I guess I ought to make at least one post this month. I read a bunch of books recently. "King of Foxes," "Exile's Return," and "Flight of the Nighthawks" continued Raymond Feist's bland fantasy series. Orson Scott Card wrote one classic 20 years ago with "Ender's Game," and tries to milk that success with "Shadow of the Giant." Sadly, this book, like the others in the so-called Shadow Quartet, isn't very good. The writing is pedestrian and dull, the characters cardboard cutouts, and Card displays the geopolitical acumen of a 9-year old Risk fanatic, or possibly a neoconservative.
With "The Mission Song," John LeCarré continues the examination of Africa he began in "The Constant Gardener." It's a fine effort; think of it as "Zaire-iana." James Clemens hits a lot of the fantasy epic clichés in "Shadowfall," but writes well and introduces some neat variations.
Cintra Wilson's "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations" is quite possibly the angriest torrent of vitriol I have ever read. The title explains it all. It's good, but not great. Then I read M. John Harrison's "Light," a kind of bizarre science fiction story that I'm pretty sure I didn't entirely get, but was pretty good in spite of that. Finally, there was "Let's Put the Future Behind Us," Jack Womack's dark comedy about the crazy criminality of Yeltsin's post-Soviet Russia. I liked it, though I thought the ending was a little improbable.
¶ 1398 Posted at 11.50 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
books
)
I had a longer post trying to summarize some articles I've read recently on nurturing ability in children. I wasn't satisfied with it, though, and rather than bang my head on it, I'll just point you. New York Magazine reports on the right ways to praise. The authors have a few followup posts on their weblog: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
This seems related to research showing the impressive effects of practice as described in this NY Times Magazine article. Then there are some articles by your friend and mine, Malcolm Gladwell: the Physical Genius and Do Parents Matter? Also relevant is the example of Làszlò Polgàr, who raised three daughters to be world chess champions, including one who is ranked 13th in the world. And maybe What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage to finish.
¶ 1400 Posted at 11.45 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
interesting
)
I've been reading steadily lately. It's nice. Maureen McHugh's "Nekropolis" is sort of a science fiction book, but there are really only a couple of science fiction-y elements (though they are key). A young woman bound into the service of a family in Islamist Morocco falls in love with a pseudo-human slave and attempts to escape their captivity. It's not really a book where a whole lot happens; it's much more about presenting personal perspectives in a particular setting. It's good at that, but I prefer books where more happens; maybe that's an immature preference, but I'm ok with it.
Kazuo Ishiguro gives us "Never Let Me Go," which is another book in which little happens. Three children grow up in a boarding school in the English countryside, their only purpose in life being to supply organs to non-cloned humans. Ishiguro is a fine writer, and really conveys mood and character, but the story is weak, the behavior of the characters is inexplicable and frustrating, and he leaves our far too much back story. I don't know if it makes it better or worse that those flaws are certainly intended, and not considered flaws at all by the author, who seems more invested in the medium than the message. He's quite good at that, but it doesn't make for satisfying reading.
I reread "The Last Samurai" by Helen DeWitt, which I first read 6 years ago. I don't know if I was so impressed with it the second time around. I dunno.
After enjoying the "V For Vendetta" movie (which rehabilitated my opinion of the Wachowski brothers after the disastrous "Matrix" sequels), I grabbed the graphic novel on which it was based, which tells the story of an anarchist's rebellion against a totalitarian Britain of the future. Perhaps I am not in tune with graphic novels, or having seen the movie ruined any impression I could have of it, but I was underwhelmed. There were a number of characters who seemed extraneous. Some things, like the computer that ran everything, were too briefly covered. Other things were painfully over-the-top (which maybe goes with the medium). Overall, it was all right, and it certainly didn't demand a lot of time.
Last up is Neal Asher's "Cowl," a bizarre and richly imagined story of time travel and a war between two factions in the 43rd century with consequences that could affect the beginnings of life on Earth. My description makes it sound a little silly, but it's not. It's very well-paced. The two protagonists are well chosen and their paths through the story give Asher substantial opportunities for expounding on his vision. There is one poorly-done arc where one of the characters goes through a personal transformation, which mars but does not destroy an otherwise fine book.
¶ 1401 Posted at 12.14 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
books
)
What are the odds that the Democratic ticket in 2008 will not be Hillary Clinton on top with Barack Obama as VP? <sigh>
¶ 1404 Posted at 12.32 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
politics
)
It's becoming increasingly obvious that we need more fission power to sustain our economy. Wind and solar are all well and good, but they can't run all the time. Natural gas is better than oil, but it's similarly limited, and US production has peaked. Fusion is still a pipe dream. And coal is awful in so many ways.
Fission power has come a long way since the first reactor under the bleachers at the University of Chicago. There are reactor designs that can't melt down and can't explode. However, there are still problems. They produce lots of radioactive waste. Uranium requires a lot of expensive and energy-intensive refining to isolate the fissionable U-235 (0.7% of all Uranium) from the not-so-useful U-238 (99.3%). Uranium reactors also produce plutonium, making it a dicey proposition to allow countries like Iran, North Korea, or India to build and run them. We can avoid a lot of that by switching to a different fuel: Thorium.
