The infamous fake-Springsteen Vista video: we think it's kind of sweet

An internal Microsoft sales team mock rock video was leaked to the net, to general mockery and derision.

I've seen it 1.5 times, including a full sitting with my wife.

We think it's sweetly silly, though it's just musical enough to be disturbing. My toes almost started tapping, even as my teeth ached. The critics seem to think this was a serious marketing video, but they need a bit of sympathy for the Devil. It's obviously 50% self-mockery and 50% fun.

I wonder what Springsteen thought of it. The man has a sense of humor, but ...

Of course true geeks all want Microsoft to fail badly enough to crack their monopoly, but I really don't see that happening. They've got more cash than ever, they'll fix the worst parts of Vista, eventually the hardware will catch up, and Vista is far more virus resistant than XP. Unfortunately brighter days lie ahead for the sales team.

Do the sheep dogs think they are sheep?

My best explanation for the inexplicable survival of the east african plains ape is that the shepherds are keeping us around. (For mutton or for wool? The Bible is silent on that distinction.)

Shepherds, of course, make use of sheep dogs, which falsely think of themselves as more sheep than wolf.

I thought of that as I described John Halamka for a lecture I'm giving on technology for health record interoperability. From my graphic:

• "John D. Halamka, MD, MS, is Chief Information Officer of the CareGroup Health System, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, Chairman of the New England Health Electronic Data Interchange Network (NEHEN), CEO of MA-SHARE (the Regional Health Information Organization), Chair of the US Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP), and a practicing Emergency Physician"
• sleeps 4-6 hours a night
• wears an RFID chip in his shoulder
• climbs ice-covered cliff faces to relax
• flies 400,000 miles a year
• tries to be nice

Sounds like a sheep dog to me. I'm sure he thinks of himself as human though.

PS. I realized after posting that I should clarify that I'm a major Halamka fan and read everything he writes. It's actually kind of nice to have "the bar" set so high that I can relinquish any competitive aspirations.

Proud to be a geek: stackoverlow.com

At moments like this, I feel an undeserved and irrational pride in being of tribe geek:

stackoverflow.com - Joel on Software

Jeff Atwood and I ...  build a programming Q&A site that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free...

... Every week, Jeff and I talk by phone (he's in California, I'm in New York), and we're going to record those phone calls and throw them up on the web for you to listen in on, and call it a podcast. We have a lot of trouble keeping on topic, so the podcast may be interesting to you even if you don't want to hear about stackoverflow.com. The first episode is up right now. Eventually I imagine we'll figure out this newfangled "RSS" technology and you'll be able to actually subscribe and get fresh episodes delivered into your ears automatically. All in good time.

Jeff's Announcement

PS I'm still CEO of Fog Creek full time. StackOverflow.com is a joint venture between Fog Creek and Jeff Atwood. He's the full time CEO which means he's calling the shots. I'm sort of a consultant on this one.

From Jeff's description we see how inspiring 'experts-exchange' has been ...

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

I've followed Joel Spolsky's blog on business and software for several years, and Jeff Atwood's blog for over a year. They're both great writers and teachers with the geek compulsion to advance the world -- as well as their part of the world.

It's the bit about advancing the world that marks the noble geek. Karma counts. Fairness matters. You get and you give.

These two have millions of readers. By virtue of their considerable reputations earned through their writing, they may be able to make this work.

If it does work that will say something interesting about the power of the geek tribe, and of reputations developed entirely online.

Joel has a full-time job, but Jeff has only recently quit his programming job to work on independent projects. I wish him and stackoverlfow.com every success. At the moment the site is entirely audio oriented, so the best way to follow its development will be to subscribe to Jeff's blog.

Kateva.org may be blocked by some corporate filters

A reader tells me that she can't access Gordon's Notes following migration to kateva.org:

Blogger: Gordon's Notes - Post a Comment

My workplace blocks kateva.org (don't know why, I thought they only blocked porn and gambling sites) so I'll have to follow your adventures on my own time. Bummer.

This is indeed odd, since the only pages I've had at kateva.org have been my tech pages, which are pretty plain.

