Brutal Hugs is the top Google hit for "fucking skeletons", but only in Germany.
Other people found this site while searching for brutal lesbians and gay men in drag raising money for racing.
Half the search engine hits look like that-- people looking for strange niche stuff. The other half is people looking for info on Kurdistan and Iraq. I love the Internet. It's Democracy in action.
Ben's Beta Blog blogs some neat programming and math stuff, and today he's on about Peasant Multiplication.
Basically peasant multiplication allows you to multiply two large numbers using a different method from the long multiplication you learned in grammar school. The algorithm is simple: Take two numbers, A and B. Halve A and double B successively until A = 1. Throw out any remainders. Every time A is odd, add B to a running total. When you're done, that total is A times B. Here's a quick example:
| Number A | Number B | Addition |
|---|---|---|
| 375 | 1793 | 1793 |
| 187 | 3586 | 3586 |
| 93 | 7172 | 7172 |
| 46 | 14344 | |
| 23 | 28688 | 28688 |
| 11 | 57376 | 57376 |
| 5 | 114752 | 114752 |
| 2 | 229504 | |
| 1 | 459008 | 459008 |
| Total: | 672375 | |
So that's peasant multiplication. Ben is curious as to whether that's easier or harder than traditional long multiplication. I say it's harder, but that's not my concern. What I want to know is how it works. Long multiplication works because multiplication is associative: 1793 * 375 = 1793 * (300 + 70 + 5) = 1793 * 300 + 1793 * 70 + 1793 * 5 = 672375.
But why does this peasant math work? Why only add when column A is odd? What happens to remainders when you halve A? After a moment's thought I realized, it's pretty much the same as the traditional long division, except it's all done in binary. 1793 * 375 = 11100000001 * 101110111 = 11100000001 * (100000000 + 00000000 + 1000000 + 100000 + 10000 + 0000 + 100 + 10 + 1) = 11100000001 * 100000000 + 11100000001 * 0 + 11100000001 * 1000000 + 11100000001 * 100000 + 11100000001 * 10000 + 11100000001 * 0 + 11100000001 * 100 + 11100000001 * 10 + 11100000001 * 1 = 1110000000100000000 * 1 + 111000000010000000 * 0 + 11100000001000000 * 1 + 1110000000100000 * 1 + 111000000010000 * 1 + 11100000001000 * 0 + 1110000000100 * 1 + 111000000010 * 1 + 11100000001 * 1 = 10100100001001110111. Feel free to check my math. You only add when odd because when column A is even, you're multiplying by zero. And you lose remainders in the same way. Pretty neat math trickery.
So what have we learned? Peasants get screwed six ways to Sunday. Their math is longer, more inscrutable, and requires more number juggling than ordinary math. "Farm boy, fetch me that pitcher."
Free trade should be a strict liberal vs. conservative issue in America, but it's not. Republicans are the party that wants to raise the tide and lift all the boats and never sees the people drowning because they can't afford boats. That makes them natural proponents of free trade and enemies of protectionist (especially pro-domestic labor) policies. Democrats are the party that accepts less growth in return for full employment and stability, which means they are willing to protect workers and industries with tariffs and restrictive regulations on foreign goods, even though it lowers the tide for all boats.
At least, that's the way it works in theory. But actual policies don't bear out this dichotomy. Which is why Brad DeLong writes at the Project Syndicate that he finds it surprising
that President Clinton was so willing to swim against the tide generated by his own labor/protectionist base in 1993 and 1994 and establish NAFTA and the WTO.
It is also very surprising that the post-2000 Republican administration of George W. Bush has been so hostile to freer trade. Indeed, Bush has backed several major anti-liberal initiatives: a steel tariff, the expansion of agricultural subsidies, and a declaration that FTAA [Free Trade Agreement of the Americas] negotiations cannot even consider the impact of US agricultural subsidy programs on trade.
