nihil architecture blogs

LaTeX is pretty much the standard for publishing mathematical documents, a pretty old standard too, and one I dislike on a fundamental level, already I should have acquired copious amounts of nerd-rage by writing this, but you know it turns me one when you guys are mad at me.

My main dislike is hardly the quality of the output—though that could really use some work too, despite what the liberal media may tell you, it’s far from the quality of a professional typesetter—it’s the language used to specify the output. The language to me is so daft and devoid of any reasonable thought, it feels like gotos all over the place again.

The year is 2010, Dijkstra has won, few modern languages still support the goto, those that do often require the code to have special privileges and/or be explicitly placed in some ‘unsafe’ clause. However there are more things to healthy programming, say I’m programming some code which does some-thing with prime numbers, tries to find some pattern in it, just hypothetically, say that initially, I’m not that ambitious, and I investigate only the first 1 000 000 primes. Afterwards, I’m on a lead and I want to scoop it up a notch and go for the first 10 000 000, surely, if I programmed it scalably, I would only have to change the number 1000000 to 10000000 once in my code and the rest adapts right? If I run a gravity simulator, say I want to then try it for two times as much gravity? If I programmed this well I would have to change that number only once right? If I make some program to output a web-page, and I suddenly decide to output XHTML instead of HTML, surely if I did this well I would only have to change one switch some-where and the rest follows?

Okay, so let’s port this idea to LaTeX, a real life example, a friend of mine was once collaborating, he used em-dashes in his version, his parter thought they were too prætentious, so he changed them to commata. He had to edit every single em-dash, a simple substitute didn’t work because it turns out they used --- in more places than em-dashes. It was a frustrating task I can imagine. Now, it’s quite possible to just use \medium-pause every time and let this be output as em-dashes or as commata at one’s pleasure. But this is seldom done, and LaTeX certainly doesn’t make this very convenient nor encourages this. Another quite simple example would be that you’re writing some-thing which uses the speed of light, and in a second edition you find out that the symbol conflicts with some other symbol in the same formula, you’d wish you had used s_l there or some other thing instead of c the entire time, now you have to edit it, probably missing a few, and introducing errors. In my world, I would have used some-thing like [lightspeed] from the start and bound that concept to a symbol at only one piece in the entire code, which is then easily changed. Alternatively, you might find out your publisher’s style doesn’t really like dots and wants crosses or spaces for multiplication, you’re stuck on editing that. You could just search and replace, but of course you want to check. Isn’t it easier to just specify multiplication each time and define the symbol associated with that at some higher level?

Another part we’re always getting hot about is re-use of code, Two or more, use a for!, LaTeX isn’t particularly friendly about this thing either, often you will find multiple æquations which re-use some basic concept into it which often leads to copy-ing and pasting of text. I once learnt that as soon as you copy and paste your code, you’re doing some-thing wrong and I agree with this maxim. Consider this simple example:


$\land$ and $\lor$ distribute over each other, more formally:
\begin{eqnarray}
x \land (y \lor z) &=& (x \land y) \or x (\land z) \\
x \lor (y \land z) &=& (x \lor y) \land x (\lor z)
\end{eqnarray}


Splendid, I’d rather just use:


\mutual_distribution(\land,\lor)


And define once how this is output, and then be done with it. I can change that template once then later if I want to make some changes. I’m to be honest surprised that LaTeX automatically enumerates your æquations for you and you don’t have to do that yourself. And yes, it is possible with some hacking around to make such a template, but the syntax for it is so limited and confuzzling that almost no one does it, and it almost makes things less readable to begin with. I tried and I tried to make this happen a little more but the language was quite clearly never designed for it that well, and it’s madness and pain.

LaTeX lacks a \Beta on its own, quite obviously because it looks visually the same as B so why bother? Well, even if you were a dusty computer scientists who has a fetish with not keeping his mind ordered, it still begs the quæstion in what typeface?, it’s not unlikely that a typeface exists which for clarity puts Greek letters in a slightly different makeup, and I would not think this would be a bad idea, differentiating A and ? in various manuscripts can be very handy. And this requires extensive workarounds in LaTeX, to be expected from a tool coming from a time which prided itself on writing all possible code with the mentality of not looking ahead and taking into account the future. LaTeX code manages to be a reasonable write-only language, an impressive feat considering you don’t even have to mentally follow the flow of computation, that its commenting syntax is so verbose that it discourages people from using them might be another part of the problem.

Another thing I don’t like is how it enters and closes math-mode, sure, if math-modes can’t nest? Why not take the same open and closing tag right? I am sure to speak for all of us when I say that never has debugging been such a pain as LaTeX incorrect LaTeX math-mode closing, the error messages are so enormously cryptic by misplacing a dollar sign that you often have no idea exactly which it is you misplaced and often when you got it to work you still have no idea what you did wrong. It’s like rebooting your computer when some-thing went wrong and you’re still not exactly sure on how you fixed it. It turns out that closing tags help error messages and help you find them. Maybe this is Donald’s savant mind speaking who makes no errors, but for us mortals this is damned annoying.

It’s quite clear that the base of this language was designed in a time when people were practically still cave-men scratching COBOL code in granite walls to keep track of how many mammoths they hunted down.

Finally, on a more meta-level. LaTeX, well, just PDF or Postscript really, defines a lot of things which I feel a document ought not define. Yes, they are languages to specify the layout for a printing place, every pixel, every vector, and I feel that the only thing that should ever receive that data is the printer, or the person who checks it before it goes to the printer. The consumer should never receive that on his or her computer. Things like font size, font type, letter spacing, colour, text width, line spacing, these should all be properties of the viewer not of the document it reads. Supposedly LaTeX is about legibility, and it has used some archaic myths about what is optimal legibility to algorithmically force that down our throats, in reality probably more Donald Knuth’s præferred style. In the end, legibility is subjective, dependent on person, varies through locus and time, has a genetic and an environmental component, what one person considers legible another does not. So people should be able to adjust those settings in their viewer, computers are powerful enough to calculate that on the fly nowadays. Especially since e-readers are coming up, why not use that advantage?

