Someone on CNN called me a 'Dirty Jew'
Imagine that Iran decided to invade Mexico in the face of near universal international condemnation, because it claimed Mexico had weapons that it turned out it didn't. And that it then waged war for several years, de-stabilising the American continent and causing Mexicans to stream across the border into America.
Imagine that Iran had the audacity to setup a Pensicola prison, actually in America but controlled by Iran. Here they could put people that they captured and not have them subject to the Geneva Convention or domestic law. Then imagine that Iran had its navy patrolling the area and inspecting fishing boats, just off the coast of Texas.
Imagine the Americans decided the Iranians were messing too near their border, like with the Russians and Cuba, and captured several Iranian seamen and showed them on TV looking unharmed physically and possibly much better off than the Pensacola detainees, who didn't get many TV crew visits.
Would there be justifiable public outrage at the actions of America, or would the actions of Iran help mitigate it?
That the actions of Iran are benign is not an issue - its currently a dodgy place, with an even more dodgy leader. Iran, however is a place whose particular dodgy niche has been shaped in a large part by the actions of other nations, since the UK/USA instigated coup that installed the Shah (organized by my former roommate's father, by unhappy co-incidence).
Iran has the world's youngest population who have previously shown that they were ready to embrace the modern world. As a somewhat trivial illustration, Iranian's were the third largest nation to use Google's social network service. The problem is that opinion is changing among young Muslims world-wide, and that opinion is shaped not so much by the mullahs as the actions of god fearing ideological leaders of the West, like Tony Blair.
The current capture of UK soldiers is a political game that politicians like Blair are not really surprised about, but have to display surprised disgust and steadfastness while the mandarins furiously paddle the diplomatic channels underneath.
Some things are deemed unspeakable, like challenging the automatic loyalty to people who perpetrate violence because of which side of an imaginary geographic line they were born. Some other things are deemed absolutely swell in any circumstance and some things are supposed to be the right thing, always, but actually aren't. The last category includes the notion that if a ship goes down, women and children should get the first places on the lifeboats. This rule applies unless the women and children are from another country and the men are soldiers from your own.
Last night on CNN, various presenters could hardly suppress their excitement or, more accurately, their schadenfreude. As I paddled away my surplus of food at the gym, a man on TV asked me, in a very grave and serious voice, to pray for the safe return of the British hostages. But this man was not sad, he was happy, and he used the plight of unharmed, interned troops as emotional currency to buy support for violence that is tearing women and children to pieces. The lifeboats weren't for them, but for 'our troops', but more worryingly they weren't 'our troops' at all but 'our allies' troops'. The emotional currency he was spending was not his own money but mine, apparently - UK money. By showing his support for what he thought I should be supporting, he wanted to spend it. On the same show, someone suggested that Europe was a dying continent that would be Islamic by 2050.
Johnathan Miller once said that he wasn't really Jewish, but if anyone called him a 'Dirty Jew', well then he would proudly say - Yes I am. I don't normally care about where I'm from, there are many things I prefer about America and many things I don't like about Britain and Europe. But last night on CNN someone called me a Dirty Jew, and then wanted to spend my emotional cash.
Yes I am and no you can't.
I hold you partly responsible for the capture, not the release of British soldiers, but I'm actually even more concerned about the women and children whose places in the lifeboats are being stolen by the crew.
Another idea is deemed unspeakable. The idea that America's army is possibly not that good, having not won a major war for half a century. This is not a derogatory statement, but a sign of a civilised nation. It is easier to persuade a soldier to volunteer to strap dynamite to his chest and blow himself to bits in a more barbaric place than America, and how do you compete with that?
Having armies that are not very good has lots of precedent. Rome, who survived on military aggression solved this by, quite literally, hiring Barbarians. Rather like the Imperial British, however, who had an army that Napoleon used to joke about (admittedly before a rare away-win at Waterloo), America has something else. The UK had a good navy and the Americans have an unbeatable Air Force.
Unfortunately, the British had to fight a land war in World War I and it created the Iranian style, 'dodgy niche' that caused another war, World War II. Millions of people died and most people did not see it coming. Those who did see it coming thought it could be avoided, because the German Kaiser called Queen Victoria, 'granny' and Bismark had once considered enlisting in the British army.
I repeat, Millions of people died, a 911 every day for several years. This time we can see it coming and Bush doesn't call the Ayatollah Khamenei 'grandaddy'. America is sleepwalking into a region wide conflict that will require an army of cannon fodder which will inevitably end in the slaughter of countless innocent people.
My parents' generation did something purposeful and peaceful with their youthful energy and enthusiasm, in the 60s, . Depressingly, the last anti-war march in New York seemed to comprise largely of people of that generation, with less energy now but the same purpose. And its not just the ageing hippies of that are warning us. Last week The Economist magazine, hardly a hotbed of radicalism, inched one step further away from its original pro Iraq war stance to talk about the "almost criminal negligence of Mr Bush's administration". All that needs to happen for their complete conversion is the removal of the word 'almost'.
As the slow stream of gray haired anti-war revolutionaries filed past the glitzy Soho fashion stores, my generation, generation apathetic, was busy shopping. So it seems appropriate that all a Generation Apathetic protester can do is write a long, wordy blog post that won't be read because nobody reads more than three lines.
Its pretty amazing when you come accross something you actually know a little about, how you discover how naive a supposedly slick PR machine is.