One workaround is to read the blog through a web-based blog reader, which is really the right way to read these things. I use Bloglines, and I also like Google Reader. So if you can get to them, just add http://notes.kateva.org to the reader, choose any feed, and read that way.

Kateva is a made up name we gave our dog, but maybe it's impolite in some language? Or maybe your employer is using a fairly dumb filter that gets fooled by spammers faking the domain name.

I'll ask around ...

Dyer - 4 new articles

Dyer has 4 new articles out:

• Maliki blinked: Sadr came out ahead, but it doesn't matter anyway. Soon America will leave and Iraq will be forgotten.
• Zimbabwe: I'd skip this one, nothing much in it.
• Olympics: The running of the torch was a Hitler invention. (!) Look for trouble in India, and mockery in Australia.
• Nepal: The Maoists won the election.
• Berlusconi; The best of this batch, see below ...

For example:

http://www.gwynnedyer.com/articles/Gwynne%20Dyer%20article_%20%20Berlusconi%20Is%20Back.txt

...To elect Berlusconi once, as Oscar Wilde might have put it, may be regarded as a misfortune. To elect him twice looks like carelessness. But to elect him THREE TIMES is beyond a joke, for he is the most transparent fraud to have held high public office in a major European country since the Second World War. He even makes the late Boris Yeltsin look serious and competent by comparison...

...

My country re-elected George Bush, so I have some sympathy for the shame and horror intelligent Italians must feel today. Between Italy electing Berlusconi, and Nepal electing Maoists terrorists, Democracy is looking a bit peaked.

Gordon's Notes: move appears to have succeeded

The move to notes.kateva.org worked this time. Now we'll see if the feeds are redirecting properly ...

Update 4/15/08: Of course it didn't really work. Google changed the format of RSS feeds from blogspot to the custom domains, and so old RSS feeds don't work. I'm not sure any feeds, Atom or recent vintage RSS subscriptions, are forwarding correctly. Blogger is showing a very odd set of "recent" posts even with the new Atom feed.

Gordon's Notes to move to notes.kateva.org: Take II

The last time I tried to change the url for this blog the move failed. Google says the problem is fixed, so as before ...

Gordon's Notes: Gordon's Notes to move to notes.kateva.org: In theory, no changes required

... The address, however, is about to change to notes.kateva.org, where it will join Gordon's Tech which has been tech.kateva.org for about a year. It will still be published through Blogger, kateva.org is a Google "custom domain"...

... In particular Google doesn't redirect for some legacy Blogger (working) feeds, only for the current feeds.

So if you find this post in your Feed, and then no "it worked" post after it, you should be able to find Gordon's Notes at notes.kateva.org. The Kateva.org main page will also have news of the move.

Most blog readers will reset your "unread" count to 10 posts.

Wish me luck, I'll make the 2nd attempt to relocate tonight April 15th.

Scientific American on compact fluorescent light bulbs - toxic waste or not?

We'd be using compact fluorescent bulbs -- except I'm kind of clumsy. I break a few bulbs every year. According to the EPA a broken bulb is a toxic waste spill. The incongruity of one part of government advocating fluorescents, and another department warning against them, made me dig in my heels ...

... A commenter pointed to this Energy Star Canada document. It's deeply "schizophrenic" in the non-medical sense of term. On the one hand it says:

• These are perfectly safe for your baby's bedroom. Don't worry about them. You could break one a day for the rest of your days and not have a problem.
• They must be disposed of as toxic waste. Vacuum up carefully and then drop your vacuum off at the toxic waste site ...

I'm joking about the vacuum. Sorry, this still doesn't make sense. Either the mercury content is harmless and they're not toxic waste, or they're toxic waste. (My bet is they're not really toxic waste, but I'm not buying 'em until we get the regulators to be internally consistent.)

Recently Scientific American covered this topic. Some highlights (emphases mine):

Are Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs Dangerous?: Scientific American

... Compact fluorescents, like their tubular fluorescent precursors, contain a small amount of mercury—typically around five milligrams.

