Sunday, October 31, 2010

Whatever Works is Right

We like to blame politicians.  But sometimes they are not the villains of the piece.  An example of this is negative ads.  Everyone says they hate negative ads.  And the conventional wisdom is this campaign has seen an all time low, e.g. more negative ads than ever.  So who is responsible for this sorry state of affairs?  The conventional answer is that it is the politicians.  But politicians are just following the adage in the title of this piece.  Negative ads work.  They work not because of any action or inaction by politicians but because of the action of voters, namely us.

Political campaigns are actually marketing campaigns.  They follow the rules of marketing.  There is an old saw in the marketing business:  "first you sell yourself then you sell the product".  This idea is that a good salesman tries to make an emotional connection with the customer.  If nothing else, it makes it harder for the customer to say no.  So if you can make an emotional connection with the customer you can move into the "pitch".  This is the part where you extol the virtues of the product you are selling.  This is important but it is not the most important part of the sales process.

The most important part of the sales process is the "close".  The close is where the salesman moves the customer from having a positive attitude toward the product to committed to purchasing the product.  A lot of salesmen can connect with the customer and most salesmen figure out that this is important.  And a lot of salesmen are good at the pitch.  But what separates the successful salesman from the wanna be is in their ability to close the deal.

Consider car sales, for instance.  Most people do not have to make a car purchase.  Or, if they must, they don't have to buy the car from a particular dealer right now.  Moving a customer having a positive attitude toward the salesman and the car gets the salesman a long way toward closing the deal.  But the customer can always go down the street or wait a week.  It turns out fear is one of the best ways to get from "positive opinion" to "done deal".  It turns out that "I'm a good person, better than the other guy" is a much less effective argument than "I may not be all that good but the other person is really bad". And it turns out that the best time to spring the "the other guy is really bad" argument is at the last minute when there is no time for the other guy to effectively respond.  So initially negative ads were sprung at the last minute, typically in the last week or two of the campaign.

Now everyone knows this.  But our emotions take over and we go to the polls and vote against the "really bad" guy.  That's how it used to work.  But it turns out that it is really hard to counter a negative ad from the other side.  It usually turns out that the negative ad is at least partly true.  So you are countering a simple message ("he's bad") with a complicated message ("it's complicated").  Even a totally bogus negative ad turns out to be effective to an extent.  So negative ads have been showing up earlier and earlier in campaigns.  I have been making effective use of the "fast forward" feature on my TiVo to skip nearly all political ads, positive and negative, so I really don't know.  But my impression is that this campaign season has gone negative early and stayed there.

What should be done?  Negative ads are used because they work.  The obvious thing to do is say "candidate is using a negative ad against candidate y".  I am going to vote against candidate x and for candidate y solely because candidate x used a negative ad.  But few voters did this.  Early in the process when most candidates did not use negative ads and when negative ads only showed up late in the campaign this strategy would have been effective.  But that time has passed.  Now everyone uses negative ads and they use them early.  So we no longer have the option of supporting candidates who do not use negative ads because all candidates use negative ads.

The only strategy left is to ignore all ads.  And in fact a lot of people are using this strategy.  They pick their candidate early and use non-traditional methods to find candidates to support.  This actually makes a great deal of sense.  The mainstream media has essentially stopped covering politics.  The media in my area has pretty much abandoned covering government at the city, county, and state level.  So it is very hard to get a clear picture of the politicians that occupy these offices.  The national media spends a lot of time on politics.  But they cover the bomb throwers from the fringes (they are colorful and colorful = ratings) and they do horse race coverage.  I always know which party is up and which is down.  What's actually in a proposal or whatever a policy is likely to work or not, or create a good result, that kind of coverage is almost completely nonexistent.

The right abandoned the mainstream media years ago and developed alternate channels for communicating with their base.  I think the left is in the process of doing the same.  In theory this strategy should actually work fine.  But there is a lot of dumbth out there.  And far to many people have abandoned the traditional media (for the most part sensible coverage but way too little of it) for channels that have coverage that is on point but misleading, incomplete, and in far too many cases completely wrong.

Saturday John Stewart held his "rally to restore sanity".  He has the right idea.  But I am afraid he will turn out to be "a voice calling out in the desert" that will get little traction.  

Friday, October 29, 2010

dumbth on display

From today's paper:  "Climate-change skepticism a hallmark of tea partiers" by John M. Broder of the New York Times.  The story reports that "Only 14 percent of tea-party supporters said global warming is an environmental problem that is having an effect now".  My impression is that a lot of these people are huntin' and fishin' people who spend a lot of time outdoors.  I am not the huntin' and fishin' type.  But I'm also not one of those "save the (insert species here)" types.  I have no problem with hunting and fishing, if done sensibly.  Specifically, anyone who wants to blow away Canada Geese in large numbers has my complete support.  But you don't have to look far for evidence that the world is a warmer place than it used to be and that this has been bad for animals and fish and people.  The story goes on to point out that "The oil, coal, and utility industries collectively have spent $500 million since 2009 to lobby against climate-change legislation".  Tea Partiers are quick to see a conspiracy under every bush.  Why are they so blind to this actual conspiracy when they are quick to see so many made up ones.

From the Rachel Maddow Show a couple of days ago:  She talked to some supporters of Joe Miller (Tea Party Republican running for Senate in Alaska).  She asked them why they supported Miller.  Two of them mentioned gun rights.  Asked for further specifics they both characterized Eric Holder (Obama Attorney General) as being anti-gun.  But neither could list a single anti-gun thing Holder had said or done.  I know of lots of things Holder has said or done that I approve of and several things that I disapprove of but I know of nothing Holder has said or done on either side of this issue.  And Obama is pro-gun.  That's his official position.  Liberals know this because they are mad at him over it but conservatives just assume he is anti-gun because that fits their belief system.  To recap:  These people are strong enough Joe Miller supporters to be standing on a street corner in Alaska in late October because of how anti-gun Eric Holder is even though they don't know of one actual anti-gun thing Eric Holder has said or done.  Now the Tea Party knocked Lisa Murkowski out in the Republican primary in Alaska.  Is she anti-gun?  I honestly don't know.  But I'd be surprised if she had an NRA rating of less than 100%.

