Out of my hat

A dear friend of mine writes a blog. That blog has recently been attacked by some random pseudonymous blogger. Let’s call that otherwise unnamed blogger U. One of U’s many (baseless, mostly incoherent) points of contention is that my friend’s HTML skills are lacking.

U, of course, can’t manage to tear him/herself away from the Transitional DTD. This is because he/she can’t seem to lay out a web page without using TABLEs: for those of you who don’t write web pages, take my word for it that this is a no-no from the point of view of good HTML. Or better yet, don’t take my word for it; check the specs:

Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media. Additionally, when used with graphics, these tables may force users to scroll horizontally to view a table designed on a system with a larger display. To minimize these problems, authors should use style sheets to control layout rather than tables.

Add that to his/her bizarre method of captioning pictures, and his/her insulting little rant between NOSCRIPT tags that assumes that you’ve deliberately turned scripting off and aren’t, say, using Lynx or something perfectly reasonable… well, one might wonder where U gets his/her authority to question the HTML skills of another.

Oh, and U? If you’re reading this, you might want to consider the benefits of E-mail. That way if you really feel the need to trash someone, you can actually do it to their face. And if you want your sniggering little friends in on the action so they can silently applaud your irrational and unimaginative rants against The Enemy, then you can use the Blind Carbon Copy header. Of course, if courtesy and courage aren’t virtues in your world, then forget I said anything.

Oh, wait, you already have.

I’ve been considering moving lately; I’ve had enough problems with the water in my current apt. that a change of venue seems like a good idea, and I’d really like to make walking to campus in under an hour a feasible plan.

What I’d like to do is to rent a house. (I flirt occasionally with buying, but given that I’m not really looking to be living in my current city for a long period of time — indeed, given that I’m hoping to vanish with very little warning indeed someday — such a course is probably unwise.) Of course, renting a house brings with it any number of attendant annoyances: lawn care, snow removal, etc. Also, it seems not uncommon hereabouts to ask renters to supply their own refridgerator, which is a little weird but I can dig it.

However, see vanish above; when I do eventually move away, the fewer posessions I have the easier it will be. Also, I feel like I have better things to spend money on than a lawnmower… which I don’t really want anyhow, since my ideal lawn would consist of clover and other plants that don’t grow more than a decimter or so high and maybe a Zen garden.

So it’s looking like more apartment living for me.

So people talk about Massachusetts liberals as though they’re the very worst kind, and by extension that there’s no place more liberal than Massachusetts. As a Canadian, I find this funny. Particularly when the (Republican) governor is now talking about bringing back the death penalty:

Massachusetts can create a capital punishment system that is as infallible as humanly possible by narrowly defining the eligible crimes and requiring the use of DNA or other scientific evidence, according to a report that will be released today by a panel appointed by Governor Mitt Romney.

There’s a couple of points to make here. First of all, I’m not sure how reducing the number of crimes that can warrant the death penalty will increase its infallibility except perhaps in a purely statistical sense: the fewer such crimes there are, the fewer people the State will put to death and hence the fewer innocent people the State will put to death. This is assuming probabilistic independence, which may or may not be valid.

A far more significant concern, though, is the mutilation of the sense of infallible that’s going on here. Infallible is an absolute: either you is or you ain’t. You can sort of justify using terms like mostly infallible, if you really try, but as infallible as humanly possible? What the hell does that mean?

Of course, this is Massachusetts we’re talking about here, home of such prominent Catholic politicians as JFK and JFK2, so from a strict Catholic perspective as infallible as humanly possible is logically equivalent to infallible, since the Pope is human and (at least on certain matters) infallible. QED. If one wants to take a more humanistic stance, then as infallible as humanly possible must mean fallible, since nobody’s perfect.

So in other words: a commission is proposing bringing back the death penalty in Massachusetts and is trying to sell it on its fallibility. It’s pronouncements like this that remind me why I’m never, ever likely to become a politician.

Logging on to my pseudo-bank’s website, and I accidentally hit the caps-lock key when tabbing from “Account number” to “PIN”. I was vaguely aware of doing this — I do it fairly frequently, after all — but I wouldn’t have been able to tell from typing because the PIN field is “TYPE=PASSWORD” and hence conceals your input behind a sequence of — on my browser — dots.

Except — and here’s the cool part — that a little “shift-up” sort of icon thingy appeared at the right side of the text box in question. I’m imagining that I’m not the only person who hits Caps Lock along with Tab, and the friendly folks at web support for this institution got tired of asking people to check. Hence, a very pretty little solution.

By contrast — by which I mean, “On another subject entirely that’s only barely thematically related to this one” — I was recently going through my archive files and made the unpleasant discovery that the “break into paragraphs” feature that Blogger allows is more BReak and less Paragraph, if you follow me. This displeases me, because I’m a bit of a purist about formatting languages. So I’m considering doing something drastic, like migrating to some other system.

