Rule by Secrecy

Hmmm, this blog entry is not about the book of the same title. I won't mention Skulls and Bones, and the Masons, and Common Cause, and Illuminati, Fight Club, weather club, The AA, Triads and Mafias. What is the problem?????

So, I've given this some thought.

Suppose I work at an Internet Startup (aka a DOT COM), and suppose there is a group of black hat hackers at work who constantly mess with my work ("mess with"=="cause damage to the company and make it look like my fault")

Suppose now that they're not the bosses (who themselves have pit bulls that can keep those black-hats at bay most of the time) and I complain to the bosses, but the bosses deny their existence. Even though their own Shins are getting whacked day in and day out, the bosses put a grin on their face, and tell me: "Nope, black-hat hackers don't exist and you are just a bad employee."

Now, theoretically, under Darwinian world view, these unstated secret groups of clout are natural evolutionary entities that come into existence and compete, semi-stochastically. Their(the hackers') continued happiness is the result of their fitness. As a whole, human society benefits from their existence. What's more, the bosses are probably grinning with a bloody shin bashed to the bone, exposed to air because they believe that these guys are good for the company(or to themselves somehow).

Now, as a non-hacker, I suffer constantly. And from my perspective, the bosses have the power, by virtue of their being the boss which entitles them unconditional rights to hire and fire for any reason at any time(at-will, non-competitive clauses). So either they are in cahoots and hired the hackers intentionally, in which case I wonder why it appears to me that they're blooding in such a painful place, or they do not have control. Personally I would prefer the prior, even though that would make the bosses my original antagonizer, and that my shines is the only one that's bleeding.

In general, why, beyond the fact that I am not a member of some secret power, is governance under secrecy a bad thing?

Well, decisions are not made democratically--how can it be democratic decision if the decisioning maker are unaware of the problems ?? (Okay, CS people spare me the "news" about ZK algorithms, because then I'd have to ask "is the system bug free? and does it always terminate in acceptable amount of time?")

Unmonitored decision making process is not trustworthy. I don't trust it! You shouldn't trust it! The secret power shouldn't trust it because how does it know that it's actually not the secret and that it is actually being played by a bigger/different power that is being deliberately kept secret from them?

I believe that only a clearly stated and strictly enforced policy of open government, free government and honest government can have a chance of being a lasting righteous government. I believe paranoia and unwarranted diligence in self discipline are key characters that can help us attain it.

The secret societies will still exist.

Clouts, political parties will still exist.

Nazi's and 911 and Communism and Capitalism and imperialism (ahh, the ISM's) will all still happen.

so... what changed? What good did this mental reverse big-bang do for me?

I'm not too sure. But, I guess, I lost sight of the driver of this universe. I lost faith in that good is always prevailing...

sigh... I feel lost.

Mail Order Wife

I saw a movie on hulu today about Mail order Brides

http://www.hulu.com/watch/179430/mail-order-wife

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377088/

For starters, the lady that they chose to play the Chinese whore Eugenia Yuan's(http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1067699/, actually an ABC, picture, tom.com) quite beautiful, reminds me of HK movie stars and speaks awesome Mandarin Chinese--unlike many real HK movie stars who couldn't be bothered to learn it for hundreds of millions of dollars...

It's sad though, Zhang ziyi (the lead in Memoirs of a Geisha) once said that Chinese female stars can only play whores in America, and indeed, this talented female Chinese movie star stars as a conniving sex fiend. Her face tells me of her uncompromising strong personality and knowledge of her Chinese heritage beyond her genetics, but her character, .. ahh, her character ring so bad and so real! I don't know if it's typical for mail order brides from Burma to speak very good Mandarin, but I was very drawn by her Chinese--strident, confident, intoned correctly, surely a native Chinese speaker. Apparently she's a language buff who also speaks Spanish and Russian... Could have played a Russian mail order bride...

Her name 原丽淇 sounds like her character's name as she first appear, yuan2li4chi2, so lichi==leeecheee.

Personally, I've been swindled out of a lot of hard earned cash by Chinese girls. Sometimes it's a wad of cash, sometimes it's small bits of meal and gifts. well, it's not really that much money, but the circumstances are especially disgusting (I feel disgusted, not that the mutual situation is disgusting, ugh, just pause your imagination for a second here...), the circumstances had been at my loss in the same way that the characters of this movie had been at loss financially, except I didn't get to make a movie or take revenge, or the girl as hot, but that's beyond the point.

