¶ 1197 Posted at 05.19 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

The bizarre thing about the spying on Americans scandal is how seriously people are taking the Bush administrations assertions that they have that power. Most Republicans are basically taking the line, "oh, well, it's basically just a clerical error that it's not in the Constitution." The Democrats and some Republicans, on the other hand, are responding with, "oh no, you've made a slight error in your reasoning." The proper response is to laugh in the face of the hapless Bush minion making the claim, possibly spraying your beverage all over him. These aren't arguments that are on shaky ground; this is nonsense, it's pure fantasy. The Bush administration's ability to read this so-called presidential power in the Constitution makes the "judicial activism" of Earl Warren et al. look like Scalia's textualism 1 . The worst part is the way Congress is (not) reacting, letting themselves be enslaved to cowardice 2 and partisanship to the detriment of us all.

¶ 1198 Posted at 08.40 AM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

¶ 1201 Posted at 02.18 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

¶ 1202 Posted at 01.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( software | web )

For the last 6 weeks, I had been battling my through David Gilmour's "Curzon: Imperial Statesman". I've finally finished, and I'm ready to switch to a fluff diet again. George Curzon was the epitome of late Victorian English nobility. He was born to a member of the House of Lords. He believed strongly in the imperial mission of the British Empire. He served for seven years as Viceroy in India. A staunch Conservative, he opposed women's suffrage. He seemed destined to enter the highest ranks of British statesmen as Prime Minister, but due to a temperament that often exasperated his peers, fell just short of his goal. In Winston Churchill's words:

The morning had been golden; the noontide was bronze; and the evening lead. But all were polished till it shone after its fashion.

As a biography, Gilmour's book is a compelling portrait both of the man and his times in the late Victorian British Empire and the first quarter of the 20th century. He covers in great detail Curzon's upbringing and career, the latter being inextricable from his social life. In his early adulthood, Curzon was a prolific traveller throughout an Asia in the grip of European colonization. I found the parts about India especially interesting, although there were times when I was SO VERY ANGRY THESE WORDS FILL ME WITH RAGE due to the inherent injustice of British colonization, though Curzon himself was one of the more benign British rulers, trying to curb the abusive and unfair treatment by British occupiers of native Indians and working to restore historical buildings such as the Taj Mahal. The parts of the book covering British government during and after World War I are also informative, painting a picture of a nation beginning to realize that empire might not be all they had thought.

Where the biography falls down is in how the author constantly praises Curzon's administrative and rhetorical abilities. We get a taste of the latter, and we certainly are well-informed where it comes to the numerous gaffes and mistakes caused by his obvliousness or indifference to his colleagues personal feelings, but the author gives us little raw material to judge for ourselves his strengths as a ruler. This is especially important because Curzon's Viceroyalty ended controversially with him falling on his sword (so to speak) over an apparently minor issue of administrative policy. That particular scandal is covered in great detail, but due to the insufficient of policy details meant we knew his was the right position due to hindsight and the author's insistence, not by having developed any confidence in his abilities ourselves. That is a key omission, as Curzon's career was built on the twin foundations of rhetorical and administrative excellence, which were sufficient to overcome those aspects of his personality which were somewhat less excellent.

Overall, however, Gilmour does an excellent job of depicting an important and misunderstood historical figure, one whose all-too-human failings and poor luck have kept him in relative obscurity, with what little is generally thought of him being either wrong or unfair. If you're a fan of historical biography, this book certainly worth a look. I learned a great deal that I hadn't previously known, presented in clear (though dense) prose. It's motivated me to learn more about this interesting era, in spite of the SO FURIOUS I AM parts about imperial Britain.

¶ 1203 Posted at 05.30 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

I don't do New Year's resolutions. I don't believe in them 1 . Consider that people generally come up with these resolutions well before the New Year, but delay implementing them until that time. Why is that? Surely, if the resolution is a beneficial change in their lives, they would benefit most from implementing it as soon as they decided to do it. Then there's all the baggage that comes with calling it a New Year's resolution. That's just asking to fail, because nobody keeps their resolutions. In those apparent contradictions are the answer. People make New Year's resolutions for things they think they should do but don't actually want to do. Waiting till the New Year delays doing something they don't want and allows them to join a crowd of people all failing at once, reducing their guilt. It's win-win; they get the satisfaction of trying to do something positive without actually having to do it or feel bad about not doing it.

All of that is a long-winded, roundabout way of saying I have resolved to do a new thing, but this resolution is not of the New Year's kind. The main thing I took away from Paul Graham's latest essay was the idea that one should constantly be producing something. I've spent a lot of time thinking about various ideas, but little time in either following through on them or laying the groundwork for doing so at another time. I find it very easy to let a day go by without having accomplished anything productive (code-wise), and it's similarly easy to let a single wasted day become a wasted week. I won't have that luxury if I'm on my own; days and weeks like that could be fatal to an attempt to go independent. As a result, I've resolved that I must write some useful code every day. Always Be Creating 2 . It could be for my day job. It could be for some noodling around on my own. What doesn't matter so much as long as it happens.

There are several clear advantages to doing this:

1. Self discipline and good work habits.
2. Being a doer, not a dreamer. I've spent a lot of time thinking about things I could do and very little time actually following through.
3. Experience and knowledge beyond what I might get through my job. This is especially important because the languages and technologies that will be most useful for me aren't ones I use at work. For example, if I want to create a client-side application, C# looks to be the best language to use. For building many kinds of web applications, the Java that I know is useful, but I suspect a more dynamic language such as Python will be better suited for the scale of what I'm more likely to attempt.
4. Building a library of useful parts from which I could build other things. When the time comes to go off to try whatever fool idea I seize upon, I cannot allow myself to start from scratch. I need to have all my building blocks and tools ready. Otherwise, I just won't have enough time or energy. 90% of most software projects is plumbing, and most of that is the same with similar projects.

¶ 1205 Posted at 12.27 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | longshot | software )

¶ 1206 Posted at 12.28 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

¶ 1207 Posted at 02.38 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | (un)employment )

¶ 1208 Posted at 01.46 PM ⇒ No Comments ( fyi )

Almost nothing 1 freaks me out like the possibility that Uma might be unhappy on the other side of the house without us knowing. I don't think it's ever happened before, but I can't know that. We have a mother-in-law plan. We can't hear what's going on in Uma's room without a baby monitor 2 . Problem: I am a light sleeper. Uma's sleeping noises will wake me up unless the baby monitor volume is exactly right. We have a monitor with a volume dial with no stops. The zone between silence and "I can hear her spleen" is very small. Yes, I bought the absolute cheapest baby monitor. It doesn't matter. Nobody sells baby monitors advertising precise and repeatable volume control. They're all into video and flashing lights.

So, every night I have to guess. I have to distinguish between two shades of white noise to know whether it's just far enough or too far. If I'm lucky, she'll murmur before I fall asleep, so I'll know I can hear her. Often, she doesn't. So I worry. That's not to say that we rush in everytime she peeps. Most of her noises are just sighs or babbles or coos. Even when she yells or cries, she's often still half asleep. Intervening then will wake her fully, which will make her really mad. So we listen and wait. She may fall asleep. Or she may need us. Either way, we have to hear her so we know.

Pediatricians will tell you that there's no permanent harm caused by letting your baby cry. I cannot believe that. Your child will remember you weren't there for her, if not consciously. You will remember you weren't there for her. We engage in many adult behaviors that are completely lost on her. It's not a waste of time. We are training ourselves as parents to make sure we have the right habits for when she does notice. Respect. Politeness. Responsiveness. Otherwise, how will we unlearn the bad habits once it starts to matter? In fact, it will almost certainly start to matter before we realize it matters, at which point we'll have lost something we might not be able to get back.

It is very easy to tune out someone else's anguish once you let yourself believe it's ok. The slope is a slippery one. I don't want to set a foot on it. She's my baby girl. Her distress might not be caused by anything that is real to us, but it is real to her. I need her to have absolute faith that I will be there for her. I need her to believe that more than anything else. Once she stops believing that, it is hard, even impossible, to go back. I can't lose that, even if people say 9 months is too young to know that. The risk is too high. She's my baby girl.

¶ 1209 Posted at 06.16 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me )

¶ 1210 Posted at 10.18 PM ⇒ No Comments ( funny )

¶ 1211 Posted at 05.49 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics | news | funny )

Author: George R. R. Martin
Title: A Feast for Crows
Hey, look, another fantasy fiction mega-tome! I'm on it. This one's been a long time coming, there having been a five year gap between this, the fourth book in the series, and the book preceding it. So, hey, go read those and come back, right? What to expect from those is about what you'll expect from this one. That is to say, it's uncommonly good epic fantasy, but not for the faint of heart. Most other such books and series have a bit of a Disneyland feel. They're in semi-medieval ages, but they're not very medieval. People die nobly. There are Good People, and there are Bad People. Oh, sure, there are often people who switch sides because the author thinks [s]he is clever, but it's either completely random or telegraphed hundreds of pages in advance 1 . Martin does away with all that. You don't know what he's going to do. It's not because he's flat-out unpredictable, but because his characters are complex and changing in an uncertain world. With Robert Jordan, you know where he's going; you just want to see how he's going to get there. And then he'll annoy the crap out of you getting there. Not so with Martin. I just finished the fourth book in a projected seven book series, and I still don't know what's going to happen. In some ways, that's a bad thing; I almost feel as though the main action hasn't gotten started yet.

Another good thing about this series compared to some other epics is that Martin is honest. When the story is seen from a character's point of view, you know what's going on. There are none of the irritating hinting at secret plots and actions that the character knows about, but the reader is kept in the dark (and, as I see it, taunted). Martin still has too many characters, but at least he limits the number of PoVs to a more manageable number. I sort of wonder whether Robert Jordan's forking of plot threads, multiplication of characters, and half-assed attempts at intrigue in his last few books are a response to Martin's much defter storytelling. Robert Jordan has some gifts, as I've mentioned before, but Martin is as good in those departments and just plain better as a writer.

This book is a bit of an aberration, as it was originally much longer than its current 784 pages. In order to make it publishable, Martin broke it in half, not by splitting the narrative by time, but by character and plot thread. The next book will cover much of the same time period, but with the missing characters. It's a little bit unsatisfying, but it's better than having an artificial break in the story.

Then there's the medieval part. The world is a brutal place. The medieval era was even more so. Most fantasy fiction is pretty anachronistic 2 about that. Not our guy Martin. It's not graphic, but only because that is unnecessary. To some degree, actually, I think he overdoes it, but then I realize that's my own squeamishness, not any lack of historical 3 accuracy. Still, it's something a prospective reader ought to be warned about.

By this point in the ramble, I hope I've given you some idea as to whether you want to read the book. If not, I'll sum it up: this is for people who like fantasy fiction. It is not for people with sensitive stomachs. It's especially for people who are sick of mediocrity in the genre 4 , who want a more challenging and subtle story that doesn't pander to teenagers.

¶ 1212 Posted at 05.03 AM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

Book: Accelerando
Author: Charles Stross
I enjoyed Charles Stross's last two books, "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise." They were the right balance of science fiction speculation and story. His latest, "Accelerando," is something less. It charts the path of humanity and a dysfunctional family from the near future, (possibly) through the technological singularity, and beyond. The problem is... well, there are several problems. In spite of being science fiction, "Accelerando" is firmly grounded in the present, the very specific present of the last several years. Writing your science fiction from the cutting edge of science, technology, and society is a sure-fire way to obsolete your story before it hits the bookshelves. Extrapolating from trends born a minute ago makes it impossible to filter out the inevitable noise from a near infinity of dead ends and mistakes as the collective mass of humanity stumbles blindly into the future. References to webloggers and slashdotting may have an immediate appeal and drive sales as members of those communities feel a flush of pride at their inclusion (possibly even praising Stross's daring vision in the process), but all they will do is render the book hopelessly dated in 10 years and incomprehensible in 20.

Stross brings some new ideas, but the story leaves something to be desired. mashups of current trends may be excitingly post-modern, but they are no substitute for actual creativity and a strong narrative. Stross adds incrementally to the growing corpus of concepts in science fiction. To the singularity, post-humanism, cybernetic implants, distributed intelligence, computronium, consciousness uploads, nanotechnology, simulated realities, personality backups, group minds, planetary engineering, whole solar system Matrioshka computers, and numerous other now-standard tropes of modern science fiction, he adds reputation markets, forking and converging consciousness, laws and contracts written in code, and some partially-imagined sketches of exotic economics concepts and the evolution of intelligence. There are a lot of other ideas, too, but many of them are not very good ideas. They're the product of throwing a lot of buzzwords and nascent concepts into a blender, not creativity, vision, and insight.

This is meant as a novel, however, and that's where the ultimate flaws lie. The Cory Doctorow quote on the front cover is especially telling:

Who knew it was possible to cram so many sizzling ideas into this many pages? Stross's brand of gonzo techno-speculation makes hallucinogens obsolete.

Final verdict: skip it.

Addendum: This book was originally published as a serial in a science fiction magazine, which may explain some of those flaws. Painting characters with a broad brush avoids having to keep track of deep characters for month after month (9 in total). It also will create a bias toward stuffing each part with brief references to novel concepts based on the present, as magazines are more transient. Only pack rats hang on to magazines long after their publication, and few of them go back to reread the published stories (I assume). Stross would have done well to work harder on the transition from magazine to book.

¶ 1214 Posted at 12.00 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

Christopher Hitchens in this editorial about the Muhammed cartoons asked the rhetorical question, "hasn't the word offensive become really offensive lately?" Hitchens moves on, as that is not his subject in that editorial, but I thought it worth dwelling on. Having dwelt, my answer is in the affirmative. Modern use of the word offensive is offensive. It makes sense when applied to physical things designed for attacking. An offensive weapon. The offensive line. It doesn't work so well when applied to other things. Calling a smell offensive implies that there is something about the molecules themselves that is abominable. That's obviously silly. You find the smell unpleasant, but that's just you. Oh, sure, you can say "the smell is offensive to me," but you're still using offensive as a modifier of smell. That you qualify it does not change that your language places the blame for the offense on the smell. The objective statement is that you find the smell unpleasant. Your reaction is your own, and calling the smell offensive is a weasely attempt to promote your subjective opinion to objective fact. You took offense. That you did so unconsciously does not change that.

The same goes for offensive speech, be it spoken, written, or drawn. It doesn't matter even if that speech is intended to cause offense. Your reaction is entirely your own. If a tree insults your mother in a forest, and no one is around, should she be offended? Be as sensitive as you like. Get mad about every little thing that people say that you dislike. Go nuts. But don't call it offensive. You and only you are responsible for your behavior. Calling something offensive just proclaims that you aren't smart enough and self-aware enough to control your own reactions, or that you are attempting to manipulate others by pushing their buttons.

Merriam-Webster's dictionary includes the definition "causing anger or displeasure" for offensive. They are wrong. A bullet may cause death. A spark may cause a fire. Nothing, however, causes anger or displeasure. A bullet and a spark are dumb matter behaving only in accordance with the laws of physics. Nothing in the laws of physics necessitates us getting angry in response to an "offensive" stimulus. We just choose to react that way. That doesn't mean that the stimulus is not bad, just that our reaction is not automatic and inevitable. Note the difference between "X is offensive (to Y)" and "Y is offended by X." The meaning is the same, and yet completely different. People are people, and so you can find someone who will be insulted by just about anything. There are no objective criteria for labelling something as offensive besides that someone somewhere claims to have taken offense. They chose to be offended, even if they are not aware of the choice.

