An exercise for the reader is to tell me (through memory or research) what two seven-letter words were involved in the story, from Word Freak, of a Scrabble game whose first play was a seven-letter word and whose second play was a seven-letter word that also made seven two-letter words.
Earlier this week Julia and I finished a game in which I slipped AXONS under TOGAE. (For one of the ancillary words ET became ETA, but since TA itself is a word I think this still counts as 5/7 of the Word Freak thing.)
I think I might be gravitating to the "one box" camp for Newcomb's paradox. But I should tell you how I got there.
Julia, like nearly every intelligent person, disagrees with me about the track/switch "kill one man to save five" problem. She's surprised that once my own life is secure, I'm unwilling to be an agent of death. (I suppose anyone who knows that I'm not a pacifist -- e.g. that I continue to support what the U.S. is doing in Iraq -- should be many times as surprised.)
My immediate answer -- not my whole answer, but so instinctively first that the rest is just rationalization -- is that ground rules be damned, I reject the 100% certainty that it's a case of five innocent people dying versus one innocent person dying.
So what if the ground rules become absolutely ironclad?
Then my answer to the switch problem becomes really lame, though it continues to be my answer. (It's not nearly as lame as the people who'd let their entire basement hideout be massacred because they were too wussy to smother one baby.)
This got me to thinking about other ground rules that I find suspect. For example, even in the usual formulation of prisoner's dilemma (where players have a dominant strategy that works to the other player's disadvantage) I am the most outspoken advocate I know of the correctness of the "nice" option. No matter how hard you stipulate that this is a one-time game, in practice different flavors of it can and do come up frequently. The world as a whole is better off if everyone consistently cooperates, and if everyone realize that the world as a whole [etc. to infinity].
Although you'd think Newcomb's paradox stems from a game that you personally play just once (apparently billions of other people have played it though, for the Great Predictor to have amassed such a track record?), something similar might be at play here: Think of sustainable development, and of various free rider problems. (I wonder if they cover Newcomb's paradox in those "Green MBA" programs...)
One caveat: Several years ago at a New Year's Eve party thrown by geeks, for geeks, I overheard someone (whom I'd never met and have never seen since) mention that unlike his friends, he carries grudges from strategy game to strategy game. That is, if you screw him over in one game (think of Diplomacy and the like), he'll remember it. That guy apparently wished to use his openness about such grudges to his advantage, as a deterrent.
I think if you're playing a strategy game that you don't (can't) take payoff calculations personally. The best long-term reaction to that guy I overheard would be just to refuse to play games with him.
(So the paradox is that I advocate screwing people over when you're playing for fun, yet being "nice" when you play for money! This must be what I think given how fervently I advocated the "Friend" strategy in that old game show Friend or Foe.)
I find problems 1 and 2 to be slam-dunk easy (can you guess from my other political views how strongly I value the right of self-defense?).
Like everyone who's ever taken a college philosophy class I've had plenty of opportunity to think about (and discuss) the trolley problem and its variants; I tend to be one of the few people in the room (sometimes the only one) who opposes throwing the switch.
The Time quiz doesn't include the "famous violinist" problem (nine months of detaining one man so that another might live: one of the most thinly-veiled allegories in this realm); my answer to that one is consistent with pro-life principles.
(For what it's worth, related to practical sociopolitics rather than abstract philosophy, one of my five biggest regrets in life is having been so vocally anti-abortion over the years. Since I somehow doubt that I personally have talked anyone out of having an abortion, that outspokenness has easily done more harm than good.)
It's come to my attention that a big-city sports writer recently began a sentence:
"The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth [...]"
There's no need to even finish a sentence like that, as the first part already marks the speaker as a deranged attention-whore.
It gets even better when the writer in question refers to Colonial pamphleteers in a pejorative sense. (Damn that Thomas Paine...)
(OK fine, here's a second-hand link, via Baseball Think Factory)
This is a week old but this Deadspin post reminded me:
As many of you remember, on our wedding day the U.S. drew Italy. Last week we went to a wedding in Hanford, sharing a suite with Julia's parents. In the morning we watched Israel upset Russia (more straightforward story here) on Fox's Spanish-language all-futbol cable channel. Great game, winning goal scored just past the 91-minute mark.
