Stupidopedia on Jon von Neumann

While just about everyone on SciBlogs and elsewhere has been having fun at the expense of Conservapedia, the Wiki site set up by conservatives to further isolate their followers from reality, I thought I’d just do a quick search on what entries they had up on computer science. That’s where and when I found an article on John von Neumann.
Now, you might be thinking that any article on von Neumann should focus on his major contributions to quantum mechanics, pure mathematics, economics (game theory) and computer science (the now standard serial electronic computer model). But here is the only specific part in the article about von Neumann outside of the intro:

Not religious most of his life, von Neumann surprised friends by requesting to see a Catholic priest on his deathbed.
While other physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer were criticizing the atomic bomb they helped create, von Neumann was unapologetic. Oppenheimer remarked that physicists had “known sin” by developing the first atomic bombs. Von Neumann cleverly replied that “sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.”

So we have quote mining in the second paragraph (making it look as though von Neumann’s intent with the quip was theological, when in all likelihood is was no less metaphorical than Einstein’s “God does not play dice” motif) and a total irrelevancy in the first. In their mind it seems that a scientist’s most important work is done on his deathbed, when in failing health and heavily medicated (von Neumann was under military guard and surveillance at the time to make sure he never gave out military secrets while inebriated). This leads me to believe that Conservapedia articles on computer science (and everything else) will work hard to educate everyone on a shitload of nothing.

So You Know That Really Beautiful Girl You See and Want to Know?

When she laughs bells tinkle and angels gasp. Because you know that she's clever and lovely and passionate and doing something far more amazing than you. And you just hope that maybe if, a few moments after she's passed you, then you can touch your toe in some of the sparkle dust that she's left in the trail of her shadow. Because yes, she's so much person that even her shadow leaves a trail.
And she's intense. And you always feel a little bit of a fraud when she talks to you. Like surely you can't be cool enough for this amazing person to be talking to you. But she does. Because she's awesome and sincere and nice. Genuinely nice. And even if you do feel a little insecure enough to want to find some reason to dislike her, you just can't.

Nope. Nothing.

Tiny Truths...

In the southern hemisphere summer of 1848, twenty-three-year-old Thomas Henry Huxley was sailing Australian waters as Assistant Surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake. He was head-over-heels in love with a young woman he had met Down Under, and drifting into the critical skepticism about matters of religion he would later dub "agnosticism." Other than young Henrietta "Nettie" Heathorn, the main thing on his mind was jellyfish, of which he had netted hundreds. As the ship sailed up the Australian coast he worked at sorting out the relationships among his many specimens, and between the jellyfish and other marine organisms.

Huxley's biographer Adrian Desmond writes: "Nettie, a sensible girl who liked Schiller and penned love poems, must have asked 'Why jellyfish?' And he must have led her self-importantly from these pulsing 'nastinesses' to the great problem of existence, contrasting the tiny truths of creation with the great sandcastle sophistries for which men were willing to die. The tiny truths were real bricks which would build a palatial foundation to Truth. They were stanzas of Nature's great poem; and only by reciting the ultimate sonnet could we gain a rational set of mores and a real meaning to life."

Darwin grand synthesis, that would make sense of Huxley's jellyfish observations, was still more than a decade away, and Huxley would eventually enter the lists and make a name for himself as "Darwin's Bulldog." But here in the South Seas we see him formulating his own important contribution to the human story: The idea that we have something important to learn about human mores and meaning from even the lowliest blob of protoplasm afloat in the sea. He had already decided that eternal truths, if they were to be found, would be discovered in the Book of Nature, not from the hands of Anglican high divines, as a patient accumulation of individually minute observations. The only knowledge worth having was secular, not theological, and "was not to be delegated by episcopal patrons, but seized by plebeian hands." The jellyfish represented common knowledge, by and for the common person.

Gram-Schmidt in Factor

Here is the Gram-Schmidt algorithm in Factor:

: proj ( v u -- w )
[ [ v. ] keep norm-sq / ] keep n*v ;
: (gram-schmidt) ( v seq -- newseq )
dupd [ proj v- ] each-with ;
: gram-schmidt ( seq -- orthogonal )
V{ } clone [ over (gram-schmidt) over push ] reduce ;
: norm-gram-schmidt ( seq -- orthonormal )
gram-schmidt [ normalize ] map ;


I coded this because I thought I needed this for something I'm working on, and it turns out I did not, so I made a blog entry from it instead. Pretty freaky, huh? However if this ends up being useful, I'll re-implement the numerically-stable variant.

On Barring the Stars and Bars

Historian John Steele Gordon responds to Hillary Clinton's call to remove (purge?) the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds:
What everyone — except serious historians of the Confederacy and vexillologists — thinks of as "the Confederate flag" in fact is no such thing. It is the battle flag. And, as far as I'm concerned, it is ruined as a symbol by its post–Civil War associations, just as no one can look at a swastika — a design of great antiquity — without thinking of the Nazis.

So why not fly the national flag of the Confederacy instead? From above:

Top left: The Confederate battle flag.
Top right: The first flag of the Confederacy.
Bottom left: The second flag of the Confederacy.
Bottom right: The third flag of the Confederacy.

The stars and bars [top right] would certainly serve as a memorial to those who fought under it and its successors, but it is free of the stain of twentieth-century racism. Most people, I fancy, seeing it flying from a pole on the capitol grounds in Columbia would have no idea what it was and go on about their business. But those who cared most certainly would recognize it as an honorable emblem of their ancestors' "blood-bought immortality."
Two hasty stitches:

--Why should policies cater to people who "have no idea" about the policy itself? Since when do historians embrace the politics of "Ha ha, I know a secret!" and favor accommodating the ignorant? Since when is the goal of a debate to placate those who have no understanding of what you're debating in the first place?

--Either way, I think Gordon has it exactly backwards. If we are going to engage in the Civil War version of "support the troops but not the war" politics, then let's at least be historically accurate about it — by embracing the Confederate battle flag at the expense of the "Stars and Bars."

If the typical Confederate foot soldier owned no slaves and cared little about abstract notions of secession, federalism and "states powers," but simply felt a (patriotic) duty to defend his homeland, then why sully that "forgotten honor" by embracing the flag, not of the Confederate soldier, but of the Confederate politician — the very same politician who ruined, or cost him, his life — for interests that were not even his to begin with?

"So as not to confuse the uneducated" is not a legitimate answer. Either educate them or unconditionally surrender to them and have no antebellum emblems whatsoever (which seems to be the prevailing view anyway). In which case the issue really will devolve down to "Ha ha, I know a secret."