Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

If someone can explain to me how the Latin word for “witness” came to mean “sperm storage device”, I will be pleased and impressed.

Likewise, it would appear that “testicle” means something like “little witness” in the original Latin.

(To “testify” means literally “to show off one’s testicles.”)

P.S. (2 March 2006): A reader writes in with this:

It seems to me this whole affair is related to the biblical custom of putting one’s hand next to the groin when swearing or taking an oath, as one would do when testifying.

For example:

Genesis 24:9

So the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master, and swore to him concerning this matter.

Genesis 47

29 And the time drew near for Israel to die. And he called his son Joseph and said to him, Now if I have found favor in your eyes, please put your hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me. Please do not bury me in Egypt, 30 but let me lie with my fathers. You shall carry me out of Egypt and bury me in their burial place. And he said, I will do as you have said. 31 And he said, Swear to me. And he swore to him.

My friend Jamie has been writing a lot recently about his efforts to make cheese, and they’re (the writings are) just goddamn mouthwatering. Today’s entry about tasting raw milk for the first time is spectacular. Or maybe it only is if you’re a big cheesehead (a cheesehead, not a cheesehead).

Is there a good P2P instant-messaging client? Instead of talking to one another through a centralized server, you’d talk with your friends directly: your messages go directly to their computers. As it is, when you send a message through AIM, for instance, it goes to the AIM server and then back out to the recipient’s computer. This is good for privacy in one sense, because the person you’re talking to doesn’t know where you’re located; if they used a P2P IM client, their computer would have to know your current IP address (or at least a proxy’s IP) before it could talk to you. On the flip side, all your messages are going through the server, so the server could very well listen in on your communications.

Such a service couldn’t be 100% P2P, because you need some way to work around firewalls. The difficulty is that a lot of companies forbid inbound connections, but allow outbound ones. Groove solved this problem by setting up external “relay servers”: your client polls the relay every now and again to see whether there are any messages waiting for you; if there are, your client goes out and gets them. Likewise, if someone wants to start an IM chat with you, I presume (though I don’t remember if it’s true) that the remote client tells the relay server, which queues a message invitation for you, which you get the next time you poll the relay.

Groove uses relay servers for a lot more than we’d need here. All we’d need this version of a relay to do is tell you when someone else wants to chat and whether they’re online, then get out of the way. The relay would be just like Napster, actually: the server tells you what’s available, and you download the file directly from the other person’s machine.

I can see a — potentially clever, but not necessarily very useful — version of this that would be even more peery. You sign on to your P2P IM client and send messages to all your friends who are currently online, using (for instance) the last known IP address you had for them. If they’re available at that last known address, you ask them to provide you with the online status — if they know that status — of every other person in your network; this takes some more burden off the server. Only if your friend is not online at his last known address do you then consult the server to get his current IP.

It’s an idea, anyway. I wonder whether any part of this has been implemented outside of Groove.

ESPN headline: “Schilling will try to regroup as Red Sox host Devil Rays.”

Can a single person actually regroup? I understand the implied meaning — namely something like, “to refocus one’s efforts” — but it’s just a strange usage.

I sent a client a link to a graphic on this site, and along with the client’s request for that graphic I got two other requests:

hostname — – [30/Aug/2005:13:12:31 -0400] “GET /vtibin/owssvr.dll?UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=5606&STRMVER=4&CAPREQ=0 HTTP/1.0” 404 213 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; DigExt; Q312461)”

hostname — – [30/Aug/2005:13:12:36 -0400] “GET /MSOffice/cltreq.asp?UL=1&ACT=4&BUILD=5606&STRMVER=4&CAPREQ=0 HTTP/1.0” 200 229 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; DigExt; Q312461)”

Should I be concerned that the client’s browser has been taken over by viruses of some sort, or is this a fairly standard request?

(Well, I know it’s not standard: requests for the vtibin directory are very infrequent in my access logs, as it turns out.)

I’ve been staying away from The Republican War on Science, because the title makes it sound like another get-liberals-riled-up kind of book without any practical payoff. However, today’s Crooked Timber review of it casts it in a whole different light, and I’m now quite eager to check it out. Food Politics also goes on the list; Jessamyn, I believe, also recommended it to me a while back, and Jason Smith probably did too. These are all smart folks who know their stuff, so I should listen to them.

I am intrigued. It’s Netflix, only where you trade DVDs with others in your network.

Language, the brain, genes, DNA, and the universe all seem to be composed of finitely many types of object, combined in infinitely many ways. Is that just a statistical fluke, or is there something deeper going on? Why aren’t genes encoded as continuous objects? Why aren’t there infinitely many atomic elements? Why do neurons seem to follow the all-or-none law? Why don’t humans encode their ideas in continuous waveforms rather than discrete symbols?

