A national ban on an architectural element seems silly but the vote to stop the construction of minarets in Switzerland is a real accomplishment. The people of a mature country have peacefully expressed a strong collective feeling against what they perceive as a grave threat. The tragedy is that they identified the threat as the Islamic religion.

The real threat is more general, more widespread, and more dangerous than Islam. It took something as extreme as Islamic extremism to trigger a cultural awareness of it. Unfortunately, like the ringing of an alarm clock, the first thing to awaken consciousness is for a time the only piece of reality about which we are aware. Islamic extremism is the alarm clock.

The supporters of the minaret ban see the growth of the Muslim population as an aggressive cultural invasion. They don’t see an immigrant minority that deserves state protection. They see settlers from a destructive culture claiming their country. They feel vilified within their homeland by outsiders and they are afraid that their politicians will continue to insist on irrational “religious tolerance” despite the intolerant attitudes spread through Islam.

National Islamophobia is a phase whose time has come. It is extreme, prejudiced, and wrong, but it is the natural reaction against the wrong actions of extremists trying to universalize Islam. Two wrongs do make a right when everyone learns a lesson. The lesson here is that no protection for status, be it religion, race, sex, or what have you, is deserved when it is used for harm.

Religions have been invoked to excuse atrocious behavior since ages before the life of Muhammad. So have other statuses such as race, color, nationality, and sex. The world tends to absolve these harmful trends after a reform and some generations. And the human race eventually learns a lesson.

I see the minaret ban as a sign that the world is just beginning to reject religion as an excuse for bad behavior. Peaceful Muslims will work with non-Muslims to prevail over the radical perversion of Islam. This time will pass into history and be replaced by a time of rational discrimination and careful tolerance. I hope I’m right, the sooner the better.

I was disappointed when I read the OS X 10.5.7 news and found no mention of the missing video card selector. The wording here was not promising:

Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.

But after I installed the 10.5.7 update I found the new option right where it belongs, in the Energy Saver preference panel, shown here:

Hey Apple, you should have included this in an OS X update before shipping the hardware. But it’s too late to argue. My biggest gripe about the 17-inch is now moot.

I’m no Tony Robbins myself but I dread sitting on conference center chairs while geeks practice their public speaking on me. Last year I spared myself half the misery by sticking my face in a laptop. This year I am sparing myself the whole misery by keeping my butt out of conference center chairs altogether. Theater seating is ten times more comfortable and there is good service.

SXSW Interactive is a well-built structure. It provides a definite time and place where dense social networking is encouraged in many forms but it guarantees nothing. The panel schedule is a gamble akin to playing roulette. Some panels are unforgettably good. Even so, many veterans will report and I agree that most of the best events do not appear on the schedule and many are not even restricted to badge holders.

Still, I like to have a badge with Interactive privileges. I maintain hope that smarter people than myself will fill me with knowledge and inspiration. So far I am satisfied with the interactions I have shared with people face-to-face. I am having a good time this week and nothing would spoil that faster than an hour on a stiff seat in a darkened room wishing I were anywhere else.

I wanted to give it a chance. I studied the schedule but nothing grabbed me and pulled me in. It occurred to me that I should at least attend my favorite panel but it’s not on the schedule this year. My heart sank.

Surely there are others who have felt this way. I know some who stopped attending because the strain outweighed the value. I know this about myself: experiences that echo the boredom that pervaded my educational career can also summon the discontent that was my reaction to that boredom. The similarity between a panel schedule and a day in the life of myself as a high school student is enough to commence the dark reverberations.

I also know that my moods and tastes are subject to change without notice. It would not surprise me to find myself excited about panels in the future. Nor would it to learn that my attitude had been soured by a temporary condition elsewhere in my life. Surely others have recovered from similar downswings.

Unless and until I am drawn to an Interactive event, I am thankful that my SXSW Gold badge includes Film. If you need me, look for me comparing schedule grids at the Iron Cactus. Or I’ll be working at home face-to-face with visiting coworkers. It makes me extra glad to live in Austin.

The credit for this switch belongs entirely to the lovely erlang-mode. (I tried TextMate’s erlang mode but I couldn’t get past TextMate’s strange navigation keys, etc. I wish there were standard navigation keys in OS X. Too bad. I’ve heard TextMate is great.) The emacs erlang-mode helps me write beautiful code. Now that I’m also learning to use emacs in php-mode I rarely become disoriented and type “:w” to save a file. (I don’t miss vim.)

