peteg's blog - noise - talks

$10 booked 2019-02-23. The ticket included a drink so I got another 50 Lashes at IO Myers Studio. The sizeable audience sat in rows of chairs on the floor (they'd removed the risers). This pair of conversations was hosted by the Director of UNSW Centre for Ideas, Ann Mossop. Apparently they were both guests at the recent Adelaide Writers Week.

Briefly, Hanif wore a pink shirt, untucked, with sneakers and looked like he was in danger of sobriety. He owned to being born in 1965, that Pakistan has been at war throughout his life, and writing novels might be a bit childish but he's addicted to storytelling. Apparently writing Red Birds took most of the seven years since his previous novel. In his mind war is pure cynicism: some people make a lot of money from it, and careers are furthered. On a stage elsewhere he was told by a real Navy Seal that war was a lot like Call of Duty; absurdism rules the day. The present wars are very sanitised: little blood and few dead bodies, certainly no coffins, are shown on US TV. The classic Việt Nam movies were all focussed on an America traumatised by killing heaps of people: just stop it man. The current Pakistani government is a democracy but is censoring the press etc. like the military dictatorships.

In the brief Q/A session Eid suggests smoking a lot to get over trauma. Hanif's advice to his cadet journalists: don’t get fired, don’t get killed. There was also some discussion about citizenship.

At the Chicago Public Library at 6pm. I sprinted down there after work, which turned out to be unnecessary as the auditorium only got half full. Garry Wills is elderly now but quite entertaining, often batting away Perlstein's attempts to corner him with brevity and perspicacity that the author was lacking. The audience was clearly liberal and perhaps for that reason the talking was long on assertion and short on empiricism. My present lack of consciousness precludes me from reading the book itself.

Pankaj Mishra uses the book to gesture at notions of freedom. It reminded me of the quotation he pulled from Tanpınar (intro, p xvii):

The privilege I most treasured as a child was that of freedom ... Today we use the word only in its political sense, and how unfortunate for us. For I fear that those who see freedom solely as a political concept will never fully grasp its meaning. The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale — or rather it opens the door to countless curtailments.

Cowderey was famous for taking it to the politicians while he was the Director of Public Prosecutions for NSW back in the 1990s and early 21st century. I read his book Getting Justice Wrong sometime back then. As a semi-retired visiting professor at UNSW, tonight he spoke on those old themes, and gave us his backstory: assisting the Commonwealth in prosecuting R&R drug violations by visiting American soldiers, and four years or more in Papua New Guinea as a prosecutor. Contrary to Fraser et al, this was not a mea culpa: he acted on his beliefs while he had power, though he often found the law and justice to be at odds. We heard of the husband who assisted his wife (suffering from advanced MS) commit suicide who later owned up to it all, forcing the police to charge him with murder. The result was a conviction for assisting suicide and a twelve-month good behaviour bond; some kind of justice in his eyes. He claimed the Greens have "an excellent policy" here. There was also the young Vietnamese bloke who gave a clean needle to a junkie who overdosed later that night, yielding a manslaughter conviction.

Broadly Cowderey explored the schism between justice and the law, and advocated for more discretion for judges etc. — which is cold comfort for those of us outside the legal arena who so easily see the costs and obfuscations and not so often the progress. I got the impression that he felt much of his work as DPP in prosecuting drug offenders was a waste of time, though he was careful to say that the other laws are already strong enough to handle organised crime, black markets and all that. I heard the same about the terrorism laws back in the day.

Over the past few months I have been chugging my way through the videos of this meeting of computer science luminaries. Gérard Berry is very funny. (I must watch the other videos on his home page.) Gordon Plotkin's talk is quite abstruse even by the standards of this audience. Philip Wadler shows how to run a panel. Gérard Huet and Larry Paulson give great accounts of the early days of interactive theorem proving systems, and John Harrison shed some light on what he does at Intel.

Milner's last innovation in his process algebraic tradition — bigraphs — don't look like gaining much traction from what I saw here.

Michael Kirby reminded me that no matter how much mathematics and science I study, wisdom lies elsewhere.

Trekked out to the Riverside Theatre at Parramatta with Pete R.. Took us a bit more than an hour to get there, with heavy traffic on Parramatta Road and the M4 even around 4:30pm; I find it hard to believe that anyone would do this every day.

We got there perhaps ten minutes into Quiggin's keynote talk, which sounded a lot like he was reading directly from his blog. Generally he focussed on what the institutional response to the global financial crisis should be, in structural terms. I guess the guts of it is in Quiggin's paper, and in brief, the idea is to get the public sector to take a larger role in the areas where markets have not shown themselves to be superior. A sample argument: the government can always borrow at better rates than the private sector (presumably axiomatically: the private sector is underpinned/regulated by the Government, and hence cannot be a better risk) so there is no real (as compared to political) gain in financing via public-private partnerships. A lot of the nuance was beyond my limited understanding, but as always he sounds at least plausible and often irrefutable.

