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.
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.
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.
Where do people get the idea that the Oscars have 1 billion viewers? How can they not instantly see that's wrong
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? I'd elaborate, but the New Yorker already did.
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Answer: innumeracy and parochialism. Most people don't have any idea of what the US or world populations are, and that maybe, just maybe, an American event hosted in America by Americans presenting awards to American movie-markers might not be of interest to non-Americans.
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'smoreinfo. 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
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.
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.
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Ironically, I couldn't find the report on CERN's web site, the irony being that the World Wide Web was developed at CERN in order to distribute information more efficiently.
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.
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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.
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There's the completely valid justification that poor people may get hurt disproportionately by this, and I don't want to be sanguine about that. There are several things wrong with that. One, it assumes that circumstances are static. People with less money will adapt just like the rest of us. Two, how many people do you see buying Hummers or Priuses now? They get less benefit from our currently still very cheap gasoline, since they don't drive the big gas guzzlers, and they get none of the tax credit for hybrids (meaning the policy actually costs them, as they pay taxes for no benefit). Three, it assumes that our only assistance to the poor is and will be through cheap gasoline.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The New York Times Magazine has an article about how animal shelters are trying harder to make adoptions work, featuring Austin's own Town Lake Animal Shelter, which is where our dog Molly came from.
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
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. 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
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. 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.
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It's not like she chose how much to put on the plate, after all; it's not her fault there's waste.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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. 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
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, and allowing the faculty to focus on research and real teaching. The current system is just a waste for everyone involved.
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I used the qualifier printed because electronic books offer the potential to be the best of both worlds, like in Neal Stephenson's book The Diamond Age. Of course, few people in the mainstream think about it that way; they just think of e-books as the same old thing using a different presentation technology. That's the way things go, just like the first online store fronts were print catalogs in HTML. When you learn a new thing, you start by doing the old things in a slightly different way.
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As opposed to the corrupt practice of professors using their own textbooks and forcing the students to buy them at ridiculous prices.
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.
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.
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.
1 And that's ignoring the skewing of behavior caused by the test itself; if I get rewarded for producing more code, I'll do that, even if it's no better.
2 Except that's even worse, because the tests are absolute measures, not relative ones. Assume one school has ninth graders in the 75th percentile and twelfth graders in the 75th percentile, while another school has 25th percentile ninth graders and 50th percentile twelfth graders. The former school will be thought of as a better school, even though the latter school clearly did a better job. Schools aren't there to produce students of a particular quality; they're there to improve their students.
The NY Times says employers are unhappy with the new immigration bill because "it would not cure the severe labor shortages they foresee in the coming decade." I have a cure for labor shortages that works every time in every situation: pay more.
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?
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.
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 redeployed1.
There are certainly plenty of apparent exceptions. Contrast n-plus-5-letters to black2.
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.
1
I googled that phrase expecting to find a nice link to Max Barry's Company, but found almost nothing except a real world use in this EU report (PDF). It's in the wild!
2
Assuming black is ok these days. White seems fine, and I'm cool with brown, but that's hardly conclusive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
1
I'm sure they know this, and its inclusion is there to placate the studios, or something like that
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.
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).
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:
I just saw the deserts episode of "Planet Earth." Wow. Maybe I've just forgotten what nature documentaries are like, but it was really great. My friend tells me it's even better in HD, which I'm too cheap for. I highly recommend watching. There were so many "holy crap" moments.
The Alamo Drafthouse, a local theater chain, sponsored a contest to come up with unnecessary sequels. I haven't seen any of the trailers, but just the posters are good. My favorites are the ones for "Se7en," "Cast Away" (either one; they're basically the same), "Street Fighter," one of the "Apollo 13" ones, and the sequel to "A Clockword Orange." The one for "United 93" is obvious, but it required big ones. Too bad there's no poster yet.
Sometimes I type without looking at either the screen or the keyboard. I never internalized orienting my fingers based on the pips often found on the F and J keys, so sometimes my hands end up being off by one. Tjat cam ;ead tp cpmoca; resi;ts sp,eto,es. I should just write a thing that detects when that's happening and automatically corrects it. How many semicolons do I really need in one sentence?
A very, very, very dedicated entymologist has devised a pain scale for insect stings. Now there's an objective reference for how much pain you feel. Too bad scorpions and spiders aren't on there; I'd like to know exactly how much it would have hurt had I gotten up close to that giant spider I saw crossing the road the other day (from my car! from 30 feet away! it was huge!).
A trip into Wikipedia brought me to the brown recluse spider, considered one most dangerous due to the potency of its venom. In discussing a number of bite treatments, the article noted, "None of these treatments have been subjected to controlled, randomized trials to conclusively show benefit." Indeed. I imagine it would be hard to find volunteers.
Reading about how engagement rings are silly, I noticed one of the embedded links was to a 2 sentence sidebar. Hang on a second... How come the sidebar isn't, you know, on the side? Wasn't Slate launched as a "web magazine?"
James Hornfischer's "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" is something I would have eaten whole as a 13-year old, when I went through a phase where I read all the WWII books in our community library. It's a detailed recounting of part of the last great naval battle in the greatest naval war in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The book focuses on one of its smaller consitutuent actions, the Battle of Samar, where a Japanese force nearly destroyed the defenders of the beachhead occupied by Douglas MacArthur's invasion force.
The Imperial Japanese Navy bet everything on stopping the US invasion of the Philippines in late 1944, as its success would enable the US to cut off Japanese access to conquests in Southeast Asia, including the essential petroleum resources of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). The title derives from the fact that this was the last battle in which "ships of the line" were significant1, ushering in the age of the aircraft carrier, as well as the importance of destroyers, a.k.a., "tin cans," in halting the Japanese offensive.
Admiral William Halsey allowed himself and the Third Fleet to be decoyed by the few remaining Japanese aircraft carriers, enabling another force of battleships and cruisers to slip past and attack the elements of the Seventh Fleet covering the landing. This force included the largest battleships ever built, the Musashi and Yamato. Task Force Taffy 3, the primary target, was composed of destroyers and "escort carriers," small aircraft carriers converted from merchant ships. In spite of being outgunned, in a battle that saw an aircraft carrier being sunk by gunfire and the first Kamikaze attack, the American forces managed to defeat the Japanese and force them to retreat, at great cost to themselves. Halsey's diversion was successful in destroying the remaining Japanese aircraft carriers, in spite of the great risk to the landing. The Japanese Navy was not destroyed, but it never was a threat again, and thus the book was closed on the once mighty Japanese Imperial Navy, less than three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Hornfischer's history is a highly readable narration of the battles. His style is easy and light, with effective description of the broader situation as well as the finer details that convey the horror of the war. His research included many interviews with American survivors, and his thoroughness is apparent. He tends a little to the melodramatic and poetic, but I expect some readers would view that as a virtue rather than an annoyance. His only real flaw is a tendency to include names and backgrounds of individuals who end up playing no great part of the action; there are hundreds of names to keep track of, and it would have been easier to remember the key players if so many bit players hadn't been cluttering up the narrative. I would have liked to have read some accounts from the Japanese perspective, but Hornifischer primarily uses Japanese sources to corroborate or fill in gaps in American sources. His aim is not to provide the authoritative history, but instead to tell a particular story. At this, he is successful.
1 Strictly speaking, that's an assertion rather than a fact, as there have been no significant naval battles since then.
After my scare last month with almost losing a few years of photos, I set up Jungle Disk to back up my important files over the Interweb. Jungle Disk uses Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) to store arbitrary amounts of data at multiple geographically separate data centers1. It's a lot more reliable than anything I could piece together myself, and it's trivially easy to set up. Of course, uploading 20-odd gigs over my simple Road Runner connection means I'm not going to have a full backup completed until, oh, next Wednesday, but after that...
1 I wish I could work on something that cool at my job.
Are confirmation numbers really confirmations, or are they just record keys? That is to say, how does a confirmation prove that I paid my gas bill other than to uniquely identify my payment record? If their database farts and my payment record gets lost, is my confirmation number worthless? My guess is yes. What they really need to do is cryptographically sign a receipt at the time of payment that I can hang onto. It won't prove that I paid, but it can prove that they said I did, which is good enough for me. I suspect most people haven't thought about what a confirmation number really means, otherwise they'd realize that it probably doesn't confirm much of anything.
Bruce Schneier has a fine essay attempting to bring some sanity to way politicians and the media freak out about so-called terrorist plots that are not really any threat at all.
Before you watch this video, be warned that it will ruin the end of "Once Upon a Time in the West." I don't like Arcade Fire's new album as much as I like "Funeral," but "My Body Is A Cage" is a great song, and making it the soundtrack of this scene is pure genius.
This essay from the American Enterprise Institute isn't the first time I've heard the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s being the real reason for the collapse of the USSR, but it's certainly the most thorough. It was written by a former cabinet minister under Yeltsin, which gives it some added weight. I think it's especially noteworthy because one might assume that the AEI would be interested in burnishing the legend of Ronald Reagan.
I recently read "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger," by Marc Levinson. Sounds kind of boring, huh? You might be surprised. While it certainly drags in places, it's a pretty interesting story. This is a book intended for a popular audience, and it generally hits the mark. There could have been less information about various political and regulatory developments, but much of that was essential for demonstrating both the resistance and then the transformation wrought by the shipping container.
