Disclaimer: This is not an official Georgia Tech publication, and Georgia Tech does not endorse anything I write here. It is a collection of some ramblings that I wrote for your amusement. ---- May 10, 2008 It seems almost certain that Obama will be the Democratic contender for president, now that he has more superdelegates than Hillary. Personally, I am starting to get a little tired of hearing about the Democratic primaries. For one thing, Obama's supporters and some news media have, without interruption, described some of Hillary's tactics as ``negative campaigning''; indeed, it has been on the news almost every single night. Some of her acts definitely meet my criteria for ``negative campaigning''; but, criticizing her for criticizing Obama's experience, as some have, is going a little too far in my opinion. Such actions confirm a stereotype of people on the left (certain Obama supporters), which is that lefties are crybabies that can tolerate no criticism. Hearing Hillary promote certain positions that I doubt she really believes in (like the gas tax holiday) has also been rather painful to watch. She reminds me of Tracy Flick from the movie Election -- she will do whatever it takes to win. She should realize that when she makes claims like that, as well as engages in negative campaigning, that people will remember her words, and be less willing to vote for her in the future. Clearly, she has left a lot of her initial supporters rather upset... and perhaps they are starting to wonder whether she was ever the person she seemed to be. **** I thought I would add to one of my previous entries on how computer science versus math handles variables: I forgot to mention that in math papers, in certain circumstances, it is perfectly fine to change the values of variables. One example is when one makes use of a lemma that has a parameter X. On different invocations of the lemma one allows X to be different values. This is similar to what computer scientists call ``locally bound variables'', which are variables that are instantiated for a particular local (i.e. ``short-term'') purpose, and then forgotten once one moves to a different context. Another way that variables are allowed to have different values is, say, when one has a function and one wants to speak about its value ``at x = 1'' and then perhaps later ``at x = 5''. Here, one can think of this as the conditional statement ``if x = 1, then ...'', thereby sidestepping the issue of actually assigning it some value. There are a few more examples. However, if one writes a paper and sets ``X := {1,2,3}'' (here X is a ``set variable'') and then somewhat later in the proof writes ``X := {1,2}'', one might just get a referee report with a comment like ``That is confusing. Why don't you change the second usage of X to a new variable Y?'' In other words, a lot of referees annoyingly treat variables as thought they are constants (I have certainly been criticized for this, and asked to change my `variable' names)! ---- May 12, 2008 I recently read a very interesting article in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell, titled ``In the Air''. Gladwell, perhaps you recall, is the author of ``Tipping Point'', a book which explores how certain large social phenomena can be initiated by tiny actions in the right context. I was not much impressed with that book, as I had read similar such things over the years, and so found it lacking in original content; however, I suppose he did a good job synthesizing many ideas into a short and highly readable account. His article ``In the Air'', which can be found by going to http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=1 is about how great scientific discoveries and inventions were not as difficult to come up with as people perhaps would guess. He lists numerous inventions that were discovered by several people at the same time; for example, two people came up with the telephone, five people came up with the steamboat, and nine people came up with the telescope. Some biographers of the ones we remember (like Alexander Graham Bell) seem to think that perhaps their subjects ideas were stolen. Gladwell argues that, rather, their ideas were ``in the air'', and all it took was some talent and time to see them through -- talent and time had by more than one! Gladwell also talks about how wrong-headed it is to name mathematical or scientific creations after their ``inventors'', as one does with a work of art. Here is an excerpt from his article: ++++ The statistician Stephen Stigler once wrote an elegant essay about the futility of the practice of eponymy in science -- that is, the practice of naming a scientific discovery after its inventor. That’s another idea inappropriately borrowed from the cultural realm. As Stigler pointed out, “It can be found that Laplace employed Fourier Transforms in print before Fourier published on the topic, that Lagrange presented Laplace Transforms before Laplace began his scientific career, that Poisson published the Cauchy distribution in 1824, twenty-nine years before Cauchy touched on it in an incidental manner, and that Bienaymé stated and proved the Chebychev Inequality a decade before and in greater generality than Chebychev’s first work on the topic.” For that matter, the Pythagorean theorem was known before Pythagoras; Gaussian distributions were not discovered by Gauss. The examples were so legion that Stigler declared the existence of Stigler’s Law: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” There are just too many people with an equal shot at those ideas floating out there in the ether. We think we’re pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we’re pinning tails on donkeys. ++++ I myself have been a victim of the ``naming game''. Personally, I don't mind that much, but giving everyone their proper credit is important for two reasons: 1) It is necessary for a particular field of study to grow, as it creates incentives for people to enter or stay in it; and, perhaps most importantly, 2) Giving people their proper credit often translates into salary increases, awards and grant money, which further strengthens a particular field of study. And now that I have written this, I will try to be extra careful myself in the future, and give everybody their proper due!