What I find surprising is that the myth about Democrat and Republican views of free trade still stands. On free trade, Reagan was no better than GW Bush, despite his reputation as a free trader. Reagan was the guy that imposed 100% tariffs on Japanese electronics! And Reagan's protectionism was not a new Republican policy. According to Alfred E. Eckes, professor of history at Ohio University and former chair of the U.S. International Trade Commission, protectionism is the traditional Republican policy. In a 27 February 1996 article in the NYTimes, he wrote:
From Abraham Lincoln in 1860 to Alf Landon in 1936, every Republican Presidential candidate ran on a platform endorsing high protective tariffs -- averaging more than 40 percent ad valorem on dutiable goods. . . . Protectionism was associated with prosperity and independence. Preaching class harmony, 19th-century Republican economic nationalists justified the protective tariff as essential for protecting domestic workers from imports made by cheap European labor. They considered the tariff a fee on foreign manufacturers for participating in the American market. . . . Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "Thank God I am not a free-trader.'
The truth is that neither party takes a principled stand on free trade. Free trade raises all boats, but protectionism helps isolated industries. That means that the companies and workers that benefit from specific protectionist policies lobby for them, and government caves to this focused lobbying because there is no focused opposition. There is no specific group that can go to Congress and say "This tariff will hurt me." The buyers of timber aren't organized into a timber purchasing group, so they often lose the political battle against the timber producing industry.
Special interest groups demand protectionism, and Republicans have responded. Free trade has not been an effective slogan in America. Indeed, Eckes continued on to write,
From 1860 to 1932 the high-tariff card worked well for Republican candidates. Their position appealed to business, agriculture and working people. Republicans won 14 of 18 [presidential] elections.
It's time to put this myth to bed.
Polis | 5 Writebacks | #
Some libertarians were sitting around one night smoking some righteous weed (as is there, you know, right), dissing the man and trying to prove that George Washington smoked too. One of them suddenly looked up, his red eyes shining with the light of revelation. "I've got it!" he shouted. Everybody laughed.
"No, wait," he said. "I'm serious. What if all us freedom lovin' activist libertarians all lived in the same place!"
"Like a commune?"
"No, not like hippies, just together in the same state. There'd be enough of us to swing elections and we could make our own laws."
And then he settled back into the couch and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he was crazy starving and he'd completely forgotten his idea. The libertarian utopia almost never came to be.
Thankfully, the internet heard this boy's dreams, and a website was formed: the Free State Project. As soon as 20,000 people sign up, they'll all pick a state, move there, and elect Harry Browne their philosopher king. Thankfully, New York isn't one of the states they're considering moving to.
All I can say is that I love this idea. Let the states be the laboratories of democracy, why not? The 50 states should not all have identical laws. There should be a place for everybody. Mormons have Utah. Liberals have California. Rich sex addicts with low standards have Nevada and Jerry Springer. There's no reason why Libertarians can't have Wisconsin.
My question, though, is what happens when your neighbor turns his home into a non-stop rock and roll brothel, bar and firing range? Music turned up to 11 24/7, drunken horny gun toters, your 5-year-old son propositioned and your 6-year-old daughter offered a job. My prediction is that a few people will just move or suck it up. But some people will turn to the law, either local government or tort law. And the law will respond, slowly but surely, and the law will fasten onto liberty not as a swift and totalitarian attack but as an accretion of reasonable compromises that slowly drag her to the ground.
So have fun, libertarians, and good luck. Just remember that your rebellious children will all be socialists.
Via Talk Left.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Trying to differentiate himself from the other candidates and shape the issues of the primary, Dick Gephardt is stumping for universal health care. Basically, he wants employers to provide health care to their employees, with tax credits to help offset the costs:
Gephardt's proposal would require all employers to provide private health insurance to their workers and would offer refundable tax credits to corporations, including those who now offer insurance, to offset 60 percent of their insurance costs. He also called for assistance for low-income workers to help them pay their share of insurance premiums, for smaller measures to expand coverage for Americans who are not employed and for a large grant to state and local governments to relieve their current budgetary crisis.
I don't really understand why we should tie health care to jobs at all. If we're going to have government-mandated universal health care, using employers as middle-men doesn't make any sense. The only thing employers contribute to the equation are the inefficiency of decentralized bureaucracy and 40% of the cost of health care. We could tax businesses to recoup that 40% (they're paying it anyway), so that's not an issue.
