Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

There is a pretty good reason we frown on people with financial interests in government policy giving money to the people who decide that policy. Primarily because those decisions may not be made on the merits of the choices but because of self-interest, and secondarily because citizens will doubt the wisdom of those choices even if they (occasionally) turn out to be good even with the bribery. One of the disappointments of adulthood was realizing how much white-collar wrongdoing is legal. Many policy makers are elected and the primary mechanishm in my adult years has been legal, through campaign contributions. John McCain was a mix of good and not-so-good intentions; one of his issues was campaign finance reform. He once stated that nothing could ever improve in government without such reform, and he and Russ Feingold passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in 2002 which made things better. It was often criticized by corrupt politicians for not fixing everything because since it mad...

I like building parsers.  For those of you unfamiliar with the word, a parser is a program that interprets an input string, validating that it is of the correct form and extracting data from it when it is.   When I ran my own website for my students, before my university started using professional content management systems, I regularly wrote small data files to describe the behavior of the website and used parsers to read them. Parsing techniques fascinate me. They all start with the notion of a grammar such as I was taught (in simple form) for the English language back in grade school. The language of acceptable input inevitably has structure and grammar seems to be an easy way to describe that structure. A sentence may be a simple noun verb  for example, and a grammar rule for this one kind of sentence would be of the form sentence -> noun verb . For any meaningful language there are many grammar rules (called productions) using nonterminals (names of structu...

Today is the 250'th anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. I do not know of any other national holiday celebrating the reading of a document prepared by a bunch of lawyers; I believe it is one of the many things that makes the US unique. What other day could we celebrate?  Washington fought a war of attrition against the British. Celebrating the conclusion of the Battle of Yorktown would perhaps lead to a discussion of how many years of battle led to it. The Treaty of Paris? More conclusive but, you know, French.. In any event all of my life there have been many celebrations on the day but very very little discussion of what we celebrate. Fireworks, parades. Not much about the freedom from the parts of British rule that are explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights. Not that much about liberty most years, although my memory of the bicentennial fifty years ago seems to include a good deal of discussion of it throughout the year. But, we have Trump ...