Armrha's Journal

Big news this Sunday was a paper released that claims to be a serious proof on the P = NP problem. Big enough to bring me out of livejournal limbo for at least a day. It's a draft paper by Vinay Deolalikar, and I think it's been pulled for the moment while they are addressing some typographic errors and some incorrect methods in the paper, but its yet to been definitively shot down.

A Proof that P != NP

Here's an update from today with some of the various issues with the paper.

Issues with the Proof

Either way, this is really interesting news. It's one of the Millennium Prize Problems, each of which have a 1 million USD reward for solving, but the implications of solving these very difficult problems are even more interesting. The last one solved was the Poincaré conjecture, which was solved by the angry genius Grigoriy Perelman, who still remains disenchanted with the mathematics community. Perelman turned down the million dollar prize. Also, a Fields medal.

A proof that P != NP is not quite as world changing as the other way around. If it's true, the most immediate consequence will probably be cryptographers around the world going out for beers in celebration.

this bear video is amazing.

You people are all insipid nitwits.

1) Do you think they will not have a bible around in 50 years? Given that it's the most widely republished book in the world, it's safe to say that in 50 years the KJV will still be around and unaltered.

2) Newspaper: Newspapers are not printed on archival quality paper, but are still an okay choice. But still, libraries keep records of newspapers going back a long, long time. They will likely be able to dig up whatever newspaper you put in there anyway.

3) There is no reason to put in a DVD of any sort, including any of these anime, manga, comedy films, 'Super Troopers', or really any other popular media that you think for some reason needs to be preserved in a time capsule. And especially not backed up with a flash drive. For one, why would we suspect DVDs or USB are going to be a relevant medium 50 years from now? Neither is even close to 50 years old right now. Museums and specialists are still going to have them in half a century, but they are going to be mighty dissappointed to read your carefully burned DVD and find... 'Super Troopers', a film that will certainly be maintained in the vaults of the producer well after 50 years. Just disgusting. Don't you have anything more to your personality than the types of media you like to consume?

I think the most reasonable replies are the photos, journals, etc. Things that will put together a picture of life as it was 50 years ago for an individual. Though I have no doubt 50 years from now we'll have no shortage of data on the way people lived their life now (hell, just keeping a record of the livejournal archives would be enough for anyone studying half a century ago to put a lot of stuff together), many different sources and stories would be good for posterity.

I'm shocked and a little confused at the insane conservative backlash about John P. Holdren, Obama's "science czar" and this textbook, Ecoscience.

The book details some rather grotesque methods that population might be brought under control in a crisis. Nobody is denying that the strategies and techniques inside it are terrible things. But the entire outrage seems to ignore the entire reason these strategies are proposed -- a crisis of enormous overpopulation, mass starvation, famine, disease.

Is the problem one of imagination? Can people not imagine a scenario where these things are happening? I mean, if you had quizzed me on the street about what the government should do if population has raced out of control and people were starving on the streets, disease running rampant, I would have probably suggested similar measures, starting with the least extreme and moving up to the most extreme. In a survival situation, your rights go out the window, no matter who you are.

It's crystal clear if you reduce the situation from a country-perspective and to a personal perspective. Assume you are on a vessel of some sort, and you are the last people in the world. The supplies are running out, and the ship that could support 20 people indefinitely now can only support 15 indefinitely -- if 5 stay, they are going to cause the oxygen to run out and everyone to die.

I think even hardcore conservatives in this situation would agree; 5 people have to die in order for the rest to survive. I find it hard to believe anyone would justify the end of the human race in order to avoid making a difficult moral decision. Even in the face of oblivion, we have to be ready for the hard decisions. The conservative outrage against this text seems to be outrage at the concept of government ending up having to make these decisions.

I understand how disturbing that might sound, but a government is just a group of people in charge of regulating and directing activity at a national level. In the survival scenario above, there's a small government in the decision-making processes that lead to selecting the 5 to die. You might argue that the government is incapable of properly executing extreme strategies; You might say they are unfit to decide when it is time to execute them, and I'd agree with you -- It's difficult to accept that kind of power in somebody else's hands. But honestly we can't say that envisioning such strategies is not necessary or warranted.

