My son's words

One quiet evening we were watching TV - my wife, the kids and me. It was warm and late, so Michael fell asleep on my shoulder. Soon enough it as time to go upstairs. When I woke him up, the sleepy boy said: "Dad, I am sleeping on you, and you're sleeping on the sofa, and the sofa is sleeping on the floor, and the floor is sleeping on the house, and the house is sleeping on the cold hard Earth, and the Earth is sleeping in Space, and the Space is sleeping in the Universe, and the Universe is sleeping in God".

Auto Industry Bailout

You want to save auto industry? Sure. Let's give the workers 2 years worth of jobless benefits at 75% of salary and medicaid. Let's offer loan gurantees to any company willing to open shop in Detroit and sell 40+mpg cars in two years.

The big three? Who cares?

Mom is back from the hospital

About two months spent in, open heart surgery, very hard and long recovery. She is still not quite herself, but the prognosis is good.

When I look back at this ordeal, I realize we've just spent 200,000. I am not a poor man at all, but I could barely afford something like this. I would have to stop spending on my kids' education, too. Thankfully, the government helped with Medicare

Nowadays, it seems, every person, after reaching certain age, is guaranteed to need this kind of spending to stay alive 10 or fifteen years longer. This kind of money would bankrupt most people, and I am afraid the government will not have any money either, in near future. We've gotten so good at medicine, doctors can literally perform miracles. For a price.

Personally, I would do whatever it takes to help my mother, bankruptcy or no bankruptcy. And in my particular case, it would probably be enough. But many people simply don't have enough resources to do what it takes. And in aggregate, as a state, much less as the whole world, we don't have enough resources to do everything for everyone. Who picks the winners? Is my Mom supposed to live longer, or someone else's? The science brings terrible moral choice - no matter what we do, someone who could live dies.

I don't care at the moment. My Mom lives.

A question of love.

While I was walking the dog yesterday, the kids and my wife got into a discussion about love. When I came home, Michael greeted me with a brand new joke:

How does Mom scream?
With love.

Halloween costumes for Obama and McCain

NPR asked today: what should they wear?

The answer is perfectly obvious - both should derss as G. W. Bush!

Heard on NPR - begathon ad

NPR (WNYC, to be precise) is having the semiannual begathon (theoretically semiannual - in reality they do them 3-4 times a year, plus "sponsorship announcements"). One segment in particular struck me as unusually sinister, even for NPR.

They accept a call from a young girl. The girl says that her parent always have NPR on in the house and in the car (even in bathroom), but they never contribute any money. So the announcer asks the girl to get her Mom on the phone. Flustered and ashamed Mom says that she always wanted to pay but forgot. Ca-ching!

The moral of the story: let your kids listen to NPR, and they will become the model Young Pioneers, perfect Pavlik Morozov.

Rights and freedoms

This cartoon (via Donald Sensing) is a simple and mostly right. But it's less right for being so simple. The "adults" in both frames are actually correct.

The "old-style conservative" (a tautology, I know) in the top frame is talking about the freedom of doing what you consider right. Things like speaking your mind, associating with the people you consider good, or worshiping the supreme being of your choice, including Nonesuch. Those freedoms can be taken by force, but they are not given by any government. You have them because that's how you think.

The "liberal" in the bottom frame is also right. The government nowadays gives you many rights. The right to pension in the old age, the right not to be hungry and homeless even if you don't work, the right to medical attention whether you can pay the doctor or not. These are the rights that government gives you. They used to be alms, things that religious people had to contribute because their religion said so. Nowadays they are ... still alms, but extracted by IRS. You can have them because other people think you have them. And yes, if you have a scrap of decency, those other people do have a claim on your time and effort.

If conservatives want to have a good discussion, they need to clearly separate the freedoms that the top frame talks about, and the rights (entitlements?) that the bottom frame refers to. Those things are governed by different rules even if we use the same word for them.

Spreading the wealth around

Senator Obama is going to go on spreading, until the only place you can see any wealth is on the spreading knife.

Annotated Turing

I've finished "Annotated Turing". It's amazing how one person, in his head, managed to create the entire software industry - with elegant solutions and dirty hacks, bugs and features, hardware solution and programming languages and all the things that had to be reinvented over the next 40 years. And he did it without even trying, as a byproduct of a mathematical proof and philosophical thought.

I can perfectly see how Fortran-Algol-C-C++-Java axis evolved exactly along the lines the Turing predicted. I wish I could get a similar book on Alonzo Church lambda calculus - I suspect that would help me a lot in understanding Lisp. And, to complete the list, I guess Smalltalk would be another by-product of Turing's direction, even though that apple fell far from the tree indeed.

One thing I found troubling is the fact that the proof of impossibility of building the "validating" machine does not refer to any properties of the validating machine itself. Rather, it refers to the inherent impossibility of a machine printing a number that depends on the re-execution of that same machine. A gnawing doubt in my mind keeps wandering: if we use the "validating" machine in a different way, would we get rid of contradiction? I need to re-read that part.

Happy pigs

Happy, satisfied, thoroughly sated and comfortable pigs.
(via Instapundit)

Vice-presidential debate

I just can't listen to this. Both candidates are perfectly indistinguishable on the matter of regulations. No matter who wins, our economy will go down the drain.