There is a certain type of liberal who uses the word to end any discussion that (s)he finds unpleasant (for any reason, but usually because that person doesn't have a leg to stand on). In a gratifying display of bipartisan cooperation, after their original rejection of political correctness, there are now increasing numbers of conservatives who use the word in the same way (for example, if one criticizes the process that led to the US invasion of Iraq). There should be a Godwin's Law for people who call something offensive. You can label anything as offensive. That in itself is enough to render it useless in any meaningful discussion, as no debate can allow itself to be constrained by the wild emotions of every knee-jerk fanatic out there.

Do you remember when Ari Fleischer said "people should be careful what they say?" There are people who don't much like freedom of speech. However, rather than assault free speech directly, they use insidious means of discouraging speech they dislike. Certain ideas are called unpatriotic. Others are, yes, offensive. Free discussion is something that divides us and aids our enemies. On the surface, avoiding offense seems like a fine thing. Who would go out of his/her way to cause others grief? It is only when something like the Muhammed cartoons happens that we realize that everything offends somebody. It is only when such a thing happens that we realize that words and pictures are just ink on a page. "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Labelling an idea offensive is an attempt to take it out of circulation. It is a way to control what people think. And that, is truly offensive.

¶ 1216 Posted at 05.28 PM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

There are people who believe that there have been alarming increases in the average temperature of the Earth in recent times are due to human action that increases atmospheric greenhouse gases. Then there are people who disagree. A problem in the debate on this issue is that global warming is a complex concept with numerous parts, and you have to believe all those parts in order to accept the whole:

1. The average temperature of the Earth has risen in recent centuries. A reasonable person cannot dispute this. We have records.
2. The rise in the temperature is great enough and rapid enough to be a concern. This is also well-supported. Warmer temperates mean that ice melts and sea levels rise. You don't have to get into more complicated theories such as the global conveyor belt thermohaline circulation to see a danger from increased temperatures. There is some uncertainty as to how much of a temperature rise causes how much melting, though that is lessening as we watch the ice in the Arctic and Antarctic shrink.
3. Human action can cause macroscopic changes in the global climate. I include this because anyone who disagrees with it is a fool. Perhaps you disagree that we are currently causing climate change through excessive greenhouse gas emission, but you cannot think that we would be unable to alter the global climate if we really put our minds to it. Remember nuclear winter? There are over 25,000 nuclear warheads in the world. Then there was the change in temperature patterns after September 11 when no airplanes flew. We can create and drain massive lakes, divert rivers, and destroy mountain ranges. It is obviously within human power to remake the world's climate if we dedicated ourselves to that goal. Obviously, we won't, but it is a small step from there to accepting the idea that we could also do it accidentally.
4. Gases such as carbon dioxide and methane affect the Earth's temperature. No serious scientist disputes the existence of greenhouse effects. Earth isn't the only planet with an atmosphere. Venus has a severe greenhouse effect due to its carbon dioxide atmosphere that makes its surface temperature 900° F, hotter than Mercury. With an atmosphere comparable to Earth's, Venus would also have a similar climate. Mars has a thin atmosphere, so even its 95% carbon dioxide concentration is insufficient to warm the planet.
5. Increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases increases a planet's temperature. This is a logical consequence of the previous point. The temperature increase that results from an increase in greenhouse gases can be precisely determined in laboratory experiments by measuring how much infrared radiation a known quantity of a gas absorbs. Coupled with measurements of atmospheric samples, solar radiation intensity, and the Earth's albedo (reflectivity).
6. The concentration of these gases has increased in the last few centuries. This has been established by samples of the atmosphere from previous eras through sampling ice cores, though these samples do not cover most of the Earth's geologic history.
7. The increase in greenhouse gases is a result of human action. We know how many trees have been cut down. We know how much oil we have extracted and burned. We know the same for coal and natural gas. There are additional sources of carbon dioxide, however, such as volcanic action. We also don't fully understand the global effect of plants and algae that consume atmospheric carbon dioxide. We release methane through wasteage in our consumption of natural gas, as well as landfills, cows (seriously), and other human activities. We have also released large quantities of haloalkanes (e.g., CFCs, also implicated in the ozone hole), but our use is phasing out. Human activity does not significantly increase atmospheric concentrations of nitrous oxide, ozone, and water vapor.

¶ 1217 Posted at 12.21 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1219 Posted at 10.21 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me )

¶ 1220 Posted at 11.26 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tv )

It's common knowledge that young people learn foreign languages more easily than older people. A lot of research has focused on the neurological aspects of learning to explain this. I believe there is another part to it. We find learning other languages harder as we age because we know our native language better. When you're 8 years old, you aren't dismayed by your ineptitude as a student of a foreign language because you can barely speak your own. At 28 years, however, things are different. I think I know English very well 1 , and I am acutely aware of that fluency when confronted with my lack of fluency when attempting to speak German, French, or Marathi. The degree of intimidation you feel is directly proportional to the gap between your native fluency and your ability in this alien tongue.

This also helps to explain why immersion is a more effective method of learning; if your choices are the awkwardness of speaking badly or the greater awkwardness of not speaking at all, it's easy to overcome the inhibition to fumble through the foreign language. On the other hand, if your choice is speaking your native language fluently vs. speaking the foreign language awkwardly (i.e., in a non-immersive setting), you're always going to have to force yourself away from the easy path.

I think something like this applies to programming languages as well; I am pretty fluent in C-like languages such as C (duh) and Java, but when I see completely different languages like Haskell or Erlang, I am baffled. The thing to remember is that I'm not actually any worse at those languages. My deep familiarity with languages in my comfort zone creates the appearance of larger gap to the foreign than if I knew nothing of those languages.

¶ 1223 Posted at 11.23 AM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

A short time ago, I read a weblog post on how to manage independent work on the side. The article isn't so important; what caught my eye was that the author used the phrase "a generous 8 hours of sleep every night." Maybe for him. I need 9. That's just the way it is. It's like brown hair or liking papaya; it's one of those things that just is. It doesn't mean you're any better or worse of a person, yet people (Americans) persist in thinking that they're somehow better off and just plain better for skimping on sleep. College students, tech workers, hospital residents, and just about everyone else is a member of this weird macho cult.

By just about every objective measure, not getting enough sleep impairs your abilities. Your reaction time lengthens. You're moodier. You can't concentrate. You feel worse, physically. You think more slowly. Your short-term memory is diminished. The only thing that being tired helps is creativity, which makes sense because your brain is scrambled. You'll come up with wilder ideas, but you will be worse at developing them.

What do you gain from sacrificing sleep? Did you get to see the luge finals? Get a Tivo. It's cheaper than being tired all the time. Maybe you managed to implement that whole module. Great, now someone is going to have to find all the bugs you put in, and you're going to have to fix them. Or was it just so you could brag about how stupid you were?

I am something of a sleep fanatic. This was true well before we had a baby. When I don't get enough sleep these days (which happens frequently, partly due to the aforementioned baby), I really feel it. I look back on my college years, when I got by on considerably less sleep. I mean, if I tried to sleep that little today, I'd just feel miserable all the time. Then I realize, I was miserable all the time in college.

Conveniently, reddit posted a link to this sleep summary from a sleep researcher at Stanford. If you think you're getting enough sleep, try this. Go into your bedroom and lie down like you're going to take a nap. Turn off the lights, draw the shades, make everything quiet, etc. If you lie there for 20 minutes without falling asleep (and you haven't consumed any coffee, exercised, or done anything else stimulating), you're ok. If you fall asleep, you're not sleeping enough. Lack of sleep hurts. If you think otherwise, you're just fooling yourself.

¶ 1225 Posted at 01.45 PM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

Excerpt:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Dennis "Boog" Highberger, Mayor of the City of Lawrence, Kansas, do hereby proclaim the days of February 4, April 1, March 28, July 15, August 2, August 7, August 16, August 26, September 18, September 22, October 1, October 17, and October 26, 2006 as "INTERNATIONAL DADAISM MONTH."

¶ 1226 Posted at 10.20 AM ⇒ No Comments ( weird )

I figure there are two types of people when it comes to sports commentary. Some people listen to it, maybe just because it's there, or because they want to. Others don't listen to it because it is stupid. I take the middle ground: I listen to it precisely because it is stupid. They called the US vs. Sweden curling match "a game of cat and mouse." Figure skater Evan Lysacek learned an "important life lesson" when he bounced back from a poor short program performance. Then there's how they pick exactly one biographical datum about each individual or team and repeat it endlessly, whether it be Jamie Silverstein's overcoming an eating disorder or Tanith Belbin's "ordeal" in becoming an American citizen 1 . It's hilariously stupid.

It's also amusing how many of the commentators have accents. This isn't a knock by any means on the commentators, but rather that it makes obvious how Americans only care about many of these sports once every four years, if that. For sports like curling, biathlon, bobsled, etc., the commentators are often Canadian, English, Scottish, or even fluent non-native speakers. We just don't have the interest to support homegrown American "talent" when they're only needed once every four years. The same thing happens with the World Cup, though 10 years of MLS should change that.

Less fun is how thoroughly white the Winter Olympics are. South Korea, Japan, and China provide a steady shot of color, but that's about it. Part of that is justifiable: there aren't a lot of places (where people actually live) that have real winters, and those are mainly Europe, Russia, and North America. However, there are significant non-white populations in those areas that aren't represented. I ascribe that in part to cultural factors, but also to how expensive these sports can be. Skiing and snowboarding require a substantial capital investment, as well as the lift ticket fees. Ice skating requires expensive lessons. I have no clue how anyone gets started with bobsledding and curling, but I'm sure that's not cheap, either. Those costs will naturally favor white people. I don't know what, if anything, should be done about it, but it sure is a shame.

Speaking of bobsledding, I don't think it belongs in the Olympics. I'm sure it requires skill, but that is the skill of piloting. I'm not too keen on the rifle shooting events, either. I figure that any event included in the Olympics should require at least a few of the following 2 :

• Precision
• Strength
• Stamina
• Speed
• Agility
• Elegance/Artistry

In general, I'm also against some of the team-oriented sports. The Olympics should celebrate individual excellence. I distinguish between sports like hockey and the 4x100 relay. Victory in the former relies on the success of the group 3 , whereas in the latter, it is the sum of individual performances. Furthermore, games like soccer have a significant strategic element that muddies the waters. A mediocre team with superior strategy can defeat an excellent team with poor strategy. That is certainly a good thing in many cases, it will diminish the importance of the attributes I list above. The Olympic motto is "Swifter, Higher, Stronger," 4 but nowhere does it say "smarter."

¶ 1228 Posted at 12.31 PM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

¶ 1229 Posted at 12.09 PM ⇒ No Comments ( fyi )

¶ 1231 Posted at 08.11 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

There are those who believe that we invaded Iraq to secure its oil. These people may be right, but they may be wrong. It doesn't matter, because even if we didn't invade Iraq to secure its oil, we are still there because of oil, no matter whom you believe. Don't believe me? We attacked Iraq in 2003 because (pick any or all):

• We wanted their oil.
• Saddam Hussein was an oppressive, brutal dictator
• They had weapons of mass destruction
• They supported Al-Qaeda
• They were a threat to Saudi Arabia

Saddam Hussein was clearly a terrible man. There appears to be a strong correlation between strong economies and free societies. More interestingly, there appears to be a strong correlation between strong economies and a lack of natural resources. Correlation is not causation, but it makes a lot of sense. Natural resources can be easily controlled by a small group of people, and it's wealth that literally comes out of the ground, as opposed to the wealth produced by trade, manufacturing, and services, which is greatest in free societies. Natural resources often support tyrannies. Witness Iran, the Republic of Congo (back when it was Zaire), Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc. Saddam Hussein would have been a despot regardless, but controlling the oil enabled him to strengthen his grip even more.

We know they had weapons of mass destruction at some point. Of course, those programs aren't free. How did Iraq pay for the investment in research and capital? Oil money. Why would they be useful? For attacking or intimidating neighboring countries in advancement of the goals of Arab nationalism and Iraqi expansionism. Oh, and you can take their oil, too.

Then there's Al-Qaeda. We now know that there was no meaningful connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but Al-Qaeda is still relevant. The roots of that organization are in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, but Al-Qaeda only formed in the early 1990s due to Osama bin Laden's outrage at infidel troops being stationed in the holy land of Islam. Those infidels? US troops. The holy land? Saudi Arabia (I smell oil...). He was also strongly opposed to the Saudi government itself, which we have helped to keep in power for decades.

US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War because Iraq was considered a threat. Why do we care about Saudi Arabia? Because they are the major producer of oil (there's that word again). That's the same reason the Iraqis would consider invading. We attacked Iraq in 1991 because they invaded Kuwait. Why did they invade Kuwait? Because Iraq and Kuwait had a dispute over whether Kuwait was illegally tapping Iraqi oil fields. It was also because Iraq's port facilities had been destroyed in the Iran-Iraq War, not to mention their substantial debts arising from the same war.

The Iran-Iraq War had numerous causes. Mesopotamia has been a mess for basically all of recorded history. However, there were certain more immediate issues. One was Saddam Hussein's desire to fully control the Shatt al-Arab waterway, an important shipping channel for oil exports from both Iraq and Iran (hello, oil). The Iranian Revolution had occurred the previous year, presenting Hussein with an opportunity, as the revolution had alienated the west, as well as inspiring fear that the revolution would spread to the Shi'a majority in Iraq. The United States supported Iraq in the war as part of a strategy to counter-balance the dangerous revolutionaries in Iran, but also sold weapons to Iran as part of the Iran-Contra Affair. These actions certainly prolonged the war. Still, that's all geo-political, right? There's no oil there...

Except there is. The Iranian Revolution was a revolution against the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, whose regime was corrupt, autocratic, un-Islamic, and pro-Western. The Shah had been returned to power in 1953 as part of an Anglo-American operation to overthrow the legitimately elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. There were two primary reasons for this: the first was because of Mossadegh's socialist rhetoric and Iran's position on the border of the Soviet Union. The second? The Iranian government nationalized the oil-producing assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, due to ongoing disputes over the distribution of royalties (from... oil).

So... where does that leave us? We wanted the oil directly. We wanted to secure the alleged weapons of mass destruction that were financed with oil money. We wanted to hit an alleged ally of a terrorist group formed in response to our actions to protect our oil supply. This threat came from a nation whose fortunes were tied to and often driven by oil. Any way you slice it, no matter who you believe on the Iraq War, our involvement is inextricably intertwined with petroleum. It's all in Wikipedia; you can see for yourself. We only care about the area today (besides Israel) because of oil. These are essential facts for people to understand. Our oil addiction kills.

