Shtetl-Optimized

When I first saw the headline, I assumed it was from The Onion or (more likely) some local MIT humor publication. But no, it’s from the Associated Press.

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For the past few days I’ve been at FOCS’2007 in Providence, Rhode Island, where apparently I’m supposed to have been live-blogging the conference. This came as news to me. (One of the organizers wrote to ask if I’d be posting live updates. I replied that I might post something eventually.)

The trouble is, I still have tons of “backblog” from my previous trip to Latvia and Germany. And so, in the hopes of someday catching up, without further ado I hereby post some photos from Europe.

Sure, I support moderate-to-liberal Democrats … as a temporary measure until zee vorkers take over zee vorl’ [laughs maniacally]

(The above photos were taken in an underground bunker a couple hours from Riga, which the Soviets secretly built in the 70’s, and to which top Communist party officials planned to retreat in case of a nuclear war. Of course, no provisions were made for the rest of the population. Apparently the Soviets built shelters like these all over Latvia. Most of them were converted to bowling alleys or library storage space, but one was preserved for tourists.)

My gracious hosts in Latvia: longtime colleague (and sometime Shtetl-Optimized commenter) Andris Ambainis, Andris’s Ambai-niece Ilze, and Ilze’s husband Girts.

When I think about Munich, Germany, so many mental associations spring immediately into my mind: the fine baroque architecture, the nearby Bavarian alps, the freshly-baked pretzels that are a Munich specialty, the open spaces perfect for rallies and demonstrations of all kinds — but most of all, of course, I think of Oktoberfest! Here you see me drinking genuine bier served by a genuine bier wench (not pictured) with my gracious hosts from the Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik: Norbert Schuch, Ignacio Cirac, and Michael Wolf.

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Watch a sphere get turned inside out with no cuts or creases. Hat tip: John Baez.

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I was, of course, delighted that Columbia University invited my good friend Mahmoud to speak there, and dismayed only by the tedious introduction by President Lee Bollinger. (“Having demonstrated conclusively that today’s featured speaker is a murderous tyrant with no more right to partake in the civilized world than Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun, let me now, without further ado…”) However long your speaker’s list of achievements, crimes against humanity, etc. might be, I think talk introductions should be two minutes tops.

But since this particular event has already been covered on more blogs than the Monster has subgroups, today I thought I’d roll out an occasional new Shtetl-Optimized feature — in which, for want of anything better to blog about, I discuss some books I’ve read recently.

The Truth About The Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What To Do About It by Marcia Angell.

Like many in the US, I once “knew” that drug companies have to charge such absurd prices here because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to fund their R&D. This book reveals the hilarious truth about what drug company R&D actually consists of. My favorite examples: coloring Prozac pink instead of green, marketing it for “premenstrual dysphoric disorder” instead of depression, and charging three times as much for it. Inventing new drugs for high blood pressure that are less effective than diuretics available since the 1950’s, but have the advantage of being patentable. Proving in clinical trials that a new drug works better than an old one, as long as you compare 40mg of the one to 20mg of the other.

The book paints a picture of the pharmaceutical industry as, basically, an organized crime syndicate that’s been successful in co-opting the government. It trumpets the free market but depends almost entirely for its existence on bad patent laws that it helped write; it bribes doctors to prescribe worse expensive drugs instead of better cheap ones; it waits for government-funded university researchers to discover new drugs, then bottles them up, makes billions of dollars, and demands credit for its life-saving innovations.

Among the arguments put forward by the rare negative reviewers of this book on Amazon, the following was my favorite (I’ll let you supply a counterargument):

Who do you folks think are paid higher, scientists in the Unis and government programs, or scientists in the industry? … Marcia saying the Universities and the NIH are more innovative in developing drugs than the Pharma Industry is like saying (using sports analogy) Minor League baseball is better than the MLB. Which players do you think are paid more? Common sense my friends.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman.

This book has received a lot of attention lately, and deserves all of it. The topic is: if humans disappeared tomorrow, how long would it take for the world’s forests and coral reefs to regenerate, garbage to decompose, excess CO₂ to wash out of the sky, giant land mammals to reappear in North America, etc.? Of course this is just a different way of asking: “exactly how badly have humans screwed up the planet?” Weisman’s key insight, though, is that it’s less depressing to read about the world regenerating itself than about its being destroyed.

It’s hard to identify a clear thesis in this book, just lots of interesting observations: for example, that African elephants weren’t hunted to extinction whereas woolly mammoths probably were because only the former evolved to fear humans; and that, if North and South Korea ever reunite, it will be a disaster for the dozens of endangered species that now survive only in a four-mile-wide demilitarized strip between the two. The prose is beautiful throughout, and sometimes reaches heights rarely seen in environmental writing. After explaining the role of volcanoes in climate change, Weisman says: “the problem is, by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s.”

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Taking a cue from the Pontiff, I thought I’d provide three quick updates on my personal life (no, not my personal personal life; that’s none of your business).

