Curioser and curioser...

Now here's a colorful character: evolutionary/genetic biologist and general purpose radical JBS Haldane.

While trying to attribute a different quote that turned out to be his, I ran across the following, which I thought was quite in line with my previous posting:

I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

Turns out he's got quite a few other zingers. The one I was looking for was the one quoted often by Sapolsky (who, though not quite so zinger-prone, himself, nevertheless provides some incredibly entertaining science writing): I'd lay down my life to save two brothers or eight cousins.

I'll have to pick up a real biography.

Wonder what they're cooking up nowadays

Lauren Weinstein has apparently been converting his old videotapes to digital, and is posting some curiosities. Here's one about the 1970's predictions for the waves of the future. It's funny to hear the oooh-aaah tone in which they discuss the distant possibility of things we take for granted today, but it's also surprising how much of the impact of our technology they were able to anticipate.

Kind of makes me wonder what wild and impossible thing someone's working on today that we'll be absolutely dependent on in 30 years. My prediction track record is not good. I remember the first time I heard someone talking about protein secondary structure prediction from amino-acid sequence. My reaction was, "Nah...it's much more complicated than that. They'll never get it to work." And when Ellen bought her first PC, she whined "I know it will be obsolete as soon as I get it out of the store." I was just starting grad school at the time, and thought I knew plenty about computers. Chortled I: "Obsolete??? With 20 meg of hard drive??? You couldn't fill that much memory if you sat down to write from now through the rest of your life."

Where do rhyming poems come from?

From French, it seems.

I have been listening to a series of lectures on poetry (I am horribly ignorant about it). At any rate, one of the things the instructor mentioned struck me as very interesting.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but...

Apparently Anglo Saxon poetry (i.e. pre-William the Conqueror British poetry) favored alliteration and rhythm and did not use rhyme extensively. One of the innovations brought to England by the Norman conquest was a French predilection for rhyming poetry. According to Prof. Drout, French and Latin are more amenable to or better facilitate the use of rhyme (i.e. same sound at the end of a word, after a stressed syllable) than English, because they tend to have a lot of common word suffixes that all sound the same. (I am reminded of my high school French class exercise of enumerating all the ways you can make the "A" sound: e, ee, ees, ai, ais, ait, aient, aie, er, est, es, et,...am I forgetting some?)

Again, according to Drout, cosmopolitan, continentally traveled Chaucer was instrumental in adopting rhyme into English and treating alliteration as a cheesy device.

Macy's "Magic Mirror"

Wow...I just had to ask myself if this wasn't April Fool's Day. I've just seen about the worst idea I've come across in a long time.

"Macy's shoppers can now check their look in a "magic mirror" in a fitting room, thanks to touchscreen computing. A large mirror, linked up to a touchscreen tablet computer, lets visitors to the iconic department store chain's flagship New York location scroll through their options, then digitally "try on" clothes in the mirror. Then they can get quick feedback from friends by posting their image to Facebook or sending it in an e-mail or text.

How long until

1. Someone figures out how to hack the system and turn on the magic mirror remotely, capturing unwitting customers in the fitting room in various stages of undress?
2. (Variant of 1) Someone in the Macy's IT Department figures out a way to run the system in "test mode" to turn on the camera on unwitting customers in the fitting room in various stages of undress...and starts collecting the images?
3. Macy's starts capturing that Facebook or email address you enter, and starts sending you messages like "If you liked that DKNY dress, you'll just love this Ann Taylor"?

Thank goodness it's only scheduled to be available until November.

Edited to add: It all makes sense to me now. It seems that the company that's making this capability available to Macy's is UK-based RetailCam...that would be UK as in the country that brought you Big Brother and 21st century quality surveillance.

Interview with John Le Carre

I accidentally tuned in to Democracy Now yesterday and was surprised to hear someone talking about Bukavu, which I was reading about last week in The Mission Song. Surprise, surprise...who should be speaking but John le Carre, himself?

It turned out to be a very nice hour-long interview by Amy Goodman. It covered all sorts of stuff, from his experiences visiting Africa (he says he is a follower of "Graham Greene's dictum" that "if you're reporting on human misery, you do well to share it") to politics to his writing process. Having read a number of his books with interest (I really enjoyed "A Most Wanted Man" last year), I found this interview put the books into a nice context.

I will add that le Carre has a lovely voice. He sounds like a man half his age.

I'm adding him to the list of people I'd like to make friends with.

Another one: "bites the dust"

Yes, I am a fan of Queen.

However, what this is really about is the origin of the phrase "bite the dust". I ran into what may have been one of the fairly early uses of this phrase, reading Samuel Butler's comparatively painless prose translation of The Odyssey.

According to The Phrase Finder, the phrase "bite the dust" was used in 1750 by Tobias Smollet. However, they also note that Butler uses it in his 1898 translation of the Iliad, and I myself found it in his 1900 translation of the Odyssey (book XXII). Lang, et. al. translate the same phrase as "bite the earth" in the Iliad.

So as I figure it, the image of "bite the dust" to refer to a violent death goes back as far as Homer.

Who knew?

John LeCarre says...

"A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue."

