Monkeyspheres and murderers

I’ve recently been amused by this piece of social commentary:

• Inside the Monkeysphere (hat tip: Violent Acres)

The gist of it (you should read the whole thing, but I’ll try to summarize) is that human psychology hasn’t evolved to deal with groups of people larger than, say, 150.  This small bunch of people whom we actually think of as people is our Monkeysphere.  We dehumanize people outside of our Monkeyspheres not because we’re callous assholes or ignorant savages or evil racist white people (or whatever) — but because we just can’t deal with the notion that there are so fucking many people out there, and we just haven’t adapted to really live in larger groups yet.

I’ve also been re-reading a book that’ll disturb the hell out of a lot of people:

• The Murderer Next Door by David Buss

(This book is so good, I’m taking notes this time around.)  Mr. Buss contends that most murders fit a fairly narrow set of circumstances — and that killing people under those circumstances provides an evolutionary advantage (or at least it did a few thousand years ago).  He also goes into a great deal of detail on the evolutionary psychology of mating and sex (guess what drives most murders?) and comes up with some pretty convincing justifications for what most of us are pleased to think of as inexplicably shallow behaviour.

As far as I’m concerned, these results — and the theory of evolutionary psychology in general — vindicate the theory of natural selection.  Sure, Darwinian evolution could still be false, with these murderous impulses planted in our heads as a test of faith by the benevolent but unknowable God who created us six thousand (and change) years ago, but we don’t care — we just want a scientific tool that can explain existing data and predict new results.  It doesn’t matter whether natural selection or a loving God wired us to kill our ex-girlfriends if we can use the theory to understand high-risk situations and end up with fewer murders.

This is what pisses me off about “Intelligent Design” — it has no predictive power.  If your answer to every hard question is “well, it’s a miracle“, you might be right — but you aren’t right in a useful way, and I simply don’t care.

Weapons-grade irony, Drug War edition

You know how liberty cuts both ways?  Turns out that tyranny does, too:

• Those Vicious Iranian Drug Cops (Reason magazine)

Here’s the money shot, from Pajamas “Ron Who?” Media’s Michael Ledeen:

For me, the most revealing thing about [photos of an Iranian drug bust] is that the police feel obliged to wear masks while conducting a drug bust in the capital. tells you something about the relationship between the people and the state.

It sure does, Mike, it sure does.

In Defence of Fundamentalism

Frank Tipler is upset that one can get a physics degree without having to learn the fundamentals of modern physics:

•  Postmodern Physics (The John William Pope Center)

That got me thinking: what are the fundamentals of computing science?  I don’t care about questions like “what’s the least amount of training you can get away with before you’re able to write mediocre enterprise applications in Java” — Joel Spolsky has addressed that topic more than adequately.  But suppose that you want to be able to understand the theory behind just about everything you’d care to do with a computer — or at least have the background to learn that theory quickly.  What would you need to know?

First, you need some fundamental math: set theory and predicate logic.  (Is logic really “math”?  Let’s not quibble… at least, not in this post.)  Without logic, you can’t build circuits from logic gates — and without gates, you don’t have digital computers.  Without set theory and induction, you can’t analyze algorithms — and algorithms are to computing science what theorems are to mathematics.  If you can’t do induction, if you don’t know what an equivalence relation is, you may be a software developer but you sure aren’t a computing scientist.  (If you can’t do induction, you also don’t have a hope in hell of understanding recursion — so you probably aren’t much of a developer either.)

Next on the list is computability theory.  You don’t necessarily have to be comfortable with the whole complexity zoo, but you really ought to know what a finite state machine can compute, what sorts of problems require a push-down automaton, and what requires a full-blown Turing machine.  You should also know what NP-complete problems look like.

To make sense of some parts of complexity theory (as well as data structures, which I’ll get into later), you ought to know some graph theory.  While we’re talking about math again: linear algebra and calculus will make your study of algorithms much more pleasant, and a little bit of group theory will make your study of linear algebra much more pleasant.