One of the greatest strengths of America was the fact that Washington was a tiny part of her, not that important. As years flew by, the role of Washington grew, but it was not trying to _be_ the country. Now, seizing the excuse of the crisis they made themselves by creating huge monopolies and then encouraging them to make garbage loans, the govt is trying to _be_ the country, or at least her economy. If we're lucky, they will fail so fast and so hard that we'll be able to get rid of them in 4 years. If we're not lucky, the frogs will be boiled so slowly that by the time we wake up, the govt will be the one with all the money and all the power, just like in the good old Soviet Union.

Adventures in plumbing 2

I've replaced a handheld shower head yesterday. The operation is simplicity itself, no knowledge or tools needed. However, the design of the showerhead itself is an interesting thing to contemplate.

The head is an interesting example of marketing and engineering uniting their forces agains UI designer. It has a number of settings for the way water comes out. The setting are switched by rotating the wheel placed around the entire head.

Now, the two most used settings are "normal" shower and "shut off" (AKA "trickle"). The design should make it very easy to switch between them. But the engineering had an elegant implementation where the "off" and "normal" were at the opposite ends of the rotation. And then marketing made it worse by specifying that the switching wheel must look smooth and polished.

So now I have to rotate the ring more than 180 degrees, going through settings that spew water with considerable forse. And then I have to rotate it all the way back, with soapy hands.

Someone is obviously not eating their own dog food.

So the bailout failed

This is what the US Constitution was designed for - to make such things extremely difficult. It may yet pass, but it will look nothing like the thing that they tried to pass today. Everybody will have had some time to cool down, and may be the financial people will realize that their worst enemy is indeed fear itself.

Us or them?

Here is what happens when America (and the Western World in general) is paralyzed with the guilt.

We should go ahead andd drill for oil here. Because whoever else will do it will do it worse - would you rather Mr. Chavez set the ecological standard? Or the Chinese?

We should go ahead and take over the decaying African messes. Would you rather Saudi Arabia do it, like the do in Sudan? Or China, again, as in the linked article?

We should bring back polluting industries on our shores, because no matter how bad they are here, they are worse in China.

How long will China's smog subsidize our national parks? How long will China's exploited workers unions? How long will China's brutality subsidize our paralysis of will in failed countries?

The article gives us all a glimpse of what the world will be like if US will slip into a coma that already claimed England, the coma that France never left since WW1 or even earlier. Do you like it?

My mom was having a surgery

That explains no posts over the last couple of weeks.

She is slowly recovering. Barring something unexpected things should go well.

On smiting

Today I was at a Bar Mitzvah, and the text was saying, among other things, "He shall smite you with consumption". Now, I know that consumption is a nasty disease. But the other meaning is also very fitting, don't you think?

Deeper reason of the current crisis

In essence, we've been living beyond our mean for the last 30 years. And, for once, it was not just rich, but mostly poor and middle-class who were doing that. The poor had the government assistance, to a point when "being poor" no longer means "being deprived of necessities", but rather "not having work a work to go to". And the middle class had their credit cards and home equity.

Well, the ride is over. We're about to find out if the country whose major industries are "Services" and "Finance" can support the kind of lifestyle we're accustomed to. Can we really afford to ship all the dirty stuff to China and enjoy our clear air here while they die of pollution? Can we really survive on selling movies, music and software? When we have nothing to buy our toys with, we may need to re-learn to make them.

Perfect storm in finances

The perfect conditions for the bubble: the greed of bankers who thought they found a way to turn poor people into risk-free investments, and the do-gooding of socialists who wanted everybody to live in a house, invome be damned.

Statically typed language - old man's unit tests

After implementing GUI testing support that should allow me to write acceptance tests, I am finally getting to the refactoring of our "tween" application, piece by piece. The foal is to cleanly separate GUI from business logic. The business reason to do this is to put some long-running task into background, but I also have a long-term intent of unlocking 12 years worth of business logic from the obsolete XWindows GUI and putting a better, faster face on it.

Well, there are no unit tests at all available for me to verify that this stuff still works. But it's C++, so I can be pretty sure that replacing f->x[i] with f->x(i) will not break anything as long as the compiler is satisfied.

And that brings me to the title of the post. Without tests covering every single line I change, I would not dare to do what I am doing in Python, perl or Smalltalk. In C++, I can risk it because I can limit myself to such step that can be verified with compilation and a simple acceptance test. So. Static types are useful for some things, anyway.

"You know, Aleksey - you're not a traitor. You're an enemy"

An article on Russian Internet describing a "conversation" between Putin an an opposition journalist, Aleksey Venedictov. Thin Bush inviting Michael Moore for a "chat.

http://vazhno.ru/important/article/13034/

(more later)

Invitation to bad code.

Here is a nice Windows programming technique from "The Old New Thing":

What possible use are those extra bits in kernel handles? Part 2: Overcoming limited expressiveness

This is something that we should have left in the 90s and on embedded systems. Bit twidddling in OS handles! And yet Windows proudly proclaims that it can still do it. Will we ever grow up?

