Good Math, Bad Math

Big Number Bogosity from a Christian College Kid

Tue, 04 May 2010 20:34:19 -0500

I know that I just posted a link to a stupid religious argument, but I was sent a link to another one, which I can't resist mocking.

As I've written about quite often, we humans really stink at understanding big numbers, and how things scale. This is an example of that. We've got a jerk who's about to graduate from a dinky christian college, who believes that there must be something special about the moral atmosphere at his college, because in his four years at the school, there hasn't been a single murder.

Yeah, seriously. He really believes that his school is special, because it's gone four whole years without a murder:

Considering that the USA Today calculated 857 college student deaths from 2000 to 2005, how does one school manage to escape unscathed? It's certainly not chance or luck. For Patrick Henry College, it's in our Christian culture.

Critics mock us for our strict rules - like no dancing or drinking on campus, no members of the opposite sex permitted in your dorm room, nightly curfew hours - and the lack of a social atmosphere it creates. We have been the subject of books (God's Harvard), television shows, op-eds, and countless blogs who rant against our brand of overbearing right-wing Christianity that poisons society's freedom.

Yet, what is the cost of students being able to "express" themselves? Is that freedom worth the cost of drunk driving deaths, drug related violence, and love affairs turned fatal?

There were 857 college student deaths in the five-year period from 2000 to 2005! Therefore, any college where there weren't any murders in that period must be something really special. That christian culture must be making a really big difference, right?

Well, no.

According to Google Answers, the US Census Department reports that there are 2363 four year colleges in the US. So, assuming the widest possible distribution of student deaths, there were 1506 colleges with no student deaths in a five-year period. Or, put another way, more than 60% of colleges in the US went that five-year period without any violent student deaths.

Or, let's try looking at it another way. According to the census, there are 15.9 million people currently enrolled in college. The school that, according to the author, is so remarkable for going without any murders in the last four years? It has 325 students. Not 325 per class - 325 total.

In other words, among a group making up less than 2/1000ths of one percent of the college population, there were no murders. Assuming that the distribution of violent deaths is perfectly uniform (which it obviously isn't; but let's just keep things simple), given that there were 857 violent deaths in the student population as a whole, how many violent deaths would you expect among the student body at his dinky christian college?

That would be a big, fat zero.

The fact that there were no violent deaths at his school isn't remarkable, not at all. But to a twit who's incapable of actually understanding what numbers mean, that's not the conclusion to be drawn. It's also not that the violent death among college students is actually remarkably rare. Nor is it that most college students will go through college without any violent deaths on campus. No - according to a twit, with 857 violent campus deaths over five years, the only reasonable conclusion is that there must be something special about the ridiculous religious rules at his college that prevented the great rampaging plague of violence from touching the students at his school.

I actually spent five years as an undergraduate at Rutgers University in NJ. During that time, there were no violent student deaths. (There was one death by alchohol poisoning; and there was one drunk driving accident that killed four students.) But zero violent deaths. Gosh, Rutgers must have been an absolutely amazingly moral university! And gosh, we had all of those horrible sinful things, like dancing, and co-ed dorms! How did we manage to go all that time with no violence?

It must have been the prayers of the very nice Rabbi at the Chabad house on campus. Yeah, that must be it! Couldn't just be random chance, right?

Ok, now let me stop being quite so pettily snide for a moment.

What's going on here is really simple. We hear a whole lot about violence on campus. And when you hear about eight-hundred and some-odd violent deaths on campus, it sounds like a lot. So, intuitively, it sure seems like there must be a whole lot of violence on campus, and it must be really common. So if you can go through your whole time in college without having any violence occur on campus, it seems like it must be unusual.

That's because, as usual, we really suck at understanding big numbers and scale. 800 sounds like a lot. The idea that there are nearly sixteen million college students is just not something that we understand on an intuitive level. The idea that nearly a thousand deaths could be a tiny drop in the bucket - that it really amounts to just one death per 100,000 students per year - it just doesn't make sense to us. A number like 800 is, just barely, intuitively meaningful to us. One million isn't. Fifteen million isn't. And a ratio with a number that we can't really grasp intuitively on the bottom? That's not going to be meaningful either.