Some people have already done this, it’s called separation of præsentation and content, take apart what you are saying semantically, and how you are layouting what you say for the most part as you can. It’s scalable, it takes into account that the house style of the publishing magazine may later on change, it enables the same document to easily be published in multiple styles depending on the target audience, it also gives the audience itself control over the style if they receive it in digital format, and so on. I for one hate with a passion that new misodendric hype of basically 1 em line spacing in papers. I’m still not really sure if they actually hit enter twice after every line or make some switch that does that automatically for each line, but as they use LaTeX I would not be surprised if they actually accomplished their treeslaughter by the former. Every time I see it, I would kill to have my PDF viewer implement a simple switch that could take that away, it reads both annoyingly and I’d like my grandchildren to have a plentiful supply of oxygen.

Okay, so let’s say you have to be operated. You go to meet your doctor, he shakes your hand, he’s friendly, he makes a little small talk, tries to ensure you that it’s not a big deal, that this operation is routine work for him and that he’s done it for years and the risks are really quite small, he’s friendly, and he seems genuinely concerned for your well-being. There’s just one catch.

He’s some-one who look to be in his twenties, and he has long, green hair and an eye-brow piercing.

Now, as you go to the operating table, you see him there again, he’s removed his piercing, his hair is tucked back, he’s wearing his white coat, his gloves, and he’s wearing an operating mask and all that good stuff. Obviously none of this interferes with his task at hand.

However he’s still a youthful bloke who’s got long green hair and an eye-brow piercing when he first introduces himself to his patients. The quæstion at hand is if people can, or should, be able to be refused for a job like this regardless of meeting all other qualifications because they don’t radiate the authority with that that they should.

Where-ever you go, laws regarding this are opaque at best, the concept of ‘discrimination’ is vague and arbitrary. Discrimination was illegal when it was legal to not hire women into executive functions because they didn’t radiate authority enough. And it is still illegal this day while for a lot of legal things the only qualification one needs is to be older than a certain age. What is ‘discrimination’ and what is not, is quite simply just translating the mass consensus of the people about ‘how far you can go’.

And quite obviously, there are a lot of people who would not feel that women radiate enough authority to be able to be a doctor. However not hiring women because of that rule is out of the quæstion in most western countries these days, that’s ‘discrimination’. And of course being a woman is irrelevant for one’s capabilities as a surgeon. Just as having green, long long and an eye-brow piercing is. However people grow a lot more sympathetic to requiring doctors to change that, because people might not feel safe then. Even though obviously it’s just conceding to their præjudices.

Of course, there is a fundamental difference between being a woman and having a piercing and green hair, you can change the latter easily, but not the former. Or is that entirely true? Quite absurdly one can say: ‘You can also change your sex!, and that’s quite true. But of course, a very big sacrifice to make for most people to be a doctor. But perhaps not bigger than for some people to live their lives in a hair colour they do not like just because some people are small-minded bigots?

Piercings and green hair are again different, you can take out a piercing quite easily, but to die your hair back and forth from every interview is quite cumbersome, to cut it and let it re-grow is again completely impossible.

But this is all still the public service. Let’s say you are a commercial entity with a for-profit raison d’être, if the law would require you to hire women, even though the sad reality is that hiring women in certain positions will simply mean less profit—then you’re stuck with that. You might even think that this is a sad thing and honestly want to give these woman a chance to prove themselves, but the reality is that you’re primary responsibility as a ceo is delivering profit to your shareholders, and not hiring women accomplishes that. You cannot let your political convictions interfere with your job, so to speak.

As said, what the law requires and what not of employers is opaque. However it seems to have been established some-what by præcedence that sex and ethnicity are not a quality you cannot hire people on. Even though it will eventually hamper your profit because the world is simply filled with small-minded bigots. You can also argue that this has a good reason, as you cannot (easily) change these qualities of yourself. It’s imaginable that you for same reason also can’t disqualify short people on the argument that clients are simply still small-minded bigots.

But it seems to go deeper than that. Long hair poses a risk in various job situations, but women seem to never be required to cut their hair short even though it could hamper their performance. Women simply in various cultures conventionally have long hair, and you can’t ask them to cut it, because it would be seen as quite hard for a woman to live without long hair should she desire to have it.

However, say you’re a male waiter in a classy restaurant, it’s quite imaginable that they require you to cut your long hair. Admittedly it hampers with your job performance, and not even for a tangible reason, but only because the world is filled with small-minded bigots. But because it’s ‘unconventional’ for males to have long hair, this can be required of them. Even though some security risks that are far more important cannot require women to cut their hair short. It would be unsurprising for me if some men have just as much troubles having short hair as some women. This can also be a cultural thing though, indeed, to ask a Sikh to cut his hair, a thing his religion forbids, is again more complicated.

A fundamental difference between public services like health-care and commercial things is though that health-care is seen as a right provided free of charge, at least in the civilized world outside of that isolated greatest nation in the world. While those commercial things are privileges you pay, if you pay for it, should you not be able to demand that you are assisted by some-one who is not a foreigner if you so please? While if it’s a thing the government provides free of charge, you have nothing to complain, take it or leave it. If you don’t like it, then try to pay a doctor out of your own pocket.

There’s been a lot of confusion and fighting over this so called ‘Mosque’ that’s being built at Ground Zero. Opponents noting the insensitivity, proponents saying this is religious freedom and one of the principles that Nation Under God was built on. Then there’s still the debate of Okay, it should be legal, religious freedom says it is, but is it wise?.

Well, wise, maybe not, probably not, but only because of the stupidity of man. Why is this ‘insensitive’? Is it ‘insensitive’, if a crime is done by Christian people to place a church close to that site? Many of the most infamous US criminals were Christians of course. Don’t ask me how they combine this, and don’t ask me how people combine Islam with suicide bombings either; people find their ways. There seems to be a sliding scale of acceptability of bigotry here. If your girlfriend was a bitch, to hate all women thenceforth is unacceptable and bigoted. If your boyfriend was one, to hate all men, well, that’s more acceptable. If you’re robbed by a black man, to then say all black people are scum goes too far and is præjudiced. But to think the same after being robbed by some obscure ethnicity such as Slovenes, that’s more acceptable again. To don’t trust punkers after a group of them beat you up, that’s just a nice argument to demonstrate why supposedly they [all] are scum.

So what is this ‘considering the sensitivity of the issue’ really but compromising for the bigots that can’t see the difference between different people who just happen to all profess being ‘Islamic’; that’s really all it is. Islam, unlike various schools of Christianity is not monolithical in nature, there is no One Supreme Authority such as a pope, there are no churches and people above churches, no bishops and so on. There are people who say they are Muslim, and they of course each all mean a totally different thing with it. For some, being Muslim is little more than faith into The One God and his righteousness and almightiness, and to others, this involves covering women in elaborate cloths. So basically, wise as it may be to be ’sensitive’ to avoid further polarization, it’s still basically giving people what they want for their bigotry and ignorance.