And I have definitely personally experienced Chinese girls turn from innocent helpless servants barely surfacing from millenniums of cultural oppression and physical cruelty to suddenly become tigresses in heat for money, power, and other men, and then suddenly cools to absolute zero when confronted with the man's true feelings. It's not too far from what the movie shows. (Her marriage to Adrian is a modern metaphor of Chinese women's past. Her lack of language and social skills represents her Chinese female heritage; her repeated attempts to get married--fighting for her right to be in America where she has rights; her marrying Andie is her success in gaining her freedom and respect; her attempts to put pigs in Addie's apartment despite his insistence of moderation is metaphor for her struggle for power in the relationship, and finally, she use her reproductive right and theoretical biological clock, albeit understandable, is quite an unwieldily unruly beast hungering for absolute dominance!!)

sigh..... I hate this movies. I so don't want to hate the movie like he doesn't want to love her, accidentally falling into a shallow pit of slutty slushy muddy mix of bodily fluids, so bad but borderline not that bad but so so bad!!!

The story telling is so endearing, the narrative is so gripping, the actors are so talented. All are wasted on such ugly side of the Chinese and the American. I hate her for such a great performance, with the same passion Andie loved her, with perverse curiosity, tasteless initiation, so pointless, stretched out beyond normal necessity and human patience (the character's normal human patience, not the viewer's normal human patience), and concludes with WTF? who? what baseball? what did I miss?

Why did it end on a high note celebrating a baseball player?

I don't want to criticize America because Baseball has to be one of the gayest games there are on TV, guys scratching balls. Important signals being signaled right in front of the crotch for another guy to pay attention.

Homosexual realties aside, the mention of baseball, the toasting and drinking of beer, by a group of cooperating men, brings back a sense of normalcy... I felt comforted by the fact that the women and all that she represented was gone. In the circle of men there was a sense of closure, feelings of trust, camaraderie, accomplishment, clarity, safety and merriment.

Does this symbolize the success of America in defending the American ways and the forced return of ugly Chinese people and their culture to their homeland of Burma? The Americans united to rid the country of foreign devils' evil and unrighteous influences.

The portrayal is so polar that after the film completed, I did not miss her boobs, and that handsome face, those sexy legs after the film's portrayal of her. Too real... I mean Wilhelmina(Ugly Betty) is still likable, Kathryn (Cruel Intentions), Angelina Fox ( Wanted), Mystique (Xmen), Michelle Cat Women (Batman), Sharon Stone(Basic Instinct), .... err, plenty of examples of female villainy... But I felt like I was thoroughly rid of her imagery in my mind, just as Andie and Adrian were rid of their desire for her.

Sad! I hate the movie even more now that I blog about it...

Fedora 13 Broken Menu Bar

I found the instruction on this page helpful in trying to get many applications working (eclipse, gimp, etc) in fedora 13. I performed a

rpm -e gnome-globalmenu-common-0.7.8-1.fc13.x86_64 gnome-applet-globalmenu-0.7.8-1.fc13.x86_64

and the menu now shows up. In the duration of 2 hours of trying to find this answer, I've competely wiped my home directory with all traces of all my settings,... ugh! but I have the "File" menu now.

Here are some things I searched for.

"File Menu Missing in Fedora 13"

"Missing Menu Bar in Gimp"

"Linux Eclipse How to Hide Menu Bar"

"Gnome Linux Hide Menu Bar"

"Gnome Menu Font configuration"

Ohh, here's another oddity: To select sloppy focus in Fedora 13, you have to install control-center-extra package.

ugh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

drunken poste

I'm drunk.

I just took my prescription pills. One of these pills is a soft-gel that I found to work the best when I chew it before swallowing (probly works better in the upper digestive system than lower). Maybe someday, we'll have nutrition pills that require chewing like real food. And we'll just chew on pills for sustenance.


Anyways, I wanted to post something I was discussing with a really good friend last night. The models and algorithms that we were interested in require analysis and optimization in these properties:

• Latency and Throughput (Needs to respond fast enough, and supply solutions fast continuously)
• Relevance. (This is often ignored because most of the time designers of algorithms will not deviate with from the problem)
• Performance. (Actual performance in the sense of accuracy, coverage, generalizability, stability and robustness, and min-max properties, etc.)
• Cost: how much is it goina cost to apply an algorithm satisfying the above three types of specifications. This should also include implementation cost. Something like TCO, possibly minus the O at some point. :(
• Long term performance: What it will do in the long term. This includes every thing else that is more global than what is required to satisfy the above four and contain things like environmental issues, game theoretic problems, and the likes.

This may seem completely out of context to everybody, but that one friend who's email system suddenly all barfed, here they are. the properties that I want to keep track of.



goina drink more now. wanted to get that down on electrons before I pass out.

Documentaries and Boardwalk Empire

I just watched the premier of HBO's new series Boardwalk Empire(Wiki). The first episode was directed by Martin Scorsese.