In recent days I’ve been kicking around something that Adam Rosi-Kessel said years ago but doesn’t remember saying. He, my friend Dave and I were sitting around at Muddy Waters — possibly the world’s best coffeeshop, in Burlington, Vermont — and Dave responded to something that Adam said with, “But that would violate natural selection!” Maybe, for the sake of illustration, Adam was saying that we should help the sick.

Adam’s response was the right one: natural selection is a description of how nature works; it doesn’t tell us how we ought to behave. It may be the case that our “purpose” in life is to pass along our genes to the most people possible. But whether or not that’s true, we are quite free to do otherwise. Monks who spend their lives celibate in sober contemplation have not violated some deep natural law; they have merely stopped the tree of descendants at themselves. They are probably also fighting against a very deep urge to mate, because our ancestors were all — from the beginning of time until now — good at mating, and probably had a higher-than-normal predisposition to do so. But in cutting off their descendants, they have not committed a moral wrong.

Likewise, by helping out the poor, enfeebled, and elderly; by buying glasses for those with atrocious eyesight; by picking up starving cats off the street; and in a million other ways besides, we are modifying natural selection in the narrow way it’s normally construed. We are stopping “survival of the fittest” (which, in that phrasing, is almost a tautology: the fittest are defined as those who have the greatest number of descendants). But who cares?

And if the argument is that we all should care, because supporting those with biological infirmities weakens our species as a whole, I think it’s sufficient to note that we are all the result of narrow natural selection failing to work. If you’ve ever overcome a bad infection through the use of antibiotics; if you’ve ever avoided starving to death because of unemployment insurance; if your wearing glasses has saved you from a dozen car accidents; if you don’t have to leave your town in the summer because your city has kept public sanitation under control; then you have avoided — to a greater or lesser degree — one-on-one contact with nature through human efforts. You are no longer a product of “survival of the fittest,” narrowly construed. If you manage to reproduce, it will be because of various human interventions that redefine what makes a person reproductively successful.

So then the reasons why people reproduce change. Maybe the poor reproduce more, which upsets social Darwinists. Natural selection is still active; it holds no matter what the standard is by which people choose mates. It gets it precisely backwards to then assert that it is violating the natural order for “unsuitable” people to mate. The natural order is whatever happens to exist at the time; natural selection adapts quite well to the world as it is.

(Any misrepresentations of Adam’s views are my fault. Any bad clothing choices are Adam’s fault.)

The New York Times has an article today on the spat between statistics-minded baseball managers and those that aren’t statistical. It combines the he-said/she-said bickering that makes modern journalism so lovely with a complete avoidance of the statistics that are central to the whole issue.

The basic questions include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Does the Moneyball school (and incidentally, all of this predates Lewis’s book by at least a few years; Lewis was reporting on a pre-existing phenomenon) accurately predict the number of runs scored and allowed by a given team?

2. Does the same school predict games won and lost?

3. Does increased used of statistics tend to make teams win more, less, or neither?

The article provides no tools to allow the reader to answer these questions, other than the assertions of various people contradicting one another. Perhaps that’s because they can’t assume that their readers have taken a stats class. So they have to resort to talking about a few cases, without any indication of whether those cases reveal a larger pattern.

It makes me sad to imagine that Bill Mueller might not be with the Sox next season. Put Youkilis in at first, Mueller in at third, kick out Millar (I wouldn’t have thought of this had Kieran Chapman not mentioned the possibility; it makes good sense), and everyone’s happy. Mueller makes a million less per year than Millar, so financially it’s some kind of win. And Youkilis appears to make the league minimum, or close to it. (P.S.: the league minimum is $316,000, apparently, and Youkilus makes $323,125.)

I’m sure Theo Epstein knows his job better than I do, but I think Mueller may be my favorite Sox player, and I can’t imagine seeing anyone else at third base. I guess I’m just sentimental.

Globe article below.

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I’ve realized recently that I have almost no biological knowledge. My recent spate of books by Dennett, Dawkins and others is refreshing, and I’m hoping to start digging more deeply into the actual math; my favorite meme in science, I think, is “That’s a great story, but where’s the math?”

(Somehow I made it through four years of fairly decent statistics at CMU without learning that R.A. Fisher was most famously a biologist. Yes, I had heard about his use of controlled experiments for agricultural studies, and I knew about the great strides that he made in devising statistical methods for small samples, but I never knew that he was a cofounder of the Darwinian-Mendelian synthesis.)

So here’s where I’ll write down questions that I hope to answer as I read more.

1. Why do human females have the fertility period they do? I.e., why shouldn’t we be able to have kids until just a few years before our deaths? Presumably the answer is mostly that children can’t survive long on their own, and that our ancestral mothers didn’t live as long as we did. The first reason will lead to a maximum childbearing age that’s some small number of years earlier than the average age of death (or something close to that). But over time, this would seem to give an advantage to genes that allow children to survive on their own at an earlier age.