50 years ago, if you wanted to send 50 bags of coffee across the ocean, someone would walk each back one by one onto a freighter and find somewhere to stick it. The process was unbelievably inefficient. Goods would take more time to be loaded and unloaded than they actually spent on the ocean in transit. Then there were the union rules and interstate and international commerce rules, which might be enough to turn anyone into a laissez-faire capitalist. For instance, if the longshoremen received a palletized shipment for transport, they would unpack the pallet on the dock, repack the same shipment onto the same pallet, and only then load it, billing the shipper for the extra time. The Interstate Commerce Commission in the United States had books of rules about how much truckers, railroads, and cargo ships could charge for each commodity, and which routes they could take; a trucker couldn't take an alternate, shorter route from Nashville to Atlanta unless his company had the rights to that route, and he had to drive the truck back empty if they only had cargo rights in one direction. Needless to say, all of this had a crippling impact on efficiency, and thus a huge increase in costs.
The container was by no means a non-obvious invention. Various attempts had been made over a period of decades to rationalize freight, but ran into various obstacles due to (lack of) scale, political consideration, union resistance, or technological problems. Only in the late 1950s did the various factors come together with the drive and vision of one Malcom McLean, who wasn't even in the marine shipping business. Over the course of just a couple of decades, the container completely transformed the shipping business, with growth to match that of any high tech startup. The changes rippled throughout the world economy as land-based shipping and manufacturers adapted. That a computer assembly plant in Tennessee can put together Korean RAM, Taiwanese motherboards, German CPUs, and Japanese displays delivered yesterday to fulfill a $300 order today owes everything to the revolution of the shipping container. It ranks with the automobile or the telephone in its transformative effect on society, but unlike those other inventions, its impact was hidden from the public eye. Until now.
I saw a pair of these birds in my neighbor's yard this morning:
I also made a
larger collage of several images
that's too heavy to post on the front page. They're clearly some kind of wading bird; unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any shots of them in flight; they have impressive wingspans. I'd guess they were about 18 inches tall standing fully upright. I'm not sure how clearly you can see some of the details; they have a reddish orange rim around their eyes and a thin white crest. I've never seen them before, so I'm guessing they're non-local migrants.
John and I figured out that the unknown birds I saw yesterday are juvenile Yellow-crowned Night Herons. We initially thought it might be a Green Heron (which isn't very green). Austin is squarely in their range, while we're at the periphery of the Yellow-crowned Night Heron's range, but it seems like a pretty solid match. Maybe that's why they looked lost.
Iusedthewisdomofcrowds to help with the identification. I kind of feel obligated to get a Flickr account and upload my pictures now.
When I was a young lad, I made sport of killing the houseflies that gathered in our garage. I became quite good at it, to the point of using rubber bands to kill them from 5 or more feet away. There were three key pieces of information that allowed me to achieve such prowess as a hunter of flies:
Flies can see well in all directions except behind them,
It is possible to get close to a fly if you move slowly,
Most importantly, in order to get into the air from a surface, a fly will jump a few inches.
My standard technique for killing a housefly standing on a table then became to sneak up behind them slowly, position my hands to either side, and suddenly clap them together a couple of inches above. The fly would see my hands coming and jump into the air to fly away, just in time to get squashed. Eventually, I got sick of cleaning fly guts off my hands and learned to cup my palms; that way, most of the time I wouldn't smack the fly directly so much as stun it with the pressure wave from clapping (so I assume). Then I could pick it up with a paper towel and squish it cleanly.
We've had a lot of flies in our house lately. These flies are a little less cooperative; they tend not to land where I can get them. As a result, I've had to try to get them in the air. The most important thing when stalking prey is to never take your eyes off it. Close off the exits to make it harder for them to get away. That's because you'll probably miss on most attempts, and they're easy to lose sight of. Finally, rather than clapping at a moving target, I try to swat them out of the air using a rolled up newspaper or sometimes just my hand. Now, flies are rather light, so that's not usually enough to kill one. The trick is to hit the fly so it goes zooming into a wall or the floor. You'll hear a satisfying "thwock" when you do it right. Then you just pick the fly up and dispose of it. Be aware that the fly might just be stunned, so it may right itself and fly away. Then you have to do it again. This time, it'll probably be easier.
Let's suppose I was out late last night stealing cars, and my boss mentions I look tired. Suppose I make the following statements:
Antihistamines make me sleepy.
I am allergic to cats.
My neighbor has a cat.
My neighbor is out of town for a while.
I do not make the explicitly false statements "I am watching my neighbor's cat" and "I took an antihistamine." Did I lie?
What matters with a lie isn't the exact phrase used, but rather what a reasonable person would infer, and (to a lesser extent) what the speaker's intent was. People frequently use half-truths like the above to intentionally give a misleading impression without making any single false statement. However, it's not just about the statements in isolation, but their collective effect that makes it a lie. A lie isn't about truth or falsehood; otherwise we'd call a mistaken statement a lie. What makes a lie is the intentional attempt to deceive.
I wanted to like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan," I really did. He just didn't write a good book. The premise is great, that our world increasingly dominated by rare events of great impact, which models based on bell curves just can't cope with. His thesis is that we focus far too much on the frequent, normal case when it's just not that important. As a trader, his strategy was to put most of his portfolio in very safe investments while investing a small part of it in a basket of risky investments highly levered to unpredictable, non-linear phenomena. An interesting insight he makes is that risky investments may be less risky than the so-called safe investments because their risks are out in the open. In other words, all companies have risk, but the risks to the safe ones are just harder to see
1.
The book's core idea is well worth exploring, but Taleb spends far too much time blasting the ignorance and closed-mindedness of the establishment, and far too little time supporting his argument with hard data. To be sure, innate in the ideas of "The Black Swan" is that data can only refute a hypothesis, rather than confirming one, but he can and does use that fact to attack the standard models of randomness. He just doesn't do it with any kind of rigor. Strictly speaking, you only need one data point to disprove a model, but if you want to convince people, you should do so with a heavy dose of evidence. As such, the book gets tedious when you realize there's no there there. It's all assertion. Sometimes that's all you can do, but don't waste your readers' time with your own grudges.
1 an instance of "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
Shepard Smith, Fox News anchor, went to a Chicago Fox affiliate to help them improve their local news operation:
His tips for improving the show included adding more music, bigger graphics and a faster pace... "I'm not here to talk to you about journalism," one witness recalled him saying. "I'm here to talk to you about good TV."
Woot. I'm a potential victim of identity theft. IBM lost tape backups holding employment information, including Social Security numbers. Mind you, I haven't been an IBM employee for 8 years, and even then it was as a summer intern. *sigh*.
Uma's been learning about things that are Mommy's or Daddy's or her own. She'll point at one of her toys and say, "Uma's!" I feel vaguely uneasy about teaching possessiveness, like I'm raising some little materialist. I feel a little like I'm teaching her something bad.
You've no doubt seen that phrase on sticks of gum, or bottles of water sold in a flat pack, or any number of individually packaged items sold in larger packages. It's kind of a curious phrase. The intent is clear: they don't want people to buy the product at the bulk rate and then turn it around and sell off the individual items. That would undercut the retailers who already sell the same product packaged (and labelled) for individual retail sale. The reason it's phrased that way is simple: they can't tell you not to break it up and sell the items singly. Once you buy it, it's your property, and you can do whatever you want with it. The best they can do is the rather limp suggestion I quote above. It's probably not targeted at you so much as it's targeted at the retailers themselves.
I like seeing pictures of famous people when they were a lot younger than now. Matthew Perry and Christina Applegate in 1988, for instance. He looks kind of Kyle MacLachlan to me in that shot.
Daniel says I was wrong. The statement is about complying with regulations regarding the listing of ingredients, nutritional information, etc. Here's some corroboration. So now we all know.
According to the LA Times, a publicist said of her difficulty obtaining an iPhone for Cher, "Doesn't winning Oscars, Grammys and Emmys entitle her to move to the front of the line?" No comment necessary, I think.
We're going to LA later this week. One of the things we're going to see is Griffith Park, which burned a few months ago. If deer had final words, I think I can guess what this one's were.
I escaped Los Angeles and all I got was this stupid blog post. We have some pictures. Note especially the last few.
If you get nervous at all driving on, say, I-35 in Austin, do not under any circumstances drive on the freeways in LA. That translates to "do not go to LA." people drive fast in LA. In Austin, you'll usually see a number of people driving 5-10 mph above the speed limit. In LA, the average speed is 10-15 mph above the speed limit. If you are uncomfortable doing that, don't get on the freeway. Someone driving 15 mph below the average speed of traffic is almost as much a danger as someone driving 15 mph above.
If the guidebook entry for a restaurant names the chef, and (especially) describes him (always a him, it seems) as a "rising star," the portions will be tiny and the food over-priced.
Don't stay downtown. Try Pasadena. Pasadena is nice.
We saw them setting up for and cleaning up after a shoot for the show "Heroes." It turns out that the building with the sculpture in front of it that was supposedly in NYC is actually a block down from the hotel where we stayed.
If you don't mind the freeways, driving on the 110 from Pasadena to downtown is fun, especially at night. Twisty and windy, zooming along at 60 mph, which is plenty fast for that road. It feels like a driving game.
If you want to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, do it in the morning.
LA is not hot compared to Austin. I dunno about the valley, since we never went there, but the ocean seems to keep LA cool. At least, it did while we were there.
I'm not one for art hanging on walls, but the Getty Center was super cool. The grounds, the architecture, and the setting were all impressive.
The beach gets really crowded on weekends or holidays. I don't know if I liked Venice or Santa Monica beach better.
Hollywood looks just as ugly as the rest of LA
Few places in the LA area accept Discover
Free parking in LA is nearly impossible. Metered parking is sometimes easy, sometimes hard; pay parking (valet or self-park) is ubiquitous
Motorcycles ride between the lanes on the freeway in heavy traffic. It appears to be the major benefit of having one in LA. I didn't see a motorcycle not doing this.
Gas costs barely more than in Austin
Traffic is a little unpredictable (a traffic jam at 11:30pm?), but the system works surprisingly well. Maybe I just had low expectations.