The real benefit of decoupling jobs and employment is that it's good for workers. It cushions the blow of unemployment, which is now the double-whammy of unemployment plus loss of health care. It also creates jobs because it lowers the marginal cost of hiring more workers. If employers directly pay for health care, the cost of hiring another employee is that employee's salary plus benefits. Removing the employer from the health care system makes the benefits portion of that cost lower, which makes employees more affordable, which creates jobs. From the employer perspective, it would also be great not to have to deal with the bureaucracy and paperwork of managing their employees' health care, something no company really wants to do.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Field Day offers Beasties, Beck, Radiohead, Le Tigre, Blackalicious, Trachtenberg Family, N.E.R.D., Beth Orton, Liz Phair, Luna, Blur, the Roots, Thievery Corp., Ben Lee and more. Live! In concert! Two day festival! See you there?
Bruce Schneier, writing in his Counterpane Newsletter, relates an interesting bit of applied statistics on the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Database. He argues that
Because there are so few terrorists (for example) amongst the general population, a error-filled database is far more likely to identify innocent people as terrorists than it is to catch actual terrorists.
And he's right, of course. Check his page and walk through his simple math.
I have argued that the same logic Schneier applies to the NCIC database also applies to racial profiling. In racial profiling, the database is your skin color. Dark = guilty and light = innocent. This database has a much higher error rate than the one 1% Schneier considers in Counterpane.
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
I just received a bill for $8.16 from a radiology center that treated me last year. As if the shoddy treatment they gave me wasn't insult enough, they're sending me threatening letters over 8 bucks! This is the first I've seen this bill, but the letter says
We have attempted to contact you about your overdue account. We would like to set up an agreement to settle the matter. Please select your payment method from the following.
___ 1. Payment in full is enclosed.
___ 2. I prefer monthly payments of $____. I realize, if payments are missed, my account may be submitted to a collection agency.
___ 3. I will contact your office on ____.
And at the bottom, it says
THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO CALL TO SET UP A PAYMENT PLAN. THIS ACCOUNT COULD BE TRANSFERRED TO COLLECTION
I checked box two, put a quarter in the envelope, and mailed it back.
Your choices for first-person reports from Iraq have so far been limited to embedded puppets getting fisted by the Pentagon, American and foreign news outlets who think patriotism means lying, or amateur blogs from people with interesting on-the-ground perspective but no journalism skills. But now that has changed.
Chris Allbritton, a j-school grad, raised a bunch of money and has shipped off to Iraq. He's just crossed the Syrian border into northern Iraq, and is travelling independently to file reports via a sat-phone to his website, Back to Iraq. The great thing about Chris is that he is not beholden to any corporate news outlet, since he raised the money for his trip independently with donations through his website. His coverage will be uncompromised.
I've never met Chris, but he's a friend of an acquaintance of mine. That makes me more inclined to credit his reports. Perhaps it shouldn't, but it does.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
Talkleft has another great post about Ed Rosenthal's marijuana cultivation conviction.
The war on drugs is America's longest and least successful war. America has 6.6 million men and women who are wrapped up in the correctional system right now. That's 3.1% or 1 in 32 people. Remember your first grade class? Odds are, one of your classmates is in jail or meeting his parole officer right now. Remember how your graduating class had 320 kids? The ten kids that sat in the back are probably going stir crazy in jail cells and halfway houses right now, and they're probably black and latino. More than half of the federal inmates and more than a quarter of state inmates are there for drug crimes. In 1970, that figure was 16.3% for federal inmates. And the problem is only growing.
That's millions of people whose lives have been waylaid by the correctional system for drug offenses, mostly young, minority, and male. And what do we have to show for it, aside from having our civil liberties under attack and a lack of treatment alternatives? 40% of 12th graders did drugs last year. In 1991, that figure was 29.4%. In 2001, an estimated 15.9 million Americans age 12 years or older used an illicit drug in the month immediately prior to the survey interview. That's a lot of people, and every one of them is the 'enemy' in a war on drugs. It's also a lot more people than the 12.8 million who used drugs in 1995. In 1990, 29.4% of college students smoked weed. By 2000, that number rose to 34%.
For more drug stats, look here.
Polis | 3 Writebacks | #
Seeking to calm those that fear Bush's Iraq attack is a rolling start to broader mid-east conquest, Birtish Foreign Secretary Jack Straw "Iran is an emerging democracy and there would be no case whatsoever for taking any kind of action." As for Syria, Straw said "we have worked hard to try to improve relations".