Recently Christine O'Donnell (Republican Tea Party candidate in Delaware) asked:  "Where in the Constitution is 'the separation of church and state'".   If you are looking for the words "separation of church and state" she's right.  But this is a code phrase for the complex relation between specific religions and our Federal Government.  And the foundation for that relationship is based on the Constitution, especially the First Amendment.  Tea Partiers claim to be ardent supporters and defenders of the Constitution.  But they sure seem to want to make a lot of changes to it.  Some of them want to repeal the 14th (anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen), 16th (Income tax), and 17th (direct election of Senators) amendments.   This last one is particularly peculiar.  The relevant text of the first amendment is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof".  Now there are a lot of religions and a lot of religious practises.  The plain language prohibits the government from prohibiting these practises.  Now what O'Donnell and the Tea Partiers want is to "establish" a religion, namely fundamentalist Christianity, in this country.  "Establish", in this context has a specific meaning.  It refers to King Henry the VIIIth establishing the Church of England as the official religion of England.  Wars were fought about which religion was to be "established" and people were killed for supporting the wrong religion so the issue is as serious as it gets.  Establishing a religion in the U.S. is unconstitutional on the face of it.  Doing this also interferes with the constitutionally protected religious practise of others.  O'Donnell and like minded people are all in favor of interfering with religious practises they don't approve of.  I dare you to find a Tea Partier that supports the smoking of peyote, a religious practise of long standing among several Native American peoples.  So O'Donnell is in fact anti-constitutional.

Certainly the left is guilty of engaging in dumbth thinking.  But they do not engage in it in such a blatant and consistent manner.

Nekked ladies

I am an admirer of nekked ladies.  It's a guy thing.  Women do not seem to be interested in admiring nekked guys.  If you pick up a women's magazine you will find lots of pictures of other women and few if any pictures of men.  The women in question are often supermodels.  There are no supermodel guys.  And I think women are looking mostly at the clothes and accessories and not so much at the model inside them.  With guys, well there's a famous joke.  The punch line is "what color is her purse".

Anyhow, this story is actually about Playboy magazine.  Playboy used to be a big thing.  It's still around but nobody pays much attention to it now.  I haven't even glanced at a Playboy in years.  But when I was in college all guys knew about Playboy.  And, like me, they only read it for the articles.

Playboy was started in the '50s by Hugh Hefner.  Before it became popular it's niche was filled by Esquire. Hefner figured that there was room for a magazine that had some editorial heft like Esquire but pushed the boundaries a little harder on the nekked lady front.  He turned out to be right.  By the time I was in college Playboy was "where it's at" and Esquire was a dinosaur.  Now at this time there were also "girlie" magazines.  But they were a back room (or perhaps a barber shop) item that no one admitted to reading in polite company.

Playboy took its editorial content seriously.  Every monthly issue featured an interview with a prominent person.  And they published fiction by big name authors.  And being a good "I only read it for the articles" kind of guy, I read all the interviews.  (I will confess to skipping a lot of the fiction).  Another part of the editorial content was Hefner's "The Playboy Philosophy" contributions.  I quickly cottoned to the fact that I could safely skip these.  It might be useful to look these over now.  Hefner has demonstrated over many decades to have a social conscience, the origins of which can probably be found in these contributions.  He has also turned out to be far less of a hypocrite than many of the social commentators that have clashed with him.

Anyhow, back to the articles, and especially the interviews.  One of these interviews was with Raquel Welch.  Playboy by this point had done photo spreads on many sexy Hollywood actresses, the first and most famous being Marilyn Monroe.  And they originally approached Welch to do a similar spread.  She turned them down but said she would be willing to do an interview.  Playboy was smart enough to go along.  So one month there was the interview, which I carefully read.  Another notable "get" for the interview series was Fidel Castro.  At the time this was a big deal.  We were at the height of the cold war and here was this commie running a country that was just 90 miles from out border and was the home of the "Cuban Missile Crisis".  So I carefully read this interview too.

But then I noticed something.  A few days after I had read the interview I couldn't remember a thing from it.  I was still impressed that Raquel had gotten away with doing an interview rather than a photo spread.  But I couldn't remember a single thing she said.  Similarly with Castro.  He was a big deal and it was important to understand his thinking.  But a few days after the interview I couldn't remember a single thing from it.  This was the beginning of the end of my interest in Playboy.

Once Playboy established that there was money in this sort of thing the imitators started springing up.  The first was Penthouse magazine edited by Bob Guccione, who died recently.  Guccione applied the "take it a little further" formula to Playboy.  The pictures were racier.  But he failed to get Penthouse's editorial content taken seriously.  So Penthouse was seen as a sleazier Playboy imitation.  This did not stop it from making money.  But it made less money than Playboy and started fading sooner.

The other famous imitator was Larry Flint's Hustler.  He applied the "take it a little further" formula to Penthouse.  Almost from the start no one took Hustler seriously.  Most people viewed it as a "skin" magazine pretty much from the start.  Flint decided fairly early on to not buck the image and is now happy to be known as a pornographer.  Flint was shot and paralysed in 1978.  He has been wheelchair bound since.  Flint, like Hefner, has been noted for his support of social causes.  He has actively opposed anti-pornography groups, as one might expect.  But he has also been very active in various free speech efforts.  Finally, he has funded various efforts to "out"  the hypocrisy of various conservatives, most notably Bob Livingston during the Clinton impeachment.

I never regularly read Penthouse or Hustler.  And the whole field has moved on.  The movie "Deep Throat" came out in 1972 and all of a sudden every town of any size had a porno theater.  Hefner went along with the loosening of restraints but decided at some point that things had gone too far.  So Playboy has been relatively sedate for many years now.  I don't know if Penthouse is still in business.  Larry Flint and Hustler definitely still are.  I think that both Hefner and Flint would agree that they are now in different businesses.  In 1982 Hefner put his daughter Christie in charge of the business side of the company.  She continued to run the organization until 2009.  Somehow it's not the same to pick up a "men's" magazine that is put out by a company run by a woman.  But good for her and good for her father.  It certainly damaged his reputation (in some circles) as a woman hater or at least woman denigrater.