¶ 1233 Posted at 01.04 PM ⇒ No Comments ( terrorism | issues | iraq )

¶ 1235 Posted at 01.07 PM ⇒ No Comments ( terrorism | issues | iraq )

I was reading up on the upcoming Honda Fit as a possible next car for us. Along the way, I spotted a rumor that Honda would introduce a gasoline-electric hybrid version. I hope that's false, because it's a dumb idea. The regular Fit already gets about 35 mpg on average. Let's say hybridizing the power train pushed it to 45 mpg. For someone who drives 12,000 miles per year, that means a drop of about 75 gallons annually. At current prices, that's less than $200/year in savings for a $3,000 increase in cost. With an investment return of 8%, it would take at least 19 years to make your money back. Hybridizing already-efficient cars doesn't save much money because it doesn't reduce gasoline consumption. What we need is hybrid Suburbans. If you turn 13 mpg into 18 mpg, you save 255 gallons per year, or about $635. That only takes 6 years to pay for itself at the same 8% return on savings. That's pretty good.

gets even better. Consider the wide variation in mileage. I drive our Toyota Corolla to and from work. That's about it. Any weekend trips are in the Accord. My office is about 9 miles each way. That works out to about 3600 miles per year. That's nothing. There are normal people who drive several times that, especially in places like Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Houston, or Atlanta. More importantly, there are some people who drive an order of magnitude more than that. Regional managers. Taxis. Pizza delivery. Any one of those people can easily drive 200 miles per day. At 20 mpg, that's 2000 gallons of gas (assuming 200 work days). At 25 mpg, it's 1600. That's $1000 saved per year. That's 4 years to pay back. p>

gets still better. Those people drive ordinary passenger vehicles. What about the UPS trucks, delivery vans, US mail, and 18-wheelers? Those vehicles rack up the miles. They're also big and heavy, with mileage in the single digits. Assuming a trucker drives 6 hours per day at 60 mph for 40 weeks per year is 72,000 miles per year (very, very conservative). That's about 14,000 gallons of gas (yes, fourteen thousand) Hybridizing a single 18-wheeler to boost its mileage 20% saves about 2300 gallons of gas, or over $5700. Obviously, doing that to a tractor rig would cost more than the $3000 it costs for a passenger car, but at anything under $25,000, it's a no-brainer.

point is, there are vehicles whose performance characteristics and/or usage patterns result in gasoline consumption that dwarfs ordinary passenger vehicle use. Hybridizing those gets way, way more bang for the buck than a hybrid Prius, Civic, or Escape. I'm not saying you personally shouldn't buy a hybrid, just that as a nation, our efforts are best focused on the biggest consumers of gasoline. I'm not aware of any government program that encourages commercial operators to invest in those technologies, though 1 . Maybe Congress overlooked something here. That's the flaw with using tax credits to encourage specific behavior. We don't want people to buy hybrids, we want them to use less gasoline. A gasoline tax will always be superior to targeted incentives because people are creative and diverse. Congress can itemize and encourage everything under the sun that reduces gasoline consumption, but then they have to find out what the possibilities are, whether they're real, who might use them, how effective they are, etc. Or, they could just slap a $1/gallon tax on gasoline and let us deal with it. We'd do a better job.

Speaking of excessively-finely targeted behavior, I'm going to contradict both my above statements and previous ones. I am now against a gasoline tax. Gasoline isn't the commodity we want to minimize. What we want to minimize is oil. We derive a lot of products from oil that aren't gasoline. Fuel oil, fertilizer, and plastics are big ones. It's not good policy to target gasoline specifically. Instead of a $1/gal gasoline tax, then, I suggest instead a $20/barrel tax on oil itself. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day, or 7.3 billion barrels per year. That's $146 billion in oil taxes per year, more than enough to cover the ongoing (monetary) costs of our oil war. Of course, the US government wouldn't actually collect that much money because it would destroy demand. Doesn't matter to me because it's a win either way.

¶ 1238 Posted at 12.21 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1240 Posted at 09.41 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

If someone challenges a position you hold, and you have to think of a defense, you have already lost. You should already know your defense from when you formed your opinion. If you have to justify your position after you adopt it, you're either parroting someone else's position or just going with your gut, neither of which is an acceptable substitute for actual thought. There are too many people who don't know why they believe what they believe. Too many people don't even realize they ought to have reasons for their beliefs. You are of course free to believe whatever damn fool thing you want to believe, but you and everyone you deal with will be worse off for it. If you think about an issue first, and then decide your position on it, you'll never have to think up a defense for it; you'll just have to remember your reasoning.

Not only do you need to know why, you also need to know why it's better. We usually start and stop either by inheriting the beliefs of those around us or whatever idea jumps into our heads first. What are the odds that those ideas are the ones that lead to the best outcomes? This isn't a question of picking strawberry or vanilla at the ice cream stand. You're choosing your strategies for life. You owe it to yourself and those around you to make a deliberate choice.

¶ 1241 Posted at 08.30 PM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

¶ 1242 Posted at 12.42 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | articles )

¶ 1245 Posted at 03.30 PM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

¶ 1247 Posted at 03.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( stupid people )

In 1961, the psychologist Stanley Milgram performed a simple experiment. Take an ordinary man (they were all men), and see what happens when he is induced to inflict pain on another. The setup was simple. The subject was told that he was participating in an experiment testing learning methods. He was to be the "teacher," while another man was the "learner." If the learner, believed by the teacher to be a subject but secretly an actor, failed to give the correct answers, the teacher was told to administer an electric shock of increasing severity. The learner would give all the external indications of being in severe pain, to the point of pounding on the window separating him from the teacher. If the teacher hesitated, the person running the experiment would goad him on. Fully two thirds of the teachers proceeded to increase the voltage until the maximum level (supposedly fatal) was reached. Of course, they were the real subjects of the experiment, whose purpose was to test obedience to authority. Besides being a disturbing and valuable bit of insight into human nature, it has a bit more immediate relevance.

I can't help but see parallels between the Milgram experiment and the "cry it out" schools of thought on training babies to sleep. Both require ignoring a person who, by all indications, is in great distress. More than ignoring the distress, you are in fact an active participant in causing that distress because you have the power to relieve it. There is also the element of authority in asserting that you are doing the right thing. In the Milgram experiment, the authority was the psychologist running the experiment. In the world of baby care, it comes in the form of pundits and "experts" such as (but not only) Richard Ferber. I use the word authority intentionally, because the appearance of authority is really all it rests on. Ferber may be a pediatrician, and he is the director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders, but there have been no scientific studies on the comparative effectiveness of any of the various methods for teaching infants and toddlers to sleep (with the exception of co-sleeping, which isn't quite the same kind of thing). As a result, there is a huge jumble of assumptions, myths, and actually effective techniques that can very difficult to untangle. You end up with lots of people loudly proclaiming the superiority of their chosen path, with little beyond anecdotal evidence to support it. "Cry it out" methods can be very appealing to desperate parents (and you do get desperate) because they remove responsibility and can (partially) eliminate the problem by defining it out of existence. It also appeals to parents of certain philosophies by attempting to avoid pampering and coddling children, as though those concepts make any sense whatsoever with a baby.

I don't say any of this out of sanctimonious judgment (for once), but instead out of guilt. You see, we have taken a small step down the path to the dark side. We have made a conscious effort to be less responsive when Uma is upset at bed time (nap or night). The sleep situation in our house has degraded over the last few months, to the point where we had to expend considerable effort to get her to fall asleep at least twice and sometimes all three times in a day. This involved rocking, patting, and singing until she was calm or asleep, then trying to put her down gently, running out of the room, and hoping. Usually, she woke up as she was getting put down, and it was a roll of the dice as to whether she would accept it or start crying. Getting out of the room quickly helped, as it seemed like seeing us leave caused more unhappiness than us being absent. For a while, I was spending 20 or more minutes on her morning nap and up to an hour at night trying to soothe her to sleep. Sleep times became something that we approached with fear and foreboding, because we knew it would be hard. That was not a situation we wished to see last indefinitely. Certainly, she would sometimes go down without a fuss, but that was a distinct minority of cases. However, on numerous occasions, we haven't been able to respond to Uma's cries as quickly as we wanted. To our surprise, in many of those cases, she quieted down and fell back asleep without intervention.

As a result of our accumulated exhaustion and this faint light of hope, last week we decided to make the conscious choice of holding back. Our rationale is simple. Uma is aware of us and the world around her to a much greater degree than she was a few months ago. She is very good at letting us know when she doesn't want something, be it more peas, a diaper change, or to have her face cleaned. There's a difference between that and the confused, scared desperation that sometimes afflicts her. The former is just complaining, while the latter is real agony. She's also much more clued-in to what's happening around her and can often predict what is going to happen. Sometimes, she starts complaining as soon as she's picked up from play time or finished nursing because she doesn't want to go to bed. Our new choice is to ignore the complaining and respond to the real anguish. We're not exactly happy about this. Most obviously that is because there will always be some crying, but it's also because there's a lot of error in the process. We often think she'll quiet down and then endure awful, painful minutes as she doesn't. Or we'll intervene when we don't need to, which is certainly not painful, but has a wearing effect. We're slowly getting better at distinguishing between the two, but there are still those terrible moments. Ideally, she wouldn't cry at all, but we are far away from that. One thing is for certain, though; we will not let her cry indefinitely. We listen very closely to the quality of her cry. Some cries are clearly fishing to see if she can get Mommy or Daddy back, while others are red alert and get us in there faster than a blink.

I feel like we're doing the right thing for us and for her, but it's very easy to convince yourself of that no matter how bad a thing you are doing. In spite of the problems we've had with her sleeping, I'm also glad we didn't try this before. For this to work in a way we're comfortable with, it's essential that Uma be aware and self-reliant enough that she can quiet down, play for a while, and then fall asleep. It's certainly not something to do with a newborn 1 , who is so bewildered and confused that any disturbance is terrible and frightening. We certainly don't want to teach her that crying gets no response, because sometimes, something truly is wrong. Nor do we want her to believe that we won't respond to her distress; even if she isn't capable of thinking those thoughts today, she will be someday, and sooner than we think. We just want her to learn that sleep isn't as distressing as she thinks. So far, it's been helping. When she's genuinely upset, we fall back on our standard playbook of soothing tactics. We still try to leave with her awake, but sometimes we just have to go in for the long haul. That's fine. We didn't expect that things would be immediately perfect; we just wanted to reduce what had become a frequent ordeal. It doesn't seem to have affected her in any great way. She complains a little more when we bundle her off to bed, but it also seems like she complains less once she's actually in her crib and we're gone.

Teaching an infant to sleep is a hard, hard thing. It could be the hardest thing to deal with as the parent of an infant. Uma isn't the angel baby you occasionally hear about; my personal opinion is that she's slightly (but only slightly) more difficult than the average. Of course, it's not really fair of me to blame her, since it could very well be that we do things that sabotage our efforts (as we have in the past). Still, it could be worse. We have friends with a son a couple months younger than Uma who almost never sleeps more than two hours at a time, even at night. Uma does fall asleep without any crying at least some of the time, and she rarely wakes up more than once per night. She's generally a happy baby, and when she isn't, most of the time it's our fault (hunger, thirst, taking away a toy for no good reason). She's been healthy (knock wood), developmentally normal, and just a lot of fun. We spent a lot of time thinking about what to do. We have to strike a balance between her needs and ours, between what's good now and what's good for the future. Decisions like this aren't easy, nor should they be.

¶ 1248 Posted at 03.54 PM ⇒ No Comments ( us | babies )

While waiting at the dentist, I read part of a "Parenting" magazine 1 . There are some interesting and useful pieces of information in there, but mainly I read them out of a voyeuristic desire to see what terrible names parents give their children. There were a few finds here, though nothing fantastic. There were the siblings Kaleb and Adeline. Also, twins Sid and Newt (apparently not short for anything). My favorite was the family with four kids: Brayden, Caysen, Tayler, and Camden. I tell you, parents these days...

¶ 1249 Posted at 12.53 PM ⇒ No Comments ( names )

We got selected to participate in a test run of the census. The Census Bureau is verifying their procedures and systems in preparation for the 2010 census. The questions asked are pretty innocuous, but I still found myself reluctant to answer fully and completely. Being the introspective, analytical sort, I tried to figure out why. After all, I am required by law to answer, and the forms repeatedly state that violation of my privacy by Census Bureau employees is punishable by law 1 . I realized that I have been trained to be suspicious of any instance in which I am asked to provide personal information without an obvious need for it. It could be the cashier asking for my home phone number, which they never get. It could be some web service not related to email that nonetheless wants my email address. It could be the gas station asking for my zip code 2 . Every day, I refuse intrusions into my privacy by parties that do not work for me and do not have my best interests at heart. The Census Bureau may be sincere and perfect in protecting my privacy, but the government has done a poor job overall 3 . I have been trained to be on my guard constantly, to be instantly suspicious of anyone asking personal questions. The Census Bureau may be trustworthy, but I deal with so many parties that are not that it is very hard to overcome my conditioning. The failure of the government to protect me thus reduces the breadth and quality of legitimate information-gathering efforts such as the Census.

¶ 1250 Posted at 07.55 PM ⇒ No Comments ( privacy )

On a government form:

I understand that both myself and my spouse must sign below.

I understand that both my spouse and I must sign below.

Allow myself to introduce... myself.

You allow myself to introduce myself.

(You) allow me to introduce myself.

He understands that both himself and his spouse must sign below.

Allow herself to introduce herself.

¶ 1251 Posted at 11.02 AM ⇒ No Comments ( grammar nazi )

Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.
The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.

¶ 1254 Posted at 03.09 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1255 Posted at 10.23 AM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1256 Posted at 07.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

Sometime last September, I passed my ten thousandth day. "10,000 Days" is also the title of the new Tool album. I don't know what the title means, only that it appears to be of some personal significance to the lead singer, who happens to share my birthday, though he preceded me by just over 5,000 days. It has not been released officially yet, but that doesn't mean anything anymore.

have been listening to the album for the last week. Initially, I was disappointed, but now I am not so sure. I think that you need to listen to something at least 10 times before forming an opinion of it, unless it obviously sucks, so I persisted. It is definitely growing on me. It is less obviously sophisticated than the previous album, "Lateralus." It is also more personal and less abstract than either that album or the preceding "Ænima." Given that those albums were each separated by 5 years, it is understandable that there will be some progression. The official release date is May 2, 2006, which means I have 8 days to decide whether to buy it or to delete the MP3s forever. Those are my rules. We'll see which way it goes.

As an amusing side note, the September 2005 edition of the band's newsletter claimed that they had spent a year recording a decoy album to leak, knowing that leaking was inevitable. It would be pretty amazing if this is in fact not the intended release. I guess I'll find out in a week.

¶ 1257 Posted at 11.30 AM ⇒ No Comments ( music )

We attended Mueller Family Day on Saturday. It was a pretty low-rent affair, basically a tent in a field with a bunch of people talking about the Mueller Airport residential redevelopment project. We missed most of the structured talking, due to Uma's nap, but I got two key questions answered.

The first important discovery is that they changed the order in which they plan to build out, due to drainage issues. The area I wanted most, due to proximity to the main features of the development (school, retail, parks), will now be the first area with houses rather than the second. That means next summer, instead of sometime in 2008 or 2009. That was sooner than we expected, and probably sooner than is financially responsible or even possible. Bummer.

On the other hand, I picked that area based only on looking at the map, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything. Besides, if done right, pretty much any part of that development is going to be better than 95% of the rest of Austin.

The other key datum was that the range of house prices is expected to hit $550,000. Ouch. No way we can get anywhere near that for at least a decade. The representative didn't elaborate on the features of such a house. It would certainly be the biggest house with the fanciest upgrades, but I don't know how big, what upgrades, or how much each contributes.

