A couple quick notes

I made a couple quick election simulations looking at polls because of some conversation I had. The first is a simulation if the polls are biased and we want to cherry-pick a Romney victory, the second is just a lazy simulation of the results if they aren't biased. I don't do anything at all to the polls or introduce any macroeconomic variables or presume any sort of covariance structure between the states. This is just a lazy man's confirmation that, unless the polls are systematically biased, Barack Obama is, indeed, ahead. And there's some sloppy source code, too, if you want to try at home. If you don't mind a little irreverence, I call the candidates "Mittens" and "Bronco Bama" throughout because of the adorable video of a little girl saying she was tired of "Bronco Bama".

The market seems to say that, as of 7am on Monday, the odds are at 77%-ish.

Besides that, I'm extremely busy until Wednesday.

The official panheresy political endorsement.

Vote for whoever you want, I find both candidates to be odious in many ways. If you can pretend that third party candidates are real candidates, sure, vote for them, whatevs. As for Mittens, to paraphrase Michael Scott, "I hate so much about the things that [he chooses] to be." As for Barry O, drone strikes, continuations of Bush-style attacks on civil liberties, killing whoever he wants to kill as long as they're not on American soil, several other things.

Neither side is willing to even think about climate change, energy policy, world population, and many other issues related to risk management in the way they must be considered. Barry O is at least willing to admit that global warming is occurring and humans are at least partly responsible, but he is not willing to really take the necessary action. It is politically intractable. For Mittens, of course, this is all just a joke. Roffles. I especially like how the Forbes article - from August 31st, mind you - points out that a substantial portion of the US population is on coastlines, sea level is definitely rising, and this definitely increases risk from storms. As they say, "Denying this (as some state and local governments are doing) is crazy: sooner or later, the people living in these places, and the businesses they built there, will pay the price." PRESCIENT MUCH?

And but so anyways, we will have to get off carbon fuels rather soon. Even if we weren't to do so, in a couple generations, we will have completely burnt through our billion-year inheritance and will discover that we will have to have started today in replacing carbon-based fuels to maintain anything close to our "standard of living", as none of the alternatives are as "nice" as carbon-based fuels. Unfortunately, given the way humans are prone to managing risk (e.g., poorly), we are exceedingly likely to realize this far too late, even if the political process were completely objective and unswayed by unlimited anonymous donations by the fossil fuel industry.

Anyway, my own personal recommendation in this election to vote for the guy who is less likely to set off a nuclear war and who is more likely to reform energy policy away from our addiction to cheap carbon-based energy. Neither real candidate is going to stop the murder of babies and Mittens isn't going to be more "liberal" about killing American citizens outside the boundaries of America.

Frankly, in a certain sense, I don't care about getting out of the current economic abyss, as reforming energy policy may require certain sacrifices, economic prosperity among them. However, you know, sometimes buying insurance is costly, but it's better to buy insurance than to clean up from a disaster. Rational risk mitigation, baby. It's something humans aren't good at.

A few more thoughts on languages

I'm by no means a person who knows anything about languages, language acquisition, language pedagogy, or linguistics. However, despite my profound ignorance of anything, I will note a few things here.

It is universally agreed that Rosetta Stone kind of sucks. It's like the CrossFit of language acquisition: it makes a lot of claims that just fall short of reality. Here's an interesting article - and there are others on the site - about some of its inadequacies. http://www.casl.umd.edu/node/919

Esperanto makes (or has made) some ludicrous claims as well, of course. I'm still idly learning on my (short) bus commute because, well, why not? But I have no illusions about it. Generally speaking, the typical method of teaching Esperanto is kind of an old-school pedagogy - go over the grammar pretty much "in order" and then work through stuff until you've mastered the language - but it isn't too terrible for Esperanto because there's relatively little "new" grammar if you're used to an Indo-European (emphasis on European) tongue. But there's a surprising amount of grammar and odd Indo-European stuff for a language that claims to be simple for everybody in the world - but I'll leave that discussion to actual linguists. See also: http://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/inkoj/article/view/838/1084

So if you're wondering what to do instead of Rosetta Stone: Rosetta Stone might be good for helping to drill vocabulary or something. That's all. I've heard good things about Assimil. Pimsleur is good for what it is, but beware of thinking it teaches you all that much. All of this is quite useless without the opportunity to speak with real speakers of your target language. But, really, this is all baseless from me, I'm more of a dead languages guy and my French was always more of a reading ability than anything else (and why not, who would I talk to?).

Unless R or MATLAB count as languages, then I could talk about... something.

And another thing about the Volapuk wikipedia: one of the annoying things to me is that, if somebody were genuinely curious about Volapuk and were interested in reading some honest human-written article in Volapuk just to see what a Volapuk article would look like, it would be rather hard to find substantial Volapuk content (as opposed to machine-translated stuff).

