Ah it’s time to go on a bit of a rant here. I learned a number of important travel tips while I was trying to get back to the states from Italy. They are:

• Flying random airlines localized to a specific country is usually a very bad idea
• … Especially when those airlines are localized to a country where strikes are often completely random in nature.
• Never, ever, when traveling internationally, book multiple trips on the same day.

Now some specifics:

I arrive, after a really fantastic trip in Italy, to the major Rome international airport (FCO). My flight was to London on Alitalia, where I was to pick up a seperate set of flights back to Indianapolis. The UK government paid for my trip to and from London whereas my trip to Italy was for personal business, so these two trips were booked separately.

Accordingly to Alitalia, my flight was “confirmed” and my ticket was “valid”. Ha! Well it turns out that Alitalia was randomly striking at the time, but only sort of striking, as some pilots would show up to fly the planes and others would not. This seemed to be completely par for the course there, which didn’t make much sense to me. Turns out people had been waiting there for a flight to London for over 3 days. None of their flights had left due to this strike. And of course all other flights to London were way overbooked because Alitalia hadn’t had a flight there in nearly a week. But, of course, according to the airline, the tickets were still “valid”, they just didn’t have pilots to fly the planes.

As the time came where it became obvious that I wasn’t going to make my connections in London, I started to freak out a bit, since it seemed no one was going anywhere from Rome and I was never going to be able to get home. I forfeited my flights from London to Indianapolis and was stuck in Rome because of this crappy airline. So, I had to wake up my parents at 2 am on the west coast to book me new flights back to Indianapolis through Frankfurt and DC. What was a nearly free 2 week stay in Europe had just become much more expensive.

Obviously I couldn’t show up for my flights in London, so those tickets were just flat gone. Would Alitalia at the very least give me my money back? Of course not, they claimed my tickets were still “valid”. Good lord. Screw you people.

When I arrived in Rome and told the people I was staying with that I was flying out on Alitalia, they openly laughed at me and said “good luck getting home”. Ugh.

Never fly Alitalia.

Cheers.

I finally cross the pond tomorrow. Heading for Cambridge, London and Teddington in the UK and then off to Perugia and Rome in Italy. Get to spend 2 weeks over there so I’m very excited. See Jason and Mica and get to see my sister in Italy.

Oh yeah, and there’s that pesky thing called work that I have to do too. Stupid conferences. At least I’m an invited speaker: get the N-star treatment.

Cheers.

I’ve been asked by the few people who have taken the time to stomach some of my harsher critiques of our current form of Capitalism over the past few years whether or not I see the current financial crisis as some sort of vindication of my ideas. It has taken me some time to make a decision about that, but the short answer is: yes.

My principle argument about the self-destructive qualities of Capitalism has been many-pronged. Some of these prongs are not particularly relevant. My favorite deals with Capitalism’s requirement for unending expansion. While I think this is a perfectly valid point to consider, I can’t make a conclusive argument about its impact on today’s crisis.

The more relevant argument deals with the financial sector and the business of those who make money by dealing with money: investors, traders, speculators, etc. The core problem I have run into when talking about this with those who either aspire to become a participant in the financial sector, or with those who are simply admirers who hope to benefit from these practices now or at some point in the future is the claim that it is more complex than it could possibly look from the outside, and those who are not practicing cannot possibly understand its importance. This argument to me is akin to the religious argument that God works in mysterious ways and His truth, goodness, and existence is thereby unquestionable; an absurd justification, in my opinion.

So, speaking from the outside, the practices of the financial industry are self-destructive for the following reason.

The basic idea on Wall Street is to produce money by moving money. I’ve heard the phrase “you need money to make money” repeated without the batting of an eye by many respectable and intelligent people in my life, and this surprises me greatly. Currency is nothing more than the universal equivalent. In some economic epochs it has been an equivalent for goods more generally, and to some degree that is still the case. But more specifically in Capitalism it is the universal equivalent for productive labor hours. At its core the game in the financial industry is to create the equivalent using only more of the equivalent, without producing goods and without engaging in productive labor. This is not a complicated idea and no amount of business schooling or time spent engaging in this behavior can make it more complicated or less absurd. If there is any practice that this can be related to in a glorified fashion it is gambling. I’ve gambled a bit in my life and certainly wouldn’t mind winning the Powerball, but I could never convince myself or anyone else that going to the tracks, studying the horses and making a correct educated guess about investing money in a winning horse is in any way a productive activity. Now nobody at the tracks or on the Vegas strip is going to contribute to the collapse of major economies. However, it is the same activity that is the driving force of the industry whose success or failure correlates directly into the success or failure of world economies.

Now I don’t think this crisis is the end of Capitalism. Or even that any part of this world is ready for a major overhaul of the principle underpinnings of our economic systems. Those who know me know I am an admirer of Marx, Engles, and to some degree, Hegel. However as with any philosophy there are parts to appreciate and parts to call outdated and parts to dismiss on their own absurdity regardless of timeframe. Being a critic of Capitalism does not mean that feeling vindicated today makes me happy, or that it makes me search for that sickle I must have hidden away somewhere to head out to behead the fat-cat Capitalists and lead a revolution. Many radical socialists or communists have been revolutionaries; I am not. I hope that the crisis, whether or not it continues, allows people to open their eyes to some of the self-destructive qualities of our society, and allows them to get over fear of outdated catch phrases and misunderstood notions dealing with the big bad word: Socialism.

