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Month: August 2008 (page 2 of 2)

Has Junior poisoned the brand? GOPers say no.

14 August 2008 / / Comments Off on Has Junior poisoned the brand? GOPers say no.

Forty-one percent of Americans say that G. W. Bush is the worst president in U.S. history. Thankfully for Bush, 50% said, “Well, maybe he isn’t the worst.”

I’m tempted to side with the 41% percent. The Republic is still standing, and anyone worse than Bush would surely have brought it down. On the other hand, Buchanan or Johnson might have been worse. If the question had been worded “worst president in living memory“, then Bush definitely. And for “worst ever”, Bush is on the short list. I do think, however, that 2001–2008 will go down in history as the time when constitutional government in America was the most endangered.

But there was one stat that reminded me yet again that most people who still identify as Republican are unimpeded by such things as reality and good sense.

While 61% of Americans overall say Bush has been bad for the Republican Party, only 28% of Republicans themselves agree. On the other hand, 81% of Democrats – and 68% of unaffiliated voters — rate the president as bad for the GOP.

Imagine. About 70% of Republicans don’t think Bush has been particularly bad for the GOP brand. Why, no. With GOP party identification dropping, and record numbers of Republican congress-critters retiring, Bush has had what can only be described as a salubrious effect on the Party.

I’d have thought Republicans would throw Bush under the bus what with elections coming, but no, they still hold him dear. They really do live in a different universe.

Viva Severed Heads

13 August 2008 / / Comments Off on Viva Severed Heads

I’ve been kind of bummed since finding out that Tom Ellard has broken up Severed Heads, one of the great electronic/industrial/noise/dance bands of the last thirty years. Well, ‘broken up’ is the wrong term, since it’s just Ellard. Perhaps I should say he’s ‘stopped doing it’, but that doesn’t sound quite right. That’s the story though.

Severed Heads is one of my formative bands. One day in 1986, I walked into a record store in Seattle’s U-District, and they were playing “Twenty Deadly Diseases”. It was a great piece of industrial dance electronica, aggressive but cerebral. I immediately realised that whereas I’d been listening to the Art of Noise, it was this that I’d really been looking for. I promptly bought all the Severed Heads I could find, and never listened to the Art of Noise to any real extent ever again.

Listening to a song like “Army” from Come Visit the Big Bigot, it’s hard to believe that it came from Australia. It’s very icy, and many’s the day I would slap on the headphones and walk in the snow with the sound of “Army” mixing with the cold and the howling wind and the gray sky and the long arctic horizon.

Not going to that year’s Severed Heads/Skinny Puppy show in Seattle is still one of the great regrets of my concert-non-going experience. (The other is Kraftwerk in Perth at the Big Day Out 2003, because it was on a Sunday. Shitty religious observance! At least I got the bootleg from the show.)

But now Tom’s hung it up because he’s teaching full-time at UNSW. Academia has sunk many a promising career. Why not both at once, like Dan Snaith of Manitoba, or Brain May from Queen?

However, our loss is our gain, since Mr Ellard has released much of the Severed backcatalogue. There are gems among the free downloads (especially ‘Twister’), but it’s Big Bigot and Bad Mood Guy that really shine. You might also want to check out his thesis, an exploration of how recording format can affect the music itself.

Random House, society, wimps out

11 August 2008 / / Comments Off on Random House, society, wimps out

This is wrong.

Prophet Muhammad novel scrapped

Plans to release a novel about Prophet Muhammad’s child bride A’isha have been scrapped by US publishers Random House over fears it could spark violence.

Violence? From Islam? But they told me it’s a religion of peace!

Random House is wrong to pull the project just because they assume a small number of violent Muslims will be offended. Yes, they may, but you have to give them the right of reply. They made an awful fuss over the Muhammad cartoons, but maybe —just maybe — they’ll react differently this time. And anyway, people need to realise that we live in a marketplace of ideas, and even their wonderful precious beliefs aren’t immune to some tough scrutiny now and again.

I guess it’s pretty rich coming from me, since I wouldn’t be the one targeted for violence. But I could be. Having my face on this blog and criticising religion like I do could make me a target some day. Any of us could be, just for living in a secular society. That’s why it’s vital to confront violent religious extremism head on, instead of tiptoeing around it hoping it will go away.