Bozo-boy is making an extremely common mistake. He's just simply failing to comprehend how numbers scale; he's not understanding what big numbers really mean.

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The Danger When You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Mon, 03 May 2010 19:35:52 -0500

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

There's no shortage of stupidity in the world. And, alas, it comes in many, many different kinds. Among the ones that bug me, pretty much the worst is the stupidity that comes from believing that you know something that you don't.

This is particularly dangerous for people like me, who write blogs like this one where we try to explain math and science to non-mathemicians/non-scientists. Part of what we do, when we're writing our blogs, is try to take complicated ideas, and explain them in ways that make them at least somewhat comprehensible to non-experts.

There are, arising from this, two dangers that face a math or science blogger.

There is the danger of screwing up ourselves. I've demonstrated this plenty of times. I'm not an expert in all of the things that I've tried to write about, and I've made some pretty glaring errors. I do my best to acknowledge and correct those errors, but it's all too easy to deceive myself into thinking that I understand something better than I actually do. I'm embarrassed every time that I do that.
There is the danger of doing a good enough job that our readers believe that they really understand something on the basis of our incomplete explanation. When you're writing for a popular audience, you don't generally get into every detail of the subject. You do your best to just find a way of explaining it in a way that gives people some intuitive handle on the idea. It's not perfect, but that's life. I've read a couple of books on relativity, and I don't pretend to really fully understand it. I can't quite wrap my head around all of the math. That's after reading several entire books aimed at a popular audience. Even at that length, you can't explain all of the details if you're writing for non-experts. And if you can't do it in a three-hundred page book, then you certainly can't do it in a single blog post! But sometimes, a reader will see a simplified popular explanation, and believe that because they understand that, that they've gotten the whole thing. In my experience, relativity is one of the most common examples of this phenomenon.

Todays post is an example of how terribly wrong you can go by taking an intuitive explanation of something, believing that you understand the whole thing from that intuitive explanation, and running with it, headfirst, right into a brick wall.

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Iterative Hockey Stick Analysis? Gimme a break!

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 21:46:23 -0500

This past weekend, my friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece of bad math. One of Orac's big interest is vaccination and anti-vaccinationists. The piece is a newsletter by a group calling itself the "Sound Choice Pharmaceutical Institute" (SCPI), which purports to show a link between vaccinations and autism. But instead of the usual anti-vac rubbish about thimerosol, they claim that "residual human DNA contamintants from aborted human fetal cells" causes autism.

Among others, Orac already covered the nonsense of that from a biological/medical perspective. What he didn't do, and why he forwarded this newsletter to me, is because the basis of their argument is that they discovered key change points in the autism rate that correlate perfectly with the introduction of various vaccines.

In fact, they claim to have discovered three different inflection points:

1979, the year that the MMR 2 vaccine was approved in the US;
1988, the year that a 2nd dose of the MMR 2 was added to the recommended vaccination schedule; and
1995, the year that the chickenpox vaccine was approved in the US.

They claim to have discovered these inflection points using "iterative hockey stick analysis".

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Finger Trees Done Right (I hope)

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 10:47:53 -0500

A while ago, I wrote a couple of posts that claimed to talk about finger trees. Unfortunately, I really botched it. I'd read a bunch of data structure papers, and managed to get myself thoroughly scrambled. What I wrote about was distantly related to finger trees, and it was useful to help understand how fingertrees work - but it was not, in any way, shape, or form, actually a description of fingertrees. Since then, I've been meaning to write a proper post explaining finger trees - but with the work on my book, and with chaos at work, I just haven't had the time. This time, in order to do my damnedest to make sure that I don't screw it up again, I'm basically go to describe finger trees over a couple of posts by walking through the best finger-tree paper that I could find. The paper is "Finger Trees: a simple general-purpose data structure", by Ralf Hinze and Ross Patterson. This might by the paper that introduced the structure, but I'm not sure.

