What to do when terrorists attack

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-terrorism-20101226,0,2998659.column

 

One of these days, one of these plots is going to succeed. It's not unpatriotic or defeatist to say that; it's realistic.

And that's why one of the most intriguing concepts in counterterrorism today is called "resilience" -- preparing for terrorist attacks and minimizing their impact when they happen.

Terrorists aim to damage their opponents partly by provoking reactions bigger than the original attack. Osama bin Laden spent less than half a million dollars on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, but he caused billions in damage by prompting a shutdown of financial markets, air travel and other chunks of the U.S. economy -- not to mention the war in Afghanistan and the other counterterrorist campaigns that ensued.

But if a society is prepared for terrorist attacks, makes sure its citizens know how to react when they happen, and protects its transportation, communications and utilities networks from being paralyzed by local disruptions, the impact of terrorism is reduced. It's still a problem, but it's no longer an existential threat.

...In case of most terrorist bombs, experts say, the best thing to do is to seek shelter inside a building -- whether the bomb is conventional, chemical, radiological or (in the least likely scenario) nuclear. If the bomb is inside your building, get out; but if it's somewhere else, take shelter.

The greatest danger from most of those bombs may be from secondary explosions, airborne contaminants or radiation. Jumping into your car to flee merely exposes you to more risks, and when thousands of people try to evacuate, they choke the roads, cause traffic accidents and impede emergency responders.

But not everybody knows that. A 2007 survey found that in the event of a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosion that spreads radioactive material, 65% of people said their first impulse would be to flee. Flynn talked last year with New York City firefighters and said some of them didn't know whether they should tell people to evacuate or seek shelter in the event of an explosion. ("The policy of the department is clear, and that's shelter in place," responded Joseph W. Pfeifer, New York's assistant fire chief for counterterrorism. "We've trained everyone on that.... The real challenge is educating the public.")

"Nobody ever told the emergency responders what to do," he said.

In the case of a nuclear explosion, a study by Stanford professor Lawrence Wein estimated that a small nuclear device in Washington, D.C., could kill 120,000 people if most people sought shelter in buildings -- but 180,000 if most people tried to evacuate.


--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Von Neumann (humor)

Subject: Von Neumann (humor)

 

From http://www.infiltec.com/j-logic.htm 

 

The following problem can be solved either the easy way or the hard way. 

 

Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going at a speed of 50 miles per hour.  A fly starting on the front of one of them flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour.  It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death.  What is the total distance the fly has flown?

 

The fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper by summing an infinite  series of distances.  The easy way is as follows:  Since the trains are 200 miles apart and each train is going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide. Therefore the fly was flying for two hours.  Since the fly was flying at a rate of 75 miles per hour, the fly must have flown 150 miles.

 

That's all there is to it.

 

When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied, "150 miles."

 

 "It is very strange," said the poser, "but nearly everyone tries to sum the infinite series."

 

"What do you mean, strange?" asked Von Neumann.  "That's how I did it!"

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

Girl advice

[fwd to blog from another conference]

 

General girl advice to any young males who might be in love: telling her exactly what you're feeling because you can't hold it in any longer is not generally an effective strategy, because (her being a woman and you being a man) what you say is not actually what she will hear. Also, since women are more emotional than men (in general, just like men are taller in general--there are exceptions)--because of that, the best way to communicate may be to her feelings, not her intellect: use very few words indeed. The goal is not for her to KNOW how much you love her so she can make the correct logical inferences from that fact, it's for her to feel how much you love her so she can intuitively make the correct judgments for herself based on that reality. Note also that the goal is not for her to feel how much you need her--that's your problem. "I love you and I want to bring you joy. Interested?" It's an offer, not a plea. If not you are doing it wrong.

 

~Max

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Check your pronunciation

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Announcing/Standard_Pronunciation

 

I think I've been mispronouncing "apartheid", "candidate", "electoral", "foliage", "inclement", "jewelry", "mayonaise", "Visa", "zoology" and "diphthong" for years. I would have been mispronouncing "bruschetta" too except I don't even know what the word means [five seconds later: I do now]. But at least I say "hundred" correctly (and "twenty" also, though it's not on the list).

 

Surprisingly, the way I pronounce "spiel" ("shpeel") is incorrect/nonstandard. The naive way ("speel") is correct. Oh, and "yarmulke" should be pronounced phonetically, after all.

 

-Max

--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Articles of Faith

A friend of mine at work asked me, "What can you tell me about The Articles of Faith? Its history / purpose, etc?"

