Gioia De Cari in "Truth Values"

Gioia is a self described “recovering mathematician” who has a great gift for writing, acting, and singing. (Oh, did I happen to mention she is a soprano?) Her play was unexpectedly funny and enjoyable. When I first received an email about it, I expected a litany of complaints about how hard it is for a woman to make it in math and science (largely male-dominated fields). But it wasn’t and yet it was, at the same time. It is said, “there is no story so good that it can’t be spoiled in the telling”. With Gioia, she had a fantastic story and told in the best manner possible, as a monologue/mono-act by the author/actress herself. It was funny, and it was sad, and best of all, no matter who you are, you couldn’t help but empathize with her. It offered a scathing and insightful look at an academic (sub)culture that was born out of the incidental male-dominance in mathematics (and sciences) and continues to serve as a deterrent for women to succeed in these fields. But Gioia wasn’t complaining, she was just holding up a mirror; and to ensure that the walls of prejudice do not block the message, she gift wrapped it with some irrepressible humor which was a treat to watch.

Incidentally, Gioia wrote the play as a response to former Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ (yes, the same Larry Summers who Obama said “did a heckuva job” on the Daily Show) statement that women are less represented than men in the sciences because there is a ”greater variance in intelligence among men than women, and that this difference in variance might be intrinsic.” [source] Not surprisingly, that controversy contributed to his resignation the following year.

The performance schedule for Truth Values is available here. If you get a chance to attend it, then do not miss out! I promise you that you will not be disappointed.

I close this post with a video by Gioia discussing her play:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwt7KZHfKKc

A quick intro to IMAP. As described by Tom Spring from PC World:

IMAP is geek speak for Internet Message Access Protocol. ….
… with IMAP any changes (sorting, deleting, reading, or otherwise) are reflected across all Gmail interfaces – be it using Outlook Express, your iPhone, or Web-based Gmail. For example if you create a folder and sort messages into it using your desktop Outlook Express client those changes show up on Web-based Gmail.

IMAP is a boon for people like me, who check their emails from multiple locations. So I decided to give IMAP support on Gmail a spin, and here’s what I came up with:

For starts Gmail has done a remarkable job of supporting IMAP. I can understand the technical difficulty in being able to support IMAP on Gmail. Think about it: Gmail moved away from conventional folder based email organization to offer what is essentially a tag-based (label-based) organization of email (although their tagging interface is too cumbersome in my opinion). Given that IMAP is a folder-based email access protocol, reconciling the two is not an easy task. But Google has done a good job of it this time around.

For starts, after you enable IMAP, and configure your mail client there are changes that you will notice in the web-based Gmail interface.

• All the folders that you create using your email client will now appear as labels in your web interface.
• Certain labels like Trash, or Chats are reserved by gmail. If you try to create a folder by that name, then the folder will appear as ‘[imap]/foldername’
• If you have any label of form ‘text1/text2′, they will now appear as folder ‘text2′ being a subfolder of folder ‘text1′. So If you have any labels of the form ‘family/friend’, or ‘work/spam’, consider renaming them without a ‘/’ before enabling IMAP.

So how did tag-based Gmail reconcile with folder-based IMAP?

• Each label appears as a separate folder in IMAP.
• To apply multiple labels, just copy the email to multiple folders.
• Moving an email from one folder to another will change the label on the email from the first label to the other.
• If you move an email to a sub-folder ‘sub’ within a main folder ‘main’, on the web interface, it will show up as being labeled ‘main/sub’.
• If you configure you mail client to sent email using gmail’s smtp server, then every copy of the email is stoed in the ‘[Gmail]/Sent Mail’ folder.

Here are the set of IMAP actions and their corresponding web based Gmail actions.

Spam, however, is handled differently. To mark a message as spam, just move it to the ‘[gmail]/spam’ folder in the IMAP interface. Simply marking the email as ‘spam’ on your mail client (like Thunderbird) will trigger the email client’s spam filters, but not Gmail’s.

Drawbacks

• One The only major drawback is that the IMAP’s default trash folder is different from Gmail’s Trash folder. There’s no easy way to fix it. The only fix that I found to work for Thunderbird is here on Tech Samurai. It not the most straight forward config change to make Thunderbird to GMail’s Trash folder.
• The bigger issue with the simulation of folder-based structure on top of tag-based structure is the following:
  If an email has multiple tags (labels) associated with it, then the email shows up in multiple folders on the IMAP client. ‘Deleting’ such an email involves deleting (or moving to [Gmail]/Trash) all the virtual copies of the email from all the folders where they reside. This can be a arduous task, especially if do not know all the labels that were applied to the message to begin with (and you dont, if you are using the IMAP interface exclusively.

Overall, a really clean and neat implementation on Google’s part. Good job Google!

(Having said that, I still recommend people seeing this movie. The attempt and effort is legitimate. So are a lot of fears expressed in it.)

Virgin Birth

My opinion of the movie received its first dent when, in Part I, it says that Krishna (a Hindu god) was born of a virgin. I may not know about Greek, Roman, or Egyptian mythology, but I do know Hindu mythology and I know for a fact that Krishna is not believed to be of virgin birth. This gives me good reason to suspect the claims about the stories of Horus, or Dionysus, or any other mythical character that the movie talks about.

Authority of Sources

Going back to the source of this ‘information’ in the sources page, I found that the Krishan’s Virgin Birth assertion was obtained from books by M.D. Murdock (a.k.a Acharya S.). Acharya is a major proponent of the Jesus myth hypothesis, but her works cite other works that are of suspect authority, and provides extremely once sides citations. In fact, most of the sources and books cited in the movie website are all in the style of conspiracy theories, and have suspect authority at best. By the principle of inheritance of authority, Zeitgeist is of questionable authority as well.

What is plausible may not be true

Zeitgeist shows what could be a plausible explanation for Christianity, 9/11, and the federal reserve system, but they need not be true. To assert the truth of any statement, one needs to (a) show that the statement cannot be falsified, and (b) all other statements that oppose this statement can be falsified. Zeitgeist fails on both counts, and hence cannot assume credibility to the statements it makes.

Obfuscation Through Over-Simplification

Specifically in Part III, the description of money generation by the Federal Reserve Bank is over-simplified to a point where its practically untrue. The pathological sequence of events that could lead to a financial catastrophe is true, but the described mechanism of the Federal Reserve Bank fueling massive debts on America is not. A good place to get an idea of how money is generated is the Money Creation article on wikipedia.

Also, as far as massive debts due to interests on loans that serve to feed more loans and so on, go.. well… that’s pretty much how any economy runs. The money has to come from somewhere, and this ‘generation’ of money has to be controlled (to avoid ‘over heating’ the economy and spiraling the inflation), the best means of doing so is to attach a penalty to generating money, and that’s what the Federal Reserve accomplishes by charging interest on the money thats generated.

So that’s my 2 cents worth second thoughts on Zeitgeist. However, I still encourage people to see this movie. At the very least, to see what alternate explanations can be provided for a same facts presented to you. All too often you have access only to the media’s interpretation events and facts. This is great way to see the counterculture argument and interpretations.