Are you flaming kidding?

Whose propaganda is more over-the-top? I'd say Republicans outdid Democrats this time. Gah.

Spore has landed

Whatever plans I had for blogging, coding, reading, eating and sleeping are on hold. "Spore" was purchased today at about 8:30 at Target. The only reason I am writing this is because the kids are playing at the moment.

Yes, it is that engrossing.

Words not said

Obama did not say "Fight for America"
McCain did not say "Color"

Not once.

Liveblogging McCain at RNC

"I work for you" - addresser to RNC. Hmmm.

Iraq war mentioned. "Mission Accomplished", take N+1.

Mea culpa for Republican Party. Once you lost trust, what can you do to get it back? Nothing. (I've just had that conversation with my son) And McCain gives no details. How about announcing that evbery incumbent Republican in Congress will not run again?

"I will... He will... BOOO" repeat. Ad nauseam.

Support retraining.

More choice in education. No vouchers? Nope.

Lead the world in green things, the American way. I like taht! We can do it our way - make things nice and make some money in the process.

Georgia. Strong words to Russia.

Did McCain just say that he will not go to war, no matter what?

"The end of the Cold War"? Someone is not thinking.

The POW part.

Country as an idea, not a place. That's why I am here!

Did Obama promise to fight for the country?

Not a bad ending, considering.

My first success with embedded programming!

I've got a blinkenlight and a flipping display message!

The board is done by my friend, he also provided me with the flash programmer, but the code is all mine. Welcome to the AVR world. I am soo excited!

Dissidents needed. Again.

When you check out the Russian Internet, one of the more striking features is the complete silence of the opposition. Not a word from Kasparov, Ryjkov, Kasianov, Yavlinsky, Nemtzov.

I think this signifies the end of opposition in Russia. Putin clearly demonstrated that politicians cannot be in opposition. "Politician", almost by definition, is someone who is advancing an agenda with the goal of getting to power. The "getting to power" part is no longer open in Russia, not in anything short of armed rebellion or political assassination (not happening, and outside of "politics" anyway).

Since politicians will not argue with the Russian powers that be, Russia needs to bring back the people she did not need these last 15 years. A dissident is someone who would bear enormous personal sacrifices for his truth and his country, with no prospect of any power as a reward. Soviet Union had a good crop in its time. Of course, some of the ideas that inspired them are discredited (democracy and capitalism are swearwords in Russia now), and other ideas are now in power (Great Russia, God's People). Still, a dissident is now the only kind of person that would speak up against Russian government inside Russia.

On Lisp

I've got my hands on the PDF of "On Lisp" book by Paul Graham. I am about 1/3 through but I've already noticed some things that really bother me. it seems that before Common Lisp (ca.1985?) Lisp did not have lexical scoping, and, hence, its most distinct feature, closures. And, before Schema (1995?), Lisp had separate namespaces for functions and variables (I am a bit confused here, bear with me), resulting in the need for "funcall" function (or is it a form? a macro?) and things like #' and #. .

It seems that Lisp as we know it now (basically, Scheme) is not really 50 years old. And the 50 years old language was barely more usable than Fortran.

An exciting event on Friday night

Yesterday (Friday) we talked about nothing in particular with my co-worker, and I mentioned that she looks tired. So she says: "Oh, I am really excited about going to sleep tonight!".

The kids must have been different then...

I've just watched "Airplane!". That movie is rated "PG"? Full frontal naked breasts, snorting coke, smelling glue, horse in bed with a woman, seppukku, solicitation of sex from a child, suicide by hanging, imitation of sexual intercourse while partially dressed. Not sure I've got it all.

I'd hate to be the P providing the G to a 10yo after this movie.

Words in Obama/Biden

After seeing the

OBAMA
BIDEN

demonstartion by Ann Althouse, I can't possibly understand how she missed an ad staring her in the face! And of cource "bi", as in "bisexual".

Publish Post

Big Trip West

We've just returned from what I termed "The Grand Circle". Flew to Phoenix, Arizona, then drove to Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Death Valley, Yosemite, Sequoya Park. From there, we went to the Pacific coast: Monterrey Peninsula, a stretch of Route 1, Morro Bay, LA. And from LA, back to Phoenix and so home to Newark Airport.

The experience was so vast, I can hardly express it in words. I've seen a completely new face of Nature, something I haven't experienced in my previous life in Russia or in my new life in New York. The Gran Canyon is especially imposing. The impression is that no matter where you look, there is another chasm that goes deeper still, until eventually you can't even see the bottom of the deepest one - too narrow and too steep. The camera utterly failed me - I could not possibly convey that experience of seeing no bottom, no ultimate limit. Or, similarly, the clouds hurrying over Route 1 at the Pacific Coast - tendrils of fog 10 feet over the road, while the road itself is perfectly clear. And the cloud itself, hanging over the cliffs and slowly moving inland.

Some of the impressions are not even visual - the aroma of pines in the Sequoya National Park, the desert wind and the taste of salt in Death Valley, Soda Springs mineral water in Yosemite - exactly like Polustrovo mineral water of my youth.

