Monday, January 27, 2014
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Bobcats
Say what you will about the Bobcats and their organization, but if the season ended today, Charlotte would be in the playoffs! [the bar is pretty low in the Eastern Conference.]
Monday, January 20, 2014
The Brilliance of Plato
Plato always manages to surprise me. Today I was preparing for class tomorrow, where we'll be discussing Plato's Crito. In this dialogue, Crito tries to convince Socrates to break out of jail and run off to Thessaly. Socrates refuses based on his duties to Athens.
What I hadn't noticed until today: at the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates talks about a dream in which the goddess tells him: "The third day hence, to Phthia shalt thou go." (trans. by Jowett) Both Socrates and Crito take this to mean that Socrates won't die until the next day (the third day from the dream). I had never looked up "Phthia," assuming it's a mythical place where the dead go. According to Wikipedia, Phthia is a town in Thessaly! Hence, Socrates has already committed to going to Thessaly. The quote above is from the Iliad, where Achilles speaks the line; translated, Achilles says "I'm going home." And as Plato indicates, so is Socrates, just in a different way than Crito imagines.
What I hadn't noticed until today: at the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates talks about a dream in which the goddess tells him: "The third day hence, to Phthia shalt thou go." (trans. by Jowett) Both Socrates and Crito take this to mean that Socrates won't die until the next day (the third day from the dream). I had never looked up "Phthia," assuming it's a mythical place where the dead go. According to Wikipedia, Phthia is a town in Thessaly! Hence, Socrates has already committed to going to Thessaly. The quote above is from the Iliad, where Achilles speaks the line; translated, Achilles says "I'm going home." And as Plato indicates, so is Socrates, just in a different way than Crito imagines.
Friday, June 21, 2013
What, Me Worry?
I've been thinking alot about the government's data mining program. As some have argued, it takes public information and discovers suspicious correlations. These are then investigated, but no wiretaps are done unless there is probable cause.
This is all well and good, except if you combine two features:
1) There will be a lot of false positives. If the error rate for finding "suspicious correlations" is 1%, meaning that out of 100 "hits", only 1 person is truly innocent, then 2,000,000 Americans will be picked out as suspicious. (I am assuming that the base number for cell phone users is 200,000,000)
(tip of the hat to Zachary Ernst for reminding me of this)
2) As others have argued persuasively, for example here, we are all criminals. We break federal regulations all the time, mostly through ignorance.
Combining 1 & 2, we can come to the conclusion that the data mining program has the capabilities of being very intrusive to many people we'd argue shouldn't be the focus of government suspicion. If I'm one of the false positives, it won't take long for an investigator to find evidence of my wrongdoing, which will provide enough evidence for a wiretap.
This is all well and good, except if you combine two features:
1) There will be a lot of false positives. If the error rate for finding "suspicious correlations" is 1%, meaning that out of 100 "hits", only 1 person is truly innocent, then 2,000,000 Americans will be picked out as suspicious. (I am assuming that the base number for cell phone users is 200,000,000)
(tip of the hat to Zachary Ernst for reminding me of this)
2) As others have argued persuasively, for example here, we are all criminals. We break federal regulations all the time, mostly through ignorance.
Combining 1 & 2, we can come to the conclusion that the data mining program has the capabilities of being very intrusive to many people we'd argue shouldn't be the focus of government suspicion. If I'm one of the false positives, it won't take long for an investigator to find evidence of my wrongdoing, which will provide enough evidence for a wiretap.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Beware the Internets!
Ken at Popehat describes an interesting set of cases undergoing review right now: allegedly, a company's business model is: 1) acquire a bunch of copyrights of worthless movies, 2) wait for someone to download one of these movies illegally, 3) bring suit against that person for violating copyright, and 4) settle for some amount. As he notes, the tables may turn as a federal judge is inquiring into whether this is a case of extortion. Stay tuned!
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