I enjoyed watching it. However, I'm trying to come to terms with the drama, the history of the 1920's America, and Big Business. The show masterfully puts us in the right mood with Enoch speaking at a women's temperance movement. He speaks for universal suffrage, as any sane politician would do in a room full of women just around the time when women gained the right to vote. In matter of minutes, the audience is completely enveloped in the period, the sounds, the smells, and the taste of alcohol, the politics, the money, and the crime. Gotta hand it to martin Scorsese, master film maker, awesome show!! Oh, and the Italian mobster, the

However, entering into this show, I had just watched a documentary called The End of America hosted by Naomi Wolf, author of a book by the same name. For a moment, I won't talk about all the parallels she draw between post-911-USA and the Nazi's (the Swarzwasser private police force and the modern day Black Water), and I won't think about how the guy who had business rights to the world trade center was(and still is) a Jewish person(Larry Silverstein). It all suddenly seem to me that 911 is mostly a war to destroy Jewish properties; and as a second purpose to enforce a police state, justify secret and illegal spying on citizens;and as a third reason to play out all kinds of sex-kinked tortures; and lastly a white-dominance thing...

But most importantly, from the documentaries, I learned that there is the possibility that the prohibition, was put in place not for practical/moral/ethical/social reasons, but for the exclusive purpose of forcing people to use Gasoline. The wiki entry for John D. Rockefeller does not mention the prohibition. But apparently Ford (the founder of Ford) had decided to make his cars(Model A,T) operate both on gasoline AND alcohol. For Ford, this technological feature was something that was very useful at the time. Farmers can pull up to any farm and ask for some home distilled alcohol and the car would run. For Standard Oil it would mean the end of lucrative business, Rockefeller's oil company lobbied to pass prohibition laws, and that's where Al Capon makes his cameo in Boardwalk Empire...

The prohibition ended, in fact, the very year after Henry Ford gave up and stopped making his cars compatible with alcohol. Coincidence?? I think not!!

So what?! you say, what does it matter that these dead people did some lobbying to get their ways?

Well, it puts things in perspective... It also makes a manufactured 911 much more believable. If Rockefeller could pass a law in a democratic country full of the freest people in the world so that they can't drink any more, I can imagine those people jumping from the world trade centers volunteering to be victims. This must be the power of... no, not power of the devil, the power of money at work!

And knowing that Ford was an innovator who gained money by building technologically superior quality products and not through entirely selfish politicking, I feel very proud to be driving a Ford to work tomorrow morning!! Designed and built in America by Americans!

I did not know about Bhopal

omg, I did not know about Bhopal. Apparently, a pesticide company Union Carbide India Limited had a plant in Bhopal India, a city located smack dab in the middle of India. The pesticide company had an accident December of 1984, killing more than 8000 people with in one week, and up to 16k people in the following time, 550k injuries, 38k severe, 4k permanent. The release hurt so many people because it was high temperature, high pressure gas released into atmosphere which covered the entire city. It also killed a lot of trees within the first week.

Wow, the poor Indian people.

I learned of this from a documentary The Yes Men Fix the World. The company Union Carbide is now owned by Dow Chemicals(DOW). The Indian people are continuing to pass aid package for the people affected by this disaster. The United States, on pains of economic consequences, refuses Indian any additional aid or payment.

I am at odds with myself on this. I mean, yes, really, the original people who caused this should pay for it. Subsequently, the current owner (as the movie demonstrates) should pick up the tab to improve their own corporate image. (Because China is watching, and Europe, and Africa, and South America... are all places that can afford to refuse Dow Chemicals) Lastly, the United States government should restrict it's corporations and make finally remediation.

As an American, I feel sorry for the poor people of India and wish that they can be helped. But at the same time, I feel that their government was most negligent, and continues to be friendly with US corporations to an unnecessary degree. The Indian people should pay for recovery because they were partially responsible for it happening by electing a government that allowed this to happen.

As an American, I am certainly not willing to pay in taxes to help them fix this. I mean, I'm not a stock owner of DOW and never was, and never owned mutual funds with DOW chemicals as a component, and I never was part of that decision making process, and not part not because of my negligence but because it just didn't involve me. Some entrepreneur decided to get the money, goto India, bring a risky technology there, and..., and I don't know what happened between then and the accident,..., but those involved in the process should pay for it!

If they're all dead and gone, then certainly the current government should pass legislations to prevent it from happening, followed by technological and financial aid to help clean up the mess. It should be powered by a charity, paid by people who have vested interest in India.

Heck, if such a corporation existed, the "Help Bhopal India To Recover" for profit corporation, I may even by stocks in it.

But I am really sorry this happened to India, and I'm sure it's happening in China too, but with less visibility...

Apologies

I feel that I want to write in my blog following my last post apologizing to Jewish people who suffered greatly from Holocaust. I don't mean to suggest that malice towards the Jewish people during the Holocaust was an inconvenient side effect of failure in communication.

Also, I will apologize to Chinese people who think that I am writing about the cultural revolution and saying that those in power arranged for atrocities to achieve personal or political interest counter to the interest of the Chinese people. I'm sure that was... well, I won't characterize it here, but to say that I'm not talking about that at all.

