Awesomeness

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Duel

[Sent this to the White House via their web site]

Dear Mr. Obama,

Your vile and baseless assault on womanhood in your most recent campaign ad compels me to respond. Though I have in the past had a high opinion of you, I say now that you are a varlet and a knave. No honorable man would say or allow such insinuations to be made about any woman, let alone his own constituents. I demand that you immediately disavow and apologize for the Lena Dunham ad and face me on the field of honor, or admit that you are no man at all.

I await your craven response with eagerness.

Sincerely,

Max Wilson

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Elegance

So far, Elegance of the Hedgehog reminds me of an old Asimov question, "How do you justify your existence?" I.e. I exist, yes, but why me and what am I for? This is not a religious question, it's a personal one, and everyone (even God(s)) must find an answer that satisfies them to be happy. For me the answer is "learning, teaching, and love" which incidentally appears to be God's answer too. It will be interesting to see how Renee and the girl answer theirs in the end. The girl obviously needs one. Wouldn't it be awful if she killed herself and woke up dead, and still felt life was absurd? What would she do then?

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Models

The following statement from this article on politics, makes me want to say about models: "The University of Colorado model, which has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since 1980, has Mr. Romney taking all nine swing states plus New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Maine. If this plays out, Republicans will more than run the table. It's starting to look like Mr. Obama is behind the eight ball."

Models can be wrong. There are other models predicting exactly the opposite (clean Obama win) which have ALSO "correctly predicted" the results of the last several elections. (I can dig one up if anyone cares, but you've probably seen them in news reports.) Models always make simplifying assumptions, and frequently they are "trained" formally or informally using past results--and testing models against their own training data proves nothing. It's also provable from computer science that purely empirical testing of models will fail: the No Free Lunch theorem establishes that there 

is no optimal empirical method for generalizing statistically from past results to future results. You HAVE to understand the "why", or your model is just black magic and may break at any time.

Ultimately the test of a good model/hypothesis/theory is twofold: 1.) Does it accurately predict outcomes OTHER than the ones used in its own creation, e.g. future outcomes or historical outcomes? 2.) Does it yield useful insights into the underlying causal mechanisms?

Remember this next time someone talks about their (political, economic, climate, etc.) models. Ask, "What data did you use to make this model, and what data did you use to test it? Are the predictions the model makes about human behavior or climate plausible given what else we know about human psychology, meteorology, or physics?" Until you've asked these questions and listened to the answers, their model isn't really telling you anything. Until then, it's just noise.

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Effort or results

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/10/03/we_fund_dependency_115648.html

WorkForce1 is a program designed to "help people find jobs". That means it's important to fund it as much as possible, right? No, first you need to find what it does, not just what it is ostensibly supposed to do.

"Finally, I met with an 'adviser.' She told me I lacked experience. I know this. I asked for any job she thought I was qualified for, and she scheduled an interview at Pret, a food chain that trains employees. At Pret, I learned that my 'interview' was just a weekly open house, publicized on the company's website. Anyone could walk in and apply. Workforce1 offered no advantage. Despite my 'scheduled interview,' I waited 90 minutes before meeting a manager. He told me that WorkForce1 had 'wasted my time, as they always do.' He said, 'They never call, never ask questions.' He prefers to hire people who seek out jobs on their own, like those who see Pret ads on Craigslist.'"

If this is a real pattern, the program is not worth funding, no matter how noble its purported design goals.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.

Math

[Written after the first Romney/Obama debate]

The dangers of mathematical illiteracy: if your opponent wants to cut tax rates in a "revenue neutral" way, and you want to paint him as a tax-raiser, it's useful to understand some math. Just imagine how different it would have seemed if Obama had displayed some policy knowledge. "Okay, you say your rate cuts would be revenue neutral, but with respect to what baseline? Current law or current policy?" Presumably Romney then says, "I would leave revenue unchanged from where it is today." Then Obama would come back and say, "But tax revenues are $300 billion under historical levels because of emergency measures that we've taken to help the economy recover from the Bush recession." [It makes me feel ill even to write "Bush recession", but that's what Obama ought to say because that's how he thinks of it, and how the majority of Americans still think of it.] "You're saying that you're leaving $300 billion dollars a year of your tax cuts unpaid for, $3 trillion over the next decade. That's 60% of your tax cut that isn't paid for? Tell me, how is that responsible?"

The trap is twofold: suck Romney into a wonky discussion of baseline math ("You based your claim that you would 'cut the deficit in half by the end of [your] first time' on emergency spending under Bush! And you didn't even manage it!"), and undermine Romney's credibility.

Because Obama doesn't know any math, he couldn't talk about specifics and couldn't go on the attack. All he could do was repeat, "You have a five trillion dollar tax cut. Somebody told me so. There's a study."

In 2016, the Democrats will nominate somebody from the business world who understands math. The era of nominating Senators from D.C. on the theory that they have "government experience" is drawing to a close.

-Max

--
Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.
    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.

Learning programming

Great article on learning programming. Has implications for any kind of UI design, since any kind of GUI interaction is really just another way of "programming" your computer. In particular, has implications for my plans to incorporate programmable AIs into my Android games.

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

A programming system has two parts. The programming "environment" is the part that's installed on the computer. The programming "language" is the part that's installed in the programmer's head.

This essay presents a set of design principles for an environment and language suitable for learning.

The environment should allow the learner to:

• read the vocabulary -- what do these words mean?
• follow the flow -- what happens when?
• see the state -- what is the computer thinking?
• create by reacting -- start somewhere, then sculpt
• create by abstracting -- start concrete, then generalize

The language should provide:

• identity and metaphor -- how can I relate the computer's world to my own?
• decomposition -- how do I break down my thoughts into mind-sized pieces?
• recomposition -- how do I glue pieces together?
• readability -- what do these words mean?
  

[snip]

Khan Academy's tutorials encourage the learner to address these questions by randomly adjusting numbers and trying to figure out what they do.

Thought experiment. Imagine if you bought a new microwave, took it out of the box, and found a panel of unlabeled buttons.

Imagine if the microwave encouraged you to randomly hit buttons until you figured out what they did.

Now, imagine if your cookbook advised you that randomly hitting unlabeled buttons was how you learn cooking.

-Max

--

Hahahahaaaa!!! That is ME laughing at YOU, cruel world.

    -Jordan Rixon

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honour more.