Steve Reads

I’m in a daze. And I can’t do any better than Bill Simmons at explaining the delirium in Boston, so I won’t try. He describes Life After Game 5. Now we’re one game past that, tied with the Yankees in this series, and have already made history once — by becoming the only team in major-league history (out of 26 that tried) ever to fall behind three games to none and win the next three games.

The thing about this year’s Sox is that everyone in this town loves them so much. I met a nice woman on the bus back to Vermont a while back who’s been watching the Sox since 1967. She mentioned — echoing Jerry Remy [caution: website design is sufficient to make eyes bleed] — that the Sox’ loss in the 2003 ALCS was the worst defeat that she’d ever seen. I asked her (since I couldn’t ask Jerry) why the 1986 loss to the Mets in the World Series wasn’t the worst. She answered in two parts: first, she said, the fans in ‘86 didn’t love their team nearly as much as the ‘03 fans loved theirs. And secondly, when the Sox lost game 6 in 1986, she said the fans knew they’d never win game 7. Whereas we were just a few outs away from going to the Series was in the bag in 2003.

So now we’re back exactly where we were a year ago. I’m exhausted. I thought the Sox were dead and gone when they lost the first three games; they were playing awful, awful baseball, and I couldn’t bear to watch the end. But now we’re going to game 7. Not only are we going to game 7, but I spent the last two innings of tonight’s game 6 biting my fingers down to the bone, praying that the Sox wouldn’t blow their lead. They nearly did, with ordinarily rock-solid closer Keith Foulke allowing two guys to get on base. But he finally struck out the last batter, and on we go to game 7.

I don’t know whether to feel ecstatic or cautiously optimistic or cynical or what. I am in a strange emotional freefall right now. And all because of a game. The thing is, around here it is very far from being “only a game.” If the Sox make it to the Series, I and every other Bostonian will be camping outside of Fenway, waiting for home-run balls or spare drops of Johnny Damon’s sweat to land on us.

But that’s looking too far ahead. We have one more game to win.

I know it’s patently absurd, but the thought that the Red Sox deliberately screwed their first three games to tire the Yankees out, only to come back Rope-A-Dope style in the final four games, is kind of appealing. It turns a thorough cockup into brilliant strategy.

Back in July, I mentioned some experiences trying to get Eudora to work like an actual email program. Turns out that Eudora is not an actual email program: it is a series of patches layered on top of a “Hello, World!” program. Had I only known this months ago, I would have saved myself endless headaches.

The good news is that I’ve now switched a client over to Mozilla Thunderbird, at his request. It works really well, and it’s as sleek as the Mozilla browser. It’s not a pile of cruft like Eudora.

One nice thing about Thunderbird is that you can import all your settings from Eudora or Outlook or a few other programs. But I just noticed today that the “relay personalities problem” (mentioned in the first link above) bit me on the butt again when converting from Eudora to Thunderbird. I converted the client to Thunderbird, then stupidly forgot to send a test message to and from his account. He called me a few hours later to ask me why his mail wasn’t working.

It looks like Thunderbird’s conversion utility doesn’t use the following logic:

1. There’s a relay personality in Eudora.
2. Account A uses this relay personality to send mail.
3. The relay personality uses a certain SMTP server.
4. Therefore when I convert account A, I ought to use the same SMTP server that the relay personality uses.

I think it may have grasped some of this logic, but not all of it. Frustrating, in any case. I’ll need to file a bug here.

At least we’re done for good with Eudora. It’s an awful program, and it ought to be consigned to the dustbin of Win16 from whence it came.

My amazingly cool and great friend Nick is in town for a few days, and after a long time of his trying to find his way through Boston roads (why oh why will this city only label the cross street at a major intersection, and not the major road itself?) I got a little bit of time with him tonight. Off to the bar with us.

Perhaps this explains why I think it’s possible that the Sox will win the next two games at Yankee Stadium. Schilling pitches on Tuesday night. He’s questionable, given his injury (why oh why did we not know about the seriousness of the injury until the moment it became a catastrophe? And why oh why does Francona seem incapable of pulling pitchers out before they become catastrophes?), but maybe he’ll “pull a Schilling” — namely, act like we know he can and rock any batters who come before him.

Then Wednesday? I have no idea. Lowe? Again? What? Such is the power of The Schilling that I consider a win on Tuesday possible. Certainly the Sox think this is possible, or they wouldn’t have scheduled Pedro for today and Schilling for tomorrow; Schilling’s the stronger Yankee Stadium pitcher.