And ignorance is quite the word to describe what most people know of this place, on the right we have a picture of how it’s going to look. Looks kind of like modern architecture nay? And it’s more like a plaza than a Mosque really. These are some of its features accordingly New York Daily News:

• An auditorium
• A theatre
• A swimming pool
• A child-care area
• A basketball court
• A performing arts centre
• A book-store
• A fitness centre
• A restaurant, serving kosher dishes
• … last but not least, an Islamic praying centre

Obviously this thing has more in common with a plaza than a Mosque, indeed it’s modeled after 92nd Y. It’s just a plaza with a place people can also pray, how insensitive.

To put matters worse, the thing is not planned at Ground Zero at all, rather so near, three blocks to be præcise… do we really have to pay that much for bigots that people who are part of some religion cannot built a modern art centre three blocks away from some sight that other people who are part of the same religion did some crime?

And I think the simple answer is yes, it’s stupid, but we have no other option. It will polarize people even more and lead to more deaths if they do not give. Just because people are so damned stupid and do so damned little research. Stupid people—alas—are surprisingly powerful when in large groups, and alas surprisingly numerous. Thank you Sarah.

Friend of mine’s recently got a tortoise and commented to that he seems to reject food the information books and sides all say his species should really like, and seems to præfer food said media never even mentioned. But looking at such media like Tortoise Care the things that are immediately noticeable are:

• The source does not refer to many rational arguments, nor to any empirical research that can make compelling its claims.
• For a very large portion of the things the source claims, testing the accuracy of it scientifically would either be very unethical and tortoise-abuse, or simply downright theoretically impossible.

Which seems to be the trend on about all sites, books, professionals or what-ever that seem to deal in the care of pets or even children, many child psychologists and pædagogues will claim various things about child care that should raise the eye-brow ‘If they ever tested this hypothesis this means that they for 16 year long mistreated a group of children, lucky control group there…’, also, once in a while, these theories are outright rejected, again, with no real empirical or rational argument to support it. No-one nowadays will claim your child needs a substantial amount of physical punishment to grow up, nowadays that’s considered detrimental to the development of a child. Teenagers masturbating used to be a thing best prævented, nowadays part of a child’s ‘natural development’… I hope we all know that phrases like ‘natural’ are best avoided in serious scientific literature, especially when used to communicate a value judgement about some practice…

The term value judgement might be essential, all these sources are inhærently præscriptive; sure, they bring it as descriptive, as simply describing what actions supposedly hurt a tortoise or a child. But in the end the main effort of people communicating and originating such information is to change the way people behave, not to simply inform them with knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Researches into things which can cause certain things in animals that have no such præscriptive character tend to indeed be based on the actual scientific method, whence things such as your child should not be exposed to too much cursing come, I haven’t an idea. Or wait, I do, quite obviously people just don’t want their children to curse and go invent whole faux-sciences like ‘child psychology’ just to give this obviously moralistic notion some false illusion of a ’scientific character’.

After reading about this new C# language, some design choices of it baffled me, which were part of a new trend, I’m not talking about lambda abstractions, about some object oriented features, about things that drastically reduce performance, I’m talking about if(x = y) being illegal. Conditionals in C# apparently require their value to be of the type bool, if the compiler cannot prove they are of type bool, this is considered a static compile time error.

Now, to some programmers, if(x = y) would be naïvely perceived as a typo, or applying basic rules to a C-syntax. But it’s actually quite possibly intended code in many languages. C popularized an interesting concept, assignment wasn’t a statement, but an expression, it had a well defined value, namely, the value that was being assigned. This allowed for ‘chain assignments’ : a = b= c = d, and on most architectures this maps most efficiently to machine operations. It’s also a rather common way in JavaScript to loop over some list, and for that reason the ‘next’ operation yields null rather than an error if there is no next, stopping the loop.

It’s also to many programmers a source of frustration, typos can often lead to unintended code, if(x = 5) is of course always true. Though a lot of programmers have taught themselves to use if(5 == x) to catch those errors early. So C# has chosen to favour the latter problem, a restriction on power and expressiveness to protect people against themselves. Even though the problem could have just as easily been avoided by using := for assignment, oh well.

And this seems to be the trend more and more, restrictions and restrictions on power to protect people ‘against themselves’, my rants on psychiatry and society should make it clear that I am generally opposed to protect people ‘against themselves’. Let people do what they want, maybe they do a thing they’ll regret, maybe they’ll stop doing it afterwards. It’s better to teach a child to not touch a pan by letting it burn its fingers then by just saying ‘don’t do it’ and the child having grown up knowing it shouldn’t do it, but never really knew why. And this is also exactly what these restrictions do, instead of teaching people good programming, and the theory behind it and why they shouldn’t do certain things, you just don’t allow them to do it, they won’t do it because they have no choice, and they’ll never understand why they shouldn’t and they’ll be kept ignorant forever. My hunch is that there are more programmers on the planet that don’t realize why they use == ‘in an if-statement’ and = outside it than those who realize why this is done. Which really was one of the beautiful things of C, it gave the programmer choice, and indeed, at some points it does pay to be able to use assignment inside a conditional. while(obj = array[i++]) ... is code which I very commonly use in languages where accessing outside of the bounds of an array yields null rather than an error, and it probably was designed so for this purpose. If this C# idea catches on, people will probably be kept more and more ignorant and in the end completely be obscure to the fact that== is a binary operator, just like +.

A thing people often misunderstand about this issue is static versus dynamic typing, often things like In statically typed languages, variables have a type, in dynamically typed languages, values have a type. are uttered, quite a crude approximation. Static in most context is the same as ‘lexical’, a statically typed language is designed so that ‘types’ can be inferred from analysing source code alone without running it or computing any values. Static typing is older, and less powerful than dynamic typing, but also more restrictive. Static typing is also easier to implement, for this reason, when the first high level languages came, people had the interesting idea of coming up with ‘type declarations’, so that a compiler could analyse these during compilation and safeguard a programmer against errors whose result may be well defined in machine term operations, but whose result is also ‘nonsensical’ to any human reader. Applying float addition to integers is a perfectly defined operation that produces a new natural number in binary base which you can interpret as whatever you want, a character, an unsigned integer, a signed integer, a float, a four-character ASCII string, it’s all about interpretation of that scalar ordinal value. However in any of these interpretations, to human readers it’ll most likely not make any ’sense’. So if in the source code of programs variables of the ‘wrong’ type were used together, lexically, the code wouldn’t compile, and signal an error. In static typing, this can just be inferred from source code.