Thorium has all kinds of nice features. By far the most dominant isotope is Th-232, which is perfectly good as a fuel. Thorium is much less radioactive than Uranium, so there's much less danger in handling it. Reactors using Thorium have a closed loop where all highly radioactive elements remain in the reactor. And the Thorium reaction cycle produces no plutonium. Why did we focus on Uranium in the first place? Because we wanted the bombs. The original nuclear power plants applied the knowledge gained from the Manhattan Project; it didn't make much sense to invest effort into a different path, especially when we wanted to build thousands of warheads. Now, well, things are a little different. Even better, a Thorium reactor can consume other radioactive elements. That means that the Plutonium sitting around from disarmed nuclear warheads, or the spent fuel from Uranium-based nuclear power plants can be burned away rather than sitting around for centuries spewing neutrons. Here's more info. The first article mentions a CERN report claiming that Thorium power generation cost would be 1/3 that of coal, which is the cheapest current source
1
.
I'm not one to say that the government ought to take the lead in doing something like this, though it would be nice to see some support. Hmmm... there's a publicly-traded company developing Thorium Power. I think I'll take a little gamble.
¶ 1406 Posted at 12.36 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
energy
)
We want to use less energy. Compact fluorescent light bulbs use much less electricity than incandescent bulbs.
So it makes sense for, say, Australia to ban incandescent bulbs, right? Except... GE has developed an incandescent bulb that uses the same amount of electricity as a CFL. That's great news for everyone who doesn't live in Australia. This is an excellent example of why governments shouldn't try to pick winners. If you want people to use less electricity, make electricity more expensive. People will figure out their own solutions. Some people will do nothing and pay more. Some people will install better light bulbs. Others will put in skylights. And others will just sit in the dark. I don't care what they do, and neither should the government. What matters is that people use less electricity, not how they do it. One size does not fit all. Try running an Easy-Bake Oven on a CFL.
The hybrid tax credit is the same. If you pay taxes in the United States and I buy a hybrid, I want you to know that the income tax credit that I get for that is a waste of your money. I drive a 30 mpg Toyota Corolla a distance of about 5,000 miles per year. It makes no sense to give me $3,000 so that I use 100 gallons of gas per year instead of 160. And that $3,000 isn't going to get a Hummer driver into a Prius. You make gas more expensive, and I won't care because I don't use much anyway, but the Hummer driver will take notice. If consumption of gasoline is the problem, make gasoline expensive.
1
The City of Austin is considering mandating that all houses sold in the city be made more energy efficient at the time of sale. That's the same sort of one-size-fits-all solution that wastes money. My neighbor is a bachelor living by himself. He doesn't eat much food or do much laundry. Why should the city force him to have a new dishwasher or clothes washer? On the other hand, we eat at home nearly every night of the week, and having a toddler in cloth diapers means a buttload (haha) of laundry. It might make sense for us to have new appliances. But that should be our decision. After all, we could easily switch to using disposable diapers. Even a general mandate such as investing 1% of the sales price in such measures is misguided; there are year old houses and 100-year old houses, and they use vastly different amounts of energy. Applying no upgrades to the former and 2% of the value of the latter will achieve far more good than a flat 1%.
Higher prices aren't (just) about profiteering. Price is an important mechanism for balancing supply and demand,
as I described in a hypothetical example last year. If you want less demand, increasing the price is the simplest and best way of doing it. It allows people to reach their own accommodations with the new reality, whether through substitutes, conservation, avoidance, or just ponying up the extra dough. It keeps the focus on the real issue. Mandating compact fluorescent light bulbs does not deter electricity wasted on a TV nobody's watching. It also makes it obvious exactly what's going on; how much do you suppose Toyota and Honda lobby for the hybrid tax credit? Let's be clear: we as a society do not want compact fluorescent light bulbs. We don't want hybrid cars. We don't want Energy Star appliances and weather stripping. What we want is for people to use less energy. Let people find their own ways of getting there.
¶ 1407 Posted at 02.58 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
energy
|
politics
)
I've noticed a big jump in the number of people who title themselves "principal." These are not administrative heads of schools, but architects, financial consultants, and other non-educational jobs. What's so attractive about being a principal?
¶ 1410 Posted at 01.40 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
words
)
This site should look exactly the same as it used to. But... I've rewritten my crappy site software in Python. It's still kind of crappy, but it's a much smaller and more deal-withable crappy than before. Dreamhost didn't like the piggishness of Java, so it would often kill my publisher process. Using Java also made it a pain to update the software (meaning I didn't do it). Python is a lot friendlier, both to Dreamhost and to me. Please let me know if you see anything broken.
¶ 1411 Posted at 01.49 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
site
)
Max Barry has a daughter about the same age as Uma, but he's funnier than I am.
¶ 1412 Posted at 09.27 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
funny
|
us
)
I guess March is Entropy Month. The things that broke this month include Tivo, my computer (twice), our dishwasher, some other plumbing, our cable modem, the water pump in the car, and each one of us (and Uma twice). Blech.