 

I really like the Articles of Faith, and I think there is logic and a pattern to the statements which not everybody notices. I've mentioned this to several people verbally but never written my observation down, so I think I will quote my response to him here on the blog just to get my thoughts on record, even if I turn out to be wrong. : )

 

The Wikipedia article is pretty decent. Originally written in 1840 or so as part of a response to someone who was writing a book on Illinois history or something and wanted information for include a chapter on Mormons. The fellow didn't end up using the information in his book but it's still a pretty good capsule description of the gospel. I might loosely paraphrase it thusly in my own idiom:

 

"We believe in God the Father, and also that Jesus Christ is his Son, and that the Holy Ghost testifies of both. We believe that sin brings punishment to the sinner, but that through the Atonement of Christ any man may receive forgiveness of sins which are past, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel, which are: faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism, and receiving the Holy Ghost. These ordinances must be received from the Lord's authorized servants, called by revelation. The church exists to organize those servants, now as in ancient times, and includes prophets, apostles, pastors, teachers, etc. as set forth by Paul the Apostle in Ephesians 4. We believe in miracles and in the Bible; we also believe in the Book of Mormon, and in everything else which God has revealed or will yet reveal, which is much. We believe in the literal fulfillment of Biblical prophecies regarding Israel and Christ's return. We believe in freedom of religion for ourselves and for those not of our faith, and in obeying the laws of the land. If there is anything which is true and good we also believe in it, no matter where that truth is found."

 

-Max

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

On American Power

Interesting observations on China, worth reading. I wish I knew enough to evaluate how correct his analysis of the response to China is. Be sure to read down to the "Lessons For American Power."

 

Beijing's recent missteps in Asia — moving ahead with reactor sales to troubled Pakistan and crudely threatening Japan over the arrest of a Chinese fishing captain — are swiftly solidifying America's Asian alliances.  The new Japanese government came into office hoping to rebalance Japan's foreign policy and reduce tensions with China.  That dream is now dead.  And China's deepening relationship with Pakistan, intended in part as a counter to America's nuclear opening to India, is driving Asia's other emerging nuclear power closer than ever into the arms of America (and Japan).  South Korea, once drifting peacefully toward China, has moved back towards the United States following China's support for Pyongyang after the sinking of a South Korean naval boat.

In all this there is one clear theme.  America isn't containing China.  China is containing itself.  As China's economy grows and its military develops new capacities, it is looking for ways to turn that potential power into actual power over events.  In the past, China has tried to attract its neighbors into its orbit with sweeteners like trade deals and aid.

But these measures apparently strike a new generation of Chinese policy makers as unsatisfactory.  China is too great a power to play nice, they think.  So they assert their territorial claims more and more boldly, and blow up disputes with Japan out of all proportion.

Lessons for American Power

These developments in Asia illustrate an important truth about America's world role: the foundations supporting our power are much stronger than many people here and abroad understand.

We have had a decade of hand-wringing about American power.  First, 9/11 was seen by some as a deadly blow against the citadel of American strength and the collapse of the World Trade Towers was seen as the start of the fall of America's economic and political domination.  Then the unpopularity of the Bush foreign policy was alienating our friends.  In the Arab world in particular, we were so hated that not even friendly governments could continue to work with us. Then we had lost the war in Iraq, and leading foreign policy analysts and politicians (most of whom had endorsed the war at the beginning) called for ignominious retreat as the best and indeed the only possible strategy.  After that came the stock market crash and the financial meltdowns of 2008, and the "Anglo-Saxon" model of cutthroat capitalism was said to have decisively failed.  After that came the rise of China, the hot new superpower in the east that owned our debt and therefore owned us — and that was going to sweep all Asia into a new economic and political bloc that would leave us in the cold.

This was and is all a bunch of hooey.  Americans do make mistakes in our foreign policy and these can be costly both for us and for other people, but American power is more durable than it sometimes appear.  American power is not eternal, and the world political order is not unchanging, but strong and deep forces in world affairs have brought the United States to its present position of influence and power; those forces will not disappear overnight.  Rome wasn't burned in a day.

The latest round of events in Asia provides a textbook case of just how strong the foundations on which American power rests in Asia really are.  The more China rises, the more Asian countries rally to the American side. [snip]

The entire article is worth your time. And now I must go back to thinking about fencing and hiking instead of politics.