Or is it that people don't believe such situations can occur? This seems short sighted to me too. I have heard the Quiverfull people talk about how 'The Earth will provide' etc, but no reasonable person can assume there are not limits to what the ecosphere. Everything we know about the science involved in our energy supplies shows us there is an upper limit, even if we are not there. The earth is like a giant vessel, hurtling through space, and if we have more people that can be sustained, everyone is threatened. The textbook notes this, talks about things that could be done to bring population back into control, and then clearly states that such extreme measures should be avoided if AT ALL possible. Of course they should. The extreme measures provide the counterpoint to the 'keep the population under control in the first place' argument; If you don't want the extreme measures, take steps to keep from forcing the hand.

I guess I feel there's a mental divide in a lot of conservative heads on 'personal' issues and 'national' issues. For me, too, it's hard to imagine any situation or problem in my personal life to become a problem to millions of people -- I can't even imagine a million people. But I have to acknowledge that they do exist, and that government regulation of population would have to be preferable to the government refusing to intercede in 'personal affairs' and going through famine and the inevitable destabilization that would cause. I mean, the average person is only at most 72 hours without food away from thinking a can of wet dog food is utterly delicious. How many hours does it take before other people start looking tasty, comically parodied in cartoons with two folks on a deserted island? Can anyone honestly say they'd prefer roving bands of cannibals over government supported sterilization programs?

I understand the Catholics outrage toward it, they eschew all forms of birth control as awful. But heck.

Governments already enact some measures to control population: The US has tax breaks to people with children, which are in place supposedly to support growth even if it's just the power of the voting majority holding it in place these days. China has tax penalties to people who have more then a couple children, in theory causing the population to shrink. It's the same kind of thing; Governments regulate these kind of things all the time.

Another thing is people keep labeling the book as 'supporting eugenics' and calling Holdren (and by association Obama) 'hardcore eugenicists', as seen in the Amazon.com top user review for 'Ecoscience'. This is wrong; Eugenics is the process of selective breeding in human populations in order to decrease the frequency of traits viewed as negative and increase the frequency of traits viewed as positive. Nothing in any publication of Holdren's espouses such a view. Population control in Holdren's context has nothing to do with genetic manipulation. I can only assume the association is to make people think Holdren is a totalitarian hell-bent on world domination, and to bring up associations with Hitler -- which is despicable pandering to their audience. Holdren's views are not in line with Hitler's at all. Anyway, any conservatives on my friends list, please tell me about the big deal here. If you are uncomfortable with any administration making such decisions in the advent of a population crisis, what is the alternative other than wide-spread famine?

I have recovered 100% of the lost data.

Misery is hard drive recovery. I was a stupider back then, and I should have taken every opportunity to get important data off of a raid 0 stripe. Still, I'm not going down without a fight. I've been sitting here half the night, and using an external drive enclosure, have tried orienting, spinning, and nursing the drive to a full spin and carefully monitoring copy commands. I just need 1 good copy of it and I can ditch the broken drive.

The other drive seems fine, but I'm definitely taking this opportunity to migrate off of a raid 0 stripe. I should explain what that means, I guess, though most of you probably know already.

RAID stands for redundant array of (inexpensive, or independent) disks. Essentially it lets you net yourself some reliability or extra space at various different tradeoff points. You start with 2 disks, which is what I had. Say they were both 150 gigabyte disks. Well, you could pick RAID 1 or mirroring and then you'd have 2 disks running, both with copies of your live data. This effectively protects against straight up platter damage ruining your day; Errors on 1 disk will cause that copy to fail and then you run off the live disk until you replace its pair. This is 'mirroring' and it is what I should have done.

This provides the reliability benefit and a slight performance benefit in reading, since the controller can read a large file into memory using both disks to read other parts. On the RAID 1, if the text string 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' was your data, this is what it would look like on Disk1 and Disk2:

D1: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'
D2: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.'

