Twister, baby
“I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”
Ari Fleischer
You’ve got to love this stuff. It’s like a verbal Möbius strip.
Hoaxing
There’s been a spell of hoaxes making the rounds on the Net lately.
Michael Savage, a right-wing tele-blowhard lost his job after a call-in prankster gave him just enough rope to hang himself. This story got a lot of play in Blogistan.
There was Baby Ink, the website for a toddler-tattoo parlor. Done with a completely straight face, it was revealed as a hoax.
There is the amazing robot cop spec video (bah, annoying redirects: click on “Neil’s domain,” then “reel pt 3”) that some people took seriously. This is not a hoax per se–this simply reveals the credulity of some people.
Now there’s Hunting for Bambi, which purports to be a, ahh, service that allows men with some serious issues to paintball-hunt naked women. Although there’s actually a legitimate news story (and video) on this, it appears to be a hoax.
The thing these hoaxes have in common is outrage, in both senses of the word: they are outrageous (incredible), and they are outrages (atrocious). They get us into a sputtering fit for a moment, until someone pins down that they are, in fact, false.
Of course, when hoaxes appear elsewhere in the public arena, the revelation of falsity provokes even greater outrage.
Flightpath wins
At roughly 9:30 tonight, the Flightpath coffee shop was granted a variance on the city’s parking requirements. Four people rose to speak against; at least 20 people rose in favor, including a co-president of the Hyde Park neighborhood association and the chairman of the North Loop planning commission. Apart from those two, none of us actually had a chance to speak, but I think that our number, especially those of us who stuck around that late, made an impression.
I’ve written about this issue before, and I’m glad it is finally resolved in Flightpath’s favor.
I got down there at 6:30 or so, so I had plenty of time to study the public-input process. It was mostly dull as dirt, but occasional flashes of vendettas, duplicity, etc, made things more interesting.
Update 16 Jul 03: The window in the side door was smashed in by a rock this morning, quite possibly by one of the neighbors opposed. It might be some young punk, but the timing is suspicious.
The Name of the Rose
Finished reading The Name of the Rose today. An excellent book I can’t recommend highly enough. It is a book about perversions. Perversions of faith, of knowledge, and of sex, and the ways in which these perversion lead to bad ends. It is about the conflict between faith and reason (this theme was the main focus in the movie version), between religious and temporal power, between the learned and the unlettered, between the powerful and the weak.
In many places, the book touches on matters of current interest, and it is rife with eerily relevant quotes.
The conflict between faith and reason is still with us in the fight between creationism and science. The stalwart conservative of the book, Jorge, polemicized:
“Preservation of, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge, as a human thing, that is has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretation of the fathers of the church. There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.”
Contrast with the progressive protagonist, William:
“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept the commentators of holy books had very clearly in mind.”
This has some resonances with the position of the right wing that dissent is somehow unpatriotic, and questioning the government intolerable. And despite the lapdog media’s reluctance to call the government on its shit, we are seeing some of G.W.’s whoppers coming back to bite him. The narrator, Adso, hopefully observed
Such is the power of truth that, like good, it is its own propagator.
Some unpatriotic churls have wondered why we invaded Iraq on the suspicion that it had WMDs, when North Korea was openly admitting they had them. Adso was told by the nomadic heretic Salvatore that
…when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected this is why the simple are so called.
It’s been noted in a few places that the difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats see the world in shades of gray, and believe in compromise; Republicans see the world in black and white, and don’t. In a showdown, William accused Jorge:
“…the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. You are the Devil, and like the Devil, you live in darkness. If you wanted to convince me, you have failed. I hate you, Jorge, and if I could, I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer.”
Liveable City
Liveable City is a community-activism group trying to keep (make?) Austin, well, a liveable city. The board has some good people on it–the Spelmans and Catharine Echols are people I know with a track record for getting good things done.
Spam in my name
I previously hypothesized that we’d eventually see viruses/trojan horses used to relay spam, and later reported that it was, in fact, happening. Now it is happening in my name.
There are plenty of Outlook viruses that infect computer A, mine the address book, and then send out infectious e-mail to parties B, C, D, and E, but pretending to be someone else from the address book, making it much more difficult to trace back to the infected computer and fix the problem. It would be simple for one of these virus writers to substitute spam for infectious e-mail (and probably add in hooks for updating the spam messsage remotely).