¶ 1413 Posted at 10.44 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
us
)
There are all kinds of schemes for replacing gasoline, from corn-based ethanol to algae producing biodiesel. Me, I'm putting my money on genetic engineering. See, all those other things require some kind of industrial infrastructure. They're all multi-stage processes. You have to harvest the corn and process it, or build your vats, etc. It's all just too much work.
I figure genetic engineering will make it easy. Imagine an acorn. Toss a bunch of them into a field. Come back 5 years later and find a forest. Hook up a network of hoses like tapping a sugar maple and drop the end into a 55-gallon drum. Drip drip drip you get bio-diesel. The trees aren't a product of evolution, so they don't need to waste their time with things like seeds. Nor do they need the diesel for themselves, so we can suck it all out. We can design them to grow like weeds for 5 years, and then stop dead, so the majority of their photosynthetic potential can go into sweet sweet biodiesel. Splice some algae genes and tweak their photosynthesis. To be user friendly, you make them sprout a spout when they're mature, so you don't even need to tap them, just hook up the hose.
This is probably not the most efficient way of producing energy from a chemical perspective. That's not what to optimize for. What you want to minimize is human effort. There's basically no investment of human effort after the acorns are produced. Nor is there any new technology needed to burn biodiesel, unlike ethanol (a little bit) or hydrogen (a lot). It doesn't need fancy batteries, because diesel is sort of a battery anyway. It's carbon neutral and way better environmentally than most of the ways we produce energy today. Just imagine driving up to a tree to fill up when your Hummer is running dry.
Credit where credit's due. This is not an idea original to me; I got it from the gasoline mangroves in the short story Appeals Court by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.
¶ 1414 Posted at 02.13 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
science!
|
deep thoughts
)
There's no money in the "Star Trek" universe. We never learn what they do instead of money, though. They clearly still have scarcity of resources, at minimum time, energy, people, and interest in dull jobs. How do they allocate these limited resources to satisfy their needs? They never tell us, they just say there's no money and leave it at that.
¶ 1415 Posted at 11.47 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
deep thoughts
|
tv
)
I have subscribed to HBO and Starz/Encore. That costs $25/month, which is wikkid expensive, unless you're only doing it for a month. See, I have 140 hours of capacity on my Tivo now, and those two channels are showing at least 30 movies that we want to see. I can fill up my Tivo with movies to watch later. Less than a buck a movie is pretty good.
¶ 1416 Posted at 12.38 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
|
tv
)
Have you noticed how car rental companies assume that a rental car customer will always prefer the larger vehicle? For one thing, they cost more. For another, if you reserve a compact car, and they don't have one available, they'll give you larger vehicle, even a large SUV. Never mind that they're harder to drive and burn more gas. I don't blame the rental companies; I think this reflects the preferences of their customer base. Our wasteful ways are subtle and pervasive.
¶ 1417 Posted at 01.05 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
oil
|
economics
)
I guess it's nice that compact fluorescent bulbs save energy, but mainly I like them because I can get a lot of light. The maximium wattage limits on fixtures are because of heat, not light output. A fixture limited to 40 W can take a CFL with the same light output as a 150 W CFL because what matters is that it's only 40 W worth of heat (sort of). That's pretty bright.
¶ 1419 Posted at 04.32 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
energy
)
Among the 88 Precepts of neo-Nazi white nationalist David Lane you will find number 11: "Truth requires little explanation. Therefore, beware of verbose doctrines. The great principles are revealed in brevity." 88 precepts, mind you.
¶ 1421 Posted at 02.48 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
funny
|
stupid people
)
We ditched Uma and went to see the film adaptation of "The Namesake" this weekend. In a word, it was disappointing. In more words, it was a 3-hour movie excessively trimmed in the editing room to an unhealthily skinny 2 hours. There was little development, and the movie shifted times, places, and situations abruptly. There were several sub-plots that were introduced and then unceremoniously dropped without explanation. A few of the performances could have been better (Kal Penn) and director Mira Nair indulged in some gratuitous tricks, but by far the problem was that too much was left out. I realize that it's a near impossibility for a director to faithfully bring Jhumpa Lahiri's evocative descriptions and affecting prose to the big screen, but that's not where this movie failed. At times, Nair managed to hit the right notes, such as conveying the crushing loneliness of an immigrant housewife in a cold, isolated home in a foreign country. For every such scene, though, there were a handful more that missed their mark because the pacing was off and the transitions nonexistent. While it couldn't be perfect, it could have been a lot better.
¶ 1422 Posted at 12.12 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
)
A lot of websites use Javascript auto-focus to save you the click to put your input cursor into the right form field. The problem is that you might have already gotten there if the site load is slow. That's because the Javascript to set the focus usually runs only when the page has completely loaded. As the page is loading, you click your mouse pointer on the input field and start typing. When the page finishes loading, the script runs and moves the pointer to the input field where you're already typing. Sometimes this will delete what you've already typed, while other times you may end up typing the second part of your input in front of the first part. Either way, the fix is simple: don't set focus if the value in the input field has changed.
¶ 1423 Posted at 04.35 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
software
|
web
)
I keep reading. One of the books I read was Charles Stross's "The Atrocity Archives," a surprising mix of Lovecraftian horror with a spy thriller via "Office Space." Strange though it may sound, it really works. The book is actually a combination of two stories with the same characters and setting. You can read an excerpt from the first story, The Atrocity Archive, the whole second story, The Concrete Jungle, and A Colder War, a similar story with different characters and a somewhat different backdrop.
