American exceptionalism?

From: Human Rights Watch:

[A]t at the end of 2006, more than 2.25 million persons were incarcerated in US prisons and jails, an all-time high. This number represents an incarceration rate of 751 per 100,000 US residents, the highest such rate in the world. By contrast, the United Kingdom’s incarceration rate is 148 per 100,000 residents; the rate in Canada is 107; and in France it is 85. The US rate is also substantially higher than that of Libya (217 per 100,000), Iran (212), and China (119)….
The new BJS figures also show sharp racial disparities in US incarceration rates, with black men incarcerated at a rate 6.2 times higher than white men.

Exceptionally criminal? Exceptionally vengeful? Exceptionally racist? Whatever the explanation ((Yes, yes: I know.)), it certainly makes a mockery of US claims to be the “land of the free”.

"It rarely rains in dreams"

I’ve been reading – and listening to – one of my favourite poems: Robert Hunter‘s “Flight of The Marie Helena”. I got a cassette copy back in 1985, when it first came out, and played it so often that the tape wore out. Fortunately I found an MP3 version a few months ago. ((But if it were re-released, I’d buy a copy in a heartbeat.)) I love the strange and gently surrealistic journey that Hunter invites us on…

The Marie Helena glides upon
the bright white ocean of
our second day.
Everyone aboard her is
a stowaway. There were
no tickets for the passage.

… and the way he returns to the real world:

After a week’s unfolding
many things have changed.
It is time now to
change them back again.
It is still true, in spite of
the flight of the Marie Helena,
still true, that it rarely,
very rarely, rains in dreams.

Mmmm. That was a good way of putting the world on hold for 37:30. Of course, the world may have something to say about that!

Tossing my wristwatch
into the snapping sea,
my timepiece is returned by an
indignant wave, rewound.

Indeed.

Cognitive dissonance about girls and science

Exhibit A:

NEW YORK – Girls swept a prestigious high school science competition for the first time Monday, winning top prizes of $100,000 scholarships for their work on potential tuberculosis cures and bone growth in zebrafish.
It was the first time girls had ever won the grand prizes in both the team and individual divisions of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

Exhibit B (From Melissa at Shakesville):

Almost exactly one year ago to the day, I wrote about the Discovery Channel Store’s curious gender segregation—and, this morning, I got an email from Shaker Mariah complaining of the same thing. In other words, another year passes, and it’s still Same Shit, Different Day.
[…]
The first five items offered for girls ages 8-12 are:
~ Rainbow In My Room
~ Discovery Sew Fun Sewing Machine
~ Discovery Pink Slide and Text Messengers (“Chat with your friends wirelessly and transmit text messages up to 15′ away.”)
~ Discovery Diamond Dust Microscope
~ Discovery Fashion Design Studio
What a “Fashion Design Studio” has to do with science is something I cannot explain to you.

Click through to see the difference between the boys‘ and girls‘ microscopes.
OK, I know that the Discovery Channel is a symptom, not a cause. For all of their noble rhetoric, they’re just another entertainment company with a retail operation that’s trying to make a buck from cheap Chinese imports with bling. But it’s still frustrating.

Anthropic games

What is it with the stupid anthropic principle? First Paul Davies, now Dinesh D’Souza. Fortunately The Quantum Pontiff and his friends have it all sorted out, in no-holds-barred ROTFLMAO style. Enjoy:

Don’t forget The Brontothropic Cosmological Principle ,
which I learned about from a comment by Tjallen
on Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: (as edited by B. DeLong:)
About [130] million years ago, there was the Brontothropic principle….
The fundamental constants of the universe must be such to allow the Brontosaurus to live and thrive
[No wait!–T]hey’re gone…

The Quantum Pontiff has joined the collection of blogs that Google Reader takes care of for me ((Yes, that’s a deliberate allusion to Douglas Adams’ electric monk.)), along with Neurophilosophy and Pickled Politics.

Daniel Dennett endures the execrable Dinesh D'Souza

Sigh. Groan. Moan. I’ve just spent a couple of hours watching the video of the “debate” between Daniel Dennett and Dinesh D’Souza at Tufts University last Friday. I wanted to watch it because I always enjoy Dan Dennett, but it was a pretty painful experience. D’Souza is an odious little squirt: shrill, ranting, illogical, rude, discourteous, constantly haranguing the audience while completely ignoring the moderator’s attempts to remind him of time limits. Dan Dennett was polite, respectful, and moderate, but even he was getting visibly annoyed at D’Souza’s grandstanding.
I advise scientists of all stripes to steer clear of this video. D’Souza’s caricatures of cosmology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, physics and psychology betrayed either monumental ignorance or a complete lack of principle. And logicians and philosophers should also stay away. I have never heard so many abuses of the concept of causality in one session. Nor can I remember when I last saw so many hoary old arguments dusted off and defended with so little craft: even Pascal’s Wager was wheeled out (twice!). And D’Souza had the nerve to attack Dawkins, and Dennett too, for venturing out of their areas of expertise. (However I must concede that he stayed in his own specialty all evening: unadulterated bullshit.)
And I’m not even going to get into his frequent references to atheism’s responsibility for Stalin, Hitler, and eugenics. Speaking of which, it was nice to see my old friend and colleague Jon Dreyer in the audience, asking D’Souza to explain how he justified the leap from a “first cause” to Christianity. It’s a shame D’Souza chose to completely ignore the question, but at least it gave him another excuse to bring in Hitler and the Nazis. Where’s Godwin’s Law when you really need it? ((Jon: if you read this, perhaps you add a comment about how the audience reacted to D’Souza’s curious move of attacking his hosts and audience as a bunch of north-eastern elitists? Was he simply rattled because almost all of the questions were directed at him, and many were distinctly hostile in tone?))
D’Souza is a nasty little man, and an intellectual midget. He didn’t deserve to be on the same stage as Dennett.

