reasons for pessimism #1: your "representatives" represent your opinions and not your interest

The foundations of representative democracy lie in a middle ground between a nation ruled by its people and a nation ruled by an insulated aristocracy. A balance is needed because meither of these systems works particularly well: an aristocracy is insulated from bad decisions and has no incentive to make good ones, while direct democracy assumes a level of governing competence in the populace that is rarely if ever attained. For such a middle ground to work, representatives must be both beholden to their constituents in a substantive way, that is, elected, and must also represent not the opinions of their constituents, as that would be no better than direct democracy, but their constituents' true best interest.
Unfortunately, these two requirements are mutually exclusive. In order for the representative to be forced to answer for bad decisions, he or she must be elected by the populace. Unfortunately, the populace is not qualified to make judgments about how good the candidate's judgment is, or else direct democracy would work. Instead, the election chooses the candidate whose opinions on policy questions are most in line with those of the constituency. But a representative elected on the basis of opinions and policy priorities is by definition a representative who will vote exactly as his/her constituency would in a direct democracy!
A standard political post would likely propose an alternative at this point; it is far from clear, though, that alternatives even exist. As Winston Churchill (may or may not have) said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." For the foreseeable future, humanity will be stuck with an inherently contradictory system acting as the backbone to our governments. And that's in the most free countries in the world, with the best future prospects—oligarchies and dictatorships are even worse.

l'etranger, or why i am not a nihilist

So one thing that I haven't done nearly enough of in the past year is reading fiction. A couple days ago, Diana gave me a list of a couple books to read and I was able to find all of them in my house. I didn't post last night because I was focused on reading one of them: The Stranger, by Albert Camus. If you haven't read it, now's a good time to do so—that is, before you read the rest of the post and ruin half of it for yourself.
Meursault is generally a very rational person, although he is completely unable to see any situation from someone else's point of view. This rationality devolves into nihilism towards the very end, as he is first convinced by the chaplain that atheism implies that life is without a purpose and then convinces himself that the unavoidability of eventual death implies that what he does on the earth doesn't matter. This is the inevitable conclusion of a man who lives in a world of his own creation; a world that will die with him. If your life's purpose is limited to yourself, it dies with you, and your life will have accomplished nothing.
Fortunately, there are other options. We simply must consider the existence of people other than ourselves—something Meursault was unable to do. We can take the view that we should extend the self-interest that Meursault holds for himself to everyone around us—we can better the lives of others. Alternatively, and just as honorably, we can take the view that helping other individuals is just as short-sighted as helping ourselves and devote our lives to the progress of the civilization or species as a whole—to the acquisition of knowledge for all of humanity. We can even listen to those who believe that the best way to encourage the progress of humanity is to pay attention exclusively to our own self-interest. But regardless of your choice, there is absolutely no reason to doubt that your efforts have an effect—that your life has a purpose. This is why I am not a nihilist.

reasons for optimism #1: autocracy is becoming harder and harder to sustain

This is hopefully the first post in a series (not all in a row), alternating reasons for being optimistic about the next couple decades with reasons for being pessimistic/scared/paranoid...
The very same technology that has enabled and will continue to enable improvements in governments' ability to track us in various ways will finally prevent autocracies from functioning - if we let it. But that is neither controversial nor difficult. What is required is not only the technological tools, but knowledge both of their existence and of how to use them. Essentially, the only way for repressive regimes to survive is to somehow convince their citizens that knowledge, particularly about the world outside their country, is a Bad Thing, that ignorance is bliss. But a strange thing happens when you forbid learning—it happens anyway. Human beings have an innate thirst for knowledge that no dictator can stop. Instead, they're forced to micromanage every parcel of knowledge that flows in their country, a feat that has eluded even the most resourceful despots.
The first step towards democratic revolution is usually capitalism. A free market is incompatible with autocratic rule, and empowers individual citizens through economic improvement. Unfortunately, what much of the world has done over the past few decades to "put pressure on" rogue states has been in the form of "sanctions". These are rules designed to hurt the states' economies in the hope that their government would collapse. These policies have never worked - every single democratic revolution has been from the bottom up and due to the people realizing that a better life is possible, not due to a top-down collapse of the government. With these sanctions, we intend to end the lavish lifestyles of regime officials and party members. Instead, the regime simply transfers the costs to their people—causing a decrease in the standard of living of millions of the world's poorest people and giving the regime itself additional justification and propaganda. These sanctions also prevent the very economic development that is one of the only ways to a democratic revolution.
But enough with the pessimism, it turns out that, even with sanctions, technology is already beginning to make a difference. You can bet that Iranian officials will never rig an election again—or if they do, a revolution will be nigh. China may have to back down on its decree that web filtering software must come bundled with every new computer—or if they don't, the easily-hackable Green Dam software itself may very well become a tool of freedom and not repression.