Finally, I did most of my Playboy reading during the period before silicone breasts.  Now certainly the women featured in the Playboy photo spreads during this period had unnaturally large breasts.  But they were natural unnaturally large breasts.  Now I am willing to confess to a preference to larger rather than smaller.  This preference is shared widely.  It was the reason that Playboy selected large breasted ladies and it is why the silicone breast implant industry exists today.  But most women do not come by large breasts naturally.  So what's a girl to do?  After years of careful study of this issue, my recommendation is to stick with what you came by naturally.  I prefer small natural breasts to large artificial ones.  And, due to the early education provided by those by gone issues of Playboy, I am very good at spotting the fake ones.        

Thursday, October 28, 2010

There are no fiscally conservative Republicans

Most Republicans claim to be fiscal conservatives.  I say bunk!  There are two ways you can be a fiscal conservative.  You can support high taxes and high spending or you can support low taxes and low spending.  Well, actually there's a third way:  You can support high taxes and low spending but no one's for that.  Republicans are for low taxes and high spending.  That's fiscally irresponsible.

Now if you listen to Republicans they say Democrats are "tax and spend".  I translate this to mean they are for high taxes and high spending.  This is fiscally responsible.  Republicans claim to be for low taxes and low spending.  They have been modestly successful at cutting taxes (and conning Democrats into also cutting taxes) but they are completely incapable of cutting overall federal spending.  They claim otherwise and point to programs they have cut.  And they have cut a few programs over the years.  But each time they have cut a program they have increased another program by much more than the cut in the same year.  The record bears me out on this.

First of all, it doesn't matter what congress says.  All Federal Budgets (and I am focusing exclusively on Federal Budgets in this piece) are set by the Executive.  The final budget that congress adopts is very similar to what the White House sent up.  Congress only makes minor changes that do not affect the overall situation.  So we only need to focus on what the White House does.

The last fiscally responsible Republican President was Richard Milhous Nixon.  Jimmy Carter was more fiscally prudent than his Republican predecessor.  William Jefferson Clinton was more fiscally prudent than his predecessor.  It is too soon to tell but the possibility exists that Barack Hussein Obama will be more fiscally prudent than his predecessor.  On the other hand, Ronald Reagan ran up bigger deficits than his predecessor, George H. W. Bush ran up bigger deficits than his predecessor and George W. Bush ran up bigger deficits than his predecessor.  So Reagan and both Bushes were fiscally irresponsible.  The all time champion most fiscally responsible President in the modern era is William Jefferson Clinton.  It's not even close.  He came in with big deficits and left office with big surpluses.  Those are the numbers boys and girls.

Now Republicans, especially those running for election this year, are promising they have turned over a new leaf.  But a look at what they say about taxes and spending tells the opposite story.  You can close the deficit by either increasing taxes or reducing spending.  No Republican is in favor of increasing taxes so that leaves reducing spending.  All Republicans make grandiose but vague promises to reduce spending.  They are complete bunk in almost all cases.  I have adopted a "one hundred billion dollar rule" BS test to simplify the situation.  If a proposal is not specific and if it does not cut spending by at least one hundred billion dollars per year, it is BS.

John McCain proposed attacking ear marks in the 2008 campaign, for instance.  He was not specific so it fails the BS test on that count.  But more importantly if you zeroed out all ear marks it would only save $18 Billion.  So it is BS.  He also made vague promises to cut military spending without supplying specifics.  Military spending is a good place to look for cuts, but without specifics its more BS.  McCain is a typical full of BS "fiscal conservative" Republican.

There are some Republican proposals on the table that have the potential to pass the BS test.  Congressman Boehner has proposed drastic cuts to “nonsecurity discretionary” spending .  If fully implemented they would save just over $100 billion per year.  I don't believe they would be fully implemented.  But if Rep. Boehner's proposal was fully implemented it would reduce out current deficit by less than 10%.  That's why my BS test is so important.  It would take more than ten proposals that did pass the BS test to balance the current budget.

Rand Paul, a candidate for the House, has proposed unspecified "drastic" cuts to the defense budget.  This proposal has the potential to pass the BS test but it currently fails due to lack of specificity.  Rep. Ryan has purposed big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.  Again, details are lacking but the potential exists for these proposals to pass the BS test.  But none of these proposals have gathered even a dozen supporters among Republicans.  Are they serious?  I don't think so.

But wait, it gets worse.  The Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of this year.  Continuing these tax cuts will increase the deficit in 2011 and out years by over $400 billion per year.  This is the proposal championed by all Republicans I am familiar with.  Now the Obama plan is almost as bad.  He wants to continue the "middle class" component and drop the "wealthy component".  This is almost as bad as the Republican proposal.  It would increase the 2011 and out year deficit by over $300 billion per year.  Any Republican who claims to be worried about the deficit and who does not decry both the Obama and the Republican plan for the Bush tax cuts is full of BS.

My personal position is for fiscal conservatism with some flexibility.  I think that most years the Federal Government should balance the budget or run small deficits.  But when the economy is bad (like it is now) and if there is a lot of slack in the economy (like there is now) then it is a good idea to run big deficits.  I came around to this way of thinking many years ago.  It has enabled me to observe the state of politics on this issue over many cycles of good times and bad, of Republican, Democratic, and split government.  In all this time Republicans have been full of BS on this issue.  They talk one game and do exactly the opposite.  They also lie about the Democratic record on this issue.  Some Democrats are very fiscally responsible.  Some are less so.  Most, if not all, Republicans are fiscally irresponsible.  