The point of finger trees is pretty simple. It's very similar to the point of zippers. Programming in functional languages is terrific. As I've described before, there are a lot of advantages to writing functional code. But there are also a lot of places where a naive implementation of an algorithm using a functional data structure is dreadfully inefficient. Functional code may be prettier, more maintainable, and more reusable - but imperative code is frequently much more efficient. When you're doing an operation that, conceptually, modifies a piece of a complex data structure, then functional code can really suck. Finger trees give you a way around that - for many common updatabale data structures, you can build finger-tree versions that are very close to or fully as good as imperative, updating structures.

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Friday Random Ten, 4/23/2010

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:30:21 -0500

Stellardrive, Inlandsix: Reasonably good instrumental prog. They're not particularly exceptional, but they're decent.
Gong, "The Octave Doctors and the Crystal Machine": Gong is a perfect example of one of the differences between the great prog bands, and a lot of the neo-progressive stuff. I can't quite describe exactly what it is - but you listen to a band like Gong, and you never get bored. You can listen to it over, and over - and it's always interesting. Even though the individual features of the music are similar to what a lot of less brilliant bands do, they manage to put them together in a different way. I can listen to a neo-prog band like Jadis or Frost once or twice a month; if I listen to them more than that, they start to bug me. But I can listen to Gong twice a day, and never lose interest.
Parallel or 90 Degrees, "Backup": One of the really great neo-progressives. Po90 is Andy Tillison's other band, and they are brilliant. Not as brilliant as groups like Gong, but pretty damned amazing.
Jadis, "All You've Ever Known": Here's exactly what I'm talking about. The beginning of this Jadis track is actually sort-of like the Gong track above. But somehow, it's dull when Jadis does it. Listening to them right after Gong and Po90, they frankly sound terrible. I really like Jadis, but they can't hold a candle to the prog greats.
And So I Watch You From Afar, "If it Ain't Broke, Break It": Really good post-rock. ASIWYFA is on the louder end of post-rock, and they're really good at it. They're one of my most recent post-rock discoveries, after being recommended to me by a reader of the blog, and I'm really enjoying them.
Genesis, "Your Own Special Way": And now, my favorite band of all time. I love Genesis. Even after Peter Gabriel left, they still wrote some of the best prog rock of all time. There's a reason why so many neo-prog bands were inspired by them. Even when they're doing a song like this, which is basically a silly sappy ballad, they make it into something really special.
Jacob Hoffman with Kandel's Orchestra, "Doina and Hora": an incredibly old recording of traditional klezmer, led by probably the greatest Klezmer xylophone player ever. If you have any appreciation for Klezmer, this will absolutely knock your socks off.
The Flower Kings, "Soul Vortex": Ah, the Flower Kings. The only neo-progressive band that I've found that's really as good as the original prog guys. Whatever that elusive "it" that the great bands had that made them endlessly listenable was, Roine Stolt and the Flower Kings have it.
Transatlantic, "The Return of the Giant Hogweed": On their latest album, Translatlantic added a disk of covers of their influences. Naturally, no group made up of members of the best neo-progressive bands could possibly not include a classic Genesis track. It's a very faithful cover, and it works really well.
Marillion, "Forgotten Sons": An old favorite of mine: one of the lesser known tracks from Marillion's very first full album. From the very start, Marillion was really something special.

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Book Update

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:04:23 -0500

Very quick post here: the third beta of my AppEngine book "Code in the Cloud" was released this morning. If you've bought a copy of the beta, you can go to your pragmatic account, and download a fresh copy with all of the fixes and new material.

If you haven't bought a copy... Well, if you're interested in cloud programming, I'd like to think that this book is a pretty good overview of the subject. It's about Google AppEngine, but I've done my best to write it so that it discusses the nature of cloud programming in general, using AppEngine as a specific example of a cloud platform. Buying a copy supports your friendly math blogger and makes me happy; and when I'm happy, I'm more likely to write more posts for the blog :-).