There's a buttload of Priuses in LA
Few flat surfaces lack graffiti
The Walt Disney Concert Hall is pretty cool, but it doesn't require a lot of time to appreciate it. Well, I could be wrong; we didn't have time to go inside.
Unlike Austin, the streets don't change names every 5 miles. Wilshire is Wilshire is Wilshire.
Man, Michael Jackson could have been huge. Bigger than Elvis and the Beatles put together. Am I the only one who thinks that Zombie Michael Jackson is less scary-looking than modern Michael Jackson?
I've been getting a lot of "You've received an e-card from a classmate!" spams. Or "mate," "friend," "lover," and a bunch of other variations. Today, I got one with the subject "You've received an e-card from a worshipper!"
I've read a bunch more books. To my dismay, I think I've forgotten a couple of the books I've read in the last month or so. Bummer. I'll probably end up reading them again, except I've taken them off my "to read" wishlist, and I don't think Amazon provides an "undelete" facility. Boo hoo.
"Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature," by Jan Lars Jensen: Step 1: write a creative semi-science fiction novel that has a tiny possibility of offending some religious fundamentalists on the other side of the world. Step 2: fall into insane paranoia about bringing about the end of the world upon publication of said novel. Step 3: struggle to regain sanity. Mental illness is not exciting or romantic, it's just very sad and disturbing, and Jensen tells us exactly why that is in this autobiographical account of his life after he finished Vishnu 3000.
"The Bonehunters" and "Reaper's Gale," books 6 and 7 of the Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" fantasy series. You don't jump into a series in the middle, so I'll leave it at that.
I finally managed to read the sequels to Alastair Reynolds's excellent Revelation Space. "Redemption Ark" and "Absolution Gap" continue the story, but don't measure up to the quality of the first book. Too many key characters disappear and are inadequately replaced, the coldly futuristic tone warms up, and the scope narrows.
"His Dark Materials" is a trilogy by Philip Pullman comprising "The Golden Compass," "The Subtle Knife," and "The Amber Spyglass." The series is sort of aimed at young adults in an attempt (by the publisher, at least) to cash in to the Harry Potter phenomenon, but is interesting and worthwhile for adults as well, even more than Harry Potter. It starts as a young girl's simple quest, and definitely feels like a young adult book at the beginning, but through the course of the three books ends up in a completely unexpected place. Though it is no doubt popular with the younger set, the story and themes are surprisingly mature ones that might only be fully appreciated by adults. Highly recommended.
Last among the books that Amir sent me is "The Prince of Nothing" trilogy by R. Scott Bakker. This is another series that rises above your standard fantasy genre fiction. It has complex characters, intriguing ideas, and a proper disregard for a number of the clichés of fantasy fiction. However, it has a few significant flaws which, though not fatal, certainly diminished my enjoyment. While the main characters were deep and well-written, there were a number of significant characters who were little more than cardboard cutouts. I say they were significant in that they were essential to advancing the plot, but in no other ways were they important, which was unsatisfying. Bakker could certainly have burned a couple dozen pages on fleshing out these characters. Secondly, while Bakker managed to a'voi'd t'he p'rob'lem o'f' to'o ma'n'y a'po'strop'hes, hë dïd sö wïth thë dübïöüs täctïc öf üsïng töö mänÿ ümläüts. Finally, and most significantly, his world was completely unimaginative. Oh, ok, this is a Crusade story. Those are the French, those are the Germans, those are the Arabs, those are the Byzantines, that's Christianity, this is Islam, there's the Mediterranean, that's Jerusalem, he's the Pope... It was so thinly disguised that it was almost worse than not disguising it and just writing an alternate history novel. It's still pretty good, but that lack of imagination definitely soured it.
Last among the books I remember reading (especially since I just read it over the weekend) is "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," by J.K. Rowling (duh). There's not much to say. It's what you would expect. It was certainly exciting, but it does highlight to me that the success of Harry Potter was due mostly to chance; there's nothing about Harry Potter that is that special. It's good, certainly, but it's not great. I read it mostly for closure.
NASA has a cool map showing solar eclipses and where they will be visible over the next 17 years. I think the asterisk indicates the point directly under the sun at totality. It looks like Austin will get a brush in about 17 years, though we may have to drive to see it; the map's resolution makes it unclear. Then there's one that will come close to Beijing just a week before the 2008 Summer Olympics. Then there's one in 2 years that's going to start just west of Bombay, passing a little to the north of it; I think the odds of my being in India then are rather low. Oh well; I can catch a fragment of the total lunar eclipse coming next month, assuming I'm willing to wake up at 6 AM, or the one in 3 years late at night.
History is economics. More and more that's become my opinion after reading books like "The Box" and now "Cod," by Mark Kurlansky. Cod was easy to preserve and plentiful throughout the North Atlantic. Vikings followed the cod to Labrador, as did Basque fishermen later, "discovering" North America centuries before Columbus. The wealth of Boston was built on cod, fostering the rise of a powerful merchant class opposed to economic domination by the English. This later became the core of the American Revolution. Cod was an important leg in the "triangle trade" that brought slaves to North America and the Caribbean. At the same time, cod's nutritional value and easy preservation helped it power exploratory voyages to the Americas, Africa, Asia, and beyond. Its value was critical in numerous political conflicts and near-wars over the years. Then centuries of bounty slammed head-on into technological progress as the North Atlantic cod fisheries collapsed in the late 20th century, ending a thousand years of plenty.
"Cod" is one of those books that highlighted my ignorance. In our age of plenty, with miracles such as refrigeration, it's easy to forget how critical commodities like cod were. I wouldn't have minded maintaining my ignorance on how to prepare cod (yuck), but it was easy to skip those pages. It's a slim book, and lucidly written, so it's a quick read and easy to digest. Highly recommended. I look forward to reading Kurlansky's book "Salt."
Bill O'Reilly is a lying jackass, so I mostly don't mind that Home Depot will no longer advertise on his program1.
However, I was more than a little bothered by this sentence in the email from the Home Depot representative: "The Home Depot has a policy that prohibits the running of its advertising on programs that express strong opinions or political views." I mean, I understand, but it's still pretty depressing.
1
I'm reluctant to support anything that would inhibit someone from expressing her opinion, no matter how stupid.
Whenever I recommend something that fits into a genre to someone who isn't a fan of the genre, I always feel obligated to tack on an... acclaimer 1. Placing something in a genre always seems too limiting, and it's something I bump up into because most of what I read, watch, and listen to falls into a genre of some kind
2
. It's not enough to say that Tool is a metal band, or that "His Dark Materials," is a young adult fantasy trilogy, or that "X-Men 2" is a super-hero movie. It's not because any of those things are untrue, but rather they aren't sufficient to convey their qualities. Labelling is restrictive
3
. The label becomes the most prominent aspect of the work, when the message I want to convey is about the work's quality. That's what happens when you're on the outside looking in; you see the superficial similarities between the bad and the good, but can't see the deeper differences that make the good good. 90% of everything is crud
4
, but in unfamiliar genres we only see the 90%, while we're able to see the 10% in familiar ones. That 10% transcends the genre, whereas all the 90% has going for it is the genre.
I'm not sure how to get around this. I can't avoid using those labels, because they're useful. It's a useful starting point for checking stuff out
5.
Furthermore, we use different standards for different genres; I know I ask a lot more from comedy movies than I do for action movies
6
. It's not just a lowering; I think I (now) have higher standards for fantasy and science fiction than I do for "general" fiction. The labels provide a handy shortcut, where collaborative filtering (either formally through something like Amazon, or just conversationally) requires much more overhead. Maybe there's nothing to get around, and that's just the way it is.
1 What's the proper antonym of disclaimer? Acclaimer works well enough for me.
2
Strictly speaking, everything is a genre of some kind, but there are certain defaults that are sort of non-genres, the general body of works that we put genre works into in the first place in order to distinguish them. For books, it's "general fiction," novels set in contemporary or near contemporary times in our familiar environment, without fantastic elements or a mystery. For music, it's "rock/pop." I don't think there's anything like that for movies, but "comedy" and "drama" come pretty close.
3
Not just in media works; the standard "what do you do?" question when people meet has the same feel.
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Sturgeon's Law, which was apparently a response to critics trashing science fiction because much of science fiction is trash.
5 Nobody can reliably say "if you like X, you'll like Y," but "if you like X, you should try Y" is still far more useful than trying to find things you like on your own, given how much people are cranking out these days.
I got named all the European countries in 2:51 and all the United States in 2:00. I got 151/192 on the UN members list before time ran out; that one's harder since it doesn't have an accompanying map. I counted ones where I didn't get the name exactly right (lacking the most of the time). There were about 20 that I really should have gotten, and the rest are small, obscure countries that I don't feel bad about missing (especially Pacific and Caribbean island nations).
I think "Conversations With My Agent" by Rob Long is the only book I read recently that I forgot in my recent roundup. Rob Long was a TV writer who somehow graduated in just two years to being showrunner of "Cheers" in its final seasons. Long writes a light, funny account of being trapped in "development hell" after the hit show ended
1
. It's a light book, even with some gratuitous padding, but you don't mind because Long is funny and makes you feel like you're there. If you've got a few hours to kill feeling cynical about Hollywood, pick it up.
1
Sadly, it looks by his resume that he's still stuck there, even though this book was published in 1996. According to his own site, he writes occasionally for magazines and newspapers, and has a weekly commentary on LA public radio.
159780018X978-1597800181Liz Williams's "The Snake Agent" is a surprisingly simple detective story in an occult near future Chinese Singapore franchise city where Heaven and Hell wage battles for souls. The lines between the worlds have blurred, and Hell is making a play to win for keeps, assuming the bureaucracy doesn't get in the way. Detective Inspector Chen is our hero on the case, a man troubled by his renouncing of his matron goddess for an undemonic demoness. It's a fine tale, but it's just a little too thin. Some books have too much exposition and too many detours, but this one could have done with more. It's decent. Maybe the sequels will do better.