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Top 10 list

This is a work in progress.  I am trying to create a Letterman style "Top 10" list.  At this point I only have 7 items and I have not settled on the sequence.  So, in no particular order, here's what I have so far:

Top 10 things I have learned from Bristol Palin on "Dancing With the Stars":

  • You don't have to be a star to be on "Dancing With the Stars".
  • Ozzie Osborne is a better parent than Sara Palin.
  • Margaret Cho is a better dancer than Bristol Palin.
  • Len Goodman has the appropriate ethics to qualify him  for a job on Fox News.  (He gave Bristol an 8, the highest mark he awarded that night, on Week 2).
  • Bristol at 19 can dance better than a 58 year old man with two bad knees (David Hasselhoff).
  • She has less "charm and charisma" than an overweight, over the hill, 60 year old computer nerd (Steve Wozniak).
  • (added 11/18/10) All military officers are "'gentlemen' by act of congress".  Similarly, Bristol Palin is a "'good dancer' by act of Tea Party".
Additional contributions and help with the sequence warmly encouraged.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Computers I have Known

I wrote my first computer program in 1966.  But that's not the start of computers.  And I'm a pedantic kind of guy so let's begin at the beginning.  The word "computer" has been around for a long time. But for most of that time a "computer" was a person who performed computations.  I'm going to stick with the machine type of Computer.  The first computer was a machine called ENIAC.  It was begun during World War II and finished after the war ended.  It was built by John Mauchly and Prosper Eckert, two professors at the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.  It did not really resemble a modern computer.  It had no RAM and you couldn't program it in the modern sense.  But it was the foundation of all modern computers.  Others quickly took the ENIAC design and added various memory systems that eventually evolved into RAM.  The also added programming ability and all the accouterments that we associate with the modern computer.   A nice book on ENIAC is "ENIAC" by Scott McCarthy.

ENIAC was a custom "one off" machine.  It was followed by several other custom "one off" machines.  But by the mid nineteen fifties recognizably modern computers existed.  They were programmable, had memory systems, and had peripherals like printers, keyboards, display units, etc.  There were also production runs of a number of substantially identical machines.  The first production computer was the Univac system.  All these early computers were built with vacuum tubes, commonly between 10,000 and 20,000 vacuum tubes per machine.  Anyone who has dealt with large numbers of incandescent light bulbs knows that they fail regularly.  It was virtually impossible to keep these machines running for an extended period of time because a tube here and a tube there would fail.  They also put out terrific amounts of heat.   This meant you needed a lot of electric power to run them and then a lot of air conditioning to keep them from burning up.

In the late fifties there was a big concern that the Ruskies were going to send a bunch of bombers over the North Pole equipped with nuclear weapons.  As a response to this the U.S. Government built something called the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line.  They decided to equip it with computers.  Also, by this time electronic circuits made with transistors (an early form of Integrated Circuit) had just become available.  Transistors were much smaller and used much less power than vacuum tubes.  The Government specified that DEW line computers be transistorized.  IBM won the bid.  But they did not have a transistorized computer available immediately.  So what they told the government (and eventually did) was that they would deliver tube computers but would replace them with compatible transistor computers within two years.  The tube computers they delivered were models 704 and 709.  The transistorized versions were models 7040 and 7090.  And that's where I come in.

The first computer I ever wrote code for was an IBM 7094, a souped up version of the 7090.  The 7094 had 32,768 "words" of 36 bit memory.  A character of text was represented in 6 bits so you could put 6 characters in a word.  This amount of memory was equivalent to about 150K (yes!  thousands of bytes) of RAM.  6 bits allowed for only 64 different characters.  So all that was available were the digits (10 characters) the upper case letters (another 26 for a total so far of 36 characters) and an assortment of punctuation.  This machine cost millions of dollars and had far less computing power than a modern dumb cell phone.

The second computer I wrote code for was a Burroughs B5500.  While IBM is still in the computer business, Burroughs is not.  In the 1960's the computer industry was characterized as IBM and the seven dwarfs.  Burroughs was one of the seven dwarfs.  Univac (see above), another dwarf, merged with the Sperry Company (a defense contractor) to become Sperry Univac.  That company in turn merged with Burroughs to become Unisys.  Unisys still exists but primarily as a Defense Contractor.  The B5500 was a very innovative computer.  It too had 32,768 (2 raised to the 15th power) words of memory.  But, if I remember correctly, each word was 48 bits in length so it had more memory than the 7094.

My third computer was a CDC (Control Data Corporation) 6400.  CDC was another of the seven dwarfs.  Various parts of what was CDC still exist as parts of other companies.  But CDC stopped making computers in about 1990.  The CDC 6400 was a slowed down version of the CDC 6600, which was designed by Seymour Cray.  The 6600 was extremely fast for its time and relatively cheap.  Cray was a genius and eventually became known as "Mr. Supercomputer".  The 6400 was the only Cray design I ever worked with.  But he went on to design the CDC 7600 and other 7000 series computers.  Shortly thereafter he went his own way founding Cray Computer.  He designed and built the Cray 1, far ahead of its time, and various follow on machines.  A good book on Cray and Supercomputers is "The Supermen" by Charles J. Murray.  Cray went bankrupt after Seymour's death and the name was eventually purchased by another supercomputer maker (Tera Computer Company), which now does business as Cray.

The 6400 had an even bigger word size, 60 bits, but still used 6 bits to represent a character.  Cray was a genius at designing fast floating point units.  His designs were generally floating point units with the minimum amount of additional hardware necessary to feed data to the floating point units.  The 6000 series (6400, 6600, and a "dual processor" 6500) instruction set was extremely simple and orthogonal (a mathematical term).  This made it very easy to learn how to program them in machine or "assembly" language.  It was my contention for many years that if you knew the assembly language for any computer I could teach you everything there was to know about 6000 series assembly language in less than a single 8 hour day.

The 6000 series and later Cray designs were peculiar in a number of ways in their representation of numbers.  A floating point number occupied a 60 bit word.  Like standard "scientific" notation" there is a "mantissa" part that tells you the value of the nonzero digits and an "exponent" that tells you where the decimal point goes.  The 6000 series computers. like other computers, were binary rather than decimal, but the idea is the same.  What made the 6000 series computers peculiar for their time was they had a representation for infinity.  They also had a representation for unknown (literally the value of this number is unknown, it has no particular value) and two representations of zero (a plus zero and a minus zero).  Using either the plus zero or the minus zero in a computation would give the same result.  If the result of a computation was zero the hardware would always generate a plus zero.  But you could also perform computations on infinity and unknown.  For instance, infinity plus infinity would yield infinity.  Infinity minus infinity would yield unknown.  Unknown combined with almost anything would yield unknown.  You could also specify if you wanted to use affine or projective infinity (you don't want to know).

