Pedantic moment: I'm sick of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts"

I really am.

Okay, I guess I can't just leave it at that because apparently it's not obviously false.

Two other variations on this phrase: "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" and "the whole is not the sum of its parts". I bring these up because this makes the mathematical error twice as bad. $$whole > \sum parts$$ is the original expression, $$whole \neq \sum parts$$ is another.

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The Movie Crash

I was introduced to Crash somewhere between 2006-2008. My Sociology teacher in high school had the class watch it. I enjoyed it (being a teen with no taste of course!), and I have a DVD now and have watched it again a number of times since (guess I still have no taste?). Sometime in 2010 I learned that a lot of so-called intellectuals really hate the movie. I didn't really understand, and I still don't entirely, why it deserves hate. It's at least better than Twilight, right?

The criticisms are typical, which doesn't make them invalid, just typical. It has a shallow plot, shallow characters, single-dimensional characters, perpetuation of stereotypes, predictable in parts, tugs at heartstrings instead of delivering a clear unambiguous message, perpetuates the supernatural, and so on. I think I just have a much lower standard for movie quality than these critics who hate Crash; if I want depth and exposition I'll read a book. I'm fine to admit that my brain goes to half-power when watching a movie or playing a game. These are entertaining activities, not intellectually stimulating ones (even the really good games or movies). Of course, the half-power thing applies to most fiction I've read too--most of my reading these days is non-fiction.

The reason I like Crash is because it offers a lot of intellectually stimulating after-thought to chew on, which includes its various criticisms. And at this point I sympathize with critics, because when I got a Netflix account, I was honestly surprised that Crash was the top-rented-out movie. Where are all the discussions of the issues raised? How come so many people I talk to still haven't seen it or don't care about talking about any of the issues? Why don't people remember much from the movie?

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Is government responsible for created wealth?

There has been a lot of heat lately on the issue of how much rich people owe society or their government now that they are rich. One aspect of this debate is where does wealth come from and is government in the end responsible for it?

I have a fairly simple answer, because it's a fairly simple question. The US government allows for a huge variety of ways people can start a business and create and sell something, which is the biggest source of wealth generation into the economy. If the US government were more totalitarian and for example required that in order to sell anything you had to go through their network to get it approved, to get it tested, to get it approved again, and the whole thing cost multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars (and if it's rejected at any stage for any reason you have to start over), I don't think anyone would be able to create much wealth. You'd have the biggest corporations maintaining their revenue streams but innovation and creation there would be slow.

On the other hand, it doesn't matter how many avenues a government leaves open for people to create wealth in. At the end of the day some human brain has to think of something and act on it, it has to actually produce something. This may be someone envisioning a new car engine, contacting the necessary manufacturers to make a prototype, then getting a designer to build a car around it and then marketing and selling. This is a new thing that previously did not exist, created out of the squishy folds of human brains but kickstarted by a single human. The government allows this process to happen, but because of this then this process seems like it would happen regardless of if the government was there in the first place. (Furthermore at each stage there's opportunity for more wealth creation--maybe the new engine requires a new manufacturing technique that can be applied elsewhere, maybe standard car designs won't work with this new engine and so a new design must be imagined that may be useful elsewhere too.)

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Possibility and Free Will

What is possibility? What do humans mean when they say "This is possible" or "That's impossible!"?

There are many definitions of "possibility", so in polite conversation it's useful to use them precisely. Let's start with "physical possibility" as one form. This is basically saying "The known Laws of Physics either permit or do not forbid this outcome from occurring." As an example, suppose you're pondering the possibility of picking up a rock and throwing it such that it lands on the moon. This is physically impossible because your body and your arm do not contain the required energy to get the rock there. As another example, suppose you are considering the possibility of sustained nuclear fusion in the lab providing a huge supply of cheap energy. This is physically possible because we have physical proof of this process already happening--that is, the sun does it already.

Another form of possibility is "Logical possibility". This is basically saying "Using two-valued True/False logical propositions and their rules, we can logically deduce whether some proposition questioning the logical possibility of something is true (that is, it's possible) or false (that is, impossible)." As an example, suppose you assume for the sake of argument that a human arm can generate a million petajoules of energy on a whim, then you assume the fact that it takes some amount of joules to throw a rock to the moon. Then you can logically deduce that because you have a sufficient amount of energy to throw a rock to the moon, you can do so. It is logically possible under this set of assumptions. As another example, suppose for the sake of argument that penguins can fly. Then it's logically possible for a penguin in a zoo to take off and fly back to its home in wherever it came from. As another, assume for the sake of argument that crows can't fly, and so it's logically impossible for it to escape a glass container you put it in.

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Incredibly Stupid Caching System

Finished up a dumb cache strategy which is why you may have been experiencing problems with this site. Basically I'm caching all GET requests into files and a single POST that results in data modification (like me posting a new post) invalidates all the caches by removing all the files. I know I know it's stupid. Also there's a weird error right now where all the output is being prefaced by a newline that I haven't tracked down which led to some some interesting javascript errors. Anyway, things should be fixed now.

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Notes from Probability Theory Chapter 2

Chapter 2, The Quantitative Rules, begins with a quote:
Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation. Laplace, 1819.

In my quotes file I have it in the "original?" French: La théorie des probabilités n'est que le bon sens reduit au calcul.--Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace

This chapter is devoted to the mathematical deduction of the quantitative rules of inference which follow from the three desiderata of last time. They were 1) representation of degrees of plausibility by real numbers; 2) qualitative correspondence with common sense; 3) consistency.

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Rich fool buys something frivolous, therefore...

Tax the rich! So an annoying motif of progressive and liberal news outlets lately is this. They'll find something they have some issue with and always conclude with "tax the rich". What saves them from being as bad as conservatives is they don't additionally say "you shouldn't be allowed to do it." Here's one example:



They later had an update because apparently the house wasn't up to building codes and was ant/termite infested. They were still hammering the tax the rich point and didn't apologize, though. They were also very skeptical about the excuse, which is fine, it's good to be skeptical of people's proclaimed motives. Here's a more recent video.

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