The main reason that I'm mentioning it is that a few people have asked me to provide a forum on the blog for questions. I'm happy to answer questions, and I'd love to hear feedback from anyone who's read it - both positive and negative. (And, to be honest, the negative feedback is generally more useful, so I'm very serious when I say that constructive negative feedback is welcome. Anything that you can tell me now, before it's printed, is something that I can fix!)

So if you've got any questions or comments about the book, please go ahead and put them in the comments here. On the other hand, if you find any errors, you're welcome to put them here, but it would help me more if you could file an erratum at the book's pragmatic press page, linked above.

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Shocking Fraud from Financial Scum

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 13:21:53 -0500

Against my better judgement, I've ended up writing a lot about the financial mess that we're currently going through. If you've read that, you know that my opinion is that the mess amounts to a giant pile of fraud.

But even having spent so much time reading and studying what was going on, the latest news from the financial mess shocks me. Even knowing how utterly sleazy and dishonest many people in the financial world have been, even knowing about the stuff they've been doing, the kinds of out and out fraud that they've perpetrated, the latest news makes them look even more evil than I could have imagined.

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I am a racist

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:31:33 -0500

(Unfortunately, this post has been linked to by a white supremacist site. Instead of providing a forum for their foulness, I'm shutting down comments on this post.)

Unfortunately, I lost the link that inspired this. But I recently saw a post by a conservative about "reclaiming" the word racist. It went on to list a collection of reasons why he was a racist. The gist of it was that all of us dirty liberals were the real racists - because there's no possible reason for us to support things like affirmative action, welfare, etc., unless we really, deep down, believe that minorities - particularly blacks - are stupid animals incapable of taking care of themselves.

It's typical bullshit. So I'm responding in my own way. Because, you see, I am a racist. I'm not proud of that fact - but growing up in a deeply racist and sexist culture, you can't avoid absorbing racist and sexist messages and attitudes into your worldview. And the blogger who inspired this is, like me, a member of the privileged elite. The difference between us is that I at least try to notice the effects of my privilege. I don't support social justice programs like affirmative action, welfare, and job training because I think that poor black people need help because they're less smart than me: I think that people like me have unfair advantages that we rarely appreciate, and that everyone deserves the same advantages that I've been lucky enough to receive. But however idealistic I am, however commited I am to social justice, the fact remains: I am, to my shame, a racist.

I am a racist - because I never noticed all of the unearned privileges that are given to me until someone pointed them out.
I am a racist - because even after learning about the unearned privileges that I recieve, I still don't notice them.
I am a racist, because I have grown up in a culture that, at every turn, teaches me that to be white is to be better, and smarter, and I have absorbed that lesson.
I am a racist, because I instinctively react to members of minorities with fear.
I am a racist, because I live in a sunset town.
I am a racist, because I believe that I deserve the success I have, even though I know people who are more smart, capable, and talented than I am never had the chances that I did to be successful, because of the color of their skin.
I am a racist - because I am a white man who has directly benefited from the unfair preferences that have been directed towards me all of my life.
I am a racist - because every day, I benefit from the denial of basic privileges to other people.
I am a racist, because I do not notice the things that are denied to people who are different from me.
I am a racist, because I do not notice the advantages that I have over others.
I am a racist, because even when I do manage to notice what is denied to people of different races and backgrounds, I don't speak up.

The point of this isn't just to do a sort of "walk of shame". The point is that I am an incredibly lucky person, who has benefited from all sorts of things - from where I was born, to the color of my skin, to the background of my parents, to my gender. I have recieved, and continue to receive benefits because of those, and many other factors that have nothing to do with my own merit. And except for very rare occasions, that goes unremarked, unnoticed.

People like me think of ourselves as the default - as "normal" people. We consider the incredible advantages that we receive to be normal, unremarkable. We don't notice just how much we benefit from that assumption of our own normality - the benefits we receive fade into invisibility. We don't even notice that they exist. And then when someone who doesn't get those benefits has trouble, we naturally blame them for not being as successful as we are.