My Son the Fanatic: Julia read the short story that inspired this movie; it wasn't what she'd call comedy. Nor was the movie (except in some very subtle indie flick sense), despite every genre classification we've seen. Still well worth watching.
Unbreakable: Julia strongly recommended this to me, having liked it (way back when it came out) despite not expecting to like it. In fact, earlier she'd rented Memento on my behalf even though Unbreakable was the movie she had in mind.
This is how tired I was (and how ignorant I am): Bruce Willis. Emotional distance plus foreboding. The city of Philadelphia. And yet it didn't register until the obligatory M. Night cameo itself who was behind this movie. So far we're 2-for-2 on my deeply enjoying M. Night movies that star Bruce Willis and are set in Philadelphia.
(I don't know if there's a way to put this without spoilers, but I disagree with the claim that this needed to be a trilogy instead of one movie. That is, I disagree with both the implied praise and the implied criticism. The movie is just right in itself.)
We have two month-by-month picture calendars in this apartment. One was created for our honeymoon and shows a glacier for November 2007. The November 2007 picture on the other one is of a man who died this morning, way before his time.
Earlier this week I'd looked at the calendar and thought it somewhat ironic that he'd been released by three different teams since we got the calendar as a giveaway.
There is also an eerie connection involving back-of-the-rotation A's pitchers who had previously been with Tampa Bay. Well, maybe two is one short of a "eerie connection," but if I were pitching in the Rays system right now I wouldn't want to take my chances on being the third.
Are we still at the point where every electoral victory by a gay politician requires "Gay" to be the first word of the headline? Even in a SF Chronicle story about Vallejo?
Further down: "[Osby] Davis, 62, a real estate attorney who aimed to become the city's first African American mayor, said Tuesday that he will ask for a recount."
Somehow I don't think his goal was in and of itself to become Vallejo's first AFrican American mayor. Strictly speaking I think his goal was just to become mayor.
"Gas in Phoenix (and probably everywhere else) has jumped almost 75 cents in the last 4 weeks. Why? Because demand is up due to the holiday season. Frankly, I hope it spreads to the point that people start actually doing something besides complaining about the prices. We need to force our governments to take action against the petrolium [sic] industry."
--some named Boritom, from this thread (emphases added)
(By definition.)
However, I've gotten SNIGLET (also known as TINGLES or SINGLET or GLISTEN) on my Scrabble rack at least three times in recent memory.
"That big-college football and men's basketball players should be paid is a perennial contention. TMQ thinks the idea is wrong on these scores: First, the players already receive tuition, room and board, which is hardly an inconsequential form of payment; second, paying college players would ruin college sports, thus killing the golden goose and ending the money flow."
--TMQ (emphasis added)
While we're here (these both probably ought to have been part of the post below; such is life), yet another Easterbrook-ism:
"[D]o you really need to pay people $50 million a year to inspire them to work hard? The unstated assumption is that for anything less than ultraextravagant pay, modern CEOs will refuse to perform their duties. Anybody like that should not be hired in the first place!"
On the planet where TMQ resides, all employer-executive negotiations are within a bilateral monopoly. (Nobody gets better offers elsewhere.)
Do you think CEO compensation represents a market inefficiency? If so, why do you think the efficient market hypothesis failed? (My gut answers are "Yes" and "Because boards of directors have blatant conflicts of interest," but TMQ's knee-jerk populism doesn't even reach such questions.)
(Football, movies, AND politics?)
"The number of current box-office stars who have portrayed hired killers in major-studio films probably exceeds the number of actual professional assassins in the real world. You don't have to be Dr. Freud to speculate that cinema stars, steeped in a Hollywood culture obsessed with personal power, subconsciously fantasize about actually being able to kill whomever they please. But doesn't it strike you as strange that so many big-name stars are willing to portray characters who commit murder without compunction? Can it be coincidence the public is becoming turned off to the movies at the very time so many stars revel in morally vacant roles?"