So if America goes after Syria or Iran, we do it alone. That's clear, but what I want to know is what happens if Iran or Syria crosses into Iraq? Straw also said, "it is important that Syria ensures that its territory is not used as a conduit for military supplies to the government of Iraq, and I hope that they are not doing so." If Syria continues to provide supplies and begins to provide troops too, what will Britain do? Will they chase the Syrians back to the border and then stop? Or will they roll on to Damascus? Will we disrupt an emerging democracy if the democratic will of the people is to kill Americans and Brits?
I ask not to be provactive, but because it's already happening (and here and here). Syrians and Iranians are already crossing the border, or at least trying to. These aren't regular troops, just untrained volunteers, but what happens when Syria and Iran become the bases for post-war terrorism in Iraq? Will we treat them like Afghanistan (invade) or like Pakistan (beg for cooperation)?
I'd really like the answer to these questions from both the British and American side.
Polis | 2 Writebacks | #
I know most of our readers do not own their own homes. But for those of us that delude ourselves into thinking we and not the bank owns the homes we live in, there is some much-needed tax relief available in NY State through the School Tax Relief (or STAR) program.
If you own your primary residence in NY, you can fill out a form and the state will lower your school tax bill. If you are over 65, you can get an even larger reduction. I don't know how much, but the paperwork isn't much.
I'm amazed that soon-to-be presidential candidate Gary Hart is blogging. It says a lot about his approach to democracy and public discourse that Hart is bringing his ideas directly to the people and making it easy for the blogosphere to engage those ideas. It takes courage and confidence to wade into discourse with some of the most vocally opinionated people on the internet.
I just have two questions: First, how can I volunteer in NYC? And second, why on earth hasn't he blogrolled us yet?
Polis | 4 Writebacks | #
The Girl and I had dinner with two men and a woman the other night. The men, in addition to being men, are all vaguely nerdy about math stuff. They like to think in well-ordered algorithms and all of them have coded. The thought processes of the women, suffice it to say, are informed by less doctrinal concerns.
Because the Girl and I have too much dirty laundry to keep all of it at home, conversation eventually turned to our latest dispute: how to organize our spices. Ah, yes, the sweet mundanities of cohabitation. Everybody agreed that the spices should be organized alphabetically (as opposed to by frequency of use, taste, color, smell, size, container shape, or price). Where the men and the women disagreed was by which letter spices should be properly alphabetized.
Specifically, we disagreed on where to put the red pepper. The men were unanimous that red pepper is properly filed under P for pepper. Red pepper is "Pepper, Red" on the spice rack, just as William Shakespeare is "Shakespeare, William" in a library. The women objected that they never call it pepper, red. They call it red pepper, and why would you want to complicate something as simple as arranging spices?
Ah, but the men countered, where then do you put the crushed red pepper and the ground red pepper? Under C and G? Again the women shook their heads. Those are kinds of red pepper. They go next to each other under R because everybody thinks of them as red pepper. The men wanted to know which came first, the crushed or the ground. The women just stared back and said who cares which comes first. If they are next to each other, you'll find whichever one you need.
We men scoffed at such imprecision. What's important, I said, is that you have an objective, easy to understand system. Anybody using the spices should not have to guess as to what personal name we have for crushed red pepper. Any stranger could come into our kitchen and understand without asking us or knowing anything about us exactly how to find the crushed red pepper. Besides, my system puts all the pepper next to each other: black, creole, red ground, red crushed, white. It's easy and convenient.
The women wanted to know who these mysterious strangers were that were sneaking into our kitchen and cooking with our spices. And how come neither those people nor the men ever do the dishes? The men promptly surrendered.
So where do you put the pepper?
Lots of people have little widgets on their blogs to keep track of and automatically link back to frequent referers. Now Blosxom users can have these widgets too.
This plugin allows you to automatically link back to people that link to your blog. It populates $referer::recent with the most recent referrers to your blog. It orders the list by number of hits referred and is smart enough to combines hits from different referral URLs on the same domain. It won't detect hits from the domain on which your blog is hosted so that users don't see your obsessive reloading of your page. It also allows you to specify a list of URLs to reject so you can prevent people that reach your site through Google searches from clogging the list too. It also has the ability to let you specify pretty names for the blogs that connect to you so users see links to Bob's Blog instead of bob_blog.com or whatnot.
Grab the plugin from the Flavours, Mods and Plugins page.