But seriously, what are the Sox doing to me? Is the emotional rollercoaster part of their gig? The Yankees never threaten to suck, do they? They had a bad spell in the middle of the season, but it lasted a month and after it was over they were back to winning 2/3 of their games. That much success must get boring  . . . 

Maybe I’ve now graduated to understanding what real Sox fanhood is about.

If you needed any more proof that Bill Safire is a scumbag, you need only observe (a) that he managed to devote an entire column to the so-called “smear” that Kerry and Edwards perpetrated on the Cheney family by mentioning that their daughter is lesbian; and (b) that he’s not spilled a drop of ink, as far as I can tell, attacking any of the Bush administration’s smears against the Kerry campaign (see Swift Boat). For that matter, add in (c) that he’s also not once attacked the Bush administration’s rape of civil liberties (except for the proposed Total Information Awareness campaign a while back). He focuses on one speech act by the Kerry campaign, and ignores the very real and very dirty administration to whose party he belongs.

Now, as a lot of other people have noted, it is only a smear for Kerry to have mentioned Mary Cheney’s sexual orientation if the statement is false or the lesbianism is something she’s tried to keep secret. But in fact she’s quite open about her sexuality, and in fact worked as a gay and lesbian outreach coordinator for the Coors Brewing Company until her father ran for VP. So this is not a secret.

Safire is probably right that this is a calculated attempt by the Kerry campaign to drive a wedge into the Republican “base”: if Kerry can convince a sizable number of Republicans that Cheney hasn’t been doing all he can to “convert” his daughter, that might swing some votes away from Bush. (Probably not to Kerry — probably to more extreme right-wingers.) It’s a great strategy.

Not only that, but it points out the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s insistence on the “sanctity of marriage.” The question Americans ought to be asking themselves is: If I had a son or daughter who told me he or she was gay and in love with someone of the same sex, wouldn’t I want that child to be able to marry the person he or she loves? Vice President Cheney presumably loves his daughter and wishes the same benefits for her that she would have if she weren’t lesbian. In the privacy of their own home, they probably are far more supportive of her than they are of gay marriage in public. Though of course this is only speculation on my part.

Republicans have been using gay marriage as a wedge issue at least since the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution requires it to recognize gay marriage. It’s time that we point out the fundamental absurdity of the Republicans’ position; if we have to make them squeamish by requiring them to take a public position on their private behavior, this seems no worse than what their legislation already does to the rest of the United States.

If you download music from my machine, here’s a suggestion to make your life and mine easier. You, presumably, want to download all the tracks in an album. If you use a web browser to do this, it’s annoying: you have to click one by one through every link in a directory (assuming it’s one album per directory) and save each file individually. Many people, out of frustration, will download several tracks at once to save themselves the irritation of waiting for one to download before clicking another.

There’s an easier way: download wget. It’s a free-software tool, and it does just what you want. To download all the music in the directory ‘myMusic’ on www.domain.com, and all of its subdirectories (say, it’s organized into directories ‘artist/album’ and you want to download everything by a given artist), using username ‘foo’ and password ‘bar’, use this command:

wget -r --http-user foo --http-passwd bar http://www.domain.com/myMusic

Now all the music you want will be deposited in a directory called ‘myMusic’ that sits in the same directory where you currently are. The files will have downloaded one at a time, so my machine won’t be overburdened; and you will have issued precisely one command to get this all done, meaning you won’t need to click on 15 different links to download 15 different files. It should be easier for both of us. Check it out and let me know if you agree.

Is anyone else afraid that Life After Pedro will look frighteningly close to Life After Clemens?

P.S.: After watching him these past few days, I feel confident in answering “no.”

In a desperate attempt to not watch the Sox get swept, I noticed that Cosma said everyone would be writing about the Times Magazine article on President Bush’s faith-based presidency (my cache) — a presidency wherein the man doesn’t listen to anyone who disagrees with him, and seems to genuinely believe that he is God’s vessel. I’d like to point out two passages. First is the one that everyone is (rightly) quoting:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors  . . .  and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

So that’s frightening. The effect on me would probably be worse if the Scotch weren’t still wearing off.