Three paragraphs, and I still haven’t mentioned programming!  Well, yeah, you should be able to write code.  You should understand variable persistence and namespaces, function application, and iterative and recursive problem-solving.  You should be able to take a problem and decompose it into a collection of functions and data, each of which does exactly one thing (and does it well).  You should be comfortable with the basic data structures: lists, stacks, trees, and hash tables.  You should be able to follow pointers and properly manage resources.  If you can’t make malloc(3) work, you’re fucked, even if you never touch C — explicit memory (de)allocation is just one form of resource management.  Honestly, though: if you can do the math, programming shouldn’t give you much trouble.

The rest, as they say, is just commentary.  If you know logic and set theory, you should be able to figure out relational databases and logic design.  If you know graph theory, linear algebra, and calculus, you should be able to figure out computer graphics and networks.  If you know about resource management, you ought to be able to figure out operating systems, and if you know computability you should be able to figure out compiler design.

There’s a lot more to computing science than the fundamentals I’ve mentioned above, but without those fundamentals I don’t think I’d get anywhere.

Populism: it works, bitches

(Note that the title of this post is a clear reference to this xkcd comic.)

First of all, Michigan GOP chairman Saul Anuzis petitioned to have Ron Paul removed from future Republican debates. I guess he’s upset by the notion that the continued American presence in Saudi Arabia might have had some effect on the Saudis who flew airliners into the WTC a few years ago. (Maybe if we don’t talk about it, it’ll go away!)

This made some of Ron Paul’s supporters a tad upset. What should you do when a politician upsets you? Let the fucker know!

And that’s what happened:

• Chaos and Shock at Michigan GOP HQ (Lew Rockwell)

“Fringe candidate” my ass.

Update: Score another for the Internet:

• Saul Surrenders (Lew Rockwell)

I love the way Anuzis puts it, too:

After consulting with my fellow RNC members, I believe there isn’t anything to be gained by advancing a petition aimed solely at removing Congressman Paul from the debates.

Almost makes it sound like he didn’t get vox populi shoved up the jacksey by an irate internet, doesn’t he?  Silly neocon.

Cardboard terrorism

In Manchester, owning a cardboard cut-out of a video-game character can get you arrested for “firearms offences”:

• Armed cops in Lara Croft bust action (El Reg)

(Let’s all pause for a moment to appreciate the sublime double-entendre in that headline.)

Officers duly made their way to [David Williams's] house in Dukinfield, near Ashton-under-Lyne, but quickly spotted the silhouette of a gunman in the front room.

They cordoned off the street, called for armed back-up and, when Williams failed to answer the front door, piled in mob-handed through the rear entrance.

In the event, the armed perp put up little resistance, since she was a life-size representation of Lara Croft which Williams had taken home for disposal on eBay. He recounted: “It would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so terrifying. One of the police held a gun and yelled, ‘Where’s the weapon, where’s the weapon?’

[...]

Williams was arrested at the scene and held for 13 hours. He’s now been bailed on firearms offences and will find out next month if he faces further action.

An unfortunate incident, to be sure. (I’m not sure how Mr. Williams could have committed “firearms offences” without a firearm, but this is Britain we’re talking about. Perhaps his cardboard cutout was deemed anti-social.) Nevertheless, everything worked out for the best as far as the State is concerned: procedure was followed.

A spokeswoman for Greater Manchester Police explained that “officers peered inside after Mr Williams failed to answer his front door”. She added that they “believed they saw a silhouette of a person pointing what appeared to be a firearm inside the house”, and had accordingly followed “correct procedure” by backing off and calling in armed colleagues.

What a relief! Just imagine what might have happened had correct procedure not been followed: Mr. Williams might not have been arrested, held for thirteen hours, and charged with ridiculous offences. He might even have gained some relief from the “nuisance phone calls” about which he complained to police in the first place! Wouldn’t that have been a tragedy?