OR, you can be greedy and go for RAID 0 -- This is what I did -- and double your space. The RAID controller will stripe each disk with a certain amount of data, maybe only 1024 bytes per stripe. So if you end up with disks looking like:

D1: 'Teqikbonfxjmsoe h aydg
D2: h uc rw o up vrtelz o.'

As you can see, with the stripe we save so much space! We can then fill up all that remaining space with all kinds of junk.

But you better not put any kind of important junk on there. Because what happens when one of these drives dies? Well, you're left with:

D1: 'Teqikbonfxjmsoe h aydg
D2: X(

And lemme tell you, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- especially when it's stuff like binaries, archives, etc, that are essentially unrecoverable without their other stripes.

Not to mention raid controllers all decide to do their own thing, proprietary setups that make it difficult to pull the data in anything but the controlled environment they want you to do it in. Yeah, we've made ways to get around most of it, but damn if it isn't inconvenient.

So on a forced write with DD, I am at 19 gigs on the fail disc so far. it's about 65 gigs of data, but this is better than the 1.6 gigs it was stuck at hours ago. Man, today has been such an awful day. I spilled my coffee before I got to take a sip, and I almost lost my arm after getting completely trapped by a piece of furniture for 45 minutes after the building had closed. (Man, long story, I don't want to get into it.)

They say patience is a virtue in cases like this. I may have to leave it writing all night. dd will just keep trying to write if you pass it the option conv=noerror, so right now I think I hjave it doing something like dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb bs=2048 conv=noerror,sync,somethingelseican'tremember?. That means input file = device on bus sda, output file device on bus sdb, blocksize is 2048, do not stop on errors, copy all data sector for sector, and whatever the other option I put on there was. Whatever. It's hung, and not getting past the bad block at 19 gig. #*!#$. I need every block, so I can't run badblocks or anything and just flag bad sectors. So my options are to sit here and wait... and wait... and wait...

I was reading Darwin's Dangerous Idea on the plane again, and found this wonderful bit around page 100, thought I would post it here for you guys to read:

One reader of an early draft of this chapter complained at this point, saying that by treating the hypothesis of God as just one more scientific hypothesis, to be evaluated by the standards of science in particular and rational thought in general, Dawkins and I are ignoring the very widespread claim by believers in God that their faith is quite beyond reason, not a matter to which such mundane methods of testing applies. It is not just unsympathetic, he claimed, but strictly unwarranted for me simply to assume that the scientific method continues to apply with full force in this domain of faith.

Very well, let's consider the objection. I doubt that the defender of religion will find it attractive, once we explore it carefully. The philospher Ronald De Sousa once memorably described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgement was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies that God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!" If you then volley back demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply: "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not down for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the benefit of the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down."

Now if you want to reason about faith, then offer a reasoned ( and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other ( a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seirously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this is common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfuscation to avoid mutual embarassment and loss of face, you have either seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself. (The ball is now in your court.)

-Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

This articulates my feelings on the subject very beautifully. I'm tired of poorly reasoned demands to 'respect' the sanctity of religion in that fashion. Gould's idea of non-overlapping magisteria is total rubbish -- Science is merely the procedural application of reason & rationality, and nothing can be claimed to be 'immune' to that without stepping out of the field of relevance entirely.

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd get more information out on the swine flu and what we've learned about it.

A summary of some of the news lineups today about the swine flu and it's effect.

Genetic information on the virus, some interview quotes from researchers.

CDC information on symptoms and risk groups (what they have so far anyway.) Things that should reassure you: There is no report of any kind of cytokine-storm like behavior in the current outbreak of swine flu

I think the tone in these articles is pretty good -- nothing like, well:

Of course, we have Dr. Henry Niman freaking out. Niman is a well known alarmist, seeming to pop up talking about SARS, Avian flu, and runs a company that thrives on virus related buzz. He also is remembered for being a big pusher for biotech stocks in the 90s. He might be correct but he sure has a lot of incentive for any given outbreak to go larger than smaller.