The fourth computer I wrote code for was the SDS (later XEROX - same computer, they just changed the name) Sigma-5.  This was the first computer I used that had 8 bit bytes and 32 bit words.  8 bits permits 256 different symbols to be represented.  This leaves room for upper case letters, lower case letters, digits, punctuation, and lots of other stuff.  Also 8 is a power of 2 (2 raised to the third power), which is more convenient to hardware people than 6, which is not a power of two.  A 32 bit floating point number is rather small, you only get about 6 significant digit accuracy.  This is fine for a lot of calculations but inadequate where more precision is required.  Let's say you are adding up numbers that run to millions of dollars.  A million is 7 digits and if you need the cents you need nine digits.  So it was possible to do "double precision" floating point computations, giving you about 12 digits of accuracy spread across two 32 bit words.  Of course, the CDC 6400 could do double precision computations using 120 digits, giving you access to astounding accuracy.

The Sigma-5 was a good bridge to my next computer, and IBM 360 model 40.  Previously all the computers I had worked on were "scientific" computers.  They were good at engineering and scientific calculations, hence the floating point (e.g. scientific number) stuff.  The 360/40 was supposed to be a "general purpose" computer.  It was supposed to be able to do the scientific stuff but it also had good support for "business" computations.  Businesses needed to get long columns of figures to add up accurately.  The numbers themselves were known with complete accuracy.  (A checking account balance off by even a penny can make a customer very angry).   But while "business" computers can handle numbers with complete accuracy they can't handle small fractions like millionths or really large numbers (e.g. the number of miles in a light year).  And in engineering and science numbers are usually known to an approximate value (the plane is going at about 500 MPH plus or minus 10 MPH or the sample weighs 536 plus or minus 2 grams).

This 360/40 belonged to a Bank.  Since the Bank wanted the computer to keep the books of itself and its customers, it needed to do accounting type calculations on dollars and cents so they didn't even purchase the floating point unit, which was optional on the 360/40.  The 360/40 had 8 bit bytes and 32 bit words like the Sigma-5.  But it also had "packed decimal" arithmetic that was ideal for doing accounting calculations.  And it had 128KB (thousands of bytes) of "ferrite core" memory (memory made of many tiny magnetic donuts with wires strung through them).  When the IBM 360 line came out, memory pricing was very simple.  It was $1 per byte.  And, if you didn't know how much memory to get, IBM recommended buying an amount that matched the price of the computer itself.  So, if you bought a million dollar computer, you should buy a million bytes of memory for about a million additional dollars.

While, the 360/40 was my first "IBM 360" family computer, it was far from my last.  I worked on a 370/155, a 3032, a 3033, a 3083, a 3081, and possibly others.  All these machines had a common architecture, so that programs designed for the older machines would run on the newer ones.  And these were all million dollar machines.  And they were physically big.  The 3033, for instance, consisted of several boxes.  One of them had a length of 32 feet.  They were all five feet high and the whole set took up a 35' by 35' square of floor space.  And there were many cables snaking between the various boxes under the floor.  So you had to have a false floor that was raised about 12" above the real floor so there was room to snake the cables around.  The 3033 had 16 MB (finally we graduate from thousands to millions) of RAM, and by now computers used RAM.  It was rated at about 3.2 MIPS (million instructions per second).  This would put its speed at somewhere between an Intel 386 and a 486.  It's a computer but it is now as powerful as a normal cell phone.  I spent a lot of years working on IBM "mainframe" computers.

My next computer was an IBM PC, almost the original model.  It has an 8088 processor and 128KB of RAM.  The 8088 had a 16 bit internal architecture but the external bus was only 8 bits wide.  Over the years I have worked my way up through the Intel line (with a few AMDs mixed in).  I went from the 8088 to a 386 to a 486 to a Pentium to whatever they are called now.  I currently own a couple of PCs.  The fanciest one has a quad core Intel processor and supports 64 bit architecture.  I have gone through DOS 1.1, Dos 2.0, DOS 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3.  I skipped DOS 4 and did DOS 5.  I then did DOS 6.0, 6.1, 6.2, and 6.22.  I have done Windows 3.0, 3.1 WFW, Windows 95, OSR2, 98, 98SE2, and Millennium (I only beta tested Millennium then I dumped it).  I have done NT (in both desktop and server flavors depending on the release) 3.51, 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP.  I am currently running Windows Server 2008 on one box.  I run XP on my main desktop and have test driven the desktop version of Windows 7.  I am planning to get a new desktop box with Windows 7 on it in a few months.  I have also run various versions of Redhat Linux.

So that's most of the computers I have known.

Unamerican words

This post is less serious than most.

I think of myself as an Engineer with an Engineering outlook.  My father was also an Engineer, in his case a practising one.  He worked at smaller companies most of his carrier.  But on a couple of occasions he worked for large companies.  This is a story he told based on an event that happened while he was working for a large company.

This company had a supply room staffed by a woman attendant.  One day my father went to get some office supplies.  Ahead of him was another Engineer who was English.  The English fellow calmly asked the attendant for a "rubber".  She immediately turned bright red and started stammering.  At that point my father leaned in and said "I think he means an eraser".

This is an example of "Two countries separated by a common language".  Except in this example the two countries use different words for the same concept rather than the same words for different concepts.  I have come across several other examples of this "different words" phenomenon.  Here are some others.

There is a tool that Americans call a "wrench".  The idea is that you use this tool to wrench things, to force them to do what you want them to do.  The English call the same tool a "spanner" because it can be adjusted to "span" or fit bolts of several sizes.   Both terms seem about equally valid to me.

There is a family of electronic devices that Americans call "tubes".  This is short for "vacuum tube" and this phrase captures key details of its construction.  The vacuum tube was invented by Thomas Edison.  Shortly after he invented the electric light bulb, something that is a vacuum tube but is not generally referred to as such, he did a number of experiments with them to see what else he could figure out.  In one of these he inserted a metal plate close to but not touching the filament.  He noted that a steady current emerged from the contact he connected to the plate.  It turns out that electrons boil off the hot filament, travel across the vacuum inside the tube, and strike the plate.  These plate electrons generate a current.  This was the first diode (initially a tube with two components, later any device that turned alternating current into direct current).

