50 Homer Simpson Quotes

This is a tribute to The Simpsons Movie. Watch it if you have not done so, it is freaking hilarious and I could not stop laughing at the movie from start to end.

• Operator! Give me the number for 911!
• Oh, so they have internet on computers now!
• Bart, with $10,000, we'd be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like... love!
• Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.
• I'm normally not a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.

• Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.
• Well, it's 1 a.m. Better go home and spend some quality time with the kids.
• Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'Sir' without adding, 'You're making a scene.'
• Marge, don't discourage the boy! Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.
• Doughnuts. Is there anything they can't do?
• You know, boys, a nuclear reactor is a lot like a woman. You just have to read the manual and press the right buttons.
• Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way.
• When will I learn? The answer to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV!
• Son, when you participate in sporting events, it's not whether you win or lose: it's how drunk you get.
• I'm going to the back seat of my car, with the woman I love, and I won't be back for ten minutes!
• [Meeting Aliens] Please don't eat me! I have a wife and kids. Eat them!

• What do we need a psychiatrist for? We know our kid is nuts.
• Marge, you're as beautiful as Princess Leia and as smart as Yoda.
• Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
• The only monster here is the gambling monster that has enslaved your mother! I call him Gamblor, and it's time to snatch your mother from his neon claws!
• When I look at the smiles on all the children's faces, I just know they're about to jab me with something.
• I'm having the best day of my life, and I owe it all to not going to Church!
• Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such and such.
• I'm not a bad guy! I work hard, and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
• Getting out of jury duty is easy. The trick is to say you're prejudiced against all races.
• It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day.
• Lisa, Vampires are make-believe, like elves, gremlins, and Eskimos.
• I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
• Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.
• Remember that postcard Grandpa sent us from Florida of that Alligator biting that woman's bottom? That's right, we all thought it was hilarious. But, it turns out we were wrong. That alligator was sexually harassing that woman.
• Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use.
• How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?

• Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.
• Homer no function beer well without.
• I've always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is -- and it's me.
• Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream?
• If something goes wrong at the plant, blame the guy who can't speak English.
• I'm never going to be disabled. I'm sick of being so healthy.
• I like my beer cold, my TV loud and my homosexuals flaming.

• [Looking at a globe map...country being Uruguay] Hee hee! Look at this country! 'You-are-gay.'
• All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.
• Dad, you've done a lot of great things, but you're a very old man, and old people are useless.
• But Marge, what if we chose the wrong religion? Each week we just make God madder and madder.
• I think Smithers picked me because of my motivational skills. Everyone says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.
• Dear Lord.. The gods have been good to me. For the first time in my life, everything is absolutely perfect just the way it is. So here's the deal: You freeze everything the way it is, and I won't ask for anything more. If that is OK, please give me absolutely no sign. OK, deal.
• That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!
• Beer: The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.
• If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing
• I'm in no condition to drive...wait! I shouldn't listen to myself, I'm drunk!
• 'To Start Press Any Key'. Where's the ANY key?

Bill Maher -- The Decider

Bill Maher's stand up comedy... This is freaking funny, even though some of the jokes are rehashed from his New Rules segments from Real Time with Bill Maher.

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6


Part 7


Part 8

Salvador Dali Statue

@ UOB Building, Raffles Place, Singapore

Lewis Black On Iraq

This is an old Back In Black Clip from the Daily Show... Here Lewis Black talks about the good news coming out of Iraq.




The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - The Most Trusted Name in Fake News

The French Connections

I am not a big fan of free-market capitalism, and many a times I have argued with my Libertarian friends that the free-market forces needs government regulation. While this article that appeared in The New York Times might not "prove my point" completely, it does add weight to my views.

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The French Connections
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 23 July 2007

There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s airport bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business success. Lester Thurow's 1992 book, "Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America," which spent more than six months on the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.

Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into triumphalism. Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with Europe's slow growth and Japan's decade-long slump. Above all, however, our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac complained that the Internet was an "Anglo-Saxon network," and he had a point - France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.

What most Americans probably don't know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved - in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links - it's the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our "high speed" connections are painfully slow by other countries' standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

As a result, we're lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn't even in the top 10.

What happened to America's Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot - or was persuaded by special interests to ignore - the reality that sometimes you can't have effective market competition without effective regulation.

You see, the world may look flat once you're in cyberspace - but to get there you need to go through a narrow passageway, down your phone line or down your TV cable. And if the companies controlling these passageways can behave like the robber barons of yore, levying whatever tolls they like on those who pass by, commerce suffers.

America's Internet flourished in the dial-up era because federal regulators didn't let that happen - they forced local phone companies to act as common carriers, allowing competing service providers to use their lines. Clinton administration officials, including Al Gore and Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, tried to ensure that this open competition would continue - but the telecommunications giants sabotaged their efforts, while The Wall Street Journal's editorial page ridiculed them as people with the minds of French bureaucrats.

And when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband - if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that's much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.

It's too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it's interesting to learn that health care isn't the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.

A Critique On Postmodernism

I have often argued with my friends trained in the humanities that I think Postmodernism is a crappy bullshit theory and a stupid way of looking at reality, for they often confuse between opinion and fact. It looks like I am not the only one to feel this way. This is an interesting article I found online here, which summarizes my feelings quite well.

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Intellectual adolescence

FROM CYNICISM TO POSTMODERNISM | Contrarianism has a proud intellectual heritage, but in its postmodern flowering it merely became juvenile, complacently smashing up the entire interlocking crossword puzzle of human knowledge.

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
Editors, www.butterfliesandwheels.com, and authors of Why Truth Matters (2006).

The very name “postmodernism” seems designed to stake out the territory of the latest hottest thing, the farthest point on the chart plus one. But there is a sense in which postmodernism seems not novel at all but just another example in a recurring pattern that goes back as far as we can squint. Postmodernism is notoriously elusive of definition, but if we take it to include, at a minimum, a suspicion of grand narratives, an urge to problematise everything (especially whatever seems least problematic), anti-foundationalism or relativism in knowledge as well as ethics, and a “playful” or “ironic” view of truth, then history presents a good many people who resemble postmodernists and schools of thought that resemble postmodernism.

