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Saturday, April 12, 2003
Send the Marine 
| | I just got an email from my aunt, the ceramic artist Grace Apgar, who is the most robust 90 year old I've ever known, with the single exception of her mother, who lived to 107. She points us to a reported exchange between John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum in which Metzenbaum apparently pitched one of the dumbest soft-ball questions in political history: How can you run for Senate when you've never held a 'real job?' Glenn hit it out of the park: |
| | I served 23 years in the United States Marine Corps. I served through two wars. I flew 149 missions. My plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire on 12 different occasions. I was in the space program. It wasn't my checkbook; it was my life on the line. It was not a 9 to 5 job where I took time off to take the daily cash receipts to the bank. I ask you to go with me... as I went the other day... to a Veterans Hospital and look at those men with their mangled bodies in the eye and tell them they didn't hold a job. You go with me to the space program and go as I have gone to the widows and orphans of Ed White and Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee and you look those kids in the eye and tell them that their dad didn't hold a job. You go with me on Memorial Day coming up, and you stand in Arlington National Cemetery, where I have more friends than I'd like to remember -- and you watch those waving flags, and you stand there, and you think about this nation, and you tell me that those people didn't have a job. |
| | I'll tell you, Howard Metzenbaum, you should be on your knees every day of your life thanking God that there were some men -- SOME MEN -- who held a job. And they required a dedication to purpose and a love of country and a dedication to duty that was more important than life itself. Their self-sacrifice is what made this country possible. |
| | I HAVE HELD A JOB, HOWARD! What about you? |
| | Although it was a rehearsed speech rather than the impromptu response legend has since made it out to be, Glenn's stinging rebuke to Metzenbaum was a masterful stroke that swung momentum in his favor. He bested Metzenbaum by 8 percentage points in the primary and was elected to the U.S. Senate in the general election, carrying all 88 counties in Ohio in the process. |
| | In other words, he still kicked ass. |
Chaste makes haste
Tendentious Information Approximation
| | At SATN, David Reed compares the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program at DARPA with the Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) research conducted by J.B. Rhine (who named the phenomenon) suggesting the tendenitious assumptions behind TIA's research have a precedent in those of Dr. Rhine's: |
| | What we are asked to believe is that the work being done by DARPA (on clean data sets, looking for evidence to prove hypotheses about behavior that cannot be validated against real behavioral experiments) can provide any clue about the use of such technology in the very specific context of the real world activities being observed, and the hypotheses being tested. |
| | This entire field of mining uncontrolled data, and inferencing, is quite analogous to the ESP enterprise in this sense. (it would be laughable as GIGO if it weren't taken so seriously... |
| | And I am afraid that the country is unable to understand that the so-called scientists (including Adm. Poindexter) who are leading this are about as clueless as the ESP researchers were, as to their biases, etc. Clever computer science, even powerful and correct computer science, will serve the same role in this process that the powerful statistical methods served in the Dr. Rhine's ESP research enterprise. The math was not wrong... but it helped create a delusion. |
| | Earlier in the post David says he expects to get flamed for dumping on Dr. Rhine. I'll just ask him to substantiate his claims about the flaws in Rhine's research. I assume he can. |
| | I just don't want to see Rhine's entire body of work dismissed, or used as an example for a project I suspect Rhine would find preposterous. (Perhaps there's a clairvoyant around here who can contact the late doctor and clear this up...) |
| | Back in the 70s, I worked with (though not for) Rhine's group (warning: the link arrives at a site with regretably self-discrediting new age music) then called the Institute for Parapsychology (also the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, or FRNM). My employer at that time was the Psychical Research Foundation (PRF), a FRNM spin-off that studied (inconclusively, for what it's worth) the possibility of life after death. Both research organizations were in orbit around Duke University, FRNM across the street from the East Campus and the PRF on the West Campus. (This was, irrellevantly, when I became a Duke Basketball Fan.) |
| | Rhine's institute has been around for a very long time now, and I am sure there has been plenty of flawed research along the way. But I am far more sure that there has been much good research as well. The total body of work is quite large. |
| | I've been away from the field for a long time, and I only worked in the field just long enough to publish an affectionate parody of a typical research paper, in an early issue of OMNI Magazine. (If I can find it, I'll resurrect and republish it one of these months.) But I have friends, excellent scientists, who continue to work in the field. I'll invite them to weigh in on both the TIA issue and on David's claims about Rhine's research. Could be they'll agree with him. For now I have no idea. |
| | [Later...] Glen Campbell responds.: |
| | Not that I'm any fan of TIA (I'm not), but this is, I think, an unjust comparison. Data mining is well-established as a technique for determining patterns in huge sets of data; it's simply a multi-dimensional mathematical analysis that determines patterns in data sets with multiple correlations. His point is that ESP research is flawed because the underlying data is bad. Data mining works, on the other hand, because the underlying data is known to be accurate. |
| | I may be wrong here, but I think David's point has to do more with assumptions made in collecting and analysing the data than with the raw data itself. |
Iraq 2.0
| | So, a reader asks, Will the new government of Iraq be allowed to hate, and want to fight, Israel? |
| | I believe the answer is Not if we can help it. But I'm not sure we can. |
| | Still, the best possible scenarios at least seem plausible to me. |
Holy, Right, Good and Beautiful
| | I think a case must be made at this time that the Bush administration actually is EWBU. |
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