Category: crazy ideas

The Talkback Quality Paradox

Ever since Web news sites and forums made it possible for the random readers to post talkbacks, I have been noticing the abysmal quality and thought which went into several of the talkbacks.

Given that most of those talkbackists have the right to vote and given that they demonstrated their lack of wisdom, the question is: how do democracies get managed in a more or less reasonable way?

Seems that good democracies have filters between the random opinions at whim and actual action. First of all, you must care enough about your opinion to discuss it with your relatives and friends, trying to win them over to your point of view. Several big mouths seem just not to care about their own utterances.

Then, as you argue with your closest and dearest ones, their objections get you to check and polish your idea. Blatantly silly ideas fall on the side at this time.

Finally, to actually lobby in support of your idea, you need funds. To have funds you need to be successful in business or persuade people, who have been successful in making money. Since it requires rationality in one’s brain to make money in our world, this is yet another filter, which makes it difficult for crackpots to get their agenda across.

We can improve the process further by refusing to elect people to political positions, unless they have proven that they know to bring an idea to fruition, to manage an operation, to explain why their ideas are sound. This is important especially in small non-profit organizations, in which the membership elect the governing bodies. We also should be less serious about people, who did not prove themselves to be doers rather than big-mouths.

The dilemma of using illegally-obtained information

discusses in Illegally obtained information the problem and proposes a solution to the problem.

In the first Dirty Harry movie and in real life in Israel, the problem is one of preventing a crime which is happening right now or going to happen soon. In Israel, it is called “the ticking bomb” dilemma. What do you do if you know that a terrorist put a ticking bomb somewhere, which will kill several people when it explodes; or when you know that a suicide bomber is on his way and you must stop him before he explodes bringing several lives down with his own life?

In my opinion, resolution of the dilemma begins with identification of possible ways for authorities to abuse the system and harass innocent civilians. After all, the original motivation for the complicated and convoluted procedures of the court systems all around the world, and to the principle of suppression of illegally-obtained information, is to prevent framing up innocent people, who ran afoul (or otherwise are not conducive to the interests) of people in power.

Uncertainty of truth of mathematical proofs

According to the article Mathematical proofs getting harder to verify, it is now very difficult and sometimes impossible to be certain about the correctness of mathematical proofs.

I can envision the rise of the special profession of mathematical patching. It would work as follows.

  1. A fundamental theorem is proved, but its proof is difficult to verify.
  2. A lot of mathematics is being based upon that theorem.
  3. Another fundamental theorem is proven and receives similar honorable status in mathematics.
  4. A contradiction is found, which means that both theorems cannot be both true.
  5. In order to save the rest of mathematics, the theorems are patched.

Patching, in this context, means adding qualifications to the theorems, so that fully-qualified versions of the theorems do not contradict each other. The qualifications will be based upon the actual way the theorems are used in subsequent mathematical development, which is normally less than the full generality of the theorem.

Do the rulers of the "Free World" secretly subsidize terror organizations?

As a way to induce citizens to submit themselves to 1984-style telescreens, do our dear elected leaders cut police budgets and secretly finance terror organizations so that we’ll be persuaded to allow surveillance cameras to be installed at our homes?
Houston Police Chief Wants Surveillance Cameras In Private Homes

What human rights should convicted murderers have?

The present system, which grants convicted murderers like Yigal Amir some rights, looks to me like broken one. In principle, the proper punishment for murderers (especially those, who deny you your franchise right by voting for you by means of a pistol rather than by ballot) is death. However, in practice they should be sentenced to life term. This is because of the possibility that the convicted person was framed – a possibility which is too real when police forces do not have adequate budgets or professionalism.

This is in contrast to people, who committed less serious crimes and do not deserve to be executed because of those crimes. While they are imprisoned, they are entitled to some rights, which will allow them to return to society in more or less sane frame of mind and become contributing members of society.

What rights should convicted and imprisoned murderers have?

My position is that they should be granted the right to run their own investigations and evidence collection, which can lead to their exoneration. They should have unlimited access to lawyers and to law libraries. They should have access to forensic textbooks and other sources of information. After all, the reason they were kept alive is to allow for the possibility that they were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. Except for the right to collect evidence of their innocence and appeal their conviction, they should have no rights.