Dynamic typing is some-thing different, more powerful, and more dangerous, ‘dynamic’ in this context has the usual meaning of ‘only known when the code is run’, in dynamic tying, values carry a label, which is checked when operations are applied, if it doesn’t match, a runtime error or exception is raised. Dynamic typing was a novelty due to Lisp, a language in which source code itself was dynamic, a lexical analysis was insufficient to determine if types wouldn’t conflict, because the source code itself was no longer static. Other languages adopted this then-performance-costly idea because of the raw power it afforded, the downside is that programmers again had to manually verify their code and follow the logic of it to ensure that type errors would not occur. Which in statically typed languages can be proven by the compiler.

And proven is a very important word here, it can be proven by a compiler, but not decided, it’s theoretically impossible to decide if a type error is going to occur lexically. Where deciding means that all programs you reject will have type errors, and all you accept will not. Compilers only offer the guarantee that accepted programs will not have them. It’s quite possible that a rejected program will also not have it, but as long as the compiler can’t prove it, it will reject. This is a pretty awkward mentally. ‘I do not accept your program, for I cannot show it will work.’, rather than ‘I do not accept, for I can show that it will not work’, however, though the latter path is also possible, choosing it will necessarily leave open the option of type errors. A trivial example would be:

{int a, b; float c; a = true ? b : c;}

This will usually be rejected in statically typed languages, even-though a type error will never occur from this, of course, this example is quite useless but a more useful example would be:

function concact(x,y) {
if("array" == typoeof x && "array" == typeof y)
return (new Array).append(x,y);
else if ("string" == typoeof x && "string" == typeof y)
return x + y;
else if("number" == typoeof x && "number" == typeof y)
return x + y;
else return null;
}

Dynamically typed languages often offer facilities for runtime type-checking to choose a program flow, the same thing happened as above, a statically typed language would reject this example, even though for whatever input it may get, a type error cannot possibly occur within this function, a compiler has no way to prove this algorithmically from a lexical analysis. Lexically the function + which applies to two numbers is applied to the same variables in the same lexical environment whereon array_append which applies to two arrays is also applied. The compiler cannot prove no type error is going to occur. Many people who coded in ‘archaic’ static languages often felt the pain of having to re-write and overload functions that do the exact same thing that have to deal with both integers and floats, but templates and generics did offer a marginal solution.

The real rescue for this problem in statically typed languages is parametric polymorphism, where types are not constants, but variables. The function above is then ‘typed’ as simply ‘taking two identical types, producing a value of same type, or null’.

Static typing is not only a restriction on programmers to ‘protect them against themselves’, it’s also taking with it a lot of things that need no protecting. It’s banning cars because some of them are unsafe, and taking the safe one’s with it because you have no way to infer præcisely which are safe.

Other languages have evolved a different tactic, they aim to make their syntax ‘clear’, a well known and ridiculously failed example is a certain language where the now ubiquitously readable action of C++; would be similarly expressed as ADD 1 TO COBOL GIVING COBOL, as it turned out, use and conventions make readability, not natural language. Though the latter example is a lot clearer to people never having programmed. The sheer mass of exposure to the former form makes it immediately clear. A dynamically typed and less extreme example would be:

def factorial(n):
if x > 1:
return factorial(n - 1)
else:
return 1

Python, often using English words, some-what reads like English, define factorial in n: If x is greater than 1, return factorial of n minus 1, else return 1. It has shown that it helps some people to read the code aloud in their mind, one of the ancestors of Python has a wholly different vision:

(define (factorial n) (apply * (range 1 n)))

Or at least how I would write it, people often say that Lisp is ‘unreadable’ but I beg to differ, in my opinion Lisp code is exceptionally clear, consistent, there is no such thing as operator præcedence, not only is the delimiting of lexical blocks explicit, the limit of an expression is, the range of an operation is and so on, with syntax highlighting there is no confusion if the code you edit is still inside of the scope of your control structure and so on, the one thing is, it’s impossible to read it like English. Why does infix notation exist even though it’s inconsistent, is it more clearer due to conventions, or because x = y can be read as ‘x is y’ in English?

I know that to be able to read it as English or to be able to use layout indentation doesn’t work for me. I find myself counting invisible characters in Python and then summing them to determine block structure. I like the fact that in Scheme, what it does is clear from a simple rule that requires no thought at all, the value of evaluating a list is the evaluation of the head as an expression applied to the evaluation of the other forms. But I’ve found that most people like to see ‘a variable’ as being identical to the value, rather than evaluating to a value.

Another thing lately while discussing some features of Clojure is when I found that most Clojure programmers see ‘a list’ as ‘an ordered collection’ for all purposes not that different from a vector. Thinking about it that way just gives me shrivels when programming, ‘a list’ to me is a binary tree which on its outer right leave points to a special nil constant, or that constant itself. This is what I ’see’ conceptually when I work with lists, when I get their head or their tail. I also found out there an interesting differing view in that those that advocated against using cadddr in lieu of simply fourth found themselves translating ‘the fourth item of the list’ to ‘the head of the tail of the tail of the tail’ of the list. Where those that insisted on cadddr being clearer found themselves wanting ‘the car of the cdr of the cdr of the cdr of the pair’ and thinking ‘That would be uumm, the fourth of the list.’. The Zen of Python famously includes There should be only one obvious way to do it., I find that when people have such conceptions about ‘clear code’, they forget that different people have a differing view on ‘clear code’, many people’ll call APL, Forth or Lisp a mistake because the code is unreadable, users of either often passionately disagree and say a program is instantly readable and very clear. The fact that these languages have endured so long should point to this. But they do have in common that they can’t be read out loud in English. I’m a visual thinker, most people I know that defend Lisp are so likewise, maybe that explains some things. I never ‘read my code aloud’, I don’t think English is a very good language to express mathematical or sequential logic in. Notation like forall x forall y : ( forall z : ¬(z in y)) -> x + y = x is a lot clearer than ‘For all x for all y, if for all z, z is not in y, then x plus y æquals x’, but this is often shortened down to ‘x plus zero is always x, where we encode zero as the empty set.’ Still, that doesn’t define the idea ‘empty set’. I personally rather see code as what it is, a series of expressions evaluating to a value, that value then taken as the value of an outer expression to work with. Different people, different methodology. Which is also a reason I don’t think people should be restricted, different restrictions work differently for different people.