So far this year, I have read 63 books totalling some 25,682 pages. Of those, there were:
21 historical fiction (the Aubrey/Maturin series)
18 fantasy
10 science/speculative fiction
5 contemporary fiction
3 general or miscellaneous non-fiction
2 mystery
2 economic history
1 technical non-fiction
1 history
1 auto-biography
In the 214 days of the year, that's an average of a book every 3.4 days, or about 120 pages per day. I guess that's a lot. No wonder I don't get anything (else) done.
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A friend lent me Mary Roach's "Stiff." It tells about all the things that happen to a body after someone dies, and the things that we as a society choose to do with them. We visit a body farm at the University of Tennessee, read about how mummies were steeped in honey and the liquid used as medicine in the Middle Ages, and how a Swedish environmentalist is leading a movement to compost bodies after death. Roach ranges far and wide, producing a book chock full of interesting if less than useful information. It's only a little bit gruesome and not at all depressing. Roach attempts to infuse the topic with humor, which apparently works on some readers. I didn't find most of the intentional jokes funny; maybe I'm just... what's the word? Humorless? Rigid? Inflexible? Nevertheless, there were a number of more subtly humorous parts, none of which come to mind right now, sadly. Anyway, it's interesting and thought-provoking and worth a read.
For the record, I've decided what I want to happen when I die
1
. The first priority is taking any and all useful transplantable parts. Liver, lungs, kidneys, heart, eyes, whatever. After that, I'd like my body to be used for scientific research, with the sole exception of weapons research. Crash test passenger? Sure. Lying in the sun in the soon to be operational body farm at Texas State University? Fine. Developing a more deadly bullet? No thanks. If there's anything left of me after that, I'll like my body composted (cremation uses too much energy), with an Indian mango tree and an American Elm (Updated: or a Vermont sugar maple) planted above. Just for the record.
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Another year, another pulpy Harry Bosch mystery from Michael Connelly1
. This one is called "The Overlook". There's not much to say. Connelly's writing isn't getting any better. It's kind of hackneyed
2
. There's a lot of "Bosch realized" and "Harry knew" when those are completely unnecessary, since we never have any other perspective. There are laughably bad bits like this:
Bosch hung up and immediately called Ignacio Ferras, his new partner. They were still feeling their way. Ferras was more than twenty years younger and from another culture. The bonding would happen, Bosch was sure, but it would come slowly. It always did.
Emphasis mine. It's definitely genre fiction that doesn't rise above the genre, but it only took a day to read, so I won't complain (more).
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I am a wimp when it comes to horror movies. This dates back to seeing "A Nightmare on Elm Street" at a sleepover in 3rd grade and was reinforced by "Event Horizon" in college. That movie freaked me out something serious. It was thus with some trepidation that I started Joe Hill's "Heart-Shaped Box." I nearly didn't continue after the first few pages, but I realized I was being silly, so I forged ahead. I'm glad I did.
"Heart-Shaped Box" starts with middle-aged rock star Judas Coyne buying a supposedly haunted suit from an online auction to add to his collection of occult and morbid artifacts. Caveat emptor, but this time it's because the buyer got what he paid for. The ghost is not a kindly one, and the haunting begins the clock ticking on Judas Coyne's life.
This was a very satisfying book. It is thoughtful and complex, with layers slowly revealing themselves. The pace steadily ratchets up as we discover what was originally a simple ghost story is in fact an intricate plot pulling together years of mistakes and worse, both by Coyne and others. He is haunted by both real ghosts and figurative ones, which converge to offer a chance at redemption. The characters are real, flawed people, who gradually reveal more of themselves to us as the plot unfolds. "Heart-Shaped Box" is one of those genre novels that transcends the genre. I'd even argue that it wasn't really horror, since I wasn't afraid (YMMV). Regardless of what you call it, it's a fine book. Highly recommended.
I was too harsh on Michael Connelly's "The Overlook." Everything I said was true, but I should have also mentioned that the plot was pretty decent. He even managed to make a solid and necessary political statement.
Following up on Home Depot cutting their ads from Bill O'Reilly's program... I disagree with nearly everything Bill O'Reilly says, but the solution is not to keep him from saying it. The solution is to refute him. I want to see Bill O'Reilly get pwned publicly for being an imbecile. That way the message gets out to the people who believe the same things. Without people spreading stupid ideas, it's a lot harder to get people who share them to pay attention to better ideas. It seems like people spreading stupid ideas have the advantage, but I think that's just because they've adapted to the medium better at this point in time. It's easier to use a new medium when your ideas are shallow and simple; it's hard to articulate many good ideas even in familiar media. Home Depot isn't the problem; they're responsible to their shareholders, and their shareholders don't (and shouldn't) care if people have stupid reasons for boycotting their stores. This is a problem for the rest of us, and there's only one solution: respond patiently and thoughtfully.
I can't find the fire in me to get angry about what the Bush administration does anymore. It's not that I have other things that take my attention. I've just lost the ability to be outraged.
Every President has caused outrage for something. Most Presidents have made at least one egregious violation of American principles. Nixon had Watergate. Reagan had Iran-Contra. So far, Bush has:
Launching the Iraq War under false pretenses
Abu Ghraib
Guantanamo
Warrantless wiretapping
Extraordinary rendition
Valerie Plame (by association)
Signing statements
US Attorney firings
Torture
And those are just the highlights, just the mistakes that violate American principles rather than simply demonstrating incompetence. When other Presidents screwed up like that, they'd bob and weave and try to tap-dance around it. They'd try to play down the controversy and play it cool. Not Bush. He'll either assert that he's right, lie, or ignore it. Then another scandal will erupt, and we'll forget about the previous one.
That's why I can't be outraged anymore. It's overwhelming. It's like the circuit in my brain that handles that emotion doesn't work anymore. It carried too much for too long, and now it's blown out. I'm sure I'm not the only one. If it was intentional, I'd say it was a brilliant and audacious strategy. At least I can take comfort in knowing that Bush has probably motivated more people than have burned out.
A protagonist with amnesia makes it easy to start a film franchise. You don't have to bother with introducing everyone, something that hurt the first "X-Men" movie. "Casino Royale" dodged it too, but that's because they didn't have to establish James Bond, just differentiate the new one.
If you have the cash, it seems like it's going to be a good time to pick up a recent used car. $150 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgages are set to reset to a higher rate in October. The next 11 months will see an average of $30 nillion worth resetting every month (source). That's roughly 500,000 households in October and then another 100,000 per month, or a million and a half over the next year. Those people are going to have to cut out other things to keep their houses, and I'm sure a lot of them bought nice cars in the last couple of years.
"There is a way to be good again." That is the fundamental idea behind Khaled Hosseini's debut novel, "The Kite Runner." The story begins with our narrator, Amir, as a young boy in pre-chaotic Afghanistan. His best friend is the Hassan, the servant's son, a slightly younger boy whose devotion is almost too much, a dedicated faith in Amir that he will betray. They live under the care of Amir's larger-than-life father, a successful dynamo of a man to whom Amir is a source of constant disappointment. The boys grow up, and the evils and dangers of the world shatter their stable lives. Afghanistan descends into violent chaos, and they are separated forever. Amir escapes from Afghanistan, but not the shame of failing his friend. He gets a chance at redemption, if only he knows what to do with it.
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I didn't particularly like "The Kite Runner." I'd like to expand on that, but it's not really something I can explain. It was certainly a good book, but it just didn't grab me, and I don't know why. Lots of people liked it, though, so maybe you will too.
If it was Randall Stross's intent to convince me that Thomas A. Edison was an unlikeable, mendacious, egoist whose true successes were heavily-reliant on others or even realized mostly by others, he succeeded admirably. "The Wizard of Menlo Park" presents a thorough portrait of Edison the promising inventor and incompetent businessman.
Edison was a workaholic who procured well over a thousand patents to his name, but was unable to translate those inventions into true successes. Much of the development work was done by his extensive teams of assistants, but the Edison legend was born early in his career, so the work was presented as his alone. His ego led him to make bold pronouncements of the perfection of his inventions when they were barely-working prototypes, most notably with the phonograph and light bulb. His ego blinded him to business opportunities, such as the vast potential of musical entertainment when his goal with the phonograph was as a dictation machine.
Oddly, Stross omits mention of two seemingly important inventions mentioned in Edison's biography on Wikipedia: the telephone carbon microphone and the fluoroscope, an X-ray machine. Even stranger, Stross subtitled the book "How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World," when Stross seems to think his only true innovation was being a celebrity genius (which was an accident more than anything else). The book's apparent goal and its actual value seem at odds here. Stross demonstrates how Edison relied heavily on his assistants, how he frequently chose bad ideas over good ones, how he thought himself an able businessman in spite of frequent failure, and how many of his ideas were being worked on simultaneously by others (the light bulb, electrical distribution, and the phonograph, for example), and how again it was others who actually perfected them. In some ways, what I took away from the book was that what was so remarkable about Edison was how the legend of Edison, a recent historical figure, is so different from the reality. It is a worthy book, but that incongruity is certainly confusing.
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Back in 2005, Alaska (of course) Representative Don Young changed the contents of a billafter the House and Senate had passed it. How is this even possible? Every single job I've had has had a system for preventing exactly that kind of thing, even when it was just a music web site.
Scientists appear to have discovered a protein that can erase memory. They have not indicated they know of any way to control what gets erased, either in kind or quantity. At present, it has only been demonstrated with rats, as there are obviously enormous ethical issues there. However, there are those who have no ethical issues whatsoever.