This applies, in principle, even to Yigal Amir. This covers the hypothetical case, in which he was framed AND hypnotized (brainwashed) to believe that Itzhak Rabin had to be murdered.

A Nightmare

I had a nightmare, which leads to a puzzle.

In my nightmare, I parked my car in a parking lot and went to carry out my errands. As I returned, a woman came in her car and parked her car in the empty parking space next to my car, got out and started talking in agitated way on her cellphone. She parked her car in such a way that I could not get my car out without rubbing her car and leaving scratches on both cars. So I needed her to come back to the car, and re-park it in a better position.

In my nightmare (as in real life) I am deaf so I had no idea what she was talking about and did not know if it is a real emergency or just extreme Blond inconvenience. I tapped her shoulder and started asking her to re-park her car. She pushed me aside and continued talking into her cellphone. I needed to get out urgently and could not afford to wait 20 minutes until she finishes her personal business. Nevertheless I waited 5 minutes just in case she really has a problem.

As I was pondering what to do now, I woke up.

Now, children, what courses of action were open to me?

  1. Violate her personal space by taking her cellphone from her until she moves her car to let me out.
  2. Be aggressive and scratch both of our cars.
  3. Honk my car’s horn (after having entered it from the right front door).
  4. Visually bother her by flashing or pissing in front of her.
  5. Write down her car’s license plate number and take pictures of her car and her face using my camera-cellphone.
  6. Bottle up my annoyance and take a cab to my destination and try not to feel like schmuck (“frayer”) afterwards.
  7. Look for the parking lot’s guard and lodge a complaint with him.
  8. Start with (5), continue with (3) and then (2).

What is the word length of the computer that the IRS use for Bill Gates' taxes?

According to Microsoft founder too rich for tax computer to handle, IRS need to use a special computer to store and manage Bill Gates’ tax return.

Given that Bill Gates’ fortune is now $47×109, how many bits are needed to represent it?
Dollars: 47×109 = 0xAF16B1600 i.e. 36 bits (not including the sign bit).
Cents: 47×1011 = 0x4464DD49800 i.e. 43 bits (not including the sign bit).

Maximum fortune which can be represented in 31 bits (signed) and 32 bits (unsigned):
231-1 cents: $21,474,836.47 or $21 million
232-1 cents: $42,949,672.95 or $42 million

If only dollars are represented, then billionaires can be accommodated ($2,147 millions in 31 bits, $4,295 millions in 32 bits).
Thus, if IRS ignore cents, they need the special computer to manage tax returns of several of the billionaires having tax relationships with USA. So Bill Gates probably is not the only one, whose taxes require the IRS to use a special computer.

What is the biggest enemy of innovation? Not what you think!

The January 2006 issue of the magazine TheMarker features innovation as a special topic. One of the articles in the issue was a roundtable discussion with six innovation managers. One of the questions, which they were asked to answer, is: What is the biggest enemy of innovation?

They gave the conventional answers – flood of innovations, failure to integrate with other business functions, failure to share intra-organizational knowledge, insufficient management support, clinging to status quo, culture of punishment for making mistakes, etc.

No one of them gave the following answer:
The biggest enemy of innovation is the tsunami of bad ideas.

Every manager or venture capitalist, who opens up to new ideas, is familiar with the deluge of crackpots with hare-brained ideas, good ideas which currently have fatal flaws, nags, single-minded evangelists of a single idea – but a mediocre idea, etc.

Some ideas require a lot of effort to evaluate them and finally reject them, only to be confronted again with them, brought by another crackpot, who is repeating history. Others get implemented and when they fail, they cause a loss, burnout and depletion of the funds available for new ideas. And the worst – all those nags. Yuk!

Even the most open-minded manager or VC eventually gets burned out after having been subjected to the first 100 nags with 200 mediocre ideas. On the other hand, people, whose ideas have been rejected several times, are not encouraged to bring more ideas. The next idea, which may turn out to be The Next Big Thing, suffers from the previous bad ideas.

At the risk of bringing upon myself a deluge of crackpot ideas, I am asking for ideas how to avoid the dilemma of not missing a good idea on one hand, and avoiding time, attention, discouragement and expenses associated with rejection of thousands of bad ideas on the other hand.