Let the adherents of Islam step up and show that they’re a peaceful religion, as they claim. Or let us see the reverse.

L’affaire Edwards

10 August 2008 / / 2 Comments

I’ve read everyone in the world’s opinions on John Edwards’ affair. The weird thing is, every time I read someone’s comment, I agree with it, even things that contradict other things I agree with.

It’s none of the public’s business. If Edwards had been some moral crusader, then fair game. Moral crusaders think everyone’s sex life is an open book, ergo so is theirs. But Edwards was not one of these, and I’d rather it be something for him and his family to deal with.

It matters because voters think it matters. I wish everyone thought like me, but they don’t. America contains many puritanical hypocrites, who I suppose want to be represented. And if they don’t like someone’s sexual behaviour, they have the right to not vote for them. That’s the game, and everyone goes into politics knowing it.

I’m disappointed in John Edwards. I quite liked him, and would have been glad to see him take the nomination. Imagine if that had happened, and here we’d be in a state of hosedness.

Edwards was reckless and immoral. Cheating on your cancer-stricken wife really sucks balls. And he was stupid. Have we learned nothing from Bill Clinton? Gary Hart?

I’m angry with Elizabeth Edwards, too. She knew about the affair when John was campaigning, but they both chose to go through with it anyway, and risk instant campaign death and four years of President McCain. I think we Democrats dodged a bullet.

McCain is worse. But there are lots of other reasons not to vote for McCain that are actually good, as in this article about why McCain would make a mediocre president at best.

I hope the Edwardses can make a contribution to American public discourse once again, because I’d hate to have this be the last thing we hear about them.

The 100 most common words in English

7 August 2008 / / 1 Comment

Another language game: How many of the 100 most common English words can you name in five minutes?

Of course, the actual words in the list will depend largely on the corpus they’re using. Still, it’s an interesting challenge. As a computational linguist, I must have looked at loads of lists like this, but I only got 50 of them. That was more a function of how fast I could type. You have to bang out one every 3 seconds with no mistakes to get them all.

Hmm. How can I get a hold of their language data? I’d like to know what people thought were the most common words.

Tire gauge Republicans

6 August 2008 / / 1 Comment

There’s a group of people in America that refuse to take personal responsibility for their problems. They just want the government to do everything for them. They’re called Republicans.

Look at the current tire gauge flap. Obama mentioned in a recent campaign speech that keeping tires inflated could help improve gas mileage. The McCain team has gone nuts over the matter, claiming (dishonestly) that tire gauges represent the whole of Obama’s energy policy. They’d rather drill the Arctic instead.

See, they could take responsibility for making sure that their cars are tuned up properly and have the tires inflated to the right pressure. But they’re too lazy and irresponsible. So instead they want the government to give the go-ahead on more drilling. But giving them more oil will just keep them addicted.

It seems the Democratic Party stands for personal responsibility. Those Republicans are always looking for government handouts.

UWA Atheist/Christian debate

5 August 2008 / / 11 Comments

The debate went pretty well, actually. In the Christian corner was Tim Thorburn, and the Atheist was Michael Tan.

Atheist Michael did a great job, hitting all the main points. Humans have a need to explain things, and sometimes they make explanations that involve magical beings. But we need to use evidence and reason to sort out what’s happening, and the evidence for Christianity is not particularly strong. The most electric moment: Tim said that the Bible contained predictions that have been fulfilled, and Michael responded that many others haven’t yet, especially the return of Jesus. “How long is it going to take before we realise he’s not coming back?” he said, to gasps and applause from the audience.

Christian Tim argued that Christianity was true because the Bible said so. Okay, he didn’t put it as weakly as that. He mentioned that the Bible contained eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ resurrection, and that Paul alluded to the eyewitness accounts so casually that they must have been well-accepted by the Christians of his day. So that’s the evidence.

“Except it isn’t evidence,” I said to Tim as we chatted afterwards. “It’s another claim.”

“How do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, Paul is claiming that Jesus was resurrected and that there were eyewitnesses to it. But that’s not evidence. That’s another claim, and we need to examine it.

“I mean, it’s part of the same story. You can’t use a part of the story as evidence for the story!”

“Yes, I can!” he said, looking rather surprised.

