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Phillip Adams nails it

25 November 2007 / / Comments Off on Phillip Adams nails it

On the election, that is.

It hardly matters whether Howard is a bigot or simply another politician skilled in exploiting the bigotry of others. In many ways the latter is more morally repugnant. Either way it’s this behaviour that condemns Howard – far more than any IR laws or his Government’s extraordinary waste of the nation-building opportunities provided by the economic boom.
…
The youngest voters are too young to recall Howard’s response to Hansonism while Tampa and even Iraq may be fading in the memory or concerns of their parents. But rest assured that the judgment of history will be far harsher on Howard than anything that happens in the tally room tonight.

Election results: Schadenfreude edition

24 November 2007 / / 4 Comments

John Howard lost his seat in Parliament.

Ha.

Mal Brough lost his seat in Parliament.

Heh heh heh.

Who else do I detest?

Labor romps it in

24 November 2007 / / 1 Comment

This has been a strange election. It’s been clear for weeks that Rudd would be the new Prime Minister, but I haven’t been able to figure out why. John Howard clearly has always been an odious man with ruinous policies, but which one of his faults undid him in the eyes of the Australian electorate? Was it:

  • the nasty campaign?
  • ceaseless toadying with George Bush?
  • getting Australia into Iraq?
  • cutting funding to Australian universities?
  • throwing asylum-seekers in jail and claiming they’d thrown their children overboard?
  • using the race card to attract One Nation voters and split the electorate?
  • his refusal to sign Kyoto and his foot-dragging on climate change?
  • his leanings toward nuclear power?
  • the GST?
  • undermining the redeveloping autonomy of indigenous Australians?
  • and refusing to say ‘sorry’?

Not for the low-information Australian voters I walk among. Even the controversial IR laws weren’t enough to register on their radar. And Howard’s term has been marked by largely sane monetary policy. Why the revolution?

When I asked, people would say something like, ‘Well, it’s time for a change.’ ‘He’s been in for a long time, and it’s time for someone else.’ Simple voter fatigue.

And so Australia shrugged, and sent Howard packing.

West Australia, I know your results are tallied last, and even if you elect all Liberal Party candidates, it won’t make any difference. But I’ll be very disappointed.

Happy Thanksgiving

22 November 2007 / / 1 Comment

Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday in Australia, but I do it anyway. It’s great because the stores are open, it’s warm outside, and there’s no football. Bit hot for cooking though.

I’m thankful that Labor is looking to win the election this weekend. Saturday night will find me glued to the TV, and perhaps dancing on the couch as we give the mean little man from Earlwood the boot.

Find yourself in the census.

21 November 2007 / / 4 Comments

The U.S. Census Bureau has just released some data from the 2000 Census: Most frequently occurring surnames.

‘Midgley’ is ranked at 18,854, somewhere between ‘Commander’ and ‘Dummer’. That’s down from 17,653 ten years ago — falling more than a thousand points! So there aren’t a lot of us. But at least when I google my name, almost all the hits are me.

A related article from the New York Times observes that Vargas is the new Thompson.

Census data isn’t just interesting; it’s useful for language researchers. For example, I use it to plow through dialogue corpora to find first and last names, and change them all into ‘#firstname’ and ‘#lastname’. That way, my classifier can find (for example) introduction sequences more easily because it’s not trying to look for a hundred different names.

Life from conception: How likely are they to be right?

19 November 2007 / / 20 Comments

Women of the world: think of yourself as a box. LGM has the video.

Are you surprised that Catholics might think of you as some kind of holy receptacle? Hope not.

This is an argument I’ve heard a few times: if there’s even a chance that life starts at conception (whatever that means), then we should err on the side of caution and prohibit abortion. My answer is: who are we taking care of here? A fetus that might be alive, or a real woman who is alive, and whose quality of life will be messed with by forced childbirth?