More alarmism here. Unsubstantiated comments from what may or may not be healthcare officials in Mexico do not a controlled study make. They're in an extremely stressful situation, too, but the blatant fearmongering in the tone of this article is just disgusting. The comments, however, are pure gold:
Eyes Open
"Time to connect some dots. Over the past two years, I’ve been noticing that jets are leaving long, persistent trails that slowly diffuse until they have the appearance of cloud cover. Jet contrailsare nothing more than ice particles that freeze at higher altitudes after leaving a jet engine. I became curious after seeing these trails that do not disperse, and which form at altitudes that seem too low for ice particles to form, much less persist for hours. Go to youtube or google video and search for “chemtrails”. Planes are crisscrossing our skies, leaving thick trails that spread out into a complete “white out”."...[continued]"
... JFK was killed by a physics defying bullet. Most of us are intellectually misdirected by the greatest of all firewall words: conspiracy. Anything out of the ordinary or contradictory to propaganda is branded as “conspiracy theory”. Somehow, suspicion directed at our government has been equated with lunacy, and the absurd cover stories and lies are taken as reality. Think for yourself, otherwise the media will do it for you.

This is a planned pandemic, a deliberate depopulation using as its instrument a man-made virus."

Laying the crazy on pretty thick in the first set of comments, we hit a chemtrail guy halfway through! I love these dudes -- chemtrails is this fantastic totally insane conspiracy theory that hundreds of thousands of people that work on airplanes somehow participate in a governmentally funded and sponsored mind-control or weather modification program to spray chemicals into the air (inexplicably) using contrails. The evidence for this is that contrails are in the sky for a while and seem to creep some people out. As Thomas says in the article above, "Anyone who doesn’t buy into the conspiracy theory is treated as an active member of that conspiracy. Conversely, anyone who signs on to “chemtrails” is em­braced as a fellow traveler, no matter what their other beliefs."

I don't know what powers people to these heights of insane deduction (Jets leave trails of water vapor behind them as they move, in a well documented phenomenon. Must be a government conspiracy to control your mind!) or how they think that contrails must be the easiest method to spray these chemicals (Assuming they want to spray chemicals all over the place, and have the resources to spray enough to cover the US, why not just spray them at night? Or spray them so they don't leave trails for conspiracy theorists to gawk it and freak out on the internet about?) It reminds me of the Rainbow Aerosols lady.



Anyway, back to swine flu hysteria! House Rep (R-MN) Michelle Bachmann wonders why democrat presidents cause swine flu. For those of you not willing to suffer through the video, the quote:

"I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

This comment is strange on a couple levels. Because as the famous vaccination picture shows, Gerald Ford was in office when we had the last big outbreak of swine flu. But why even correct that, since how can you relate whoever is in a political office to biological mutations and recombinations of flu?

This kind of relation stinks of comments regarding supernatural causation. You know the type, the people who want to prescribe everything to the influence of their deities. I can't imagine how else you would think democratic leaders could cause a plague other than divine retribution -- and that kind of mystical-causality belief scares me in an elected leader.

The CDC has a twitter line thing with more info on basic sanitation and dispelling facts. It's helpful I suppose. Just don't succumb to panic. Even if you get flu, you can get better, and the stress of assuming the world is collapsing is not going to help the process.

The media and their terrible 24 hour news cycle have locked their jaws onto this Swine Influenza that has hit this season. Anyway, just in case anyone is buying into the hype:

All deaths reported so far as in Mexico, which despite lots of growth still has a substandard health care system.

Confirmed cases in other places in North America and Europe have already gotten better after a couple days home.

It's just a normal flu. Normal flu even kills people every year. This is nothing like the Spanish Influenza pandemic. If it were the case, we would be seeing such strong and lethal symptoms in the victims. So far, it's just a flu. You get nauseated, achey, tired, etc. The flu.

The media outlets are always sharp to call out a plague (good ratings) and they would love to say this is untreatable and viciously deadly, but it seems to be pretty well treated with Tamiflu. Nobody wants to be the person who said 'don't panic' when it was an actual pandemic, but given what we know so far and the total tame nature of this flu, I'd have to say the overabundance of concern is unfounded. So if you were panicking and canceling any meeting you had with swine, calm down. It's going to be fine.