I also asked him about the Book of Mormon. At the front of every copy of the Book of Mormon, there appears the testimony of three men who claimed that an angel showed them the gold plates. There’s also the testimony of eight other men who claimed that they got to see the gold plates without any angel. I believe these testimonies to be false, to which Tim the Christian readily agreed. But if you’re going to accept the testimony of so-called eyewitnesses in the Bible, why wouldn’t you accept the testimonies of eye-witnesses in the Book of Mormon?

Tim responded that the Bible was a very reliable source of testimony because it had many different witnesses whose testimony dovetailed together so well that it couldn’t all be fiction. I’m not doing his response justice because he said it much better than I can remember, and I hope I’m getting the gist of it right — memory is unreliable. But that was basically the idea; the Bible was so much better a source for eyewitness testimony than other books because it was so complex and dense and interlocking that no one could have faked it and it must be true.

But anyone who’s heard the story of the Nottingham Lion or heard conflicting reports from eyewitnesses at accident scenes knows that eyewitness accounts are not reliable sources for what really happened. Especially when the story has had hundreds of years to get itself straightened out.

Anyway, it was a fine outing. Michael and Tim were good gentlemen to talk to. And the UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society has a Facebook group, if you’re a person of the ‘Book.

Accent fun

4 August 2008 / / 3 Comments

How are you at guessing accents?


I didn’t do so well — only 30 points. You’d think a linguist would have a better grip on the vowels. But it is a bit tricky when it comes down to actual cities.

Oh my FSM! Atheist/Christian debate at UWA

4 August 2008 / / 2 Comments

UWA people: here’s an event that might be worth attending. It’s a debate between ‘UWA Atheists and Agnostics’ and the omnipresent ‘Christian Union’.

I didn’t even know there was an organisation for atheists and agnostics at UWA. So I’ve no idea who will be on the panel. But get a load of the topic: “Christianity: Truth or Fiction?”

Don’t you think that’s a lot to take on? It’s impossible to establish the existence of the Head Supernatural Being, but then you have to demonstrate which religion is his favourite. So there are a lot of places to deflate this kind of argument. I expect to see a lot of ‘Appeal to Scripture’ and maybe some ‘Appeal to Consequences’ because you know how they love that crap. Hitler and Stalin are expected to make an appearance.

That’s tomorrow (5 August 2008) at 1.00 in the Alexander Lecture Theatre. See you UWA people there, and I’ll have a full report for the rest of you.

Knol debuts

2 August 2008 / / Comments Off on Knol debuts

I’m checking out Knol, a new project from Google. It’s a knowledge base that’s sort of a cross between Wikipedia and Amazon ratings. Here the focus is on authorship. Authors write their own Knols, instead of contributing to a group’s effort like some amorphous blob author. That means experts in a field can represent.

I can see how this would avoid some Wikipedia problems.

  • Wiki-vandalism wouldn’t be a problem since you have control over your own Knols.
  • No more pointless and frustrating edit wars on intractable topics.
  • You don’t have to pretend to be neutral.
  • Original primary research would be allowed, unlike on Wikipedia.
  • It also avoids classification problems. Much discussion on Wikipedia concerns whether this article should be merged into that article. In Knol, the user does the classifying with only the search terms. A Knol could pop up under many different searches instead of just appearing in one article.

But is having so many separate authors a good way to arrange the world’s knowledge? One thing I’m finding in my language research is that individual points of view are terrific, if they can be aggregated into some kind of group opinion. Wikipedia does this by forcing people to hash out the issues and decide what content will appear on the page. Knol takes a rating approach, where individual votes from readers will (presumably) cause good articles to float to the top of the search results page. So it’d be like a bit like Wikipedia, except that there would be maybe 30 articles on generative grammar instead of one, and while each individual article might not be as strong as a good solid Wikipedia article, the best would come pretty close.

Here’s an example: I tried looking up ‘atheism’, and got one result. (Yeah, it’s early days.) It was a thoroughly useless page by “United Church of God” about how great God is, blah blah blah. Basically it was an old school web page that someone ported to Knol. But it’s getting downweighted mightily, and as more articles appear, it will probably sink out of sight.

The more I think about this, the more it grows on me. The next task will be some kind of true aggregation, where instead of reading only the best article about (say) the existence of UFO’s, you take the 100 top-rated articles on the topic, and automatically generate a group opinion. Sounds like a job for someone who’s into automatic summarisation and paraphrasing.

I bags it.

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