Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

I can’t quite explain it, but all the hype about Global Warming just doesn’t seem to pass the sniff test. Keep in mind, I completely agree that our polluting the environment is bad and we should reduce pollution and try to find cleaner energy sources. This seems like a no-brainer, as it’s a socially responsible requirement to being a good citizen of the planet.

This is related to my previous post about environmentalism and how it is shifting from true science to almost a faith. Environmentalism even has it’s own Eden, fall of man, and prediction of coming doomsday (all this is covered in detail in this excellent speech by Michael Crichton). And to complete the “faith” analogy, no matter what happens (hot, cold, wet, dry, hurricanes, no hurricanes), it all comes down to Global Warming.

Media coverage tends to be given to stories generating more excitement and ratings. As a result, impending catastrophes sell. Suppose there were two studies: the first claiming that “There’s a bit of warming, but we can’t statistically predict too far into the future since we only have limited data.” While, the second says, “The entire West Coast will be under water in 100 years.” Obviously the latter is going to get far more attention than the former.

30 years ago, Newsweek published on article on the imminent danger of global cooling:

Citing “ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” the magazine warned of an impending “drastic decline in food production.” Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect “just about every nation on earth.”

Fortunately this fell into the bucket of all things that get ridiculously hyped by the media, but don’t happen. Some of my favorites in this bucket are Y2k (anarchy, no electricity, no water, unrest, and rioting for at least a year) and the Population Bomb (“in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”).

Both of these didn’t come true and that’s great for us. But I doubt we’ve learned our lesson about over-hyping potential events and becoming the boy that cried wolf. (Though, of course, in this case, I don’t think people are intentionally lying.)

With this over-hype comes over-commercialization of university research and politicization of science. At worst, these can lead people to get the cart ahead of the horse, that is, make the evidence fit the conclusion (like that whole pesky WMD thing). At best, “facts” get spread that get things way out of proportion. I remember in high school we watched a video where the narrator claimed that every day in Brazil, mankind was clear cutting a piece of the rain-forest the size of New Jersey.

A simple analysis shows at that rate Brazil would be out of rain-forest in just about 365 days (the area of Brazil divided by the area of New Jersey). Obviously this “fact” wasn’t quite right.

Anyway, my original point was I think there’s sufficient intrinsic motivation to take care of the environment, but the hype with worst case and doomsday scenario will hurt the cause more than help it. You shouldn’t have to scare people to convince them of something and treat dissent as if it were heresy. I’m still a firm believer in civil discourse based on fact and reason. Hopefully that doesn’t make me a dinosaur. :-)

I’m looking out my window and it’s snowing!!! I like snow, but come on, this is nuts. It’s not supposed to in Seattle this often.

Hopefully it doesn’t stick. I don’t want to deal with another horrible commute home. :-(

Last week I finished reading A Clash Of Kings, the sequel to A Game of Thrones. As I said before, this series came highly recommended, and it still hasn’t disappointed me. A Clash of Kings picks up right where A Game of Thrones “ended”. I put “ended” in quotes, because while I did reach the end of the physical book (there weren’t any more pages) , but the story didn’t get wrapped up that much.

Again, this book has lots of extremely well developed characters and lots of plot twists and turns. The characters mostly fall into the “gray” between good and evil, so you don’t always not whether to root for or against a character. And a few times, when you think you have a character figured out, you get proven wrong.

And it, for the most part, continues to be realistic (relative to the genre). And the story continues to be suspenseful since we only get bits and pieces of the story and background. In lots of other books, the whole background circumstances are clearly laid out, so you can easily predict what’s going to happen.

This book did move a bit slowly. The individual chapters are still very engaging, but the overall plot didn’t progress that much. I keep hoping that at least one character will resolve nicely and “ride into the sunset”, but no such luck so far. I’m very curious to see how this all wraps up eventually.