From my perspective though, seeing code as English is a bad idea and I can imagine that people make errors like if(x = y) where they mean if(x == y), once you see them both as binary in the same vein of + where the former simply evaluates to its second operant always and has the side effect of changing the value of the memory location the first points to that of the second. And the latter operation evaluates to true or false depending on the æquality of both. But some instead ‘choose’ to read if(x == y) a = b; as ‘if x is y, then a is b’, which is where the trouble begins is my hunch. It’s a very approximate and awkward simulation of assertive mathematics, programming language are not assertive and do not constrain their variables concordantly the truth of the termination value.

Of course, I said I was averse to protecting people ‘from themselves’, I have nothing against protecting people ‘from others’. I think it’s perfectly acceptable that an aviation company demands its software be written in a very type safe and very restrictive language. But ideally this should already be done by people who’ve learnt the hard way what a simple typo can cause and understand why the restrictions are there and what exactly they prævent. Many people nowadays start learning programming with C#, ideally people should be taught programming in a language without any type checking at all to firmly grasp the difference between float and integer operations.

Some people reading this Blog might find my grammatical capabilities dubious, those will probably give up. In fact, I was told from childhood on I should make my sentences shorter in essays, and I could divide native speakers over the fact if my grammar in a given language was correct or not. I’ve lately taken an appreciation to realize that these are ultimately related, take this extreme example of a sentence I once posted in a thread about anti-piracy vs. anti-copyright.

So please, Micra, cut the holier-than-thou self-righteous attitude of that some how it’s a de facto moral absolutism that downloading is bad and your surprise that people here with tonnes more of rational arguments than your morally stagnated dogmatic view on the matter try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Some people would say that that is grammatically very bad, and all of those would not be able to point out why it’s so bad. A thing I always had, they said it was bad grammar, but they either admitted they couldn’t say why, or say they didn’t feel like it. Point is that it’s very much grammatically correct, allow me to show it by cutting it down and down:

First we remove some adjectives:

[...] Cut the [...] attitude of that [...] it’s a [...] absolutism that downloading is bad and your surprise that people here with tonnes more of [...] arguments than your [...] view on the matter try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Then we remove some embedded clauses:

[...] Cut the [...] attitude of that [...] it’s a [...] moral absolutism that downloading is bad and your surprise that people here [...] try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Finally the bare skeleton of the sentence:

[...] Cut the [...] attitude of that [...] it’s a [...] moral absolutism that downloading is bad. [A]nd [cut] your surprise that people here [...] try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Now, this is very obviously grammatically correct, and inserting extra adjectives and adpositional clauses surely shall not change this. So, what was wrong with it? It was just a very long sentence inside a very long sentence, maybe that’s hard to read, I can imagine that a lot of people would find a sentence to be grammatically incorrect even though they can’t point out why, simply because they can’t read it. One could call it a mark of supreme bad style in literature to write such sentences.

I can’t say I care, I don’t think about how I’ll word things or ‘prose’ when I debate, I write down what I have to say. Of course this is all defeating to the goal to convince an opponent if he-or-she can’t even read what I’ve to say.

I also don’t believe in ‘good style’, most rules of style were invented at whim by some person at some time any-way, like split-infinitives, that’s just nonsense. But I’ve also come to appreciate this very simple fact reasoning; I write those sentences without thinking or trying, most people find them hard to read, I don’t find them hard to read at all, so does this say a lot about my capability with grammar, or theirs? I’m not stupid in learning languages or seeing patterns, far from it, so, the often told rule of ‘making shorter sentences’, couldn’t it all just be a warped way to say ‘Keep account to the grammatical deficiencies of your audience?’, people that often make long sentences and are perceived as ‘chaotic’ by their audiences have a popular reputation to be quite intelligent nonetheless, what if people just perceive it as chaotic due to their own inability to perceive the more complicated patterns? I’ve made compelling the notion that my sentence was correct, even though a lot of natives would at first sight say that it obviously was not.

I’d find it a not-too unreasonable notion that children who’re told by their teachers to curb the length of their sentences are in fact being told implicitly ‘You’re smarter than I, therefore I find your sentences hard to read.’

But then again, who with half a mind’d deny the universal præsence of dubiousness in linguistic præscriptivism?

In rough lines, the plot of The Terminator (1984):

1. Android gets sent back in time to kill a woman
2. Man gets sent after him to protect her
3. Lots of explosions that barely damage the robot
4. At the final end the android is caught in a huge explosion and and is finally visually severely maimed but continues its pursuit regardless
5. Man sacrifices himself to slay the android
6. Woman helps a little
7. Robot dies

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991):

1. Liquid gets sent back in time to kill a boy
2. Android gets sent after him to protect him
3. Lots of explosions that barely damage the liquid
4. At the final end, by random chance the liquid falls into molten steal and is slain
5. Android sacrifices himself to save the future

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003):

1. Gynoid gets sent back in time to kill a teenager
2. Android gets sent after him to protect him
3. Lots of explosions that barely damage the gynoid
4. At the end, by some huge explosion the gynoid is finally visually severely maimed but continues its pursuit regardless
5. Android sacrifices himself to slay the gynoid

Terminator Salvation (2009):

1. In the præsent, death row convict signs over his body to medical purposes
2. Shit goes wrong
3. In a post apocalyptic world, a human resistence forms against an oppressive AI bent on destroying / enslaving mankind
4. Lots of explosions
5. The death row inmate emerges from the wreckage of one of such
6. Finds its way to the resistance
7. EPIC PLOT TWIST, turns out to be an android similar to the one in the first film
8. Denies this, but is finally shocked to see for himself that he’s been rebuilt.
9. They, being racist fags, try to kill him, he escapes
10. Finally wins their confidence by saving them
11. Gets a job to infiltrate the AI with his cybernetics
12. In there, realizes that the AI manipulated him the whole time, playing on his subconscious mind and using him as a spy apparatus
13. Breaks free of the AI’s control (literally) and goes of to save the person he trapped
14. Saves him from an android of the type of the first film, though he’s wounded
15. Sacrifices himself at the end to save that man, who just happens to be the leader of the resistance, the boy from the second and third film and the son of woman and the man of the first.

