Falling victim to youtube clickbait: Sociologist claims “Math is racist”

January 24, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

Retrospective note:

It appears that the youtube thought police have struck, and the video linked to below is no longer available: “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.”  I’ll leave the link in place below in case of the unlikely event that the original posting account is ever reinstated.

The video I watched may have been a clip from “Watter’s world”, interviewing Anne Delesio-Parson (linking to rumble instead of youtube to avoid further censorship.)  I had some doubts that it was the same interview, since I remembered the interviewer being more verbally adapt, and this interviewer Watter is anything but verbally adapt at the beginning of this video.  However, I think that Watter is playing dumb (rather condescendingly) at the beginning of the interview for theatrical effect, so this may be the same video after all.  It’s definitely as annoying as the original, and makes many of the same points.

Original blog post:

I made the mistake of listening to the following stupid interview while eating lunch today:

https://youtu.be/W7IqkwVnw0U

This was a stupid interview, and was probably just designed to piss people off:

  1. The premise itself is asinine.  There have probably been racist applications of all fields of study, but that does not imply any intrinsic racism.  Individuals can be racist, but it takes extraordinary circumstances to make a subject racist.
  2. The interview format was ridiculous.  If one makes the unlikely assumption that there is some sort of nuanced view to the thesis, how can somebody be expected to explain it in 4 minutes in an aggressive and confrontational interview?

Sadly, it sounded like the interviewee actually did want to make the claim that “math is racist”.  However, she was actively trying to bend language to her will, redefining racism in the process, which is both lazy and pathetic.  It seems to me that it is profoundly immoral to attempt to use words that have historical baggage, words that invoke an emotional reaction because of that history, and then do a bait-and-switch redefinition of the word under the covers.  It’s like playing the magician’s game, distracting somebody with the left hand, while the tricky right hand palms the coin.

What would racist fields of study actually be?  How about the research programs of the Nazi doctors, or US military radiation and disease experimentation on blacks in the ’50s [1].  Those I’d call racist research programs.  To use abuses of math to call the subject itself racist weakens the term to the point that it is meaningless.

The 4 minute constraint on this interview was also pointless.  I don’t have any confidence that the interviewee would have been able to provide a coherent argument, but this sound bite format made that a certainty.  Calling that an interview is as ridiculous as the thesis.  Kudos to the interviewer for quickly calling her on her BS as it was spouted, but he should be ashamed of trying to fit that “discussion” into a couple of minutes.

<h1>References</h1>

[1] William Blum. <em>Rogue state: A guide to the world’s only superpower</em>. Zed Books, 2006.

Some adverts from 1930’s and 1940’s Argosy pulp magazines

December 29, 2019 Incoherent ramblings ,

I have a whole pile of 1930’s and 40’s era pulp fiction magazines that I bought when I was a kid.  I’d read all the Tarzan books and was also raised in a Scientology household where LRH was revered, so I hoped to buy some of the original Argosy pulp fiction mags that I understood featured both these authors.

I asked at my local used bookstore if they had any such magazines and was told yes, but “If you want them, you buy the whole box.”  The bookstore owner didn’t want to haul the box out of the back storage room, have me flip through them, not find what I was interested in, and then have to put them all back.  I basically had to buy the whole lot sight unseen.  For $15 I ended up with a giant box that had a whole bunch of Argosy magazines as well as a whole bunch of “Blue Book” (a “magazine for boys and men”.)  I didn’t score the Burroughs nor the LRH that I was hoping for, but they were pretty neat nonetheless.  Plus there were a couple 1910’s era magazines that I also scored, which I thought were worth the $15 just by themselves.

Despite how cool I thought these mags were, the bulk of them have languished in boxes (kept from degrading in comic book bags), for years in various basements.  When my latest move was pending, I thought it was time to get rid of some of them.  They didn’t move on kijji nor facebook-marketplace, but I gave a few away to people who came by the house, and have now also started sprinkling some of these around various Toronto “Little Free Libraries” in the new neighbourhood.

The aspect of these magazines that I like the best are the ads.  Here are the ads from two 1936 issues and one 194x issue (both of which now live in a neighborhood little free library.)

Amazon’s kindle-direct now has Canadian manufacturing

December 14, 2019 Geometric Algebra for Electrical Engineers , ,

As a “kdp” author, I got an email about new Canadian manufacturing for kindle-direct orders (i.e. my Geometric Algebra book and various UofT physics and engineering class notes compilations.)