Of the two respondants, Steve Keen, A/Prof at the University of Western Sydney, stridently claimed the economy is fuelled by debt to a much larger extent than the government admits, and that it has a pervasively pernicious effect. Pete R. was suspicious about his charts and simulations, which were difficult to interpret in such limited time. Most interesting was his claim that all decreases in unemployment since the great depression have been funded by debt that has yet to be paid off; in other words, we have no story for sustainable growth. One man's debt is his countryman's investment?

The other respondent was Guy Debelle, who cursorily dismissed a lot of what Keen had to say. It was difficult to take him for more than a technocrat, playing the reassure-the-sheep role that the Reserve Bank is generally adept at. Not much light, and the heat was a bit tedious.

A talk by the authours at Shearer's Bookshop in Leichardt. For mine the corrosive effect the Howard Government has had on Australia's public institutions is both its most important and most troubling legacy. Due to our general disinterest in matters civic, the manifest concern has been economic and occasionally social, rarely structural, perhaps because such things make few people relaxed and comfortable. I find this very irritating.

If one has a rough idea where these people are coming from (traditional liberal democracy, Westminster accountability, etc.) then I expect there is little that will surprise in this book. (I haven't read it yet, I'm going on past Clive Hamilton form.) One may then wonder what the point is in producing a record of the debasement of public institutitons if it will only be read by those who are worried in the first place.

(The authors were careful to note that the Hawke and Keating Governments also engaged in nepotism, neutering, playing favourites, etc. and spent a long time disavowing the "Howard hater" tag. Clive Hamilton made reference to Judith Brett, an academic studying the Liberals, and I think there is a lot they could learn from her about wrestling their way to the centre of the public political debate.)

John Pilger asked the final question of the night, asserting that the situation is not so very different in the other Anglo democracies. Clive Hamilton's response was that the democratic processes are much stronger elsewhere. I also think it's important to note that our party structures are so much more rigid than in (say) the U.S; from Peter Garrett of the ALP we get a toe-the-party-line cop-out, as if dissent on the issues that made him famous politically would be the most heinous and damaging act imaginable. The "broad church" of the Liberals can sometimes show evidence of an internal debate, but Howard is always calling for more discipline. Are people so scared of democratic processes?

There's a review in the Smage by David Marr. I note Peter Andren patronised the book launch at Parliament House, and that Marr will publish a Quarterly Essay in June this year entitled His Master's Voice: Public Debate in Howard's Australia.

Ross Gittins is the editor of the business section of the Smage and writes the occasional edifying column on economics. (Andrew Norton observes that he tends to alternate commentary on social policy with demystification.) This was the launch of his book, a distillation of (mostly other people's) wisdom apropos living a good, or perhaps even happy, life in an age of excessive consumerism and dearth of time.

Richard Glover was his partner in conversation, and was quite a bit sharper than I would have expected by his Saturday Smage columns, particularly when he was summarising questions for repetition through the microphone. We heard about an itinerant childhood, being the son of two Salvo officers, and much was made of the recent work in behavioural economics. I asked Gittins at the end if we would see a return to collectivism, and earnt a very Maynard-Keynes response: "Just wait, it will be back".

There's a review from the Smage.

The UNSW alumni association has been organising these talks for a few years now. I thought I'd give it a go, partly because of the topic:

Professor Archer will present a fascinating discourse on Australia as the home of the world's biggest, weirdest and oldest fossils. Hear all about flesh-eating kangaroos and bizarre creatures that go back to the dawn of life on earth.

but mostly due to idleness. Yep, he described all kinds of weird ancient creatures, mostly at a level that would impress a primary school student. More interesting were the implications he drew from the fossil record, such as the relative success of marsupial and placental animals and the possibility of human inhabitation of this continent going back millions of years (and not just thousands). Political sensitivity made him pull his punches on the latter, unfortunately.

These stories of empirical science — the field work, the cross-discipline collaboration, arguments about the balance of probabilities, the broad interest in the results — make me realise just what a weird field computer science is.

As part of the Sydney Writers' Festival (2006) at the City Recital Hall, Angel Place Sydney.

Philip Wadler gave a talk at the University of Technology, Sydney today on the subject of his Links programming language (or more precisely, some details of his plans for it). I'm not sure just why he's in Australia; I heard along the grapevine that he was visiting Peter Stuckey (associated with NICTA) at the University of Melbourne. As Manuel and Gabi are in New York presently there was no UNSW connection, and the Sydney NICTA nodes aren't doing functional programming in any serious way. So... that leaves the category theory angle, of course, and that leads the Sydneysider to C. Barry Jay's door.

The talk was probably no different to any of the others he's given on this topic. What I find interesting is that the project is inherently messy, building on a lot of people's work rather than trying to investigate self-contained super-specialised research problems. It is as if Philip Wadler (amongst others) now thinks the question is not so much "how do I do X?" but "how do I do X for practical instances of X?". I wish them success from afar.

Sean told me that he also gave a talk at Macquarie Uni yesterday, which I didn't hear about - roughly on the unusual effectiveness of logic in CS, I'd hazard to guess.