Mainstream criticism on all films has been overwhelmingly positive, except the last one, let’s cite some examples:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times:

After scrutinizing the film, I offer you my summary of the story: Guy dies, finds himself resurrected, meets others, fights. That lasts for almost two hours.

There is nothing visible in this world but a barren wasteland. No towns, no houses, no food, no farms, no nothing. Maybe they live on Spam. The resistance is run from a submarine commanded by Gen. Ashdown (Michael Ironside), who wants to destroy Skynet and all of its human POWs. Connor, who is not even human, vows to save them. Wait. That’s Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), the guy from the past, who looks so much like Connor that maybe he only thinks he’s Wright. Marcus is a convicted murderer from the past, awakened from cryogenic sleep.

The first “Terminator” movie I regret (I suppose) I did not see. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) was a fairly terrific movie, set in the (then) future, to prevent the nuclear holocaust of 1997. You remember that. It was about something. In it, Edward Furlong was infinitely more human as John Connor than Christian Bale is in this film.

Claudia Puig of USA Today:

Bale is surprisingly one-dimensional as John Connor, the leader of the human Resistance movement whose destiny is linked to the future of mankind in this doomsday action franchise. He seems to be simply recycling his gravelly Dark Knight growl.

Director McG (both Charlie’s Angels movies) is all about visuals and creating an ominous sense of disorientation, but he’s not as deft with storytelling or eliciting performances. Few characters ever say more than a couple of sentences at a time, and when they do, it’s often to assert the obvious. The predictable story feels as if it were written by a computer program labeled “sequel.”

I haven’t seen one of these films in full, just parts, action is not my style, I know most have, and you can probably look up the plot to confirm that the plots are really like that. Maybe Terminator Salvation does suck, I can imagine that it does, from what I saw from the other films, they all suck. However I don’t think these reviewers are truly honest with themselves and their audience, and I see this happening all the time. They’re trying to find a reason to hate it, they just hate it, for whatever reason, maybe subconscious, maybe they had a bad day when they watched it, maybe they just don’t like Christian Bale and it ruins the whole film for them, maybe it’s the power of suggestion in advance. But they just don’t like it and try to find some way to back this up and write it about it.

Criticizing a Terminator film on one-dimensional acting? What? In the first three films Schwarzenegger played the same character over and over again, he’s playing a robot for fucks sake, it’s one dimensional as can be and you can pardon him there for being a crap actor, especially at the end of Rise of the Machines it becomes so obvious that when he can’t use sunglasses to conceal his facial expression and actually has to make one it looks like a child attempt’s at acting.

And seriously, attacking it on not having enough plot? The First three films, all had the same basic plot. And in all three both time travellers die with the good guy sacrificing himself and in all cases the aggressor seems unstoppable and at the end always dies with some stupid dumb fuck luck deus ex machina, that’s right, it’s a bloody deus ex machina, it’s well hidden but crap, a helicopter out of no-where crashing on your enemy, your enemy randomly falling in molten steel? Seriously, that could have happened at any point in the film, there’s no progression whatsoever in any of those films, except maybe the end of them that usually reveals some strange often paradoxal plot-twist.

I’m not defending Salvation here, I’m criticizing these reviewers for not being honest with themselves and their audience, what-ever reasons they had for not liking it, it’s not mentioned in the reviews. It’s like school days all over again, you hate a classmate really for absurd reasons like his voice and then try to find a more tangible justification for yourself like that he’s an arse or that he’s arrogant while a lot of your friends are just as arrogant.

Which is in the end while film reviews or of art in general which have an opinion of the quality thereof are ultimately ridiculous as much as prætentious, one cannot give a true reason for hating these because it works more on the subconscious level than on ‘hard’ things like plot or acting or scenery. People just hate these things for some subconscious reason and then try to find arguments. Of course, giving a description of the film without a value judgement is a lot more possible. But in the end people want a hierarchy, they want to be able to say that some things are ‘better’ than others, and they want it to be a total order, they want to be able to place every film in it, and they want to præserve the idea that if film x is better than y, and y is better than z than x is also better than z. Even though clearly you can’t do this in art, people still make up ways around it like collecting reviews from mainstream critics and normalizing them. You really can’t go further then ‘I like it’, or ‘I don’t', as soon as you give a reason you’re lying to yourself and your audience.

Robert Spitzer, M.D. claimed in a 1975 criticism of Rosenhan’s study which sparked controversy regarding the professionalism of psychiatry:

If I were to drink a quart of blood and, concealing what I had done, come to the emergency room of any hospital vomiting blood, the behaviour of the staff would be quite predictable. If they labelled and treated me as having a peptic ulcer, I doubt I could argue convincingly that medical science does not know how to diagnose that condition.

Which is obscenely true. Just as it’s true that if you were to come there and complained about a stomach pain, got an interview and they labelled and treated you as having a peptic ulcer that would be irresponsible, and probably do more harm than good. Would medicine be effective if practised in that way? of course not, that’s why they do more than talk with you, they run tests on you via objective apparatus and instruments.

Psychiatry is tantamount to giving people radiation therapy for breast cancer because they claim they feel pain in their chest without putting an X-ray through them first. I’m not saying there’s a better way, I’m just saying that since most mental conditions are not fatal, moving like this is completely irresponsible and does more harm than good.

Kay, let’s say a random person murders a kitten or mistreats a child or beats up what-ever, naturally we—or most people—would beat that person up if we had the chance, or at least severely punch him in the face to make sure he does not carry out his intentions or threat to empty a can of liquid on the poor cat and drop an object warmer than said liquid’s ignition temperature on the cute critter.

Now, some would call this altruïsm or a desire to protect the cat or what-ever victim at stake here, can’t say I’m absolutely sure of that. I don’t mean the clichéd story of feeling better for yourself. I mean another facet to it, because people are simply too selfish to care that much about cats or even children or even their best friends.hat’s in any such of this cases always strangely præsent is that the people that are out to protect these people put a lot more focus on the aggressor than they do on the victim.

In fact—people seem to completely stop caring if there’s only a victim, but not a tangible aggressor, and seem to care a lot if there’s an aggressor, but not tangible victim, the so called ‘victimless crimes’ that exist in various jurisdictions that some (a few) people find stupid and should be repelled.

In the case that a certain person has some suffering going on but there’s no tangible aggressor, as in, it happened by pure accident or it was even due to downright bad luck, people tend to have a lot less of an emotional response. For instance, take these two examples.

