Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I suppose "π" is too much to hope for, but what's wrong with "Stand and Deliver"?

in a decent school, you'd be fired for that.

I got ridiculed over at Kevin Drum's site for mentioning this, but I guess I'll say it again. The point was not to give a realistic portrayal of computer viruses. (Was the plot otherwise realistic?)
It was "un hommage" to War of the Worlds, where the invaders were defeated by the common cold.

I like the idea, though I agree it doesn't belong in a math class.

Totally unrealistic. Like, alien computer systems are really going to be configured to mate with Apple product. Who uses them anymore?

Yeah. I got rid of my last alien-designed laptop four years ago...

I grew up about 10 blocks from New York’s Museum of Natural History/Hayden Planetarium, and I went to both regularly. A visit to the planetarium started with a short pre-recorded astronomy lecture on the first floor. Then you went upstairs to the big dome passing the famous luminous sign, which read: “To Solar System and Rest Rooms.” The big dome housed the magnificent Zeiss projector, and seating for about 150 people. After about a ten-minute interlude of classical music, the main astronomy lecture started. It was always given live by a professional astronomer who was also bit of a showman. The lecture (aided by the projector) was a solid, accurate, astronomy lesson based on some specific topic. The bookstore in the lobby sold college level astronomy books as well as introductory material for young students. Having fond memories of the place, I brought my young daughter there circa 1987. Everything changed. While big dome still had a Zeiss projector, the astronomer was gone, replaced by a pre-recorded lecture that had virtually no content, and did not make use of the projector. That smaller lecture room on the first floor no longer had the beautiful mosaic floor. The planets on overhead tracks were gone too. Instead there was a “Star Trek” exhibit! Sickening. Gone were the meteorites (banished to an obscure corner in the geology section of the Natural History Museum) and the early rocketry exhibits. The entire Hayden Planetarium experience had been dumbed down to another variety of mass entertainment. About 12 years later, I returned with my daughter to visit the new “Rose Center” which replaced the Hayden Planetarium. Even more horrible. So I’m not surprised “Independence Day” is presented as a lesson in computer science. It wasn't always like that. Not in New York anyway.

Oh YEAH?! Well MY biology teacher showed Osmosis Jones in an AP biology class! It's a half-animated movie in which an anthropomorphic white blood cell voiced by Will Smith and a cold pill attempt to stop an evil virus from killing a fat slob whom they inhabit!

And, I did well in that class on the AP too.

I've never posted a comment on a blog before, but since you have "stooped" to education I will say that as a parent of college age kids, and a graduate of private schools and so-called elite colleges I have been appalled by the depths to which education has stooped. Independence Day in a science class does not surprise me.....Our kids' school started a"unit" on marine mammals by watching Free Willie -- and writing some sort of free associative 'reflection" on it. But of cxourse there was always the option to "just" draw a picture if you didn't think you could express yourself adequately in words.....and we, as parents, paid for this! Have we heard of dumb and dumbr?

Hah! What you don't realize is that all our computer technology was copied from the crashed alien ship. About the only bit that humans had developed was viruses (and virus protection software). The aliens had eliminated all their anti-social types so never developed viruses or defences against them.

Yes it was unrealistic. The invading aliens appeared to have far more advanced technology than earth, which must have been the case, since they were the ones to knock on our doors first. Under those circumstances, there was no way an earthling virus could knock out their computers.

Remember that it was the invading whites who killed Algonkin with virus infested blankets, not the other way around.

"...The aliens had eliminated all their anti-social types so never developed viruses or defences against them...."

That's an interesting observation; but not adequate. Aliens were probably masters of cyber-warfare and must have already detected every single piece of cyber-warfare the earthling could possibly wield, including computer virusus.

There was a rather good hoax inspired by Independence Day at the time:

http://www.authentium.com/threats/hoaxdetails.cfm?ID=25

Apart from anything else Independence Day was one of the most dreadful movies ever made, a Plan 9 from Outer Space with better production values. If bad taste were a firing offence...

To train a mathematician, students should spend time working problems and proving theorems. To train marketing specialists, students should observe techniques used to persuade others and present visually compelling images. There are more jobs for marketers than mathematicians and the marketing jobs generally pay better.

The thing I liked about Independence Day was the aliens use of our satellite communications network to coordinate their attack. Suppose they had shown up in 1850. Totally stymied. "Can't attack this place; no satellite network. We'll have to come back later."

If one must show an irrelevant movie at least make it a good one.

If my recollection is accurate, about the director of this movie being described as one not appreciated in Germany but having found his place in America, then I must say that German movie making communities have pretty good sense about things. (Except that I never understood why all German actors and actresses look like they have been recruited on the basis of extremely strict physical standards. I mean they all look like each other as if they were all relatives. I mean if I look at an undentified movie clip at random without the sound for a few seconds I can probably tell if it is German movie or not.)

