From the monthly archives:
While we mourn the victims of the Jakarta bombing, terror is still continuing in Darfur. Today, for the first time, Colin Powell described the campaign by the Janjaweed militia, backed by the Sudanese government, as genocide. Passion of the Present has his full speech and more.
Inevitably, whatever the world does in response to the Darfur genocide will be influenced by the war in Iraq and its aftermath, and I’m going to look at the question in that light.
I suspect that the results of Chris Lightfoot’s estimation quiz (trailed by Chris a while ago) will prove to be the Dead Sea Scrolls of the subject for years to come; there is ample evidence for both sides here. I would just like to get my oar in first by saying that it provides definitive support for my views. Well it does.
It appears that the bomb outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta (which killed 20 (Update: latest figure is more like 8) people and injured about 170, almost all of them locals and therefore presumably Muslims) was set by Jemaah Islamia, the Al-Quaeda offshoot that was responsible for the Bali nightclub bombing. This is yet another outrage in what is turning out to be a very grim month. What this the precise nature of this outrage tell us about Islamism?
“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001619.html reports on a “small tiff”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/09/business/worldbusiness/09outsource.html?pagewanted=all&position= between Paul Samuelson and Jagdish Bhagwati over outsourcing. It contains a good line that tells you a lot about neoclassical economics:
bq. But Mr. Bhagwati … says he doubts whether the Samuelson model applies broadly to the economy. “Paul and I disagree only on the realistic aspects of this,” he said.
In contrast, Marxists tend to agree fully on the realistic aspects of things but disagree about the unrealistic ones, such as when exactly the revolution is coming, who will be in charge, and whether people or robots will clean the toilets afterwards.
“Best. Blog. Ever.”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_09_05_fafblog_archive.html#109473871601998017
As “Kitty Kelly’s hatchet-job on the Bush family”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385503245/ref=lpr_g_1/002-7398203-0818411?v=glance&s=books nears publication, lots of people are linking to these “additional revelations about George W. Bush”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003137.html by the Poorman. And you know what? “So am I”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/003137.html, because they’re great. Go read, especially if you are a staff writer for the Kerry campaign.
As a spin-off from Daniel’s discussion of “whether the DEM04 contract is overvalued”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002460.html on the “Iowa Electronic Markets”:http://128.255.244.60/graphs/graph_Pres04_WTA.cfm, here’s a version of the trend surface he calculated that shows “differences between the Black-Scholes valuation and the observed market price”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dem04.pdf over time (you can look at it in smaller “PNG”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dem04.png format or better-quality “PDF”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/dem04.pdf). I created it using “R”:http://www.r-project.org/, the free[1] statistics package because I “didn’t like Excel’s default effort”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/kerrychart2/surface.JPG and I hadn’t had a reason to use R’s wireframe() function before. It’s still not up to the standards of the “Bill Clevelands”:http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/departments/sia/wsc/ or “Ed Tuftes”:http://www.edwardtufte.com/ of this world, but it was the best I could manage on short notice. Thanks to Daniel for sending me the data, and remember that whereas I am happy to field questions about graph colors and chart widgets, technical queries about option valuation, Black-Scholes volatility fluctuations and arbitrage should still be directed to him.
fn1. As in “free to make your own mistakes.”
Matt Weiner over at Opiniatrety puts a musical spin on the question of favorite opening hooks by exploring “the greatest first lines of record albums”. Songs usually either grab me in their entirety or they don’t speak to me much at all so although there are lines I really like, they are rarely first lines. I guess by the time you realize whether you like the first line of a song you are half way through the entire piece so perhaps the effect of that first segment is not as important as it may be for a book. In any case, there seem to be lots of music aficionados around here so I thought you might enjoy heading over to Matt’s blog and discussing favorite first lines of songs. There are also a couple of people who comment about first lines of movies in response to the book post. Oh, the possibilities…:)
In commenting on the game of chess, “Will Baude”:http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2004_09_05.html#004389 notes the following.
bq. Professor Leitzel of Vice Squad writes in to remind me of the 1913 Zermelo’s Theorem, which establishes just that: given the game’s finiteness (established above), there exists some strategy s.t. either white always wins, black always wins, or nobody does.]
Not so, as it happens, although it’s been the conventional wisdom among game theorists until recently – the inestimable James Morrow (whose “Game Theory for Political Scientists” I’m using as a coursebook this semester) states it a little more formally when he says that
bq. Zermelo showed that chess has a winning strategy: White can force a victory, Black can force a victory, or either can force a draw.
But, as discussed on my old blog last year, this “very interesting paper”:http://www.math.harvard.edu/~elkies/FS23j.03/zermelo.pdf by Ulrich Schwalbe and Paul Walker, shows that Zermelo said no such thing. Zermelo proved a much narrower result, and indeed explicitly states that he _hasn’t_ proved that chess has a winning strategy.
bq. The question as to whether the starting position … is a winning position is open. Would it be answered exactly, chess would of course lose the character of a game at all.