I have just received a bounce message for a piece of spam that purports to come from me, and was apparently sent to an invalid address. It is also interesting to note that the entire message text is base64-encoded, which no doubt helps it slip past spam filters.
Needless to say, I am chagrined. For those who care, I have posted the raw text of the bounce message (e-mail addresses changed to protect the innocent).
Meanwhile in related news, Spamotomy looks like a good clearinghouse of information on spam.
Science fiction, double feature
On Saturday, the Paramount showed an excellent double-bill, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet Both very entertaining and worthwhile movies. I had never seen The Day The Earth Stood Still at all, and hadn’t seen Forbidden Planet on the big screen, so this was a treat.
The program started off with a campy Batman serial episode from (I’m guessing) the late 40s. Shooting probably took only slightly longer than the finished product, on a budget that was probably scraped up by robbing schoolkids of their lunch-money. Hilarious.
The Day The Earth Stood Still gives form to a fear that many people had and still have, that this planet is irredeemably fucked up, and can only be saved by a benevolent alien who will force/help us to straighten up and fly right. Once upon a time, we called this kind of thing Christianity, and the Christian metaphors in the movie are barely concealed: Klaatu goes undercover as “Mr Carpenter,” dies, and rises again. At the time the movie was made (1951), the world was divided into Manichean camps, and the threat of total nuclear annihilation was itself a bit science-fictiony–the USA and USSR were nowhere the point of mutually assured destruction then. These days, that threat seems more remote, we’ve had more time to get used to that fear, and the world is vastly more complex.
Forbidden Planet deals with more universal weaknesses–hubris and the unbridled id, the hubris of forgetting the frailty that the id represents. From a technical standpoint, it is interesting how far advanced over The Day The Earth Stood Still it was–made five years later, we get the addition of color, Panavision, elaborate sets, props, matte effects, and pretty good (for the time) animated effects. Not to mention Ann Francis’ shapely gams. The movie was also an obvious inspiration for Star Trek, in terms of the look, setting, and plot elements and themes for the pilot and first episode. It was a surprisingly academic movie–there was some effort to get scientific references right, and a lot of polysyllabic words, like “instrumentality” and “philologist.”
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
They are keeping an eye on us, now you can keep an eye on them. MIT is working on a Government Information Awareness site, a sort of search-engine to keep track of the feds.
Blizg
Blizg is another one of these blog-affinity finders. It looks for “ICBM” location data (as popularized by GeoURL) and Keywords in your headers, and finds proximate and topically-related blogs for you. Nice. Although it would be more powerful if it could extract keywords from the stuff you actually post about, rather than the stuff you mention in your meta-data.
Adventures in biomechanical translation
Machine translation (MT) is the bugbear of the professional translator. Machine-assisted translation (MAT) is a more devious, and perhaps more pernicious bugbear. Machine translation takes the translator out of the process entirely; machine-assisted translation makes use of the translator’s expertise to create patterns of source/target sentence pairs, and attempts to extrapolate these patterns through the source text. Translation agencies then use the “match rate” as a way to chisel the translator on payments.
Most of the work that I do is not very amenable to MAT (if I used it at all)–my guesstimate is that most of my jobs would have less than a 10% match rate overall. But the job I’m doing right now would be highly amenable to MAT: it’s programming document where a given sentence may be repeated 50 times, with minor variations in predictable spots.
The job was sent to me as a series of MS Word files, which I manually concatenated into one. Word search/replace tools are relatively limited, but BBEdit has a powerful implementation of GREP. So, after much gnashing of teeth, I managed to export a usable HTML file from Word, and cleaned it up. This in itself could be the subject of an even-more-tiresomely long post, which I will spare everyone from reading, and myself from reliving.
Once I got the file whipped into a shape I could stand looking at, I started working out GREP patterns. Some of these were highly productive–one pass would translate 40 or so sentences. Some would only do the one I was looking at. So I’ve been manually reproducing the MAT process, and getting pretty good at GREP syntax to boot. But as I work on it, there’s always a nagging feeling that if I understood that syntax better, I could produce more generalized patterns that would capture more sentences. The ultimate, of course, would be the hideously convoluted pattern that would be required to translate the entire document in one pass–which starts getting into Chomsky territory.
Postscript: I finished that job. What started out as 28 Word files weighing in at a total of 1.2 MB wound up–when I finished concatenating, exporting to HTML, cleaning up, translating, and compressing with Gzip–as a 17.1 KB file. Amazing.