One thing that is starting to bother me is this feeling that the scale is not quite right. The armies involved range from 10,000 to sometimes over 100,000. I’m not sure the land mass described would actually be able to support that many people given a medieval era technological base. I know, it’s a really nerdy thing to be bothered by, but “I am what I am”. :-)

So, in case it wasn’t obvious, it you liked the first book, I’d strongly recommend the this one.

Based on Jamie’s and few other friends’ recommendations, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I found it to be a pretty interesting and fast read, with lots of good anecdotal evidence. But I noticed that the anecdotes weren’t always followed with thorough explanations or proofs. So I often found myself muttering, “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.”

The book is written in a very readable and accessible way, but sometimes is overly repetitive or presents irrelevant info. As lots of people have pointed out in the Amazon.com reviews, the very well known idea of yawns being contagious takes pages to explain while repeating the word “yawn” many, many times. The irony, though, is wonderful. :-)

The main premise is that “ideas” can be spread as “viruses”. This in itself is a pretty old and established concept (for example, it’s an important part of Snowcrash). After all, if viruses are spread with people coming into contact with each other, and ideas are spread by people coming into contact with each other, it seems to follow that they would have similar characteristics.

Gladwell’s points are that an epidemic needs the following:

1. The right Few: In spreading an idea, you need the right people: the “connectors” and “mavens” that can spread the idea.
2. Stickiness: The idea needs to be sticky or memorable.
3. The right Context: The idea needs to be presented in the right context.

Again, these ideas are nothing new or special. But the “anecdotes” in the book are generally pretty interesting.

The first section about the “Few” has the same information presented in Never Eat Alone: some people are more connected than others (the Connectors), some people know lots of things (the Mavens), and some people are good at selling ideas/products (the Salesmen). Apparently Ferrazzi read Tipping Point before writing his book. :-)

From this idea, came the usual conclusions: the rich get richer since they know the right people to get things done, etc. Gladwell also talks a lot about how people influence others, including both verbal and non-verbal communication and talks about some relevant studies.

For Stickiness, Gladwell had a long discussion about how the children’s shows Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues were developed. There was lots of good information on early childhood development, techniques for measuring retention, and general childhood education. While I find the subject matter very interesting on its own, these ancedotes didn’t directly address the issue at hand. I was left with knowing that’s important for your idea to be “sticky”, but not much else.

Lastly, Gladwell discusses the power of context; specifically how the environment can affect people’s actions. His main examples are crime rate drop in New York City during the ’90s and various experiments with normal people acting as prisoners and guards.

Gladwell explains that NYC crime drop had a lot to do with how enforcement of small laws (like graffiti or subway tolls), changed the environmental context so that there was less of a crime-filled feeling around the city. While this is certainly part of it, I think the explanation in Freakonomics is much more thorough (I’ll write about it later). Also, the experiments Gladwell mentions are interesting, but are mostly well known ones that would part of any Psychology 101 textbook.

Overall, I thought Tipping Point was a good read and worth getting from the library. I wouldn’t buy it, as I don’t plan on reading it again. While the main ideas are straight-forward and aren’t new, the anecdotes are interesting and worth thinking about.

In America, Monday was Presidents’ Day and we celebrated by getting the day off of work. At least most of us did, Microsoft doesn’t give employees the day off, but Google does. :-)

Since it was a long weekend, Jamie came up from San Jose to visit. Jamie is one of Crissy and I’s best friends from college, was Crissy’s roommate for all four years of college, and was in a bridesmaid in our wedding. The three of us, joined by Sapan, spent the weekend just relaxing and hanging out. If you’re a Type A vacationer, you would not have approved. :-)

In addition to relaxing, we did a lot of eating, as we are all believers in the “When on vacation, you can relax your diet” rule. We ordered in some pizza from Papa John’s (the old WashU staple) and despite some heavenly intervention, it still took 45 minutes to get to us from the store 2 blocks away:

That’s right, it says, “Your pizza experience managed by Christ”. Needless to say, this led to lots of funny and near-sacrilegious discussion. Rest assured, the box is being sent into Leno’s headlines.

