depth first search

I keep hearing about this problem of communicating with people in the future about dangerous radioactive waste storage sites. My solution to the problem is to make the sites as desolate and unremarkable as possible. Given our natural curiosity, putting up elaborate structures seems like more like an invitation than a prohibition, even if those structures are designed to be foreboding or menacing.

And if people of the future happen upon this desolate and unremarkable wasteland, what then? Well, some of them get sick and die. We have  to trust that humanity’s ability to formulate causal models from that kind of data remains intact, and so the rest will relearn the forgotten lessons of the past. In other words, the best way to communicate with the future by doing nothing special and trusting that they will figure it out.

UPDATE: Ana called me out for not reading the linked article (just the pull quote). This is one of those cases where a piece of news is making multiple circuits around the web, and I had assumed (wrongly) that the links led to an article I had read awhile ago, and not the current (and quite interesting) interview.

I also have to revise my own plan somewhat. A Rosetta stone like monument is clearly the best bet for the short term, assuming some language survives. Though computational linguistics is making progress decoding languages with no Rosetta stone analogue, the ability for future generations to interpret signs increases dramatically if one of the available languages is known.

The case where no language survives in its current form is more complex. Here’s were my plan makes a bit more sense. You have to weigh the probability of discovery against the probable protocols future humans (or others) might employ should the site be discovered. I was imagining an ideal scenario where the site could avoid detection for a million years.

But what if it is discovered? I think the best result is to have some kind of subtle but lasting monument, and let the experience of exploring a radioactive hot zone (and the inevitable bad result) lead future explorers to the correct conclusion about the meaning of the monument. Basically, if people find the repository, we want to make sure they explore it, and by exploring it, learn the nature of the danger. This avoids the terrible case where people settle the area without any knowledge of the danger lurking underneath.

People always look at me a bit quizzically when I start to rave about Primer. Today’s subtle Primer reference in XKCD perfectly captures both why I love the film, and why nobody knows about it.

Last year Anastasia and I went as undecided Ohio voters. This year we’ve chosen a more subtle muse:

I now own a pair of overalls. And a pitchfork.

The first 45 minutes of The Trojan Women had two levels — yelling and interpretive dance. The next 45 minutes turned into a Greek Rocky Horror picture show, thanks in large part to over-the-top performances by Menelaus and Helen of Troy Greece.

We secured front row seats in a black box theater, thanks mostly to my wife’s uncanny ability to surreptitiously navigate past any form of line. I joked earlier that we were in the splash zone, or perhaps the Gallagher zone (beware of flying watermelon). As the play progressed, I realized we were in real danger of being in the spittle zone, so tight was some of the staging to the stage level front row seats and so committed to the yelling were the actors.

Taken in totality, the entire experience turned into such a ridiculous mess, you’ll end up forgiving the tedium of the early minutes. If you can time it right, start paying attention (like you could avoid it) when Menelaus enters (every bit the modern pillager), then tune out after the punk rock number. That about brackets the highlights.

What strikes me about the Letterman scandal is the complete lack of acknowledgement of any ethical wrongdoing. I mean sure, older men having sex with young female assistants is icky, but nobody seems to be stopping to consider why this is icky.

Even feminist blogs, who really should know better, seen more obsessed with other things than this matter.

Here’s the problem. When superiors in an organization sleep with people who work for them, they are contributing to a culture that says, bluntly, sleeping with the boss is a way to get ahead.

Am I wrong in thinking this? Is the situation more complicated?

It seems odd that women are drastically underrepresented at Wikipedia when women in graduate school outnumber men. This means that there is more to the story, possibly more issues — cough, sexism — which Wikipedia must investigate to figure out what gives when it comes to their lack of women contributors.

I find it difficult to imagine a more egalitarian platform than Wikipedia, so if Wikipedia is sexist then there’s really no hope for any organization not being sexist. Consider that Wikipedia, as a platform, knows virtually nothing about anyone who participates. Even when an editor misbehaves, it is often difficult to figure out who that person is.

That’s not to say that a Wikipedia gender gap isn’t real. You’ll just have to look outside of Wikipedia for the cause.

UPDATE: What I haven’t considered is that while Wikipedia may itself by egalitarian in design, it certainly allows sexists to edit as freely as feminists. As my wife puts it, “You can express prejudice without directing that prejudice against its object.” As such, the anonymity in the design doesn’t really offer any protection from sexism. While the egalitarian nature of the design certainly allows for counter edits, who has the time? That, and the multitude of complex social factors that affect the parity of men and women in online communities suggests that this is a more complex question than I initially suspected.

One of the most interesting things to come out of the Robert Taylor lecture was this little anecdote. I think it is important to remember that maintaining diversity, beyond the ethical and moral importance of doing so, confers tangible benefits. And we should remember that a lack of diversity at Xerox circa 1970, viewed retroactively, was not just immoral. It was stupid and immoral.

