Monthly Archives: October 2012

"The case for not voting" is a waste of time

What's so silly about this is that in the time it takes a person to read this, that person could've instead read a quick overview of the GOP and Democratic party platforms, and thereby educated themselves enough to know which party would best fit their policy preferences. This isn't hard. It doesn't take hours of study.

Signing Up A Storm

About the sign language interpreter for the NYC mayor's updates:

Many people commenting on Ms. Callis’ interpreting seemed unaware how integral facial expression is to ASL. Just as those of us who hear take cues from tone of voice and inflection, those who are Deaf (and there’s a big distinction between Deaf with a capital ‘D” and “deaf”) take cues from facial expression. Facial expressions are a grammatical aspect of the language and can relay more information than the signs themselves. Many hearing people appeared to mistake her animated signing as being theatrical or over the top, when in reality she’s simply conveying the emotional tone of what’s being discussed.

Now imagine doing a four-year degree in computer science where every class, CS or not, is translated by an ASL interpreter - someone is explaining file system directory structures, and hash tables, and MIMD vs SIMD multiprocessing, or physics, or discrete math with English words, while another person is signing them. That's what RIT students, of all degrees, get. Or did... this was a long time ago...

It was kindof wild, for someone like me, who had never been exposed to deaf culture before. I could pass time in class, when I wasn't passed out asleep, trying to figure out how ASL works. That heightened emotional vibe is eye-popping at first, but you figure out what it's doing eventually. I never really got ASL as a language, but the isolated signs usually made perfect sense in context - the signs seemed like obvious matches to the words and phrases that the lecturer was speaking. All I remember these days are the novelty signs : bullshit, tea, tree, fish. pussy) I should have learned it all.

Mrs. lived in the deaf dorms, so was far more exposed to the culture. She knows a lot more ASL than I do.

comfortablysmug

[I]n the chaos around Hurricane Sandy, [@comfortablysmug tried] to trick his media followers, and their followers and readers in turn, with fake news. He reported, falsely, on a total blackout in Manhattan, on a flood on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and other things that didn’t happen. Two of his tweets garnered more than 500 retweets. One drew a rebuke from ConEd’s official Twitter account. Twitter’s self-correction mechanism — rebukes and rebuttals from knowledgeable sources — shut down each rumor, but not until at least one, the flood claim, had bled widely into the television media.

read on.

Close To The End

We've scheduled movers! Very exciting. During their estimation process, they asked if it was a new driveway. We said: yes, it was. They asked how long it was. We said: I dunno, pretty long. Turns out that they will not park a fully-loaded moving van on a new driveway because the weight of the truck will crack it. They said it takes a year before the concrete will be cured enough to handle a truck. Mmk, I'm not gonna be the guy carrying the dressers however many tens of yards it is from the road to the house!

We're now onto converting our building loan to a traditional mortgage. This means another round of "Send Us All Your Financial Info" for us, even though we're dealing with the same people who did our construction loan, and so went through the same process with us back in March. Oh well. We got a fantastic interest rate! If things turn out right, after we sell our current house and apply the profit to the new mortgage, we should be paying less per month for this new house than we're paying now. This doesn't count the cost of the land, for which we paid cash. But, that's ok. Monthly payments hurt more than lump sums from savings.

Statistics is a bourgeois pseudoscience

Paul Krugman, talking about how the right has turned against NYT statistical blogger, Nate Silver:

Yet the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.

This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.

Or, in a word and a half: proto-"Lysenkoism".

Lysenkoism is used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.

...

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.[9]

Genetics was stigmatized as a 'bourgeois science' or 'fascist science' (because fascists — particularly the Nazis in Germany — embraced genetics and attempted to use it to justify their theories on eugenics and the master race, which culminated in Action T4).

...

In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience";[10] all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev, who claimed to be an expert in agricultural science, also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). The ban was only waived in the mid-1960s.

Home Stretch

Out in the woods, the house is almost done...


iPhone

The second floor has its second coat of poly. Third coat will be applied after all other work is done. First floor has been sanded and is waiting for its finish.


iPhone

Might be a little hard to see here, but the balusters (the vertical parts of the handrail) are pretty close together. I saw a railing like this in another house in the development and said we wanted them spaced out more. But, it turns out they have to be that close together because of building codes: 4" minimum between balusters. Drat!

Also, upstairs windows all must have child-proof mechanism to stop them from opening more than 4" without pressing a little button while lifting. And so they do.

The kitchen is progressing.


iPhone

This is the first time we've seen the house with lights in it. It's been natural light, only, up till this week. But now, it's alive!

We did our unofficial pre-walkthrough walkthrough this weekend. We made a list of things that need to be fixed. Most were minor: a couple of cabinet doors don't close correctly (too close together); some minor drywall patches needed; utility room sink is too small for the opening they cut in the counter; there's a big gap between the granite and the wall on one end of the kitchen counter, etc..

Mrs. discovered that the big light fixture she chose for the foyer is just too small for the space it occupies. So, she's going to have to see if it can be returned.

While we were there, there was a whole family working to clean up the sanding dust from the floor finishing: mother, father, two little girls. It did not feel great seeing two little girls wiping down our stairs by-hand. I don't feel its my place to say anything to anyone about this, though. Oh well.

Current house is still for sale. We were talking to some neighbors at a Halloween party who said under no circumstances should we try to sell an empty house - because if we did, people will assume we're desperate to sell and will give ridiculous low-ball offers. So, if we heed their warnings, we'll either have to leave enough furniture there to make it look lived in (not really possible - we really don't have a lot of spare furniture), or rent some furniture. Blech. Our realtor said not to worry about it.

Start Your iPods

Random five, described:

  1. Portishead - Plastic. Trip hop, you're back! Well, kinda.
  2. Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions - Thinking Like That. A lovely, dark & broody tune for this dark and broody weather.
  3. 10 Ft Ganja Plant - Righteous Dub. A sweet little instrumental reggae to brighten the mood.
  4. Mudhoney - Magnolia Caboose Babyshit. And then a crazed grunge instrumental to mix things up, in preparation for...
  5. The Black Keys - Howlin For You (live). This is a good one. I should like these guys more than I do, however.

Testify!