As effective as it is at enabling white light, however, mercury—sometimes called quicksilver—is also highly toxic. It is especially harmful to the brains of both fetuses and children. That's why officials have curtailed or banned its use in applications from thermometers to automotive and thermostat switches. (A single thermostat switch, still common in many homes, may contain 3,000 milligrams (0.1 ounce) of mercury, or as much as 600 compact fluorescents.)

Jim Berlow, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Hazardous Waste Minimization and Management Division, recommends starting by opening the windows and stepping outside. "Any problems at all frequently are handled for the most part by quickly ventilating the room," he says. "Get all the people and pets out of the room for 15 minutes and let the room air out. If you have a central heating system or an HVAC [heating, ventilating and air-conditioning] system, you don't want it sucking the fumes around, so shut that down."

... After airing out the room, the larger pieces of the bulb should be scooped off hard surfaces with stiff paper or cardboard or picked up off carpeted surfaces with gloves to avoid contact. Use sticky tape or duct tape to pick up smaller fragments; then, on hard surfaces, wipe down the area with a damp paper towel or a wet wipe. All materials should be placed in a sealable plastic bag or, even better, in a glass jar with a metal lid.

...Vacuums or brooms should generally be avoided, as they can spread mercury to other parts of the house.

Intact bulbs can be a headache to dispose of, too. In many locales it is illegal to throw fluorescents out with regular garbage, but the closest recycling or take-back facility may be miles away...

"Our first preference is not to see them go into landfills," Berlow says. "Recycling really closes the loop on this as best we can right now. But on the other hand, we also don't see huge risks from them going into landfills, either."

So the authorities aren't budging on the toxic waste cleanup routine, and legal disposal of even an intact bulb requires a significant trip (I have years of toxic waste dump material in the garage waiting for me to schedule that trip).

I'm waiting for the LEDs.

PS. I'm sure as heck not touching that thermostat switch ...

Condolezza Rice and Torture

Rice is said to be maneuvering to be McCain's VP.

Rice authorized torture. In detail. Repeatedly.

ABC has the story. Note that Ashcroft, who's reputation has been on the rise for a few years, was disturbed. Tenet wanted to be sure Cheney and Rice were implicated in the torture decisions, he didn't want his agents to take the fall alone. The torture proceedings are probably still continuing -- as indicated by the Goss transition.

Emphases mine.

Sources: 'Principals' OK'd Harsh Tactics

By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE

April 9, 2008—

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft...

... this is the first time sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program. According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific interrogation methods, but approved them.

... Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal.

According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas. ..

... Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

The Principals also approved interrogations that combined different methods, pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval in the 2002 memo, sources told ABC News.

At one meeting in the summer of 2003 -- attended by Vice President Cheney, among others -- Tenet made an elaborate presentation for approval to combine several different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time, according to a highly placed administration source.

A year later, amidst the outcry over unrelated abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the controversial 2002 legal memo, which gave formal legal authorization for the CIA interrogation program of the top al Qaeda suspects, leaked to the press. A new senior official in the Justice Department, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew the legal memo -- the Golden Shield -- that authorized the program.

But the CIA had captured a new al Qaeda suspect in Asia. Sources said CIA officials that summer returned to the Principals Committee for approval to continue using certain "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns -- shared by Powell -- that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: "This is your baby. Go do it."

Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Power, Tenet and even Ashcroft will need to be very careful about where they vacation for the rest of their lives. There are many nations which may be obliged to arrest them in the future.

If McCain accepts Rice as VP, he will be continuing a long repudiation of the values he once defended.

The Consumerist

A blog dedicated to consumer activisim: The Consumerist. It includes the Chinese poison train section. The world needs China to be enormously successful, in an ideal universe the Chinese government would be funding publication of "The Chinese poison train".

From the about stream:

7. Who is responsible for this?

The Consumerist is published by Gawker Media, the folks also responsible for Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Defamer, Idolator, Jalopnik, Gridskipper, Wonkette, Kotaku, Screenhead, Lifehacker, Valleywag and Gawker.

I can't get their feed to work with Bloglines at the moment.

Lester Brown, Julian Simon, the UNFPA, Malthus, and, again, the Food

I heard Lester Brown on NPR this morning.