There have always been people who look at the world and social arrangements, and decide to do everything by contraries. There have also always been people with a more nuanced view of the matter, but who have been represented by others as doing everything by contraries. Socrates the ironist was portrayed by Aristophanes as just such a philosophical over-turner of apple carts, one who inspired sons to rebel against their fathers, contradicting their every word and challenging conventional wisdom to the point of absurdity. Aristophanes’ Socrates in The Clouds was a caricature (and there is a story that Socrates was in the audience and laughed uproariously), but the caricature may have influenced the capital charges against Socrates that he did not believe in the gods that Athens believed in, but introduced new gods, and that he corrupted the youth of the city.

The outcome was bad for Socrates’ immediate well-being, but it probably (with Plato’s help) did a lot for his long-term fame. Doing things by contraries often works that way. It can be a serious effort to look behind appearances and think critically about custom and habit, and it can also be a way to get attention, whether admiring or disdainful.

The 6th century BC Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama also, according to the legend, did things by contraries, as did other ascetics and wandering sages throughout history, right up to Thoreau and Gandhi and Ted Kaczynski. Since most people want comfort and prosperity and (if possible) luxury, those who voluntarily turn their backs on that sort of life and choose poverty and discomfort are necessarily being contrarian. Diogenes the cynic, whom Plato called Socrates run mad, was another such: he held that the distinction between virtue and vice was the only one that mattered and that other conventional distinctions (public and private, raw and cooked, yours and mine) were worthless—in other words, he “problematised binary distinctions.”

Cynicism became a widespread movement or school of thought in the Hellenistic world. One New Testament scholar argues that Jesus was a home-grown Cynic and that many of the sayings that strike Christians as novel and unique are in fact neither, but rather good conventional cynicism: they generally amount to doing or advocating doing the opposite of the (socially, as opposed to cynically) conventional thing. Turning the other cheek, giving the shirt as well as the cloak, talking to a woman from Samaria, healing on the Sabbath, letting the dead bury the dead, rejecting the stoning of a woman taken in adultery—they’re all contraries.



HOWEVER, DOING things by contraries is an easier matter in pre-industrial societies than it is in modern (or postmodern) ones, in which economic and vocational complexity are associated with myriad shifting overlapping groups and micro-cultures, with varying norms and expectations. What is contrarianism in one context may be the most slavish conformity in another. At a family gathering or high school reunion or neighbourhood potluck, the post-colonialist sex-positive queer theoretical opinions may be thrillingly exotic, but back at the coal face, at department meetings or when teaching liminality and hybridity 101, they are not all that startling.

In other words, to the extent that the underlying project is that of being the one radical who will never be out-radicalled, of being the new Nietzsche or Freud by finding previously unproblematised power structures to problematise, then… the task can be a daunting one. It’s late in the game. The players have been here for a long time, they’ve gone over the ground again and again, they’ve turned up everything—all the gold and emeralds, even the coal and limestone and gravel, were dug up and carted off long ago. However long one looks, however patiently one digs and scratches and turns over, there may simply be nothing left to find. A nondescript bit of stone or scrap of bark isn’t going to do much good. The field is just played out.
The only recourse left seems to be to problematise the field itself. What is the field then? What is the ground the problematisers stand on? Knowledge itself, reality itself, truth itself; science and reason, the foundations of modern knowledge and practice. It becomes necessary to question or deconstruct or deny not just the criteria for science and reason, but science and reason themselves, as in this article from 2001:

This paper offers a postmodern “deconstruction” of basic physical theory, which is the cause and effect of classical physics specified by Newton’s laws of motion...This deconstruction of “Newtonian text,” which demonstrates that the presumed causality of external forces in classical physics indeed is a social construct (as postmodern sociology claims all theory to be), refutes the presupposition of natural science about the objectivist foundations of modern scientific discourse.1

An article on evidence-based medicine published in 2006 offers some even stronger claims:

Within the healthcare disciplines, a powerful evidence-based discourse has produced a plethora of correlates, such as specialised journals and best practice guidelines...Unmasking the hidden politics of evidence-based discourse is paramount, and it is this task that forms the basis of our critique...[T]he objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific arena.2

This article was sharply criticised by the Guardian science columnist Ben Goldacre, among others, and the International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare published a reply to the criticisms which began with this explanation of postmodernism:

The postmodernist thinking that has characterised a number of academic disciplines in the last two or so decades of the 20th century—and is still alive and well in some quarters—has played an important role in creating new ways of developing ideas in the arts, science and culture. The relativism on which it is founded, and the “liberation” from sacred cows it seeks, have a place in healthcare and health science. At its simplest…postmodernism is a response to modernity—the period where science was trusted and represented progress—and essentially focuses on questioning the centrality of both science and established canons, disciplines and institutions to achieving progress. The nature of “truth” is a recurring concern to postmodernists, who generally purport that there are no truths but multiple realities and that understandings of the human condition are dynamic and diverse. The notion that no one view, theory or understanding should be privileged over another (or that no discourse should be silenced) is a tenet of postmodernist critique and analysis.3

It is easy to find instances of this kind of theoretical and epistemological egalitarianism. In anthropology, for example, approaches that are broadly postmodern are common, and are associated with a general move against what are seen as the totalising and oppressive aspects of Western science. Thus, Thomas Gregor and Daniel Gross point out that many books have been published within the discipline, in which anthropology is seen

to facilitate colonialism and other repressive relationships…to contribute to the abuse of indigenous peoples by romanticised descriptions of their culture that failed to take account of their threatened status, and to permit racially and culturally alien outsiders to produce and market false, misleading, and even exploitative caricatures of other societies.4

Postmodernism provides an escape from anthropology’s supposedly reactionary heart. Since postmodernists can claim, variously, that there are multiple realities (all of them socially constructed); that truth-claims are necessarily embedded in particular language-games or discourses or power relations; that to suppose that language refers to the world at all is to be committed to a naïve “metaphysics of presence”; so it is possible simply to assert that anthropology must cast off its imperialist past, reject the scientific paradigm, and reinvent itself as a morally engaged discipline.

