Month: September 2004

Now that’s a pumpkin! It’s in our garden, and it’s at least a half-meter across. In another month, when it’s time to pick it for Halloween, it’ll probably weigh fifty pounds. Whee!

When I wash the dishes each evening, I tend to crank up some tunes on the stereo in the family room. The other night I was listening to some great music, and all three kids ran into the room and were jamming to it.

The funny part was the music was the likes of Queensryche, Van Halen, Lillian Axe, Tesla, and other assorted hard-rock bands. Strange that a three-year-old would enjoy a rousing rendition of, say, “Operation Mindcrime”…

From today’s New York Times:

MOSCOW (AP) — Responding to a spate of deadly terror attacks, President Vladimir Putin announced a series of anti-terror initiatives Monday that would strengthen the Kremlin’s grip on every layer of Russian political life. Putin told Cabinet members and security officials convened in special session that the future of Russia was at stake, and called for creation of a powerful anti-terror agency.

“The organizers and perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the breakup of Russia,” he said. “We need a single organization capable of not only dealing with terror attacks but also working to avert them, destroy criminals in their hideouts and, if necessary, abroad.”

Funny thing is, this sounds a lot like what Bush and Ashcroft did three years ago. While one could say that the U.S. was “caught sleeping” and didn’t really know what to do after a terrorist attack of such magnitude, it’s a little surprising the Russian government was as unprepared as it was. Bush has been tromping over the globe proclaiming how his War on Terror will shut down the bad guys everywhere, and surely all of the major world leaders have heard the rhetoric by now. Coupled with the rise in international terrorism incidents, I would expect the Russians to have put into place at least some rudimentary measures to handle an attack like the Chechan one a few weeks ago.

Instead, the pessimist in me feels like governments use major terrorist attacks as justification for increasing their own power. Why worry about handling the problem before it occurs when you can consolidate more power afterward? While I’m not suggesting Bush or Putin knowingly allowed the attacks to occur, they sure jumped at the chance to take away a few more liberties…

If Photoshop applied in the real world…

I’m reading Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact” for the second time. The first time was when I was given the book for Christmas, back in 1987. It’s been about 16 years, then, since I first made my way through the story. I saw the movie, of course, and thoroughly enjoyed it– but I didn’t realize how disparate the two are. They’re both very good, but different in many significant ways.

In any case, I’m nearing the end of the book now and I realized as I read that my interest in mathematics stemmed, in part, from some of the “puzzles” presented in the story. Of particular note is the conversation between Ellie (the protagonist) and her long-deceased father (simulated by the aliens). In summary, her father tells her that long ago, before even the aliens were making their way around the galaxy, some great civilization built a network of wormholes linking stars throughout the galaxy.

Although there’s an interesting real-life story behind that part of the plot (Sagan challenged his friend Kip Thorne to come up with a way to travel faster than light without violating known physical laws), the part that was intriguing to me was the statement by Ellie’s father about the nature of pi. He said the civilization who had constructed the wormholes had also left behind a message inside of pi. Basically, you had to calculate it to trillions of trillions of decimal places before you’d find the message.

“How can you hide a message inside pi?” she asks. “It’s built into the fabric of the universe.”

“Exactly,” he answers.

While there are interesting religious undertones here (Sagan was an athiest), it got me thinking. Is that really possible? Could some supreme being– call it God, or a race of long-dead aliens, or whatever you want– actually construct the universe in such a way that basic physical constants were messages? Or, more abstractly, that they held some deeper meaning?

In the end, questions like this piqued my interest in such puzzles. Several years after that, in college, I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the subject and ended up with a degree in mathematics. While I can’t say my major and my career was decided by reading “Contact”, I can definitely point to it as a part of the journey taking me where I am today.

“Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.”

— Seen on Slashdot

I love web ads like the one below. They’re hilarious simply because they’re so unreal. Take this one, which is advertising a singles’ site. Now, the advertisers know full well that statistically, men use the web more than women. Moreover, men who use the web an above-average amount of time are likely going to be less socially adept. Ergo, the chances are the kind of person who would visit a singles’ site is a geek.

So what do they use in the ad banners? Why, hot women of course! You can bet that most of the “3 million” people who are registered on the site are absolutely not hot.. They’re unattractive, socially inept computer nerds hoping to find a babe.

Okay, so I’m generalizing…

“The gods do not protect fools. Fools are protected by more capable fools.”

— Larry Niven

* You call them “terrorists” when their cause is one you don’t believe in.

* You call them “freedom fighters” when their cause is one you DO believe in.

* And you call them “guerrillas” when you aren’t sure.

An ongoing, classic example is the conflict in Chechyna. In the American media, the soldiers there tend to be called “guerrillas” or “rebels”. Never “freedom fighters”, and I haven’t yet heard them called “terrorists”. I think we just don’t know what to make of them. The Russians, on the other hand, refer to them quite clearly as “terrorists”.

It looks like a bunch of them seized a school down in Georgia (Russia, not U.S.) and the news stories about the situation refer to them as “guerrillas”. Still not sure, I guess. It seems to me that grabbing a school and holding a bunch of kids hostage isn’t a “freedom fighter” kind of thing to do…