why modern math education is neither math nor education

Ever since the 1970s, mathematics courses and textbooks have been inexorably moving away from a reasoning-based pure mathematics and towards a more algorithmic sort of applied mathematics. As a result, students, and sometimes even teachers, are often unable to explain why a method or theorem works, and therefore are forced to memorize several other methods for similar operations that would otherwise be evident. For example, if students understood at an intuitive level why polynomials behave like their highest degree term as they approach infinity or negative infinity, then they wouldn’t have to memorize three separate rules for horizontal asymptotes of rational functions. Why don't they understand this? It is being taught as three separate rules, and any attempt to simplify them is brushed off with the excuse that "this is easier to understand". A student once asked me how to solve a system of one linear and one quadratic equation. I asked him why he wasn't able to perform linear combination just like he would in a system of linear equations. He replied that he had never learned how to do it with a quadratic system. After I went through the problem with him, he remarked that he had "never thought of it that way before". What he had learned was an arithmetic procedure to solve a simple system of two linear equations by combination, not a general approach to solving all types of systems. Due to the textbook, the teacher, and the student having never made the connection, the class would have to spend an entire day studying how to solve a system of quadratic equations, again in a mindless, stepwise manner. The end result of this mindset is that students are unable to recognize quadratic equations unless they are in the form ax²+bx+c and taught a false dichotomy between rational expressions based on their degrees.
Without deduction and inference, mathematics is nothing more than rote memorization. With it, it becomes a tool for revealing the only universal truths this universe holds. Students learn mathematics for two reasons: to supply basic tools like arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus that can be applied in the real world, and to learn the process and intuition for deducing truth from the chaos that is the universe we live in. The majority of college graduates have already forgotten most of the former, and they never even had the chance to learn the latter.

Note: some of this was written in February for an assignment of Mr. Stueben's. He's the only math teacher I've had in my decade in school who understands the importance of both of these reasons. If you want to start learning mathematics, one of the best things you can do is to tell your math teacher to read his 1998 book detailing how he is able to perform this feat while keeping to the curriculum and keeping his job (entitled Twenty Years Before the Blackboard, available here).

incentives, or why grading policy lies somewhere between economics and foreign relations

In this post, I plan to cover the issue of grading policy, particularly in relation to FCPS and TJ.
First of all, what is the purpose of grades? I propose that it is twofold:

1. Grades are intended to give an objective measurement of both achievement and effort in order to provide colleges and others with an idea of how the student performs in a typical academic environment, as opposed to on a standardized test.
   
2. Grades are intended to provide an incentive to students that drives them to put more effort into their academic pursuits than they would otherwise, that is, to provide external pressure to those without internal pressures.

Second, how well does the standard letter grade system with this purpose?

Does it provide an objective measurement?

For the most part, yes, but different teachers do apply different standards. This is hard if not impossible to fix. The hope, of course, is that differences between teachers get averaged out in any one student's GPA over the course of their four years of high school.

Does it provide the proper incentives?

Absolutely not. The critical part of any continuous incentive system (e.g. wages) is a strictly positive marginal increase in the incentive's value over the performance variable being targeted by the incentive. In calc terms (yay), d(I(p))/d(p) > 0. This is not satisfied by any threshold-based system. With a numerical grade of 92%, for instance, there is a strong incentive to perform that does not exist at a grade of 94%.