--Tuesday Morning Quarterback
Easterbrook gave a long list of actors who have played hit men. To his credit, he did not impugn the religious beliefs of any of them.
In your opinion, was Bush vs. Gore resolved correctly?
In your opinion, was this football game resolved correctly?
I say yes to both. I realize a case could be made that those positions aren't consistent, but I think enough distinguishes the two. (Summoning football players from the dressing room isn't quite on the same level as waiting weeks/months to see who leads a nation of 250 million people.)
If you were a devil's advocate could you make a coherent, consistent case for "no" to both questions?
Full article here but I learned everything I needed to know from the block quote here:
"This is a major step in the right direction. Bonds was a cancer."
Feinstein leaves (intentionally?) vague just what the "this" modifies (it's the first word of a new paragraph) but surely he doesn't mean the indictment itself. I hear Vince Carter is hard to get along with sometimes; why not indict him as well?
"In the court of public opinion you can be guilty at any time, especially when the evidence of your guilt is overwhelming."
The Baseball Primer posters mentioned Feinstein apparently has some ugly history involving the Duke lacrosse case. Someone less lazy than me can look it up and comment as needed.
"Being a hero is not a right granted by the constitution; it is a privilege. "
So rumor has it that people who play sports for a living are capable of being something other than a hero or a villain. I think this intermediate state is known as humanity.
"There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda."
--quote from this article, snarked about here
Politics below the fold.
Anger Management and License to Wed are built on the same premise, that any given everyman will be better off if some psychopath is given official sanction to mess with him, supposedly for his own good.
I still refuse to watch Anger Management; I learned yesterday that we'd be watching License to Wed. (I could have opted out but didn't feel strongly enough to do so.)
Life is not rocket science. Playing well with others does not require elaborate schemes, nor does learning how to play well with others require some sort of contrived adversity.
(Who in their right mind would contrive adversity? Life has enough real adversity to deal with.)
Respect each other. Communicate. Plan ahead, where appropriate. Cope. Repeat over the course of several decades.
I learned three particular things from Reason today: One is that Mike Huckabee is arguably the most frightening plausible president. If he and Hillary (or he and Obama) won their respective nominations, I would volunteer several hours a week to the campaign of the Democratic candidate.
The next is that Britain won't let some fat people immigrate because they would pose too much of a strain on the national health care system. As you might imagine, this wouldn't be a problem if people paid for their own medicine.
The third is that some sheriff's deputies are not only too incompetent to avoid raiding the wrong house, but also too incompetent to avoid shooting an innocent person's dog. "The deputy says he feared for his life."
Do I need to explain how the movie rants relate to the political rants?
(Post-script: How can I be so dogmatic about the right to be left alone, yet willing to support what Brian Doherty calls endless international policing and adventurism? For one thing, I don't privilege Americans over the rest of the world. For another, I do believe that many (most?) regimes are inherently illegitimate, especially the non-democracies. So compared to real libertarians I have a much higher tolerance threshold for international intervention. I'll admit that it's not always clear whether the actual people involved are better off in a war zone than they were under tyranny.)
This is the face of an adorable dog.
I tend to favor big dogs, with short thick fur, who could plausibly perform acts of heroism (yet also be gentle and loving to a small child).
On further review (i.e. a bunch of Google Image Searches) my favorite dog breed seems to be husky. Honorable mention to collies (we had one growing up) and golden retrievers. I'm not much of a fan of hounds, terriers, frou-frou dogs, fighting dogs, or Great Danes (ha ha, most Great Danes look a lot like Marmaduke...).
HILLARY GOES AFTER OBAMA ON "EXPERIENCE:" Well, it's true. He's never been First Lady.
--Instapundit
(Link here.)
Dear "Today's Parents,"
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Speaking of books found in the children's section of a local bookstore (in blog posts with unsavory framing devices), this might have been the other book that caught my eye a week ago. I can't really tell for sure, but for purposes of this post the point is the book in question had cover art of a smiling girl in a leotard.
Whichever picture it was reminded me of part of this SVU episode (which aired as a rerun some time during the 2005 Christmas week) where as part of undercover work, Stabler had to take a test given to paroled sex offenders to determine to what extent non-sexual images of children [still] arouse them.