This might sound like hyperbole, but it is not. Louise Lamphere, for example, a past president of the American Anthropological Association, claims that there is an “urgent need” for an “engaged anthropology,” within which moral commitment trumps impersonal scientific concern, and where the communities that anthropologists work with are treated as equal partners in the research process.

There are a host of critical social issues that anthropologists are currently researching where our qualitative methodologies, in-depth field research, and knowledge of local languages and cultures gives us vital insights into the sources of social problems and also of potential remedies for some very pressing societal dilemmas.5

Similarly, Nancy Sheper-Hughes claims that a critical anthropology will “assert the subjectivity of knowable phenomena” and propose “reflection as a valid category and method of discovery” (author’s italics). Moreover, she argues that anthropologists should become “negative” workers, practice “barefoot anthropology,” and “disrupt expected academic roles and statuses.”6

This desire among anthropologists to radicalise their subject, and to reject the hegemony of scientific orthodoxy, can lead them to articulate positions that are highly counterintuitive. Frederique Apffel Marglin, for example, in her essay “Smallpox in Two Cultures,” writes about the campaign by colonial administrators in the 19th century and the Indian government in the 1970s to vaccinate the Indian people against smallpox. She does not stop at making the reasonable point that colonial officials and the Indian government were tactless in telling those who resisted vaccination that they were superstitious and irrational. Her aim is larger: “to challenge science’s claim to be a superior form of knowledge which renders obsolete more traditional systems of thought.”

She mounts her challenge by problematising the binary opposition that Western medicine invokes—not unreasonably, one might think—between disease and health, death and life, and she contrasts it unfavourably with the traditional Indian worship of Sitala, the goddess of smallpox.

In absolutely negativising disease, suffering and death, in opposing these to health and life in a mutually exclusive manner, the scientific medical system of knowledge can separate in individuals and in populations what is absolutely bad, the enemy to be eradicated, from what is good, health and life. In the process it can and does objectify people with all the repressive political possibilities that objectification opens.7

There is something rather stunning about a level of science-phobia that sees “negativising” disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. It is extraordinary that Marglin, even for a moment, countenances the possibility that human suffering might be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren't for the intervention of an oppressive system of Western medicine.

Marglin’s ruminations have had little, if any, impact on programmes of vaccination. Indeed, it was precisely such a concerted programme that eradicated smallpox, long considered to be the worst of the infectious diseases, from the world in the late 1970s. However, there are other cases where this kind of epistemic relativism and scepticism about the possibility of truth has had more sinister effects.

For one thing, there is pervasive confusion about what knowledge is; about what the standards of justification are, what evidence is valid and what is not, why it matters, and similar very basic issues. At a time when scientific literacy is of ever-increasing importance, a sophisticatedly ironic view of science and reason is not useful. It helps foster the endemic journalistic idea that for every “issue” there are precisely two sides and that both must be heard, which results in fake “controversies” in which one side has all the evidence and the other side has mere assertion, yet the putative controversy runs and runs.

There was for instance the pseudo-scandal in the UK about the MMR vaccine and its alleged implication in causing autism. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield, a research scientist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a paper showing that he had found traces of the measles virus in the intestines of twelve children with autism. He suggested that the MMR vaccine was dangerous, but he had no real evidence for the suggestion; nevertheless there was a panic about the MMR, a drop in vaccination rates, and an increase in measles—a dangerous disease.

Public scientific literacy is further threatened, especially in the US, by demands from some religious groups that schools teach intelligent design in addition to or instead of evolutionary biology. There is an ever-growing mountain of evidence in support of the latter and none in support of the former, yet the news media and even reputable publishers such as Cambridge University Press continue to treat the matter as a genuine controversy and the proponents of ID as epistemically respectable parties to a debate.

Another claim which has worked its way into the broader culture is that Einstein’s wife Mileva Marić was his unacknowledged collaborator for much of the most productive part of his career. There is essentially no evidence for this claim (nothing more than Einstein’s use of the word “our” in connection with his work in a few of his letters to Marić), as the physicist Allen Esterson has shown in great detail,8 yet advocates for Marić’s role, again, claim parity with historians of science and Einstein scholars unimpressed by speculation about what Marić might have done. The US public broadcaster PBS, part of whose mission is to be an educational service, features a documentary about Marić that Esterson has shown to be riddled with errors.9

Just two weeks ago, another television documentary made claims that DNA evidence and statistics show that a tomb in Jerusalem is that of “Jesus’s family.” Again, there is no real evidence;10 again, the claim is an absurd one that nevertheless gets a great deal of media and public attention, most of it all too serious and credulous.

The Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt noted a similar confusion last year, after the editors of the Daily Northwestern decided to run a column by electrical engineering professor and Holocaust denier Arthur Butz “‘in order,” they said, “to “facilitate a more educated debate over Butz’s beliefs.’”

That is akin to facilitating a debate between flat earthers and scientists or between people who said there was no slavery and historians of slavery. Butz’s beliefs are documented lies. Don’t take my word on it. Take that of the Royal High Court of Justice and two different Courts of Appeal.

Lipstadt sums up:

Let the likes of Butz and Irving go on talking to neo-Nazis and other deniers. That is their right. Neither the Daily nor any other paper has an obligation to publish such lies.11

But one of the consequences of epistemological relativism is such widespread confusion about what constitutes knowledge or a legitimate claim to knowledge, and what does not. Knowledge becomes confused with fairness, and fairness becomes the idea that both sides deserve a hearing, and not just a hearing but active publicity.



THE IMPULSE which leads postmodernists, and others, to valorise epistemological relativism is easy to understand. It is rooted in a commitment to egalitarianism. It is bad enough that Western countries grow fat on the poverty of everyone else; it simply cannot be tolerated that their scientists, philosophers, and centres of learning also determine what methods and tools should be considered the best for finding out about the world. After all, to allow that this was true would be to add epistemic power—the power to determine what counts as knowledge—to the economic, political and military power that Western countries already possess. The solution then is simply to privilege the knowledge claims of people who are in various ways marginalised and oppressed. After all, if nothing else, it is surely obvious that they will know more about their own situation than representatives of the forces that oppress them.