Third, why does everyone involved seem to have an agenda?
The PTSA wants TJ students' grades to improve even without an actual increase in effort, while the school board wants actual growth in performance and effort. The school board is concerned with every student in the county; the TJ administration and PTSA are not. From a viewpoint outside TJ, what PTSA wants would look both elitist and unjust: maybe TJ's courses are all honors, but wouldn't the addition of a 0.5 quality point for all TJ courses be unfair to those to whom that quantity of honors courses simply isn't offered? If the purpose was really an incentive, why apply it to every course? Doesn't it become less of an incentive and more of a simple boost without reason and without a corresponding increase in absolute performance?
From a purely self-interested point of view, of course, anything that benefits others without affecting yourself is functionally equivalent to something that hurts you more directly. An A seems better when compared with a B+ than when compared with an A−…

Can’t we all just spend more time doing the work and less time arguing about how we should be graded on it? This is precisely what a continuous, letter-free system would enable. Directly converting from the numerical percentage to a numerical GPA actually makes everything easier, while removing the abomination that is arbitrary thresholds from the equation entirely. No matter what your grade, you would have the same incentive to perform as anyone else.

an extension/improvement/clarification to mbti

The four type traits in the standard Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are considered "preference" traits because they are measured by a test that cannot judge anything else and because the type dichotomies are intended to be "unbiased" in some way. Yet this does not cover a huge amount of the variation in personality among the population, and still remains quite biased:

Other personality traits being the same, an iNtuitive person (one who grasps patterns and seeks possibilities) is 27 times more likely to have a high IQ than a Sensing person (one who focuses on sensory details and the here-and-now).

--http://libertycorner.blogspot.com/2004/03/iq-and-personality.html

This and other similar correlations exist not because the traits are inherently related to intelligence, but because they are correlated closely with traits the MBTI cannot measure, that is, the absolute development and abilities of one's mind. While the majority of MBTI "extroverts" (often spelled extraverts in psychological literature) are active and controlling in a conversation or group of people, this need not be the case. Similarly, someone who prefers concrete facts over abstract thoughts, that is, an MBTI S, may still have a highly developed intuitive mind.
Thus I am proposing an extension to the four-letter MBTI type designation, adding subscripts to represent these correlated traits, enabling people to more easily see in what ways they differ from their MBTI archetype. For instance, an ENTP whose "correlated traits" line up exactly with his or her MBTI traits would be an E_EN_NT_TP_P. An ENTP who differs from the E archetype by virtue of being generally passive in conversations, and differs from the P archetype by virtue of being somewhat of an overachiever (this would be me) would be an E_IN_NT_TP_J. Reading off one's subscripted trait designations, one produces what I will call the "secondary type", which in this case denotes "for an ENTP, I act an awful lot like an INTJ".

maybe it's time for a politics post

"When in the course of human events" the need arises for a thorough examination of government, and of our government in particular, we ask ourselves what we even mean by a government. What is our ultimate goal in creating restrictions on fellow humans with only indirect consent to such? Is our goal complete happiness for all; as such there is no incentive to work or innovate? Is our goal true morality; as such the basic human right to believe what they choose comes into jeopardy? Is our goal the continuation of our eternal quest for knowledge?

It should be.

For all we know, we are the only intelligent species in the universe. Are we going to let that opportunity disappear by letting evolution kill us off?

We cannot.

We must march along in the pursuit of knowledge hoping that someday, far in the future, we can at last feel that we are done. It is only then that it is even possible to tackle the other great aims that humanity may have. To further this ultimate aim of conquering all of the secrets of the universe, we must focus our government on innovation, as that is the general term for creating new knowledge. We need an innovation economy, and we have one: Capitalism. We need a way for all voices to be heard, and we have one: Democracy. We need a way to extend ourselves to increase the availability and usefulness of innovations, and we have one: the Internet. What we don’t have is a beneficial, reliable, and ingeniously useful way of combining them. We need internet-enabled democracy and an Information Economy. What is interesting to note is that these will develop on their own as a consequence of the very existence of those three pillars. What is more interesting to note is that their very development is being prevented by various laws that do what all short-sighted laws do: protect people from themselves. We have laws that force anyone who develops any new source of energy to perform a complete environmental impact analysis and report it to the EPA before they can even build a prototype. We have laws that cause the FCC to “own” the radio spectrum, and grant exclusive licenses of such spectrum to the highest bidder, effectively locking out anyone who isn’t a multi-billion-dollar telecom company. Effectively, we have hundreds of laws whose unintended consequence is preventing innovation from 99% of the population and yet we aren’t doing anything about it.