Not everything about emacs is perfect. It doesn’t understand my Mac’s right-delete key. Left-delete (backspace) won’t delete a tab; it converts it the tab spaces and deletes one of them so that I have to hit backspace many times to delete a single tab. And in php-mode, the indentation rules are far more complex than the WordPress coding standards; I just want tabs in php-mode.

Even though I have these problems, you have to hand it to emacs for being customizable. It took a couple of hours to find all the solutions, but I solved all of the above problems above by adding these lines to my .emacs file:

;; Map OS X Terminal SSH delete key
(global-set-key (read-kbd-macro "ESC [ 3 ~") 'delete-char)

;; Backspace should delete, not convert tabs to spaces
(setq c-backspace-function 'backward-delete-char)

;; In PHP, never indent; always insert TAB.
(require 'php-mode)
(defun my-php-mode-hook ()
  (local-set-key (kbd "TAB") 'self-insert-command))
(add-hook 'php-mode-hook 'my-php-mode-hook)

This works for me even though I understand less than half of it. There is so much to learn.

He should die. Keep it simple.

Who is Bear Stearns?

I’m not really sure… good follow-up question.

…you freeloading “Internet generation” types should subscribe to the damned magazine already, for the so-low-it’s-sinful price of $19.97 per year.

Now I subscribe to Reason online and in print.

(The title is inflammatory hyperbole. In writing it, I borrowed the style of Fox News so you will believe me when I say I’m fair and balanced. To keep with proper form, much of this article will be composed of irrelevant and misleading statements. It is my hope that you will be capable of distilling something worthwhile from the morass—good practice for when I’m not around and you have to watch Fox News.)

I am writing because in response to two Rolling Stone articles (The Fear Factory and Truth or Terrorism? The Real Story Behind Five Years of High Alerts) my discontent congealed into a desire for new movement of conscientious objection.

Starting movements is not my thing, so I’ll just scatter some ideas here and leave it to more zealous people to organize and undertake. Indeed, it is too late to found such a revolution in this country. The movement is already under way. Even so, let’s set about dissecting it so as to better understand it.

In order to start a movement, one must first locate a controversy and then inspire others to lend support to the weaker side. It wouldn’t be a movement if its efforts merely reinforced the status quo.

For the sake of academic exploration let us take as a controversy the War on Terror—the term itself should elicit an unpleasant emotional reaction—with the weaker side held by the people who want to stop it. Let’s be very clear and establish that nobody believes the United States should stop defending itself. This is an academic exercise.

There are three parties in this controversy and you should evaluate your own position in one of them. They are the leaders, the followers, and the opponents.

The leaders are few and difficult to pinpoint. They include politicians, financiers, and military advisers and strategists, though some of the people in such positions are opponents.

The followers are the largest of the three parties and only by the power they lend to the leaders does the War on Terror march on. They include all levels of military personnel, government representatives, corporations in the defense and security sectors, mainstream media outlets, right down to the American voters who elect pro-War politicians.

The leaders being so well distributed and the followers being so many are the reasons assassinations don’t happen in this country. You can effect unimaginable change by killing a great mind but when the juggernaut is steered by hands so hidden and pushed by devotees so numerous and the great minds are nowhere to be found…

The opponents are the weakest group not because their premise is weak—they alone base their effort in truth and not lies—but because the majority of Americans do not demonstrate their full intelligence when confronted with pictures of violence.

To argue for continuation of the War on Terror by saying that we must be ever-vigilant, that to disagree is unpatriotic, etc., is to misunderstand the controversy. Those who wish to stop it are not mujahideen trying to subvert our government. They are trying to wrest our government from the control of American politicians who they believe have taken it hostage, to put an end to needless spending and killing and dying, and to restore American civil rights.

The undecided and the inactive always fall in the second camp because inactive parts contribute to the momentum of the whole. If you could ask Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein they would agree with me: an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon.

Opponents gain support by taking followers away from the established leaders, converting the leaders, or removing them from power. In a peaceful movement, this would be done by working within the system according to its own rules. I do not think the situation is bad enough to justify a military coup or a civil war. Let’s hope it never is.