 

-Max

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

Zombie ants

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/aug/18/zombie-carpenter-ant-fungus
--
Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

The Voice of God

Christopher Columbus wrote of his trials on his fourth voyage the following account:

 

Exhausted, I fell asleep, groaning. I heard a very compassionate voice, saying: 'O fool and slow to believe and to serve thy God, the God of all! ... Thou criest for help, doubting. Answer, who has afflicted thee so greatly and so often, God or the world? ... Not one jot of His word fails; all that He promises, He performs with interest; is this the manner of men? I have said that which thy Creator has done for thee and does for all men. Now in part He shows thee the reward for the anguish and danger which thou has endured in the service of others.'

 

I heard all of this as if I were in a trance, but I had no answer to give to words so true, but could only weep for my errors. He, whoever it was, who spoke to me, ended saying, 'Fear not; have trust; all these tribulations are written upon marble and are not without cause.'

 

When I read these words I feel emotion not unlike that which Columbus himself describes feeling. And I feel so terribly proud of, and in awe of, Heavenly Father. He is exactly what a Man ought to be. When I grow up I want to be just like Him.

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

Ex-girlfriends

I've always kind of liked the idea of ex-girlfriends. It's a nice simple, uncomplicated, platonic relationship with a lot of warm feelings and none of the headaches or obligations associated with romantic relationships--if anyone asks whether you two are dating you can laugh and say, "Been there, done that," and close the subject. It's too bad that it's not actually possible to have an ex-girlfriend without having a girlfriend first, however instantaneously--a state of affairs which repulses me. (It's a wimpy halfway state which is neither friendship nor courtship but tries to be something in between, and in contemporary practice it's nearly synonomous with physical exploitation. Celestial beings have no use for boyfriends or girlfriends.) Fooey on the English language for that.

 

Someone should get me an ex- for Christmas.

 

-M.

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

About Eggs

Factoids (courtesy of Harold McGee's "On Food And Cooking"):

• Chickens are "indeterminate" egg-layers, which means instead of laying a fixed number of eggs a fixed number of times per year, they keep on laying each day until they accumulate a certain number. If a predator, such as a human, takes one of the eggs before she finishes she will replace it before stopping. If the predator keeps taking the eggs she will never stop.
• An animal's "reproductive effort" is the fraction of her body weight which she deposits daily in her future offspring. A hen's reproductive effort is 100x that of a human.
• An egg weighs 3% of a typical hen's weight, and she may lay an egg almost every day.
• Imagine a human woman having a four-pound baby every day!
• An industrial hen may produce eight times her body weight in eggs over the course of her year-long life.
• A hen expends 25% of her daily calorie budget on egg-making. (Ducks expand half their energy on egg-laying!)
• Hens have only one ovary.
• Hens store sperm inside their oviducts. After the germ cell has accumulated enough yolk from the fats and proteins in a hen's liver, but before the egg white is added or the shell is formed, if the hen has mated recently some of the sperm will fuse with (fertilize) the germ. Either way the egg will still get laid.
• An eggshell has about 10,000 little holes, concentrated at the blunt end, to let air into the egg while the embryo is developing. All these holes put together would be about as wide as the head of a pin (2 mm).
• Inside of an egg yolk you can see a flat little white disc attached to ropy white things that look (sorry!) kind of like boogers. The white disc is the actual germ cell, whether fertilized or unfertilized, i.e. the chicken embryo. The ropy white things are designed to keep the embryo from smashing itself into the walls of the shell.
• Good news! This means that you don't have to be queasy about eating unfertilized chicken embryos, or feel nauseous when you think about the texture of the yolk. That's just a bunch of fats and proteins from the mama chicken's liver. Only the little disc ever had any chance of becoming a chicken, even if it had been fertilized.
• By eating the yolk you are, however, stealing candy from a baby. Unfertilized baby chicken, that is.
• Modern industrial techniques transform feed into eggs with better than 33% efficiency, and feed into chicken meat at better than 50% efficiency. That is, you can produce a pound of eggs from less than three pounds of feed, and a pound of (broiler) chicken from less than two.
• Egg color is totally unrelated to nutritional value or taste and is determined by the protein composition of the cuticle, which it the outermost layer (designed to slow water loss and block the entry of bacteria through the pores, at least initially).
• Rhode Island Reds lay brown eggs.
• Chinese Cochins lay eggs with yellow dots.
• Chilean Araucanas lay blue eggs.
• The cross between a Chilean Araucana and a Rhode Island Red lays green eggs.

-Max

 

--

Be pretty if you are,

Be witty if you can,

But be cheerful if it kills you.