Update: The British crackdown upon women with fake guns continues:

• Armed police swoop on fancy-dress cowgirls with toy guns (thisislondon.co.uk)

I’m particularly amused by the fact that the “cowgirls” in question were paying more attention to public safety than the cops:

The girls pulled off the motorway and into a supermarket car park in Brighouse

“We chose Tesco’s car park to stop because there were lots of people around and we thought if they were armed they might be a bit more careful with all the public there,” added Miss Rupp, a mother of two.

Yee-haw.

God’s favourite editor

I am, of course, referring to:

• vi, improved

The ViEmu folks have a pretty solid apologia for vim here:

• Why, oh WHY, do those fucking nutheads use vi?

(I’ve taken the liberty of unBowdlerizing their title. Don’t thank me, it’s my job.)

Now, as every geek knows, the most rancorous of holy wars isn’t the one between Muslim extremists and the secular excesses of Western civilization, nor the one waged by conservative Christians against sex that doesn’t involve altar boys — it’s the bitter debate between vi users and emacs enthusiasts. In this new age of bipartisan understanding, though, there has emerged a compromise: Viper, a vi emulation mode for emacs. Thus we see promise for a new age of unity and understanding.

Problem is, I’ve never been able to get viper-mode to do proper line numbering (:set nu in vim).  I find jumping directly to a given line the most useful movement command in vi, so its absence is a deal-breaker.  So much for rapprochement.

Escalating the war on anti-socialism

Subtitle: the Brits shit all over property rights:

• Police get new powers to evict anti-social residents from their own homes (thisislondon.co.uk)

Briefly:

Police are to get tough new powers to evict anti-social residents and board up their properties, Home Secretary John Reid is to announce.

Officers in England and Wales will be allowed to temporarily throw out nuisance neighbours, whether they are council tenants, private renters or even own the properties.

Now that’s just awesome.  Regardless of whether you own your home or whether you’ve done anything illegal, the cops can kick you to the curb and board up your house if someone decides that you’re a “nuisance”.

Not open to abuse at all.

There’s that term again: “anti-social”.  I could swear that it means something different — something more akin to “felonious” — on the other side of the pond:

 Mr Reid is expected to tell the Police Federation annual conference in Blackpool: “The widening of existing powers to temporarily close premises where anti-social behaviour is rife will help our police crack down on this scourge in our communities.”

Anti-social behaviour is a scourge?!  Great burning balls, when last I checked anti-social behaviour meant, for example, getting fitshaced at your office Christmas party and blurting out obscenities — the adult equivalent of “doesn’t play well with others”.  Now it’s grounds for the State to forcibly evict you from your home?  That’s fucking ridiculous.

Of course, we are assured that such extreme measures will only be used as a last resort.  That’s comforting, isn’t it?

Fuckin’ A

One of my favourite words is becoming more socially acceptable:

• Expletive Deleted (The Guardian)

But it’s not just desensitization that’s making this particular bon mot more popular:

As well as liberalisation for its own sake, the fact has also dawned that, linguistically, fuck is a very flexible and interesting word.

That’s hardly unbefuckinglievable.

This trend has interesting ramifications for my writing.  As those of you who’ve been paying attention are by now acutely aware, I write this blog because I can get righteously angry and blow off some steam.  If “fuck” is becoming less powerful and more common-place, does that pose me a challenge?

Not really, no.  For one thing, I nonetheless have recourse to some particularly foul language (if I so choose), by the way of careful exploitation of taboos.  For another — well, as far as I’m concerned, people who find simple words, regardless of context shocking seem as backwards and anachronistic as people who sincerely believe that rock music is the work of the devil and that superhero comics directly inspire street crime.  Welcome to the twenty-first fucking century, folks!

“Fuck” is a seasoning — it can bring out the flavour in a bitter, vindictive, furious rant, but by itself it is profoundly uninteresting.