We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.

Hippie.

A Horrible Person

Here's an example something that annoys the fuck out of me:

Whenever there’s something technologically fascinating that is beyond my ken, I just imagine that tiny elves are responsible somehow. Sitting in a workshop, tinkering and tweaking away, perhaps whilst humming a merry tune. But alas, Netflix recommends new things for you to watch not due to the machinations of adorable wee workshop sprites, but through the science of algorithms.

Here's another:

The use of algorithms in policing is one example of their increasing influence on our lives. And, as their ubiquity spreads, so too does the debate around whether we should allow ourselves to become so reliant on them – and who, if anyone, is policing their use. Such concerns were sharpened further by the continuing revelations about how the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been using algorithms to help it interpret the colossal amounts of data it has collected from its covert dragnet of international telecommunications.

One more:

Sean Gourley is co-founder and CTO of, a company that gets hired by governments and business to create algorithms. He says, "From an algorithms perspective, this is a great time to be alive. Algorithms are just frolicking in the mountains of data that they can play with."

Gourley uses algorithms to predict insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and help banks map developing markets for new technologies. As an experiment for NPR, he maps the development of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He uses algorithms to sort through about 40,000 blogs and articles written since the movement began and group similar ideas together.

There are countless other examples.

As all programmers know, an "algorithm" is a process, a way of solving a problem. That's all it means: the steps you take to solve a problem. It doesn't mean "vaguely sinister artificial intelligence", it means "process", "technique", "instructions for solving a specific problem". And it's not specific to computers (though it is most often used with computers and mathematics): a recipe for fried chicken is an algorithm, as are the directions to your house, so are step-by-step directions for folding an origami elephant from a dollar bill.

Yes, Sean Gourley uses algorithms to predict insurgencies in Iraq. He also uses one to drive to work, and another to make coffee, and another to do his laundry (step 1: put the clothes in the basket. 2: carry the basket to the machine. 3: put the clothes in the washer, etc.).

In the first quote up there, I bolded a bit about "the science of algorithms" - a phrase which means something completely different from what Netflix is doing. Netflix isn't doing the "science of algorithms", Netflix is writing algorithms (aka, coming up with techniques and processes) to find interesting patterns in their customers viewing history. There are no elves, no demons. There are just computers mindlessly following the steps people have told them to follow in order to solve the same problems over and over and over. Humans identify a problem they want to solve (marketing), come up with the process (algorithm design), figure out how to get a computer to follow it (programming), and then the computer does it, over and over, and then ... profit!!

But reporters apparently don't know this. It sounds like they start talking to scientists or engineers about something they want to about and when they hear the word "algorithm", instead of hearing it as a synonym for "process" or "technique", they imagine some mysterious and arcane entity that only the wizards of technology understand - some kind of semi-autonomous demon, created by dark magic, that can do all kinds of tasks, and that obediently does its master's bidding (but which could probably kill us all, if it chose to). But the word has no sinister connotations - that stuff comes straight from the reporters' ignorant imaginations. And an algorithm isn't a general-purpose worker elf; it's a fixed set of instructions, written to solve a specific problem.

Suggestion to journalism schools: teach your students what "algorithm" actually means - and on the next day, teach them how the US Senate works.

/rant

One of my brothers is a musician who runs a recording studio, and recently he told me that a friend of his recorded an album (is that still the right term?) at a well-known studio in Los Angeles. His friend doesn’t have a record deal or anything — he just rented the studio time to cut the record.

Here’s the interesting part: the guy’s backing band consisted of Jim Keltner, Leland Sklar, and a couple of other guys who names I didn’t recognize but who my brother assured me are similarly big time. OK, that’s not really the interesting part: the interesting part is that, according to my brother’s friend, you can currently hire superstar session men like Keltner and Sklar for $500 per day to make your self-financed record. In other words, you can basically get Eric Clapton’s or Jackson Browne’s former backing band to be your backing band on your record for around $2000, total, if you’re willing to do it in a day.

Sounds like a fun DIY version of the Rock And Roll Fantasy Camp thing.

That other theme was just not for me.

BBC sayeth:

One of the brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston bombings was in possession of right-wing American literature in the run-up to the attack, BBC Panorama has learnt.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev subscribed to publications espousing white supremacy and government conspiracy theories.

...

The programme discovered that Tamerlan Tsarnaev possessed articles which argued that both 9/11 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were government conspiracies.

Another in his possession was about "the rape of our gun rights".

Reading material he had about white supremacy commented that "Hitler had a point".

Tamerlan Tsarnaev also had literature which explored what motivated mass killings and noted how the perpetrators murdered and maimed calmly.

There was also material about US drones killing civilians, and about the plight of those still imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.

href

Hasselhoff [No, not that one. This one is the singer for the Bloodhound Gang] has publicly apologized, adding that the passing of items of all kinds through his pants is a band tradition, but Russia's top law enforcement agency is still considering pressing charges.

hah.

Let's try this theme for a while. See how it goes.

I like links on the sidebar better than links all at the bottom. But, I'll see if I can get used to it.

Bureaucratic Procedures

How long would it take to teleport a person?

Researchers James Nelms, Declan Roberts, Suzanne Thomas and David Starkey started out by calculating how much data it would take to represent a human being. They went with 10 billion bits, the amount of data encoded by DNA base pairs in the human genome.

Then they calculated how much information would have to be fed into the human brain to restore the traveler's pre-teleportation mental state. That inflated the total to a truly astronomical number: 2.6 tredicillion bits, or 2.6 x 10^42 in scientific notation.

The time required to transmit that data depends on how much bandwidth you have. If you're using the 30 GHz microwave band that's standard for satellite communications, it'd take 4.85 quadrillion years (4.85 x 10^15 years). That's about 350,000 times longer than the universe's current estimated age of 13.8 billion years.

That's a long time.