 

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

 

 

Nuclear weapons, use of

Obama has announced a new nuclear posture for the United States: we will not enage in "first use" of nuclear weapons against any country which is signatory to and in compliance with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6352YK20100407

My uninformed reaction to the Nuclear Posture Review: Republicans are incorrect. The NPR statement is not important militarily. Responding to a chemical or biological attack with nuclear weapons is not an option we would want to exercise in any case. Suppose Uzbekistan or Nigeria, for some insane reason, hits New York City with a sarin gas attack that kills 4000 civilians. We are fully capable of destroying their whole national infrastructure with conventional military force (Army commitments in Iraq/Afghanistan notwithstanding). Using nuclear weapons would simply be a good way to kill a few million civilians for no good return. Realistically, we don't want to do that. Besides, if you really want those civilians dead, destroying their infrastructure will do it, over time via starvation, without the irrational negative PR associated with nukes.

So, you don't nuke someone who is too insignificant to harm you. The only nations we would ever realistically want to nuke are those who are currently unable to nuke us but are developing the capability to do so--Iran and North Korea, at least in the popular view--and those who cannot be defeated with conventional means. In the first case, Iran and North Korea are in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty so the new posture does not apply to them. More importantly, they have been in violation all along and we _still_ didn't nuke them, even under the "warlike" George W. Bush. Most likely we were never even tempted to nuke them. In the second case we're dealing with serious, existential threats. Now, if Russia and China got together with Japan, Canada and Mexico and dropped a few hundred thousand soldiers on our shores by surprise--probably by stuffing them inside of shipping containers--we'd find ourselves outgunned, defeated, and occupied in short order if we stuck to conventional weapons, and it would be very tempting (but risky) to use nukes to salvage the situation. I don't imagine the offical "nuclear defense posture" is going to have much to do with how that scenario plays out. In almost any other scenario I can think of, initiating an exchange of nuclear weapons with Russia is a sure-fire losing game for both sides, again without regard to the "nuclear defense posture."

The one area I can see where this could make us less safe is that, having declared that we will not commit "first use" of nuclear weapons, another country might be tempted to force a military confrontation over something important to them (Taiwan) when the terms are favorable to them, since they know they won't get nuked for winning (although both parties are presumably willing to respond once the other party has already escalated to nukes). Thus, the new doctrine makes Taiwan and Israel less safe, and probably Georgia, and maybe all of Eastern Europe too. It doesn't make the U.S. any less safe unless you believe our interests are intrinsically tied to theirs.

It does make it slightly more hazardous to be a U.S. Navy carrier group in the Indian Ocean, since you can now be wiped out without triggering a nuclear war. That's bad for you, but good for the rest of the gene pool.

I may be wrong about all this, I often am.

-Max

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

How your taxes get spent

Your Money Is Spent On	Your Share	%
National Defense	$4,828.00	20%
Veterans and Foreign Affairs	$1,016.00	4%
Medicaid, Food Stamps, and Related Programs	$3,303.00	14%
Unemployment and Social Services	$1,525.00	6%
Social Security, Medicare, and Other Retirement	$9,655.00	37%
Net Interest on the Debt	$2,287.00	8%
Law Enforcement and General Government	$508.00	2%
Physical, Human, and Community Development	$2,287.00	9%
Total Paid	$25,409.00	100%

When I filed with TaxACT.com they computed a summary for me of where my taxes went. I don't begrudge $5K on national defense, and $500 for law enforcement seems okay to me too. The $12K on Medicaid and Social Security are of more concern to me, and $2K for the national debt is non-trivial too, especially given how low interest rates are right now. It's easy to imagine that ballooning to $5K or more per year once interest rates go back to normal levels.

 

Presumably your taxes are spent in about the same way.

 

-Max

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Cheap Turpentine

I've been reading a lot about discovery and the art of design. Here are two quotes that I particularly like:

 

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea." - Francis Bacon

 

This invites the question, "But isn't that the road to self-delusion?" Not necessarily. You may have reasons to believe there is something there which don't involve having actually seen land. You may have seen seagulls in the distance, or you may have analyzed the ocean currents and things that drift through them, or you may, like Christopher Columbus, have calculated the circumference of the earth relative to Marco Polo's reports on the size of Asia. That's where faith comes from, actually, before it becomes a perfect knowledge: evidence that you comprehend and believe, but imperfectly. You may even have no evidence that you can articulate, but curiosity or a feeling that there must be land out there closeby--this is more like hope than faith, but it still can lead to discoveries. (You just have to be prudent about pursuing such hopes full-time because they don't always pan out.)