Our current house is about 1700 square feet. Adding another living room, another bedroom, another full bath, and doubling the kitchen gets us somewhere in the 2300 sq. ft. range. That's not huge by American standards. On the other hand, it's a design goal of this development to be denser and to draw people out of their houses. There won't be any McMansions. I know that the smallest houses at Mueller will be around 1100 sq. ft. I neglected to ask what the top end of that range will be. Hopefully, it'll be well above the 2300 sq. ft. that I want. I recognize the fundamental conflict here between what I am conditioned to want, and what I know is intrinsic to making this such an exciting place to live.

There's not much I can do at this point besides wait. It's a little tense for me because this is the first indication that it might not be attainable. That's a big bummer, because I can't really think of anywhere else in Austin that I want to live, and leaving this area is highly unlikely. Still, it's also very, very preliminary and based on incomplete information. It changes nothing about what we must do.

We need to make our house nicer. We need to avoid spending money on things we don't want or need enough. And I need to develop my career, both in terms of my day job and also in whatever else I can wrangle. On the first, we've made some strides with the painting and skylights, and we're going to have to do something with the 1260 lbs. of flooring I bought last month. On the second, we're pretty frugal as it is, but we can be better. One thing is for certain: our retirement and Uma's college education come first. If we must sacrifice those to get there, it's not worth it. On the third, that's all me. More on that later.

¶ 1258 Posted at 02.06 PM ⇒ No Comments ( house | austin )

George W. Bush should be impeached. There is no longer any question in my mind. You can make a case for Bush being a terrible president based on Iraq, Katrina, federal deficits, and any number of other, awful Bush administration policies, but elevating those to the level of crimes justifying impeachment is hard.

What is unambiguous is that he has committed treason. He has violated his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." George W. Bush, in signing the renewal of of the Patriot Act, included an addendum that stated he did not feel bound to obey its requirements. This is mind-blowing stuff. George W. Bush has as much said that no Congress or judiciary has the authority to constrain him. He denies the checks and balances that are built into the Constitution based on some complete nonsense.

Take for example the NSA wiretaps, where the Bush administration has argued that the President has "inherent power" to do anything and everything necessary to "protect the nation from foreign attack," and he and only he decides whether a particular action is for that purpose. In other words, George W. Bush claims he can not just eavesdrop on your private communications, but also take your property, search your home, forbid public assembly, confiscate your weapons, imprison you indefinitely and without charges, torture you into self-incrimination, kill you, and give you a wedgie. Quite obviously, that is bullshit. By ordering such actions, and even just asserting the executive branch has those powers, Bush has violated his oath of office and the Constitution, and thus committed treason against the United States.

Of course, this will never happen. The Republicans in Congress are too blind and too partisan to see the damage that Bush has done. It's not enough that he is going to leave office in 3 years, assuming he doesn't claim that he has the "inherent power" to remain in office after the expiry of his term to "protect the nation." This country cannot permit any person to overthrow the Constitution, not even once, and allow that to go unpunished, lest it set a precedent. He must be investigated, tried, and punished the maximum extent permitted by law (which, for treason, is pretty severe).

¶ 1260 Posted at 12.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

¶ 1262 Posted at 03.15 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

1. Costa Rica over Germany, Poland, and Ecuador. I want to go to Costa Rica one day. It seems like a very interesting country. Plus I've inherited from my dad an attraction to the underdog. I know nothing of Poland and Ecuador, while Germany has a brutal, aggressive style of play lacking in style or finesse. They win, but they're not fun to watch.
2. Sweden over England, Paraguay, and Trinidad. I liked how the Swedes played last time around.
3. Netherlands over Argentina, Côte d'Ivoire, and Serbia-Montenegro. I like the Netherlands, both the country and the soccer-playing style. Argentina's a powerhouse in soccer, but I don't have much of a feel for them. Nor do I know much about Côte d'Ivoire. Serbia-Montenegro I am explicitly rooting against; Serbian fans are apparently some of the most racist in Europe. I would very much like to see the Latins of Argentina and the Africans of Côte d'Ivoire kick Serbia's ass.
4. Mexico and Portugal over Angola and Iran. Mexico's our pal, this silly political controversy over immigration notwithstanding. Portugal gave us vinho verde. I don't have a feel for Angola. Iran? Pshaw. I might have been positively disposed towards them under Khatami, but not under this Ahmadinejad lunatic.
5. USA over Italy, Ghana, and the Czech Republic. C'mon, is there any question about this one? U! S! A! U! S! A! U! S! A!
6. Oof. Tough bracket. I pick Japan and Brazil over Croatia and Australia. I liked Croatia in the last World Cup, but they can't compete with Japan and Brazil for my affections. Japan's our pal and entertainingly bizarre. On top of it, their team in the last World Cup was excellent. I was really impressed. As for Brazil, how can you not root for Brazil? They make soccer into the beautiful game.
7. South Korea over France, Togo, and Switzerland. No question at all. Korea had an amazing run in 2002, getting into the semi-finals before running out of gas and losing the third-place match to Croatia. The team was just fantastic, and I hope they return with the same skill and vigor they showed then.
8. I have no strong preference between Ukraine and Tunisia. I think I'll go with Tunisia, since I'm guessing they're an underdog. I have nothing positive to say about Saudi Arabia (big surprise). Spain, which will likely win this bracket, has some of the more racist fans in the sport. I would be pretty pleased to see the Berbers and Arabs of Tunisia thump them.

¶ 1263 Posted at 12.32 PM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

¶ 1264 Posted at 09.12 AM ⇒ No Comments ( media )

The administration's legal position can be summed up starkly: When we're at war, anything goes, and the president gets to decide when we're at war.

Indeed, the president's lawyers have already informed the federal judiciary that they regard the entire world, including every inch of U.S. territory, a "battlefield." That outlandish claim has profound implications for the Bill of Rights because there are no legal rights whatsoever on the battlefield.

Under this sweeping theory of executive power, the liberty of every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House.

¶ 1266 Posted at 02.13 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

"We went from totally believing in Bush to really having our doubts," said Wayne Toomey... "It comes down to his lack of care about gas prices."

And then there is the story of gasoline, which in Florida now averages $3 to $3.45 a gallon.
...
"It is 60 miles round trip to visit my family," Ms. Meicher said. "It costs me a half a tank of gas and maybe $15 when it used to be $8. I give it a second thought now when the family says, 'Let's do this or that.' We are real close, but now I feel like I am saying 'yes' maybe two out of every three times these days."

¶ 1267 Posted at 11.43 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | stupid people )

I recently heard that the Citgo company is owned by Venezuela or interests in Venezuela. If Citgo is indeed owned by Venezuelan interests, it is my intention to cease using Citgo gasoline.

¶ 1268 Posted at 11.33 AM ⇒ No Comments ( stupid people )

¶ 1272 Posted at 07.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1274 Posted at 01.57 PM ⇒ No Comments ( site )

¶ 1276 Posted at 04.57 PM ⇒ No Comments ( funny )

A fundamental tragedy of the Iraq War is that the fundamental idea was a good one. A democratic, stable government in the heart of the Arab world would have undercut terrorists like Osama bin Laden. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy. Osama bin Laden and his ilk are definitely a violent revolution, as one of their key goals is the overthrow of the current governments of many Arab states.

Of course, Al Qaeda seeks a re-establishment of the Islamic Caliphate in the Muslim world, so it can hardly be said that democracies would satisfy them. Nor do we wish to satisfy them 1 . What establishing a free society would do is to cut off their oxygen supply. It would help to dissipate the oppression and helplessness that foster the anger that creates a steady supply of recruits.

What was completely wrong was how the creation of such a democracy was attempted. The doctrine of pre-emption, lack of a UN mandate, the missing WMDs, Guantanamo Bay, the alleged-but-untrue links to September 11, Abu Ghraib, the self-serving policies of the CPA, and American arrogance in general severely crippled and possibly doomed the enterprise from the start. Rather than cutting off the flow of recruits, the United States instead turned a stream into a river. The Arab world cannot believe that America is sincere in the goal of fostering democracy and protecting human rights, and, having seen the Bush administration at work for 5 years, I don't blame them.

My worry is the lesson Americans will learn from Iraq is isolationism. The real lesson is that how you do something matters just as much or more as what you do. When you claim to be doing something for someone else's own good, you must be purer than pure. Anything that you do that makes the intended beneficiaries of your efforts question your sincerity will undermine your efforts. You cannot force a free society into being, you can only create the conditions that make one possible. If one reserves the right to do evil things 2 , endlessly repeating the equivalent of "trust me" will not have the intended effect. The Iraq mission cannot succeed without the cooperation of the Iraqis, but we have made it hard for them to do so. The same is true to varying degrees in the Arab world; we preach freedom, but support oppression in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other nations. We may have unmatched military power, but no amount of military power can change how people think and behave; the fall of the USSR 3 ought to be proof enough of that.

Along those lines, Peter Beinart, editor at large for the New Republic, makes a convincing case that Cold War liberalism is due for a resurrection in a NY Times Magazine article. Some choice quotes:

Americans may fight evil, they argued, but that does not make us inherently good. And paradoxically, that very recognition makes national greatness possible. Knowing that we, too, can be corrupted by power, we seek the constraints that empires refuse. And knowing that democracy is something we pursue rather than something we embody, we advance it not merely by exhorting others but by battling the evil in ourselves. The irony of American exceptionalism is that by acknowledging our common fallibility, we inspire the world.

If cold-war conservatives worried that Americans no longer saw their own virtue, cold-war liberals worried that Americans saw only their virtue.

Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists', their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism.

America can be the greatest nation on earth, as long as Americans remember that they are inherently no better than anyone else.

¶ 1278 Posted at 03.23 AM ⇒ No Comments ( iraq )

¶ 1281 Posted at 12.27 PM ⇒ No Comments ( geek | consuming )

¶ 1282 Posted at 11.45 AM ⇒ No Comments ( me )

Nancy Pelosi has said Democrats won't seek impeachment even if they win a majority in the 2006 elections. That is absurd. Impeachment is completely justified, to the point where Congress is neglecting their duty to the country by not pursuing it. This isn't about political tactics anymore, but rather an unobstructed, unlawful grab for powers anti-thetical to the governing principles of this great nation.

The Democrats are afraid of seeming vindictive, but the people who would accuse them of that would call them all kinds of names no matter what. No amount of bending over backward to appear fair will matter to the knee-jerk reactionaries, so they should just ignore them. Mainstream America wouldn't consider impeachment vindictive when presented with the volumes of evidence detailing George W. Bush's violations of the Constitution and (other) federal law. There's no way to appear fair other than by being fair.

The Democrats justifiably don't want to be unfair by being overly harsh, but their attempts to avoid that are taking them down the even worse path of being overly meek. There are real crimes that must be investigated and punished, both for the present and to destroy any possibility of these actions serving as precedent. The right thing to do is the right thing to do. I can hope that Pelosi's statement was meant keep from ruining their chances in the 2006 elections, but I don't really expect them to magically find their spines the day after.

¶ 1285 Posted at 03.00 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

From the registration-encumbered Chicago Tribune (bugmenot is your friend):

"GM on Tuesday announced a promotion that caps gas at $1.99 a gallon for one year for buyers of certain full-size sport-utility vehicles and midsize cars in California and Florida.

Consumers will receive a monthly credit to a pre-paid fuel card for the difference between $1.99 and the average price of premium gas in their state."

The perfect quote was provided by a Sierra Club director: "I have never heard of an addict getting off their addiction by having someone subsidize their fix."

¶ 1286 Posted at 02.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( oil | stupid people )

I suggest a simple answer to the question of when to leave Iraq: when the Iraqis want us to. At least once every year and/or parliamentary election, there should be a referendum where Iraqis can simply check "Yes" or "No" to a continued American military presence. After the first election where a majority 1 of Iraqis vote "Yes," United States forces will commence a withdrawal ending some fixed amount of time after the election 2 . This should be a loudly and frequently stated commitment.

The advantages of this policy are numerous. First of all, from a moral perspective, it inches us back to the high ground. The United States is not an imperial power. Self-determination is a right we recognize that all peoples have, be they Kosovar Albanians or Soviet Tajiks 3 .

Secondly, it would subdue 4 the controversy domestically about an exit strategy. It would also put pressure on us to get things right, as it may be the Iraqis ask us to leave before we think is best. It would also give us a face-saving way to get out without the country being fully stabilized.

Finally, and most importantly, it would send a clear message to Iraqis that they are in charge. Instead of focusing on what they dislike about the American presence, it would make them think about what we do to help them. It's easy to rage against something you cannot control, but once ordinary Iraqis have to deal with the possibility that they could push out the one force preventing all-out civil war, I expect that their attitudes towards the United States would ease up. It gives them the (self-)respect they deserve as free people, something they don't have today.

Our current Iraq occupation is not accountable to the people it supposedly helps most. Accountability is the best way to ensure success, as it gives them a stake and keeps us honest 5 . Giving the Iraqis the choice is the best way of defining an exit, saving face, and aligning the interests of ordinary Iraqis with ours, and vice versa.

¶ 1287 Posted at 11.39 AM ⇒ No Comments ( iraq )

¶ 1288 Posted at 07.34 PM ⇒ No Comments ( movies )

I dislike the increasing use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems that require you to talk rather than use the keypad. Part of it is that I feel weird talking to nobody. I understand that is a personal opinion, and that some people feel more comfortable speaking words rather than using a numeric keypad.

The more important concern I have is that it makes the call less private. I'm sure the service providers are good about making sure highly sensitive information like passwords or social security numbers are entered through the key pad, but I still say somewhat sensitive information when I work through the menu of a health insurance or a financial services company. I don't necessarily want people in earshot to know that I'm calling to check on my claim or checking my bank balance.

A corollary is that others nearby might not want to hear my business regardless of its content, so being able to conduct as much of the call in silence is the considerate thing to do.

One can respond by saying I shouldn't be making such calls where I'm concerned about privacy or disturbing others, but that's not very helpful. The whole idea is that these systems provide valuable and convenient services, so suggesting I work around an inconvenience is missing the whole point.

¶ 1289 Posted at 01.51 PM ⇒ No Comments ( observations )

Final figures ... indicated that ... "X-Men: The Last Stand" smashed the ... record even harder than originally estimated.

¶ 1291 Posted at 02.10 PM ⇒ No Comments ( movies | funny )

¶ 1292 Posted at 11.57 AM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

¶ 1293 Posted at 02.31 PM ⇒ No Comments ( movies )

¶ 1294 Posted at 11.14 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tv )

The bombing that killed Zarqawi also killed 5 other people. One was a child. The other four could very well have been insurgents as well, but a child? The media have barely mentioned this, which is consistent with how they have barely mentioned civilian deaths in general. There are many issues here, the vast majority I will leave alone.

Civilian deaths like these are unavoidable, and massacres like the one alleged to have happened in Haditha are almost inevitable as well. This does not mean that war should be avoided at all cost, but at minimum, they should not be sought out has happened with Iraq. When making the decision to go to war, one should be forthright and acknowledge that many innocents will die. That's (part of) why the pre-emptive war doctrine is so terrible, because it elevates war to a choice rather than something forced upon you. That doesn't even get into figuring out where the conservatives' respect for life went.