One reasonable question here is, “All right, fine: I like the idea of a benevolent dictatorship. They’re good leaders; they know what they’re doing. I’ll let them lead me by faith.” So then we check out our president’s knowledge of geography (defined as “the study of the world that he could annihilate without much effort”):

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored “road map” for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman — the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress — mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

“I don’t know why you’re talking about Sweden,” Bush said. “They’re the neutral one. They don’t have an army.”

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: “Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They’re the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.” Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. “No, no, it’s Sweden that has no army.”

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.

December of 2002. A year and change after September 11. Shouldn’t the president’s education have gone into overdrive right then?

But never mind that. I’m still trying to escape from the Sox. So onward I go through Cosma’s writings. I found a reference to a book which just sounds fascinating and great: Martin W. Lewis’s The Myth Of Continents, whose thesis seems to be that the system wherein the world is divided into seven continents is a bad historical artifact. That alone wouldn’t be worth all that much (it’s never made sense to me that Europe and Asia are two separate continents), but I gather the book is really carefully and deeply written.

Then there’s a book which may be a strong argument against the “they hate our freedom” school of thought: Yahya Sadowski’s The Myth Of Global Chaos.

Cosma also points to a really delicious Mike Taibbi smackdown of Tom Friedman (my cache), the latter of whom would be in the running for the position of my least-favorite Times columnist if Bill Safire and David Brooks weren’t fighting so very hard for that title. Taibbi gives us

“Grapes of Wrath,” March 12. Perhaps my favorite Friedman piece of all time. He begins with the delicious image of listening to the Battle Hymn of the Republic on his car stereo, and then moves on to his central idea: This war is a "gut call," and his gut "has told [him] four things." First: This is a war of choice. Second: Reconstructing Iraq will be more difficult than we think. Third: We ought to take our time there once we’re in. And fourth: The majority of the world still hopes to avert war.

Unwittingly, Friedman has led his reader on a tour through the four chambers of his stomach. He has literally revealed to the world that he is a cow. It would take a genius on the order of Shakespeare to invent a character capable of writing such a thing.

It’s conceivable that tonight’s ALCS game is the worst game of baseball I’ve seen all year. The Sox deserve to lose.

I mentioned this in an email to Cosma a while back, so now I’ll toss it up here.

The idea is that when you collect a piece of data, you have constrained the set of models that could possibly model the world correctly. Any model of physics will have to account for the fact that objects near the surface of the earth fall at 9.8 m/sec². Collect enough pieces of data, and presumably the class of models that can describe that data gets drastically narrowed.

So I’d like to see a formal model theory of science develop: establish a “universe of models,” then constrain the size of the admissible models. Cosma tells me that Patrick Suppes’ book Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures addresses this. That’s now on the queue.

Karl Rove appeared for two hours today before a grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame case (my cache — I spent valuable minutes coming up with a fake personality to register on their site, and I’d like to save my readers the trouble of doing the same).

In case you’ve forgotten about Plame, she’s the wife of Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador who attacked the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Niger. Plame was a CIA agent, and someone — presumably at the White House — “outed” her, thereby ending her career and possibly jeopardizing the lives of her sources. The claim is that the White House outed her in order to get back at Wilson. Outing a CIA agent is a federal crime. Outing a CIA agent out of crass political motives is beneath contempt. I hope whoever is responsible — and a large part of my heart wishes that it’s Karl Rove — pays dearly for it.

One client of mine has got me really pumped: they understand and embrace the connection between open-source software and democracy. They’re urging me to develop a database for them using open-source technologies like MySQL and PostgreSQL. They see that the open-source movement is fundamentally about creating mini-democracies wherever the opportunity arises. And I’m getting very excited about these small successes.

I remember drooling over OS/2 back when it was a threat to Windows NT. In particular, I drooled over Rexx, which was supposed to be a scripting language that put anything Windowsy to shame. Now apparently IBM has open-sourced Rexx or some variant of it. Sweet. I wonder if they’ll open-source OS/2 itself. It’s never too late to reach your childhood dreams. Next up, I’m going to turn into a princess.

Ebert mentions an “angry letter” from Sean Penn to the creators of the new movie Team America. I googled a bit and found the letter he’s talking about. Damn; here ‘tis:

October 6, 2004

To Trey Parker and Matt Stone,

I remember a cordial hello when you guys were beginning to be famous guys around Hollywood at some party. I remember several times getting a few giggles out of your humor. I remember not being bothered as you traded on my name among others to appear witty, above it all, and likeable to your crowd. I never mind being of service, in satire and silliness.