Assuming a similar effect can be produced in humans, how long is it before a criminal gang 1 uses this to wipe out someone's memory? Maybe someone who is informing for the police? The standard tactic is to kill them, but that is messy, dangerous, illegal, and alerts the police. However, if the informant shows up at a hospital with no memory of who he is...
We don't even have a criminal category this kind of thing fits in; it's certainly an assault, but so much more, and in some ways it's a murder, but the victim is still alive. This is freaky stuff. Even if this particular research path turns out to be a dead end, it seems likely that something like this will someday be discovered/invented.
1 Or a particularly ruthless secret service, which one might consider the same thing.
Both the military and police forces are investing heavily into so-called "non-lethal" weapons. The most famous example of this is the Taser, which has in fact resulted in some deaths 1. It's hard to object to "non-lethal" or "less lethal" weapons in principle. They definitely sound like an improvement. The problem arises when you realize that the world is not static.
The benefit of "less lethal" weapons is that they provide an alternative to guns. When a police officer would normally use her gun, she can use a Taser instead, incapacitating rather than killing. What isn't so beneficial is when the Taser becomes a substitute for other things as well. Nobody thinks of verbal engagement as a weapon, but it's often the most useful way for a police officer to defuse a potentially dangerous situation. On the other hand, a Taser is unequivocally a weapon. It hurts. It burns. But it does not (usually) kill, and often doesn't leave any marks. The consequences of using a Taser inappropriately are (understandably) considerably less than using a firearm inappropriately. Instead of using persuasion, which is frustrating, hard, and not guaranteed to work, a police officer can just use the Taser. It has a known effect with a known cost. That makes it easy to use, not just in situations where it is appropriate, but also insituations whereanother approachmight be better.
The fundamental problem breaks down into two parts. One, police may be more likely to use the weapon because of its reduced lethality and evidence of use. Two, those who might have been inappropriately assaulted have an uphill battle making their case because it is harder to prove injury. The courts are generally reluctant to override the judgment of a police officer in the heat of the moment. Even more concerning are "crowd control" weapons, which have a history of use against peaceful orderly protests as well as riots, as those are more often a deliberate choice by law enforcement officials rather than the panic or misjudgment of a single officer. There is an inherent restraining effect in police batons and especially firearms because the injury is obvious and lethality likely. "Less lethal" weapons have no such built-in restraint.
There is no clear solution here. These weapons can be used appropriately and achieve police goals at reduced risk to both officers and citizens. However, using these weapons without clear protocols for use and effective accountability mechanisms at the organizational level is a recipe for abuse. Technology can help with some of these issues, from the cameras mounted in police cars to memory chips embedded in the Tasers themselves recording their use. This is only useful insofar as police oversight is effective and responsive; technology cannot be a panacea.
The greatest worry I have is not with these weapons, but the apparent increase in the divide between the public and the police, as evinced by the militarization of the police. Police officers will naturally want to act with as much power as they can in order to safeguard themselves, but that greatly increases the consequences of mistakes. The police are "peace officers," not military. The motto is "to serve and protect," but too often the police seem to see citizens as an enemy.
1 It's worth noting that Taser themselves don't call it "non-lethal", though they do imply it when contrasting their product against "lethal force" as illustrated by an semi-automatic pistol.
If you'd like to get on this whole weblog thing, go right ahead. Just don't tell anyone about it until you know you're going to stick with it. A weblog with just one post is worse than no weblog at all. A common pitfall is that you have a lot to say, but don't realize that's years worth of expression that's all been bottled up. Once you've gotten all that out, what are you going to do? There are no doubt millions of weblogs that lasted a week or even a few months, ending once their creators ran out of things to say 1 . Make sure you give it a couple of months and a few dozen posts before you even think about telling people about it. And above all, do not make your first post about starting a weblog.
I've come up with a rule of thumb: if you see something scary on the front page of the news, you can safely ignore it. The media cares most about unusual events. Terrorism. SARS. Septuplets. Celebrities. They don't cover plain old car accidents, influenza, single births, or my neighbor's house getting robbed of $1000 in DVDs and tools. There's even a journalism cliché about it. Remember that the next time we have "Summer of the Shark."
This phenomenon has given me the idea 1 to start a site that would focus entirely on the ordinary dangers. Heart attacks. Car accidents. Natural deaths. In order to avoid being mind-numbingly boring, it would present a condensed version of the national news: 812 people were diagnosed with cancer on August 22, 2007. Just for comparison, I would include "0 deaths from terrorism," "0 cases of SARS," and the like. I'd call it "Dogs Bite Men" 2.
Big Faceless Organization produces software for businesses. That's their real name. I did a little bit of research to make sure it wasn't a joke; it seems like a real thing.
We saw "The Bourne Ultimatum." It was good. There were no cheesy moments like that awful line from "Live Free or Die Hard" that I saw in the trailer:
Mac: You just killed a helicopter with a car!
Korben Dallas: I was out of bullets.
Or the even worse:
Mookie: Did you see that?!?
Hudson Hawk: See it? I did it.
That movie probably had more gunshots and explosions in a single scene than the whole "Bourne" trilogy. "Bourne" had real characters. "Bourne" had development. "Bourne" had intelligence. There were elements that were at least clever and possibly even brilliant1. Even Jessica liked it. If you haven't seen it, you have to see the first two first, and preferrably not long before. We watched them a couple of weeks ago to get Jessica caught up, and it helped. Too bad about the shaky-cam, though.
1 Cryptically, so as not to spoil: haircut, splashing in the water, and (the best), "you look tired."
Until recently, that there were both books on evolutionary biology and the philosophy of evolutionary biology. I wanted the former. With Daniel Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," I got the latter. Boy does he go on. And on. And on. He would do well to use simpler prose.
One thing he does make clear is that evolutionary biologists have worked too long and hard on evolution for the theory to fall beneath the puny slings and arrows that Creationists often deploy. Disagreement is usually on the precise mechanics; you don't see anyone arguing against gravity because scientists have yet to find a graviton. There are other disagreements, including some disbelief that such a mindless process as natural selection could yield the results we see, but those tend to be as vague and poorly articulated as the Creationists, only with something else pulling the strings.
It's unfair to criticize this book for being a mostly philosophical book rather than scientific. He certainly does go into the science, but primarily from the perspective of game theory, algorithms, and the like, rather than deploying evidence. This isn't the book to read if you want an overview of the current state of the art in evolutionary biology. It's more of a niche book, aimed at those who want to delve deeply into the more speculative and philosophical implications of evolution by natural selection. I personally found it tiring, but I guess it's the thing for those who like that sort of thing.
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Paul Neilan dedicated his debut novel thus: "To my parents, who I hope will never read this book." That's as good a warning as any of what to expect from "Apathy and Other Small Victories." The book is bizarre and profane, with its protagonist Shane being an unlikable, unfriendly, hostile anti-hero. I note all those things as a warning lest you expect something else and are shocked 1. If that doesn't scare you off, you should read it, because it's funny. Sometimes really, really funny, other times only mildly so, but definitely worth the few hours it will take to read this slim novel.
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1 By my standards, it's not very shocking, but I've learned my standards are different from other people's.
Mark Liberman1, the linguist who so effectively skewered "The Da Vinci Code" mentioned his difficulty remembering the name of a Swedish mystery novelist. Enjoying the mysteries from time to time, I noted it down. And then I read it. And it was fine. Its biggest advantage is a different setting. Sweden, you might have noticed, is a different country. Crimes are fewer and less severe. That's especially true because this book takes place ina more rural area. Our detective protagonist, one Kurt Wallander, is a detective in the mold of previous fictional detectives before him, a determined, even driven man who can't hold a marriage together. I'm still looking for a truly fine mystery, but until then, Kurt Wallander will do just fine.
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What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?
I recently sent a link to an article about a new TV show to Jessica with the note: "This looks like it could be interesting." Look at all the wimpiness: "Looks like." "Could be." "Interesting." Why not just say what I mean? "I want to watch this." What if it's stupid? OH NO! What if it's boring? HORRIBLE! What if the article misrepresented the show? TERRIBLE! Such weaseling. How pathetic.
Relax. I am not having an outbreak of self-loathing.
Does anyone lose weight switching from regular Coke to diet? Butter to margarine or olive oil? Oreos to Snackwells? Whole milk to skim? My suspicion is that it doesn't make a difference. Eating the low-sugar, low-fat versions of the same things you've always eaten probably doesn't do much. You have to make a more drastic change than that, like kicking the (soda) can completely. I think the so-called "healthier" versions of unhealthy foods are just like "educational" toys: they're the exact same thing with a superficial veneer of goodness. Of course, I could be wrong...
The current plan is for baby number 2 to be born at home. We've selected a midwife that Jessica has seen several times. She's also a medical nurse, which is a qualification that I needed. She has a professional relationship with several OB/GYNs at North Austin Medical Center, where Uma was born, in case we need medical backup.
One of the key mistakes that George W. Bush made in invading Iraq was to deploy too few troops. This will remain true even if Iraq becomes a peaceful democracy tomorrow. Why? Because we've been held in at best a stalemate for four years. Once you show that someone can hold you off for four years, it doesn't take much to imagine being able to hold you off for longer. Other potential enemies will see what's happened and think, "If we could just fight a little harder and a little longer than the Iraqis did, we can beat them."
For the United States to maintain the global perception of being a superpower, it is simply not enough to win. The United States must make winning look easy. We must make it seem futile to resist. No matter what happens now, it's too late for that. The question of opposing the United States militarily is now a question of weighing costs and benefits, rather than one to be dismissed immediately as ludicrous.