Later someone (I forget who) added another component, a screen or "grid", which they placed between the filament and plate.  If a small negative voltage was applied to the grid then the plate current disappeared.  This configuration is called a triode (three components).  Further experimentation determined that a small change in the grid voltage could result in a much larger change in the plate current.  Thus a small signal (voltage change) to the triode could be used to control and, if operated correctly, could result in a large change (amplification) in the plate current.  The triode became a key component in early radios and other electronic devices.  As a result of this "control" characteristic the British refer to these devices as "valves".  So an American "tube" is a British "valve".  In this case I think the Brits have the better term.

In America we have a game called "football".  In Britain (and the rest of the world) we have a game called "football".  They are completely different games.  There is a tortured historical chain that connects American Football to British Football but at this point the commonality between the two games is almost nonexistent.  So which name is more accurate?  British Football involves a very intimate association between feet and balls.  Almost all control of the ball is implemented by the foot or feet.  There is permitted contact with other body parts like the head but foot action dominates heavily.

Now consider American football.  There is the occasional kick but most of the control of the ball is exercised by the hands.  The center snaps the ball with his hands.  The quarterback holds the ball then often throws the ball with his hands.  Running backs hold the ball while running.  Receivers use their hands to catch the ball then behave like running backs.  A better name for American Football would be handball.

Unfortunately, the name "handball" is already taken.  And the game it is associated with involves a lot of hands and balls so we must scratch "handball" off our list of possible alternative names for American Football.  Now consider what the Americans call the British game.  They call it "soccer".  Now socking is a not a completely accurate description of what goes on in American Football but it is reasonably close.  It we break "soccer" down into "sock" and "her", the "her" part does not fit as the game is played primarily by men.  So "sock him" or "soccem" would be a better name.  Here too I give the nod to the British for a better fit between the word and what it is connected with.

There was a 1960's "spy" TV show produced in the U.K. that I loved.  It starred Patrick McGoohan and was called "Danger Man" in the U.K.  The theme song in the U.K. version was called "High Wire".  It was OK.  Americans would recognize it because parts of it were used heavily within the episodes.  But the version broadcast in the U.S. was called "Secret Agent" and featured a theme song called "Secret Agent Man" sung by Johnny Rivers.  The U.S. theme song was much better.  It included the now famous line "they've given you a number and taken away your name".  This was a reference to the number "007" given to James Bond.  Danger Man was the most realistic of the '60s spy TV shows.  As a result it never was as popular as other offerings such as "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", the James Bond movies, and other competitors.  McGoohan took the "given you a number and taken away your name" idea and turned it into a TV series called "The Prisoner".  The Prisoner has achieved cult status, although it was not that popular at the time of original broadcast.  I found the "alienation" and "theft of identity" themes mildly interesting.  But it was just too weird for me.

When I was growing up there was a famous word.  It was famous for being very long.  It was "antidisestablishmentarianism".  When the movie "Mary Poppins" came out it included a song about another long word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".  The new word immediately took over as the long word of choice.  But it is a made up word.  The other word is an actual real word.  Germans are famous for making up long words by smashing a number of short words together.  Antidisestablishmentarianism is an example in English of the same idea.  Breaking it down we have:

anti                 a negative
dis                  a negative
establishment  more on this part later
tarian              someone who does or is a member of the group who does
ism                 the philosophy associated with the thing

The key part is "establishment", which refers to "the established church".  The Church of England (a.k.a. the Anglican Church) was "established" (e.g. created) by king Henry the VIIIth.  He badly wanted a male heir.  He talked the Catholic Church into the equivalent of a divorce several times because his then current wife was either barren or kept producing only daughters.  Finally the Church had enough of this fudging and stopped cooperating.  So Henry "established" the Church of England (initially a clone of the Catholic Church except it had a liberal divorce policy when it came to kings).  Shortly thereafter there arose a group opposed to this whole idea of an established church.  They were the disestablishment bunch.  And some time later an opposition to the opposition developed.  They were the antidisestablishment bunch.  And all this got studied.  So scholars started writing papers about antidisestablishmentarianism.  Now two negatives cancel each other out.  So I don't know why they didn't just talk about establishmentarianism.  But, if they had, the word would not have been long enough to be interesting.

Finally, let me close this ditty out with a little Harry Potter trivia.  The first book has to do with the "Sorcerer's Stone", according to the American title.  What is that?  Never heard of it.  Well it turns out that the original U.K. title referred to the "Philosopher's Stone".  This makes much more sense.  Philosopher's Stones come from Alchemy.  Supposedly you could touch a Philosopher's Stone to "base metal", usually assumed to be lead, and it would turn to Gold.  Philosopher's Stones were often imputed to have other mystical properties too.  Alchemy eventually evolved into Chemistry and searches for a Philosopher's Stone were abandoned.  Modern nuclear chemistry provides an actual working recipe, by the way, for turning lead into Gold.  But it turns out the process is far more expensive than buying Gold at your local jewelry store.

Apparently the U.S. publisher of the Potter books believed that using "Philosopher's Stone" in the title was too much for the delicate sensibilities of potential American readers and changed the title to the nonsensical "Sorcerer's Stone".  Meanwhile, vast quantities of gore, death, and destruction are available at your local video store or on the TV in your child's bedroom.  But apparently, this is of less concern.  And, given the current state of education in this country, I'm not sure most American children have even heard of Philosopher's Stones. 

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Why I am an Atheist

The title of this post in a variation on "Why I am a Catholic".  G.K. Chesterton published a short essay with this title in 1926.  I could pick out no coherent argument as to why Chesterton was specifically a Catholic as opposed to a member of any other possible religion.  Gary Wills published a book of the same title in 2002.  I read Mr. Wills' book.  Well, actually I read parts of his book.  I expected to find some coherent argument as to why he was a Catholic.  Mostly I got large chunks of personal history so I started skipping around looking for the core argument.  It turns out that he is a Catholic because his parents were Catholic and he was raised Catholic.  This is hardly a compelling argument.  Mr. Wills is well known for his disagreements with some aspects of Catholicism.  Some of this is on display in the book.  Again some kind of analysis as to why Catholicism, especially in view of his disagreements, instead of something else was lacking.  I will be addressing this issue further in other posts.  But for the purposes of this post I will follow in Mr. Wills footsteps and lay out a history of my path to Atheism.