The low points were, in retrospect, Las Vegas and LA. Las Vegas is, compared to the other things we saw, amazingly fake. We visited Venetian and Caesar's Palace, the casinos famous for the decor. I found it irritating. I've seen palaces, and these are anything but. They are, perfectly obviously, pumps for sucking money. And that's it. No art or culture needs apply.

LA was just another big city. Malibu beaches were nice. But again, for someone who lived in big cities on th ecoast before, nothing special.

The last day was really trying: 6 hors drive, 5 hours inn airport, 5 hours flight, an hour drive - all with n sleep. In the end I spent 24 hours awake. Toward the end Irka had to whack me with a water bottle to keep me awake on the way home.

I will probably post more on this trip as the whim strikes. For now, I'll be returning to the normal posting...

Some of the

Citizen of the world, huh?

I remember when I became a citizen, I swore an oath:

"I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen".

Should we add the same words to the oath of the President of the US? Or may be Obama is running for UN Secretary General? In that case the speech makes more sense.

Advantages or marriage

It occurred to me today in the morning: if it ever strikes my fancy to tattoo my wife's initials on my arm, I only have to suffer through one letter, not two.

Picasso's Bull

I've just got introduced to this (through Programming Reddit, no less).

My reaction surprised me - Picasso loses me at plate 4, only to completely win me back at plate 11, the last one.

The art experts will have to forgive me, but I think that #11 is almost perfectly disconnected from #10. 4 through 10 represent a formal process of reduction. 11 is the leap beyond formal rules, straight into the quantum heart of the matter. I have a feeling that those intermediate plates are Picasso's post-factum justification of his genius, his attempt at expressing logically that which cannot be logical.

Many lesser men (women too I guess) went that way, only to fail the last stage. Unfortunately, due to Picasso's need to explain, the intermediate stages now qualify as art. I wish we were spared the sight of half-done sausages...

Heard on NPR a while ago

(This brought it to my mind)

They were doing a profile of a welfare recipient. She had no job, her daughter was going in rehab, the daughter's husband (SO?) was in jail. She had to postpone her education to take care of her grandchildren. The education she was postponing? Writers' workshop.

Bailout, "rescue package" and so on

NPR can't spend fifteen minutes without saying "buyout" or "rescue". For those with ADD in the news room: not a single cent changed hands yet. All Feds did was to _promise_ that they will give money to Freddy and Fanny. That should be enough to calm down the markets. Somebody has to pay attention to the numbers - unless the Fs were heavily concentrated in subprime debt, the rate of failure of ordinary loans does not warrant the kind of excitement that we see in the markets. According to Mortgage Bankers Association, "The percentage of loans in the foreclosure process was 2.47 percent at the end of the first quarter, an increase of 43 basis points from the fourth quarter of 2007 and 119 basis points from one year ago." (http://www.mortgagebankers.org/NewsandMedia/PressCenter/62936.htm) I really doubt that this kind of failure rate can bring down Fs in the absence of market panic.

Cartoon idea

While listening to discussion on of FDA warning for epilepsy drigs on NPR, it occurred to me that someone who is better with drawing than I am would do well to produce a comic: A book, with words "Holy Qoran" on it, and then below: "FDA Warning: may cause suicidal thoughts and actions".

Wall-E

Since everybody and his brother is reviewing "Wall-E", and I've actually seen the movie, I guess I'll join in.

I found the movie to be OK on average. The first part was fabulous, including the Buy'n'Large commercials and post-apocalyptic humor. I was enchanted, right up to the point where the robots reach the spaceship and the captain /autopilot controversy starts. From that point on, the move gets more and more artificial and unbelievable (in the Stanislavsy' "I don't believe!" sense). Objectively speaking, the evil autopilot was actually right. But to admit it would spoil the movie, so happy end is, to use a Russian expression, pulled on by the ears.

Pixar build up quite a store of goodwill with me. I've seen their every movie after "Toy Story". So I will still go see their next movie. However, if this was their debut, I would not be so sure.

Bush must be out of his mind!

According to a report heard on NPR, Iraqi leaked our demands in the ongoing negotiations on the status of US troops in Iraq. They want us out in 3 years. Bush is asking for 7+.

I think Mr. Bush is mad. What should our troops be doing in Iraq in 3 years? Building sewers? Organizing school boards? Three years are perfectly reasonable period to get out - too long if anything. And getting out in three years ensures that in 10 we'll be in a position to negotiate for bases, not as a hated occupant, but as a friend who helped in need and then stepped aside.

Get the idiot out of White House, I say, and then negotiate with the successor. Mr. Bush is "stuck on stupid".

Declaration of Independence as editorial

That's what Stamford Advocate did today. They published the full text on their Editorial page. I really appreciate the gesture. How much more pathetic, in comparison, was a tiny piece on Iran jammed into the leftover space! The paper basically says that destroying Iran's nuclear program may be the right thing, but we're afraid of what Iran will do in return. The idea that Iran should be afraid of what we do in return does not even surface.