• A woman by sheer accident without any one really being at fault has nude pictures of herself thrown on the internet.
• That very same woman is photographed in the shower and uploaded to the internet.

Now, in both cases the victim is humiliated, ashamed, a victim, but in the latter case, there is an aggressor, some-one whom we can blame for this thing. The latter always provokes fierce responses from most parties getting notice of it, often a desire for retribution, the first will merely provoke either a small dose of sympathy, fake sympathy, or simply laughing at that woman.

When I was quite young, seven years old I think, I saw a couple of people capturing frogs and bullying them. So knight in the shining armour that I was, I raced to there, liberated the frogs, and got beat up for that by the guys. A mate that was there with me wanted to follow them to beat them up, I was more like ‘You might call an ambulance first?’, he didn’t even think of that, he didn’t care for my suffering, he cared for making the person that caused it pay, not to help me who was lying pretty battered there.

However, looking back in retrospect, I also have to conclude another thing of myself: I would not have stopped to rescue those frogs if they got trapped on their own, and as hell not risked several injuries for that. Only the fact that there were some aggressors into play galvanized my desire to free those frogs, I wasn’t trying to help the frogs, I was trying to at some way compromise the action of the aggressors if I look deep down inside, and I think that almost all people would do the same.

Same with animal rights activist group, all their actions have one thing in common, the suffering is always due to human influence, due to some-one they can place blame on. They (read: we, I pay for that too and chain myself to fences) are not out to help animals they are out to compromise the efforts of people that are trying to hurt them, a completely different thing. Yet we (they) tell ourselves that we want to help animals, in reality we just want to make people pay we don’t like, don’t like for for instance doing cruel shit to animals. It’s also the same in every trial, in every news report about it, the news isn’t  about that some person has greatly suffered, the news is about that some person has caused great suffer to another.

Almost never is there a report about suffer in the news if it’s not done by some crime or some goof-up of some-one. The only exception I can think of to this rule are reports about mass natural disasters, and it makes you think why we all still remember 9/11, but have forgotten about natural disasters that caused so much more destruction hmm? There’s never news about some old grandmother sitting at home feeling like shit, but if she got into that position by some human error like the wrong drug præscribed oh as hell it would have come into the papers. We don’t care about suffering, we care about the people that cause it.

Then of course comes the even more interesting situation of an aggressor, but no victim. How can there be an aggressor but no victim? Let’s say you have this stereotypical really sweet girl that likes to help people, she cleans up for her boyfriend, makes him sandwiches, the whole she-bang, well, she doesn’t mind to that, it probably gives her a nice feeling, maybe she likes to cook, who knows? But still a lot of people will target their criticism at the boyfriend for ‘taking advantage of her’, regardless of her not minding. I’m not saying that he should take advantage of her, or that people shouldn’t target complaints, I’m just saying that they don’t target it to help the girl, the so-called victim, but to punish the guy, the so-called aggressor. It’s not about some-one getting hurt, it’s about some-one doing a thing people don’t like. They will most likely try to make the girl realize that she shouldn’t do that and should mind, now assuming they succeed in doing that, from an utilitarian perspective they’ve greatly failed then; the girl has lost one fun activity to do, and the guy get’s less sandwiches, no one-wins, every-body loses.

Some time back, I had a conversation with a district attorney about the idea of the legal system, not so much a debate, she felt of course that people that commit crimes should be put into jail, let’s not get too nihilistic and hold that axiom as dogma for sake of argument. I was more openly quæstioning the issue of how many innocent people are put into jail as a sacrifice for that ideal. After all—all there is to this is a lower bound of how many innocent faced legal discipline, ignoring for the time being the possibility that—of course—a guilty man can also later be ruled innocent.

Now, I personally believe one can ask and force people to compromise to help others, I think one can kill one man to save to others. And until some one has given me a tangible definition of the difference between ‘compromising another man for one’s own benefit’ and ‘refusing to put effort into helping another man’ I shall assume them to be merely politically differently coloured terms for the same concept. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter of you like. Both come down to you gaining advantage and willingly letting another man losing some-thing for that goal.

So, I agree that—assuming the legal system helps to stop crimes—to a certain degree it’s reasonable to force innocent people to be compromised to help more innocent people. In fact, I of course don’t believe in the moral nature of legal systems and see it purely as asking a certain group, here criminals, to give up their gains for another larger group, here productive citizens. Seeing how the definition and popular opinion about what constitutes a ‘criminal’ changes dramatically over time, I have no reason at the moment to believe it’s any more than simply a system people have evolved to justify their system and actions and not having to face the fact that they as a majority sacrifice a minority for themselves by mentally labelling them ‘criminals’ and believe that some how they ’should’ be punished.

Her reasonable response in some-what similar colours to my open thoughts were. ‘Yes, but it’s a price we pay for it.’, the ‘we’, here is an interesting one. Who exactly pays for it? not I, I’m not innocently in jail, I assume her to not be either while we talked on Jabber. So it’s a price  ’we’ ask other people to pay for us as I illustrated above. But it’s not as unfair as it sounds, as it’s still a democratic system and people have by majority vote chosen for it under the understanding that by sheer bad luck they too could be incarcerated innocently and have accepted that risk for the benefit of their secured safety. Though—it only takes 51% of the adult population that does not yet reside in jail—innocent or not—to decide this for the entire population. So theoretically, the minority can decide this for the majority, though that doesn’t seem to be the case and legal systems are overwhelmingly supported.

But there’s a catch to it, the population seems to support legal systems under misinformation, people make this choice effectively on the knowledge of only the lower bound I spoke of before, not many people seem to be actively conscious of the fact that it could, and most likely is, a lot higher than all the cases that were discovered of people being put to justice for a crime they didn’t commit. More so, the legal system itself seems to spread propaganda about lady justice being blind and judges being impartial, supposedly that people are innocent until proven guilty and other romanticized ideas about the functioning of the legal system that are blatantly not true. Judges as human are they are are far from impartial, one may be innocent until proven guilty on paper but de facto one has to face interrogations, one is ‘held for quæstioning’, one has already been compromised in one’s freedoms and desires before being formally convicted and most legal systems offer no compromise if a conviction is not obtained. Furthermore, of course a lot of judges have already made up their mind in advance. Maybe people know this on the street, but do they realize it? Are they really as conscious of this as of the fact that they have five fingers? Or do they just know this as a given to answer on tests but make their choices of life as if that fact isn’t there?