Remembering the CDC 6600

Ah, nostalgia, nostalgia! El Reg just published a piece about a classic:

Control Data Corporation 6600
Released: 1964
Price: ~$6m-$10m
OS: COS, SCOPE, MACE, KRONOS
Processor: One 60-bit CPU, ten shared-logic 12-bit peripheral I/O processors
Memory: 128K 60-bit words
Display: Printer, plotter and dual video display console
Storage: 2MB extended core storage, magnetic disk, magnetic drum

I was a systems programmer on one of these beautiful beasts for a year, from July ’72 until August ’73. It was my first job out of school, at the University of London Computer Centre. We had a 6600 and a 6400, and while I was there we took delivery of a 7600. The 6600 had daily scheduled maintenance from 1 PM to 2 PM, and although we usually needed all of it (OS patches, replacing hardware modules, etc.) there were times when there was nothing to do… so we had the most powerful computer in the country ((Well, maybe. We kept hearing about this rather non-standard IBM mainframe up at Daresbury…)) at our disposal, for whatever we wanted! I had this simulation framework that I’d written to explore the behaviour of different paging algorithms, and it ran really nicely on a dedicated 6600!
One of the more idiosyncratic features of the CDC 6600 was the way in which applications issued system calls. In the early versions of the SCOPE OS, all of the operating system functions ran in the PPUs ((Peripheral processing units.)). ((Later on, they introduced some CPU-resident OS services, which I always thought was a real hack.)) So how does a CPU-resident application issue a system call? There were no dedicated instructions for the purpose; no traps, or gates, software interrupts, or anything like that. The technique was simple:

  • Construct a request block in memory, including the function code, buffer pointers, etc.
  • Clear a flag bit in the request block.
  • Store the address of the request block in location 1 of the application’s address space. (This location was referred to as the RA, or Reference Address, plus 1.) [Thanks to Peter Schow for the correction.]
  • Poll the flag bit until it is set.

In practice, the busy waiting didn’t last long; as soon as the OS noticed the presence of a (non-zero) address in RA+1, it would switch the CPU to another task.
All this leaves only one question: how do you access memory location RA+1 from a Fortran program? We used a little library function, IADDR(), which returned the address of any variable. And then we wrote code like this:

DIMENSION MEM(0)
INTEGER RA
DIMENSION IORB(16)
RA = -IADDR(MEM)
…
MEM(RA+1) = IADDR(IORB)

All of this looks rather primitive now. However, it’s worth pointing out that it looked quite primitive then. I came to the 6600 from the PDP-10, which was a powerful CISC design with a very rich instruction set ((The most expressive programming language was assembler – at least, until LISP and POP-2 arrived.)), and Seymour Cray’s minimalist design took me by surprise. In many ways the 6600 was the first RISC machine: a clean memory model, specialized register files, and simple instructions that got the most out of the technology of the day. It used ones-complement arithmetic, which meant that we had to cope with two zeros – positive (all 0’s) and negative (all 1’s).
What a gorgeous piece of machinery.

"US says it has right to kidnap British citizens"

Once upon a time, the US claimed to be a nation of laws, and set great stock by the idea of “due process”. Not any more, apparently. And we’re not dealing with terrorism, or national security; just run-of-the-mill criminal stuff. Nor are we talking about countries with which the US doesn’t have extradition treaties. We’re talking about the UK, the closest approximation to an ally which the US has these days.
Today’s Sunday Times reports on an ongoing extradition case associated with a fraud accusation:

During a hearing last month Lord Justice Moses, one of the Court of Appeal judges, asked Alun Jones QC, representing the US government, about its treatment of Gavin, Tollman’s nephew. Gavin Tollman was the subject of an attempted abduction during a visit to Canada in 2005.
Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. “The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared,” he said.
He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: “If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.”

I wish that the judge had asked whether the US regarded this as the new standard in international law which should apply to all. For example, if a US “bounty hunter” kidnapped a British citizen and transported him or her to the US, this would be prima facie illegal under British (and European) law. Under this US interpretation, it would seem quite acceptable for the British police to kidnap the bounty hunter in the US and whisk him or her back to the UK to stand trial. And the Germans could presumably have kidnapped the CIA agents that had been charged over the al-Masri affair.
But since the Bush Cheney “imperial” administration believes that it is above US law, why would it bother about international law?