Does torture work? - Salon.com

Citing American French experience in Vietnam, French experience in Algeria, and British experience in World War II, Salon says no.

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII - washingtonpost.com

The Post describes how the greatest generation fought the most monumental war of our time:

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

The American interrogators of World War II got more information with more humane techniques in a vastly more significant conflict. We are not the men our fathers and grandfathers were, and we will be remembered as a generation whose confrontation of a lesser challenge was small, petty, cruel, and vindictive.

Authenticity

I do not usually find myself in agreement with Media Lizzy, but Charles T. Moran has a very thoughtful post on the reaction to Senator Larry Craig's arrest and plea of guilty to sexual misconduct in a public restroom. Its most refreshing admission: "Republicans are no more virtuous or noble than Democrats."

Universal Acid

is how Daniel Dennett in Darwin's Dangerous Idea describes the effect of Darwin's theory of natural selection in almost every area of modern intellectual inquiry. Dennett sees Darwin as providing a revolutionary explanation of how the complexity of life can exist without positing a cosmic intelligence directing its development. In a running comparison with Turing and Von Neumann's discoveries in the area of artificial intelligence, Dennett describes evolution as an "algorithmic" process that operates much the way computer programming does: simple instructions can produce complex results.

Dennett defines an algorithm as having the following characteristics:

(1) substrate neutrality: The procedure for long devision works equally well with pencil or pen, paper or parchment, neon lights or skywriting, using any symbol system you like. The power of the procedure is due to its logical structure, not the causal powers of the materials used in the instantiation just so long as those causal powers permit the prescribed steps to be followed exactly.

(2) underlying mindlessness: Although the overall design of the procedure may be brilliant, or yield brilliant results, each constituent step, as well as the transition between steps, is utterly simple. How simple? Simple enough for a dutiful idiot to perform — or for a straightforward mechanical device to perform. The standard textbook analogy notes that algorithms are recipes of sorts, designed to be followed by novice cooks. A recipe book written for great chefs might include the phrase "Poach the fish in a suitable wine until almost done," but an algorithm for the same process might begin, "Choose a white wine that says 'dry' on the label; take a corkscrew and open the bottle; pour an inch of wine in the bottom of a pan; turn the burner under the pan on high; . . . " — a tedious breakdown of the process into dead simple steps, requiring no wise decisions or delicate judgments or intuitions on the part of the recipe-reader.

(3) guaranteed results: Whatever an algorithm does, it always does it, if it is executed without misstep. An algorithm is a foolproof recipe.

The mindless process of natural selection, by which selective pressures winnow out species from amongst the rich diversity of random mutation, is just such an algorithm — or group of algoriths — Dennett argues. As such, given millions of years to operate, it is perfectly capable of explaining the complexity of modern life, the existence of humanity, and the development of consciousness.

Such an explanation based on randomness and mindless algorithms dissolves in its elegant simplicity many traditional explanations of humanity's place in the universe, engendering quite a bit of hostility, hence the moniker universal acid.

Blast from the Past (The Geek Code)

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GJ/L d++ s+ a+ C+ UL>++++ P>+ L+>++ E W++ N o-- K- w !O M>+ V-- PS++>+++ PE Y+ PGP>+ t !5 !X !R tv+ b+>++ DI-- D- G e+++ h---- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

(Decode)

Tea and History

Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish on how the adoption of tea as England's national beverage in the eighteenth century may have dramatically reduced the incidence of waterborne diseases.

Life

Conway's Game of Life is a simple computational game in which "cells" are either "alive" or "dead" based on their proximity to other cells — too few neighboring cells cause a cell to "die" from isolation and too many from overcrowding. The game is interesting on multiple levels. It was designed to show that an initial pattern could be self-replicating based on simple rules. As an analytical tool, it allows for analysis both at the cellular level and at the level of patterns, in much the same way that biological organisms can be analyzed. In another twist, Life is "Turing complete" and can function as a computer.

Jerry Built and Jury Rigged

I recently applied Service Pack 2 to a Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 and received the following error message: "Setup could not verify the integrity of the file Update.inf. Make sure the Cryptographic service is running on this computer." The good news is that Microsoft has good documentation of the problem. The bad news is that it took 11 steps to fix it.

Rushdie Deserves His Knighthood

India Knight makes a compelling case in the Times on why Salman Rushdie deserves his knighthood and why a free society should not be afraid to award it to him.

When I heard about the outrage over the knighthood, I went looking for a copy of Midnight's Children. Both Midnight's Children and the Satanic Verses were sold out at Borders, so I picked up a copy of the Moor's Last Sigh. Besides being tantalized by the title, I figured that it was my modest contribution to the Rushdie defense fund.

On a completely unrelated note, who knew that Rushdie was married to Padma Lakshmi, the host of television's Top Chef?