The trouble is, though, that it isn’t obvious. There is no reason to suppose that simply because people are downtrodden they will possess true beliefs about their situation and the world that has conspired to put them in it. Smallpox is a virus: the fact that some people consider it to be associated with a goddess doesn’t make it any less a virus. Similarly, an electrical storm is a natural weather phenomenon; the fact that some people have believed it to be a sign of the wrath of the gods, doesn’t make it any less a natural weather phenomenon. Put simply, the world has a reality that is independent of the claims that people make of it. Being oppressed and marginalised doesn’t automatically put people in a good position to get a grasp on it.



OF COURSE, the likely response to this from any halfway sophisticated postmodernist will simply be to deny that there is this kind of a mind-independent reality. Consider, for example, the work of French sociologist Bruno Latour. In his book, Pandora’s Hope, he seems to argue—though much of his prose is deliberately opaque—that the objects of scientific knowledge exist only to the extent that they are articulated through the manifold mediations which constitute scientific practice. Thus, for instance, he claims that the proposition “It refers to something there” indicates the safety, fluidity, traceability, and stability of a transverse series of aligned intermediaries, not an impossible correspondence between two far-apart vertical domains.12

Needless to say, it is supposed that this kind of contrarian thinking has a number of radical implications. Latour insists, for example, that existence is not an all or nothing property. Rather, an entity gains in reality the more it is associated with other entities which in their turn collaborate with it. Moreover, we should never say “‘it exists’ or ‘it does not exist’”13 (unless, it seems, we’re Bruno Latour, answering a question posed in our own book a few pages earlier about whether ferments existed before Pasteur made them up; then we can reply: “‘No, they did not exist before he came along’—an answer that is obvious, natural, and even, as I will show, commonsensical!”).14

Latour’s general way of proceeding is to employ an absurdly ornate and rhetorical writing style in order to muddy a number of conceptual waters, presumably with the hope that in this way the banal will be rendered profound. Particularly, he likes to blur the distinction between our knowledge of objects and the objects themselves (what Susan Haack calls “the passes-for fallacy”). Here is an example taken from his discussion of a paper by Louis Pasteur which deals with the discovery of a yeast related to lactic acid fermentation:

The capacities of the natural world are modified between the beginning and the end of the story. At the start of the paper the reader lives in a world in which the relation between organic matter and ferments is that of contact and decay…At the end the reader lives in a world in which a ferment is as active as any other already identified life form…15

It hardly needs saying that Latour simply asserts here what he needs to demonstrate: namely, that the external world is somehow affected by the process of coming to know about it. Presumably what he is pretending that he is not saying is that the world seems different once we know certain things about it. Very well, but this is just obvious. The rhetorical trick he employs to disguise this truism, or to give it the veneer of profundity, is simply to pretend that he is talking about the world itself rather than our knowledge or experience of it.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont complain precisely about Latour’s tendency to mix up statements about knowledge with statements about things in their Intellectual Impostures. Here is Latour’s offending statement:

Since the settlement of controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not the consequence, we can never use the outcome—Nature—to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.16

This is what Sokal and Bricmont had to say about this sleight of hand:

Note how Latour slips, without comment or argument, from “Nature’s representation” in the first half of this sentence to “Nature” tout court in the second half. If we were to read “Nature’s representation” in both halves, then we’d have the truism that scientists’ representations of Nature (that is, their theories) are arrived at by a social process, and that the course and outcome of that social process can’t be explained simply by its outcomes.17

Latour, then, employs a shoddy epistemology, a dodgy grasp of logic, and a fondness for an overblown turn of phrase, in the service of a contrarian project, the main aim of which seems to be to render the obvious mysterious and the banal profound.



THERE IS THE THOUGHT that the kinds of issues that we have been discussing in this essay are mainly local and parochial; that yes, these are important concerns within the academy, but that they are of little relevance to the lives of people outside of it. However, such a view is mistaken. There are good reasons for everybody to resist postmodernist nihilism about the possibility of truth and knowledge.

One compelling reason is that the pursuit and accumulation of knowledge is at least as likely to be liberating as it is to be oppressive or colonialist. Historically, the recognition of a sharp difference between justified assertion and mere assertion tout court has been a force for liberation and progress, and against arbitrary power and illegitimate institutions. Meera Nanda puts it like this:

Having grown up in a provincial town in Northern India, I considered my education in science a source of personal enlightenment. Natural science, especially molecular biology, had given me a whole different perspective on the underlying cosmology of the religious and cultural traditions I was raised in. Science gave me good reasons to say a principled “No!” to many of my inherited beliefs about God, nature, women, duties and rights, purity and pollution, social status, and my relationship with my fellow citizens. I had…found the courage to assert the right to fulfil my own destiny, because I learned to demand good reasons for the demands that were put on me.18

Contrarianism, nihilism, the overturning of tables and interrogation of all foundations have their uses, but they also have their risks. There is always risk in demolition work: one may destroy something of great value that cannot be replaced.

With all the special pains and miseries of human life, we have advantages not possessed by even the cleverest of animals. We can tell each other what happened when one of us was absent, we can discuss memories, we can plan the future; we can mourn, we can explain, we can imagine, mutually as well as singly. We have language, and we have writing and other forms of recording. This means that we can generate cumulative knowledge that is beyond the reach of any other animal on the planet. It took us millions of years to realise this talent and put it to use, but we now have a heritage of knowledge and science built up over centuries: a vast interlocking crossword puzzle, in Susan Haack’s metaphor. That heritage is of great practical benefit, of course, but it is also of great non-instrumental value, in the same sort of way as music and art, drama and poetry, cathedrals and Bamiyan buddhas.

If we are going to throw all this away, if we are going to play the contrarian card, then a cautionary principle applies: we have to have good reasons for thinking that what we are throwing away is not something of great value. In its adolescent excess, in its desire to shock, to titillate, to push against boundaries and convention, postmodernism come nowhere near meeting this cautionary demand.