¶ 1295 Posted at 02.34 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1296 Posted at 12.38 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | sports )

Navy Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, the [Guantanamo Bay] base commander, described the suicides as "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

¶ 1297 Posted at 05.01 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

I've managed to watch about a half dozen of the games thus far. None have been great, but a few were pretty decent. The Brazil vs. Croatia game was all right. Brazil looked sluggish, but Croatia impressed, even as they lost. They got numerous good chances, but just couldn't go all the way.

Yesterday's Spain vs. Ukraine game was good, but was marred by a terrible call by the referee. A Spanish player with the ball in the box stumbled either on his own or due to incidental contact with a Ukrainian defender. It wasn't worth a penalty, especially since the Spaniard got a clean shot off, but the Ukrainian was sent off with a red card. Since it happened in the box, Spain got a penalty kick as well. The goal off that pushed them up to a 3-0 lead, which was out of reach of a 10-man Ukrainian squad.

The fourth Spanish goal was a beautiful one, but I can't help but think the game would have gone a lot differently had Ukraine not lost their 11th man, a goal, and their morale in the 46th minute with that bad call. Hopefully, they can pull out victories against Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, because they proved they belong in their tenacious and skillful play. It wasn't a 4-0 game; I think without that bad call, it could have been a 2-1 game. Still a Spanish victory, but not the blowout 4-0 implies. Incidentally, I found the 4th Spanish goal on YouTube. The video quality doesn't do it justice, but the official site is broken.

I've been thinking about why soccer isn't popular in the United States. I figure it comes down to three interlocking and reinforcing reasons, none of which have anything to do with the game itself. First off, there's inertia. It sounds like a non-answer, but soccer isn't popular because soccer wasn't popular a while ago. People enjoy sports that people around them enjoy, starting with their parents. Adults today don't watch soccer because their family and friends didn't watch soccer during their formative years. They're less likely to pick up an interest now.

Another killer for soccer is that the US loses. Americans don't watch the Olympics, they watch Americans in the Olympics. They watch events with Americans in them, especially events where the Americans are the favorites. Most of the Americans watching the World Cup are that way as well; they only care about the US team.

Consider the other major sports. Football is barely played outside the US, so we never see an American team lose. Basketball is the same way, though to a lesser degree. Baseball is played well in numerous countries, but we just pretend they don't exist and call a championship of American and Canadian teams "The World Series." Americans don't like watching soccer because the US team isn't very good. MLS helps in that respect because it's American teams playing other American teams, but MLS just doesn't compare to the Premier League or the Bundesliga, and Americans know it. Americans want to be the best, and when they're not, they lose interest.

The other kind of competition is for attention. In the United States, we have well-developed baseball, basketball, football, and hockey play, all at professional and college levels both, American sports fans already have plenty of sports to watch. There's little room for soccer because the space it might occupy in people's interest is already occupied.

That has a corollary in how promising athletes get pulled away from soccer. Someone who's good at one sport tends to be good at others. Michael Jordan was a better Chicago Bull than baseball player, but he still was good enough to play minor leagues. Tim Duncan of the San Antonio Spurs was a top swimmer until an accident of fate switched him to basketball. The money and the attention are on sports other than soccer, so good athletes tend to choose those sports. That's not to say that American soccer players are the leftovers from other sports, merely that they have to really like soccer to stick with it.

Sure, people will say soccer is boring, but c'mon, have you seen a baseball game? Basketball and football seem kind of repetitive, too. Once you achieve a certain minimum level of interest, it becomes entirely subjective, a reason after the fact. People think soccer is boring because they don't watch it, not the other way around.

Of course, in spite of those reasons, I'm a big fan. I readily admit that part of it is elitist snobbery; I'd be far less interested in soccer if everyone else around here was also. Mainly, I like the fluidity, individual skills, and the tension. The first two are easy to understand. The tension is less so. In soccer, anyone could score at any time. It just takes a few seconds. That's true in football and basketball as well. With football (as with baseball), the game is too structured. There's little fluidity because of the start/stop nature of play. As a result, you don't have the same sorts of ebbs and flows. Basketball has that, but each point means so little in the grand scheme that there's little celebration or disappointment for most of the game.

Soccer also has uncertainty that magnifies the tension in soccer. In basketball, football, and baseball, scoring is easy enough that you can just tell how the game went by the score. That's not true of soccer. Since scoring is harder, measuring how well a team is doing is slippery. The American games are about scoring, while soccer is about getting chances to score. The former is easier to measure, while the latter is more suspenseful. Just because someone could score at any time doesn't mean they will; usually, they'll fail. But they'll make you hold your breat even so.

Even those reasons don't go very far. I'm only interested in soccer for one month out of every four years. There's something special about the World Cup 1 . I like that it seems less commercial (in spite of the blizzard of logos) and more pure than professional play, akin to how many Americans prefer college sports. I like the exoticism of teams from all over the world. It's also how I got started watching soccer, so watching MLS or even the Premier League ($$$) would feel like a step down. Finally, there's the time commitment. I can manage to watch a few dozen games every four years, but I couldn't imagine watching a sport regularly. At least Uma will be 5 next time I make Jessica a World Cup widow.

¶ 1298 Posted at 10.22 PM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

¶ 1299 Posted at 05.28 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | iraq )

¶ 1300 Posted at 11.05 AM ⇒ No Comments ( us )

¶ 1302 Posted at 12.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( names | weird )

A ballot measure in California proposes to tax oil production. As you well know, I think a tax on oil would be a good thing, but I meant on consumption. Taxing production is a stupid idea. California is not a swing producer, so taxing oil production in that state will do nothing except to drive oil producers out of the state. Californians will pay higher prices to have more oil imported from out of state, which will certainly reduce consumption, but would that benefit be enough to make up for the loss to the economy of oil production?

The problem is that this tax implies that oil production is the problem. It's not. Consumption is the problem. By its very nature, a tax discourages the activity that incurs it. If California could significantly affect the domestic or global oil supply and thus constraint consumption, this tax might make sense, but they can't. All they can affect is consumption in state. You can import oil from other states and countries, but nobody is going to drive to Nevada or Mexico to buy gas.

In the end, California is going to have a well-meaning bill that achieves nothing positive beyond a short-term and relatively small boost to state revenue, while incurring costs to the economy from overhead and driving out businesses. Some demagogues will make political hay, demonizing the oil industry for feeding Californians' oil addiction, and looking like they're taking strong action, even as they avoid facing the hard truth and doing the right thing.

¶ 1303 Posted at 01.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | oil )

World Cup spoilers ahead.

I ended up getting 6 of the 8 World Cup matches right, which sounds like a better result than it is. Just blindly picking the teams that won their group to win their round-of-16 matches would have gotten 6 of 8 as well. My weakest call was Netherlands over Portugal, which was of course wrong. My other weak call was Ukraine over Switzerland, which happened to be right. Then there was France vs. Spain, which I knew would be close. France was the better team yesterday and justifiably won, though I was bummed about it. I don't think their rematch of the 1998 World Cup final against Brazil will go quite as well, though. My revised predictions are below, with my erroneous calls in red.

I am increasingly convinced that Germany will beat Argentina, but I still want Argentina to win, so I'm sticking with that call. I feel like the remainder are no brainers. England is just a weak team. The Germany/Argentina match really ought to be a semi-final, but this is the sort of thing that happens. After seeing Mexico against Argentina, I certainly think they deserve to be in the quarter-finals more than Ukraine, Italy, or even England. Again, that's just what happens.

Thus far, I think this year's tournament isn't up to the quality of 2002. Maybe it's because I'm not getting as immersive an experience; I haven't seen all 90 (or more) minutes of any game yet. Beyond that, though, there's a degree of predictability to the results. 6 of the 8 quarter-finalists are traditional heavyweights, having won World Cups in the past (only Ukraine and Portugal have not). Further, only Uruguay of the 7 nations that have ever won a World Cup is not in these quarter-finals, and their last win was 56 years ago. England has the next longest drought, at 40 years, but the remaining 5 have all won a World Cup since 1982.

Compare that to 2002, which had the USA and Senegal making it to the quarter-finals, and Turkey and South Korea making it all the way to the semis. I wanted the underdogs to have a good shot at it, as I think the sport is too dominated by Europe. Then there's the controversy over the referees. I can easily name 4 games that were corrupted by bad officiating. I don't remember this in 2002 when we had Pier Luigi Collina's iron fist (in the France/Spain game, a commentator wished out loud for Collina's presence). There are still 8 games remaining, so I'll try not to be too down on this tournament.

Nevertheless, I'm already looking forward to 2010 in South Africa. They're an additional 2 hours ahead of Germany, which will make the games even more inconvenient, but it'll also likely be easier for me to find the time then (*fingers crossed*). I predict that Russia will qualify and make the second round in South Africa, as Guus Hiddink has signed on to be their coach (assuming he stays through until 2010). The man seems to know how to get teams good, being credited with South Korea's amazing run to the semi-finals in 2002 and Australia's reaching the round-of-16 this time around, losing out to Italy through no fault of their own. That may also give some of the younger teams, like Spain, a chance to more fully develop their talents. If nothing else, it'll be four years of anticipation.

¶ 1305 Posted at 11.40 AM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

I understand why people are tired of squabbling about what led to the Iraq War. We're there now, and even if we decided to leave today, withdrawal would be a long and complicated process. Nevertheless, it's important to keep underlying the mistakes that resulted in the invasion for one simple reason: people haven't learned. A majority of Americans now say the war was a mistake, but I don't believe they fully understand how.

The mistakes weren't honest, inevitable human error. Rather, they were a result of specific choices made by George W. Bush et al. They chose a course of action and only then determined a rationale. They ignored contradictory evidence and pumped up supporting evidence. They failed to plan for the post-war occupation out of a combination of hubris and an unwillingness to confront the true costs. They advocated an immoral and dangerous doctrine of preemptive action. They fed American fears of terrorism, fostering yet more of the fear that is the aim of terrorism, and then manipulated those fears to achieve their political ends.

A majority of Americans and many former war supporters have reached the conclusion that the Iraq War was a mistake. I don't think they have recognized the above choices as the key leadership failures that resulted in the war, however. I am worried that many people are taking superficial, incorrect lessons 1 . Until they recognize the deep flaws in the process that got us there, though, we will make the same mistake again. Almost as bad, or perhaps worse, they may prevent us from military action when it's the right thing to do, such as in Afghanistan in 2001.

It's important to understand exactly what got us into this mess, because the fundamental problem is one of process, not of results. If you continue to apply a broken process to the world, you'll continue to make terrible mistakes. Replacing one broken process with another is no better. That's why we need to keep revisiting the key issues.

¶ 1308 Posted at 03.08 PM ⇒ No Comments ( iraq )

Bummer bummer bummer bummer. My teams lost. I don't much care that Brazil lost. It wasn't about the score so much as Brazil not being the Brazil of old. They didn't play to their potential. I said earlier that if Brazil didn't pick up their game compared to the first round, they wouldn't get very far. Well, they didn't pick up their game, and they paid the price. It wasn't just Ronaldo, though his slowness and random falling over didn't help anything. The whole team was limp. They didn't win because they didn't deserve to.

That's not to say that France was unworthy. Far from it. They played an excellent game. I'd gotten sick of hearing the commentators praise Zinedine Zidane, endlessly lamenting his imminent retirement. After the Brazil game, though, I can understand. The man was brilliant. The game's only goal was credited to Thierry Henry, but it was Zizou who made it happen. He ran the game like a general, constantly aware of the whole field, dropping passes with pinpoint precision, and using his magnificent footwork to dance out of tricky situations. Ribery and Vieira both had strong presences as well, but this was Zidane's game.

Portugal v. England was pretty close, as I expected, but Figo et al. sent the English packing. They were missing a couple of key players with yellow cards, so I expect they'll provide better competition against France. That will be a close game; I expect it will hinge on how much the French expended themselves in defeating Brazil.

The result of Italy v. Ukraine was no surprise, but the game itself was surprisingly exciting. I kind of wish I watched the whole thing, but I had more important priorities.

Which brings us to Argentina. That game was a heart-breaker. I knew it was going to be a tough one from the beginning, but it was even more tense than I had imagined. That it finished with penalty kicks left a real sour taste. Brazil didn't deserve to win, but Argentina did. Whether they deserved to win more than Germany is up for debate, but I do know why Argentina lost. It came down to one mistake by the Argentine goalkeeper. No, he didn't let the ball go by. Instead, he went out into a cluster of players when he should have stayed behind, getting a knee in the chest for his efforts (neither foul nor intentional, unless it was really subtle). Apparently, that hurts. A few minutes later, he left the game to be replaced by Argentina's #2 keeper. Germany's equalizing goal happened after that, and it's likely the first goalkeeper would have missed it as well. However, the game ended on penalty kicks, and that's where a better goalkeeper would have made a diffeerence. Furthermore, after replacing the goalkeeper, Argentina only had two subs remaining. This was important enough in regular time, but even more so during the two overtimes and the penalty kicks. I am firmly convinced that the knee to the goalie's chest is what tipped the game to Germany.

The final four are far less interesting than in 2002. Three of the four have already won World Cups, and all four are European. Compare that to 2002, when only Germany and Brazil were previous winners, and only Germany was from Europe proper (the other two were South Korea and Turkey). My order of preference is a perfect inverse to what I expect will actually happen. I most want Portugal to win, as they've never won before. My next choice is France, as I've enjoyed watching them play. Italy would be my third preference, with Germany coming in last. At this point, it looks like Germany will triumph, however. If Italy defeats them in their semi-final today, then I think Italy will win overall. France I expect to squeak out over Italy and then lose in the final, with the same result for Portugal if they win.

Overall, I'm a little disappointed in this World Cup. The Argentine loss and the lackluster Brazilian play sealed it. I'm looking forward to South Africa 2010, but four years is a long time to wait. Both the aforementioned teams will be able to bring back key players, but not all of them, and some of them will be into their thirties by then. Zinedine Zidane is proof that you can still play world-class soccer at 34, but he is the exception. That might be of benefit to Brazil, but I worry that Argentina may have lost their best chance for a time. Still, one can hope.

¶ 1310 Posted at 08.27 AM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

The idea that democratic debate gives "aid and comfort to our enemies" is self-evidently stupid. It doesn't make logical sense, and there isn't a shred of proof, either. I think it may be even more wrong than just having no effect, though. A vigorous debate about the Iraq war, rendition, Guantanamo Bay, domestic spying, and all the other bad Bush policies in defense of which the administration has trotted out the above canard could very well weaken our enemies.

Remember who the enemy is, and where their support comes from. They are extremists, to whose benefit it is to polarize the people into diametrically opposed sides, to eviscerate the moderate middle. They want Arabs and Muslims to believe that America is hell-bent on the destruction of Islam and the enslavement of Muslims. They get much of their support from poor, idle, angry youth who believe that America is responsible for their problems, and that they have little choice but to fight.

Now consider what effect a sensible, deliberate, reasonable, and, above all, public debate would have. It would demonstrate that America is not hell-bent on destroying them. It would demonstrate that there is a hope for a future that does not involve blowing up innocent people and themselves. They would immediately recognize that extremist tactics would make it harder for the moderate, reasonable voice to be heard. Far from strengthening Al Qaeda et al., showing our disunity would have the opposite effect. The fact is that we cannot win the "War on Terror" without winning over those who might otherwise become terrorists.