Today Bush cited 'Iraq the Model' as an example of success in Iraq - because there are bloggers you see.
Some time ago I added 20 or so Iraqi Bloggers to my RSS reader. About a third of them have since fled the country, a third have disappeared and the remainder are a woeful tale of human misery and sufffering, leaving a sample of 1 - Iraq the Model.
In fact Iraq the Model is the potential online equivalent of 'Mission Accomplished', something championed too soon that could go the other way. Carl Rove is not so much a genius (an incumbant Republican sock puppet would have won after 911) but a rather out of touch 'spinster'.
Bush Cites Upbeat Bloggers From Baghdad
Which one of these two buildings was built by slaves?
The one built 4000 years later.
Apple TV at one tenth of the cost and 90% of the functionality:
A long cable.
Adam Curtis' (The Power of Nightmares) latest documentary is currently being shown in the UK. It traces libertarianism to the Cold War, number theory and the rise of the self.
The title refers to a version of the prisoners' dilemma developed by John Nash who is interviewed in the documentary and was the inpiration behind Ron Howard's clawing 'A Beautiful Mind'.
Part 1 is below, the remainder of the series hasn't yet aired.
Tit for Tat is widely acknowledged as being the most successful strategy in game theory, that this is true is important since it directly affects big things - like foreign policy.
It seem clear that human beings have a capacity to harbour grudges over generations, and that these grudges tend to stem from retribution being aimed at the wrong person, or an innocent person who is a member of a perceived group through no choice of his or her own. This creates positive feedback, such that any person who has been a victim of mis-applied retribution is likely to feel injustice and seek revenge, which can also be mis-applied ad infinitum.
Tit for Tat models that I have seen imply perfect information flow, whereas the real world case of in-group/out-group mentality and grudges could be simply modelled by adding noise to the system.
I believe it would be simple to model this and to test whether it has any impact on the assumption that Tit for Tat is universally successful.
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A very simple game theory model is based upon a game where two subjects are told some rules of co-operation and play multiple rounds of a game where there is a proportional reward for their choice to either Defect or Co-operate during each round.
This game can be seen at the 10th minute of the Documentary 'Nice Guys Finish First', here.
The rewards are based upon a points system: 3 points each for mutual co-operation, 2 points each for mutual defection and 4 points for the defector and one for the co-operator, where they don't mutually agree to co-operate or defect.
This points system implies a benefit for the system as a whole, for mutual co-operation. (i.e. 6 points total vs. 5 or 4 for defections).
Matrix for two player (defect, co-operate)
-- C -- D --
C 3/3 1/4
D 4/1 2/2
This situation tends to lead to a Tit for Tat strategy for 2 players, over multiple rounds.
[Interestingly, it could be tied to the work expended in gaining a reward (energy burned to hunt vas energy gained from meat etc.) to create a thermodynamic model, and more generally an information theory model.]
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Experiment one
Introduce noise into the system with the intention of modeling real world situations where information flow is rarely perfect.
Extend the original game to include 'noise', i.e. where player A or B are given the reward as if their choices had been different, but still consistent with the rules governing their own choice (i.e. if they can't see the other players rewards, it is impossible to tell that there is any 'noise' in the system.). For example choosing to mutually co-operate means that instead of being a 3 points each player game, it is either a 1 point/3 point (player A imagines this as 1 point/ 4 point) or 3 point 3 point game.
Plot the players strategies relative to different values between 0 and 1 for the noise probability, to see if there are any 'phase changes'.
Experiment two
introduce a third player, where the noise, instead of being a background noise is noise from another player. i.e. sometimes the rewards/punishment are given to the wrong people via swapping. This is intended to mimick the real world situation where stereo-typing means that defection from one person is imagined to come from another leading to a grudge which when applied creates a feeling of injustice, and therefore incentive for retribution.
Setup:
3 players, each player plays the other two simultaneously.
The number of points that an oponent gets must be hidden (i.e. you can imply from your reward, what the other player has done).
A fuzzyness variable can be set to make a random number of games (a game is a single co-operate/defect choice) have their 'circuit switched', i.e. as player A, your reward for game A/B is actually based on game A/C without you knowing it.
My hunch is that you need to introduce a degree of altruism (i.e. co-operating after your opponent defects) to compensate for mistaken communication, and that the value of this altruism variable is non-linear.
Perhaps there is a critical upper and lower threshold where its effectiveness works, this being the range of values where tit for tat can be restored through forgiving, altruistic behaviour.
If an online poll based upon the experiments above were created, it could be tested.
Chris Jordan does some fantastic art pieces that represent quantitative information visually.
Amount of money spent per hour in Iraq as a giant picture of Benjamin Franklin made out of dollar bills.
Number of people admitted to hospital for painkiller abuse as an abstract shape made from the same number of Vicodin pills etc.
Thanks Cori.
According to a British Coffee Association spokesperson (with a vested interest), its 4.5 cups a day:
"a wealth of scientific evidence suggests that moderate coffee consumption of four to five cups per day is perfectly safe for the general population and does have a beneficial effect on alertness and performance even in regular coffee drinkers"
BBC NEWS | Health | Coffee 'no boost in the morning'
Swiss Army Invades Liechtenstein.
170 troops wandered accross the border during night time exercises, by mistake, causing much embarassment.
Perhaps the US government will accuse the Swiss of harboring Weapons of Mass Destruction in the form of Swiss Army Knives?