As it happens, I started writing a home-brewed blog software complex a couple of months ago, back before I had to learn Calc 2 at long last. Now that my semester is almost over, maybe I can get back to that & solve my problem that way.

Clevermonkey has briefly left semi-retirement from blogging in order to bring us his thoughts on music sharing. The inspiration for his post was a CBC News package from a few weeks ago:

The segment had a lot of sound-bites from various punters, pundits and lawyers discussing whether or not file-sharers were stealing music and whether or not current Canadian fair-use laws needed to be amended to criminalize file-sharing in Canada. It even had Steven Paige, of Barenaked Ladies fame, smugly suggesting that file-sharing, if left unchecked, would be sure to force him into a job at Tim Horton’s.

Now, the question in my mind is this: why is Steven Paige entitled to be a music star?

The centerpiece of the debate on MP3s and filesharing is the contention that it’s theft. Someone who copies files is, in a slightly abstract sense, stealing. From who? Presumably not the person that they’re copying from, since filesharing is, well, sharing, and hence the source for the files can be assumed to be complicit in the theft.^* Rather, the theft is one of intellectual property, requiring us to accept a model for the distribution of music, etc. akin to the licencing of software: An abstract pattern is created. Its creator retains the right to distribute concrete manifestations of this abstract pattern. In the business world, of course — be that the business of music or software — the creator cedes those rights to a corporation which employs them.

So we’re not talking about stealing from the artists, because the artists don’t have control over what is notionally their intellectual property. They have sold those rights to their employers — the record companies. If any stealing is going on, then it’s theft from those companies.

So then, wherefore is Mr. Paige’s lifestyle in danger? Well, part of it is the question of royalties: unlike a software developper, most musicians aren’t salaried employees of their companies. They only make money from units sold… and generally, not so much of that comapratively speaking. The presumption is that the more filesharing that’s going on, the fewer people are going out and buying CDs. I’d like to suggest that this isn’t the case; I know numerous people involved in filesharing activities (hey, it wasn’t that long ago that I was still a university student), and most of them are massive consumers of music, both free over the ‘Net and bought on CD or DVD. Of course, anecdotes aren’t data, but I don’t think that there’s a particular inverse relationship between filesharing and music buying, and certainly I’ve not seen any arguments for why there should be.

Lurking in the background of the filesharing arguments, one can often find the dreaded Slippery Slope: why should musicians, record companies, etc. be in business at all if people are stealing their property? What if they just stopped? Then you’d all be in trouble, eh?

Well, I don’t believe that it’s possible for a musician to just stop; I suspect that most genuine musicians would create music even if they weren’t being paid for it. So it’s not like the source and font all popular music would dry up if filesharing is left unchecked. And as for the record companies… sorry, I can’t see the problem here. If one believes in capitalism as the ultimate economic panacea — and I’m not saying that I do — then there’s no particular reason that Warner, Altantic, et al intrinsically deserve to exist. If technology renders them obsolete, then why delay the inevitable with legislation?

More on this later.

*: It seems to me that we should make a distinction, though, if the sharer is doing so unwittingly; taking files that are not freely offered is I think much closer to obviously being theft. You can then go on to debate what freely offered means in this context, as I believe some of Orrin Hatch’s underlings have done recently…

As I remarked a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about the two-dimensional policy space model that certain libertarians have come to favour. Specifically, I was wondering whether there’s an easy two-dimensional analogue of Black’s Theorem, which guarantees a transitive group preference for a set of individual preferences along a (one-dimensional) continuum.

In case you’re curious, the answer appears to be no. Black’s Theorem ends up choosing the preferences of the median voter along the continuum to be the group preferences; the reasoning goes that when it comes to a specific choice between two candidates, there will always be a majority that agrees with the median. (That’s a consequence of the geometry of the situation, and it’s not hard to work out why if you sit down with pen and paper for a few minutes.)

The problem in 2D is that it’s no longer clear what you mean by median. Unlike an average, what point you get for your median depends on your co-ordinatisation of the space, since the obvious generalisation of the concept is to just take the median along each axis. Thus, one can have the same set of points but get different medians by choosing different sets of axes to work from. I suppose that this is fine if one wants to posit that the libertarians have happened upon exactly the right model, but I think there’s reason to suggest that that’s not the case.

(Of course, then there’s the problem that it just doesn’t work; it’s easy to come up with a situation where any selection you come up with doesn’t have majority support.)

On a similar topic, I saw a suggestion in the comments of a blog lately to have a policy space based along three axes, corresponding roughly to the virtues of the French Revolution: liberty (which in its extreme form would become anarchocapitalism), fraternity (fascism), and equality (communism). The cleanest way to do this mathematically would be to take convex combinations of the unit vectors in 3-space; the upshot of that model is that you can’t follow all three ideals equally well, and that there’s always going to be a trade-off somewhere.

The Urban Commuter Campus where I earn my livelihood, as seems to be the standard these days in the States, has a main academic year consisting of two fifteen-week semesters. In the summer, they then offer courses on either a ten- or a five-week basis.