I read another 2 story collection, this time by Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Chasm City. "Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days" is the two-part title, each being the title of one of the stories. "Diamond Dogs" is the story of a mission of discovery concerning a bizarre and deadly artifact on a distant planet. "Turquoise Days" concerns a human colony on an isolated world shared with a semi-sentient alien life that receives some unexpected visitors. Of the two, "Diamond Dogs" is definitely the better one, as good as Reynolds's full-length novels.
Somewhere in there I fit Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell," a novel of two men seeking to return magic to an alternate England in time of the Napoleonic Wars. This book won a lot of awards, but I'm not sure why. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. It took a long time to get going. Clarke certainly was effective in establishing the setting, with an extensive fictional backdrop, skillful use of contemporary language, and excellent descriptions. Overall, I just didn't find the whole all that compelling.
I also read Neal Asher's "Skinner," another science fiction one. Based on this and his later book, Cowl, I think he needs to work on his characters. There's no connection there, no depth, they're just pawns to move through the story. That said, the story itself is interesting. Three travellers land on an Earth-like planet teeming with dangerous life forms, getting caught up in the final resolution of a conflict hundreds of years before.
Finally, I read a book that was neither science fiction nor fantasy, Tom Perrotta's "Little Children" (basis for the recent movie starring Kate Winslet), about the affair between a stay-at-home mother and a stay-at-home father. This was also a good but not great book. Some of Perrotta's writing is pitch perfect, including the bizarre and often frustrating behavior of young children, the silly pettiness of small lives, and the angst of suburbia. His writing is funny and insightful, with well-developed, flawed characters depicted honestly but without judgment. As an overall story, I think he erred in broadening his scope to include additional characters from the neighborhood, losing the focus on what I saw as the core of the story, the affair. Nevertheless, writing skill and a keen awareness of modern life make this a book worth recommending.
¶ 1424 Posted at 05.30 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
books
)
Research shows that breast-fed children are less likely to be obese when they're older than formula-fed children. I have a hypothesis to explain part of it: there's no gauge on a breast telling you how much is left. When I feed Uma, I get a little goal-oriented. I want her to finish what's on her plate, especially if it's only a little bit. I recognized that as bad, and I'm a lot better now than I was before
1
. Naturally, I assume that everyone has that same instinct. It's easy to tell when a bottle is empty, and I think a lot of people have a reluctance to throw away perfectly good formula
2
. I suggest that doing so teaches babies and toddlers to ignore their bodies' satiety signals, so that they continue eating until they're full. That lack of sensitivity to being full probably sticks around, so they're more likely to overeat when they're older, too. I figure a way to test this would be to compare children whose breast milk is "directly-sourced" to those whose mothers pump and feed them with bottles.
¶ 1429 Posted at 04.57 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
deep thoughts
)
I finished Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series last weekend. The series is named after the two main characters, Jack Aubrey, an officer in the Royal Navy, and his friend Stephen Maturin, a physician and naturalist. The 20 books that make up the series take place during the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th century. The movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" that came out a few years ago was mostly based on a few of the books (at least 3 by my count). I liked the movie well enough, and it was certainly realistic, but it was a three star movie and these are four star books.
O'Brian writes in a style that fits the era, and he has a talent for exquisite description. He knows his characters very well, and writes them as real people, not pawns for advancing the story. Much of the plot arc depends on the technical details of sailing, which might be off-putting to some, but it also emphasizes the degree to which sailors were at the mercy of the weather. It's simply amazing what sophisticated things they were able to accomplish in this pre-Industrial time, when missions ran for years thousands of miles from any friendly port, and out of communication for months at a time. Then there's the unsettlingly primitive nature of other things, which is amply illustrated by one of the characters being a physician; what passed for medicine in 1810 is scary. It's not just about sailing; a few of the books take place with practically no ships, and much of the plot often concerns the personal or political. Using the Royal Navy as a centerpiece also affords an author ample opportunity for teaching us about the world of that time, when colonialism was still strong, but the earthquakes of the American and French Revolutions were shifting the world's foundations, and there was still much to be explored and discovered. Then there are the insights into the bizarre politics of the day, that odd mixture of democracy and monarchy and corruption that created the British Empire.
To be sure, it can be a little confusing at times, as a lot of the language is nautical (Wikipedia can tell you a lot, though), and even when it isn't, it's 19th century British English. However, all of that is necessary for O'Brian to pull you into the time and place, which he does really, really well. I do wish each book devoted a dozen pages to maps and diagrams, however, and another dozen to a glossary.
There were actually more than 20 books. O'Brian died at the ripe old age of 80 when he was 3 chapters into the 21st book. A word of advice: don't start a long series of novels when you're 56 years old, because you're going to piss off a lot of people if you die before you finish (not that he expected to write 20 when he started). I get annoyed when the estates of famous writers like Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert flog their works and turn out sequels to series that were done and done when their creators were still alive. This is different. O'Brian ended in the middle of a book, and clearly the story had legs. I don't know which author could write the way O'Brian did and do justice to his vision, but I sure want more.
