Lincoln/Coverdale

Apparently, kids are now participating in organized ultimate fighting. For reasons I cannot quite express verbally, I have a visceral repulsion to ultimate fighting and would like to see it go away. I think we can all agree that ultimate fighters probably wouldn’t be able follow an open discussion or any type of persuasion that uses non-violent means. In light of this, I propose that ultimate fighters be allowed (or, if I have my way, required) to kill each other. Here’s how it would work.

According to these estimates, about 20% of American males are between the ages of 18 and 45 which I will assume is the prime band for ultimate fighting. If the population is about 300 million and half male, that gives a pool of 60 million candidates. I’m going to be conservative and assume that 1% of these participate in ultimate fighting.

So, we have 600,000 ultimate fighters. Every match will halve the fighting pool. All we need to do is solve this equation: 2^x = 600,000. Whip out your log to get x = log(600,000)/log(2). That’s about 19. At one round per month, we could have this wrapped up by late 2009.

There is one problem with all this — in the end will be left the ultimate ultimate fighter. I believe in due process, so we can’t just kill the guy, but he must be kept from reproducing. I have a speculative solution, but no doubt someone else could do better. Society could wait until he inevitably commits a heinous violent crime leading to prison or worse. During this time of waiting, women attracted to violent assholes will be asked to take a pledge of abstinence.

It turns out there is another Jesse Kirchner at U of M Law School. She spells it Jessie and is currently a 1L. Funny thing though — she is working on a joint degree and wont graduate until 2011 — same as me. I sense much confusion in my future.

I’ve been looking over the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure in preparation for the USPTO exam (i.e., the Patent Bar). Check out this gem from 608.01(i)(c):

For fee calculation purposes also, any claim depending from a multiple dependent claim will be considered to be that number of claims to which direct reference is made in that multiple dependent claim.

I’m very afraid.

This blog looks super cool. For some reason I take comfort in the fact that someone has an entire blog dedicated Revolution-era Massachusetts.

I just got done reading this exchange between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan regarding religion, fundamentalism, and other related topics. They both debate well and their rhetorical skills often had me nodding in agreement to contradictory messages. This has something to do with my susceptibility to an argument that I cannot question in realtime, but I think there was more to it. Being a debate, reason and logic made Harris’s job easier than Sullivan’s. Short of Euler’s identity, it is an understatement to say that logical proof for the existence of God is strained. Sullivan often resorted to his subjective experience of faith which, while moving and eloquent, don’t support the notion that Jesus was divine.

Just because it wasn’t a fair fight doesn’t mean that it wasn’t worth the read. I think absolutists of any sort would do well to consider where the other side comes from. Just because I do not believe in the god of the Bible, doesn’t mean I cannot learn from those who do. Likewise, believers might be interested to know why atheists see the world differently. Intolerance on either side only seems to make the other side worse in response.

That’s my “why can’t we all get along” for 2008.

…Dice-can’t-find-the-plate. I got up early to catch the first few innings of the Red Sox “at” the A’s in Japan. Due to back spasms, Josh Beckett, the scheduled opening day starter, had to take the series off, so Daisuke Matsuzaka got the nod — kinda neat that he’d get to pitch in his hometown, right? Well, the first two innings were just plain brutal. None of his off-speed pitches were hitting the plate. Jason Varitek got to put on a display of his gymnastic ability. The only good thing to say about it was that only two runs scored.

I’ve been having a hell of a time with a data load script I’m writing at work. It’s something of the form:

$data_rows = get_a_bunch_of_data();
foreach ($data_rows as $data_row) {
  $data_row = do_something1($data_row);
  $data_row = do_something2($data_row);
  $data_row = do_something3($data_row);
  $data_row = do_something4($data_row);
}

and it consumes memory like cerebral plaque. PHP has some garbage collection mechanism through which it releases memory when a script is done running. We looked for some way to trigger this behavior at the end of each foreach iteration, but no dice. After hours of trying things and getting nowhere (it takes about 40 minutes just to see if there is improvement), we decided to make the innards of the loop it’s own function on the theory that garbage collection might be triggered when a function exits:

$data_rows = get_a_bunch_of_data();
foreach ($data_rows as $data_row) {
  $data_row = do_it_all(data_row);
}
function do_it_all(
  $data_row = do_something1($data_row);
  $data_row = do_something2($data_row);
  $data_row = do_something3($data_row);
  $data_row = do_something4($data_row);
  return $data_row;
}

and it worked!

Filed under “reasons I love Fire Joe Morgan”:

Juan Pierre hit zero home runs last year. Mythical fairy creature David Eckstein hit three, for Chrissakes, and he swings a three-inch bat carved out of a candy cane.

Well, I just had my first really annoying WordPress moment — I somehow lost a post midway through writing it. I’m not going to take the time to carefully write it again, I’ll do what I should have done in the first place and just stick to the main points.

I just watched the first episode of John Adams. I really enjoy American history — especially the Revolutionary era — but I am constantly reminded of how little I know. Was I not taught in high school that John Adams represented the British troops that opened fire at the Boston Massacre? Did I just forget? Well, I know it now. One of the first of Adams’s values we learn is his adamant view that even the the least of men are entitled to proper representation at trial. He does not represent the British in spite of what they’ve done and symbolize, but precisely because they are people and endowed with rights which are not created and cannot be abrogated by the King or Parliament.

In a later scene, John and his cousin Samuel are witnesses to the tarring and feathering of a British sailor. Paul Giamatti’s Adams shows palpable disgust as the mob strips this man and covers him with hot tar & feathers and proceeds to parade him around the docks on a rail. Even the expression on the face of rebellious Samuel turned to chagrin as the man screamed in excruciation.

I recall in grade school not thinking much of tarring and feathering. Like so much of what I read in history books, this was something that happened long ago — so long ago that I never internalized it as having actually happened. This isn’t like covering someone in glue and glitter. The tar is hot enough to cause permanent disfigurement. The colonists certainly had grievances against the Crown, but the image of a mob terrorizing a helpless man doesn’t make my heart well up with patriotism.

Andrew Sullivan has been exploring in depth the Obama/Wright controversy for the past several days. He’s done a good job finding context for many aspects of this drama. In the video Sullivan links to, Wright “clearly equates the death of innocents in American warfare with the deaths of innocents in 9/11” — a comparison with which he takes issue.

I can see taking issue with this in general. I know that there are conventions for the waging of war between states and that it is not necessarily considered a war crime if innocents die collaterally. I can see how the death of innocents on 9/11 can be considered more unjust than the death of innocents in Afghanistan in the ensuing war. But what about innocents in Iraq versus innocents on 9/11? How does one figure the moral calculus in that situation? I suppose that despite the suspect justification for the war, it weighs in favor of the US that we were not trying to kill innocent people whereas the 19 assholes on 9/11 were trying to do just that. At this point, my mind is trying to form some sort of mathematical expression to summarize some description of life-value, but it kind of makes me feel sick.

Maybe I take issue with the wording of the statement above. When equating these deaths, one can consider the culpability of the killers or the loss of a father/brother/mother/sister/etc. I think Sullivan may be talking about the former because I don’t see how the latter can be any different.