adam.oliner.net

Instead of writing an open letter to the birds who pooped all over my car, I’ll talk about this other crap from Missouri. I have to share my amazement that 71% of MO could approve a state constitutional ban on gay marriage. Perhaps I am so morally derelict that I am incapable of even comprehending the arguments against gay marriage, but from where I’m standing it seems like 71% of Missouri’s populace are bigots.

It seems the biggest argument against allowing homosexuals to marry is that it somehow defiles the sanctity of the union. What exactly this means when the divorce rate is so absurdly high, even in Missouri itself, is unclear to me. What exactly this means when some of the most famous murders of recent history have happened within the bonds of marriage is unclear to me. What sanctity, exactly, is being protected?

One of the only 5 states to have a state constitutional ban on marriage is Nevada. In other words, here is a state in which you can legally gamble away your childrens’ college funds while getting liquored up on booze, pay for sex with a prostitute, marry some random drunk chick you meet on the street, and get it annulled the following day. But, you and another consenting adult, with whom you are deeply in love, cannot get married in a beautiful ceremony in front of your friends and family if you happen to be the same gender. Because that’s just wrong.

Paging Dr. Hypotcrite; Dr. Hypocrite to the courtesy phone.

If there’s a pragmatic argument against gay marriage, it has never been clearly presented to me. I am also not sure how some people can have the gaul to deem themselves a moral authority. How does a marriage between two homosexuals affect some other, heterosexual couple? Not at all, is the answer. The movement against gay marriage seems to be driven by this notion held by certain people that they are somehow endowed with the power and resposibility to force their views and lifestyle choices on people who have done no harm. The right to the pursuit of happiness is fundamental, and for many gay couples, marriage is an important part of that. Those who use these self-righteous arguments to oppose it should be ashamed of themselves.

Medical research is stalled because stem cell research is banned, gay marriages are banned, terror alerts are raised to spread fear, and there seems to be corruption everywhere. At times like these I wonder what century it is. Sure, I agree that it violates the sanctity of marriage; blacks shouldn’t be allowed to marry whites… what’s that? Oh, we’re talking about gays? My bad. Got my bigotries confuzzled.

Oh, and birds: hate.

When we last left our hero, he was enjoying the pre-graduation festivities and talking in the third person. But then I vanished for a few weeks, only to surface again here, today, to bring you up to speed on my nocturnal activities. Today’s episode is a three-part hodgepodge update, with this section serving as a prologue. We’ve got a lot to cover, so don’t touch that dial.

The Batmobile

I bought a car! It’s a 2004 Acura RSX Type-S, black with ‘titanium’ leather seats, 6-speed manual transmission, 7 speaker 6-CD Bose surround sound, and all the other niceties that come with the Type-S. My friends all claim to like it, which is well and good. All I really care about is the fact that I can rev it up to 7900 RPMs and hit 60 mph in second gear while blasting music with the sunroof and windows down. Also: jockin’ the bitches and slappin’ the hoes. Of course, its only real purpose is to get me from Point A to Point B, but who says I shouldn’t be smiling the whole way?

The Batcave

I have a new apartment! I’m in Somers, NY renting out the basement of a house. I’ve got a private entrance near my parking spot on the driveway. There’s a mud-room, living room, full kitchen/dining area, bedroom, and full bathroom. It’s larger than I had expected, and I’m starting to feel like I don’t own enough stuff; this is precisely the opposite feeling I got by packing everything up and driving it down here. The rent I’m paying is a steal (they even included the cable modem as a gesture of good faith), and the family that lives in the rest of the house is so nice. They have two kids: Julie (4) and Thomas (2), both of whom think I’m better than sliced bread. I’ll be living here until December, working at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights. Please visit, there’s more than enough room.

The Bat…diploma

I have a CS degree from MIT! My pictures can be found here, and the MIT paper The Tech has some more. My mom had the camera, so there aren’t many pictures of me. The pictures my friends took don’t seem to be up yet. The diploma itself is a rather unimpressive piece of paper, but its sentimental value is through the roof. I might walk again next year, when I hope to get both an M.Eng. in EECS and a B.S. in Math. Perhaps the only lasting change I’ve noticed since graduation is that my brass rat is now flipped. There’s a big beaver on the bevel, and the expression goes, “While you’re an undergrad, the beaver shits on you; after you graduate, the beaver shits on the world.”

That’s Daniel’s favorite example of the difference between correlation and causality. Of course, cigarettes cause cancer and lighters, in a sense. The point is, if I published a study demonstrating that people who carry lighters are more likely to develop cancer later in life, and I published it on the Internet, someone would take it seriously. Worse, if I was a professor here at MIT, instead of just a student, I could probably get my study in a newspaper, or a lesser journal. Don’t believe me? Some researchers from Yale Medical got in the Boston Globe for publishing this crap which goes from a correlation between brain activity and dyslexia to concluding that the former causes the latter. They should all be fired.