Last night was my first visit to the Texas Performing Arts Center. The hall was pleasing and larger than I expected, or at least felt that way from our nosebleed seats in the second balcony. We did get a chance to enjoy the outdoor sixth floor balcony during intermission, though the entire evening was, for me, spent entirely too close to railings offering scant psychological protection from the drop offs they enclose.

Béla Fleck was the only familiar name on the bill (I’m naïve regarding tabla and bass players), but as a musician who traditionally attracts the best, I had high hopes for the other performers. It was, to be blunt, an evening of bests. The best banjo player, the best bassist, the best tabla player, an odd tripling that probably represented more Grammy Awards than I could carry at once.

[ Aside: You can quibble about who's the best at anything. Really it doesn't matter, as being the best is more like being in the echelon of preeminent. ]

The thing about the banjo is that it is basically designed to be right in the front of anything. I imagine learning to lay back with that kind of sound is quite difficult, and I found it continually surprising how well a bass and tabla player could remain musically out front of the banjo’s domineering sound.

[ Aside: Putting a drum head behind strings is badass. ]

The tabla is an instrument that I haven’t spent any serious time with, so that was the major revelation of the evening for me. Zakir could play the tablas so fast and with tonal variation that at times gave the impression of two instruments being played at once (rather than one played exceedingly fast), a kind of aural illusion that I’ve previously only experienced while listening to Wynton Marsalis play Arban’s Fantasie and Variations on The Carnival of Venice.

The best quote of the night came from Edgar Meyer, when describing the next piece, a canon:

This next piece is about four minutes long. I think the length of a piece is an important thing to know for modern compositions.

There were some hammer jokes as well.

The blog Computational Complexity usually focuses on issues of, well, computational complexity, but sometimes a post veers off in another direction, like this particular post on the relative strength of French engineering:

In my last post one of the comments asserted without justification that The French will never be as good at Engineering as the Germans. Rather than ponder if this is racist or bigoted, I would challenge the poster to either give HARD EVIDENCE that this has been true in the past, and a REASON to think it will continue. I still stand by the notion that globalization will make all of these local factors go away. Mainly because locality is not longer as important as it once was.

Then there’s this comment later on:

In retrospect, I do not have hard evidence of why french are not as good engineers as germans, and perhaps this is not correct (perhaps it is though). Because I cannot defend it, it was a bad example.

But I would defend myself if such a statement is called bigoted or racist. Whether it is depends on how people interpret it. I interpret it as follows:

We can measure every french person at how good they are at X, and plot the distribution (f). We can do the same for Germans (g). When I make a statement that “the french are not as good as germans in X” I am saying that the expected value of f is significantly lower than g. I am not saying about why this is (it could be connected to culture, or it could be connected to the weather, or it could be connected to the fact that the french never had any need to do X). I am also not saying anything about a particular french person and a particular german person. There is a prior on whether the german is a better engineer, but this prior is usually insignificant given that I would probably have much more information about this people besides that they are french and german.

I don’t like the term racist or bigoted in this context. The term racist does not seem to apply because France, as a country, consists of people of many different races. For the statement to be bigoted, it would have to reflect some notion of intolerance. Saying the French are bad at engineering does not strike me as intolerant as, for example, saying the French are rude (a seemingly more common opinion among Americans). It does strike me as prejudicial, which is the term I am going to use to denote this particular pattern of American/French animosity.

What I find interesting about the comment is the appeal to formalism, and the assertion that true prejudicial remarks need to explicitly cite a cultural cause or single out an individual. The appeal to formalism is both fascinating and baffling. Consider these statements:

White men are stupid.

The mean intelligence of white men is considerably less than all other races and genders.

If we plot the distribution for intelligence of white men (wm) against the any distribution of a different race or gender (rg), then we will see that the expected value of wm is significantly lower than rg.

Adding progressively more formalism turns the original and obviously prejudicial statement into something that is still obviously prejudiced. Also consider that none of the example statements above make causal claims or single out any individual, e.g. why white men are stupid or I am stupid (since I am a white man). Yet they are still prejudicial.

I’m perfectly happy to give this particular commenter the benefit of the doubt. We all carry around biases that, when exposed to even simple skepticism, turn out to be unsubstantiated, prejudicial, or otherwise flawed. What interests me are the various ways that people (and I am definitely guilty) try to rationalize these biases after they have been exposed. Part of the problem, I think, is that in this culture prejudice, racism, or bigotry have become things for which apologies are never enough, and so there is always some utility in trying to argue your way out of acquiring that kind of label.

To post too often to Twitter. I’d follow you if you weren’t clogging up my timeline! Suggestion: twabby.

Blogs that I subscribe to but don’t want to admit to reading. Suggestion: glogs.