I have decided, after long and careful consideration, that this is the Wrong Thing. Fifteen weeks is too long.

As a Canadian undergraduate, I had twelve-week terms. That was much nicer, because the term didn’t really have a chance to drag. Right at that point when you’re about to get terminally bored with your courseload, suddenly it’s time for exams and you’d damn well better get interested again. I sort of liked the year I spent on a quarter system Down South — at least, I preferred it to the semester system that then superseded it — although that necessitated a whole lot of five-day-a-week classes, which isn’t always great either.

Anyhow, so that’s my Three Bears Moment for this month: Semesters are too long. Quarters are too short. Terms are just right. Now where’s my porridge?

This weekend I’ve had my first opportunity to use iMovie. I jumped at the chance, to tell the truth; video-editting is a hobby that I cultivated for a couple of years when I was Down South and that I haven’t had an opportunity to indulge since. Also helping a friend out of a tight spot, which never hurts.

My main complaint about iMovie is how it handles the logistics of video clips. The basic layout is that you’ve got the timeline (which represents the sequence of clips in the finished product), and you’ve got an album of clips you haven’t (yet) used. To use a clip, you drag it from the album to the timeline. If you decide that you don’t want to use a clip in the timeline… well, you can’t drag it back to the album, or at least there’s no intuitively obvious way to do it. (And enough else about the program is intuitive that I’m suspecting that there is really no way to do it.) So you delete it instead.

And, if you’re really indecisive and decide later that you wanted that clip after all… or if you just wanted to move it to an as-yet-uncreated segment of video and don’t want it cluttering up your timeline… well, you’re out of luck at that point. You can only get things out of the iMovie Trash by performing a succession of Undos… so STBY if you’ve actually done a lot of complex stuff in the intervening time.

There’s a couple of ways around this, as far as I can tell; I’ve been just cut-and-pasting what I need directly into the timeline, thereby keeping the original, untrimmed footage in the album. It eats up a lot of space, and I’ve never seen Milady Powerbook here run this sluggishly before, but it works.

I’m reading Umberto Eco’s Baudolino. I find Eco’s fiction a little bit hit-and-miss; I’m very much a fan of Foucault’s Pendulum, but couldn’t finish The Island of the Day Before and didn’t feel I had the knowledge of the medieval church required to enjoy The Name of the Rose. So far Baudolino‘s keeping me entertained, though.

In parts, it’s kind of like Foucault’s Pendulum eight centuries previous. In the earlier book, you have a group of bored publishers patching together mystical conspiracies and secret societies into a Plan, which then has the misfortune of being believed. In the chapter I just finished of the more recent book, we see a group of students doing much the same thing, weaving a pastiche of legend and rumour into an account of the Kingdom of Prester John. In Pendulum, the narrator’s downfall and that of his colleagues was that they got sucked in to the very system of thought that the started out by parodying. I don’t think that’s where this book is going; rather, the characters here are proceeding completely without irony, apparently believing that they are uncovering — or perhaps creating — the truth of the matter in their fancies. It’s an interesting twist on the theme.

In addition, so far this seems to be the most readable of the Eco novels that I’ve essayed. Pendulum is very good but very dense, and it takes a while to find its rhythm. Baudolino seems to have a much clearer idea of where it’s going.

So there’s been a push in the last few years — principally by libertarians — to try and break away from the traditional single-dimensional political model. (That’s left vs. right.) Their proposal involves a two-dimensional space, separating economic and social freedoms into independent axes. They then put together quick little quizzes which allegedly plot your position in their policy space. (A commentator has described these as those little tests which tell you you’re a libertarian.)

There’s several questions you can raise regarding this proposal. One obvious one is: why should two dimensions be enough? While this description may give more explanatory room than the standard 1D model, why should it be superior to (say) a tribal description of Canadian or American politics, where people are classified/stereotyped based on demographic concerns? Or if two dimensions are better than one, why should we stop there? Why not put together large questionaires on many, many issues and then do some clustering analysis to work out how many independent axes there really seem to be?

As interesting as those might be to pursue, they’re not what I’m working on right now. Rather, I’m curious about the geometric aspects of the problem. See, there’s a result by Black that states that, as long as voters’ preferences are single-peaked, then one can find reasonable social choice procedures. (This isn’t true if preferences are allowed to vary arbitrarily; that’s Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.) What single-peaked means in this context is more or less that you can plot the various candidates along a straight line, and a voter’s preferences are determined strictly by their position on this line and how close they are to the different candidates. In other words, if the left/right model is actually accurate, then reasonable voting results are possible.

So what happens in this 2D space? Assuming that the libertarians’ model is accurate, does it give us guarantees of reasonable social choice? Or are there now sufficient degrees of freedom that Arrow’s Paradox comes into play? And if the latter is true, then under what circumstances do we need to worry?

I’ll post pictures of what I’m talking about later; for now, I just thought that some of my Faithful Readers might be interested in what I’m thinking about these days.