OPHELIA BENSON & JEREMY STANGROOM
Editors, www.butterfliesandwheels.com, and authors of Why Truth Matters (2006).



Footnotes:
1. L. Frederick Zaman III, ‘Postmodern Deconstruction Of Newtonian Science: A Physical-to-social Transposition Of Causality’, Theory & Science, 2001, http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol002.001/05zaman.html, accessed March 1 2007


2. Dave Holmes RN PhD, Stuart J Murray PhD, Amélie Perron RN
PhD(cand) and Geneviève Rail PhD, ‘Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism’, International Journal of Evidence Based Healthcare, 2006, 4 (3), 180-186.



3. Alan Pearson RN MSc PhD FAAG FRCN, ‘Scientists, postmodernists or fascists?’, International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare, 4 (4), 385–391 http://www.badscience.net/?p=338#more-338, accessed March 1 2007


4. Tomas A. Gregor and Daniel A. Gross, ‘Guilt by Association: the Culture of Accusation and the American Anthropological Association’s Investigation of Darkness in El Dorado’, American Anthropologist, 106 (4), p. 688.


5. Louise Lamphere, ‘Perils and Prospects for an Engaged Anthropology: A View from the US’, Social Anthropology, 11 (2), p. 143.


6. Cited in Gregor and Gross, op cit, p. 689 & p. 690.


7. F.A. Marglin, ‘Smallpox in two Systems of Knowledge’, in Dominating Knowledge: Development, Culture and Resistance, eds. F.A. Marglin and S.A. Marglin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990).


8. Allen Esterson, ‘Mileva Marić: Einstein’s Wife,’ Butterflies and Wheels, March 6 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=182


9. Allen Esterson, ‘Einstein’s Wife: A challenge to PBS,’ Butterflies and Wheels, July 5 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=201


10. R Joseph Hoffmann, ‘The Bones of Our Lord,’ Butterflies and Wheels, February 26 2007 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=233
‘”Faccidents”: Bad Assumptions and the Jesus Tomb Debacle,’ Butterflies and Wheels, March 7 2007 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=235


11. Deborah Lipstadt, ‘Distortions are not Worth Debating,’ Butterflies and Wheels, February 21 2006 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=174


12. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope, Harvard University Press 1999, p. 149.


13. Ibid., p. 159.


14. Ibid., p. 154.


15. Ibid., p. 117.


16. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures, Profile Books [1998] 2003, p. 85.


17. Ibid.


18. Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward, Rutgers University Press 2003, p. xi.

Bill Maher: Elites

The term "elite" has a negative connotation in Singapore... and whenever I get into arguments with friends, I have been branded an "elite" just for subscribing to the view that we need capable people to lead our government. However, I always felt that most Singaporeans confuse between the term "elite" and "no empathy" (yeah, thanks a lot, Wee Shu Min)... This is one of Bill Maher's old "New Rules" segment, and I think he summarizes my point exactly (in a funny way albeit) on the importance of having capable people in charge of your country......

科学不是迷信

(刊登于联合早报2007年7月22日)

最近回国和朋友会面，常讨论的话题是科学在社会所应该扮演的角色。由于本身学术训练的关系，因此对于科学应该在社会扮演重要角色的看法非常坚持。然而，此立场也通常和朋友对于社会某些现象的看法对立。例如中医、风水、特异功能、星座学、另类治疗等等。对于以上 “学问”，本人的立场是它们都不是建立在严谨物理证据的基础上，在某种程度上就等同迷信。

当然，有许多朋友都不认同本人的看法，最常提出的反驳是就算科学为人类带来许多高科技产品，不过却无法解释宇宙所有的事物。因此，只依靠科学角度来理解和反对以上提到的现象过于霸道、思想狭隘和高傲，而对于科学执著才是迷信的表现。

本人不否认科学无法解释宇宙所有事物，不过却不认同利用科学理解世界的做法就等同思想狭隘和高傲。首先，许多人经常把科学误解成科技产品，认为所谓科学就是太空梭或者电脑。其实，科学是一套教导人们如何获取知识的指导原则。

所谓迷信，就是客观证据不足的情况下依然坚持不合理的信念。反之，任何科学理论都必须建立在可供观察的 (publicly observable) 客观证据上，绝对不会声称别人测量不出某些现象的证据是因为没受过训练，或是没有某种的特殊能力。然而，此借口却是以上提到的现象在受到证据不足的指责下经常搬出的理由。不理会客观证据的不足而坚持某些现象存在，难道就不比因为证据不足而不接受某些看法的行为来得更思想狭隘吗？

科学理论除了必须建立在客观证据上，所有形容该理论的概念、术语，以及现象都必须拥有操作定义 (operational definition)。也就是说，所有的科学理论都必须拥有能够被观察或者衡量的现实依据。这也是为何科学家都坚持把理论建立在客观证据的基础上。如果知识是建立在主观的意见和看法上，那么恐怕永远都无法有所进步吧？

本人之所以认为科学并非高傲和思想狭隘，是因为其基本的理念建立在我们对于整个宇宙的了解并不全面的原则上。对科学家而言，这个世界没有绝对的真理，而任何科学理论都有被推翻的可能性，只要能提出足够的证据。当然，支持某理论的证据越多，此理论被推翻的可能性就越低。就如同进化论，尽管此理论几乎成为真理了，不过只要有人能够找到属于寒武纪的人类化石，就足以推翻此理论。或许利用已故物理学者Richard Feynman生前的经典语录来形容一般科学家的想法最为贴切了： 我拥有近似真相的答案、可能被推翻的信仰，以及对于不同现象拥有不同程度的确信，不过我从来不会对任何事物拥有绝对的看法。

仔细想想，这种只承认客观证据所形容的现实，而不接受客观现实以外的揣测的思想不就和孔子所说的 “知之为知之，不知为不知，是知也” 和 “子不语怪、力、乱、神” 等看法相近吗？如果不愿意接受没有足够证据的现象也可归类于迷信的话，或许这世上没有不能归类为迷信的看法。

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

This is an article written by one of Feynman's friend. He talks about the time that he worked with Feynman on the connection machine. Also, he provides a glimpse into the brilliance that is Feynman.