 

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine. - Pablo Picasso

This doesn't really need comment, does it? Sometimes theory is no substitute for practice, which yields experience and hones intuition. Plus I just think it's a funny quote.

 

-Max

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Sketch-a-Move toy car

This video is discussed by one of my textbooks on design as a great example of how "sketches" of concepts can help you decide what to build, even if you don't have the technology to actually build the thing yet. It's a lot better than investing $100 million in a technology and then finding that it isn't any fun to use.

Plus, wouldn't it be cool if toy cars DID work like this?

http://www.vimeo.com/5125096

-Max

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Temptation tax

Some thoughts from Edge.org on the psychology of temptation. Has implications for anyone trying to build wealth. Even has some implications for getting in shape or improving your education: you need to find a way to avoid frittering away your gains on your own personal "temptation tax." Not only will this help you make progress, but knowing that you will keep your gains improves your motivation to get started saving/exercising/whatever in the first place.

When you're very poor, you have very little income to spend on anything other than food. There's very little spending on temptation goods. At some point you might start to spend more on these temptations. You can start to eat dosas, doughnuts, lots of things that you might not value so much, but they're around you when you have cash and you buy them. And of course because of the regressivity, that flattens out. Once you're over here, you can now spend on things like education, etcetera. So, we've got an S-shaped curve: very low spending on temptation goods at deep poverty, but an increasing amount as income increases and then it flattens out as you get wealthier.

If you have somebody like this, notice that being here is very good. Being [at the top] is very good. But moving from [along the middle of the curve] is ultimately pointless—it looks like your income has doubled, but so much of that extra discretionary income is being spent on wasted things, on things that you don't think are that important. [emphasis added]

The key thing is to find a way not to waste the gain on things you don't care about.

-Max

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Article: Can A Biologist Fix A Radio?

J. & T.,

You might enjoy this short article by a microbiologist on the difficulties involved in making scientific progress in understanding complex phenomena like apoptosis--or a radio. It's quite readable, takes maybe ten minutes to finish.

Can A Biologist Fix A Radio?

[snip] How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size (Fig. 2, see color insert). We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.

A more successful approach will be to remove components one at a time or to use a variation of the method, in which a radio is shot at a close range with metal particles. In the latter case, radios that malfunction (have a "phenotype") are selected to identify the component whose damage causes the phenotype. Although removing some components will have only an attenuating effect, a lucky postdoc will accidentally find a wire whose deficiency will stop the music completely. The jubilant fellow will name the wire Serendipitously Recovered Component (SRC) and then find that SRC is required because it is the only link between a long extendable object and the rest of the radio. The object will be appropriately named the Most Important Component (MIC) of the radio. A series of studies will definitively establish that MIC should be made of metal and the longer the object is the better, which would provide an evolutionary explanation for the finding that the object is extendable. [snip]

-M.

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Theory and practice

Jenny,

You might find this article interesting. It's on commercializing a research tool for static analysis of software, and the surprising differences between academic requirements and commercial requirements. The article took me around a half-hour, and the whole thing was worth reading.

-Max

This is the research context. We now describe the commercial context. Our rough view of the technical challenges of commercialization was that given that the tool would regularly handle "large amounts" of "real" code, we needed only a pretty box; the rest was a business issue. This view was naïve. While we include many examples of unexpected obstacles here, they devolve mainly from consequences of two main dynamics:

First, in the research lab a few people check a few code bases; in reality many check many. The problems that show up when thousands of programmers use a tool to check hundreds (or even thousands) of code bases do not show up when you and your co-authors check only a few. The result of summing many independent random variables? A Gaussian distribution, most of it not on the points you saw and adapted to in the lab. Furthermore, Gaussian distributions have tails. As the number of samples grows, so, too, does the absolute number of points several standard deviations from the mean. The unusual starts to occur with increasing frequency.

For code, these features include problematic idioms, the types of false positives encountered, the distance of a dialect from a language standard, and the way the build works. For developers, variations appear in raw ability, knowledge, the amount they care about bugs, false positives, and the types of both. A given company won't deviate in all these features but, given the number of features to choose from, often includes at least one weird oddity. Weird is not good. Tools want expected. Expected you can tune a tool to handle; surprise interacts badly with tuning assumptions.