Le Corbeau

We've been watching French films on Sunday afternoons and I suppose we're coincidentally on a Clouzot kick. Last week, we watched Pepe le Moko and this week we watched Le Corbeau. We liked one of the actors enough that I made it a point to plan on watching the other movie I have that he is in, Les Diaboliques. Coincidentally, this is also a Clouzot. But here is a great scene:

Vorzet: But where's the light? Where's the shadow? Where does evil start? Do you know which side you're on?
Germain: It's of small importance. But we must stop the light swinging.
(Germain reaches to halt the light bulb, but recoils with burnt fingers)
Vorzet: (laughs) You hurt yourself! That proves something. There . . . I like you, so let me confide something. I take drugs. I inject myself. (spoilers removed) But I don't take myself to be a monster! Think about that, and check your conscience. The results could surprise you.
Germain: I know myself.
Vorzet: You're proud. Since the winds of hate blew through this town all values have been more-or-less corrupted. You're stricken too. You'll fall like the rest. Oh I'm not saying you'll strangle your mistress, but you'd go through my bag if I wasn't here! ... One simply has the choice.

It makes more sense in context, of course. I highly recommend the film. It also brings up two important considerations: don't gossip, and don't "inform". But it's all much more complex than that, you know.

Better than Pepe le Moko in that the women weren't just tropes.

Wikipedia addendum.

Of course, most of the articles in the Esperanto Wikipedia are crap. However, there are a substantial number with substantial human content. If you want to get a taste of how much of a given wikipedia is computer-generated crap, just go to a random page:

• A Random Esperanto Article
• A Random Volapuk Article
• A Random English Article For reference.
• A Random Euskara (Basque) Article

As you can see, most articles are crap, generally. Volapuk is remarkable in that there is little else besides the crap generated by the tools. Project idea: discriminate between these classes of articles.

Why are there so many articles in the Volapuk Wikipedia?

Volapuk was the first popular constructed language. It was popular for maybe a decade before Esperanto took off and stole its base. At its height, there were hundreds of clubs around the world, hundreds of books, hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts. It's an odd language with a lot of funny sounds, it's probably as complicated as German. In Danish, the name has come to mean "nonsense". There are still a few enthusiasts, but people estimate their numbers in the dozens (besides hobbyists who care about all constructed languages but don't have a particular interest in Volapuk). By way of contrast, Esperanto has perhaps 2000 native speakers and they have an annual international congress with 2-4000 attendees from 70-ish countries each year. There has been a continuously active community of tens of thousands for the 125 (exactly!) years of its existence. The commonly quoted number of speakers - 2,000,000 - is a bit inflated, sure. Euskara (Basque) has 700,000 speakers, but almost all of them certainly speak the language and are native speakers, as nobody has any interest in trying to learn it - it's worse than Magyar. I would be surprised if there were 100,000 who spoke Esperanto well enough that somebody with a comparable level of Basque would be counted as a Basque speaker. But, still, there's a community, it includes native speakers, and there are people who do a substantial proportion of their daily communication in it, quite unlike Volapuk.

Why, then, does the Volapuk wikipedia have 120,000 entries? Esperanto, a "legitimate" language, has only about 170,000. A couple dozen enthusiasts and a handful of con-lang nerds who are interested in all con-langs can't, on their own, do that much work on a quality product. And there are plenty of the same sort of demographic in Esperanto, too.

Answer: the Volapuk wikipedia is mostly robot-generated crap. There are few substantive articles. It's mostly full of stubs. There are a large number of machine-translated articles that are very easy to generate (e.g., formulaic articles about each town in Italy). There seems to be a machine-generated stub article for every person who was ever tangentially involved with the Volapuk movement. I'm not saying there isn't some value in this - but this certainly solves the mystery. See their talk page for details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AVolap%C3%BCk and also http://vo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gebanibespik:Smeira

If you're interested in hearing more about Volapuk, read Puk, Memory. Even if you're not interested, it's a good article. If you're interested in learning constructed languages, you should learn Esperanto instead of anything else. Nobody should try to learn a language without a use for it (and without using it), and the only constructed language with a community of speakers is Esperanto. If you're interested in learning another language and are in the US, the language you are most likely to be able to learn is whatever dialect of Spanish is most common in your area because there will be people to talk to. But if there's an Esperanto club in town, sure, you could try that, you will definitely be able to get to a "I can express myself incompetently and get the gist of what people say" level much more easily and much faster, but I would not recommend it if you don't have people to talk to.

Other uses of "volapuk" besides the Danish:

• It's a slang term ("волапюк") for rendering Cyrillic characters with ASCII Latin characters.
• A few other languages besides Danish use it as a word for "nonsense" - I don't have a full list. It's used in sentences where we might say, "It's all Greek to me."
• There's a band called Volapuk.
• That's about it.