What is it with me and music?

Just like my journey toward Jewish faith started with the Barry Sisters, my reconciliation with Germany starts with Helene Fischer . I simply can't imagine her songs in the Blood And Soil Germany that destroyed my race in the Holocaust. Must be very naive of me, but there you have it. (The fact that she was born in Russia is just icing on the cake)

Experts Exchange and DMCA

Google now shows the DMCA notices that cause it to remove search results. I just saw one from Experts Exchange. These people actually spend money on lawyers to send out those notices! No wonder their site is going down the drain.

As heard on NPR

"The President tried to position himself in the middle of the political spectrum today.  ...  He called the Republicans "hostage-takers".

Some compromise!

So Obama gets to spend more and Republicans get to tax less. And Chinese workers get to pay for it. Perfect illustration of our politics.

The shape of thins long gone

This is the familiar shape,  right? A regular coat hook.

I am willing to bet that the young among us do not know what the top part is for... Well, for the record - it is for hats.

The entire culture, gone decades ago, still visible in the everyday life. Archeology in plain sight.

Joy to the world

...or at least to me. I've translated my Python atmega CPU emulator and I can now officially say: Python is unbearably slow.

Pure Python naive implementation is 16 times slower than the real CPU. Pure Python with improved assembly command lookup is 4 times slower. C++ with each command invoked from Python is two times slower. And finally entire emulation loop in C++ is ... 10 times faster!

I did not expect that last difference. Just writing a Python loop around C++ slows it down by the factor of 20? This insanity!

I still intend to write extensions (such as timer subsystem) in Python, but the rule is clear: no Python in the tight loop for me.

Only in America

I drove by Marriot in Stamford tonight and I realized something: a girl next door and President Obama both had a party there. Ashley (the daughter of a union man) had a birthday party a couple years ago and Obama had a fundraiser before the elections. Is this a great country or what?

On WikiLeaks

Not that anyone cared, but I feel like adding my opinion to the growing pile out there.

I think we have two very different things here: WikiLeaks itself and the leaker.

The leaker signed an agreement and swore an oath not to do what he did. He needs to be prosecuted and hopefully jailed.

WikiLeaks, on the other hand, never promised not to publish juicy bits. I think they are morally wrong, but they aren't doing anything illegal. They are no different from any other newspaper. We have no basis to prosecute them.

As heard on NPR

Professor Nash on Wikileaks: "Usually the historians get to see such documents after the state has already collapsed". Is US a walking corpse?

The future is here!

I am posting this from my Personal Communication Device (AKA T-Mobile G2). The 21st century has arrived! Can the 24th be far behind?

Stupid novice error in closures in Python

I am wrapping a bunch of functions in python, so that they could take different arguments:

for fun in functions:
    def wrapper(state):
        return fun(state.current)
    # store wrapper as wrapped function

What's wrong with this picture? All wrappers end up calling the same function - the last in the list.

Took me about half an hour to figure it out. Closure in Python wraps a _variable_, not the object that the variable holds like it does in Java. The variable is shared between all wrappers - it's "fun". So all wrappers end up calling whatever is the value of "fun" at the time of call to the wrapper - the last function in the list. At the time of call to the wrapper, not wrapper creation!

The solution is of course

def wrap_function(fun):
    def wrapper(state):
        return fun(state.current)
    return wrapper    

for fun in functions:
    wrapped_function = wrap_function(fun)

Now each wrapper gets its own "fun" variable - the one inside the particular invocation of wrap_function. Hurray!

Home ownership - it ain't what it used to be

Back before the days of easy credit brought by the tax money, owning a home used to mean something. A home owner was a man of substance, possessed of the REAL property, most probably a link in a chain of generations. Mr. Jones of Trumbull, Connecticut.

Nowadays, it's a bit different. Just like you're expected to move out from your parents' house, you're expected to buy your first condo. Then your large family house. Then you sell it all and move to Florida. Then you die, leaving your kids a bunch of money (maybe) and not a pile of stones. Mr. Ivanov of somewhere within commuting distance to Wall Street.

I am one of the beneficiaries of this process, and I hate it anyway. Not much difference, nowadays, between renting and owning. Hard to call your house "my fortress" when you pay for it monthly, and will keep paying till you sell it. When Homeowners Association, insurance and zoning laws are as restrictive as any landlord about things you can do with "your" "property".

I am not sure I want the old days back. I am not even sure we could bring them back if we tried. But we have to realize that the kind of home ownership we have now is hardly the noble thing we hoped for. And, therefore, may not be worth quite so much.

Tough sell

I've got a flier from a cell phone company recently. Funny, there was nothing there about their great services. The whole thing was about great PHONES they had available. The phones they don't make. The phones that they do their best to cripple, disabling features the consumers like me want.

It's hard to be a wireless provider nowadays. All you can advertise is the price that's too high and a bunch of restrictions on usage that make your customer life harder. Better not mention it at all and concentrate on wonderful things other people sell.

As heard on NPR...