The original article can be found here.

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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine

by, W. Daniel Hillis
for Physics Today

One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, "That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard." For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

Richard's interest in computing went back to his days at Los Alamos, where he supervised the "computers," that is, the people who operated the mechanical calculators. There he was instrumental in setting up some of the first plug-programmable tabulating machines for physical simulation. His interest in the field was heightened in the late 1970's when his son, Carl, began studying computers at MIT.

I got to know Richard through his son. I was a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Carl was one of the undergraduates helping me with my thesis project. I was trying to design a computer fast enough to solve common sense reasoning problems. The machine, as we envisioned it, would contain a million tiny computers, all connected by a communications network. We called it a "Connection Machine." Richard, always interested in his son's activities, followed the project closely. He was skeptical about the idea, but whenever we met at a conference or I visited CalTech, we would stay up until the early hours of the morning discussing details of the planned machine. The first time he ever seemed to believe that we were really going to try to build it was the lunchtime meeting.

Richard arrived in Boston the day after the company was incorporated. We had been busy raising the money, finding a place to rent, issuing stock, etc. We set up in an old mansion just outside of the city, and when Richard showed up we were still recovering from the shock of having the first few million dollars in the bank. No one had thought about anything technical for several months. We were arguing about what the name of the company should be when Richard walked in, saluted, and said, "Richard Feynman reporting for duty. OK, boss, what's my assignment?" The assembled group of not-quite-graduated MIT students was astounded.

After a hurried private discussion ("I don't know, you hired him..."), we informed Richard that his assignment would be to advise on the application of parallel processing to scientific problems.

"That sounds like a bunch of baloney," he said. "Give me something real to do."

So we sent him out to buy some office supplies. While he was gone, we decided that the part of the machine that we were most worried about was the router that delivered messages from one processor to another. We were not sure that our design was going to work. When Richard returned from buying pencils, we gave him the assignment of analyzing the router.

The Machine

The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

During those first few months, Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

In the meantime, the rest of us, happy to have found something to keep Richard occupied, went about the business of ordering the furniture and computers, hiring the first engineers, and arranging for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pay for the development of the first prototype. Richard did a remarkable job of focusing on his "assignment," stopping only occasionally to help wire the computer room, set up the machine shop, shake hands with the investors, install the telephones, and cheerfully remind us of how crazy we all were. When we finally picked the name of the company, Thinking Machines Corporation, Richard was delighted. "That's good. Now I don't have to explain to people that I work with a bunch of loonies. I can just tell them the name of the company."

The technical side of the project was definitely stretching our capacities. We had decided to simplify things by starting with only 64,000 processors, but even then the amount of work to do was overwhelming. We had to design our own silicon integrated circuits, with processors and a router. We also had to invent packaging and cooling mechanisms, write compilers and assemblers, devise ways of testing processors simultaneously, and so on. Even simple problems like wiring the boards together took on a whole new meaning when working with tens of thousands of processors. In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.

'Get These Guys Organized'

I had never managed a large group before and I was clearly in over my head. Richard volunteered to help out. "We've got to get these guys organized," he told me. "Let me tell you how we did it at Los Alamos."

Every great man that I have known has had a certain time and place in their life that they use as a reference point; a time when things worked as they were supposed to and great things were accomplished. For Richard, that time was at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. Whenever things got "cockeyed," Richard would look back and try to understand how now was different than then. Using this approach, Richard decided we should pick an expert in each area of importance in the machine, such as software or packaging or electronics, to become the "group leader" in this area, analogous to the group leaders at Los Alamos.

Part Two of Feynman's "Let's Get Organized" campaign was that we should begin a regular seminar series of invited speakers who might have interesting things to do with our machine. Richard's idea was that we should concentrate on people with new applications, because they would be less conservative about what kind of computer they would use. For our first seminar he invited John Hopfield, a friend of his from CalTech, to give us a talk on his scheme for building neural networks. In 1983, studying neural networks was about as fashionable as studying ESP, so some people considered John Hopfield a little bit crazy. Richard was certain he would fit right in at Thinking Machines Corporation.

What Hopfield had invented was a way of constructing an [associative memory], a device for remembering patterns. To use an associative memory, one trains it on a series of patterns, such as pictures of the letters of the alphabet. Later, when the memory is shown a new pattern it is able to recall a similar pattern that it has seen in the past. A new picture of the letter "A" will "remind" the memory of another "A" that it has seen previously. Hopfield had figured out how such a memory could be built from devices that were similar to biological neurons.

Not only did Hopfield's method seem to work, but it seemed to work well on the Connection Machine. Feynman figured out the details of how to use one processor to simulate each of Hopfield's neurons, with the strength of the connections represented as numbers in the processors' memory. Because of the parallel nature of Hopfield's algorithm, all of the processors could be used concurrently with 100\% efficiency, so the Connection Machine would be hundreds of times faster than any conventional computer.

An Algorithm For Logarithms

Feynman worked out the program for computing Hopfield's network on the Connection Machine in some detail. The part that he was proudest of was the subroutine for computing logarithms. I mention it here not only because it is a clever algorithm, but also because it is a specific contribution Richard made to the mainstream of computer science. He invented it at Los Alamos.

Consider the problem of finding the logarithm of a fractional number between 1.0 and 2.0 (the algorithm can be generalized without too much difficulty). Feynman observed that any such number can be uniquely represented as a product of numbers of the form $1 + 2^{-k]$, where $k$ is an integer. Testing each of these factors in a binary number representation is simply a matter of a shift and a subtraction. Once the factors are determined, the logarithm can be computed by adding together the precomputed logarithms of the factors. The algorithm fit especially well on the Connection Machine, since the small table of the logarithms of $1 + 2^{-k]$ could be shared by all the processors. The entire computation took less time than division.

Concentrating on the algorithm for a basic arithmetic operation was typical of Richard's approach. He loved the details. In studying the router, he paid attention to the action of each individual gate and in writing a program he insisted on understanding the implementation of every instruction. He distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts. When several years later I wrote a general interest article on the Connection Machine for [Scientific American], he was disappointed that it left out too many details. He asked, "How is anyone supposed to know that this isn't just a bunch of crap?"