The underlying theme of people like the jerk who inspired this post is: "I made it by myself, without any help. So they should be able to make it by themselves, without any help either."

But that's bullshit, because none of us "made it by ourselves". We're the beneficiaries of the system we live in.

I grew up in a wealthy town in NJ. We didn't consider ourselves wealthy - but by comparison to lots of other people, we really were. I went to a very good school system. We complained about it a lot: the textbooks were too old; the equipment in the science labs were too beaten up; the classes were too easy, and so on.

When I was in college, I got to teach a summer program for top students from schools in Newark, Camden, and Jersey City. And I discovered that my students went to schools where they didn't have to worry about their books being too old - because they didn't have any books. I mean that literally: in their english classes, they didn't have books, because their schools had never been able to buy new books since it opened - and the books had long since fallen apart. They didn't complain about the lousy lab equipment - because their schools had never had science labs at all. How could people coming from schools like that possibly hope to compete with students from a school like mine? I didn't admitted to college over people from their schools because I was smarter. I got admitted into college over people from their schools because I was richer and whiter.

And when my students went to the campus bookstore to buy basic supplies like paper and pencils, the people who worked there followed them around the store - because what would a bunch of poor black kids be doing in a bookstore if they weren't there to rob it?

I write this math blog for fun. How did I get the background to do it? I come from a highly educated family. They taught me to read before I even started preschool. I'd learned about statistics from my father when I was in third grade. I learned about algebra in sixth grade, even though my school didn't teach it until 8th or 9th. I learned calculus in my freshman year in high school - even though my school didn't teach it until a senior year AP class. I was learning this stuff long before the school taught it to me; and my parents made sure that they bought a house in a very expensive school district where there would be things like AP classes. My parents paid for me to go to college - which gave me the time to take courses not just because I needed them to graduate, but because they covered things that I wanted to learn, just for fun.

How could a person from a family that just managed to scrape by, who lived in a school system that couldn't afford textbooks for the basic classes, much less the AP classes, how could they compete with me? It's damned close to impossible. Not because they're any less smart, or any less talented. But because I've had an absolutely uncountable number of advantages. Every day of my life, I've been given benefits which helped make it possible for me to become who and what I am. I'm here partially because I've worked damned hard to get here. But that work, by itself, wouldn't have gotten me to where I am, without luck and privilege.

People like me need to remember that. We didn't earn what we have all by ourselves. We may have earned part of it - but only part. An awful lot of what we have is built on privilege: on the advantages that we've been given because of race, gender, wealth, and family.

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Financial Shenanigans: the Repo 105

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:16:54 -0500

I'm glad to report that electricity has been restored to the Chu-Carroll household. So now I'm trying to catch up.

During the outage, I got a bunch of questions about the latest news coming out of the big financial disasters. A major report came out about the failure of Lehman Brothers, and one thing that's been mentioned frequently is something called repo105.

The whole repo105 thing is interesting to me, not so much because of what it actually means, but because of how it's been reported. The term has been mentioned everywhere - but trying to find any information about just what the hell it means seems to be next to impossible. It's absolutely amazing how many places have reported on it without bothering to explain it.

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Code in the Cloud: My Book Beta is Available!

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:27:34 -0500

As I've mentioned before, I've been spending a lot of time working on a book. Initially, I was working on a book made up of a collection of material from blog posts; along the way, I got diverted, and ended up writing a book about cloud computing using Google's AppEngine tools. The book isn't finished, but my publisher, the Pragmatic Programmers, have a program that they call beta books. Once a book is roughly 60% done, you can buy it at a discount, and download drafts electronically immediately. As more sections get done, you can download each new version. And when the book is finally finished, you get a final copy.

We released the first beta version of the book today. You can look at excerpts, or buy a copy, by going to the books page at Pragmatic's website.

If you're interested in what cloud computing is, and how to build cloud applications - or if you just feel like doing something to support you friendly local math-blogger - please take a look, and consider getting a copy. I'm not going to harp about the book a lot on the blog; you're not going to see a ton of posts that are thinly veiled advertisements, or updates tracking sales, or anything like that. If there's something that I would have written about anyway, and it's appropriate to mention the book, then I'll feel free to mention it, but I won't waste your time hyping it.