1. All known computing systems are Turing-equivalent. Aside from a few fanciful proposals for quantum computing (and including most of those) every computing system anyone has ever thought of is exactly equivalent to the 1940's idea of computing. It is unlikely that there is any viable alternative paradigm anywhere in the universe.

2. The most widely used software in the known world is full of thousands of holes and vulnerabilities any good virus writer could easily exploit. More are found all the time in spite of the secret and closed-source nature of the software. And some of Microsoft's competitors aren't much better.

3. Military systems use Microsoft Software. Military systems use other buggy software. Milnet has often been considered easy to hack (dangerous, too). Military projects often use or create open standards. The Internet started as a military project.

4. As technology gets fancier, more and more systems are run by and dependent on automated computer software. There is no end to this trend in sight.

5. All modern computer networking protocols depend on the idea of sending a binary signal over a single data line. Almost all Macintosh laptops can emulate with $20 of hardware any conceivable wire-based networking protocol. Wireless protocols can be harder, but not infinitely harder.

6. The scientists in ID4 had alien technology available to reverse engineer for forty years.

Thus, the defeat of the aliens with a computer virus was one of the most realistic things in the movie.

And furthermore, please don't assume that something is impossible with computers unless you know what you are talking about.

"Can't attack this place; no satellite network. We'll have to come back later."

Maybe they have a backup satellite network that they deploy when they need to. If the planet's already hooked up, they can save some effort.

The part I find implausible is the premise: "They're like locusts. They travel from planet to planet, their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on."

If you want natural resources, why invade an inhabited planet? Surely they can get all the minerals they need elsewhere. And you'd hope they'd have machines to process it into anything they want.

I you are going to write plausible stories about one alien species attacking another, you had better come up with a better reason than resource scarcity. Preempting a threat is actually more plausible ("Sure Terrans seem cute now with their 's-c-a-w-y H-bombs' but wait till they figure out nanoassemblers; do you really want nano-kiddies sending a cloud of von Neumann machines into our curvature detectors?") If you want a battle over resources, it had better be something scarce (e.g. access to a transdimensional gateway thingy). Otherwise, the aliens literally have to be very stupid and instinct driven to fight over resources that ought to be almost limitless with sufficiently advanced technology.

BTW, I could sort of see showing Independence Day in school if you could have a critical discussion afterwards. Not really suitable for math class though.

"...6. The scientists in ID4 had alien technology available to reverse engineer for forty years...."

And the alien technology stood where it was for forty years?

Is Microsoft going to be around in forty years?

"..) every computing system anyone has ever thought of is exactly equivalent to the 1940's idea of computing. ..."

Does that go for the so called "quantum computer" as well?

My high school history teacher showed Apocalypse Now.

My Latin teacher showed Monty Python! The Life of Brian.

Totally discouraging. That teacher should be fired. And I relate to the post about the dumbing down of the Haydn Planetarium. The Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles was "updated" a few years ago and what was once a truly cool and educational place was turned into loud and dumb. If everything is designed for the lowest common denominator, that's all we are going to wind up with.

A more interesting movie would be "the attack of the scatterpoints": These are aliens whose material world consists of wave functions on a finite set of enormous cardinality; these aliens invade the earth, not by actually blowing anything up, but by teleporting material objects such as individuals and DeLongs tea sachets into their universe.

The Neocons of the time are all upset and preparing absurd measures with Kissinger telling the Prez: Mr President you've got to show them whose zee boss"

Until some wise (non-american non-male) scientist, realizes in fact, that the scatterpoints are a running program on some quantum computer!

Now, I'll tell my (chinese) wife about this plot. It would make a great thriller starring Gong Li, as the brilliant scientist who figures all this out.

I like to think that, with that captured alien ship they had (since '47? - remember?), our heroes could make the appropriate adjustments to the alien OS to infect it. Well, at least you don't have to believe they just dumped earth viruses into ET computers.

Jeez, they could have at least showed "Good Will Hunting," which was at least superficially about mathematics.

Wait, no, this is middle school. And in GWH, there's a lot of "fuck"s thrown around. So no GWH.

Once, back when I was a college perfesser, I showed the "witch" scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in class. I was teaching logic, and we'd just covered logical fallacies. I wanted to see how many fallacies they could identify in Sir Bedevere's 'proof' that if she weighed the same as a duck, she was a witch.

They were very disappointed that I wasn't going to play the rest of the movie in class. But I was teaching at a Christian college, and I knew that "and then - the oral sex!" would get me in trouble.

Dave Barry explained this amazing vulnerablity of this advanced invading society's computing systems in his review of the movie when it was released: They're stuck with Windows, too. In fact, they traveled light years just for the chance to kill Bill Gates.

"...In fact, they traveled light years just for the chance to kill Bill Gates...."

When their simulation models told them that Bill Gates would do things like patenting the double- click, they decided "enough is enough, we go take out this guy".

You forget the most important lesson of the film: the geeks are victorious.