Feynman's insistence on looking at the details helped us discover the potential of the machine for numerical computing and physical simulation. We had convinced ourselves at the time that the Connection Machine would not be efficient at "number-crunching," because the first prototype had no special hardware for vectors or floating point arithmetic. Both of these were "known" to be requirements for number-crunching. Feynman decided to test this assumption on a problem that he was familiar with in detail: quantum chromodynamics.

Quantum chromodynamics is a theory of the internal workings of atomic particles such as protons. Using this theory it is possible, in principle, to compute the values of measurable physical quantities, such as a proton's mass. In practice, such a computation requires so much arithmetic that it could keep the fastest computers in the world busy for years. One way to do this calculation is to use a discrete four-dimensional lattice to model a section of space-time. Finding the solution involves adding up the contributions of all of the possible configurations of certain matrices on the links of the lattice, or at least some large representative sample. (This is essentially a Feynman path integral.) The thing that makes this so difficult is that calculating the contribution of even a single configuration involves multiplying the matrices around every little loop in the lattice, and the number of loops grows as the fourth power of the lattice size. Since all of these multiplications can take place concurrently, there is plenty of opportunity to keep all 64,000 processors busy.

To find out how well this would work in practice, Feynman had to write a computer program for QCD. Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic in which he wrote the program and then simulated it by hand to estimate how fast it would run on the Connection Machine.

He was excited by the results. "Hey Danny, you're not going to believe this, but that machine of yours can actually do something [useful]!" According to Feynman's calculations, the Connection Machine, even without any special hardware for floating point arithmetic, would outperform a machine that CalTech was building for doing QCD calculations. From that point on, Richard pushed us more and more toward looking at numerical applications of the machine.

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

Cellular Automata

The game of Life is an example of a class of computations that interested Feynman called [cellular automata]. Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the "continuum" might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. Each cell could be a simple automaton that obeys a small set of rules and communicates only with its nearest neighbors, like the lattice calculation for QCD. If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.

The notion of cellular automata goes back to von Neumann and Ulam, whom Feynman had known at Los Alamos. Richard's recent interest in the subject was motivated by his friends Ed Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram, both of whom were fascinated by cellular automata models of physics. Feynman was always quick to point out to them that he considered their specific models "kooky," but like the Connection Machine, he considered the subject sufficiently crazy to put some energy into.

There are many potential problems with cellular automata as a model of physical space and time; for example, finding a set of rules that obeys special relativity. One of the simplest problems is just making the physics so that things look the same in every direction. The most obvious pattern of cellular automata, such as a fixed three-dimensional grid, have preferred directions along the axes of the grid. Is it possible to implement even Newtonian physics on a fixed lattice of automata?

Feynman had a proposed solution to the anisotropy problem which he attempted (without success) to work out in detail. His notion was that the underlying automata, rather than being connected in a regular lattice like a grid or a pattern of hexagons, might be randomly connected. Waves propagating through this medium would, on the average, propagate at the same rate in every direction.

Cellular automata started getting attention at Thinking Machines when Stephen Wolfram, who was also spending time at the company, suggested that we should use such automata not as a model of physics, but as a practical method of simulating physical systems. Specifically, we could use one processor to simulate each cell and rules that were chosen to model something useful, like fluid dynamics. For two-dimensional problems there was a neat solution to the anisotropy problem since [Frisch, Hasslacher, Pomeau] had shown that a hexagonal lattice with a simple set of rules produced isotropic behavior at the macro scale. Wolfram used this method on the Connection Machine to produce a beautiful movie of a turbulent fluid flow in two dimensions. Watching the movie got all of us, especially Feynman, excited about physical simulation. We all started planning additions to the hardware, such as support of floating point arithmetic that would make it possible for us to perform and display a variety of simulations in real time.

Feynman the Explainer

In the meantime, we were having a lot of trouble explaining to people what we were doing with cellular automata. Eyes tended to glaze over when we started talking about state transition diagrams and finite state machines. Finally Feynman told us to explain it like this,

"We have noticed in nature that the behavior of a fluid depends very little on the nature of the individual particles in that fluid. For example, the flow of sand is very similar to the flow of water or the flow of a pile of ball bearings. We have therefore taken advantage of this fact to invent a type of imaginary particle that is especially simple for us to simulate. This particle is a perfect ball bearing that can move at a single speed in one of six directions. The flow of these particles on a large enough scale is very similar to the flow of natural fluids."

This was a typical Richard Feynman explanation. On the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality.

We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

Getting Richard to give advice like that was sometimes tricky. He pretended not to like working on any problem that was outside his claimed area of expertise. Often, at Thinking Machines when he was asked for advice he would gruffly refuse with "That's not my department." I could never figure out just what his department was, but it did not matter anyway, since he spent most of his time working on those "not-my-department" problems. Sometimes he really would give up, but more often than not he would come back a few days after his refusal and remark, "I've been thinking about what you asked the other day and it seems to me..." This worked best if you were careful not to expect it.

I do not mean to imply that Richard was hesitant to do the "dirty work." In fact, he was always volunteering for it. Many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls. But what Richard hated, or at least pretended to hate, was being asked to give advice. So why were people always asking him for it? Because even when Richard didn't understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well. Richard made people feel like a child does, when a grown-up first treats him as an adult. He was never afraid of telling the truth, and however foolish your question was, he never made you feel like a fool.

The charming side of Richard helped people forgive him for his uncharming characteristics. For example, in many ways Richard was a sexist. Whenever it came time for his daily bowl of soup he would look around for the nearest "girl" and ask if she would fetch it to him. It did not matter if she was the cook, an engineer, or the president of the company. I once asked a female engineer who had just been a victim of this if it bothered her. "Yes, it really annoys me," she said. "On the other hand, he is the only one who ever explained quantum mechanics to me as if I could understand it." That was the essence of Richard's charm.