On today's "All Things Considered", some rich folks complained that they aren't taxed enough (in parenthesis, both of them were born rich rather than making their own money). The both actually petitioned their senators to increase the rate in their bracket.

I could barely contain my anger. If you want to pay more taxes, you can do it now - just check a box on the form and you can give as much as you want to the Federal Government. There is a mechanism for that.

No, what you want is to tax me. And, frankly, I do not want to pay a cent more to compensate for your twisted materialistic upbringing and your rich man's guilt. Go hire a shrink or something.

Modest proposal - IT amendment to the Constitution

- Congress shall make no law larger than 100 pages of Letter paper, 10 point font minimum (no more 2000 pages that no one can read or understand)
- Every line or paragraph (whichever is smaller) of every law shall bear a name of one or more congresscritters who is responsible for its introductions. No exceptions allowed (no more anonymous windfall in "consultations")
- Supreme Court shall have the power to strike down parts of laws as irrelevant to the law's titular purpose (no more labor regulations changes in war financing bills)

Killing off the insurers, my way

This article by Megan McArdle finally prompted me to post my views on fixing our medical insurance infrastructure.

The first thought I've had for a while. The second thought I picked up today, after a conversation with a proponent of the existing reform.

I like Megan's idea of "insurer of last resort" - that is the right thing to do because no matter what, we're not willing to let people simply die. In addition to that:

- prohibit any kind of price differentiation by medical providers. The doctor must set the price for a procedure, and take the same price from all comers (obviously, different doctors will have different prices - no restriction there). We may permit an exception in the form of free treatment. Any attempt by any corporation or organization to get a better price should be punished by stiff fines to both the provider and the corporation. In particular, the government should be prohibited from seeking better prices, even for Medicaid/Medicare.

- The insurers must lose the right to dump people at will. As long as you're paying the premium, you must be able to keep the policy. This applies to COBRA in the first place, but also to all other ways that people get insurance.

These changes will break the monopoly power of insurance companies and will make them more like real insurers rather than employers of doctors.

Bumping into people in London

I am on a business trip to London this week. The city seems to be smallish for its population size - it feels like a circular Manhattan. May be I am just being grumpy - Brooklyn is nothing like Manhattan either, and yet it's New York.

I've noticed that I bump into people a lot. I could not figure it out, until it hit me - they drive on the "wrong" side, and they walk that way to. When I want to let someone pass, I sidestep to the right, and Londoners expect me to go left.

Climtegate: one man, one vote, one time

The title of this post is a well known election rule for the Left. You keep on demanding the democracy until you get the right vote - and then the democracy is declared anti-social, bourgeois or some such. Whether the vote is real as in Germany and Venezuela, or by armed revolt as in Russia does not matter. The "masses" are permitted to speak once, to name their new and permanent rulers.

The 21st century, however, brought a new twist. We now see the science, rather than the excited masses, holding the useless ballot, with the inimitable expression on their faces. You see, the scientific consensus in 1990s and the beginning of 0s was that the earth is warming up. However, further development - both the data from subsequent years and the details on how that consensus was arrived at - changed the mind of a lot of scientists. Too bad it does not matter! Our socially-conscious overlords got the vote they needed, and they are perfectly ready to disregard, discard and punish any new votes that disagree with it. The People (or the Science) has spoken! And now both should shut up and do what they are told.

Whether or not this will work out in the end - the way it did in Soviet Union for a while - remains to be seen. But I do take pleasure in recognizing the familiar phenomenon. It's really fun to see the 99.2% votes cast for the Candidates from the Indivisible Block Of Communists and Non-Party Voters. Again.

Sherlock Holmes the movie

On the recommendation of Eric Raymond, I went to see the movie. I do have the entire Canon with all the footnotes - a huge volume from Costco that I've read a few times, not counting the Russian translations before that, plus watching the Russian version of the movie (I still think that one is one of the best versions!) So I am not a total stranger to Holmes. I have to agree that the way Holmes' work looks to the bystanders in the new movie is about right. A lot of snooping about in unsavory places, some fights, avoiding being killed - and complete understanding of everything he sees. The Holmes' study is right too - I wish the Turkish slipper was there! However, I'd give the movie a B- at best. The reason for that is the case Holmes is investigating. Holmes' cases are, almost without exception, very simple. The culprit simply goes about doing his thing - murdering, poisoning, burgling. The complexity is always more apparent than real, and Holmes' magic is to see through it, to the simple explanation. There are exceptions, such as The Speckled Band or The Man with the Twisted Lip, but that's rare. And none of them are exceptional to the degree shown in the movie.

What really gets me is the complete absence of any mentions of another detective - much more suited to the case in the movie. A detective who solved such cases by the dozen. I refer to Father Brown, of course. He deals with "mystic" crimes all the time, and his complete lack of faith in magic (rather, his negative faith - he is perfectly convinced it does not exist) is the linchpin on which the cases revolve. Holmes' cases are very different from this. I wish the director would take an actual case from the Canon and showed it the way he showed his invented one. That would be a real gem...