This is something that Cold War and United Nations did to international relations. Between 1948 and 1989, a conventional war where US attacked a nasty dictator and took over his country was simply unthinkable. It could easily trigger a nuclear exchange with Soviet Union. This got institutionalized in UN framework. A weak and nasty countries lost the fear of strong and righteous ones under Soviet nuclear umbrella. Now that Soviet Union is gone, decent countries could get to punishing the nasty ones again. Being a dictator and running your country into the ground could have some consequences again. The very first experiment, in Serbia, was succesful. Iraq proved to be so costly and mismanaged that we'll likely lose any appetite to do this. But Iraq is a special case. In Iran, we could deploy different tactics, similar to ones used in Serbia. Iranians, unlike Iraqi, may actually kick out the government that got them into a war with US. Or am I being too optimistic? In any case, running a disastrous government should have consequences, and US is in the position to actually provide them.

Contemporary romance

Me and my wife are both at home. I am sitting reading blogs upstairs, my wife is sitting surfing the Internet downstairs. She calls me on the cell phone to find out what I am doing. How can we make it even more "moder"? Ah, of course... :)

My kids sang to Don Sinety!

A few years ago, I (and the whole family) went to Mystic Seaport, CT, and we heard Don Sineti singing. I bought to buy a CD of his, "The Dog Watch". And my kids absolutely fell in love with his songs! They liked "Frog Went a'Courtin'", and they liked "Three Men Went a'Hunting", but they absolutely ADORED "The Tattooed Lady". They learned it by heart, and sang it all over the place (company permitting).

Well, this year, we went to Mystic again, and we fond Don, and the kids sang the Tattoed Lady to him! He laughed his head off! It was the highlight of the day. And the next day, the kids gave a rousing rendition of that same tune at the Kids' Workshop. I was very proud!

Smart Car

So I've seen one of those Smart cars in a strip mall parking lot. The thing is loudly proclaiming one of two things: either "My other car is a minivan", or "I don't care to have kids and will end my days alone in nursing home". And I think the later is far more likely.

The popularity of Smart Car in Europe goes a long way to illustrate their demographic problem....

Adventures in plumbing

We had a drain in one of the sinks that would not work. Three different plumbers looked at it, and no one could figure out why it is so. It drained fine when the flow of water was low, but then, as I increased the flow and the water overwhelmed the drain hole, it would start making bubbles, and stop draining.

Clearly, the problem was in ventilation. For the water to drain, air needs to be provided to take its place as the water goes down the pipe. Not enough air was the problem. But how to fix it? One of the plumber cut in a vent with a one-way valve to let the air in - no dice.

Finally, one day the faucet broke. The little plastic nuts that held it to the sink cracked in two. I procrastinated for a while, but recently I finally got around to replacing it.

Now, here in the US, it seems that when you buy the faucet, you also get the drain pipe that goes from the drain in the sink to the elbow under it. Seems like a waste to me, but I guess it allows for matching the faucet and the ring around the hole. Since my old faucet was chrome, and the new was chrome too, I debated with myself whether I should just leave the old drain assembly alone. I was glad I did not.

Turns out, the plumber who installed the drain first was an incompetent SOB. In every sink I ever seen (even the ones in Russia) I noticed a presence of a hole in porcelain, high up on the edge of the sink. I always thought that the hole was for "emergency drain", in the case we plug the normal drain and forget to turn off the water. Well, I was wrong. Turns out, the hole goes through the body of the sink, all the way to the big drain hole, and joins it. The drain hole assembly is not a solid pipe - it's got 4 huge cutouts on each side. Through these cutouts the hole on the side of the sink delivers - air! - for the water to go down. In my case, the left-handed baboon who installed the sink filled the entire drain hole with the plumber putty, plugging the little hole on the side that provided the ventilation. And the 3 or 4 plumbers who saw it since could not diagnose the problem.

Of course, after I replaced the drain assembly and cleaned up the vent hole, I now have a perfect flow in that sink. But I still deplore the level of skill in our local handymen. One of those who saw this sink was a plumber with 20 years of experience! And no one could figure out what's wrong. I really expected better from US workers. Do they not care about customers? Do they not care about their own craft? Pretty disgusting...

I thought this was a doctored picture...

A judge like this cannot possibly be objective. How he got his position I don't know, but if he has a modicum of respect for the law, he should just resign. Of course, he has no respect for the law, or he would not be hanging those pictures in the first place. To the likes of him, the law is just a cudgel to bludgeon opponents into submission.

Deeper view of evolution and intelligent design

To continue the line of thought started here: Another remarkable thing about the cdk007's computational experiment was his setup of components and heredity rules. As he (she?) says himself, you need "living" component to have an evolution. It's not quite clear what "living" means in the context, so I get to interpret it my way: capable of forming useful combinations spontaneously. The very nature of the elements has to be designed (there is that word again) to allow for combinations that are useful in certain circumstances. For example, we could add glass spheres containing sand to the set of elements, and then we'll have an evolutionary path to sand clocks. Without such spheres, our time-measuring creatures can't survive in a harsh acid environment, for example.