¶ 1430 Posted at 01.41 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
books
)
Sitcoms are notorious for all having the same basic characters. There's the funny one, the neurotic one, the vain one, the ditzy one, the weird one, etc. I'm starting to think that it's not so much a lack of imagination as it is being true to reality. The key concept here is "adaptive radiation," taken from evolutionary biology. Basically, in adaptive radiation, what happens is that a single species will fracture to fill available ecological niches over time, no matter what the starting point. Darwin's Galapagos finches are the prototypical example.
I've noticed something similar in people. You'd think that the student population of Rice is all nerds. You'd be mostly right, if you were comparing against the general population, and yet Rice had the same groups as any other university or even high school. There were the jocks, the stoners, the goths, the earnest thespians, etc. Even though Rice had higher admissions standards, there were still variations along the axes secondary to selection for entry. These became more pronounced over time once the academic attributes were more normalized. You may have distinguished yourself as the smart guy in high school, but in a place where most everyone was smart, you branched out (possibly by being extra smart).
I figure the same thing happens in social groups. Once you factor out the common ingredient that brought you together, "the other stuff" becomes more significant. Furthermore, there's an inevitable conflict that will usually keep two people from occupying the same niche. The loser either finds a different niche or leaves the group entirely. These roles are not fixed to the person, but rather to the group; a single person could be the funny one in one group and the smart one in a different one. This subtle jockeying tends to shake out similarly across social groups, no matter their nucleus. Thus, you inevitably end up with the funny one, the neurotic one, the vain one, the ditzy one, and the weird one in every group.
¶ 1432 Posted at 12.17 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
tv
|
deep thoughts
)
The top ten countries in the world according to one particular statistic are:
- China
- Iran
- Pakistan
- Iraq
- Sudan
- United States of America
- Saudi Arabia
- Yemen
- Vietnam
- Kuwait
You can see we're not in good company. Without knowing what the statistic is, I think just being associated with those nine nations is enough reason to push for a change. Any guesses what the issue is? I'll post the answer later.
¶ 1433 Posted at 08.46 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
issues
)
Ours is the first generation born after the rise of feminism. We're the first generation of Americans where it's accepted and even expected for women to be as educated as men, and to pursue professional careers of their own. That has two significant effects: one, men value intelligence more than they used to, and two, men and women tend to meet in college or at work a lot more. I'm guessing that means that men and women in couples that form nowadays are much more likely to be intellectual matches than they were 50 years ago. It's well-established that intelligence has a strong hereditary component, so I predict that the intelligence bell curve is going to flatten. There are going to be fewer people around the middle, and more people at the extremes (all else being equal). The smartest will be smarter, and there will be more of them.
¶ 1434 Posted at 08.40 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
deep thoughts
)
Too many guys wear shirts that are too big for them. I know fashion is subjective. I know what looks goofy to me might look fine to someone else. But. The shirt is too big. You want to know how to tell? Look at the shoulder seam. If it's on your arm, the shirt is too big. With your arms at your sides, the seam should be about where your shoulders drop off (approximately, since we all buy off the rack, right?).
This isn't an arbitrary rule of thumb. This is engineering. Point one. Your arm moves. The shirt will flex and move at the shoulder. Seams are stronger than fabric. You want the seam at the point of stress. Point two. Your shirt will break at your shoulder. It will also break at the seam. If the seam is in the right place, there will only be one break. If it's in the wrong place, your shirt will break twice. That does not look good. Point three. Clothing manufacturers know this. They size the rest of the shirt appropriately. Big clothes on small people makes them look smaller. Big clothing on big people makes them look bigger. Wear the right size. You'll look better.
¶ 1437 Posted at 11.44 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
appearances
)
I found this cool moth in our garage:
We came across about 10 of these birds wandering around a nearby neighborhood:
I'm pretty sure they're Helmeted Guineafowl. There was an old sign on someone's lawn saying "Guinea Crossing," so I assume they're someone's pets and just roam around. Pretty strange.
¶ 1439 Posted at 12.54 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
pictures
)
Old people lose money buying commemorative coins. The short of it is that one of those late night television advertisers told a bunch of seniors that these commemorative coins would appreciate in value and were a good investment. After buying them, the buyers discovered that the coins' market value was much less than they had thought.
Now, I don't want to sound heartless. Nobody wants to see anyone impoverished, especially not the elderly. But come on:
Harold Tice of Austin pulled the money out of his 401(k), his home equity and trust funds meant for his grandsons' college education to invest in the coins...
And:
"I'm 75 years old, and that's all the money I have, and I can't afford to lose it..."
There's a whole lot wrong here. First off, though, did the coin sellers deceive the customers? Maybe, it's not clear. The only explicit claims that they made were that the coins would appreciate significantly, which is true, given enough time. They mentioned how supposedly during the Great Depression that the only currency worth anything was gold. I'm not sure about that argument. It's certainly true that a lot of sensible people invest in precious metals to protect themselves against economic shocks during all economic conditions.