Like Mr. Wills I was born a Catholic and had two Catholic parents.  My father was a Catholic to his death.  My mother is still alive and still a Catholic.  So, unlike Mr. Wills, my choice of religion has changed over my lifetime.  This is the result of some effort on my behalf to figure out what is right and true.   "Right and true" are the core of what religion is supposed to be about.  It makes no sense to me to hold to a religion which is either wrong or false.  So I am completely perplexed as to why Mr. Wills holds to a religious belief that he finds flawed in important ways.  In any case, . . .

I went to Parochial School for 8 years and then to public schools for the rest of my education.  During High School I went to 4 years of CCD (religion school).  So I have the standard religious upbringing for a Catholic.  I began to have doubts in High School.  One reason for this was exposure to history.  It turned out that my public school history books covered events of profound significance to a Catholic that were completely absent from my extensive Catholic education.  These events were those leading up to and including the Protestant Reformation.   These events did not show the Catholic Church in a good light, and justifiably so.  The Church behaved shabbily.

I went off to college at a state university.  Initially, I was ambivalent.  My approach was "keep your options open".  Even if it does not seem true, why take the chance.  This went on for a couple of years.  I eventually decided this approach was dishonest as I no longer believed.  So I quit.  I became what is called a "lapsed Catholic".  But my thinking continued to evolve.  One influence was the book "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert Heinlein.  It is a work of Science Fiction and in it the main character literally invents a religion.  The events in the book parallel in important ways the life of Christ.  This experience led me to the conclusion that it was not that hard to invent a religion.

This book was not even the only Heinlein book to deal with the invention of religions for political reasons.  Modern Science Fiction is now replete with invented religions.  The recent "Battlestar Galactica" TV series deals extensively with a made up religion within the context of its continuing story arcs.  And, most famously, another Science Fiction author, L. Ron Hubbard, has invented an actual religion, Scientology.  Scientology is no different in its general structure from other religions.  The details of its rituals and belief system are not the same as any other religion but it falls well within the range for a typical religion.  But this is like saying Dashiell Hammett wrote different detective fiction than Raymond Chandler did.  It's still detective fiction.

This exposure to made up religions in Science Fiction was part of the process I went through at this time.  For the obvious question was:  Well if there is a problem with Catholicism then what about other religions.  I quickly discarded other christian religions.  One way of looking at the Protestant Reformation was as an attempt to fix Catholicism.  The initiating event was Martin Luther's identification of a problem with Catholic practise, namely selling indulgences.  I certainly agreed with Luther's criticism.  But what happened afterward was that many other problems were identified and Christianity quickly splintered into many factions and wings.  I concluded that there was no core truth.  From my perspective, Catholicism was the best of the lot but the whole lot was bad.

I will confess to have not made an exhaustive survey of religions.  I have spent a little time looking into a small number of alternatives.  We are all exposed to a little Judaism in the western world.  I have read one small book on Islam and another book on Confucianism.  That's it.  That is less than a serious attempt.  But another thing I have done is generally observe religious practise around the world.  I am looking for evidence of "right and true".  Does the religion have a fundamental commitment to truth?  What I find is that the commitment is to dogma and truth is denied if it conflicts with dogma.  There is also supposed to be a moral aspect to religion.  What I find is that most religions are immoral.  They encourage ignorance and bigotry.  They frequently support and encourage wars and other forms of bad behavior like slavery and torture.

Finally, Catholics make a distinction between Agnosticism and Atheism.  Can I absolutely prove that "there is no God"?  No!  But this is a case of asking the wrong question.  In the U.S.A. "God" means a christian god not some kind of super smart space alien.  I absolutely believe there is no christian god.  So I am an Atheist.

My fundamental observation about religions is that they are essentially political.  Religions follow all the rules of politics.  Politics is an inherently human endeavor.  Religions are the invention of humans and subject to the failings of humans.  Once you adopt this perspective religions make perfect sense.  The way to analyze religions is not with the tools of theology but with the tools of political science.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Correction Policy

I am lazy.  I am doing this blog for the fun of it and as an exercise in improving my mental health.  And, I'm a lousy researcher.  (This is something I learned about myself when I was in college many years ago).  These are all good reasons why I am likely to screw up.  Actually, no mater how good you are and how careful you are you will screw up.  My plan, when the inevitable screw up happens, is to correct the record in a manner at least as prominently as the original screw up.  I don't have a large staff or organization.  There is just me.  So there will be no outside referee to decide when I have screwed up.  When it comes to screw ups, I'm the decider.  I realize that's suboptimal but that's just how it is.  How do you convince me that I have screwed up?

If you read my introduction you will know my general approach.  If you want to convince me that I got it wrong give me facts and analysis.  All variations on "you are a bad person" are unconvincing.  The level of civility in public discourse has declined severely over the years.  I am interested in raising it not lowering it so I will be more positively disposed to the civil among you.

Finally, as will become more obvious as I post further, I am an atheist.  In spite of that I have no problem with people praying for me or praying over my eternal soul.  My mother does it all the time.

dumbth, truthiness, and Steve Allen

Steve Allen (1921 - 2000) was a renaissance man.  He is generally known as a comedian.  But he was also the first host of the Tonight Show (1954 - 1957), an actor (Benny Goodman in "The Benny Goodman Story"), pianist, and Grammy winning composer ("The Spaghetti Waltz").  Later in life he became interested in the dumbing down of American society.  He coined the word "dumbth" to characterize this phenomenon.  He expanded his ideas in a book "Dumbth and 81 ways to Make Americans Smarter".  A few years later he put out a revised version called "Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking With 101 Ways to reason Better & Improve Your Mind".  For many years he was active in what is now known as the CSI (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) and in Allen's time as CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), publisher of "Skeptical Inquirer".

The term "dumbth" has almost completely gone out of fashion.  Thankfully, Steven Colbert has come forward with the term "truthiness" to replace it.  If Allen were still alive I am sure he would whole heartedly support Colbert's efforts.  The words are not synonymous but they address the same general issue, namely ignorance.  "truth" is believing what is.  "truthiness" is believing what you wished was.

DUMBTH, the blog

I was originally going to call this blog DUMBTH.  But someone beat me to it.  And unfortunately, once they created the blog they never used it.  So I had to go with an alternate name.  So I came up with "Sigma 5".