Here’s a fragment of that email:

“We’re excited to announce paperback manufacturing in Canada! This enables new features for KDP authors, including:

    • Faster shipping to your readers in Canada. Manufacturing in Canada enables FREE Two-Day Shipping for Prime Members.

…

Please note that, as of today, proof copies and author orders for authors in Canada will still be printed and shipped from the US.”

With the low price that I set my book prices at, paying just the US shipping for an “author proof” has been about the same as ordering a normal copy, so now there will really be no point to ordering proofs anymore.

Interesting z/OS (clang based) compiler release notes.

December 13, 2019 C/C++ development and debugging. , , , ,

The release notes for the latest z/OS C/C++ compiler are interesting.  When I was at IBM they were working on “clangtana”, a clang frontend melded with the legacy TOBY backend.  This really surprised me, but was consistent with the fact that the IBM compiler guys kept saying that they were continually losing their internal funding — that project was a clever way to do more with less resources.  I think they’d made the clangtana switch for zLinux by the time I left, with AIX to follow once they had resolved some ABI incompatibility issues.  At the time, I didn’t know (nor care) about the status of that project on z/OS.

Well, years later, it looks like they’ve now switched to a clang based compiler frontend on z/OS too.  This major change appears to have a number of side effects that I can imagine will be undesirable to existing mainframe customers:

  • Compiler now requires POSIX(ON) and Unix System Services.  No more compilation using JCL.
  • Compiler support for 31-bit applications appears to be dropped (64-bit only!)
  • Support for C, FASTLINK, and OS linkage conventions has been dropped (XPLINK only.)
  • Only ibm-1047 is supported for both source and runtime character set encoding.
  • C89 support appears to have been dropped.
  • Hex floating support has been dropped.
  • No decimal floating point support.
  • SIMD support isn’t implemented.
  • Metal C support has been dropped.

i.e. if you want C++14, you have to be willing to give up a lot to get it.  They must be using an older clang, because this “new” compiler doesn’t include C++17 support.  I’m surprised that they didn’t even manage multiple character set support for this first compiler release.

It is interesting that they’ve also dropped IPA and PDF support, and that the optimization options have changed.  Does that mean that they’ve actually not only dropped the old Montana frontend, but also gutted the whole backend, switching to clang exclusively?

weird match.com identity theft?

November 29, 2019 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

My gmail inbox was filled with “Like” emails from various guys this morning, and it appeared that somebody had created a new match.com profile using my gmail address:

Weirder still, the identity using my email address, was that of a woman:

I don’t understand the motivation of using my email address, since I was able to use that email address to submit a password change.  At that point, I was able to see that the profile was for somebody purporting to be an Australian.

In the time between changing that passsword to lock out the originator of this profile, and switching it to ‘not visible’, the password appears to be reset again.  I’m not sure how that would be possible given that the password change confirmation emails were going to my gmail account.

This made me wonder if match.com is populating itself with fake profiles, and they’ve now switched this one to use a different email address?  That theory seems to be substantiated by the following article about an FTC law suite against match.com for the use of fake profiles.  Looks like their angle is getting people to purchase paid subscriptions after seeing that there was interest in the fake profiles they generated:

“According to the FTC’s complaint, Match sent emails to nonsubscribers stating that someone had expressed an interest in that consumer. Specifically, when nonsubscribers with free accounts received likes, favorites, emails, and instant messages on Match.com, they also received emailed ads from Match encouraging them to subscribe to Match.com to view the identity of the sender and the content of the communication.”

Assuming that this case is not yet resolved, it’s pretty clumsy of match.com to continue to play the same scam.  It’s also pretty clumsy of them to use a female identity for me, but I guess my name is non-standard enough that they didn’t know what to do with it (either that, or they just take a lazy 50/50 chance when creating their fake profiles.)

 

EDIT: managed to re-reset the password, long enough to figure out how to shut down the identity.   Before I did so, I grabbed a screen shot of “my” profile:

I see that the “Profile Hidden” that I selected the first time I logged in was still selected.  I also tried changing the email address associated with this profile to one that I use only for spam, but match.com won’t allow that without also knowing the birthday that they used to create the fake profile.