Maybe we can start now.

Note 1: I wrote this last year...so yes this is another non-post
I don't have too many of those left...

Note 2: Things have changed since I wrote it 20 months ago, foremost among them the political situation itself. The current Administration believes in a very different purpose for government:

"Our government should...ensure opportunity...for every American who is willing to work"

This is an entirely admirable and respectable belief. However, it is also a naive belief. Obama is arguing for one of two types of "opportunity": if possible, everyone who wishes to be employed should be employed, and if not possible should be supported indefinitely by the government, that is, by those who are employed and therefore pay taxes.
Just as the demand for a good tends toward the supply as the price tends towards zero, everyone in the market for a job would be employed if there were no restrictions instituting a minimum amount a company must pay all employees. If the person in question is not to be employed by a company, they must either be employed by the government at what is by definition an above-market wage (if it wasn't, they would be employed in the market) or paid by the government for doing no work at all (i.e. welfare). In either case, of course, the system is inefficient, that is, wealth that could have been produced is not being produced - if the government pays above-market wages for employees, the more efficient private sector is deprived of the opportunity to hire them, and if the government pays for no work, any and all wealth that could have been created by the person in question is lost.
If we are sure that we want everyone to have opportunity, and we understand that there are trade-offs we must first consider even with that statement, there are better ways to accomplish it. Simply abolishing the minimum wage would ensure nearly complete employment, while also ensuring that each individual contributes the greatest amount of wealth possible to the overall economy. If the government so chooses, it could supplement this amount to ensure that everyone has an income at least that of the old minimum wage. While taxes are the obvious source for this funding, there are better, fairer ways: there are resources that can and should be shared with all Americans: our reserves of energy, from natural gas to uranium to thorium, are distributed randomly and no amount of capitalism can allocate them "correctly". The United States contains over one trillion dollars of each of the three fuels, not to mention either petroleum or coal, which are probably better off staying in the ground. I am not advocating for socialization of the entire energy industry, just the assertion that all natural resources in this country belong to the entire country and not the property owner who was given them by happenstance. Private companies are still better at extracting the resources themselves cost-effectively.

"i really like it when physics and philosophy intersect"