Even if the sellers did lie, the buyers were irresponsible (to put it nicely). Did any of them get a second opinion from someone about whether this was a good idea? Did they do any comparison shopping to see if they could find cheaper coins? What were they doing speculating with money they couldn't afford to lose? Six people lost $420,000 total. That's $70,000 each on average. If you're draining your 401(k), your home equity, and your grandsons' trust funds to buy any one thing, be it US Treasury bonds or tulip bulbs, you're making a big mistake. Don't get me wrong, the coin dealers are probably jerks. That doesn't matter. Even if they were swell guys with only your best interests at heart, it's a stupid thing to do.
This also hits upon a market fundamental. Coins are just like anything else: what they're worth is what someone is willing to pay. I have a 1993 Toyota Corolla worth about $1300, according to the Kelley Blue Book. If I ask you to pay $5000 for it, and you do, well, good for me. You didn't get taken, robbed, conned, or anything else. It's entirely your choice whether to pay $5000 for it. If you then try to sell it for more, but nobody is offering more than $1300, is that really my fault? You gave me the money willingly. If you're really looking for someone to blame, go after all the people who won't pay you more than $1300 for the car. There's no such thing as intrinsic value, and thus there's no such thing as an unfair price. There's just the price you're unwilling to pay or unable to get.
¶ 1440 Posted at 01.15 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
stupid people
|
freedom
)
I rarely found class lectures to be useful when I was in college. The only benefit was they imposed some degree of structure, making sure the material passed through my brain at least once. I guess it's also worth something that it gave me a chance to talk to the prof, but I rarely needed that, and they had office hours anyway. In general, lectures were like textbooks on tape, except without the tape.
One thing they definitely were not is teaching. I can read the book on my own. Teaching is about interaction. Teaching isn't a broadcast-only script; it's a stream that flows and changes direction in reaction to the students. Teaching is the teacher knowing her students and customizing the presentation to them. She skips the parts that they already know and spends extra time on the ones that are hard. She uses different media and styles of presentation to adapt the material to different learning styles. There are frequent questions, extended explanations, digressions, group discussions, etc. The teacher embeds the relevant concepts in a context familiar to the students to help them understand. The teacher is available for one-on-one supplemental tutoring in case any individual is having trouble, to customize the presentation to an audience of one. Printed textbooks are one-size-fits-all
1
. So are lectures. Real teaching is something different.
It makes sense why things went that way. Lecture comes from the Latin verb legere, to read. The first universities appeared centuries before the printing press. Books were rare and expensive. Reading aloud was the only way to disseminate the information. It doesn't make sense why things are still that way. It would be a far better use of resources to focus on creating really high quality teaching materials that are widely used
2
, and allowing the faculty to focus on research and real teaching. The current system is just a waste for everyone involved.
¶ 1441 Posted at 01.44 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
learning
)
Charles Stross is an uneven writer, but he sure is a smart guy. From a transcript of a talk he gave:
One of the biggest risks we face is that of sleep-walking into a police state, simply by mistaking the ability to monitor everyone for even minute legal infractions for the imperative to do so.
As much as I like that quote, it's worth reading the whole thing. This should help you understand why science fiction isn't just interesting, it's important.
¶ 1442 Posted at 04.06 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
quotes
|
science!
)
I take no pleasure in the passing of Jerry Falwell. To be sure, he was a bad man. He was the epitome of the entrenched hard-liner. He spread hatred and bigotry, and did a lot to hold back the progress of civilization. The wheels of progress will move more smoothly without him in the way. Nevertheless, his death is not a cause for celebration. I hate the idea of living in a world where the only way to achieve progress is to kill those holding it back, or at least to wait until they die. I regret that Jerry Falwell didn't learn the errors of his ways while he was still alive, and while it could still do good. Surely humanity is capable of more. A world where everyone's beliefs and views are effectively given to them at birth and cast in stone is a depressing, pointless one. Without the capacity to learn and grow, we are left with little. Jerry Falwell does not seem to have learned or grown much in his time on this Earth, but there was still hope as long as he lived. Now there is no longer that hope, and so I can take no joy in his death.
¶ 1443 Posted at 09.43 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
news
|
issues
)
A co-worker and I have been going back and forth about the usefulness of tests to measure a job candidate's potential. He pointed me at a weblog post discussing how knowledge doesn't automatically mean ability, suggesting that the point was that knowledge tests are wrong. I don't quite agree. It's not about whether tests work, but rather whether tests measure the things you care about.
Rarely do tests measure exactly what the job calls for. That's due to a number of factors, among them that the job isn't clearly-defined and subject to change, or that the skills it requires are hard to measure, or that testing is just too much work. As a result, we use proxies, more easily measured attributes that we believe correlate to job ability. Sometimes these correlations are stupid, where someone may be thought of as a bad programmer because he always has to look up the difference between an inner join and an outer join (that's me). Other times they are useful, like determining someone's potential as a running back from their 40-yard sprint times.
It's not that knowledge tests are wrong. Knowledge tests are quite good as tests of knowledge (duh). What's unclear is whether they are good proxies for ability. I think the evidence is clear that they're neither excellent nor awful. It's important to call out this relationship because of how often we use easy proxies as shortcuts for harder or impossible measurements. We assume that someone who writes clearly is intelligent, or that someone who speaks assertively has given the matter much thought or is right, or that someone who is Indian is a software developer.