As an aside, I learned that taking a picture of a pizza box label is very hard. I was struggling to get the focus right, when Crissy said, “Why don’t you scan it?”. Wow, using the scanner was a lot easier. :-)

Anyway, the weekend was lots of fun, but I was hit with the flu, so I was a zombie for most of the weekend. I don’t know why, but I only get sick when on vacation.

I really wanted to play in my hockey game Monday night, but since I couldn’t breathe out of my nose, I decided that I wouldn’t be much of a help to my team — that’s not to say that I’m very useful when healthy. :-)

Maybe the flu was caused by the holy pizza. I wonder if God’s trying to tell me something…

One good thing about running my own website (instead of using a free blog site) is that I can use any statistics analysis tool I want. So, aside from the interesting things like where the people reading my blog are (apparently, I have regular readers from Petaling Jaya and Kadıköy), I can see other traffic patterns.

Some are obvious, like when I stop posting, people stop visiting. That seems to be make sense. :-) Others are a little more subtle. When I updated my blog title, the search engine crawlers came by to recrawl all of my pages since they all showed updates. From that data I could see which engines crawled my site when, and who did the most thorough job.

And just recently, when I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1, the source for my pages changed, the crawlers needed to return for new pass. Of course, this is a pretty unscientific study (since I have all of two data points), so I won’t tell you which engines were the fastest to come by and update their index. But, the results didn’t surprise me. :-)

Speaking of which, what’s up with Ask.com? Ask is all over my WinFS related blogging, but is unwilling to crawl my blog, even though they crawl a bunch of sites one hop away from this one.

Stupid Jeeves.

And while we’re on the topic of ego surfing, I was looking into how the “Suggestion” feature in search engines work. Take a look at the fourth thing that Yahoo suggests when you search for my “vijay bangaru”:

I’m so amused. :-)

Yesterday, I got a text from Joshu to let me know that Peter Forsberg had been traded to the Nashville Predators. I know that you are all shocked, “What? Nashville has a ice hockey team?” Well, not only do they have a hockey team, they now have a good chance to win the Stanley Cup. It’s a sad state of affairs for “Canada’s game” when the champion for the past two years were Tampa Bay and Carolina and this year may be Nashville.

Though, I’m not predicting a Nashville win; you know how good I’ve been recently predicting sports outcomes. :-)

I’ve been a fan of Peter the Great since he used to be play for the Colorado Avalanche. I even had a poster of him hanging up in my room growing up; that poster is still up in my apartment now. Which reminds me of the Avs game I went to with my Crissy and my sisters around Christmas. Crissy saw Joe Sakic on the ice and jokingly asked, “Joe Sakic, don’t you have a poster of him still? What are you, like 12 years old?” :-)

And speaking of hockey, I think I need new hockey pants. For some reason they are really loose and have started to fall at inopportune times, even though I haven’t gotten any smaller since I bought them. And the flap that is supposed to protect my stomach falls forward and sticks outs, so it looks like I have an even larger belly under my jersey.

Perhaps it’s time to buy some new gear.

Yesterday a friend of mine mentioned Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” And though it’s a not completely related, it reminded me of a discussion I had with a sociology masters student a while ago.

She mentioned she was working on a study analyzing the circumstances of when a bystander will come to the aid of a victim. I was intrigued since I don’t feel that the conventional explanation for the Bystander Effect (diffusion of responsibility) adequately explains the phenomena.

It turns out that her research wasn’t about the number of bystanders, but the type of crime. The findings showed that bystanders statistically helped more often when the victim screams, “Help, there’s a fire!” as opposed to “Help, I’m being attacked.”

Her conclusion is that people are “horribly selfish”: if there’s a fire, they come running to help because they are afraid that their possessions are at risk. But in the case of a person being attacked, they just don’t care.

