small town's (Springfield, N.Y.) 4th of July.