That took me back 27 years. Bear with me, there's a reason to start then.

Once upon a time I was a covert intern at the UNFPA officers in what was then Bangkok.

In those days we thought of the "FP" in "UNFPA" as "family planning", though I think it stood for "Fund and Population". The UNFPA was all about changing fertility behaviors and accelerating the transition in family size from agrarian to industrial norms. Thailand, Taiwan, and Bangladesh were success stories. Rwanda was a worrisome failure. Afghanistan was on the map because of its ecological collapse.

In those days Lester Brown, the Worldwatch Institute, and Malthus were in the ascendancy. My UNFPA mentor and I leaned towards Malthus, and so I wrote essays for him attacking the optimistic economist Julian Simon, whose views were well summarized in his NYT obit:

... The essence of Mr. Simon's view of man and the future is contained in two predictions for the next century and any century thereafter that are in ''The State of Humanity,'' a book he edited for the Cato Institute.

''First,'' he wrote, ''humanity's condition will improve in just about every material way. Second, humans will continue to sit around complaining about everything getting worse.''

He argued that mankind would rise to any challenges and problems by devising new technologies to not only cope, but thrive. ''Whatever the rate of population growth is, historically it has been that the food supply increases at least as fast, if not faster,'' he said in a profile published in Wired magazine last year.

Mr. Simon's views were widely contested by a large coterie of the academic and scientific community, many of whose members believe that more people create more problems, straining the earth and its resources in the process.

''Most biologists and ecologists look at population growth in terms of the carrying capacity of natural systems,'' said Lester R. Brown, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. ''Julian was not handicapped by being either. As an economist, he could see population growth in a much more optimistic light.''...

It's generally assumed now that Simon was right, but a pessimist would say it's too soon to tell. As DeLong and Krugman have pointed out, most of the human race was in a Malthusian trap from 6000 BCE until the time of Malthus himself. Rwanda, as feared in 1982, did experience a classic Malthusian collapse, though its subsequent recovery is much faster than the pre-industrial record. Afghanistan's fragile ecology collapsed in the 20th century, and we know how that story turned out.

Many things have happened since those days in Bangkok. Outside of Africa most of the world, especially China and India, followed the predictions of Simon rather than Malthus. On the other hand, world population growth has also followed the more optimistic projections of the 1982 UNFPA.

Given my historic roots, it's not surprising then that I would call the Simon vs. Brown battle a draw. On the one hand the Green Revolution worked, cheap energy meant cheap food, and worldwide trade combined with the kind of worldwide productivity growth Simon expected. On the other hand there were also near optimal changes in fertility behavior across many nations. The net effect was that a year or two ago we though that obesity might become a bigger public health problem problem than malnutrition in many once poor nations.

During this time the UNFPA, like all great bureaucracies, evolved to fill new niches. Now it's the "United Nations Population Fund - UNFPA" and all the links on the public page are about reproductive health and fighting HIV. The words "family planning" do appear, though they are a bit hidden.

Twenty-six years later, though, the wheel may have turned again. Simon died young at 65, but Lester Brown is still alive, and again on NPR. The reason, of course, is that classic collapse factors are again in play ...

Grains Gone Wild - Paul Krugman - New York Times

... Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months...

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.

... First, there’s the march of the meat-eating Chinese — that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains...

Second, there’s the price of oil. Modern farming is highly energy-intensive...

Third, there has been a run of bad weather in key growing areas. In particular, Australia, normally the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from an epic drought....

... Where the effects of bad policy are clearest, however, is in the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels...

We need to dial way back on the biofuels experiment -- it's not working. Unless we figure out how to process cellulose it's an energy negative process. It should be a research project, not a production enterprise. Biofuel production happened prematurely because of US domestic politics (including, most shamefully, the actions of Minnesota's senators including the sainted Paul Wellstone).

The other problems are far less tractable, they'll persist even if we eliminate biofuels and lessen the direct competition between our mobility desires and food production.