2. At what equilibrium survival age would such a “child survival gene” settle?

3. Get the arguments against species selection — and any selection, in general, other than gene selection — clear in my head.

4. How do you define the X chromosome if it’s not always true that XY is male and XX is female? Is it just that one chromosome looks like the letter X and the other looks like a Y?

5. Are there any good models of the number of offspring that animals choose to have? Obviously it depends on the probability that they’ll survive to reproductive age, which would seem to fall off with the number of offspring that a given parent chooses to have. So it seems like the optimal number is either 1, or one every nine months. (Well, not really, but I’m just curious what the models predict.)

6. Page 121 of The Red Queen asserts that X-bearing sperm contains 3.5 percent more DNA than Y-bearing sperm? Why is that?

7. Why do some animals die right after mating? (I guess praying mantises are the quickest example that comes to mind.) Why not stay alive longer and spread more progeny?

If anyone out there has access to a particular article from Nature and would like to send me a copy, that would be swell.

Thanks much.

I wonder whether the following statement is true: “We can explain much of Intelligent Design’s traction within the American populace by studying the spread of Thomas Kuhn’s ideas, specifically the thesis that science proceeds by discrete revolutions separated by periods of ‘normal science,’ and the belief that over time science moves no closer to the truth.”

P.S.: I suppose this is related to Adam Rosi-Kessel’s comments on Bruno Latour. Or rather, it’s related to what Latour said.

Good little op-ed by Dan Dennett in today’s Times. Worth the read. I include it below.

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I know nothing about SIP, but when I’m less bleary-eyed from finishing Pale Fire I will read all about it. Looks like a lot of useful information in there.

A friend informs me that she took a Russian-lit class from a real live Russian person in college, and that the name “Nabokov” is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable. I had no idea. All these years I’ve put the stress on the first syllable. No wonder I’ve been shunned from polite society. That and the compulsive public masturbation.

P.S.: I’m in the middle of reading Na-BOH-kuff’s book Pale Fire, and I’m on my guard in a way that basically only Nabokov has the power to cause. I get the sense that he’s constantly playing with his readers, inviting them to take the easy route into his writings when the tough route is by far the more rewarding. Pale Fire is particularly tricky in this way, since the narrator is highly unreliable.

I’m curious how this will turn out. I need to go at Posner’s Antitrust Law again, this time with the music-industry cartel in mind. With an industry that’s that small, the companies don’t need to explicitly collude to lead to monopoly pricing: something like six companies control most of the world’s commercial music, so it’s not hard for one to signal the others that a price increase is in the offing — or, relatedly, that it’s time to boycott Apple. BMG does it, and the others follow its lead.

Of course the standard Econ 101 objection applies: it doesn’t seem like a coordinated (or semi-coordinated) boycott of Apple could work for long here. If all the record companies decided to cut Apple off, any one of them could make a pile of money by defecting and resuming its sales to Apple. But then, all the record companies must be aware of precisely how the balance of bargaining power works out: if they all boycott Apple, how long can Apple hold out before its iPod sales decline dangerously? And how long before customers start turning to the cheapest available substitutes for the iTunes Music Store — namely, peer-to-peer filesharing services? I suspect all the inputs to this equation are well-known. Both the recording industry and Apple are probably fairly certain of who will win when it’s all over. Or so I would guess.

The whole story is quite interesting, so I’ve included it below.

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James Grimmelmann links (via his del.icio.us feed) to a fascinating story about bots being used in online poker rooms. Definitely worth the read. I’ve not decided what I think about the ethics of this, in large part because I don’t really care about online poker. But this statement does seem rather convincing:

Bornert had no ethical qualms about creating a poker bot. The way he saw it, the poker sites were duping people into believing that a game of hold ‘em online was as safe and secure as one at any casino in Vegas. “The reality is that the game changed the moment it moved to the Internet,” Bornert says. Bots and bot-aided collusion were inevitable.

I have a game-theoretic question: suppose online poker rooms were flooded with bots, such that they constituted all — or at least a sizable portion — of the players there. What equilibrium does the game settle at, if any? Without knowing much at all about poker, or online poker, or these bots, I assume they succeed by keeping track of which hands other players might have. If everyone has the same information and is possibly playing the same strategies, where does that leave us?

The Sox have released Bellhorn. I’ve never particularly liked him, but somehow it was supposed to be his saving grace that he walked a lot. Now we have Graffanino at second; he hits well, he’s a good second baseman, and — I confess an irrational bit here — he’s not a punk like Bellhorn. Good riddance.

P.S.: And now Bellhorn is a Yankee? Ha! That’s funny. It will be funny just to see him cleanly shaved.

I don’t mean to pick on the guy, honestly. I hope he has a successful baseball career. I just think the Sox could do better.