People will believe anything they read, which means that, while the Internet is a valuable resource, it’s a dangerous one. You can find just about anything you want to find on the Internet, and I don’t just mean pictures of people having sex who aren’t mommies and daddies. As an experiment, I tried to find “proof” of two opposite and unreconcilable sides of an argument: do video games cause violent behavior? Well of course, says this guy; in fact, “it has been proven in a multitude of studies.” Well, crap, how can I argue with that? But, then, this article says there’s just a “link.” But hold the phone! The BBC has this piece denying that there’s evidence for causality, and calling those who would claim otherwise “irresponsible.” The BBC also says that video games can be good for you. There’s even a satire article that cites correlation as evidence that violence causes video games! That’s just about every possible opinion, and I found all of them on the Internet.

But you want to know the only one that seems to demonstrate an understanding of science and logic? Jeff Goldstein at U Chicago who wrote an insightful analysis of the quality of evidence related to video games and violence. People who want to take sides in the argument should go there first.

“OK, Adam,” you begin to ask, “what the hell brought all this on, and why is there a picture of two people having anal sex in your blog?”

This was all brought on because some group of indescribably stupid parents did 300 pages of “Internet research” to “prove” that homosexuality was being promoted in classrooms across the country. Worst of all, the photo in this post was used in their pamphlets. While their pamphlets were intended to be serious, the image they used came from The Onion. It came from a satirical article called “’98 Homosexual Recruitment Drive Nearing Goal”. These parents passed the photo off as real, when it actually came from a piece intended to mock their views as absurd and worthy of ridicule.

I’m generally tolerant of stupidity, but these people handed out their “research” at a meeting that was intended to help ensure the safety of gay and lesbian students at the school. Are these parents advocating violence against homosexuals? Did these parents think that all their factually barren research and doctored photos would actually convince anyone to join their cause? Worst of all, were they right?

Fuck it all, I need a drink.

Technically, I’m going to Santa Fe, and it’s only the hotel I’m staying in that’s called Eldorado, after the legendary city of gold. But, since I intend to steal copious amounts of booty from the hotel, the naming issue is a detail that I’m willing to overlook.

At the end of April, from the 26th to the 29th, I’ll be in New Mexico at IPDPS 2004. There, I will be presenting my paper from last summer entitled, “Fault-aware Job Scheduling for BlueGene/L Systems.” You can find my talk on the conference program page. IBM agreed to fund the trip, which is nice. The conference focuses on parallel and distributed processing, which is precisely what I expect will be the topic of my Master’s thesis. Bonus.

To put it mildly, the prospect of presenting my paper in front of a room filled with professors, research scientists, and, generally, people who know much more about the field than I do, scares the ever-loving Christ-fuck out of me. I guess that’s not putting it mildly, but it certainly is accurate. Once I put together the slides and practice the presentation, I hope to regain enough confidence to at least convince my audience that I still possess my ever-loving Christ-fuck. Patrick Winston agreed to critique my presentation, which should be invaluable. He’s what most would consider an expert on giving talks, and even gives an annual talk on how to give a talk. (Anna went to one; she’ll attest to his skill.)

Don’t worry, though. Despite my fears, I haven’t forgotten that this is a tremendous honor and opportunity, especially as an undergrad. I will adjust my ego accordingly. While we’re on the subject of huge, unstoppable forces, congratulations to UConn on their victory tonight. May it be followed by another tomorrow.

People tend to abuse this word. I try my best to restrict its use to situations in which I am using it in the Greek sense. That is, a tragic hero who is brought down by his one flaw, and so on. The media seems to just use it in place of the word “sad” because it has more oomph.

I’m gonna be a jerk now and say mean stuff about a dead kid. Anna has already told me I’m a bad person for writing this, but I’m just in one of those moods. So, this kid got drunk with his friends, got up on the roof (11th story), and decided to get a running start to help him win a spitting contest. He ran right off the edge and died. Maybe it’s just me, but “classy”, “mature”, and “tragic” are not the first words to pop into my head. But his friends all seemed to hold precisely these opinions of him, and the media felt the death was a downright tragedy. It’s sad, sure. I understand that they couldn’t have quotes in the article from kids being like, “Yeah, it was pretty stupid to trespass on a roof while they were drunk. And pretty classless and immature to be having a spitting contest. And I guess he didn’t really understand how momentum works. That sucks for him.”

But for me, the juxtaposition of the description of his death with a bunch of words that seemed to evoke the opposite emotions made it sound, to me, almost like a joke: “The drunk boy wanted to spit further, so he ran off the roof. ‘He was always really smart,’ said one of his friends.” Did that make you laugh? Maybe smirk a little? There’s a discord there. That’s how the original article felt to me. I know the media can’t be as objective as I want them to be, but at least they could have left out the comments from friends and let the events speak for themselves. After all, his death was news, his friends’ opinions were not. They should have cut off everything after “Police said alcohol was being consumed at the party.” The subtitle should have been “Sad ending to party.”

On another note, I have little to add in response to Colin’s assessment of Bush supporters besides agreeing with him. Even if you agree with Bush’s policies, a careful analysis of his performance these past four years should make it clear that he’s not competent enough to accomplish anything. Under Clinton, we had eight years of economic prosperity and relative peace. Under Bush, we’ve had four years of lies, recession, war, and terror. Who cares what he stands for? Look at what he’s done. Now, that’s fucking sad.