Speaking of sex offenders, [bangs head against wall]. Where sound public policy and well-designed data models intersect: Blow up the entire sex offender registry system and replace it with something that makes sense. Among other things, don't treat high school kids caught in oral sex the same way you treat rapists.
This substitute teacher had issues.
Not quite on-topic (the only link is age group), I saw this book in the children's section of a local bookstore and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The "Home Run Heroes" in question (McGwire and Sosa) are a bit less highly esteemed now than when the book came out in 2001.
Despite being a sports fan I'm deeply averse to teaching children to think of athletes as heroes. Maybe they will anyway, but my preferred choice of "heroes" would include anything from firefighters to Founding Fathers.
(Even at that, Thomas Jefferson owning slaves is orders of magnitude worse than any given ballplayer using needles or pills. People do terrible things sometimes; explaining that to children seems to be an interesting challenge of putting everything in the right perspective.)
Oh hey, the Amazon page claims that this book is for ages 4-8. Yet the page I randomly turned to in the bookstore contained the phrase "tremendous binge." By contrast it says here Dr. Seuss' publisher supplied him with a sight vocabulary of 223 words which he was to use to write his books, a sight vocabulary that was in harmony with the sight words the child would be learning in school.
Theodore Geisel 1, Major League Baseball 0.
As I mentioned to someone by e-mail nearly an hour ago, tonight's Simpsons had the most promising beginning in years. It went downhill as soon as they stopped caring about the comic book plot, but those five minutes were fun while they lasted.
King of the Hill was everything brilliant that this show is capable of being: An upstanding man, who's basically right about everything, coping with an absurdly changing world. Lots of satire across the board but all of it gentle. Our food could taste so much better than it typically does.
It pains me that tonight's Family Guy is about to rip off a Season 7 Simpsons episode, but I'll roll with the punches. (Something I learned by way of an image on a Deadspin thread: Tom Brady was on The Simpsons a year before he was on Family Guy.)
Update still to come re Family Guy & American Dad. I have to admit the latter is an acquired taste, yet I'm in the process of acquiring it, especially subplots involving Haley and the alien.
UPDATE: My sister and I had the exact opposite reactions to tonight's Seth MacFarlane shows. I can't tell you how brilliant American Dad was: Everything from the alien as a bad poker player to the half price park admission with soda can to the dog outside the convenience store.
I think it's safe to say the Patriots will hold their 28-7 lead.
Excel concatenation formulas tweaked to add win-loss records. Some fallout from Monday night.
32. San Francisco (2-8) (Last week: 31) Follow their historically bad DVOA (basically a performance assessment) at FootballOutsiders.com (Week 12: at Arizona)
31. Miami (0-10) (Last week: 32) Yes, you'd intuitively expect to see the only winless team at the bottom. But that's not ironclad. If the Dolphins and 49ers met next week at a neutral site, I think Miami would be more likely to win. Discuss. (Week 12: at Pittsburgh (Monday))
30. St. Louis (2-8) (Last week: 29) I'm glad I didn't watch. (Week 12: vs. Seattle)
29. Atlanta (3-7) (Last week: 26) The Paris 1941 method of protecting one's house. (Week 12: vs. Indianapolis (Thursday))
28. Oakland (2-8) (Last week: 28) How many games in NFL history have been 19-19 at the half? (Week 12: at Kansas City)
27. NY Jets (2-8) (Last week: 30) Any given game should be winnable by any given home team. (Week 12: at Dallas (Thursday))
26. Cincinnati (3-7) (Last week: 25) Throwing five TD passes would usually be a good thing. (Week 12: vs. Tennessee)
25. Carolina (4-6) (Last week: 27) Despite last week's comment, not phoning it in just yet. (Week 12: vs. New Orleans)