Which brings me to my less defensible and more important point. When you think about an infinitely intelligent being as your "intelligent designer", you have to conclude that for it there is no difference whether to think one step ahead and just create organisms, or think a huge number of steps ahead and create the elements that organisms will be made of, or think an almost infinite number of steps ahead and create the physical constants that make all the elements possible, or, ultimately, think the truly infinite number of steps ahead and create an infinite number of layers in the phisical world, all of them discoverable by science, all of them explaining one another, and all of them set up just so for intelligent life to emerge.

I admit this is rather fanciful, but without this idea, what you have is essentially random world. And how do you explain the amazing coincidence that the biological object developed for not falling out of trees was usable, unaltered in its biological essence, to comprehend the mysteries of the smallest and largest things in the Universe? What gives us the confidence that our scientific problems are all solvable and worth struggling with?

Intelligent design in genetic algorithms

Recentluy, with the help of Programming Reddit, I found this YouTube video: "Evolution IS a Blind Watchmaker".

The aothor, cdk007, purports to show that Intelligent Design hypothesis is false. Mind you, at the very best he proved that that hypothesis is not necessary. However, in reality, the video illustrates two different, less important ideas: "genetic programming is hard", and "Intelligence hides in strange places".

In my programming life, I am periodically tempted to employ a genetic algorithm. And every time this happens, what stops me is the very hard task of writing the selection function. The hard part is keeping your ideas of what the answer should be out of your selection function. If you write it in such a way that _your_ solution gets advantage just because it's yours, you may as well code your solution directly.

This is what happened to cdk007. His stated selection function is "better measure time". However, then he goes on to give survival advantage to pendulums over other combinations of gears and rods. He even says: "Pendulums swing at a regular pace, therefore they can be used to keep time". Well, pendulums are very useful, but from the perspective of the Blind Watch Maker, this fact is not known! Pendulum not connected to any springs just hangs there motionless. From measuring of time point of view, this is no better than a spring that simply unwinds. In fact, it's worse, because at least the spring can be used as a sort of sand clock without sand.

So here is the real selection function: anything that moves is better than things that do not move. Things that move at an even pace are better than things that move fast at first and then slow down. Things that move at the right pace (say one rotation a minute) are better than those that are too fast or too slow.

The challenge would be to re-write the selection function on these lines, and see how many generations the clocks will take to emerge. If the code was in Python, or any other language that has a free environment, I'd do it myself. As it stands, I'll send an e-mail to the author. And then may be I'll have to do it myself anyway :) .

So in this particular case, the intelligent design was hiding in the selection function. You see, no one doubts that combination of mutation and selection can produce dramatic changes. You only have to look at any dog to get a proof. The problem with evolution is that it's hard to imagine how complex systems arose, thee systems that had to be composed of multiple mutations, where each individual mutation was indifferent or even detrimental to survival. The clock problem illustrates that the selection has to have knowledge about the future in order to produce the desired results.

There is even more interesting point in the clock video - the point of intelligence in the set of components. I'll consider it in another post.

Java Collections Hell

I've been doing some coding in the bowels of JBoss J2EE system. One of those day I'll write a Daily WTF post on the wonders of 6-layer system that takes 5 people to adjust anything. For now, I just wanted to mention this particular piece of Java Hell.


void addList(List list)
{
// do stuff
}

void doValuation(List instruments, int[] thingsToCompute)
{
addList(instruments);
addList(Arrays.asList(thingsToCompute));
}

Here is the question: what gets passed to the addList in the second call?


List? Silly you. Compilation Error? How dare you!

List

Nice Java!

On fairies

So there we are, going home from Kung Fu Panda. Michael has an exited news - he lost a tooth during the movie! And he was happy to see a "compliment to fat people" (his daddy is not the thinnest man in town). Naturally, the conversation turns to Tooth Fairy. Daniel, ever a realist, tells Michael and me that Tooth Fairy is indeed your parents, in our particular case probably Dad (me). Michael counters that he just does not care, Tooth Fairy is more fun. Daniel, exasperated, asks - is the allowance is also delivered by a Fairy? And then inspiration strikes me. Yes, says I. The allowance is delivered by

Fat and Hairy
Allowance Fairy.

Much hilarity ensues.

Ain't I proud with myself :)

Feeling of Lispness

I freely admit that I am no Lisp programmer. I just admire Lisp from afar and theoretically. And yet recently I managed to experience a Lisp-like and C-like approach in certain code - all while staying in C++.

At work I deal with some nasty mess written 15 years ago for X Windows, using GUI toolkit that nobody remembers any more. It was initially straight C, but now has a lot of C++.

I am trying to implement a GUI testing support for that beast. Some pretty cool idea, even if I do say so myself - I'll write it up later. In any case, the GUI toolkit has no concept of a "standard" listbox. Each listbox is completely custom, drawn from opaque ClienData for each cell.

To extract strings that my testing toolkit can handle, I had to somehow intercept the drawing routines. All 200 of them. Preferably w/o disturbing the existing code. So I came up with this ingenious schema of moving the drawing code into a body of a class, where the drawing functions would be class methods. I felt it to be somewhat like a manual version of a Lisp program, code operating on code and changing it.