This proxy problem happens in a lot of different situations. IQ tests certainly measure something that correlates to intelligence, but it's pretty definitely not intelligence itself. Programmer productivity often correlates to lines of code produced or bugs fixed, except when it doesn't
1.
We also see it in measurements of school quality
2. Tests are just like statistics: it matters a whole lot how you use them.
¶ 1444 Posted at 11.45 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
deep thoughts
)
While getting lost in Wikipedia, I came across this article on Australian criminal Mark Read. Note the sidebar: "Part of the series on Australian criminals." There is no corresponding series on American criminals.
¶ 1447 Posted at 01.27 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
funny
)
The first movie I remember mutating the studio logo was "The Matrix" turning it green and monochromatic. Everybody's doing it now, of course. Is it just me, or was that the first one? Or, if not the first, was it the first mainstream one?
¶ 1448 Posted at 11.00 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
)
Speaking of movie intros, I could do without them entirely. We started watching "Superman Returns" and there were like 2 minutes of opening credits. They should just launch into the movie and have all the credits at the end. It's not like any of it is necessary to understand the movie; indeed, it detracts from the experience. Obviously I can fast forward through them, but I shouldn't have to, and sometimes they combine the credits with introductory scenes. I'm sure the Directors' Guild and the Writers' Guild and all of them are the ones who insist on it 1.
The other annoying thing is how some DVDs always make you go through the FBI warning and often trailers and some stupid intro to the DVD menu. You can't fast-forward, go to the menu, or do anything else to get around it. I don't buy DVDs, but it would really annoy me to have to go through that every time with a movie I ostensibly owned. What I've started doing is putting the DVD in and hitting PLAY a few minutes before I'm actually going to sit down to watch the movie. That works, but again, I shouldn't have to. The DVD consortium has rules. You can't get a DVD player that actually lets you skip the parts you want to skip. Not only do they have rules, but the DMCA makes it so that nobody can break the rules.
¶ 1449 Posted at 09.02 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
)
Political correctness is about changing the way people express themselves. In theory, that means that people will think differently. In practice, it accomplishes little.
Consider the evolution of "crippled." People didn't like being called "crippled" because there was negative baggage, so we started using "disabled" instead. Wouldn't you know it, "disabled" started to have negative connotations, so we switched to "handicapped." Surprisingly, that didn't work, so we decided to give "physically challenged" a try. Well, I guess it was too challenging for us, so we moved on to "differently abled." You get the point.
We start using news term to avoid the negative connotations of the old. The problem is that the baggage wasn't attached to the old word, but to the old concept. As long as the concept and its perception remain the same, the baggage will always catch up. There's how fired became laid off became downsized became right-sized might soon become externally redeployed
1.
There are certainly plenty of apparent exceptions. Contrast n-plus-5-letters to black
2.
Gay is still a neutral term where faggot is not. I suspect that neither of those is an actual exception. Instead, they both demonstrate how newer terms that are free of baggage can only do so when society at large becomes less bigoted and judgmental. The contrast with fired makes it more clear. Involuntary disemployment is always going to be a negative event because it's real and meaningful. It's good to avoid loaded, bad terms for things like race, gender, sexual orientation, and other things that don't (or shouldn't) affect people's lives in general. Losing a job or a limb isn't one of those things. It's one thing to be respectful of disabilities, it's another thing to try to wish them away. I think the key distinction is whether someone would mind shifting into the other category. I think I might mind being black a bit, but much less than 40 years ago. Ditto for being female or gay. However, I can't imagine ever not minding losing leg. That is always going to be viewed as a big bummer. What's important isn't the futile quest for a positive name for something negative, but treating people with respect. And that's a lot harder than changing the way people talk.
¶ 1450 Posted at 05.29 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
observations
|
deep thoughts
)
Bryan Singer should have stayed on with "X-Men 3" instead.
¶ 1451 Posted at 10.05 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
)
I don't think I quite noticed in previous readings how much fun Neal Stephenson had writing "Snow Crash.
¶ 1456 Posted at 10.40 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
books
)
Both Jessica and my mother were surprised (on separate occasions) when I changed a CD in a carousel-style player without stopping the CD being played. Both players have an "Exchange" button for that reason. I guess most people don't know about it. Really, why should they? The "Open/Close" button ought to do that. There shouldn't be one button for "stop CD and open" and another button for "open without stopping CD." If people really want to stop the CD that's playing, they can press "Stop.
¶ 1457 Posted at 08.56 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
devices
)
I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice the growing similarity between Google Earth and the program of the same name in "Snow Crash." It's no coincidence; it's a inevitable application and a logical interface. It's still funny, though.
¶ 1458 Posted at 09.06 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
software
|
books
)
There's a site out there doing web-based brain games. I tried their LumosIQ. I think I need more training. I got 127 on attention, 134 on memory, and 152 on processing speed, for a total score of 137.
¶ 1460 Posted at 05.12 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
neat
|
learning
)
And if yours doesn't, you should get one
1.
