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Flame on

Understanding arduously complex topics is a joy in itself. I’ve been, by professional necessity, recently working on 3D visualization technologies. Matrix rotations, vector mathematics, and linear algebra are old topics that I’ve encountered now and again, but to be pushing towards a deadline and peeling the onion layers back in support of a specific goal makes each improvement as triumphant as those early summer mornings at the tender age of fourteen when “Hello World” in machine code first ran on my Commodore 64.

Understanding is a joy.

The “Flame” malware infecting computers in the Middle East is another example. This collection of tools and technologies embeds itself in Microsoft Windows (XP and up) and monitors various actions by the users. From what is currently understood it is therefore spyware, but there may be additional functionality hidden in this huge collection of software.

There is some remarkable research already on Flame, like this 64-page report from an academic laboratory in Budapest, Hungary that shows the detailed machinations working in a modern spyware system. At heart are exploits of the Windows OS, of course, but the cleverness is magnified by some of the approaches that are applied: decrypting code resources and overlaying other running programs, multiple compression and encryption algorithms, spyware databases, kernel patching to hide running processes, and even an embedded scripting language for providing versatility in the face of new challenges.

This is l33t stuff, but it is still dependent on legacy features of the Windows OS. And don’t take that as suggesting that Linux or Mac OS X are somehow immune. They aren’t. The exploits were just targeting the OSes relevant to the task. Could OS creators fix the problem? Yes, they could, through process isolation, access control, and monitoring principles, and they have started doing so, but legacy software needs to be updated, too, or abandoned.

The Comets of Literary Cohesion

Every few years, with the hyperbolic regularity of Kahoutek’s orbit, I return to B.R. Myers’ 2001 Atlantic essay, A Reader’s Manifesto, where he plays the enfant terrible against the titans of serious literature. With savagery Myers tears out the elliptical heart of Annie Proulx and then beats regular holes in Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo in a conscious mockery of the strained repetitiveness of their sentences.

I return to Myers because I currently have four novels in process. I return because I hope to be saved from the delirium of the postmodern novel that wants to be written merely because there is nothing really left to write about, at least not without a self-conscious wink:


Myers’ essay hints at what he sees as good writing, quoting Nabakov, referencing T.S. Eliot, and analyzing the controlled lyricism of Saul Bellow. Evaporating the boundaries between the various “brows” and accepting that action, plot, and invention are acceptable literary conceits also marks Myers’ approach to literary analysis.

It is largely an atheoretic analysis but there is a hint at something more beneath the surface when Myers describes the disdain of European peasants for the transition away from the inscrutable Latin masses and benedictions and into the language of the common man: “Our parson…is a plain honest man… But…he is no Latiner.” Myers counts the fascination with arabesque prose, with labeling it as great even when it lacks content, as derived from the same fascination that gripped the peasants: majesty is inherent in obscurity. Anyone who has struggled with trying to translate foreign prose or tried to transcribe music from one instrument to another rapidly understands why the problems are unassailable cliffs to the outsider. So it is with literary prose. The less I understand, the more I feel it.

But what more is there to this? We break now away from literary criticism and to the psychology of text comprehension itself, bobbing and weaving a bit to avoid falling into the cliché of the postmodern novel. First, we know that reading comprehension is affected by two obvious factors: (a) our background knowledge of the topic, and (b) the cohesion of the text. We intuitively understand (a) when it comes to scientific texts. If we have a degree in the topic we have more background knowledge than if we don’t, for instance. (b) requires defining “cohesion” a bit. Cohesion can be measured by looking at repeated nouns and bridging concepts from one paragraph to another. Highly cohesive texts tie concepts together across sentences and paragraphs, reinforcing the relationships that are expressed in one sentence with those in others, forming semantic bridges to enhance the text. Less cohesive texts are more scatter-shot, leaving the reader to infer the relevant bridging principles.

The interaction between (a) and (b) could hardly be more interesting. When (a) is high, readers learn better and retain more when (b) is low. Repeat: low coherence texts are better for high knowledge learners. If one knows a lot, one gets easily bored by all the carefully chained concepts of high cohesion texts. Or, as a friend once said about software and hardware manuals, “They are for the weak of mind.” The opposite is obviously true. If you know little about a subject, the semantic bridges help get you from knowledge Midgard to Asgard, but they are just road noise for the knowledgeable.

It is aspirational, then, when obscurantist language and metaphors pile up like proton parts in the Large Hadron Collider. The authors are asking their readers to search for the God Participle. They want to be Latiners. They want Cormac McCarthy to transform the bloody mess of westward expansion into Exodus. They want it because they want low cohesion texts and the feeling of sailing through the vaulted ceilings of ancient cathedrals, like Leary on acid, like penitentes against the whip, like gurus stinking of enlightenment. Then the gentle readers can finally bask among the deconstructed mists after the dream has faded, waiting for the next cycle of literary critics to anoint the next round of elaborated prose and, as Kahoutek returns, so the gentle rush of spring will come again to the countryside.

The Unreasonable Success of Reason

May 2012 eclipse refracted through a lemon tree

Math and natural philosophy were discovered several times in human history: Classical Greece, Medieval Islam, Renaissance Europe. Arguably, the latter two were strongly influenced by the former, but even so they built additional explanatory frameworks. Moreover, the explosion that arose from Europe became the Enlightenment and the modern edifice of science and technology

So, on the eve of an eclipse that sufficiently darkened the skies of Northern California, it is worth noting the unreasonable success of reason. The gods are not angry. The spirits are not threatening us over a failure to properly propitiate their symbolic requirements. Instead, the mathematics worked predictively and perfectly to explain a wholly natural phenomenon.

But why should the mathematics work so exceptionally well? It could be otherwise, as Eugene Wigner’s marvelous 1960 paper, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, points out:



Galileo’s rocks fall at the same rates but only provided that they are not unduly flat and light. And pieces of paper and feathers definitely do not, but instead drift insouciantly along the channels of heat and air towards the ground. Yet we assume the laws apply and a secondary explanation (air resistance) is applied to compensate for the central tendency that is expressed by a relatively simple proportionality. But what of the geographical variations in the gravitational field of the Earth? This was mapped extensively during the Cold War to improve the reliability of ballistic missiles. Another complex suite of variables that we ignore until the swamping effect of the noise is overridden by the requirements of the specific technological application.

And it all works well enough that we soldier on, our television signals carried from perfectly still geosynchronous satellites that are actually sliding through their orbits at a breakneck speed in order to preserve the illusion of absolute stillness. It even leads to an additional question concerning whether there are phenomena that are so complex that we cannot easily characterize their underlying mathematics or that are simply uncharacterizable in terms of analytic formulations?

From Smith to Darwin



The paper uncovers some of the idiosyncrasies of Smith’s economic history:




Lies, Damn Lies, and the Statistics of Mortality

I spent a few minutes calculating my expected date of death today since I just turned 45. It turns out that I am beyond the half-way point in this journey.  I’ve created a spreadsheet that you can use to calculate your own demise and produce charts like the one above. The current spreadsheet uses the US Male/Female mortality numbers from the World Bank dataset and then a linear regression for future gains in life expectancy. Other country sets can be easily incorporated.

Enter your year of birth in the yellow box and it will create a plot of how long you can expect to live, as well as the transition point from green to red in your, eh, lifecycle.  Don’t forget to get your trusts, wills, organ donations, and directives in order.

Of course, there are no more compelling lies than statistical ones, and yet there are no other ways to guess the future than to extrapolate from the past.

Trust in What?