I don’t think people realize it at all, and many don’t even know it, people indeed seem to live their lives as if it’s true, the romanticized version of the legal system of impartial and blind judges that can separate fact from lies and speculation—it isn’t. Judges are essentially often amateurs about the things they have to rule over, often they have their experts with them but just as often they overrule their advice. The fact that in all cases, taking it to a higher court changes the decision of the judge, at least in magnitude and quite a lot of times changes the guilty to the innocent and the inverse seems to give it quite clear. Lady justice is not blind at all, she has very acute vision. If ‘justice’ takes into account that also the magnitude of the penalty is that which one ‘deserves’, then I don’t think a single man has ever been put to ‘justice’. Yet the populace that supports this system overwhelmingly seems to live in the feeling that it does function as an apparatus of justice rather than order. And perhaps not as orderly as many people also think. The fact remains that despite the legal system being there, crimes still happen. An interesting fact is also that on a world map, countries which have a very strict legal system tend to have a higher crime rate. Of course, either could cause the other and it’s well-conceivable that the populace demands higher punishments if crime rate increases, though it would seem intuïtive that as a larger percentage of the populace is composed of criminals, they would seek for less. An often cited example of course is that the Netherlands has very low cannabis consumption rates, despite the fact that it’s infamously legal in this country.

Another thing to account for is that even if people realized the true figures of the innocent being compromised in the name of the greater good, and even if they were quite high, people still maintain the ‘it’s not going to happen to me’, attitude. People tend to have this feeling that if they know, or even realize that bad thing x has a certain chance of occurring to random people. They still have the feeling it’s going to occur sooner to their neighbour than to the, and even sooner to a random person they never heard of. Humans are indeed inærently optimistic, and probably this weighs in their decision to maintain a legal system.

So, seeing that the people have been misled, and have misled themselves to make their decision to have a legal system? What would happen if there weren’t one? How moral is a random human being? What if there were just rules to keep, but one wouldn’t receive punishment for breaking them? Do humans beings not steal because they feel it to be ‘wrong’, or do they not because they don’t want to go to jail?

A thing to take into account is that ‘You will not beat a man to death because he stole a thing from you but call the police instead’ is another rule and law in this society. So, if one abolishes the state’s role in punishing people, the people will jump into that vacuum and take it on their own to punish criminals. Now some people might see this as an advantage and many people indeed have more often called for people being allowed to enforce the law on their own and have looked with dismay to people being punished more severely than a person that robbed their shop, because they beat that person practically to death for it.

And those rules are another example of order, say that a person has raped my daughter and I proceed to kill that person in rage. Many people would feel that I should not be put into prison and I can imagine it, the catch is here, ‘say that a person has raped my daughter.’. What I have done there is administered a death penalty for a crime as judge, jury, executioner, prosecutor, and legislative power against a man that ‘had a fool for a client’. I find it quite plausible that—certainly in my emotional rage—I got the wrong man. Maybe my daughter wasn’t even raped but just put up a story for some candy. So, imagine if we remove those rules? Then a lot of innocent people are going to get killed, and if we say you get acquitted afterwards only if you turned out right; still a lot of innocent people are going to get killed because people often think they are right when they are not in a fit of rage, and they have to go to jail themselves too afterwards. So this rule that you can’t take justice into your own hand serves as a rule of order.

Back to the example of the shop, we have a man caught in the act there, maybe a bit more trustworthy than a daughter coming to you crying that she’s been raped by a teacher and you jumping to your gun in rage. Say you can use more force than necessary to defend yourself on people you caught in the act, you of course have to prove afterwards that that person was really robbing your shop, that’s a lot harder to do of a dead man lying on the floor. So say you fail to prove that, and they did prove that you shoot him. You go to jail yourself, alternatively you can say that they have to prove that that person didn’t rob your shop. Well, then you’ve created a really handy way for killers to escape conviction as they can always claim those things, making it very hard for you to prove they lied. So then you end up with a system that lets the guilty go. The rule again serves for order, to let the legal system operate practically and efficiently.

Ultimately, the perception a lot of people have that these things should be allowed again seem to work on a romanticized idea of the legal system and the human ability to spot criminals you see in CSI and Law and Order. Take the film ‘Dirty Harry‘, it of course triggered a mass response from the people that police offers should have more freedom. But what happened in that film is fiction, and not reality. Understandably, many people find it strange that evidence that is illegally obtained cannot be used, after all, evidence is evidence no matter how it was obtained? Well, if you allow it and just discipline the officer that did so, they have a motivation to obtain that evidence, there being very good reasons that some of those methods are illegal. Say your hunches are wrong? you never see that in fiction do you? An officer trying to obtain evidence illegally but simply being wrong and having violated the privacy of an innocent man, or worse, tortured him. There’s a reason you can only go so far to obtain evidence. It doesn’t seem to happen in films like Dirty Harry, but police officers that are overly emotional about their cause and try to bring criminals to justice because they hate them tend to not think that clear and if they are set to get an innocent man into jail they better not have the luxury of obtaining their evidence in all the ways they like. Unusual in that this rule is there to protect the innocent at the expense of letting some guilty people walk away.

The thing I ask myself in this is what the optimum is, for me, clearly punishments should be lighter, not heavier, I see no single plausible reason why crime should increase if punishments are lighter, and they are and should be seen as a lesser evil and a vessel of order and not justice. Prævention should also have more emphasis over punishment, you don’t take innocents with that and better stop a crime than punishing some-one to prævent it a later time.

Ultimately, a tool I see to stop crime is to combat poverty, why resort to breaking the law if you have a comfortable life? It doesn’t apply to all people, I know and realize though. Another thing is to simply migrate the effect of crimes on the victim. How often have you been the patient of a crime you could ask yourself? Killed surely not, maybe a friend was killed? Not in my case or in most cases at least. Most people I knew that died died due to conditions, old age or bad driving, either of themselves or others. Not many people are truly that taken by crime, it might even be less than are innocently put away. A better solution for me would to provide for better funding and accommodations in cases of theft. As in the case of driving, many people that support higher punishments seem to also favour higher maximum driving speeds, while traffic is still a far higher cause of death than murder. It seems indeed that people are not that much interested in stopping death rates after all with their legal systems but simply getting people behind bars or punished in some way that conduct behaviour they do not approve of. No one hates a speeder, unless perhaps he crashed into your mother and killed her. But a thief or murderer, that’s another story.