In other news, here's the main reason that things have been dead on this blog since the weekend:

That's the view from my driveway as of monday morning. Over the weekend, we had one of the worst windstorms to hit New York in about thirty years. That mess is two oak trees, each close to 2 meters in diameter, which came down on our street on saturday. (If you look closely towards the right hand side, you can see the remains of my neighbors car.) The telephone pole in the picture was snapped not by getting hit by a tree, but simply by the wind. Since that pole had our electrical transformer, and those trees took out the wiring that fed that transformer, we are (obviously) without electricity, internet, or (most importantly) heat.

Con-ed is promising to restore our electricity by friday. I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, back to the happy stuff. The book exists in electronic form! Buy a copy for yourself, your friends, your neighbors, and your dog! We've got lots of wonderful new expenses to deal with recovering from that storm! :-)

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Grandiose Crankery: Cantor, Godel, Church, Turing, ... Morons!

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:26:38 -0500

A bunch of people have been asking me to take a look at yet another piece of Cantor crankery recently posted to Arxiv. In general, I'm sick and tired of Cantor crankery - it's been occupying much too much space on this blog lately. But this one is a real prize. It's an approach that I've never seen before: instead of the usual weaseling around, this one goes straight for Cantor's proof.

But it does much, much more than that. In terms of ambition, this thing really takes the cake. According to the author, one J. A. Perez, he doesn't just refute Cantor. No, that would be trivial! Every run-of-the-mill crackpot claims to refute cantor! Perez claims to refute Cantor, Gödel, Church, and Turing. Among others. He claims to reform the axiom of infinity in set theory to remove the problems that it supposedly causes. He claims to be able to use his reformed axiom of infinity together with his refutation of Cantor to get rid of the continuum hypothesis, and to eliminate any strange results proved by the axiom of choice.

Yes, Mr. (Dr? Professor? J. Random Schmuck?) Perez is nothing if not a true mastermind, a mathematical genius of utterly epic proportions! The man who single-handedly refutes pretty much all of 20th century mathematics! The man who has determined that now we must throw away Cantor and Gödel, and reinstate Hilbert's program. The perfect mathematics is at hand, if we will only listen to his utter brilliance!

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Animal Experimentation and Simulation

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:05:00 -0500

In my post yesterday, I briefly mentioned the problem with simulations as a replacement for animal testing. But I've gotten a couple of self-righteous emails from people criticizing that: they've all argued that given the quantity of computational resources available to us today, of course we can do all of our research using simulations. I'll quote a typical example from the one person who actually posted a comment along these lines:

This doesn't in any way reduce the importance of informing people about the alternatives to animal testing. It strikes me as odd that the author of the blogpost is a computer scientist, yet seems uninformed about the fact, that the most interesting alternatives to animal testing are coming from that field. Simulation of very complex systems is around the corner, especially since computing power is becoming cheaper all the time.

That said, I also do think it's OK to voice opposition to animal testing, because there *are* alternatives. People who ignore the alternatives seem to have other issues going on, for example a sort of pleasure at the idea of power over others - also nonhumans.

I'll briefly comment on the obnoxious self-righteousness of this idiot. They started off their comment with the suggestion that the people who are harassing Dr. Ringach's children aren't really animal rights protestors; they're people paid by opponents of the AR movement in order to discredit it. And then goes on to claim that anyone who doesn't see the obvious alternatives to animal testing really do it because they get their rocks off torturing poor defenseless animals.

Dumbass.

Anyway: my actual argument is below the fold.

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Scumbag Animal Rights Villains Harass Children for Father's Speech

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:00:44 -0500

This post is off-topic for this blog, but there are some things that I just can't keep quiet about.

Via my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Janet over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, I've heard about some absolutely disgraceful antics by an animal rights group. To be clear, in what follows, I'm not saying that all animal rights folks are scumbags: I'm pointing out that there's a specific group of animal rights folks who are sickening monsters for what they're doing.