So the EU, US, China and India could be simultaneously enlightened and decide to eat less meat, drive less, institute a carbon tax to fund research into alternative energy sources, and forswear biofuels. Or we could discover a something like "cold fusion", except it would have to work. Or we could ...

I'm out of ideas right now. Any suggestions?

It is worth remembering, in case anyone needs motivation for new ideas, that any local Malthusian collapse is likely to lead to the vengeful use of inexpensive weapons of mass havoc.

So we all have "skin in the game" -- beyond mere compassion.

Best explanation of the Monty Hall problem (Bayes)

John Tierney has been playing with explanations of the "Monty Hall" (Bayes theorem) problem for 17 years. That might be why he's provided the most succinct explanation I've come across ... (note: Monty knows where the car is, he can't open the door you picked, and he won't open the door for the car. That's important -- his actions provide new information. He's not picking randomly.)

Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys - The Monty Hall Problem - New York Times

...Here’s how Monty’s deal works, in the math problem, anyway. (On the real show it was a bit messier.) He shows you three closed doors, with a car behind one and a goat behind each of the others. If you open the one with the car, you win it. You start by picking a door, but before it’s opened Monty will always open another door to reveal a goat. Then he’ll let you open either remaining door.

Suppose you start by picking Door 1, and Monty opens Door 3 to reveal a goat. Now what should you do? Stick with Door 1 or switch to Door 2?...

...You should switch doors.

... when you stick with Door 1, you’ll win only if your original choice was correct, which happens only 1 in 3 times on average. If you switch, you’ll win whenever your original choice was wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times...

Probability problems are often asymmetric, they can be hard to solve in terms of the "correct choice", but easy to understand when considered when re-expressed in terms of the "wrong choice" (or vice-versa). That's what we see here.

Tierney's paragraph is a great example of expressing simple algebra in sentence form, but the key thing to recall is that Monty is adding new information because he doesn't choose randomly.

I'm fascinated by Bayesian probability. The mathematics is very simple, yet it can be very challenging to map correctly to the physical universe. On the other hand even a trivial understanding would greatly improve government and law enforcement. What a marvel!

The case of the curious silence: Counterfeit Heparin killed 62+

Counterfeit Heparin (alas, again fraud in China) killed 62 - Americans. I've not seen data on foreign deaths. The latest via ABC:

ABC News: FDA Puts Heparin Death Count at 62

... After reviewing adverse events back to January 2007, FDA said Tuesday it uncovered 103 reports of patients who died while taking heparin.

Of those deaths, 62 involved allergic reactions or hypotension, a type of dangerously low blood pressure. Those are the same side effects that caused Baxter's to pull all U.S. heparin injections from the market by February...

America's adverse event monitoring system is very unlikely to be complete. I would not be surprised if the true Heparin associated death rate were 2-3 times as high. Anaphylactic reactions are not universally fatal, so I suspect that for every death there might be ten people who were injured, some of who will not fully recover. Some will have been weakened at a critical point, and then died of other causes.

So let's make a wild guess, and estimate that 2,000 to 3,000 Americans were seriously injured or killed by a fraudulent version of an extensively used medication. Since up to 10% of our Heparin supply was affected by the fraud, that's not too shocking. In fact there's reason to suspect the practice started before January 2007, so the total could be higher.

But that's only one drug. And that's only the US. If we include all the wealthy nations of the earth (it's a cheap widely used drug but the most common uses are for expensive treatments) we can guess that 5,000 to 30,000 people have died or been badly injured as a result of fraudulent medications or fraudulent food practices over the past 2-3 years.

That's a fair total, so the curious thing in this affair is the public silence. There's a great deal of unmerited anxiety about immunizations, but very little about fraud and our food and medication supply.

So, why is America silent? Is this a variant of the social phenomena that leads to complacency about climate change?

I don't think so. Climate change complacency is relatively easy to understand -- for many Americans a warmer climate is seen as a net plus, and even some plausible experts feel our only hope is a technological breakthrough in either energy production or carbon sequestration.

This feels different. My best guess is a kind of learned helplessness, the result of 12 years of GOP destruction of government* and the obvious failure of Libertarian dreams of emergent market-driven auto-regulation.