A Kind Of Game

Richard worked at the company on and off for the next five years. Floating point hardware was eventually added to the machine, and as the machine and its successors went into commercial production, they were being used more and more for the kind of numerical simulation problems that Richard had pioneered with his QCD program. Richard's interest shifted from the construction of the machine to its applications. As it turned out, building a big computer is a good excuse to talk to people who are working on some of the most exciting problems in science. We started working with physicists, astronomers, geologists, biologists, chemists --- everyone of them trying to solve some problem that it had never been possible to solve before. Figuring out how to do these calculations on a parallel machine requires understanding of the details of the application, which was exactly the kind of thing that Richard loved to do.

For Richard, figuring out these problems was a kind of a game. He always started by asking very basic questions like, "What is the simplest example?" or "How can you tell if the answer is right?" He asked questions until he reduced the problem to some essential puzzle that he thought he would be able to solve. Then he would set to work, scribbling on a pad of paper and staring at the results. While he was in the middle of this kind of puzzle solving he was impossible to interrupt. "Don't bug me. I'm busy," he would say without even looking up. Eventually he would either decide the problem was too hard (in which case he lost interest), or he would find a solution (in which case he spent the next day or two explaining it to anyone who listened). In this way he worked on problems in database searches, geophysical modeling, protein folding, analyzing images, and reading insurance forms.

The last project that I worked on with Richard was in simulated evolution. I had written a program that simulated the evolution of populations of sexually reproducing creatures over hundreds of thousands of generations. The results were surprising in that the fitness of the population made progress in sudden leaps rather than by the expected steady improvement. The fossil record shows some evidence that real biological evolution might also exhibit such "punctuated equilibrium," so Richard and I decided to look more closely at why it happened. He was feeling ill by that time, so I went out and spent the week with him in Pasadena, and we worked out a model of evolution of finite populations based on the Fokker Planck equations. When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Telling The Good Stuff You Know

Actually, I doubt that it was "progress" that most interested Richard. He was always searching for patterns, for connections, for a new way of looking at something, but I suspect his motivation was not so much to understand the world as it was to find new ideas to explain. The act of discovery was not complete for him until he had taught it to someone else.

I remember a conversation we had a year or so before his death, walking in the hills above Pasadena. We were exploring an unfamiliar trail and Richard, recovering from a major operation for the cancer, was walking more slowly than usual. He was telling a long and funny story about how he had been reading up on his disease and surprising his doctors by predicting their diagnosis and his chances of survival. I was hearing for the first time how far his cancer had progressed, so the jokes did not seem so funny. He must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, "Hey, what's the matter?"

I hesitated. "I'm sad because you're going to die."

"Yeah," he sighed, "that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think." And after a few more steps, "When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you've told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway."

We walked along in silence for a few minutes. Then we came to a place where another trail crossed and Richard stopped to look around at the surroundings. Suddenly a grin lit up his face. "Hey," he said, all trace of sadness forgotten, "I bet I can show you a better way home."

And so he did.

Real Life Simpsons Intro

Continuing the buildup to the opening of The Simpsons Movie....

But what about the other guy???

这篇文章在早报刊登，原是在马来西亚的报章刊登的，赞扬的是李鸿毅事件。然而，本人对于此赞扬有所保留。以下是本人的几个疑问：

（1）请问对方是谁？为什么能够在服役时擅自离开岗位？
（2）为何要李鸿毅屡次检举，最后要将此事件公诛于世，军方才理会呢？
（3）这其中有没有特权的嫌疑？（例如说，白马。）
（4）为什么只公开李鸿毅的姓名？这让人感觉有炒作新闻的嫌疑。
（5）透明度还不够。


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李显龙的儿子

● 刘益万

　　如果你是新加坡总理李显龙的儿子，祖父又是内阁资政李光耀，你特殊的身份肯定让你身价百倍，若果又对政治有兴趣，那你必然是一颗万人追棒的未来政治明星。

　　李鸿毅是一个很普通的名字，但就因为他的父亲是李显龙，在许多国家这种身份就是“太子爷”，谁会动他一根寒毛？也许年轻的李鸿毅就有这种心态，结果犯了“兵家大忌”。

　　身为国民服役军官的李鸿毅，就因为将写给上级的投诉信广发给军中同僚，结果是“王子犯法，与民同罪”而遭惩戒。当然没有人责怪李显龙“养不教、父之过”，强调法纪的新加坡武装部队也没有因为“总理的儿子”而网开一面。

　　李鸿毅因把他对一名军官缺勤，可是上级主管接获其举报后却未进行处分的投诉信广发给同僚而触犯国防部守则，但至少他有胆识举报不公之事，只不过是做得“过火”而不容于军纪。

　　如果李鸿毅“洁身自爱”，他大可少管闲事，既然上司都不严管下属，他没有理由越俎代庖；何况军队中讲的是纪律，必须依照正常的管道行事，不允许你行差踏错半步。

　　20岁的李鸿毅有一般年轻人具备好打不平的本色，而在许多时候，这种挺身而出及仗义执言的行为，更是强调正义与公正社会所不能或缺，否则整个社会将成了事不关己、己不操心的泠漠境界，最后自是让邪恶肆虐。

　　如果社会变得缺情少义又无爱，凡事一只眼开一只眼闭，社会问题肯定衍生；有话直说自然也会惹人不快，甚至就如李鸿毅那样踩正地雷。当然在民主社会里，我们不愿看到有钱有权就可肆无忌惮，但如果没有人揭发不公，不满之声又没法抒发，那么社会鸿沟岂非越来越大，最后遭殃的又是谁呢？

　　李鸿毅被军方惩戒，因为新加坡不允许他有“特权”，否则他的父亲怎样面对新加坡人？缺勤的军官被控上军事法庭，两名上级主管也受到书面警告，这也反映了狮城法纪的严谨，弹丸之地的新加坡能立足全球，自有它一定的道理！

　　之前狮城电视艺人李名顺因喝酒驾车被判入狱，数十年前更因有部长被指贪污而自杀，这就是新加坡“本色”，李鸿毅被惩戒，那是新加坡人之福啊！

·原载7月14日马来西亚《星洲日报》