Consider how we in the United States reacted to the apparent ascendancy of Iranian moderates like Khatami, and the disappointment of their replacement by hard-liners like Ahmadinejad. There were and are many Iranians who interested in normalized relations, avoiding aggression and hostility, and finding a peaceful solution to various problems. That they exist is a good thing. That they publicly disagree with the ruling hard-liners is a good thing. That is, it is a good thing for everyone except for the hard-liners.

And there lies the crux of it. When the boisterous discourse of a functioning democracy is condemned as treasonous, the ultimate goal is maintaining power. That debate may be a healthy thing for America and the world at large, but it is a threat to the Bush administration. They have no interest in the morale of the troops 1 , though that is the banner they wrap themselves in. No, the goal is to squelch and pollute any reasoned discourse of important issues, because their destructive and short-sighted policies cannot stand up to scrutiny. Only thus can they remain in power and achieve a "permanent majority."

¶ 1311 Posted at 05.23 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

I thought these images on the front page of the Yahoo/FIFA World Cup web site from earlier in the week were hilarious:

Maybe it's the symmetry, or the odd expressions, or that the staff apparently thought those were the best pictures of Zidane and Figo were the best available.

¶ 1312 Posted at 07.36 PM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

¶ 1314 Posted at 03.05 PM ⇒ No Comments ( cool )

¶ 1315 Posted at 04.45 PM ⇒ No Comments ( whoa | me )

¶ 1316 Posted at 09.07 AM ⇒ No Comments ( us )

A giant Asian supermarket just opened about a mile from my house. We checked it out this weekend. Among the foods you can buy:

• Dried white fungus
• Egg steamed bread
• Essence of chicken drink
• Pineapple gel
• Pineapple seaweed shortcake
• Tamarind drink
• Veggie sesame eel

There will also eventually be eight Asian restaurants in the same shopping center. My hope is that at least one of those will be a decent Thai place. Having all that good food so close will be pretty cool.

¶ 1317 Posted at 12.14 PM ⇒ No Comments ( food | austin )

On the subject of the evolution of advertising over the last 50 years or so, the Economist quotes one Rishad Tobaccowala as likening a 30-second spot on broadcast television to "the atom bomb," segmentation of advertising on niche cable channels as being "dropping conventional bombs on villages," and targeted web-based advertising as allowing advertisers to "make lots of spearheads and then get people to impale themselves." And people wonder why I don't like advertising.

¶ 1318 Posted at 10.01 PM ⇒ No Comments ( advertising )

I'm hoping that technology advances to the point of providing the ideal, immersive World Cup experience by 2018 (Mexico?). There are a bunch of moving parts to it.

First off, I want a giant HDTV display, but I don't want to pay a lot. 2018 ought to be plenty of time for HD circuitry to get super-cheap. For the display, I figure it's either OLED or DLP, but either way, I expect 52" to be way cheaper and way better than it is today with standard projection, plasma, or LCD TVs.

I want to be able to pick and choose what is added to the feed. ESPN did a terrible job of choosing how and when to display screen overlays. They were too big, too opaque, and badly timed, often obscuring the action. Often, they showed me things I didn't care about or already knew. I want to be able to choose how that stuff is displayed, or if it's displayed at all. I also want little icons floating over the players' heads that tell me who they are, and give me some way of accessing their info on the side.

Then there were the commentators. I was fine when they said things like, "Kaka to Ronaldo, Ronaldo back to Ze Roberto. Nice move to get around Thuram, but the pass to Adriano got picked off." I was less fine when they were going on and on about how much they wanted to marry Bruce Arena and have like ten thousand of his babies, or repeated for the millionth time that Côte d'Ivoire was in the middle of a civil war. So I want to be able to pick and choose live commentary from any source I want, or turn it off entirely without muting the rest of the game.

One more big thing is the camera angles. I want a lot more of them. I want clusters at each corner, over each goal, on either side of the half line, and directly over the center of the field. Each cluster should have 26 independent cameras to ensure that every player on the field, the ball, the referee, and the referee's assistants each have a camera fixed on them at all times (that's 234 total). Obviously, each of these cameras will have to track automatically rather than having a camera operator. I'd certainly have no problem with augmenting these with field-level steadicams, other positions, or whatever; this is just the minimum. The cameras should record at a greater resolution than HD. That way, optical zooming is unnecessary, with digital zooming being the norm. Finally, I should have direct access to all of these raw feeds, or be able to tune into someone else's "mixing" of them into a broadcast in the same way that I can do with commentary.

The first couple are pretty easy, but the last will require a huge amount of bandwidth. I figure that it's relatively possible if the raw feeds are only available to broadcasters, with them "flattening" the feeds into a single stream like the current state of the art. What's more important is having a number of cameras on any and all potential actors, so it's easy to see Zidane or Figo head-butting another player. Of course, these would also be very handy for improving the refereeing, but that's a topic for another day.

¶ 1319 Posted at 12.06 PM ⇒ No Comments ( sports )

Ugh. Yesterday was not fun. Uma woke up Friday night at 10pm, which is unusual. Then she woke up again at 2am, which is still unusual, but less so. Then we couldn't fall asleep until around 4:30 or 4:45. Uma then woke up at 5:00 am for the day. She had a short nap on her walk, but categorically refused to take her regular nap around noon thirty. Then she slept a while in the car. We got home a little late, and she was unhappy, but eventually fell asleep around 8:10. Then she woke up again at 8:40. No amount of persuasion could get her to fall asleep again, so we let her up and about while we ate our dinner. We went back into the trenches at around 10:30 and finally got her to sleep at 12:15am. She woke up exactly an hour later. Luckily, she went back to sleep after nursing. She woke up at 3:20am, but fell asleep without issue, and then again at 4-something, 6-something, and finally a little after 7 for the day.

Note that anytime I say "Uma woke up" or "Uma wouldn't go to sleep," I mean that she was very, very unhappy. To summarize, Uma was basically up from 5am to after midnight, with about 80 minutes of sleep in between. Usually, she wakes up around 7am and goes to bed around 7pm, with a 2 hour nap in the middle. We didn't get much rest, either, which only makes things harder. Things were sort of like this when she was a newborn, but she was more consolable then. Right now, when she's upset, she has to have Mommy and only Mommy.

It was a long, long day, and I hope we've gotten through the worst of it. We think that she's having some massive teething, since she has a runny nose and mild fever, is reluctant to eat, and is roughly due for some canines. Ibuprofen had no apparent effect, though maybe what it did was keep things from getting even worse. She gets so confused and upset, and she thinks we can help her, but at times like that, we are out of ideas. We all just end up feeling miserable. I hate to think it's something we can't fix, that we just have to bear it until it's over, but I hate even more the idea that it might be something more serious. That's almost hypochondria-by-proxy, which is very, very easy to slip into as a parent.

Having a small child is hard.

¶ 1321 Posted at 09.14 AM ⇒ No Comments ( us )

Uma's on the mend. It looks like it was the teething. It's funny how a couple of days of mayhem can really throw things off. Last night, even as she was clearly feeling better, I was still walking on eggshells after she went to bed. She woke up hungry in the night twice, but those are easy wakings: she wakes up, nurses, and goes back to sleep. The memories of harder nights are too fresh, though, and it takes a little while for me to relax again. Every little noise sends me into a panic, I fret about us making too much noise, etc. But this round is over now.

For my reward, I have a scratchy throat, a runny nose, and a mild fever, no doubt the beginning of a cold that found my immune system asleep at the gate. Now I have to figure out how to keep my distance from Little Miss. Getting sick for most adults in isolation is a minor inconvenience, but worrying about infecting a toddler makes it much more stressful. Bad enough that we just had this unhappy weekend; following it up with Uma getting sick would just be terrible. My hope is that maybe she had a minor cold and was teething this weekend, so that she's already fought off whatever I have. An irrational straw to clutch, no doubt, but she needs to have a stretch of happy time. So do we.

¶ 1322 Posted at 07.57 AM ⇒ No Comments ( us )

Bill Kristol wants to invade Syria and/or Iran. Newt Gingrich thinks we're already in World War Three. This would almost be comical if it wasn't so scary. These people have influence. In a sense, they are right; this could very we ll be seen as the beginning of World War Three if we actually do what they suggest. These prophecies are the self-fulfilling sort.

Consider. Syria and Iran have a mutual defense pact. Invading Lebanon is almost like invading Syria, as it has been a puppet state for decades. If we attack any of those countries, either independently or with Israel, we'll be at war with all of them. It won't be a separate war, either; a war with Syria will merge with the war in Iraq which will merge with the war with Iran which will merge with the war in Afghanistan. Then consider the effect on Egypt and Saudi Arabia. They already have trouble keeping the lid on Islamist rebellion; after their people see the United States go to war with half of the Middle East, they won't be able to continue being US allies. Even worse, their governments could collapse, and I'm pretty sure that anyone who replaces them would not be positively disposed towards either the United States or Israel. It's hard to see Muammar Qadafi not try to take advantage of this situation as well.

Up north, Turkey will have a hard time keeping out of the war due to its substantial Kurdish population seeing the war engulfing the other large Kurdish populations just over the borders in Iraq and Iran. On the east side is Pakistan, which is already having its own problems with Islamists and rebellion. Having a war along its whole western border will hardly help its stability. If Pakistan goes under, look to India to immediately invade to prevent Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of Islamist fundamentalists. So now we have a single war stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and that's just how it starts. Imagine what happens if China takes advantage of our impotence to take Taiwan, or North Korea invades South Korea, leading to a war there and a remilitarized Japan. I can't possibly understand how these people think that is something that can help us.

The United States is number one right now. We have the most powerful military in the world backed by the most powerful economy in the world. In spite of that, we are bogged down and slowly losing two wars. From what bottomless well do Kristol et al. think we can find the manpower and resources to fight Iran, a nation bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan put together, as well as Syria?

Few nations have started and won wars on this scale. Wars on this scale overturn the established order, and we very much want the established order to continue. WWI ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire both, while WWII saw the sun set on the British Empire, the near-total destruction of Germany, and the ascendancy of the United States and the USSR respectively. The only way we can maintain our position of power is to not use that power, for to use it is to test it, and it only needs to fail once.

Iran and Syria have little to lose and plenty to gain. We have everything to lose and little to gain. After all, it's hardly as if Iran and Syria threaten core American interests. This is not Red Dawn. Those countries can't strike us with anything like what the USSR can. The threat they pose is significant, but it is also localized and indirect. If we put ourselves (more) in their reach, they can bleed us dry. The United States can only be a loser in such a contest. We can look at modern day Germany to see the future that awaits us if we embark on this foolish venture. After we have wrecked ourselves, and a swath from Libya to India is in ruins, China will emerge as the undisputed superpower of the world. If that isn't what Kristol and Gingrich want, it's hard to tell.

¶ 1323 Posted at 04.55 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1324 Posted at 02.02 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | stupid people )

¶ 1325 Posted at 02.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

Title: Shadowmarch
Author: Tad Williams

I actually read Shadowmarch back in the spring (maybe even March), but I haven't said anything because there is very little to say. It's kind of a by-the-numbers, decent opener to an epic fantasy series. It's not particularly original, though, and it has the semi-Disneyfied feel of a lot of fantasy fiction, sort of like how a goth teenager is quote dark end quote. It'll do, but stacked up against the competition from George R. R. Martin or Steven Erikson (of which more shortly), its lack of ambition and depth is apparent. Those other authors have raised the bar, so to speak, but Tad Williams hasn't raised his game to match. This kind of bland story might have worked in the 1980s or 1990s, but the landscape has changed.

¶ 1326 Posted at 12.00 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

¶ 1332 Posted at 08.10 AM ⇒ No Comments ( us | deep thoughts )

¶ 1333 Posted at 12.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( oil | travel | deep thoughts )

Author: Bruce Sterling
Title: Zeitgest

I picked up Zeitgeist because they didn't have Schismatrix on the shelves at the library. What a waste of time. It was just a limp nothing. Some hustler puts together a fake girl band pre-millennium and goes on an aimless journey where bizarre stuff happens. Woo. Sterling was trying too hard and got too little. Pre-millennial this, post-modern that, narrative structure blah blah blah. The story didn't go anywhere. The characters didn't go anywhere. There were no interesting ideas. It was a quarter-baked book at best on the things that mattered. I only finished it because it was a fluffy, quick read. If it wasn't such a nothing, I would have given up, but then, if it had been a something, it would have been worth reading.

¶ 1334 Posted at 11.02 AM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

On a list of the 50 largest US cities with greatest natural disaster risk, Austin is right in middle. They just ranked them there, though, instead of scoring, so it's hard to tell what the risk difference is between various cities. If I only include cities I would want to live in (Milwaukee, anyone?), it comes out like this:

1. Chicago, IL
2. Austin, TX
3. Portland, OR
4. San Diego, CA
5. Boston, MA
6. New York, NY
7. Seattle, WA
8. Honolulu, HI
9. San Francisco, CA
10. Oakland, CA
11. Miami, FL

¶ 1336 Posted at 04.23 PM ⇒ No Comments ( austin )

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Title: The Namesake

After I read an excellent book, rushing into another one seems like a betrayal. I find myself now at a time I normally read, yet unwilling to pick up even a newspaper, reluctant to diminish the novel I have just finished. The Namesake is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Part of its appeal is personal, as it concerns an Indian immigrant family in the United States, primarily the son, Gogol. Mostly, though, it's just a well-written, nuanced, and affecting story.

The story of Gogol and his family is so achingly familiar at times as to almost seem like reading a biography of myself. For example, as a student, I often had to deal with substitute teachers struggling with my name on the roster, to the point that I could tell by the significant pause and look of consternation when they got to me on the list, announcing my presence prematurely rather than subject them and (more importantly) me to the awkward agony of attempting my name. I'ts not all so specific, of course. Gogol and I have a complex relationship with the land of our parents' birth. We are neither fully American nor fully Indian, so India and all things Indian seem at once familiar and alien.

Such a result is obvious with second-generation Indian-Americans, but a similar phenomenon is found in the first generation as well. They grow accustomed to the more sedate, sane way of American life. For them, India will forever live in the 1960s, as occasional visits cannot disturb the weight of memory. Their friends and family age and die, their old haunts grow unfamiliar and change in strange ways, and they realize that what they thought for so long as their home is no longer. However, their new home can never fully replace it, either, as their formative years were spent in a different place, so its ways will never seem fully natural.

Naturally, with parents and children staring at each other from opposite sides of a cultural chasm, the generation gap only magnifies the potential conflict. The parents' natural tendency is to try to raise their kids as they have been raised. There is the obvious cultural clash, but there are deeper, fundamental incompatibilities between how people lead their lives that make the old ways unsuitable. What works living with an extended family, in the same neighborhood as your birth, where nobody drives, and where few people move more than a hundred miles from home is hardly suited to most of the United States. These conflicts are common to many immigrant families, and underlay much of the progression of the story.

Not all the themes are about Indian-ness, however. Some are more universal, or at least more American. There is the slow murder of the soul in the lonely suburbs. There is the emptiness of loss that can never be filled. We see the slow corrosion in a relationship from tiny differences leading to sudden breaks, and the insensibility of attraction. The story is inextricably meshed with the experience of Indian-Americans, but is accessible to all.