If I'm right, matters will only improve if McCain loses the presidency and both the House and Senate stay Democrat. I don't see any other configuration that will allow the rebuilding of our government.

* 8 years of Bush, and during Clinton's last term the House and Senate were both GOP. It's much easier to destroy than to create or maintain, so control of either the presidency or the legislature is sufficient to destroy  government.

Aaronson's MIT lectures on theoretical computer science - open to all

Scott Aaronson teaches an MIT course on theoretical computer science (emphasis mine)

6.080 Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science

... a challenging introduction to some of the central ideas of theoretical computer science. It attempts to present a vision of "computer science beyond computers": that is, CS as a set of mathematical tools for understanding complex systems such as universes and minds. Beginning in antiquity -- with Euclid's algorithm and other ancient examples of computational thinking -- the course will progress rapidly through propositional logic, Turing m achines and computability, finite automata, Gödel's theorems, efficient algorithms and reducibility, NP-completeness, the P versus NP problem, decision trees and other concrete computational models, the power of randomness, cryptography and one-way functions, computational theories of learning, interactive proofs, and quantum computing and the physical limits of computation...

Prerequisites. This course is designed for undergraduates (both under- and upperclassmen) in computer science and related areas of science and engineering.... The only prerequisite is some facility with mathematical reasoning ... Programming experience is helpful but not essential; the course has no programming assignments.

Scott writes on his blog, Shtetl-optimized, where he's created blogthread for the course, including links to completed lectures:

• Lecture 1: Introduction
• Lecture 2: Logic
• Lecture 3: Circuits and Finite Automata
• Lecture 4: Turing Machines
• Lecture 5: Reducibility and Gödel
• Lecture 6: Minds and Machines
• Lecture 7: Complexity
• Lecture 8: Polynomial Time
• Lecture 9: P and NP
• Lecture 10: NP-completeness
• Lecture 11: NP-completeness in Practice
• Lecture 12: Space Complexity and More
• Lecture 13: Randomness
• Lecture 14: Probabilistic Complexity Classes
• Lecture 15: Derandomization / Crypto Double Feature
• Lecture 16: Private-Key Cryptography
• Lecture 17: Public-Key Cryptography
• Lecture 18: Cryptographic Protocols (including: how computer scientists date!)
• Lecture 19: Interactive Proofs / Machine Learning

A typical lecture handout is about 8 pages. I plan to print out each one and leave them by the spot where I keep all the material for five minutes of concentrated attention is practical.

Amidst the mixed news of everyday life in 2008, what a wonder it is that all of us can freely share in work like this. Thank you Scott, and thank you MIT.

Marx and Engels on the railway bubble of 1845

Brad DeLong has a great post for his econ class that includes, as an aside, a quote from Marx and Engels on a 19th century boom and bust ...

April 9 Lecture: Econ 101b: Arguments Against Lender-of-Last Resort Operations

... In the years of prosperity from 1843 to 1845, speculation was concentrated principally in railways, where it was based upon a real demand.... The extension of the English railway system... 1845... the number of bills presented for the formation of railway companies [i.e., IPOs] amounted to 1,035.... The heyday of this speculation was the summer and autumn of 1845. Stock prices rose continuously, and the speculators' profits soon sucked all social classes into the whirlpool. Dukes and earls competed with merchants and manufacturers for the lucrative honour of sitting on the boards of directors of the various companies; members of the House of Commons, the legal profession and the clergy were also represented in large numbers. Anyone who had saved a penny, anyone who had the least credit at his disposal, speculated in railway stocks...

I think something similar was going on in America, and the economic chaos is thought to have played an important role in the Civil War.

The entire quote is fascinating reading.

The railway bubble, though it burst, had very solid foundations. My Irish-Canadian grandparents and their extended family worked largely in the rail industry at the start of the 20th century -- fifty years after the great railway depression of 1848. So the historic analogy is not to the real estate bubble of 2002 - 2007, but to the Internet bubble of 1998 - 2000.

(Incidentally, DeLong is a solid neo-liberal capitalist, his reference to Marx belongs to the history of economic thought.)