Of course, the question of winning in Iraq is now settled: we can't. Even if Americans had the political will to continue, which they don't, we cannot muster the forces we now know are necessary. In theory, we could fix Iraq with, say, 550,000 soldiers in the country1. That force could make it happen. The problem is that neither the United States nor any other member of the dwindling "coalition of the willing" has such numbers available. At best US troops are delaying the inevitable. Iraq is going to collapse, it's just a question of whether it's now or two years from now.
Russia under Vladimir Putin is becoming a fascist state. The word fascist gets abused a lot, so let me be clear what I mean by that. Russian nationalism is on the rise, encouraged by the government. Power has been increasingly centralized from local communities and provinces. Russia is increasingly portrayed as a victim of the West. The key historical event in that perspective is the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with the more recent expansion of NATO and the EU into Eastern Europe and the presence of American military forces in Central Asia also figuring significantly.
Russia's foreign policy has become increasingly aggressive, even belligerent. Russia has asserted itself in the UN Security Council on issues ranging from Kosovo to Iraq to Sudan; even when the issue seems irrelevant to their interests, they seem to assert their veto just to be acknowledged. Its activities in surrounding countries have been bolder. Russia has used its natural resources agreements as a weapon against Georgia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The fight for independence of Chechnya was violently suppressed to arrest the further fragmentation of Russia.
The internal politics have also become more fascistic. There has been steadily increasing government control of the media and a corresponding decrease in press freedoms. There is effectively only one political party in Russia. The FSB, successor to the KGB, is thoroughly entrenched in the government; Putin himself and many of the other high-level officials are former KGB and/or FSB. Individual freedoms and rights are secondary to the needs of the state.
Finally, the central government has been asserting greater control over the economy by blurring the lines between corporate and state. Key examples are the near-invisible line between the Russian government and Gazprom, the Russian natural gas company, which has been used to advance both domestic and foreign policy goals, and the effective expropriation of Yukos, a petroleum company. While the Soviet Union controlled the whole economy and production was centrally planned, fascism relies on nationalizing primarily the key industries, with much of the economy remaining relatively laissez-faire.
While there is no agreed-upon definition for fascism, today's Russia certainly seems to hit the common elements. The government is authoritarian, with many direct and indirect appeals to the good of the state. Nationalist sentiment is stoked by the government by portraying Russia as a victim of foreign powers. Strategic elements of the economy are effectively indistinguishable from the central government. Mussolini's definition of the term fascism emphasized the primacy of the state (centralized control) and "strength through unity" (i.e., "uniformity"). More than any other nation today, Russia embodies the idea of the fascist state. It turns outI'm not the onlyone who thinks so.
In 1990, Henning Mankell saw the historic changes across the Baltic in Eastern Europe, and decided to write a thriller (sort of), while using the same police officer protagonist as his earlier mystery, "Faceless Killers." The result is The Dogs of Riga, which is rather a muddled book. Detective Kurt Wallander isn't a spy, but somehow gets caught up in East Bloc intrigue that ends up amounting to very little, while boring the reader along the way. Maybe the next book sticks to the proper mysteries, something Mankell does better.
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The Pragmatic Programmer is considered one of those books you have to read as a software developer. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt's compendium of practical advice for writing good software considered a classic in some circles. It's a good book, but it would have been better if I'd read it 5 years ago. Now that I'm a "senior developer,"1 it's a lot of stuff that I already know. It's good review material, though; their recommendations are well thought out and quite practical, drawing on their collective experience in the industry. I'd definitely recommend it for someone who's just getting started, or to someone who's gotten into the business sideways, or who is looking to brush up on their techniques. If, on the other hand, you feel like you have a good grasp of modern methodologies and good practices, you can probably skip it.
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1 The recruiters who call me insist that 7 years experience == senior.
I'm not much of a sports fan. That's no surprise. However, I do enjoyreadingabout sports. That applies 110% when it comes to Michael Lewis. The writer of "Moneyball," Lewis's latest is "The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game." Like "Moneyball" before it, "The Blind Side" has two interlocking threads. One is a broader narrative about a particular trend, while the other is about an individual embodying that trend. In "Moneyball," Lewis told us about the increasingly sophisticated ways of valuing baseball players, as exemplified by Billy Bean's management of the Oakland Athletics.
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"The Blind Side" switches to football, discussing the increasing importance of passing and the quarterback, and thus the importance of the left tackle, who protects the quarterback1. The personal side is the story of one Michael Oher, a poor black kid in Memphis who was everything that a left tackle should be, and the his efforts and the efforts of those around him to overcome the many deficits in his background to help him achieve his potential. That description may not reflect as positively on the book as it should. It really is interesting, and Michael Lewis writes in such a lucid and easy way that it makes the subject accessible and engaging. The man has a gift. If you're interested in sports or sports writing, you should definitely put this one on your to-read list. Even if you don't think you are interested, maybe you should give it a try anyway2.
1 Specifically, his blind side, the side he turns away from to throw.
2 Maybe read the article by Malcolm Gladwell (your friend and mine, right?) I also linked above to get an idea; if you like that, you'll probably like the book. If you don't, it's less than 2000 words, so you haven't lost anything.
My employer, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to deploy restrictions on Internet access, meaning I have no access to my server from work. That means no posts during the day until I figure out an alternative.
There's lots of talk about "buyers' markets" and "sellers' markets" in residential housing. We've been in the latter for some time, but we're pretty emphatically moving into the former. A lot of people care a lot more about what kind of market they're in than they should, or at least, they care for the wrong reasons.
Consider. Most residential real estate transactions involve people who are moving within a market. Certainly you'll find people moving between markets, like from California to Texas, people entering the market for the first time, or people exiting completely, but by and large, most of the time, people are staying locally. That means that buyers are also sellers. A buyers' market helps you with the new house, but it hurts you selling your old one. A rising tide lifts all boats. Similarly, a sellers' market hurts you with the one one and helps with the old one. It would appear that it doesn't make much difference what sort of market it is.
That's not quite true, though. It's only irrelevant if you're moving between properties of about the same price. If your old house and your new house are both $200,000 and a bubble market is inflating the price of each by 10%, you neither win nor lose. However, if your new house costs substantially more than your old house, it's going to matter. Suppose the house you're selling would be $150,000 in a normal market, and the one you're buying is $250,000. That means you need to cover a $100,000 difference. If you're in a sellers' market, and each house's price is inflated by 10%, you're going to get $165,000 and pay $275,000; the difference you have to cover is now $110,000 1. On the other hand, if you're in a buyers' market with each house's value depressed by 10%, you'll get $135,000 and pay $225,000, for a difference of $90,000. Even if you paid more than $135,000 for the house you're selling, you're still better off in a buyers' market because you're trading up, and you want the difference between old and new to be as small as possible.
Naturally, the reverse is true. If you're moving into a less expensive house, that's when you want a sellers' market. In that case, the difference between the price of the old house and the price of the new house isn't a cost, but a profit. Even if a bubbly housing market means you're over-paying for the new house, whoever's buying your old house is overpaying even more2 than you are.
Sellers' markets aren't always good for sellers, and buyers' markets aren't always good for buyers, because usually buyers in a market are sellers in that same market. It may seem that it all cancels out, but it doesn't. If you have any flexibility about when you move next, and you plan on a bigger or fancier house in a nicer area with better schools, wait for a slump. Don't get irrationally attached to making a "profit" 3 on your house; if you're making a loss because of market conditions, think about what a good deal you're getting on your new house.
2 In absolute, not relative terms, but it's usually absolute returns that matter when your resources are limited.
3 When you factor in taxes, insurance, and maintenance, and look at the annualized rate of appreciation rather than the total appreciation, most houses are terrible investments.
"Fallen Dragon" was very clearly Peter F. Hamilton's dress rehearsal for Pandora Star and Judas Unchained. It's got a lot of similarities. Sadly, many of the differences make it a lesser book than either of the later pair, to the extent that it's cheesy science fiction rather than good science fiction. Too much opera, not enough space. Skip it and read those other ones instead.
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Scott Lynch's debut novel, "The Lies of Locke Lamora," is a strong effort by a promising new author. Unlike much other fantasy, it's not an epic 1. It works on a smaller scale, telling the story of the training and maturation of a con man2. That enables Lynch to have more fun with the story than your usual soooo serious epic fantasy author. There's still a solid plot in there that comes together rather nicely, but it's a slightly different take than my standard fantasy fare, and well worth it.
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You wouldn't think a senior VP at MTV would make a good novelist. That is, unless you were already familiar with Bill Flanagan. I've only read one book by him, but after finishing "New Bedlam," I know I'm going to read more. Drummed out of his cushy job at a major network, Bobby Kahn washes up in a small cable business in Rhode Island run by the dysfunctional spawn of a car dealer. Their channels include Boomerbox, which runs classic TV reruns, Eureka!, a snooty arts channel, and the Comic Book Channel, which has about as many viewers as you would guess. Kahn's mission is to somehow make them a success, an battle he charges into with low-brow determination. Flanagan effectively pokes fun at the TV business while also ruminating about the impact of popular television. It's a weird, crass, and often funny look at the sausage factory. I highly recommend you read it.
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Robert Charles Wilson turns out the lights with his novel "Spin." One night, the stars aren't there anymore. The Sun has been replaced by something almost but not quite the same, and the Moon has been permanently eclipsed. What happened? Why? Wilson answers those questions, but it's not just about that. The answers are closely intertwined with the story of growing up in strange circumstances and speculation about what happens to civilization when the end of everything seems nigh. "Spin" is first rate science fiction, one of those books that transcends the genre enough that you can drop the "science fiction" and just call it a good book.
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Calling a show "Dirty Sexy Money" is a sure-fire way to turn people off and make them embarassed to talk about your show. That's too bad, because the pilot was pretty good. "The Bionic Woman" was decent, "K-Ville" was good (second episode; missed the pilot), and "Chuck" was mediocre. I'm motivated to watch a few pilots for some reason this time around.
