I was thinking idly about Erdos numbers, and it suddenly struck me that I could easily prove the necessity of a couple of ‘stylised facts'[1] about the associated networks. It’s well-known that the collaboration network for mathematicians contains one big component, traditionally derived by starting with Pal Erdos. The same is true of the network generated by sexual relationships. Although there is no generally agreed starting point here, it is a sobering thought that a relatively short chain would almost certainly connect most of us with both George Bush and Saddam Hussein.
From the monthly archives:
May 2004
From “the Guardian review”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1216899,00.html of a new book by Regis Debray:
bq. Jeffrey Mehlman has managed to translate from French into an entirely new language, one born dead. It is constructed using English words but the effect is of something almost entirely unlike English. This raises profound questions. What is one to make of a chapter heading like “The Milieu/Medium Deflagration”? How is one to translate the last sentence of that chapter: “That nomadic psycho-object, the unknown masterpiece of a nation’s furniture, would mark the improbable encounter, to the benefit of a God more snobbish than His predecessors, of the custom-made and the ready-to-bear”? The last word is clearly wrong. But should it be “wear” or “bore”?
[Removed. Upon reflection, I couldn’t back this up. I apologize.]
When I met Henry in March we conjectured that one possible unifying influence on many even perhaps most of the CT-ers is the work of the analytical Marxists. It’s hard to find other unifying themes. But in the early days I noticed a penchant for Moleworthian phrases and even brief discussions (that I now can’t find). For the Molesworth innocents, unwilling to risk the miniscule cost of the collected works (also purchasable in the US at staggering expense), Radio 4 just rebroadcast its pretty good tribute to the curse of st custards. Have a listen. And then buy the book.
My post “about voting networks in the Eurovision”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001852.html led to a followup from “Danyel Fisher”:http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/, a grad student at Irvine who studies social networks. His “weblog”:http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/ is has lots of interesting stuff, including a better-informed version of a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while about “fingerprint databases”:http://drzaius.ics.uci.edu/blogs/danyelf/archives/000188.html. When the U.S. announced that it was going to fingerprint visitors entering the country, I began to wonder when the vast size of these databases was going to run up against the problem of false positives. Although we think of fingerprints as unique, the matching process is prone to error (like everything) and, for a large enough scale, your prints may be essentially identical to someone else’s. Daniel’s post links to a story where exactly this happened, in the case of the Spanish investigation into the train bombings. A perfect match turned up in Portland, Oregon.
Danyel links to a paper “On the Individuality of Fingerprints”:http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/prabhakar_indiv_pami.pdf (pdf). I also know of — but haven’t read — Simon Cole’s “Suspect Identities”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674010027/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, a study of the emergence and institutionalization of standards for fingerprinting.
The report that abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally committed the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg raises a number of thoughts for me. The murder and the knowledge of its videotape were bad enough (I’ve seen the still photos published in the papers, but have not looked for the video or for photos showing the actual murder). Giving the murderer a name seems to make things even worse, though it’s hard to say why this should be. There are, though, some important issues that need to be raised.
Remember to watch the “Eurovision Song Contest”:http://www.eurovision.tv/ this weekend. If you have no idea what this is, you can read my “primer on the subject”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000433.html from last year.
*Update*: Never let it be said that the tools of empirical social science are not abused on this website. I decided to see whether my prejudices about the geopolitics of the Eurovision were empirically confirmable. To this end, I dug up data on voting patterns in the Eurovision from 1975 to 1999. (From a B and B in “Stirling”:http://www.stirling.gov.uk/, too. If only all social science data were this easily available.) Confining ourselves to a group of countries who competed during (almost) all these years, we can aggregate their voting scores into a directed graph representing their preferences for one another’s songs over the years. Given that Eurovision songs are (to a first approximation) uniformly worthless, we can assume that votes express a simple preference for one nation over another, uncomplicated by any aesthetic considerations. We then abuse the tools of network analysis to see how the voting patterns cluster. And to think “Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com got published in “Slate”:http://www.slate.com for calculating a “correlation coefficient”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000865.html#000865.