I am pleased that I found such an engaging book so soon after resolving to read more literary books. I highly recommend it. I suggest reading it soon, as the Namesake will be in theaters this September, and you don't want to be one of those people who reads a book after a movie about it comes out, right?

¶ 1337 Posted at 01.21 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books | india | me )

¶ 1341 Posted at 03.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | iraq )

¶ 1342 Posted at 08.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( ideas )

Author: Alastair Reynolds
Title: Chasm City

Alastair Reynolds has written another fine work of hard science fiction set in the Revelation Space universe. The narrator travels from one star system to another, chasing a man responsible for the death of his employer and his employer's wife. Upon his arrival, however, he slowly discovers that not everything is as it seems. The world he expected to find has been vastly altered by a mysterious plague, while his target eludes him, and he finds himself the target of more than one hunter. It's a complicated mystery set in an imaginatively bleak setting. It's a smaller story in scale than Revelation Space, with only hints at the epic scale covered in the latter work. Reynolds seems more suited to working on a grander scale, so Chasm City is slightly weaker than the other book, but is nonetheless a fine effort.

¶ 1343 Posted at 12.36 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

Author: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Title: Effendi

Effendi is the sequel to Pashazade, continuing the story of "ZeeZee" in an Alexandria of the future of an alternate past. Some of the mystery that brought our fearless hero to Alexandria. This time, though, the stakes have grown higher. Instead of figuring out his own situation, Zee Zee discovers he has the weight of an unexpected friend and Alexandria itself on him.

Effendi carries over many of the virtues of Pashazade. It has the same distinct mood and atmosphere. It's a lesser book, though, partly because it doesn't quite cross the gap in shifting its subject from ZeeZee to Alexandria. The structure is a little annoying, with flashbacks and flashforwards coming with great frequency. Grimwood also leaves a little too unsaid. I might have read the book too fast, or maybe I'm dense, but I felt that the plot could have used a little more exposition to clue me in to what the heck was going on. I had it mostly figured it out by the end, but it would have been nice to feel less clueless in the middle of it. Still, it's a decent sequel, and I look forward to getting my grubby paws on Felaheen, the final book in the trilogy.

¶ 1347 Posted at 12.00 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

¶ 1349 Posted at 11.23 AM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

¶ 1352 Posted at 08.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tips )

¶ 1353 Posted at 12.43 PM ⇒ No Comments ( terrorism )

¶ 1354 Posted at 12.16 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

Take a look at this trivial web application. It's just sort -fgu -t, -k2. I do something like that manually when I'm transcribing our shopping list, so I don't have to hunt through the list for the next item every 30 seconds. It's just a lot more efficient to go down a list. Even numbering the list is a big improvement.

I take two lessons from this. First of all, I've already had this idea. I've had the idea to make it a web-based application as well. In fact, I've had ideas built on this basic concept that would be enough to keep me working on it for years. I've elaborated the base concept so much as to make the end product fundamentally different. I've also made it big enough that there's no way I'll even start it, because what I'd be able to do in any short amount of time would fall so far short that I'd consider it useless. The above may be a trivial effort, but I have no doubt it will be useful to a number of people. It forms a nucleus for growing something more.

The other lesson is how obvious this idea would be in a slightly different context. Imagine you were programming a robot to do your grocery shopping for you. Any solution that didn't involve the robot fetching items in a similarly sequential order would announce your incompetence as a programmer. It's so obviously the right thing to do that any halfway decent programmer would do it. That to me suggests a business opportunity, or, more precisely, a whole category of them. Computing has lots of useful algorithms for efficiently sorting, searching, collecting, packing, etc. that can apply well to the real world. Most people, however, are not programmers, and even those that are can be distressingly narrow-minded about applying their knowledge to optimize their daily activities.

Now, you could easily say that I'm a software guy and so I see everything as a software problem. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right 1 ? You would be quite right, but you'd also be missing the point. What matters is that computing concepts can effectively solve problems people have in the real world. There's something special about computing in its broad, nearly universal applicability to just about any problem that can be coherently described. Besides, having a perspective that differs is a benefit rather than a handicap when trying to come up with novel businesses.

There's an example of this that you've probably already heard of: Getting Things Done by David Allen. Now, he's not a computing guy. That's not really relevant. A key part of GTD, as I understand it 2 , is keeping track of the status of all of your tasks. Every task is either:

1. In process right now
2. Waiting for you to advance it
3. Waiting for some condition to happen (time, other input, etc.)
4. Done
5. Future

There are a million examples that I could come up with 4 . The principles are universal. That's obviously not the entire formula, else I'd be typing my letter of resignation instead of a weblog post, but it's certainly a start. What remains to be determined is which real world problems map well to which computing concepts; some of them are obvious, but I'm sure there are many surprising and subtle ones. Furthermore, though an algorithm may map well conceptually to a real world problem, turning that into a useful product or service is hardly obvious. There's a lot to mine there, and I'm certainly going to be keeping these ideas in the back of my mind.

¶ 1355 Posted at 09.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( ideas | longshot )

¶ 1356 Posted at 01.19 PM ⇒ No Comments ( terrorism )

Bruce Schneier explains how terrorism is succeeding right now because we're panicking. All of the incidents he mentions can only be viewed as horrible failures in our counter-terrorist policies. A key excerpt:

We're all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. [snip] Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers' perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they've succeeded. Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that's basically what's happening right now.

¶ 1358 Posted at 02.37 PM ⇒ No Comments ( terrorism )

Some maniac went on a rampage and shot a bunch of people at a school. It's happened before, right? Well, this time it happened at my old elementary school, and the victim was one of my first-grade teachers 1 and the mother of a girl a year ahead of me in high school. I don't really remember her or her daughter, but it's still a shock.

¶ 1359 Posted at 08.39 AM ⇒ No Comments ( news )

We managed to get Uma to take her nap away from home today, if only briefly. It was a big step. One mistake we made was that we didn't introduce her to different sleep environments back when she was barely conscious of her environment. Our reasons at the time seemed good: it was hard enough at the time without introducing additional variables. Nevertheless, it made things much more difficult for her to try to get her to adapt once she became aware of and accustomed to her room.

We have a couple of events coming up in the not-too-distant future, and since things have been going so well, we thought we'd ruin it all and try this. She complained for something like 35 minutes before quieting and, presumably, falling asleep. She never got really upset, but she wasn't particularly happy about getting dumped away like that.

When she's unhappy by herself, I always imagine her standing up and staring at the door, focusing on it all her considerable will as though sheer stubbornness could make it open and pull Mommy (or Daddy) through. Obviously, we're never happy when she's unhappy, but it seems like we're more sensitive than nearly all the other parents we know. I don't think that's a bad thing; Uma's a pretty happy kid and very well-behaved, though of course we can't assume that's because of anything we've done 1 . I can imagine this sounding rather odd to many other parents, though, and also to many non-parents, that we've been so careful.

Still, it was time to, if not cut, at least loosen the cord a bit more. She's old enough that she can sleep away from home and give us a break. We're hoping to be able to take a week-long vacation next summer, just the two of us. I'm sure she'll be ready by then, but I'm not so sure we'll be able to get to those weddings this fall. Oh well.

¶ 1360 Posted at 10.23 PM ⇒ No Comments ( us )

Author: E.M. Forster
Title: A Passage to India

A Passage to India is considered one of the classic works of literature about India. I say it's overrated. I admit, I found the early 20th century writing style to be a bit tiresome, which is a rather subjective judgment. There was more to my dislike than that. You can tell Forster tried hard not to be the white man looking down, but he could not escape the colonial condescension for "the native." The characters, while not cardboard cutouts, were also not the richly drawn portraits of, say, The Namesake. Without elegant writing, an interesting perspective, and well-written characters, the plot hardly matters. English departments have anointed A Passage to India the canonical novel about India, but there are far better ones out there. I'm sure I can find better studies of British India as well.

¶ 1361 Posted at 08.43 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

I've invested a lot of effort in trying to convince people of one thing or another. I've also spent a lot of time thinking about better ways of doing it. One thing that never occurred to me until reading this interview with Steven Soderbergh is how people actually change their minds. I don't even really know what's been the key factor in changing my own mind. I have theories, but I've never matched them up against reality.

Everybody's changed their mind about something, so you'd think it would be easy. For someone who's spent so much time trying to convince people of various things, that I've never investigated real instances of people changing their minds about something is kind of embarassing. Is it emotional? Logical? Maybe there's a trigger event. I have no idea, and I think I ought to get some idea before trying again.

Maybe that should be one of my conversation-starting questions when I meet new people 1 . It sure beats "What do you do?" So what have you changed your mind about lately, and how did that happen?

¶ 1362 Posted at 04.31 PM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

It's absolutely nuts how issues that were long since settled have crept up again. Teaching Creationism in schools? Freaking out because Janet Jackson showed a nipple on TV? Eavesdropping without warrants? Racial profiling (discrimination)? Arresting people who say things you don't like? Arresting people without charges? Disappearing people into the black abyss of secret prisons? A divinely chosen and inspired leader? Torture for crying out loud?!?!

All this stuff was settled. There were memos. There were meetings and conventions and zines and flamewars. Hell, there were at least a dozen real wars. We figured out the right answer ages ago. So what is happening with people going on TV with perfectly straight faces rolling the clock back on centuries of progress like it never happened, like years and years of blood and fire and pain and destruction didn't teach us all exactly what was wrong with all of that, and people take them seriously? How did this happen so easily and so quickly? Is the veneer of civilization really that thin?

If all that stuff's back on the table, how is anything off-limits? Am I going to see Sean Hannity expounding at great length about the benefits of child labor? Maybe Bill O'Reilly will tell us all what a good thing it would be to bring back debtors' prisons. Will Rush Limbaugh tell us that women don't really need the vote? Are we going to see Khalid Sheikh Muhammed subjected to trial by ordeal? "He drowned, so he's innocent!" Forced conversions? Religious taxes? Slavery!?!? It took so little to regress these last 5 years. Where will they stop?

¶ 1363 Posted at 08.38 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | stupid people )

¶ 1364 Posted at 08.55 AM ⇒ No Comments ( fyi | issues | terrorism )

But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.

¶ 1365 Posted at 09.16 AM ⇒ No Comments ( funny | terrorism )

The Internet has made cheating on papers far easier than it was in the past. You could read this NY Times article about it, if you wanted. My point is less about that there is cheating and more how one could automatically detect it. Right now, it seems like it's ad hoc, relying on the grader's intuition and checks against sources like Wikipedia.

I think that instructors should use statistical analysis of a student's work to come up with a rough model of their writing patterns, including vocabulary, phrases, sentence structure, and the like. Then they should compare the student's work against that corpus. These profiles should be shared across courses and semesters. It would make it much harder to copy other people's work because it would require copying from the same people each time. That's tough to do with an external source, and also tough to do with a classmate, as their profiles would be available for comparison as well. Or the cheat supplier would have to emulate the cheater's profile, which is not easily done. That's still in the realm of possibility, so schools would have to make sure that at least some of the work in the profile was the student's. That would be accomplished by having regular, in-class writing exercises, under supervision, hand-written, and without the aid of computers or the Internet. Those pieces would be scanned in and added to the corpus. Obviously, none of this would make cheating impossible, but it would hopefully make it harder than just doing the right thing.

¶ 1368 Posted at 09.01 AM ⇒ No Comments ( ideas )

We got caught up with the Harry Potter movies last night. They definitely got better as they went along. That's due in part to the source material getting better as the series progressed. They refined the movie process as well, though. They had less silly, happy happy joy joy kid stuff in them, and also less fan service like Quidditch 1 . They got all that out of the way in the first couple of movies, so they could prune and smooth.

As much as they improved, there was still a clear sense to me of something missing. The books cover a lot of ground, with less fluff than, say, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You definitely can tell a lot was cut. 2-3 hours is just too short. I think a television program would be a good option. Consider the advantages. A 26 episode season of a half-hour program is about 9½ hours in total. The books are episodic already, so breaking them into half hour chunks would work well. A television schedule would also coincide nicely with the books; all the action takes place between the end of summer and the start of the next. There also wouldn't be the multi-year breaks between movies that are so hard to avoid, which have resulted in a rather deep-voiced and burly Ron Weasley. Daniel Radcliffe is less obviously too old, but only Emma Watson seems age appropriate.

The likely downsides of a television program are three. First off is the redundancy. We have books and movies already telling the same story; why have a television series as well? There would be little surprise and predictability. That's acceptable to some extent with a movie, but over the course of a season, it could get boring. Second is the quality would probably slip. That's inevitable given the budgeting and time constraints, but also the economics; since the revenue would be steadier, they'd get less marginal benefit from making a great series rather than just a good one. Finally, with a half-hour television program, it's hard to imagine it being general interest rather than kid-focused. Still, it would be nice to get a full treatment.

As an aside, an annoying aspect of Harry Potter is that the villains are obvious. Bad people look and act bad from the beginning. There are a couple of exceptions, but they seems like exceptions designed specifically because Rowling noticed this pattern, and rather than changing the pattern, took the lazy way out.

¶ 1370 Posted at 01.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( movies )

¶ 1371 Posted at 12.24 PM ⇒ No Comments ( (un)employment )

¶ 1372 Posted at 03.28 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tips )

¶ 1373 Posted at 09.41 AM ⇒ No Comments ( music )

I have been reading, still, but I've been blocking on writing for some reason. The first of the recent crop was Vikas Swarup's Q&A. It's a story of a poor Indian waiter who manages to win a "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" style game show. Most of the story is an explanation of how he managed to win by explaining where he learned the answers to each of the questions in a series of flashbacks. I can't say it was a bad book, but it was lacking in a certain necessary something that a good reviewer would be able to articulate. It certainly didn't sugarcoat the brutality of poor India, but there was nonetheless an inappropriate dreamy naïeté about it. It was fairy-tale-ish in a vaguely "Forest Gump" sort of way that no doubt charmed some readers, but to me blunted its impact.

Under the name Iain M. Banks, he writes science fiction (including the excellent "Culture" novels). Under plain old Iain Banks, he writes more literary fiction, including the creepy and excellent The Wasp Factory. I read one of his newer books, The Business. Like Q&A, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good. It's again a simple story, that of a contemporary career woman at a bit of a crossroads in an ancient, secret merchantile business dating back to the Roman Empire. In that, it has much in common with Charles Stross's The Family Trade. Banks shows off some of his wit, and generally does a good job as a writer. It's as a plotter of stories that he falters. What happens over the course of the book just isn't very interesting.

That is not a comment that one could reasonably make about Felaheen, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's conclusion to his "Arabesk" trilogy, following Pashazade and Effendi. Again, we rejoin ZeeZee/Ashraf in an alternate future North Africa. For the first time, the story leaves Alexandria. Where the other two stories followed Ashraf uncovering the histories of others, in this final volume he discovers where he himself came from, mysteries that were hinted at but not elaborated on in the earlier books. Again, the story is interesting, the world fascinating, and the writing as excellent as before. Now that I've finished the trilogy, I can give it a strong endorsement.

Fans of Neil Gaiman's American Gods will find themselves at home with his more recent Anansi Boys. Fat Charlie's always had things a little rough in his life, with an unpleasant job, a future mother-in-law-from-hell, and a painfully embarassing father. Things get worse when he meets the brother he never knew he had and learns his father was actually an incarnation of the African god Anansi. It's a good enough story, entertaining in many ways. It's not great, though, for reasons that I am again unable to articulate well. It's too breezy, in a lot of ways, which was probably intentional, but in my mind makes it less than the weightier American Gods.