However, since that was C and C++ and not Lisp, the actual implementation was smelling worse by the minute. Completely unhappy with the mess I created, I went to a coworker for advice. He, being a simpler man altogether ('simple' as opposed to 'easier', the right kind) suggested that I should intercept calls to drawText in the common library used by 99% of our list boxes. So now I install a callback in one place, and no code changes are needed anywhere else. Perfect C-style solution for the C environment. No Lisp feeling at all, but it's beautiful.

Google Map of St.Petersburg, Russia

On a lark, I went to check out my former address in Russia in Google Maps. And what do I see? The maps of St. Petersburg are more detailed than those of Brooklyn! Every single building is shown, together with the building number. I find it amazing!

Here is the link to the place I used to live: 6 Ulitsa Petra Smorodina

But he is THE Founding Father!

Heard on the radio today: "Washington's culture of deception". Somewhere in Heaven, a tall Virginian is very upset.

We're having an oil bubble

Whatever is happening in the world to push up the price of oil cannot possibly happen fast enough to justify 30% growth in 2 months. This is a speculative bubble. It's not noticed yet because for once it's not Americans who are getting rich. But it will pop all the same, and quite soon.

As heard on NPR

A report on Basra. Two months ago Iraqi Army lost the battle of Basra. Fast forward to now, and they are in control of the city, including the toughest neighborhoods where British were afraid to set foot. What happened in the two months? Complete darkness. May be Sadr got charitable?

To translate a Russian ditty:

Revolt, when fails, is called "a revolt"
But when succeeds, they use another word.

NPR just can't bring themselves to use that other word...

Inner sea

Atlantic is new Mediterranean. And I wonder if Pacific will be the new Atlantic. Or may be Indian Ocean?

Supreme Commander: Forged Aliance

My kids got it for their birthday, and I get to play. The weapons are completely silly from th military POW, but the strategy part seems to be OK. Windows Vista was crashing every 5 minutes until I updated my motherboard's BIOS and I had no sound until I updated Direct X. Now it crashes may be once a day. Please do not buy Vista if you plan to do any gaming.

Interesting conversation at work

I was wearing a yarmulke at work in honor of Israel's 60th birthday, and a black guy who tends the coffee machines said to me: "I always wanted to ask someone a question: what happened to all the black people who lived in Palestine before Jews came?"

Well, I tried to explain that the people who lived there were not particularly black, nor were the Jews particularly white. No matter: after all my explanations Rick just sighed and said "It's always hard to be black".

Eager to return the favor of a question, I asked him about Zimbabwe. The ensuing conversation revealed two things: it's better to starve rather than let outsiders be bosses in your land, and Rick feels about America the way I feel about Germany. Except Rick lives here.

He traced his family to a slave ship that arrived sometime in 16th century, and he can't find out where in Africa they came from - the native memories of the slaves were brutally suppressed. He also said something that I still need to research to confirm or deny: America, including Northern places such as Boston, was built almost exclusively by slaves in 15th to 17th century. The free labor only got used starting in 18th century onward.

"Emmanuelle"

Watched "Emmanuelle" yesterday (Netflix, what else...).

The actors are superd, especially Emmanuelle and Mario (he reminded me of anotrher actor playing Satan in Russian "Master and Margarita" movie). I wonder, however, if the effect of their perfect work on me is the result th edirector/writer aimed for.

In my eyes, the film is about the lost meaning of sex. The triumph of the Pill in the 70s robbed sex of its connection with family and children, of its moral meaning - of its soul. What I see in the movie is the people wandering around with huge pieces of their souls torn out. They sort of feel that something is missing, but don't even know what it is - they have no vocabulary to express the absence. Emmanuelle is convulsively trying to fill the void with more of what she knows - more freedom, more abandon, more experimentation. More bisexual love, more disgusting strangers groping your body, more whoring, more rape. Anything to fill the void.

I suspect that the authors of the movie tried to create a tribute to Freedom. What they actually created, as seen by me in 2008, is beyond self-parody, beyond satire, beyond condemnation. The movie is damning the whole 70-s decade. The English word "damnation" does not sound harsh enough to my Russian ear. I prefer Russian "Prokliat'ie". Их мир проклят Богом.

AIDS ended that world. I pity and regret the people who died not knowing what kills them, but when we understood AIDS, it was no longer possible, even for the most depraved, to keep thinking that sex has no meaning. Sex got back its terrible meaning when the consequence of your choice can be death. May God forgive me if I feel anything but hate for AIDS - it's a terrible disease and we must do our best to cure it. But it certainly ended 70s like a thunderbolt from Heaven.

Proverbs

(inspired by a court verdict today wrt 93 WTC bombing and re-reading of Small Gods)

There is a Reason for everything undePublish Postr the Sun, and a Guilty Party to all things. And the Guilty Party shall have Big Pockets. For otherwise there is no Reason, no Reason at all.

Geocaching

We went geocaching yesterday! Not only it was a ton of fun, but we actually managed to find the cache. My sincere thanks to "ctomberg, 1NatureMom " for helping our family to have a truly enjoyable day.

Obama sticker

A sticker I saw on a car today was a simple "Obama" sticker - not even "Obama for " anything. One thing that struck me was the color palette. It was red, white and... black. Am I shying at shadows, or is it significant? The time will tell, I guess.

