signs of the times

Secret arrests after 9/11 will stay secret - The Supreme Court Monday refused to hear an appeal by civil liberties groups seeking access to basic data about hundreds of individuals detained by the federal government after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The decision allows the government to continue withholding the names of most detainees, as well as other information related to their arrests, indefinitely. — mh

Court Upholds Police Use of Roadblocks to Seek Witnesses - The Supreme Court ruled today, in an Illinois case of deep concern to law enforcement agencies across the country, that the police may set up roadblocks to look for witnesses to crimes. The 6-to-3 decision upheld the use of "informational checkpoints," declaring that they were not necessarily violations of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. — nyt

small update

blah — trying to hack out my last remaining personal statements for graduate applications. I've decided that the ease of writing a personal statement for a given graduate school is a good measure of the appropriateness of that grad school program — if it's obvious that a program is a good match, it's easy to write a convincing application! I've written to a lot of people at various departments, and received some odd replies. Maybe I'll post some sometime.

I've been reading Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone. I picked it up in paperback at Moe's because of an odd confluence of game theory encounters, such as reading Ellsberg's book and a few random other events (somehow Rand corp comes to mind again); having watched A Beautiful Mind last night, the Game Theory references continue. I used to love popular science books like this one, but now they just sound too dumbed-down. I looked up von Neumann's original monograph (QA269.V65) so maybe I'll take a look at that. Anyways, it's been kind of fun to read a little bit more about game theory, since I've long puzzled over the situation where you can infinitely second-guess someone (that scene in The Princess Bride comes to mind), and I'm also interested in the application of game theory to coding (of information — think Shannon and friends), since in that case, your strategy is an implicit form of communication. Another source of wondering is the 'perfectly rational opponent' hypothesis — in the real world, it's rarely economical to play completely rationally, because research costs money. Lo and behold, there's a review of a monograph on that subject in the current AMS Bulletin: ``Computation and complexity in economic behavior and organization,'' by K. Mount and S. Reiter. The authors attempt an examination of the computation-theoretic cost of rationality, but their book receives lukewarm review.

Funny quote from KALX that pertains to Emperor Norton in a small way: ``The city of Colma is the only city in the United States where the dead outnumber the living — it has that many cemetaries. It's also a very bad place to be if zombies turn out to be real!''

I saw that someone listed themselves as being interested in "applied procrastination." haha! So far in my procrastination, I have applied to be a CSUA mentor, applied for a summer research program at Argonne National Laboratory (in Chicago, with the unfortunate acronym ANL), and read about game theory.

Now back to my grad school apps for Physics. hmm.