The final book on my recent reading list is Judas Unchained, Peter F. Hamilton's sequel to his Pandora Star. Ignore the goofy titles and the silly cover art: these two books are great science fiction. Sure, Hamilton cheats by adding faster-than-light travel and force fields and other elements "hard SF" writers shun, but it doesn't matter. He manages to stitch together the disparate stories of many players in mankind's discovery of and war against a strange and alien enemy. In lesser hands (*cough* Robert Jordan *cough*), so many viewpoints would be confusing and annoying, but Hamilton is equal to it. His world is imaginative and interesting; he's clearly put a lot of thought into what things would be like in such a setting. That's not to say the books are without flaws, of which I'll mention a few. First, he has a bit of the horny teenaged boy in him. It's not overwhelming, but it's a little much. Another is his use of phrases like "he instructed his e-butler 1 to tell the car's drive array to take him home," instead of simply saying "he told the car to take him home." Once you've established that the character has such a software agent and cars drive themselves, skip the techno-babble. It would be like saying "he used his feet to walk up the stairs," or "he extended his arm, opened his hand, grasped the glass, and retraced his arm to bring the water to his mouth, where he ingested the liquid." Finally, I found the climax to be, well, anti-climactic. The story fizzled out a little towards the end. These flaws are minor, however. The books are excellent, though, and quite a deal, as Hamilton splits 1600+ pages of story over just 2 volumes where he could have easily turned out 5. I highly recommend reading them.

¶ 1374 Posted at 01.31 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )

The torture bill that just passed is one of the most reprehensible actions Congress has ever taken. There is so much wrong with it at every level. I'll just cover a few highlights of why torture is such a terrible thing, with assistance from this surprisingly intelligent Something Awful thread.

Bush & Co. argue that nobody can define precisely the boundaries of humane treatment, so there's no point in such guidelines, but does anyone doubt that ripping off people's nipples with pliers is torture? Somehow we have a firm enough definition to know that. They misleadingly say that since there is some grey area, it's all grey area. They also claim that what they're doing "isn't that bad." If that was true, why would they do it? It's a waste of energy and time to try things that don't work, not to mention just plain mean. If is effective, then it really is that bad. What would make you reveal information that could result in the capture and death of friends and relatives? Just because what they're doing sounds mild does not mean it actually is mild. It's likely that the methods they have disclosed were chosen particularly because they sound less innocuous than pliers and hot irons while still being cruel and devastatingly effective.

It's also not just about any particular method in isolation, but the totality of circumstances. There's a huge difference between reading a description of waterboarding or even having it demonstrated on you once in a safe, controlled environment, and having it inflicted on you over and over again by people who wouldn't mind if you died in a gulag from which you have no chance of escape. Certainly that provides a motivation for telling the truth.

But then, how do the torturers know you're telling the truth? If they have enough information to know what is fact and what is fiction, then the torture is pointless in all but the most extreme and contrived cases. If they don't have enough information to distinguish, they could stop before they get the real truth or continue long after. What if their corroborating information is wrong, and the victim is telling a truth that disagrees with it? The goal of torture is to break the victim, but once the victim is broken, their attachment to their cause severed, and their will made subservient to the torturers, it's ludicrous to think they could have any attachment to the truth. Torture doesn't work any better than slower, less cruel methods. More effective and less cruel methods focus on psychological manipulation that builds trust and makes the subject want to help you. And no, "make the pain stop!" is not the same thing as wanting to help you. That is the key practical issue with torture. It provides you with little that is useful while destroying something of great value.

What torture does is turn a human into a savage beast. When a torture victim is "broken," you reduce them to a sub-rational animal state of helpless terror, where the world reduces to a simple binary choice: say this and the pain continues, or say that and the pain stops. Whether there is any truth in it back from when you were still a rational human being is immaterial. Whether the interrogators promised to keep you from suffering permanent injury or dying is irrelevant. Even if you even remember what you were before or what promises you heard, you're not likely to believe it or be able to think rationally when your world has shrunk to hold only agony. That is the fundamental immorality of torture, that its effect, indeed, its goal, is to take a human being and reduce him to a cowering, fearful, pathetic animal.

The effect isn't to make you tell the truth, but to make you do whatever it takes to make it stop. There is effectively no difference between breaking your will to keep secrets and just plain breaking you and turning you into the torturer's eager slave. As a means of obtaining information, torture is almost always ineffective in comparison to the gentler methods, and you can never know until after the fact whether it was the rare case where it was more effective. As a means of obtaining reliable information, it's useless.

That doesn't mean that torture is useless in general, though. It's great for getting people to say what you want and to confess to whatever you want them to. That's why Stalin and Pol Pot and an endless list of murderous sadists liked it so much; they weren't after information or justice but instead wanted a confession to justify their actions, no matter how valid or true the confession might be. It's also effective as an intimidation tactic aimed at anyone who might cross you. In theory, that's not us, but bills like this recent one and the apparent inability of our government to listen to people with experience in these matters tells me that we're not so much better after all. Among a host of tragedies, that is a final one.

Using torture robs us of the most essential weapon we have in our battles against Al Qaeda and the like: the moral high ground. America has made plenty of mistakes, but we've always been distinguished from other nations in that our defining essence is based on principle rather than geography, ethnicity, or other accidents of history. What makes Al Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency and the Chechens and all of those terrorists so very wrong isn't what they want, but how they're willing to hurt and kill innocents to achieve those ends. We bind ourselves with limitations because we understand that is what separates right causes from wrong ones, not the goals. What is fundamentally American is that a nation ought to be founded on freedom and justice. Torture ought to be beneath us, because we should be both too smart and too good to do it. And yet, here we are.

¶ 1376 Posted at 10.34 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

They say everyone breaks; it's just a matter of time. I don't know if that's true, but I'm willing to accept it. On the face of it, that suggests the best you can do is delay, but you can never win. It turns out, however, that you can use that against your captors.

Let's suppose you are captured by those who would torture you to get information from you. You must assume you will break. Once you know that, you can use it against your captors. Well before you actually break, you start telling them things. You tell them things that are completely true, things that are mostly true, and things that are fabrications. You tell isolated facts and whole stories and everything in between. You spew a barrage of information, within which you bury the truth. They'll be able to verify some of it and disprove some of it, but most of it will be ambiguous. After all, if they knew that much there would be no need to torture you.

Your goal is to prevent them from learning the truth so they can defeat your cause. What if they hear the truth, but consider it a falsehood, or if they hear a lie and call it truth? In that case, you have succeeded, even if at some point the truth came out of your mouth. This is even something you can train for, in much the same way an improvisational comedy troupe practices. If I can think of this, I'm sure Al Qaeda can too. In fact, knowing that your victim is using this strategy would help you not one bit. By overloading them with false information, you make yourself useless as an intelligence source, even if you know lots of true and useful information, even if you tell it to them, and even if they break you.

Furthermore, you can do more than just make your interrogation pointless. If the information you give them sounds reliable, but clashes with other intelligence, you introduce uncertainty and destroy the value of those other sources. This will happen regardless of whether you're telling the truth or a lie. Your torturers will know well the limits of torture, but their bosses might not. You might not be able to save yourself, but you can protect your cause.

¶ 1377 Posted at 10.59 AM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

I think a lot of people choose to have kids too late. I know many people who had their first child in their early to mid 30s. That does not seem optimal to me, and not just because Uma was born 4 days before my 27th birthday. Consider how old I will be when Uma is at the normal college graduation age: 49. That's pretty young. Suppose Uma gets married at roughly the standard age. I'll be in my 50s. That's good, too. Think ahead to the far future where prospective grandchildren do the same things, assuming it's at roughly the same ages. I'll be 76 when my first grandchild graduates college, and about 80 at the wedding. If, instead of 27, the first child happened at 32, I'd be 86 and 90 respectively when those things happened, which calls into question whether I'd even be alive. And that's just the first child. Most people wait a couple of years at least between children. Then consider how it can take time to conceive as well as the scarily-high miscarriage rate. To the extent that one can even guess things like that, I have a pretty good chance of being around and being healthy until Uma is well-established on her own 1 .

The other major factor is the age of the mother. Pregnancy and health issues of various sorts are much more frequent once the mother is 35. If you want two kids, you have to have the first one in plenty of time for the second one to be born before Mom is 35. What if you decide you like having two kids so much that you want a third? If you started at 32, you have some tough choices to make. There's also the issue of women who stay home while their kids are young. You can certainly get further along in your career before having kids by delaying, but that means you'll be even older when it comes to returning to the work force, which can be rather intimidating.

I'm not saying that everyone should do this. I'm just suggesting that people who have a choice examine the consequences more closely. People who aren't financially stable ought to wait. So are people who aren't in a very stable relationship 2 . Ditto for people who haven't finished their education. There are any number of really good reasons for delaying, but you should make sure you've thought through the consequences, including the options it forecloses. Having a child is easier at a younger age, and when you have your children has ripple effects through all of your life and all of theirs. Delaying has clear advantages for financial stability and getting out your last ya-yas as a footloose and fancy-free youngster, but it comes at no small cost.

¶ 1380 Posted at 01.48 PM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

It's no fun denying water to your child when she hasn't had anything to drink (that she's kept down) for 6 hours. She doesn't understand pacing yourself; she just knows that she's thirsty and Daddy won't let her have any water.

To the list of reasons why you shouldn't let your young child watch television, add that it gives you something to break out when you get absolutely desperate, and, since it's completely novel to her, it doesn't really matter what you watch. Uma does know how to identify the important parts of Mystery: the baby ("baow"), the dog ("woof woof"), and the car ("vroom").

¶ 1381 Posted at 07.34 PM ⇒ No Comments ( us )

¶ 1382 Posted at 03.14 PM ⇒ No Comments ( fyi | funny )

¶ 1384 Posted at 12.02 PM ⇒ No Comments ( politics )

¶ 1385 Posted at 11.11 AM ⇒ No Comments ( issues )

¶ 1386 Posted at 08.52 AM ⇒ No Comments ( deep thoughts )

¶ 1389 Posted at 01.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( cars )

¶ 1390 Posted at 11.00 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tv )

An austin man was recovering at home today after suffering a vicious branching attack earlier in the day. The man claimed to have been "just standing there, minding my own business" when assaulted. He described the assailant as tall, brown-skinned, and leafy. The only other witness to the attack was a 19-month old girl, allegedly the victim's daughter, who testified "Uh oh." Austin Police stated that there had been similar attempts in the area recently, though this was the only attack known to have succeeded. Arboreal gang activity has been on the rise in recent months as police have been distracted by the epidemic of fern rage. The perpetrator remains unidentified and is still at large.

Ahem. Long story short, I was dumb and tried to pull down a loose tree branch by dangling from it. It worked, but the branch clocked me in the head. Stupid gravity, always trying to get at me. I got 7 staples at the ER (getting a lidocaine injection into the skull is NOT pleasant). I think I'm fine otherwise, though.

¶ 1393 Posted at 08.12 AM ⇒ No Comments ( me | house )

¶ 1394 Posted at 12.54 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | deep thoughts )

¶ 1395 Posted at 09.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( tv )

¶ 1396 Posted at 11.36 AM ⇒ No Comments ( movies )

I still read. I just find it hard to write about reading. I read "Midnight Tides," the fifth book in Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series. It shifts time and place, centering on the back story of a minor character introduced in the previous ones. It's as good as the predecessors, so there you go.

I also read Steven Dubner and Stephen Levitt's "Freakonomics." In a word, I was underwhelmed. It contained a bunch of useful information about how Levitt and others have applied analytic techniques from economics to broader social phenomena. It focused too much on telling the stories of the various discoveries, which I felt was unnecessary filler. It also seemed to lack a coherent theme. They readily admit that, but the admission does not excuse it. It was an interesting read, but I think it was unworthy of the hype.

I followed "Freakonomics" up with the novel "The Devil You Know," a thriller set in the wilderness of Minnesota. I haven't read or seen "Deliverance," but I gather there's a degree of similarity. It's a good book, with one awful, horrible, terrible flaw: the author loooooves run-on sentences. Not just any run-on sentences, but sentences that wax philosophical, often starting with a character observing something, then getting reminded of a memory, a time and place from long ago, before everything changed, but now, here, everything is different, and he has to look forward to a time this sentence ends, and it's got this weird rhythm to it that makes the cadence all sing-song-y, and you can tell the author is trying way too hard to seem profound and lyrical, but really, the guy just isn't a good enough writer to get away with it, and it would be bad enough if he just did it a few times, but there's practically one of them on every page, and you know he labored over each one, choosing each word with careful precision, and that a ton of shallow people will eat it up and gush about how deep and wonderful it is, and it's just like, enough already I want a period.

Next up was "Moneyball," by Michael Lewis. This book clearly has a lot of strengths because it managed to make baseball interesting. A book that can do that is surely a rare find. "Moneyball" goes squarely into the Malcolm Gladwell genre of describing the application of rigorous analysis to everyday phenomena and figuring out how to do it better. This time it's the Oakland Athletics figuring out how to compete in Major League Baseball with a fifth of the money of the richest teams. It turns out the conventional wisdom of what makes a good ball player might not be that wise. It was neat. I liked it a lot.

I moved on to David Sedaris's latest short story/essay collection, "Dress Your Children in Corduroy and Denim." If you've read "Naked," "Barrel Fever," or "Me Talk Pretty One Day," you'll have an idea of what to expect. Your idea will be a little wrong, though. The autobiographical stories Sedaris chose for this one are bleaker and darker than his material from before. There's a lot less of the lightness and humor that was, if not pervasive, at least present, in previous collections. They're still good stories, though.

After that came Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveller's Wife." Henry has a problem: from time to time, he travels through time. He has little direct control of when it happens and when and where he goes. He meets himself at multiple times, as well as his future and past wife, and gets into as much trouble as you might expect would befall a naked man appearing out of thin air. That description doesn't do it justice, though. Beautiful, romantic, and poignant are all better words, and they're words I don't use lightly. This is a book that will grab you. Ignore that it was a Today show choice and a People magazine something or other; this is a great book.

I hopped out of literature and went over to some cheap fantasy with Raymond Feist's "Talon of the Silver Hawk." Wow. There's a lot of mediocre fantasy out there. This almost felt like a young adult book, with its clumsy prose, crudely unrealistic characters, and heavy sprinkling of anachronism. I wonder if the other books I read by him were similarly mediocre, and I simply didn't notice because I was a lot younger. Feist is not without talent, but he has numerous weaknesses as well. They're easy reads, though, so I know I'll finish out the series (of series?), but there are many better fantasy books out there to read. Only read this series if you've run out of the better ones.

Finally, this morning I finished Iain M. Banks science fiction novella "The State of the Art," concerning a visit from his Culture to a late-70s Earth. I thought it was boring. It's not a match to any of the main Culture novels such as "Player of Games" or "Use of Weapons," which probably explains why it's a limited-release novella. If you're a huge Culture fan, you've probably already read it, but if not, you can easily skip it and lose nothing.

¶ 1397 Posted at 12.33 PM ⇒ No Comments ( books )