1. Last week I bought and moved into a condo in East Cambridge, a 10-minute walk from campus, with lovely views of Boston, the Charles River, and the Red Line T going over the bridge:
   
   (That’s mom on the sofa.) I can’t stress enough how fundamentally my life has changed now that I’m a homeowner. For example, instead of paying rent each month, I now pay something called a “mortgage,” and instead of going to a landlord, it goes to a bank. Also I get a massive tax break for some reason.
2. The students showed up this week, and the semester is here. No, I’m not teaching this fall, but there’s still plenty to do, from organizing a theory lunch to deciding what kind of whiteboard should go in my office. (With a border or without? How big a tray for pens? These are serious decisions.) On Wednesday I went to an orientation for new MIT faculty, at which I got to tell President Susan Hockfield about quantum lower bounds, the prospects for practical quantum computers, and how her fine institution rejected me twice. Along with the usual pleasantries, Hockfield said one thing that deeply impressed me: “I know it’s gone out of fashion in many places, but you’re still allowed to use the word ‘truth’ here.”
3. Besides moving, besides getting oriented, I’ve also been distracted from my blogging career by involvement with some … what’s it called? … actual research. Sorry about that; I assure you it’s just a temporary aberration.

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Update (8/17): Believe it or not, this blog actually led to something (scroll down to comment #52 if the link doesn’t work).

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I know I’ve been a derelict blogger since moving to MIT, allowing far, far too many of you to concentrate on work. But today I’m back with some quality procrastination material.

My colleague (and sometime überliberal commenter on this blog) Aram Harrow points me to a safety video for German forklift-truck drivers, which was posted to YouTube with English subtitles. As Aram says, it starts slow but is definitely worth watching to the end.

It’s funny: just this weekend, I was volunteering with the Cornell Alumni Association at the Greater Boston Food Bank. My job was to unload 40-pound boxes of canned goods from a forklift truck and place them on a conveyor belt. (And no, this is not something I’d normally do. Normally I’d offer to write a check to pay for ten people stronger than I am to unload boxes for the needy. Long story short, I was invited to do this by an individual of female persuasion.)

The whole time I was unloading boxes, I too was a bit worried about forklift safety — but, as I now know, not nearly as worried as I should have been.

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From Science and NYT.

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Today’s topic is one I was hoping I could avoid, since I know that my stance will alienate many of my own supporters. But after I read the comments on this post by Bill Gasarch, and reflected on all the men, women, and children who were dispossessed of their land while the world did nothing, I realized I could no longer remain silent.

Most of you will know what I’m talking about, but for those who don’t: I urge the readers of this blog to join me in severing all academic ties with the settler state of New Zealand, until that state makes complete restitution for its historic crimes against the Maori people. That means no more giving seminars at the University of Auckland. No more reading papers with “ac.nz” in the author’s email address. Indeed, no more involvement with any physics or climate research in Antarctica, the flights to which leave from Christchurch.

Some will say my proposed boycott smacks of anti-Kiwi prejudice. But in reality, some of my best friends are Kiwis. Furthermore, I hope and expect that those Kiwis who care about justice will embrace my proposal, for the chance it affords their rogue state to confront the lies and denial upon which it was founded.

Others will ask: if we’re going to boycott Kiwi scientists over the dispossession of the Maori, then why not boycott Australian scientists over the aboriginals, Chinese scientists over the Tibetans, or American scientists over the Native Americans, Iraqis, Vietnamese, or Guatemalans? I trust, however, that sensible people will recognize this question for the Kiwi diversionary tactic that it is. For what could Australia, China, or the US possibly have to do with New Zealand? Until the Kiwis acknowledge that the issue is them and only them, there is no hope for progress.

Even in a world rife with violence and despair, I can think of no single issue with a greater claim upon our conscience. And that is why I ask again: who will join me in severing all academic ties with New Zealand?

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Razborov and Rudich won the Gödel Prize for “Natural Proofs”, which probably did as much as any single paper to elucidate the nature of the P vs. NP problem. (More from the Bearded One and the Pontiff.) Loosely speaking, R&R showed that any circuit lower bound satisfying certain extremely broad criteria would “bite its own tail,” and lead to efficient algorithms to distinguish random from pseudorandom functions — the very sort of thing that we wanted to prove was hard. This doesn’t by any means imply that a P≠NP proof is impossible, but it does show how the problem has a strange, self-referential character that’s not quite like anything previously encountered in mathematics, including in the work of Gödel and Turing. Technically simple but conceptually profound, the paper is also a masterpiece of clear, forceful exposition. When I first came across it as an undergrad at Cornell, I knew complexity was my subject.

Following on the heels of the New Yorker, the New York Times ran its own epic on the Large Hadron Collider. So science writers can do a decent job when they feel like it. Why can’t they write about P vs. NP the same way? Oh, right … them big machines …

Andy Drucker poses the following problem: suppose there are n blog posts, and for each post b_i, you’re told only that it was posted during the time interval [t_i,u_i]. Is there an efficient algorithm to count how many orderings of the blog posts are compatible with that information? Alternatively, is the problem #P-complete? Let me stress that Andy doesn’t know the answer to this question, and neither do I.

A certain MIT undergrad of my acquaintance sent the following letter to MIT’s DMCA enforcement office.

Dear MIT DMCA Agent,

After viewing Scoop and receiving your notice, I was more than happy to comply with NBC’s request to destroy it. Rest assured that I will no longer be downloading or sharing any post-Manhattan Woody Allen films.

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