The background: There's a neurobiologist named Dario Ringach. Professor Ringach used to do research using primates. Back in 2006, when he did that, animal rights targeted him, and his children. The did things like vandalize his house, put on masks and bang on his childrens windows, and protest at his children's schools. Professor Ringach disappointingly but understandably gave in, and abandoned his research in order to protect his family.

Fast forward a couple of years. Last week, Dr. Ringach, along with Janet and several other people, participated in a public dialogue about animal research at UCLA. Dr. Ringach spoke about why animal research is important. That's all that he did: present an explanation of why animal research is important.

For that, for being willing to participate in a discussion, for saying something the animals right people didn't like, the animal rights thugs have decided to protest. That's bad enough: to stage disruptions against a professor simply because he said something that you didn't like. No, that's not enough for these rat bastard assholes. They're going to stage protests at his children's school. They're going to harass his children to punish him for speaking when they want him to shut up.

I don't care what you think of animal rights. I don't care what you think about any topic. Harassment isn't an acceptable response to speech. And no matter what, children should be off limits. Even if their father were everything that the AR people claim that he is: if he really were a person who tortured and murdered people for fun, going after his children would be a disgusting, disgraceful, evil thing to do. To do it just because he dared to talk about something they don't like? These people deserve to be publicly condemned, and criminally prosecuted. Threats and harassment have no place in public discourse.

Personally, I'm a strong supporter of animal research. Of course it's important to minimize any pain and suffering that is inflicted on the animals used in research - but people who do the research, and the organizations that oversee them, are extremely careful about ensuring that. And animal research shouldn't be done for trivial purposes: the work must be important enough to justify subjecting living creatures to it. But the results are worth the cost. I can say for certain that I wouldn't be alive today without the results of animal research: I had life-saving surgery using a technique that was developed using animals. I rely on medications that were originally developed using animal models. My mother is alive today because of animal research: she's diabetic, and relies on both insulin and medications which were developed using animal research. My father survived cancer for 15 years because of animal research: his cancer was treated using a radiation therapy technique that was generated using animal research. My sister isn't a cripple today, because of animal research. She had severe scoliosis which would have crippled her, but which was corrected using a surgical technique developed using animals. My wife would be terribly ill without animal research: she's got an autoimmune disorder that damages the thyroid; people with it need to take thyroid hormone replacements, developed - all together now - using animal research. I could easily go on: there's probably barely a person alive today who hasn't benefited dramatically from animal research. It's an essential tool of science.

While I'm ranting: one of the common responses from the animal rights people is that we don't need animals for experimentation: we can use computer simulation, which will (supposedly) be more accurate, because we can use human biology in the simulation, whereas animals used as models are often significantly different from humans, so that the results of tests on animals don't translate well to humans.

Everyone must, by now, have heard of the programmers mantra: GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. A simulation is only as good as the knowledge of the person who wrote it. You can only simulate what you understand. The problem with computer models for medical tests is that most of the time, we don't know how things work. The research is being done on animals precisely because we don't know enough about it to simulate it. For one simple example, consider cancer. There's a lot of animal research done where we basically deliberately give cancer to an animal. We can't simulate that, because the way that cancers grow and spread is still a mystery. We don't understand exactly what triggers a cancer; we don't completely understand the biological processes going on in cancer cells, or exactly what the difference between a cancer cell and a normal cell is. We can't simulate that. Or, rather, we can, but only as an experiment with a real-world counterpart to verify it.

In any case, getting back to the original point: it really doesn't matter whether you agree with animal research or not. The important point here is that using intimidation, threats, and harassment the way these AR groups are doing is absolutely, unequivocably wrong. And to extend it from the scientist to his children is beyond wrong. It's downright evil. And to harass both the scientist and his children not for doing the research that they object to, but for talking about why that research is important? I simply do not have the words to express how repugnant it is.