Mort, Elvis and Einstein – don't forget also Busy Shula and Maxwell!

Sriram Krishnan’s famous “Lisp is sin” article (shredded to tears in reddit.com) was mentioned in Lambda the Ultimate. In this article, I met for the first time the Mort, Elvis and Einstein trio.

While I did not know them at the time, the concept evoked in me painful memories. You see, nine years ago I worked on a project, which needed a sophisticated control for navigating through an hierarchical decomposition of a widget (tree control, in other words). This control was critical for the project’s ultimate success, so we spent a lot of time trying few versions and polishing it. As the project progressed, we used the control in few places in the software. Since each place had slightly different requirements from the control, I developed it as a C++ class with virtual functions. Each client of the class inherited from it and overrode some functions.

The design was very beautiful, sophisticated and a source of pride for me.

Eventually I finished my work on the project and phased out of it. The project entered a maintenance and enhancements phase. For this phase, other software developers were hired. Few years later I met the project leader and asked him how things are going.

He had me floored by telling me that his programmers had to re-implement the tree control class. The original design was too complicated for them to understand it!

Every time I feel bad about the absence of LISP and its ilk in mundane software development jobs, I recall the above painful anecdote.

Now that I know about Mort, Elvis and Einstein, I can see that my beautiful tree control was Einstein-level work, requiring Einstein types to understand it, apply and extend it. However, the maintenance programmers, who followed me, were Mort types. Groan!

Definitions of the trio can be found in:

I have an issue with Microsoft’s definition. They define Mort as a VB programmer, Elvis as C# programmer and Einstein as C++ programmer. I feel that this is too narrow spectrum of programmers.

I would like to add to the spectrum a persona to the side of Mort. This persona, called Busy Shula, is a courteous and busy secretary. She is very good at her main work. She just is not trained to program computers. She fiddles with configuration files to optimize the way her PC is facilitating her work flow. Some applications have configuration files which are really programs (like Tcl or Emacs’ elisp). So she sometimes gets exposed to programming concepts.

On the other side, there is Maxwell. He is a programmer, for whom C++ is not expressive enough. He devours the special assembly languages used by microprogrammed processors in the morning, and groks the most convoluted LISP, Haskell and O’Caml concepts at night. He also hold on his own when discussing parallel programming and even hardware design issues. He invents new programming languages and even new processors.

I believe that the best way to accommodate all those personas (Busy Shula, Mort, Elvis, Einstein and Maxwell) is to design a powerful library system for a powerful computer language (Scheme comes to my mind as a candidate). The library will feature high-level abstractions, which are convenient for the Morts and Elvises. The Einsteins and Maxwells will be able to look under the hood, rewire, and extend as necessary.

If a Mort or an Elvis gets bogged down with a problem implementing a new feature, he needs to have an Einstein on call to help him with the difficult parts of his work.

On the other hand, the Einsteins and Maxwells would not be bogged down with the tiny UI tweaks and polishes which differentiate among amateurish&irritating UI look and feel and professional&pleasant one.

Busy Shula also needs to have a Mort around to help her whenever configuration work is so extensive to constitute real programming.

The Reverse Engineer

The first cryptic E-mail message looked like a spam. I deleted it. The second cryptic E-mail message still looked like a spam. The third message came from Lysdon, whom I once employed as an information retrieval specialist in one of my projects. He asked me to reply to the E-mail messages from the Halutza UFO Institute.

Three days, a nice bank deposit of advance fee, a shower and change of clothes later, I saw the UFO in an underground hall in the Halutza UFO Institute. Seldon, the Chief Scientist of the Institute, explained to me that their scientists found few dark slabs, which have time-varying regular structure suggesting that they are storage devices. They also found that one of the slabs is undergoing changes all the time, and correlated some of those changes with changes in lighting and noise levels in the hall.

They made an experiment of trying to read the slabs and transfer the read data to the Institute’s computers. Reading all the slabs yielded about 10TB information, which was reduced to 30GB after lossless compression.

My assignment was to decipher the information and figure out what does the software embodied by the information do.

(To be continued sometime in one of the potential future timelines. Meanwhile I want to continue to read Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software!)