I’ve been asked by many to share my thoughts, and though I’ve been resisting, I thought I’d say a few things about the recent and ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia… and the US (I guess we did get ourselves inappropriately mucked up in this).

First of all I’d like to take a moment to welcome Russia to the modern world as they have acted as a completely typical and predictable regional state power (other Slavophils will recognize just how bizarre it is to attach those adjectives to anything Russian). There really is nothing out of the ordinary here, and in fact, in a grander sense, Russia is acting much more appropriately than the last time the United States engaged in serious regional power-flexing (I speak, of course, of the 1980s and Latin America). Russia saw instability in its region and moved in militarily, probably excessively. I think I’ve seen a similar play before with different actors… I can’t be sure though, that one might have been a comedy, it was a little far-fetched (I hope the reader picks up the reference here, but if not that is my fault and I’m not looking to get into it any further).

Secondly, I’d like to point out the hilarious irony here. Russia has taken military action claiming to defend the right of self-determinism in regions neighboring Russia. I’ll just provide some empty space to allow that to settle a bit.

So, Putin, remember Chechnya? Just another way that Russia has become more modern and typical. Ideals shifting unabashedly with circumstantial interests! Yay go modern nation-state! In previous epochs Russia has been an anomaly in that, while lead by awful men engaging in horrendous acts, Russia has typically had a sort of ideological zealotry it has stuck to, quite firmly. Not the case here, and if the rest of the world had a mirror it cleaned more often than once a century, it would probably applaud Russia for assuming more common tactics.

Moving on. Another point I’d like to make is that this conflict has really made clear for me the awful state of macro journalism in the US and Europe. I have not read one single article by a major news source that was not painfully un-inhibited by standards I would call essential to journalism. Some have chosen to be pro-Georgia, some pro-Russia, some even pro-US (what the hell?), but no one has relayed the facts and only the facts. This has caused me to have very little to say about the specific events that took place to cause this conflict. I simply don’t know! And I’m starting to think nobody else does either.

But what is really noteworthy here is just how un-noteworthy this conflict is turning out to be. Russia seems to have become a fairly typical international player and a regional power. Georgia may or may not have acted inappropriately but before we start name calling on Russia we should probably think about the fact that the man who almost certainly orchestrated some seriously illegal and awful regional power-flexing in Latin America during the Reagan years went on to serve as President and to produce in his offspring one of the worst Presidents in our nation’s history. Food for thought anyways…

One of the best things I have learned in the past week is that there are actually an impressive number of Congressmen on Twitter. The other great thing is that a lot of them are personally twittering rather than having staffers do it for them. There is a nice nice wiki with the names of known governmental types on twitter. A lot of them seem to only update very infrequently (such as Mark Udall (D-CO)), or have staffers writing their tweets (such as Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner the majority and minority leader respectively). However their are a lot of congressmen that are writing their own tweets and replying to other twitterers. Dan Burton even has two accounts @DanBurton for his personal tweets and @RepDanBurton for official stuff from his press office. The grandaddy of all congressional twitterers is John Culberson from the Texas’ 7th District with almost 1300 updates. Another wild thing is that he follows 3200 people and is followed by 3000. He has also made a splash recently by Twittering and Qikking live updates and video from inside the House of Representatives during what has been called a Republican congressional revolt.

A couple interesting trends in congressional Twittering is that I expected Democrats to be more on top of new web technology but Republicans outnumber them on Twitter (at least from the list above) pretty significantly. From a quick look Republicans also seem to be the most prolific twitterers (discounting feeds that appear to be done by staffers). It also seems that Twitter has brought Democrats and Republicans together on some issues. Basically Culberson and a Democrat ally, Rep. Tim Ryan, want to overhaul rules regulating correspondence from representatives. The current rules are somewhat archaic and are based on the findings of the Franking Commission which was set up to regulate how postal fee allotments could be used by congressmen. The rules forbid posting to any website that contains politicking or advertising (i.e. pretty much every website) in their “official capacity” and posts must include a disclaimer identifying the poster as a representative. The 140 character cap on Twitter prevents that. The rules also apply to blogs, youtube, and other social networking sites.

It is extremely interesting to see how congress keeps up with technology in their personal lives. It is extremelty interesting to see folks like Rep. Culberson interacting quite directly with constituents (and other citizens whether they agree or not).

For example (excerpts put together from twitter feeds):

@johnculberson 1st back up your tax assertion 2nd actually? IMO market can drive it IF we do it right & we’re not.

@jpippert I strongly support alternatives-but without taxing anyone else to pay for it. Let free market & tax credits drive it-but drill 1st

@johnculberson & drill here drill now: listen to T Boone Pickens & his mtg with Obama re dev. alternative energy. http://tinyurl.com/6lvayh

How is that for direct democracy?