I'm not too motivated by money these days. What I hope for from my career 5 or 10 years down the road is more about whether what I'll be doing will be interesting. That wasn't true when I started out. Back then, I cared more about how much money I'd be making later. I certainly like money, of course, but it's not something I look forward to the way I used to. Maybe it's because I make more now. Or maybe it's because I'm starting to get a little jaded. Or maybe, just maybe, it's maturity.
Uma claims to like Mastodon. For some reason, I don't believe her, but if it means I can listen to what I want instead of the "Animals" song on infinite repeat, I don't really care about her credibility.
Is it possible for the broader economy to be more stable while individuals are less stable? It seems counter-intuitive, but it makes sense. Lifetime employment is long dead, and it seems like the social contract of the earlier post-WWII era has been sundered forever 1. And yet, the broader economy is more stable than ever, even with the current dislocations. Economic cycles have been dampened, inflation seemingly tamed. Perhaps it is like how the San Andreas Fault creeps along instead of letting the pressure build up, and then violently releasing it in a massive earthquake. The economy creeps along, lubricated and stabilized by the fortunes and failures of millions of individual economies. Perhaps that will keep the mortgage collapse from becoming an economic collapse. I'm no economist.
1 Of course, it was a historical anomaly to begin with.
"The Bionic Woman" is a show that does female role models right. Over the last decade or so we've seen a trend in "girls kicking ass." Initially, it seemed like a good thing, such as with Sarah Michelle Gellar in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" 1. However, the trend was very quickly hijacked by exploitation. "Charlie's Angels" may have physically kicked ass, but the way they kicked as was so comically over-the-top as to be insulting. They were also too thin in skin-tight, revealing clothing2, and were written (and played by?) silly, emotionally fragile airheads. No thanks. That seemed to be the norm, too, with shows like "Dark Angel" and "Alias." At least "Xena" knew she was a joke. Even the non-ass-kicking roles too often degenerated into neurotic, hen-pecking harridans.
That's what's refreshing about "The Bionic Woman." To be sure, Michelle Ryan is beautiful. C'mon, it's TV. What's notable is that she's more normally-sized, and she dresses like a real person. She is capable of kicking ass, but she's also capable of losing, and badly so. The action is unrealistic 3, but not exploitative. She has cried on the show, but only once (thus far), and that after her boyfriend dies. She's assertive and confident, but not inflexible and definitely not bitchy. She has really serious issues to deal with in her life that are sometimes overwhelming, but she's an adult, and she behaves like one.
It's not just about our fearless heroine, either. Of the seven (thus far) recurring characters, four are women, and I'd say the top three in terms of screen time are all women. There are a lot of shows that do that, of course, but "The Bionic Woman" isn't an estrogen party like "Desperate Housewives" or "Sisters;" it's not aimed at the "for women only" demographic (ghetto?). Katee Sackhoff's villainess is also a positive role in some ways. I mean, ok, sure, she's a wack job, but that's not all she is. She's also more normal physically, and she's never shown any more skin than her face and arms 4. In spite of desperate circumstances, she also doesn't collapse into tears, and while she's kind bitchy, she's really funny while doing it.
I wouldn't call "The Bionic Woman" a great show, but it's certainly a good show. It's good to see a show aimed at both men and women with strong 5 female characters. Hollywood too often pays lip service to that while sneaking in the standard, inaccurate gender stereotypes. What's nice about it is that so much about the characters on the show is normal. Women are police officers and soldiers and scientists. They're smart and dumb, strong and weak, and generally unskanky. Hollywood doesn't usually reflect the real world, but this show does. Though the women are bionic, the rest of it is real.
I have been of the opinion for some time that the effects of the housing bust are going to be worse than have been generally acknowledged. I've seen a steady increase in the doom and gloom from the media, government, and economic analysts as time passes and the reality sinks in. Here's an example.
The late, great FameTracker had a regular feature called 2 Stars 1 Slot, for cataloging how even actors (and not just movies) come in pairs. They picked up on 2/3 of this trio, but neglected the final leg of the tripod, perhaps due to an over-rigorous devotion to their format. While I may lack their verbosity (really!) and wit, I can still exceed them with Three Stars, 1 Slot: the mellow, cocky, studly Southern white boys: Matthew McConaughey, Cole Hauser1, and Josh Lucas.
I am trying out Disqus for comments. Anyone have any, um, comments (besides that it screws up the layout)? I'm curious how it looks in feed readers; for various (not necessarily good) reasons I don't have a separate post template for RSS.
A recent headline in the local newspaper 1 claimed "Most Radiohead Fans Decline to Pay," referring to the band's experiment in digital music retailing. The headline should instead read, "Most Radiohead Downloaders Have Not Paid Yet." Just because they downloaded the music doesn't mean they're a fan; they could have just grabbed it to see what the hype was about. Secondly, the album will be released on CD in a couple of months. I would rather not pay for a digital download now and then pay full retail later. I am ethically at ease with downloading the music now without paying and buying the CD when it becomes available. I am not, in other words, declining to pay, but rather waiting to pay. Is it a terrible error? No. Does the distortion conform to the conventional narrative of music downloaders being thieves? Yup.
As his wedding day approached last spring, Marshall Whittey found that his money could not keep pace with the grandiosity of his plans. But rather than scale back, he chose instead, like millions of homeowners across the country, to borrow against the soaring value of his home.
He and his bride, Holly Whittey, exchanged vows on the grounds of a sumptuous private estate in the Napa Valley. They spent their honeymoon at a resort in Tahiti.
But now, in an ominous portent for the national economy, Mr. Whittey has grown tight with his money. His home is worth far less than it was a year ago, and his equity has evaporated. And like many other involuntary adopters of a newly economical lifestyle, he can borrow no more.
"It used to be that if I wanted it, I'd just go and buy it and finance it," Mr. Whittey, 33, said. "I'm feeling the crunch, and my spending is down significantly."
Link1. What a tragedy? What a tool. The people I know have varying degrees of financial responsibility, but few of them are outright irresponsible. I figure few of you come right up against this kind of idiocy, so it's good to know how recklessly foolish people can be.
The manic part of manic-depressive disorder has always sounded like a fun
mental illness. You feel good, you don't need much sleep, you have lots of
energy to do things. It was only after reading "An
Unquiet Mind" that I understood that it's not just the other pole of
bipolar that causes the damage. Mania means extreme impulsiveness and losing touch
with reality. It's not a stable condition; either you spiral away into
complete psychosis, or you come back to Earth and realize you've spent $20,000
you don't have on Precious Moments figurines because they spoke to something
deep within you. And that's assuming you don't somehow kill yourself in a
moment of insane recklessness. Moreso than Jan Lars
Jensen's "Losing My Mind,"Kay Redfield
Jamison's memoir of her mental illness gives a devastating picture of
what it is like. Perhaps that is because her illness has lasted decades, while
his memoir focused on a single (if extended) incident.
As involving as her story is, the memoir she wrote could have done with a
better editor. I get the feeling that Jamison would be pretty annoying to know
in person. It seems like every man she knows is "good-looking, witty, and
quite tall." She overflows with effusiveness, which is all right at first, but
gets wearisome. Every page had some form of the word "intense" on it. It was
enough to make me wonder if maybe she was in the midst of a manic episode as
she was writing the book. Nevertheless, it's a valuable book to read if you
want to understand the danger of bipolar insanity, and the lethal danger that
lurks in the depths and stalks the heights.
Media coverage around the 2008 presidential election is excessively focused on the campaigns. They describe and dissect the daily doings of campaigns like Monday morning quarterbacks. They talk about tactics and perceptions rather than the candidates and the issues. It's too much about the machinery and not enough about the end goals. It's too much noise signifying too little, but its appearance of pulling back the curtain makes it seem deep rather than shallow. It's all built up out of nothing, which makes it easier for the media to shape it. They give their blessing to the "serious" candidates who play the game, like Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney, while dismissing as jokers and weirdos the more interesting candidates like Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, or Mike Gravel.
A naïaut;ve observer might have guessed that 24-hour news would have offered the opportunity for broader coverage, but instead it has enabled saturation bombing of even narrower messages. I have similar hopes for the Internet, with some satisfaction to be found from the strength of Ron Paul's showing, but there's also the lesson of Howard Dean to give me pause. The campaigns are no more relevant than the card stock used for mailings. Losing sight of the candidates and the issues makes it easier for weak candidates with a poor grasp of the issues to slip through; indeed, it encourages it. Unless we reject the shallow focus, we'll get more of the same, and we'll deserve it.
After Michael Lewis blew me away with "Moneyball" and "The Blind Side", I made sure to grab his first book, "Liar's Poker." Lewis didn't originally start as a writer; he became a bond trader at Salomon Brothers in the mid-1980s after graduate school. That gave him a front row seat on some of the greatest excesses the decade of greed had to offer. Think Gordon Gekko. It was a weird and chaotic period, which makes for interesting reading. I claimed before that Michael Lewis "had a gift;" I still think that's true, but comparing his first book with his later ones demonstrates that he spent a lot of time honing his skills as a writer. It's still a much better book than many others ever write.