The Sigma-5 is a computer introduced by SDS in 1965.  Some of you old timers will associate the initials SDS with the Students for a Democratic Society.  But in this case, the initials stand for Scientific Data Systems.  SDS was bought by Xerox in 1969.  The Xerox Sigma series of computers was yet another example of ineptitude by Xerox in the computer field.  (If you want more dirt on Xerox and computers check out the genesis of the Apple Macintosh).  I have fond memories of coding for the Sigma 5.  It was one of the earliest computers I worked with.

Introduction

I wrote my first computer program in the fall of 1966 as an entering college freshman.  I immediately fell in love with the beasts.  This was a time when they cost millions of dollars and filled entire rooms.  I then spent over 40 years playing with them and, for most of that time, getting paid to do so.  I am now retired and busy letting my computer skills atrophy.  To deal successfully with computers you have to be logical, analytical, detail oriented, and data driven.  Computers have no opinion.  Something just is the way it is.  The good news is that computers don't get mad and they don't keep grudges.  So if you mess something up you can just do it over, correctly this time, and all is forgiven.  I have been very successful dealing with computers for a very long time.

People do not work like computers.  They are inconsistent and illogical.  Most people are not very analytical.  We all get mad and most of us hold grudges from time to time.  This is not all bad.  The real world is a very complicated place whereas computers are engineered to behave in simple predictable ways.  The world of even the most complicated computer system is vastly simpler than almost any real world system.  People have to operate in the real world.  It is a place that is literally impossible to completely understand.  People are forced to deal with the real world any way they can.  While the strategies people employ are not the best strategies they do permit people to cope with a world that seems illogical and inconsistent, where the world sometimes seems to be mad at us and where out understanding of what's going on can charitably be described as incomplete.

So it is not possible to adopt a pure "computer" approach to the real world.  It is not even a good idea.  Computers are programmed by people.  Computer programs are designed to handle a limited set of situations.  If you don't believe this then observe the behavior of a computer that is having hardware problems.  In general computers react poorly to unexpected situations.  Sometimes they even react poorly to expected situations.  So is the "computer" approach completely useless in the real world?

I don't think so.  People have been trying hard to figure out how to deal with the real world at least as long as written history has existed.  All this time people have been asking the fundamental question:  Is this approach more successful than that approach in dealing with the world?  The answer is frequently unclear.  But not always.  In fact, while it may be manifestly obvious that a certain approach is flawed and inadequate, it may also be manifestly obvious that it is more effective than another approach.

The test for effectiveness in some cases is very straight forward.  If two civilizations clash and one destroys the other completely then it is clear that the surviving civilization is more effective, at least in a military sense.  There is no need to invoke arcane mathematical calculations to come to this result.  Short of complete annihilation there are other measures that can be indicative.

Civilizations have been testing themselves against each other for thousands of years.  So we have lots of results to sift through.  It is illuminating when someone characterizes a specific civilization as "primitive".  Stripped to its essence the idea is that the primitive civilization is less effective than the "advanced" one.  There seems to be a historical trend from primitive civilizations to advanced ones.  But a careful study shows that the trend is not a straight line through time from primitive to advanced.  Primitive is somewhat in the eye of the beholder and many civilizations once thought to be advanced have declined.  Examples of this include the Roman Empire and China.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time on this subject of the advance and decline of civilizations and I am not one of them.  So I look at the problem from the most basic perspective I can think of and ask:  What does an advancing civilization look like?  My most basic observation is that advancing civilizations change.  Over time they do things in a different and better way.  I just can't see how a civilization can advance without changing.  Societies can change in two ways.  They can do things in a new and different way or they can change back to an older way of doing things.  Now I can imagine that a society can make a change and after a while decides the change made things worse.  In this case it makes sense to go back to the old way of doing things.  But I can't think of a single example where a society has made a large scale change, decided it made things worse, went back to doing things the old fashioned way, and things got better.

Certainly there many examples of yearning for the past.  Confucius decided that China had made a mistake in its adoption of new religious and social practices and that it should go back to "that old time religion".  But this was a con.  Confucius changed Chinese religious and cultural practices but it was to a new way, not back to the old way.  Perhaps someone can think of an example but I think it will turn out that reversions back to the old ways will actually turn out to be changes to a new way sold as a reversion back to the old way.  So I think advancing civilizations are like sharks.  A shark dies if it stops moving.  A civilization can not advance without changing.

Since change is a necessity the next logical question is:  How does a civilization change in a good way rather than a bad way?  This is a really hard question.  Given that civilizations have frequently declined it is obvious that it is easy to get the answer wrong.  So how do you go about getting the right answer to a hard question?  Let's turn the question around.  How do you get the wrong answer to a hard question?  It turns out that we know something about this.  People have been studying the question of how to get the answer wrong for thousands of years.  In western civilization the first ones to seriously tackle this question were the ancient Greeks.  They invented something called logic.  They basically said "if you don't follow the rules of logic you will get unreliable answers".  Since then no one has been able to poke any holes in the ancient Greek system of logic.

The situation is actually a bit more complicated.  It is possible to get a good answer using a flawed chain of logic.  But if you use a properly constructed chain of logic you always get an answer you can depend on.  Finally, there are many problems for which logic will not deliver a solution.  So logic is of limited use.  But when you can use it and when you use it correctly the result is completely dependable.

The ancient Greek system of logic has been refined and extended since.  Most visibly modern mathematics encompasses logic but also covers much more.  But the limitations remain.  It is possible to get the correct result with flawed mathematics and there are many problems for which mathematics delivers no result at all.  In fact, this has been mathematically proved by Kurt Godel in 1931.  But where it works, it works.  And more broadly Science embodies that which made ancient Greek logic so powerful.  Science, or more specifically scientific thinking, is mathematics expanded to cover more territory.  And yet again, it is possible to get a good result in an unscientific manner and Science can't answer all questions.  So it has major limitations.

It is my belief that for those questions that mathematics and Science can make a contribution then mathematics and Science will generally yield better results than alternative approaches.  And if mathematics and Science says something is wrong it is very likely wrong.  At a minimum the holder of the contrary position must acknowledge the mathematical or Scientific result and provide a good reason for discounting it.

In short I am a Sciency kind of guy.  And that perspective will be reflected in my posts.