Granted I haven’t seen the raw data or the exact analysis, but I feel the conclusion is wrong. While you could argue that there are a small amount of people for whom selfishness is a factor, I doubt it would be the primary factor.

I think it’s about risk. Interfering with any situation has some degree of risk. In the case of the fire, the risk is relatively low. I generally know what to do in this case: help people move away, call the fire department, etc. By making myself available to help, I take very little personal risk.

In the case of someone being attacked, let’s say I go help… what if the attacker has a gun or a knife, or is much bigger and stronger than me? There’s not much I can do and I might even make things worse. Just by going to investigate I could get myself killed. It seems the most reasonable thing to do is call the police and stay away.

Also, consider if the experiment is using real crime data, then you have the risk of comparing apples and oranges. Violent attacks tend to happen in bad neighborhoods, while fires are more indiscriminate and could be anywhere. I imagine that people in bad neighborhoods are less likely to help random strangers regardless of circumstance, compared to people in a nice neighborhood. That fact alone could completely throw off your data.

Anyway, I wish I could find the study to see the details. But it seems weird that the student and her advisor would jump to such a strange conclusion. I would say that they are doing it on purpose to increase the chance of their findings being published, but I shouldn’t attribute malice to something that can be explained by stupidity. :-)

I recently finished reading George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. This series and author were highly recommended to me by a number of friends (including Jason) and I wasn’t disappointed. The books has a complicated plot, excellent characters, and enjoyable writing.

The plot is similar to the actual War of Roses, where an already fractured kingdom falls into a complicated war over the throne. Since this is set in medieval times, most of the participants are armies of feudal lords that unite under common cause, but there still squabble and jockey to come out on top.

Martin presents a plethora of characters, yet they are all well developed and very realistic. A lot of good authors say that they don’t write stories; rather they create characters and settings, put them together, and see what happens. I think that this is applicable here. Martin’s characters very real, and the reader sees their both their virtues and short-comings.

Because the numerous characters are true to their attributes, the plot takes lots of twists and turns. I enjoyed this a lot more than the traditional “good” vs “evil” of the genre. That style is much too simplistic and far from realistic. In this Martin’s book, even the “good” characters do lots of stupid and evil things, because they too are just human.

I also really liked the lack of cliched elements of fantasy. There aren’t any “noble elves” or “cantankerous dwarfs”. This added to the already gritty, medieval feel of the book to give it a very realistic feel. Plus, lots of characters die. While it’s disappointing to see a good character get killed, it’s realistic. The feudal times weren’t a fairly tale — like most fantasy books would have lead you to believe — it was an incredibly bloody and horrible period of history.

The writing is also good. I particularly enjoyed how each chapter is from a different character’s perspective. This reinforces the “shades of grey” feel of the book. You get to see how each character feels and reacts to the same circumstances and this gives a much greater and enjoyable perspective to reader.

I very much enjoyed reading it and am looking forward to reading the next one in the series. I definitely recommend it! :-)

Since the Steelers missed the playoffs, I haven’t been too interested in the NFL playoffs outside of hoping that teams or players who I don’t like lose. So far, though, the final scores have been anything but helpful.

In the wild-card round, only one of four games went the way I wanted — the Giants lost. In the next round, two of the four — the Eagles and Seahawks lost. In the conference championship round just one of two — the Saints lost. Overall, four out of ten. This either means that I dislike good teams, or I just have bad luck.

Either way, for the Super Bowl, I’m hoping for the following:

1. Whoever makes guacamole know what he is doing.
2. The commercials aren’t bad. (If a product that has a bad commercial, I’ll try to boycott them for the next month.)
3. Peyton Manning loses.

I can’t quite explain it, but for some reason I don’t like Manning. I think it’s because the announcers love him and, in their eyes, he can never do wrong. And you know how much I hate stupid announcers and their brain cell killing observations: “If they didn’t tackle him, he would have scored a touchdown.”

So rooting against Manning, in a way, is like rooting against the bad announcers. Go Bears!