They're not expensive. And they're indispensible for situations like the one that greeted me this morning. We have a little mini spray thing for cleaning out poopy diapers that attaches inline between the toilet supply and the toilet. Sometime in the middle of the night, its hose decided to spring a leak. When we noticed it this morning, the bathroom was flooded as well as the carpet in the hallway and parts of both the office and Uma's room. My shop vac must have sucked up 10 gallons or more of water. This isn't the first time it's saved us, either; I can remember a morning a few months ago when I was under the kitchen sink with an uncapped hot water supply blasting in my face. If you have a house, get a shop vac.
¶ 1461 Posted at 09.32 AM ⇒
No Comments
(
house
)
A device for reporting problems with movies to the staff. Someone brought an unhappy infant to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" screening we went to last weekend.
¶ 1462 Posted at 12.55 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
|
good things
)
I've been finding it hard to find a clear dividing line between personal freedom and economic freedom. It makes me wonder whether the future perspective will think of state-run companies as being like state-sponsored churches and communism like a theocracy. Or maybe I should just go to bed.
¶ 1463 Posted at 10.24 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
deep thoughts
|
issues
)
- "Echo Park" and "The Closers" by Michael Connelly: More Harry Bosch detective stories.
- "Glasshouse" by Charles Stross: Stross uses an artificial world to poke fun at the present day, but he needs to work on his first person perspective; it's too clunky.
- "The Colour of Magic" by Terry Pratchett: I like fantasy fiction, but the authors take themselves so seriously. Not Pratchett. Imagine "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy," but applied to fantasy fiction.
- "Syrup" by Max(x?) Barry: A funny parody of the soft drink industry. It's more like his latest, "Company," than it is like his second book, "Jennifer Government." Maybe a little too much. If you just read this one, it's good, but if you read them all, you'll hope that he tries something a little different with his next one.
- "Stamping Butterflies" by Jon Courtenay Grimwood: It's all right, but I'm getting kind of tired of obscurely related plot parallel plotlines shift in different times and cryptic slow reveals.
- "The Jennifer Morgue" by Charles Stross: the sequel to "The Atrocity Archives," and I think Stross's sweet spot (along with "Singularity Sky"). He's clever and comic, but not over-the-top (though he gets a little too close). It probably helps that the main character is almost his alter ego (I assume).
- "Debugging" by David Agans: a 10-page pamphlet expanded to book length without adding anything of note. The inclusion of numerous mostly boring "war stories" and lots of short intended-to-be-funny-but-not-quite asides tells me Agans's publisher kept telling him to write more words.
¶ 1464 Posted at 12.01 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
books
)
I think it's nuts to pay $500 + 2 year contract for a cell phone, but after seeing the ads, well, I understand.
¶ 1465 Posted at 04.09 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
whoa
|
neat
)
The "Piracy" button on that theater feedback device is a bad idea. Among the reasons is that it won't work. That's because the theater owners will learn to ignore piracy reports. It practically never happens. Bad picture? It happens from time to time. Ditto for bad sound. "Other disturbance," like obnoxious people talking or a baby crying? That happens practically every time. But someone using a camcorder? I've never seen it.
There are something like 35,000 movie theater screens in the United States (source). Each one shows about 5 movies per day. That's 175,000 showings per day, or 1,225,000 per week. How many of those have someone pointing a camcorder at the screen? A dozen? Maybe? Think about how many movie patrons are teenaged boys. How many fire alarms in schools are a result of fire, and how many are a result of some kid being a punk? If you give people this button to report something that most people aren't going to see even once in their lives (do the match), you're going to end up with a huge false positive rate. It's going to be so high that that the aggregate cost of sending someone into the theater to look around will greatly exceed any possible reward. They might as well have not have the button at all
1
¶ 1466 Posted at 04.37 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
movies
|
followup
)
On the other hand, while I can certainly admire the iPhone, I don't think I'd want to buy a computer that prevented me from running my own code. The phone companies won't let you, of course, because they want you to pay through the nose for slow, buggy stuff from them. So I'll go iPhone-less.
¶ 1467 Posted at 08.01 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
gadgets
|
followup
)
According to the CIA World Factbook, the median age in the United States is 36.6 years old. That's scarily near. In 8 years, I'll be older than half of America. Yipe. I'm already older than half of the world (listed under "World" after "West Bank," rather than at the top as you'd expected).
¶ 1469 Posted at 03.15 PM ⇒
No Comments
(
fyi
)
I knew that the ratio between successive items in the Fibonacci sequence converged on the golden ratio φ, but I only recently discovered that it doesn't matter where you start (including wild starting points, too); if it follows the Fibonacci form, you'll always get to φ:
- 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89: 89/55 = 1.618182
- 1, 100, 101, 201, 302, 503, 805, 1308, 2113, 3421: 3421/2113 = 1.619025
- -1, -2, -3, -5, -8, -13, -21, -34, -55, -89: -89/-55 = 1.618182
- 152, -5, 147, 142, 289, 431, 720, 1151, 1871, 3022: 3022/1871 = 1.615179
- 1e-06, 42, 42.000001, 84.000001, 126.000002, 210.000003, 336.000005, 546.000008, 882.000013, 1428.000021: 1428/882 = 1.619048
- 0.01, 1, 1.01, 2.01, 3.02, 5.03, 8.05, 13.08, 21.13, 34.21: 34/21 = 1.619025
¶ 1470 |