It would be very interesting to trace back how this error (and a variety of others) crept into the literature. Zermelo was never translated into English before Schwalbe and Walker’s paper, so I imagine that nobody much bothered to try to read him (especially since his article was published in 1913 and was quite likely printed in Fraktur). One person’s error was presumably picked up by others, and then disseminated until it became accepted dogma in the wider literature. Academic research sometimes resembles a game of Chinese whispers – because we all rely on the research of others, serious blunders can be perpetuated for generations before someone bothers to go back and recheck the work of their elders.
Update: Peter Northup has convinced me in comments and email that I’ve misunderstood Zermelo a little myself, and that the formulation that Morrow uses isn’t as offbase as I thought it was. What’s clear is that game theorists are incorrect in saying that Zermelo used backward induction as such, and that he doesn’t show that there is a winning strategy _as such_. I stand corrected.
This is fun: a “quiz based on McDonald’s Happy Meal game instructions”:http://explorers.whyte.com/34l/default.htm . Can you recognize the languages? (Via “Des von Bladet”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/index.html ).
No-one should treat Daniel Pipes as a reliable source of information, but his claims get endlessly recycled through the internet. Today he gets prominence on “Arts and Letters Daily”:http://www.aldaily.com/ for “this piece”:http://www.danielpipes.org/article/2066 which claims that journalists have shied away from using the word “terrorist” in connection with the terrorist murders at Beslan. The Arts and Letters Daily intro reads:
bq. Call them assailants, bombers, captors, commandos, fighters, guerrillas, gunmen, militants, radicals, rebels, or activists. But please, not terrorists…
Pipes himself writes:
bq. The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms for terrorists.
He also refers to “this unwillingness to name terrorists”.
He then links to twenty news sources to exemplify his claims. These are the examples cherry-picked by Pipes to support his case. I’ve followed them all.
Is there anything more boring than my periodic expressions of disgust with blogging? I’ll keep it short. (This right-leaning comedy site did a funnier job than I would, anyway.)
A pox on your house, Glenn Reynolds. You have done more than anyone to build the blogging community, and we’re in debt to you for that. But you’ve been poisoning the well for years now.
Matthew Yglesias was making a perfectly comprehensible point. You took one sentence, a sentence that was immediately negated by the next sentence, and distorted it to fit into a mirthless satire of left-wing thought. Does the man who wrote this:
Providing financial aid to terrorists who target European civilians would be uncivilized — but, then, the Europeans are supposed to be the civilized ones, no?
have
A pox on you, Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan, dumpster-diving for offensive comments on Lucianne.com isn’t any more illuminating than dumpster-diving for offensive comments on Democratic Underground.
A pox on you. Markos, with your organization, your community-building, and your Democratic fund-raising, you are one of the only bloggers who matter. Thank you for that. But this kind of post makes us look like hysterical jokers.
Here’s bit of bad news for my American Democrat friends; your candidate is dying on his arse in the Iowa Electronic Markets at the moment.
Here’s another bit of bad news; even at these prices, he’s still overvalued.
Note to readers. There is quite a lot of financial jargon in this post, because I’m dealing with quite a few issues that are only of interest to finance bods (and only marginally to them). The interesting stuff is toward the end.
I know there are some big literature enthusiasts around here[1] so I thought I’d post a pointer to this site I just came across called Opening Hooks, “a collection of literary beginnings”. The creator of the site explains:
Chip Kidd once said, “A good book cover makes you want to pick it up. End of story.” More often then not, however, a gripping first sentence or paragraph prevents you from putting it back down. The opening hook. It’s a simple concept, reading is linear, time is finite. What keeps a reader reading is the opening hook.
I don’t have any particular memories of special opening hooks, but browsing through the site’s data base I came across this one: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” – Yup. I think this one qualifies as a good opening hook. Unfortunately, when I first read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis I attempted to do so in its original. Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Perhaps understandably, words such as “Ungeziefer” – or insect – are not part of one’s basic foreign language vocabulary lesson so I’m afraid I had a hard time fully appreciating some of the nuances – huh, some of the basics! – during my first attempt at the novel. Let’s just say I probably spent more time flipping through the dictionary than the book. But reading the sentence in English on that site brought it all back and I do think it qualifies as a good opening hook. I suspect others around here who are much bigger literature buffs than I am will think of candidates for their favorite opening lines without having to go to their book shelves (or browse an online data base).
Hat tip: Matt Read.
fn1. This post is dedicated to a fellow CT blogger. You know who you are.;-)
Alan Keyes “said today”:http://www.nbc5.com/politics/3712293/detail.html that “Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” apparently because Obama is pro-choice. But clearly the reason that Jesus would not vote for Obama is that there is just no way He would move from California to Illinois in the first place.