However, my confusion and questions about 911 and post-911 decade remains. I mean, the terrorist may have some how smuggled state of the art explosive material onto the plain before boarding, that would explain why they found that in the debris...

Sadly, to me, at this moment, that seems less likely than a government inside job--having watched the movie.

Mmmm.

memories of 911

I just watched a documentary called "Loose Change 9/11" The movie claims that many of the things about the 9-11 attack on the United States seem to be faked by a certain group of Industrialists who are lead by the Bush family. The movie claims that explosives were used to stage the various crashes and tower... It claims to find evidence of very powerful state of the art military grade explosives through out the towers, and shows shots of explosions happening on several floors as the tower falls to that floor.

There're somethings that are contradictory about the movie though. If the forces behind the conspiracy that lasted centuries were so powerful, how was it that he is able to make this movie? How is it that they didn't arrange for his and his crews' death? (As the movie claims that witnesses of foul play were killed after they came public)

What would be even more fascinating to me, and if some centuries later this is proven, would be for the conspiracy to have occurred not by direct arrangement.

How can that be?

Well, in America, as I am sure is the case else where in the world, superstition are reinforced. Many times I would observe irrational behavior of individuals in power, and could not explain it for many years after (even after all the facts come to light and all parties that were to benefit from the secrecy of the knowledge of the act have fully gained the benefit of the secrecy) The irrational behaviors could still not be explained.

Many times, large companies operate based on "communication skills" that are quite often emphasized in modern corporate world. These skills tend to be unclear, unnecessary, and really really mean things that people say and do to each other in corporations to get their point across. But most importantly, on big important decisions, unclear mumble is the key feature. And if communication skills are taught using these very same communication skills, then would we not certainly get unclear communication on top of unclear language?

I have a feeling that because of a great emphasis on this type of "communication skills", that somebody, or the whole military/government/large corporate powers may have inadvertently developed a completely different identity--a massive blob of intelligent sub-agents, who will transmit messages they were given, and act on messages that they receive. But these message's original intent were not transmitted (intentionally for purpose of secrecy).

So, this massive chaotic intelligence built on top of units and organizational units of humans, groups, teams, departments, corporations, squads, platoons, companies, battalions, regiments, corps, armies, ... all these hierarchical groups operating in total darkness of true intent of the message and tasks that they were given.

I don't really believe that money is so powerful that it could move a person, or even a whole group of (democratically elected, no less, professionally trained, no less, highly educated with the knowledges of human civilization, no less) people to do something like this.

However, I can bring myself to believe that this would happen due to lack of global intelligence on the part of each of the units participating in this system. I can believe that each units were eventually given orders to put explosives in place (if that were really the case), and followed the orders as soldiers are trained to do, but that the orders or given by misleading communications to different levels of the military, and that large orders broke down into small orders, and at each level, the order were transmuted in this unclear communication that we have developed...

This idea came from an algorithm in the Machine Learning community called "belief propagation" which will lead to a global solution when each node of a Baye's Net send it's current belief to the other nodes it is connected to. Because each unit receiving orders are receiving unclear orders that they can only pass on what they believe was the intent of the order. And through this kind of message passing algorithm, 911 was arranged, executed, and covered up.

I mean, really, if we're to believe 9-11 is a self-inflicted terrorism act, are we to believe that the Holocaust was all a hoax too? But certainly I absolute can believe that the human system of the time eventually exploded due to lack of global situation awareness by each individual participant and unit of participants, and that caused holocaust, and that the Germans, Japanese, and Italian people are still people, just as Americans are still people even after 9-11 and all the wars that it caused.

...and all the economic problems America suffered, and probably continues to suffer today.. All that, due to a maladjustment in our human system...

Naive Bloomier Filter

I've been playing with the Naive implementation of the Bloomier Filter recently. The Bloomier Filter is just a stack of several Bloom Filters on each level. (Well the Naive version described in the first few pages of the paper is any ways) Is it me or is it that I just realized that there is a huge savings that can be had by allocating the second layer to have size FPR*N where FPR is the guaranteed False Positive Rate and N is the total number of items we inserted. So, but how small is the set of items that may make it to the next layer? Well, the expected value can be calculated as FPR*N. I guess if I am smarter, I would go ahead and calculate the variance of this RV, and compute how much variance to the overall expected false positives I add by making this second layer just a fraction of the first layer....

I guess he probably says this in the paper some where, but alas, took me a day to figure out.

Actually in reality it is very rare for me to break out of the first layer unless I construct a really really obnoxious case where I tell the BloomFilter that I plan to put in 100 items, and that I want 0.00001 FPR, and then put in 100k items, then it explodes and generates extra false positives.

This is such an interesting data structure. Have you had success with this algorithm?