"European" salads in Stop&Shop

Oh yes, including the famous European Boston Salad
:)

Reminds me of a Yogi Bera anecdote: When someone told him that Liverpool elected a Jewish mayor, he said: "Only in America!"

Shoking news from Russia

My second cousin in Russia just became a Christian. Orthodox Cristian, no less. I am not against Jews turning Christian in principle - one of my friends did it recently and invited me to his Orthodox wedding - it was quite a pleasure. However, in this case, I am sure there is not a trace of grace in the whole thing. He is a Russian businessman, and I am sure he is trying to make his life easier.

I guess this tells us everything we need to know about him and about Russia as it is now. He is even afraid to go to the Jewish cemetery to visit his parent's grave.

Heard on NPR today

A discussion about paying kids cash to study. Apparently, the idea was first sounded by Newt Gingrich, who proposed paying for best grades (so that good students have some cash in hands, and not just dealers and pimps). Of course, our do-gooders could not reward excellence - no, we have to reward demerit. So now we're paying by the hour to the junior high students who are learning 24/3=8. And of course, NPR loves it. Moreover, they don't even see how Gingrich's idea was turned upside down.

Tell me who your friends are...

Two latest major business initiatives from MS are with Yahoo and Novell. Both are losers in their categories (Novell being the ultimate loser, beaten into irrelevance by MS itself). Tell me who are your friends, and I'll tell you who you are.

As heard on NPR

An interview with an Obama supporter: "When I heard about his "bitter" speech, I said to myself: how insightful, he is so right! And then I went: I can't believe he actually said that - the are going to tear him to pieces."

Obama and his cohorts know who they are, they just don't want you to know.

McCain - a do-over?

I wonder if, by picking McCain this cycle, the GOP is quietly telling us: "We've screwed up 8 years ago, please lets us pick the right guy now."

Freakonomics' new motto for US

Here (via Instapundit).
I loved the one in comments: " We’re way nicer then our government".

Another quote from John Adams

"Our electioneering racers have started for the prize. Such a whipping and spurring and huzzaing! Oh what rare sport it will be! Through thick and thin, through mire and dirt, through bogs and fens and sloughs, dashing and splashing and crying out, the devil take the hindmost."

Obligatory metapost

What makes a man so swelled with pride as to get himself a blog? What possesses me to think that my thoughts and way of expressing them are worthy of being published?

I conceive that one strangely encouraging thing about this place is a strange combination of exposure and privacy. Yes, I know that in potentia everyone can come and see my ruminations. And yet, behold the wonderful emptiness of the place! So far, according to the web counter, I am the only reader. Even my wife does not have time to go check it out. This gives me a perfect illusion of privacy - like yelling in a market place at three in the morning. The people are there, but nobody hears you. Perversely exciting feeling.

How good next Windows will be?

I found an infallible way to predict how good the next release of Windows will be!

If MS includes fax application, it will be good. If not, a disaster.

Consider the track record:

W95 fax
W98 no fax
W XP fax
W Vista no fax (not in "normal" edition anyway)

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to state the causation behind this correlation.

Russian one-liners

(crosspost from IWETHEY)


A famous example:

A do posteli byli my na vy
Before the bed you called me "Dear Miss"

Less famous ones:

Net, v etoy pose ya do svad'by ne mogu
I can't do it this way before the wedding


Pust' drian. Zato smotri kak mnogo!
May be it's crap. But look how much of it!

Kto skorchil vam takuyou rozhu?
Who made you such a face?

Of course, they all have authors, I just can't remember any at the moment.

American Digest presents the greenest swim suit in the Summer lineup - Speedo Flora.

I have to note that in the interests of sustainability and economy of natural resources, the best swim suit would be Speedo Nudd. Inquire at Two Imperial Tailors, LTD.

I've been reading "John Adams"

by David Mc Cullough. One quote in particular caught my eye. Abigail and John Adams are deciding, by letter on whether Adams should stand for Presidency. Abigail mentioned that Mr. Adams was already 60. The response was: "If I were near I would soon convince you that I am not above forty."

That line to his wife of 30 years would alone guarantee his character in my eyes, even if he did not do or write anything else in his life.

As heard on NPR

This will be a permanent feature of this site. My exposure to the Left America is limited to NPR, and sometimes I just can't help noticing some inconsistencies (or other things starting with i- and ending with -cies).

So today in my 4o minutes in the car I've heard at least three commercials (they tell you they don't have them, but "sponsored by" announcements are nothing but) for "Lions for Lambs". The fun part was that they announced everything about it except the subject of the movie. Were they afraid to scare off even the NPR audience?

Another wound from the Gay Revolution

It's impossible for two men to be close friends any more. If two men are close, the sexuality must be the reason. That's what happens when a rare and aberrant trait is represented as common and normal.
(via Instapundit)

Inauspicious beginning

Home sick, I figured I may as well go ahead with this blog lark. Just wanted a place of my own (well, not really my own, but still) on the Internet.

I've spent a long time at IWeThey, but as other things to read showed up on the Net, I've gradually drifted away from there. That left me with plenty to read, but nowhere to write. This blog is an attempt to remedy the situation. I just wonder if I have enough to say...