But there’s something else to add to the equation that I haven’t yet heard. My work in machine learning deals a lot with probabilities. I use computer algorithms to classify text, and I hope the computer sorts the text into the right bins. But I don’t just want to know what answer an algorithm gives me. I also want to know how likely that answer is to be right. It’s not enough to say what might somehow be possible. I want to know some likelihoods. So let’s add that into the mix: how likely are the various parties to be right?

The pro-choice side: Claims that women are alive. Pretty good evidence for this. Very likely to be correct.

The pro-life side: Claims that there’s a chance that a just-conceived fetus might be alive as a separate being, like you’re alive. I suppose there might be a small chance. But how often have religions been right before? Well, let’s just say they don’t have a great track record. They’ve gotten so many things wrong, including heliocentrism, evolution, the age of the earth, language, geography, astronomy, and more. And they get things wrong because of their methods. They start from beliefs, and ignore contradicting evidence. And it’s all true if you feel it’s true. Why should they be right this time, when their methods haven’t improved in thousands of years? So while it’s good to be cautious in uncertain conditions, we have to take into account the likelihood that our caution is justified in view of the expense to real live people.

This ‘just in case’ argument is convincing to some people because of the minimax principle. Because humans are usually risk averse, we try to avoid bad outcomes rather than go for good outcomes. This argument takes advantage of uncertainty, in the interest of a socio-political agenda. And so, as always, religions find and exploit our congitive blind spots.

Paranormal restraining order

17 November 2007 / / 3 Comments

Sick of supernatural beings? Hate the way they follow you into the toilet? Tired of being probed by aliens or visited by Santa Claus (or vice versa)?

Well, if you’re being harrassed by metaphysical entities, it may be time for a Paranormal Restraining Order.

At $5, the price is nice. It may not deter Satan, the bastard. And God has some jurisdictional issues. But you’ll have done everything you could do.

Of course, if you’re still in grad school at 40…

15 November 2007 / / 1 Comment

Cat and Girl tackles the issues: When does life begin?

I believe that life begins at 40. Seriously.

Oh, and the comic improves measurably if you mentally read Girl with a Lisa Simpson voice.

Understand the liberal-conservative divide, before it’s too late!

13 November 2007 / / 1 Comment

A political message from Tom Tancredo:

ZOMG! They’re gonna kill you in your beds at night KABOOOOMMMMM!!!!!1!!!

Someone had to say it.

What kind of person would make this kind of argument, and what kind of voter would buy into it? A cynical fear-mongering manipulator, and an awfully scared bed-wetter, respectively.

I have moved on from my “Bad Person” theory of political conservatism, and am now working on a new model. Here it is.

Let’s say there’s a guy over there that you don’t know, who looks kind of different.

  • You might think, “Watch out for that guy. He might try to beat you up and steal your wallet.” You’d be a conservative.
  • Or you might instead go up to the guy and say, “Hey, cool shirt.” In this case, you’d be a liberal.

Fear of perceived threats v. openness to experience. I think it goes a long way toward explaining the difference between the two political tendencies.

And the reason conservatives have had their victories in the last decade is that they’ve been very successful at joining with a third group of people: the people who would go up to that guy, beat him up, and steal his wallet.

Don’t you wish your country had a Secular Party?

13 November 2007 / / 4 Comments

Elections are coming soon, and I’ll definitely be voting for the Secular Party of Australia. Religious groups are nowhere near as politically influential here as in some other countries I could name, but I’d like to keep it that way. And the wall of separation between church and state can always use some shoring up.

But isn’t it a waste of a vote? Not here. Australia uses a system of ‘preferences’, where votes for minor parties aren’t discarded — they flow on to whoever the party (or you) specifies. It does mean that we get a proliferation of single issue parties like the Fishing Party. But then you might think the Fishing Party is a good idea. Also, some scary fringe parties can agglomerate power — like Family First or the Christian Democrats. (Or the Secular Party.) But at least you can throw your vote to someone you’d actually like to see win, instead of playing the cynical gamesmanship that American voters have to engage in. My vote will probably be passing through a few parties — probably Greens, then Labor.

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