I do mind when anybody who doesn’t have a child, doesn’t have a child at war, or isn’t or won’t be in harm’s way themselves, is encouraging that there’s “no shame in not voting” “if you don’t know what you’re talking about” (Mr. Stone) without mentioning the shame of not knowing what your talking about, and encouraging people to know. You guys are talented young guys but alas, primarily young guys. It’s all well to joke about me or whomever you choose. Not so well, to encourage irresponsibility that will ultimately lead to the disembowelment, mutilation, exploitation, and death of innocent people throughout the world. The vote matters to them. No one’s ignorance, indcluding a couple of hip cross-dressers, is an excuse.

All best, and a sincere fuck you,

Sean Penn

P.S. Take this as a personal invitation from me to you (you can ask Dennis Miller along for the ride as well) to escort you on a trip, which I took last Christmas. We’ll fly to Amman, Jordan and I’ll ride with you in a (?) 12 hours through the Sunni Triangle into Fallujah and Baghdad and I’ll show you around. When we return, make all the fun you want.

I’ve not read any C.S. Lewis. I’m told I should. Any recommendations for specific books?

If anyone’s been using the search bar on the right and found it fairly useless, it should work better now: by default, it’s configured to join search terms with ‘OR’ rather than ‘AND’. Now I’ve set it to use ‘AND,’ which I think will make it much more useful. (Thanks to Fletcher Penney for writing the ‘find’ plugin to begin with.)

Just a quick plug: if you’re not using spamassassin, you really should be. I just realized today that I’ve not gotten a false positive (message labeled as spam when it’s actually ham) in months, and that the rate of false negatives (spam slipping through to my inbox) is quite low also: I get perhaps two spams a day in my inbox, versus about 30 that go immediately into my spam folder. So the rate of false negatives is something like 6%. That’s not so bad.

Spamassassin is reason #1 why I think legislative approaches to the spam problem are misplaced. Greylisting also seems promising; a friend is trying it out, but I’ve not heard from him in a while about how it’s going. In any case, there are obviously free tools that will neutralize the spam problem in a decentralized way. So why do we need a centralized government to try to fix it?

Expect nasty dirty tricks from Karl Rove and company in the remaining 19 or so days until the election. I’ve not read it yet, but I’ll link an article from the Atlantic about his sliminess (my cache). Kevin Drum links to it and includes this bit about Mark Kennedy, a Democratic judge in Alabama who went up against Rove in 1994:

Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children . . . .At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove’s signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.

Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. “We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on.  . . . “What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”

P.S.: Having finished the article, its penultimate paragraph gives me a little shiver:

If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get nastier in the closing weeks, and without anyone’s quite registering it, Rove will be right back in his element. He seems to understand — indeed, to count on — the media’s unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove’s skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media’s unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

(Which reminds me that someone must have named a tattoo parlor Tats For Your  . . .  never mind.)

You read a link on Slashdot professing that the “tit for tat” strategy in the Prisoner’s Dilemma Challenge has been beaten. So you send this to an Internet-friend of yours who is just crazy-smart. What do you get back? A long and fascinating explanation of why this really isn’t such an interesting result after all.

I love the Internet. I’d like to reiterate that Cass Sunstein’s “echo chamber” story about the evolution of the Internet is nowhere near the only model of what might actually happen on the Net. One other possibility is that a great many of the unwashed, such as myself, will find ourselves roundly and quickly corrected.

Here’s a question I just posed to my philosopher friend Josh. I toss it out to the rest of the world also, because I’m interested.

Suppose that some day we develop true AI — it passes not only the Turing Test, but any other test we throw at it: the machine makes love in a way that’s indistinguishable from a human, feels emotion, etc., etc. It’s human by any standards.

Now we know the complete workings of the mind, or of something indistinguishable from the mind. At the very least, I think we can agree that this machine has a mind if and only if any other human has a mind. How do I know that you, or my parents, have a mind? It’s presumably because you’ve passed an ‘intuitive Turing test’ that I give you: I look at your actions and I say to myself, “This person is not a robot. His or her thought processes are similar to my own.” So let’s say that this AI passes the intuitive Turing test.

So now we have at least a model of the human mind before us — a working model that does as much for the human mind as Newton or Einstein did for physics.

The question: will there still need to be a philosophy of mind at that point? If so, what will it do?

Purely hypothetical. Answer at your leisure.