His bio on his own website is crafted to this ideal.

I'm currently listening to "The Mission Song". Enjoying it, though it's a bit pedantic, and hard to follow some of the logic, given that I'm not as well acquainted with the politics of the Congo and Rwanda as I might be. Some of my difficulty might also have to do with the abridgment for audio -- I suspect they may have cut some critical details in the interest of recording time. However, the audio rendering is quite good...I really like the narrator.

Are they playing Pacman with your vote?

Alex Halderman's group managed to get hold of some old Sequoia AVC-Edge voting machines, and without needing to tamper with the tamper-evident seals reprogrammed them to play Pacman.

Sequoia AVC-Edge voting machines are DRE (that's Direct Recording Electronic -- not digital rectal examination, which is perhaps equally pleasant). This means that the only way they capture a vote is electronically: if something goes wrong with the machine, there is no independent evidence of how the voters wished to vote. (This is in contrast with optical scan voting technologies where the voter, for example, fills in a bubble sheet, which is scanned in for ease-of-counting, but which also provides an independent, auditable, debuggable record of the vote.)

Halderman writes,

"The original election software used the psOS+ embedded operating system. We reformatted the memory card to boot DOS instead. (Update: Yes, it can also run Linux.) Challenges included remembering how to write aconfig.sys file and getting software to run without logical block addressing or a math coprocessor. The entire process took three afternoons."

There are three significant points here:

1. It doesn't appear to be terribly technologically difficult to reprogram the machine. I'm sure that having worked out the process in 3 afternoons, it would take them about half an hour to run the same reprogramming process on the next machine.
2. It is possible to do this reprogramming in an undetectable way -- i.e. without messing with the tamper evident seals.
3. Given that the machine is DRE, vote tampering cannot be independently detected or recovered from.

Voting machines are often left on their own in unsecured locations. A motivated attacker in a district that uses these machines could prepare a vote-stealing program in advance, access the machine briefly, and load the program. Without leaving any noticeable evidence. A forensic analysis of the machine would probably detect the program, but without any obvious tampering, who'd bother? And by then, the damage might already have been done -- forensics after election day would detect the possibility of tampering but would not get back what the votes should have been.

I just explained this to Sidharta in about 5 minutes. He totally got it. How come most of our electorate doesn't?

Mary Anning, Revisited

I just got done listening to another great audiobook: Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. A friend recommended it, and I'm so glad he did. It combines two themes dear to my heart: A Jane Austen set-up and, if you can believe it, the problems of women in science.

This is the story of icthyosaur and plesiosaur discoverer Mary Anning (1799-1847), of whom I wrote a while back. It is more-or-less a novelization of her life. That is to say, most of the events and characters in the book are historical, but the narrative alternates between first person accounts provided by Mary, herself, and her friend Elizabeth Philpot, an expert fossil hunter in her own right.

Elizabeth is a typical Jane Austen heroine: born into the gentry, but with a very meager inheritance of her own. Mary is accustomed to living hand-to-mouth, the daughter of a cabinet maker, who dies highly in debt when she is about 11. The two women met soon after Elizabeth and two of her unmarried sisters moved to Lyme Regis to live cheaply, after the marriage of their brother who held the bulk of the family's wealth. Elizabeth had become interested in fossil hunting and Mary, who was only about 10 at the time, contributed to the family's income by supplying a fossil knick-knack ("curie", short for curiosity) stand that the family ran alongside the cabinet-making business. Elizabeth encouraged her to get an education, and to take a scientific, systematic approach to documenting her finds. Over time, the two became friends, and apparently spent significant time together collecting and studying the fossils. Along the way, they developed connections with, and taught or led a number of the well-known geologists and biologists of the time, including apparently, Cuvier (one of the acknowledged pioneers of paleontology).

Of course, scientific expertise is no excuse for gender, and though their contributions were first rate, neither Mary nor Elizabeth were recognized by any of the scientific establishment, on anything but a personal level. They were friends with the "great men", they sold fossils to the men, they corresponded with the men on scientific matters, they led the men on fossil hunts, but they could not publish papers or attend scientific meetings. And Mary had the double whammy of being of a different social class, as well, and living on the brink of starvation for much of her life.

The story reads like a pure novel. The narrative is wonderful, as are the voices of the two women. (I will say, too, that as audiobooks go, this was a lovely one, with two readers who provide excellent voices of their own.) The historical events are woven in nicely with the plot. And throughout you feel all of the pathos of the difficulties faced by two serious scientists in the context of their gender, poverty and class.

My informant tells me that The Lady and the Unicorn is good, too. It's on my queue.

Fortune cookie wisdom

OK...you may have guessed it by now...I like fortune cookies.

There were some good ones today.

I got one that read "Do it because you love it." All "between the sheets" jokes aside, I do try to live this. Or maybe I should say, I try to live a transposed version of it: "Because you love it, do it." It is important to make time for the stuff you love. Of course, this also means that my house isn't quite as clean as it would be if I loved cleaning.

Annapurna read her fortune, and immediately groaned, "oh, that's bad!" Then she cracked up. It read "Be broke, be wealthy, but don't accept mediocity". And, no, that's not my typo.