A few minutes ago I was making chocolate milk (yes, I know, I’m 5 years old, feel free to insert witty banter). Well, as I was stirring I realized that the frequency of the sound I was hearing as the spoon hit the side of the glass decreased with increasing rotational velocity of the fluid. I have yet to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this phenomena, though I’ve only thought about it for about 5 minutes now. Thoughts?

Cheers.

UPDATE: Verdict: lame. See comment #1.

A few things seem to have gone wrong with the Wordpress 2.6 upgrade. They are,

• Permalinks broke completely, still haven’t fixed this. For now, just using an ID call (static links to articles are nonfunctioning right now).
• RSS feed also seems to have gone down the drain. This is due to the same bug in 2.6 that caused the permalinks problem. I haven’t yet been able to fix it.
• Note that for you authors the login page has moved from ‘admin’ to ‘wp-admin’. This was a quick fix to another bug in 2.6 which I have decided to leave unresolved for the time being. Expect this change to be permanent.

Sorry about all this. The permalinks and RSS feed issues will either be fixed by me if I find the time/motivation or they’ll be fixed in the 2.6.1 release whenever that comes out.

Cheers.

This weekend I went to the University of Michigan Biological Station outside of Pellston, MI (near Mackinaw City, Petoskey). I got in a few firsts there: climbing a sampling tower, going to the UP. And for the most part (aside from seeing Batman in Mackinaw City) I was completely unplugged. It was amazing. I need to do that more often.

More to the point, I put up some pictures. You can check them out here.

Cheers.

A short post, but I have to post it. ‘The Complexity of Songs’ is a short communication Don Knuth wrote back in the 70s which is really quite interesting. It’s also a pretty funny joke.

The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to evolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.

[...]

“…our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain” to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one’s memory.

[...]

Finally, progress during the twentieth century—stimulated by the fact that “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory”—leads to the ultimate improvement: Arbitrarily long songs with space complexity O(1), e.g. for a song to be defined by the recurrence relation.

We’ve really taken the concept to heart in modern popular music haven’t we? See here for explanation and here for the original paper.

Cheers.

I know vdov doesn’t usually go for the “hey look at this cool thing on the internet” type of posts but, hey look at this cool thing on the internet. It is clearly the greatest music video that has ever existed. It also dominates the field of “zombie Stalin” videos as well. It’s by a Russian metal band called ANJ [their myspace page].

I’m used to writing in C (and Matlab, unfortunately), though I’m not particularly proficient in either. But lately I’ve taken on C++ and holy hell what a huge language. Still, it has a lot of nice features that are going to be important to me in the next year of my graduate work and I’m gonna stick with it. Yay OO, ugh.

For all its size, one of the areas where I have been left completely unsatisfied is in support for threads. Yes, of course POSIX threads are there and I’ve had some success implementing them in some of my older, now completely obsolete C code which I never want to look at again. It’s baffling to me that there is nothing in the STL which develops some nice thread classes. I know there are at least 2 (if not more) very experienced C++ programmers who read vdov.net, and I’m looking for advice. Have you looked at some developed thread classes and if so what have you thought? Recommendations? I would really rather not have to write my own thread classes from scratch (especially since accessing the C pthread library would be a nightmare here), as this is both utterly useless for my research and, well, I’d probably screw it up with near-fledgling knowledge of the language.

Cheers.

I hate advertisements and, more specifically, advertisements on my clothing. This is one of the reasons why I wear GoodWill t-shirts: I don’t want to be a walking, talking billboard. This choice has brought me rather frequent social t-rauma (see exhibit 1) and I haven’t suffered alone. A recent news headline was A man was threatened with arrest for wearing a Transformers t-shirt. A couple of weeks ago my “Central Ohio Senior Olympics 1997” shirt caused me t-rauma, albeit far less public.

A man approached me while I stood in line at the Subway on the University of Chicago campus. He said, looking at my shirt, “Really? You think so?” I stared at him blankly. He continued “Are you from the area (central Ohio)?” Realizing he was talking about my t-shirt, I said “Yes”. The man replied “Well, welcome to intellectual heaven!” and walked away smiling. Still standing in line, I started to stew about this brief exchange:

Subway is intellectual heaven!? Is being from central Ohio or wearing a central Ohio t-shirt a sufficient qualification for admittance into intellectual heaven? Very unlikely.

Was I just welcomed by an (the) intellectual god? If yes, then I met an (the) intellectual god, a “sandwich artist,” and “ate fresh” in intellectual heaven after what must have been my untimely intellectual death.

What caused my intellectual death? I’d guess being constantly bombarded with advertisements and repeated t-rauma from my choice of t-shirts.

But wait! Where is intellectual hell? How can I be trying to answer such deep questions while reading mind-numbing advertisements for Doritos (taking snacking to a higher level), Mountain Dew (the new dew is up to you), Subway (eat fresh live green)? Am I really in intellectual hell?

[Update]: Is my hatred of advertisements legal in Canada?