Erik: is there a way to see if something is in a superposition or not without changing its state?
me: if you don't know, it's in superposition
if you observe it at all, it's not
Erik: what if the particle is entangled and you measure the other particle which is a light year away
me: then instantly the first particle is also out of superposition
it's called nonlocality
Erik: so it changed something a light year away instantly?
me: ...yep
Erik: now is that change concrete?
or is it just in peoples heads?
for instance, a person can be popular or unpopular, and a person can be dead or alive
if you're in australia, and i decide that i don't like you, you instantly become unpopular, because that's not a physical change, it's a mental one
but i can't instantly make you dead
me: essentially, nothing has changed except our Bayesian knowledge of the particle
Erik: do you see the difference?
me: yeah
Erik: so its like popularity
?
me: well it's not; essentially you don't get to decide what the measurement will be
Erik: what do you mean?
me: it's as if it was predestined, but you have no way of knowing before you measure it
Erik: does the behavior of the particle a light year away change at all once the particle here is measured?
me: yes...there was an experiment...google entanglement polarization for details
Erik: wtf?
so that means the scientist on alpha centari knows the second that the fist particle is measured because he sees that the behavior of the particle changes?
wouldnt that be transference of information?
me: I know...I think it has something to do with the fact that whenever he measures, he destroys the entanglement
Erik: what does that have to do with it?
oh, so he would only be able to measure the particle once?
and then it would no longer be entangled?
me: right
Erik: but wouldnt you still know if the first particle had or had not been measured already?
me: research the experiment. this is about where my knowledge ends.
Erik: one last question
is this anything at all like if:
I have two boxes, a red ball is in one, a blue ball is in the other
i send one a light year away
i open the one i have left
i instantly know the color of the ball a light year away
?
me: yeah it's almost exactly like that
except there's one finding of the polarization experiment that makes it more interesting
Erik: what are the little details, because no one's suggesting that we can communicate faster than light using boxes
so im guessing the differences are important
me: but I don't remember what this finding is
yeah
Erik: doesnt that sort of prove that the mystery ball thats far away isnt a probability, and that it simply is one of the two options
like if you throw a dice, and close your eyes, once the dye (sp?) lands, even if you havent looked, it's no longer a probability it is one of the options
me: that's the Frequentist view...the Bayesian view (my view) is that probability is a measure of belief
Erik: this shouldnt be a matter of opinion, one of them is right, the other is wrong, which is it?
actually
you'd probably say that they're both right until we measure the experiment that will determine it, right?
me: yeah...this debate has been raging among probability theorists for hundreds of years
Erik: knowing you and me, i'm guessing you're right
but that adds to the world's wtf factor considerably
wait
if you measure the photon, you collapse its superposition, but if you don't tell me, and i go over, is it still in a superposition to me?
me: I don't know what a quantum physicist would say, but i'd say yes
Erik: do you, and more importantly the general consensus of physicists, believe that the universe is deterministic?
me: no
Erik: i really like it when physics and philosophy intersect
no
thats good
any proof?
me: nope
also human free will is unlikely
but I hope it exists
Erik: me too
i think that somehow a human brain isn't just clock work like a computer
it has inputs and outputs, but something strange happens in between
me: there's a definite possibility that that something is quantum in nature
Erik: so our brains are basically computers, but with a random function that's actually random?
me: potentially
essentially we have no idea
Erik: true
is there room for a soul to exist?
me: not really
depends on your definition
Erik: but those random values could be controlled by something separate from the physical universe, which would in essence let it impact or change the physical universe without breaking any laws of nature
that's basically the only way that i see that science and religion can both exist
me: right
that's a definite possibility; however we would probably notice patterns in the randomness
Erik: we're talking quantum scale stuff
if god wanted me to win a game of risk, i wouldnt roll all 6s, something tiny would be changed years before and butterfly effect to a point where i would win the game
me: you're probably right...but it would require a lot of computational power to create such an effect
Erik: well this is god we're talking about
me: and the world must be unable to be affected by humans
Erik: true
not necessarily
why do you think there's bad in the world?
something's gotta go wrong
me: because people have evolved sin?
because sin is evolutionarily advantageous in a world of altruists?
Erik: true
me: night
Erik: night

hindsight, or why living in a bubble never lasts

One year at TJ is over - and what did I learn?

1. Java sucks
2. "Math" at TJ is no less pointless than "math" anywhere else
3. The APCS exam is worse than a joke
4. Friends by necessity are neither friends nor necessary
5. No matter how selective your admissions process is, idiots still creep in
6. It is possible to get an A in every class without really trying in any of them
7. Doing a group project with slackers means you have more control
8. But doing a group project with overachievers actually means more work
9. I was more paranoid about Obama than I should have been, but the worst is likely yet to come
   
10. I can't write anything without getting political
11. I can't write anything without going meta
12. Java sucks

I'll leave you with something completely different:

def bad():
    c='bnzedy gnrwx zqxv ughxm'
    print ''.join([e.translate(''.join([chr(n) for n in range(97)]+[chr((n-(d-c[:d].rfind(' ')-int(' ' in c))-72)%26+97) for n in range(97,124)]+[chr(n) for n in range(124,256)])) for d,e in enumerate(c)])

def good():
    ctext='bnzedy gnrwx zqxv ughxm'
    output = ''
    for i in range(len(ctext)):
        table = ''
        for n in range(97):
            table += chr(n)
        for n in range(97, 124):
            table += chr((n-(i-ctext[:i].rfind(' ')-int(' ' in ctext))-72)%26+97)
        for n in range(124, 256):
            table += chr(n)
        output += ctext[i].translate(table)
    print output

These do the same thing, and compile to almost the same bytecode...which do you prefer? Elegance or readability?