24. Minnesota (4-6) (Last week: 24) Didn't miss Adrian Peterson Week 11. Might miss him Week 12. (Week 12: at NY Giants)
23. Baltimore (4-6) (Last week: 22) The system worked. (Week 12: at San Diego)
22. Arizona (5-5) (Last week: 20) Interceptions are mostly skill, interception returns mostly luck. (Week 12: vs. San Francisco)
21. Kansas City (4-6) (Last week: 21) I got nothing (1 of 3) (Week 12: vs. Oakland)
20. Chicago (4-6) (Last week: 18) I got nothing (2 of 3) (Week 12: vs. Denver)
19. New Orleans (4-6) (Last week: 15) I got nothing (3 of 3) (Week 12: at Carolina)
18. Buffalo (5-5) (Last week: 19) Maybe hosting the 2007 Patriots is an exception to the rule mentioned in the Jets comment? (Week 12: at Jacksonville)
17. Houston (5-5) (Last week: 23) OK, who do you put in this spot then? In any event it's a much better team if Schaub and Johnson are both healthy. (Week 12: at Cleveland)
16. Philadelphia (5-5) (Last week: 16) Not Donovan McNabb's finest game. (Week 12: at New England (Sunday night))
15. Denver (5-5) (Last week: 17) The Broncos will have gone from October 7 to December 9 without a Sunday afternoon home game. (Week 12: at Chicago)
14. Washington (5-5) (Last week: 14) They hung in there on the road against a much better team. (Week 12: at Tampa Bay)
13. Seattle (6-4) (Last week: 13) Likely to be the worst playoff team yet receive a home game. (Week 12: at St. Louis)
12. Detroit (6-4) (Last week: 11) On the bright side, imagine predicting in August that the Lions would be as good as 7-9 (or even 8-8!). (Week 12: vs. Green Bay (Thursday))
11. Cleveland (6-4) (Last week: 12) Big road win: check. Finally some defense: not so much. (Week 12: vs. Houston)
10. Tennessee (6-4) (Last week: 8) Now we know who anchored their defense. (Week 12: at Cincinnati)
9. San Diego (5-5) (Last week: 9) They hung in there on the road against a quasi-elite team. (Week 12: vs. Baltimore)
8. Tampa Bay (6-4) (Last week: 10) A worthy NFC semi-finalist. (Week 12: vs. Washington)
7. Jacksonville (7-3) (Last week: 7) Playoff rematch in San Diego? (Week 12: vs. Buffalo)
6. Pittsburgh (7-3) (Last week: 5) The two Pennsylvania teams affect my fantasy football more than any other. This was supposed to be a cakewalk (as was the Eagles-Dolphins game). Oh well. (Week 12: vs. Miami)
5. NY Giants (7-3) (Last week: 6) Good bounceback. (Week 12: vs. Minnesota)
4. Indianapolis (8-2) (Last week: 3) What's wrong (it's not just the injuries), and will a trip to Atlanta cure it? (Week 12: at Atlanta (Thursday))
3. Green Bay (9-1) (Last week: 4) Thursday, November 29, at Dallas: If only this billion-dollar league didn't have the combination of greed and hubris to charge an extortionary price, then try to blame companies unwilling to pay that price. Business news aside, four of their next five are on the road. (Week 12: at Detroit (Thursday))
2. Dallas (9-1) (Last week: 2) Three straight home games are awfully convenient this time of year. (Week 12: vs. NY Jets (Thursday))
1. New England (10-0) (Last week: 1) I had a 40-point lead. The other guy had Randy Moss. If he wins, there's a chance Moss will have outscored the rest of his team combined. (So one way or another it's an interesting week for my own team to have come in way below par.) (Week 12: vs. Philadelphia (Sunday night))
"Joe Nuxhall, Modern Baseball’s Youngest Player, Is Dead at 79"
--most poorly conceived NY Times headline ever?
If you need to make good with the boss, take some tips from Ricky Williams. The 1998 Heisman Trophy-winning running back knows what it takes to get back in an employer's good graces:
Lose the scraggly homeless man beard.
--in the SF Chronicle (of all places)
"Wireless spectrum and network management are nowhere near Google's core competency. Its competence is in one market, online advertising,"
--from this article
You know somebody is a suit, rather than a tech, when they simplify an entire realm of search algorithms by just referring to the type of product that most visibly monetizes them.