Naturally a movement should spend a portion of its effort on weakening the bastion of the status quo which it opposes. However, whereas it is simple to consider members of the establishment as objects to be destroyed, the opposition would be most wise to see each one as an undernourished opposer and only provide the sustenance needed to effect a recovery.

Each type of follower is best converted in a different way and each tactic could be the subject of many books. The main ones are: swing the undecided by handing them the truth; spur the inactive by showing them the evil their inaction condones; split the followers from their leaders by shedding light on the differences between them.

An effective revolution, even a peaceful one, must: depose the leadership with the democratic support of the newly enlightened majority; deal graciously with the ousted villains; resist corruption just long enough to be remembered as a hero; retire and let the next administration pervert reality to favor their hijacking of the public mind, thus beginning the cycle again.

And now the part you’ll wish you hadn’t read, the scene where the gleaming trestle set to underlie the majestic railroad across the divide to universal liberty explodes into slivers with a blinding flash, the unbelievable news that the captain will not be going down with the ship as planned, final hope succumbing, once again provided by Rolling Stone: Kurt Vonnegut Says This Is The End Of The World.

There, I wrote it. It’s nothing like what I had in mind when I started—originally it involved retraining and mobilizing young Scientology protesters against their local reservists—but hopefully it can help me remember what I was supposed to buy at the hardware store.

Later I made a stab at formulating political opinions of my own. Having paid so little attention to any issues larger than my own small world, all I could do was restate what I’d read or heard. Analysis hadn’t begun for me yet and so I forwarded hearsay to fill the vacuum with beliefs I pretended were my own.

Inevitably there is talk of politics. Digging around for something to add to the conversation, all that appeared had already been said. In my better moments, I remembered that it was wise to remain silent rather than advance an opinion that I could neither justify nor defend.

Very recently I struck something solid: I actually believe something! I’ll write about what it is when I have a clearer idea of it.

[Update: I don't believe in anything after all.]

One could probably make a nice plot showing how the time taken by a lightning calculator varies with the size of the numbers involved, and the operations involved, and from it deduce some features of the algorithms employed.

This got me thinking about my own mathematical algorithms. By that term I mean the series of atomic steps taken to produce a result such as the sum 14 + 38 = 52 or the quotient 39 ÷ 3 = 13.

I vaguely remember being taught to add two-digit numbers in grade school. The process begins with the numbers stacked so that the ones and tens places are vertically aligned. A horizontal line is drawn to separate the stack from the result below. Starting with the right-most column, we sum each column and place the result below the stack. If the result is two digits, place the “ones” numeral below the current column and the “tens” numeral above the next colmn to the left. (“Carry the one.”) Here is the final product, showing the work done:

  1   ← carry the one
  14
+ 38
  52

That is the most basic algorithm in my mathematical toolbox. You probably have a similar algorithm that you use to add a column of numbers. Maybe you visualize the stack and proceed consciously through the steps or perhaps you have trained your mind to produce mathematical results at a subconscious level. Hofstadter’s point was that everyone’s result must be produced, at some level, by a series of simple steps he called a general recursive function (Church-Turing Thesis).

Reading about this, I realized that my own addition algorithm proceeds not from right to left but from left to right. Whereas the standard method begins with the least significant digits, my method begins with the most significant digits. (Lets leave the Freudian isomorphisms out of this discussion, interesting though they may be.) Here is the way I add numbers:

Stack the numbers as before. Sum the left-most column and write the result below. (Begin loop.) Sum the next column and if it exceeds one digit, increment the previous result and append the new result. (End loop.)

I wonder whether my algorithm can produce results with fewer operations on average. I guess that if the likelihood of column sums exceeding one digit is less than a certain threshold, my method will be faster (completing in fewer operations). Perhaps one method is easier for minds having a specific learning preference, i.e. visual or auditory or tactile.

Here’s homework for the curious: write a program that compares these algorithms in terms of number of operations to sum every possible set of two, three, and four numbers having two, three, and four digits. If my method is faster for some class of sums, such as those having an instantly recognizable feature like a low occurrence of digits greater than five, would the extra steps of recognizing such a class and selecting the most appropriate algorithm improve the overall speed of doing sums?

My hope is that somebody can produce objective proof that my summing algorithm is not always slower than the right-to-left method taught to me in school. If not, I might be afflicted with mathematics disorder—an actual diagnosis in the DSM-IV. Pfizer?