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Friday Random Ten, 2/19/2010

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:52:16 -0500

Transatlantic, "The Whirlwind (Part 4) - A Man Can Feel": a track from the new Transatlantic album. Transatlantic is a supergroup: it's made of members of Marillion (Pete Trevawas on bass), the Flower Kings (Roine Stolte, guitar), Spock's Beard (Neil Morse, vocals and keyboards), and Dream Theater (Mike Portnoy, drums). In general, I don't like supergroups; they're usually more of a commercial stunt than anything else. But I love Transatlantic; and this album is fantastic - it's a bit less smooth than some of Transatlantic's earlier work, but the writing is fantastic. Highly recommended.
Do Make Say Think, "Fredericia": a very typical track by one of my favorite post-rock ensembles. In sound, they're somewhere in between Mogwai and Godspeed, with a bit of classical influence.
Marillion, "Man of a Thousand Faces": absolutely classic Marillion. One of the things that Yes used to do that I love is slow builds. They start with a simple pattern, and repeat over and over, adding another layer each repetition. This song is the only time that I recall Marillion doing it, and it's amazing.
Abigail's Ghost, "Gemini Man": a big disappointment. A bunch of people recommended Abigail's Ghost to me as a great neo-prog band. I find them incredibly dull. Pretty much the only time I hear them is when they come up randomly, because I never choose to listen to them.
The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band, "Sam": wonderful jazz-influenced Klezmer. When they're actually playing Klezmer, FBKB is fantastic. Unfortunately, they often introduce songs with a sort of beat-inspired poetry recitation, which is just annoying.
The Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra, "Galitzianer Chusid": more Klezmer! Andy Statman plays very traditional klezmer. This one I feel a special connection to. My mother's family are Litvaks, and my father was a Galitzianer. (That is, ashkenazi Jews from Lithuania and Galacia, respectively.) Traditionally, the Litvaks were wealthier, and looked down on the Galitzianers. My grandparents used to tell my mother that if she weren't good, she'd grow up and marry a Galitzianer. And she did - and they were happily married for 44 years.
Peter Gabriel, "The Rhythm of the Heat": utterly wonderful old Peter Gabriel. Security is still my favorite of his albums, and this is my favorite track off the album.
Kansas, "Distant Vision": Often when an old band gets back together, it's pure tripe. And Kansas has reformed itself several times over the years, only to produce more tripe. This time they got it right. This album sounds like what you'd expect the old Kansas to sound like if they were writing in the 2000's. It's not exactly like their old stuff - it's grown over time - but it's got all of the beauty, complexity, and quality of their older stuff. The lead singers voice has suffered a bit with age; he can't quite pull off some of the stuff he tries to do. But it's good stuff overall.
Parallel or 90 Degrees, "Entry Level": Andy Tillison has been very busy lately, coming out with new albums from both Po90 and the Tangent. Of the two, I think that the new Po90 is the better album - I think it's absolutely terrific.
Roine Stolte, "Spirit of the Rebel": the leader of the Flower Kings recorded a solo album, which was intended to be a tribute to the pop bands he grew up listening to. But Stolte being Stolte, even when he's trying to play pop and R&B, he still manages to play better prog than 9 out of 10 prog bands. It's definitely on the pop side, much less challenging that tFK, but it's really good stuff.

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Disco Strikes Out Again: Casey Luskin, Kitzmiller, and New Information

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:32:04 -0500

For a lot of people, I seem to have become the go-to blogger for information theory stuff. I really don't deserve it: Jeff Shallit at Recursivity knows a whole lot more than I do. But I do my best.

Anyway, several people pointed out that over at the Disco Institute, resident Legal Eagle Casey Luskin has started posting an eight-part series on how the Kitzmiller case (the legal case concerning the teaching of intelligent design in Dover PA) was decided wrong. In Kitzmiller, the intelligent design folks didn't just lose; they utterly humiliated themselves. But Casey has taken it on himself to demonstrate why, not only did they not make themselves look like a bunch of dumb-asses, but they in fact should have won, had the judge not been horribly biased against them.

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