Second, in the lab the user's values, knowledge, and incentives are those of the tool builder, since the user and the builder are the same person. Deployment leads to severe fission; users often have little understanding of the tool and little interest in helping develop it (for reasons ranging from simple skepticism to perverse reward incentives) and typically label any error message they find confusing as false. A tool that works well under these constraints looks very different from one tool builders design for themselves.

--
"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

The Parable of Bob and the Bill

[letter excerpts]

Posit: Day-old bread is better than nothing. Posit: Nothing is better than chocolate. Conclusion: Day-old bread is better than chocolate.

Once there was a man named Bob who attended a charity auction. The auctioneer explained that this was a pay-as-you-bid auction, like poker: you pay as you bid, and if you lose you don't get your money back. "That's dumb," thought Bob, "but I guess if it's for charity…" Then the auctioneer unveiled the item up for bid—a twenty-dollar bill. Bob, who considered himself a very rational person, looked around the room at the other thirty-odd people and thought, "If I bid and lose, I lose everything. If I win, I get twenty dollars. I have a one in thirty chance of winning twenty dollars, so the bid is worth $(1/30 * 20) = 67 cents to me." He immediately bid a quarter, hoping to make a profit, and put his quarter out in front of him.

Another bidder bid fifty cents, and someone else bid seventy-five cents. "Going once," said the auctioneer. Bob frowned in thought. "Odd. There's only three of us bidding. That raises my expected value to $6.67, so I can afford to bid a dollar rationally." The other bidders, after some hesitation, matched his bid and soon the price was at $5. Bob shook his head, "Let's end this," and bid $6.67. Further bidding would be irrational. Bob would pocket the $20, and they could all go home.

The third bidder immediately bid $10. "Oops," said Bob, now seeing the flaw in his reasoning. "No matter what the odds are, the payoff for winning is $20, not $6.67, so of course other people will bid above $6.67. My profit is the difference between my winning bid and $20, not between my winning bid and $6.67." So he bid $15, hoping for a 33% profit on his investment. Bidder #2 bid $17, and bidder #3 bid $18. Grumbling, Bob bid $19.99. Bidder #3 sat down abruptly. Bidder #2 hesitated again, then bid $21.

Bob couldn't believe it. "Who would bid $21 for a $20 bill?" he said to himself. Then with a sudden sick shock he got it. "No," he said, "bidder #2 already bid $17. If he loses, he lost $17. If he wins at $21, he lost only $1. Clearly it is rational to bid again to reduce his losses." And with the same sick certainty, Bob knew the same logic applied to himself. Bob bid: $25. Response: $28. "Again," thought Bob, "I have the choice between losing everything, only it's $25 instead of $19.99 this time, or paying $4 for a 50% chance at winning the $20. 50% of $20 is $10, and $4 is less than $10 so clearly the only rational action is to invest another $4." Bob bid $29, hopelessly, while the rest of the audience watched in fascination. This could have gone on for quite a long time but Bob's wife hit him with her purse and told him to stop being a nit. Bidder #2 won at $30. The auctioneer thanked them all, gave $20 to bidder #2, and put their combined bids ($18 + $29 + $30 = $77) in the charity cashbox. Everyone applauded and Bob went to lie down.

Last story for today: my dad went to med school in Louisiana when I was one or two years old. Some of my earliest memories are of Louisiana and Tulane University—going for stroller rides with my mom, playing in the pool, etc. I'm not sure but I think I might even remember the flood that buried the streets in over a foot of water. (Then again, I might be getting it mixed up with the floods from my mission, which I definitely remember, including what it did to our basement rooms: it was like an indoor swimming pool, which is bad news for missionaries. Or an indoor baptismal font, which is good news I suppose.) In particular I remember a large room, which must have been at Tulane, and one wall of the room was covered with transparent glass cubes or jars, stacked one on top of the other. In each jar was yellow liquid, and in the liquid floated a dead baby. I remember two babies in particular. One had a big corkscrew of a belly button that seemed several inches long and reminded me of a screw. The other baby had two heads. I thought that was quite interesting. I don't remember if this was before or after I saw the two-headed snake at the Santa Ana zoo, which was interesting because it was alive, but I think the baby was even more interesting because it was human and had arms and legs and stuff, which snakes do not. Anyway, I don't remember feeling scared at all but I wasn't sure why the liquid was yellow and I think I drew the obvious conclusion for a two-year-old at that—especially a two-year-old familiar with swimming pools and babies—and perhaps that did disturb me a little.

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"When people are married, instead of trying to get rid of each other, reflect that you have made your choice, and strive to honour and keep it." --Brigham Young

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!