The philosopher Alan Gewirth has died, “according to Jacob Levy over at the Volokh conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_07.shtml#1084404300 . Like Jacob, I’m astonished to learn that Gewirth was 90 years old. I’ll add obituaries to this post as they appear. “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34812-2004May17.html , “University of Chigago Press Release”:http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/040517.gewirth.shtml .
Amid all the bad news, we should celebrate the fact that in the world’s largest democracy “the forces of secularism have triumphed and those of communalism have been defeated”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3712201.stm. Congress is far from perfect, but it is a great deal better than the alternative. Sonia Gandhi may well become the world’s best Italian prime minister as a result (not that the competition in that field is all that stiff).
Some months ago I bought tickets to this Saturday’s performance of “The Valkyrie at English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=19 , having failed to notice that it clashed with “the last day of the football season”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/fixtures/default.stm . Not only did it clash, but the first act would begin at half-time. So I faced the prospect of sitting through the incestuous romance of Siegmund and Sieglinde whilst in a state of anxiety about the score at “Anfield”:http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/ . Happily, “thanks to”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/eng_prem/3703591.stm Southampton third-choice goalkeeper “Alan Blayney”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/shared/bsp/hi/football/statistics/teams/s/southampton/players/255787/html/profile_hi.stm , I can relax and enjoy myself as nothing now hangs on the Liverpool–Newcastle match. Thanks Alan! Now I only have the club “selling-out to the Thai Prime Minister”:http://soccernet.espn.go.com/headlinenews?id=300102&cc=5739 to worry about.
I just watched one of the craziest at bats I’ve ever seen in a baseball game. Alex Cora, one of the weakest hitters in baseball, was facing Matt Clement, a pretty good pitcher. After the count ran to 2-1, Cora fouled off 14 consecutive pitches. After the first 7 the commentators were talking about how absurd it was to see all these consecutive foul balls. By 14 they didn’t even have any cliches left. The really surprising thing was that almost all the fouls were close to the lines – hardly any of them went into the stands.
Then on the 18th pitch of the at bat, Alex Cora, in one of the toughest parks to homer in in baseball, hit one into the bullpens beyond right field. Long at bats are fun to watch, but they often end anti-climactically. But Alex Cora hitting a home run, that was a nice ending. I do feel bad for the Cubs fans, because they seem cursed this game, but I’m pretty pleased I got to see something like that.
This NYT article about reported abuses in Afghanistan similar to those at Abu Ghraib is worth reading in full. But this in particular struck me, because the US military is frankly admitting to abusive procedures as a matter of policy:
Mr. Siddiqui [a former Afghan police colonel detained by US forces for 22 days] said he was stripped naked and photographed in each of the three places he was held. Sometimes, as in Bagram, it appeared to be part of a detailed identification procedure.
There he was photographed full length, naked, from the front, back and two sides, he said. Something was inserted into his rectum during that procedure, he said, but he does not know what it was or why it was done. “I was feeling very bad,” he said.
General Barno [commander of US forces in Afghanistan] said that this may have been to search for hidden items, but that the practice of strip searches and fully naked identification photographs was being reviewed and changed. “We’re concerned as well about the cultural impact of doing that,” he said.
Oh, you are, are you? How thoughtful. “Fully naked identification photographs”? Is that so we can spot the terrorists when a big group of naked Afghanis come running towards us? “I remember him, strawberry birthmark on the right buttock, dresses left. Take him out, boys.” WTF? WTF!!?? What the hell is happening to my country?
I have simply no idea what the point of fairly predictable, mildly revolting, ex-Lefty right-winger, seems
Terry Welch, who is serving as an Army public affairs specialist in Afghanistan, has a very reasonable request. He says that what Afghan children want, more than anything, are pens. Pens are cheap. Below the fold is his letter, including a link to OfficeMax and his address.
Given the current revelations from Abu Ghraib, it is worth remembering that a major reason for the USA’s attempts to undermine the International Criminal Court was that making American troops accountable would impede them in the War on Terror. I personally don’t have much time for the Hague tribunal; I think that the US opposition to it on grounds of national sovereignty were valid and I don’t like unaccountable international institutions. But hell … isn’t it just a bit ironic that the US Army managed to achieve what nobody thought was possible (a successful war with minimal civilian casualties) and then fouled up on the kind of “war crimes” that nobody ever so much as imagined that the US Army would commit?