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I've noticed that luxury car models tend to have names that are more like part numbers than words. It's not a perfect correlation, but it's pretty reliable. Non-luxury cars tend to have words as their names. Luxury cars may use words such as "Turbo" as modifiers on the base model name, or non-luxury cars may have alphanumeric codes like 2500HD in the same role, but the base model names tend to follow the pattern. Note the luxury cars (exceptions highlighted; it looks like there are more exceptions than there really are because the names much longer):
Ford: Crown Victoria, Edge, Escape, Escape Hybrid, E-Series Van, E-Series Wagon, Expedition, Explorer, Explorer Sport Trac, F-150, F-250 Super Duty, F-350 Super Duty, F-450 Super Duty, Five Hundred, Focus, Focus Wagon, Freestar, Freestyle, Fusion, Mustang, Ranger, Shelby GT500, Taurus, Taurus X
GMC: Acadia, Canyon, Envoy, Savana, Savana Cargo Van, Sierra 1500, Sierra 2500HD, Sierra 3500HD, Sierra Classic 1500, Sierra Classic 2500HD, Sierra Classic 3500, Sierra Hybrid, Yukon, Yukon Denali, Yukon XL
Back when I was swimming regularly, I considered a mile to a mile and a half a good workout. That comes out to about 70 to 100 laps in a standard 25-yard pool. In a non-standard pool, though, like these fantastic ones, the whole workout would be just one round-trip.
What does it mean that only 5 of the top 45 teams in college football (Division I)1
are private schools? My bias tells me that it's because public schools are less accountable to their financiers, and so can justify blowing the money. Contrary to popular belief, college sports contribute very little to academics. Notre Dame contributes the most, at $21 million per year, or a respectable $1800 for each of the approximately 11,000 students. However, other programs contribute much less. The University of Texas Longhorns football team contributes $4.7 million per year to academics, or a paltry $94 for each of the approximately 50,000 students. The majority of profits get funneled back into sports programs. And these are among the most profitable programs in the most profitable college sports.
To me, this just supports my opinion that college sports are no different from professional sports. That is, for everyone who isn't a student. The networks make money, the coaches make money, the athletic programs make money, but the students rarely benefit. Few of the athletes benefit beyond the value of their scholarships; even the most successful programs rarely see more than a handful of their athletes enter the professional leagues. The big sports live in their own separate worlds from the rest of the university; they're de facto independent. UT's football team is nearly a professional football team, just with burnt orange branding.
There's nothing wrong with making money. I endorse that vigorously. In fact, I want to go further. Let the players get paid. Get rid of the academic requirements. Let the programs keep all of their money instead of letting the schools siphon some off. Forget the pretense of the student athlete 2 and call Division I football what it is: a development league for the NFL.
1
#8 University of Southern California,
#11 Boston College,
#19 Brigham Young University,
#34 Wake Forest University,
and
#40 the University of Tulsa
2 Which only exists in less visible sports or lower divisions
There are a number of "engineered stone" countertop manufacturers all selling basically the same thing1. A handful of manufacturers dominate the market, and they're the ones you'll see at the big stores. Oddly, each manufacturer tends to have only a couple dozen colors, which means you're unlikely to find something just right from any given one. There's little difference in the product, and the costs can vary a lot, so it's worth knowing about the smaller players. I was unable to find a single, complete list of manufacturers that sell in the United States, so I had to find them one by one. Here's my list for future reference (yours, mine, whoever):
Rocksolid Granit (sic): this isn't quite the same as engineered quartz, but it's similar. An advantage with these particular people is that they install right over your existing countertops, eliminating the cost of removal and avoiding the need to go without countertops for a week 3.
It is unclear whether this is the same as the other quartz engineered stones, but it's similar. One article calls it engineered granite, but quartz is a key component of granite.
1 I am told they all license the same manufacturing Bretonstone process, which is probably why they all have the same mix of 93% quartz and 7% binder and color
3 Usually installers need the previous countertops removed for proper measurement, and it takes about a week for them to get the new ones fabricated and ready to install
The distribution of Federal Reserve Districts is clearly indicative of the era in which it was created. At first glance, it seems obvious that the 12th District needs to be split, while the 5 Northeastern Districts could be consolidated into 2 or 3. I wish there was a USA Mapper that did for the US what does for the world. That would make it clearer how they should be redrawn.
48 sub-cutaneous injections later, I have discovered I'm allergic to pretty much everything biological in Austin. Some of these are more recent developments.
Fact: John Walker Lindh never attacked or planned to attack US citizens or US soldiers. Fact: Lindh never provided assistance to Al Qaeda. Fact: though Lindh was involved the Taliban, he primarily did so before the United States had any dispute with them, i.e., before September 11th. Fact: Lindh had nothing to do with the uprising at the prison in Mazar-i-Sharif, nor the death of CIA officer Mike Spann. Fact: Lindh was tortured and otherwise deprived of the rights due a US citizen. Fact: the worst offense Lindh pled guilty to (he was convicted of nothing) was carrying weapons for the Taliban.
Due to all of that, Lindh is now serving a 20-year sentence in the ADX SuperMax facility in Colorado, where he is kept in solitary confinement 24 hours a day, with only 1 hour outside his cell in the prison yard. Consider the other guests in residence there, and their crimes. Lindh may have broken the law 1, but there is no way that what he did justifies his treatment. He didn't kill anyone. He didn't injure anyone (that I'm aware of). He didn't kidnap anyone. He didn't steal anything. He didn't commit treason 2. As far as we know, he never fired his weapon or even raised his voice in anger. For this he gets 20 years. If there was anything remotely like justice in his case, he would be a free man today 3, but if justice could be relied on, this never would have happened. I just wanted to make sure you didn't forget he existed.
1 I say may because the US government behaved very, very badly in his case, and it's easy to understand how a frightened, tortured, isolated 21-year old might plead guilty to crimes he never committed with the full weight of the federal government against him in the terrified hysteria of late 2001 and 2002.
2 Do you think they would have hesitated to charge him with it if they thought they could?
Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that latest National Intelligence Estimate (PDF) concludes that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, and does not appear to have restarted it. Furthermore, the report states that Iran would not be able to build a bomb until 2010-2015, even if they started now. The Bush administration has been trying to pick a fight with Iran for almost 6 years (counting since the "Axis of Evil" State of the Union speech in January 2002). How do they respond? I give you National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, from the press briefing yesterday:
...we have good reason to continue to be concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon, even after this most recent National Intelligence Estimate. In the words of the NIE, "Iranian entities are continuing to develop a range of technical capabilities that could be applied to producing nuclear weapons if a decision is made to do so."
And:
...we are very unsure of Iran's attentions [sic], even with respect to the covert nuclear weapons program that Iran has halted. Again, let me quote the National Intelligence Estimate: "We do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidentially whether Tehran is willing to maintain the halt of its nuclear weapons program indefinitely while it weighs its options, or whether it will or already has set specific deadlines or criteria that will prompt it to restart the program."
In other words, Iran isn't the threat we've been claiming for 6 years, the seeker of World War III (according to George W. Bush in October), the crazed fanatics itching for a nuclear apocalypse. But, because they might change their minds, we have to continue our current strategy, i.e., threatening (and likely planning) war. This only serves to reinforce what I've suspected all along: most of the "tensions" and "crisis" with Iran has been provoked, caused, or outright invented by the Bush administration.
As a side note, the Bush administration may have been sitting on these conclusions for quite some time, given Hadley's tap-dancing around the question in the press briefing mentioned above (refer to the Q&A portion), even as they continued the same bellicose rhetoric.
I have a big backlog of books that I've read, but I don't have the motivation to give them a more thorough treatment.
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch: the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora lacks something of the charm of the first book, perhaps because of an imbalance in tone. The smaller ensemble of characters may also be to blame; it's easier to keep the action rolling with more primary characters. It's still decent, but I hope the next story of the Gentleman Bastards resembles the first more than the last.
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The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson: monuments usually exist to tell the future about an event in the past. What if it went the other way? Monuments appearing to tell us, in the past, about events in the future? Events involving the gradual conquest of the world by a mysterious figure. How would we react? Is this impending doom, or impending salvation? Is the future fixed? Wilson appears to have penchant for character-based semi-apocalyptic narratives featuring characters close to but not at the center of events. He's a very good writer who deserves to be more famous.
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Exit A by Anthony Swofford: Swofford is better known for "Jarhead," which I have not read. He switches to fiction with "Exit A," an uneven novel about teenage love, rebellion, the weird fusion of cultures around military bases in Japan, mistakes, and forgiveness. It's OK.
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Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker by James McManus: Poet 1 and journalist McManus goes to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker. Plans change. Instead of a simple magazine piece, what comes out is "Positively Fifth Street," a tangled narrative interleaving McManus's unexpected success in the tournament, the simultaeous trial of the murder of Las Vegas scion Ted Binion 2, and biographical vignettes of the author. This story about greed, vice, and gambling makes for entertaining reading, but occasionally difficult reading where McManus's weaving of the disparate story lines gets clumsy. If you like poker, true crime stories, and/or sleaze, though, it's a must-read.
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The Forever War by Joe Haldeman : Private Mandella gets stuck in an interstellar war, where every battle takes him decades or centuries from the Earth of his youth. Adjusting gets harder every time, and Mandella struggles both with conflicted feelings about the war and a rootlessness in which the world has completely changed in his absence. I'm sure the book was very exciting and ground-breaking in the 1970s, but reading it now, it's just kind of a "meh."
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A&R by Bill Flanagan: after reading Flanagan's entertaining send-up of the TV business in New Bedlam, I picked up his first book. As with many first novels, this one is a little closer to the author's own experience, in music in this case. A&R tracks a tumultuous period in a couple of years at a record label. We see events from the perspective of former indie A&R man Jim Cantone, now a "senior vice president" at a the record label subsidiary of a multinational conglomerate. Flanagan takes some clever shots at the industry's general scumminess, while charting a somewhat unlikely course. The ending is a little too nice for such a cynical book, and Flanagan took a few unnecessary detours along the way (the character of Zoey Pavlov is incomplete, for instance), but neverthless produced a successful and enjoyable satire.
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New Ideas From Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz: a good survey of the history and evolution of economic thought from its nascence in the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century. It makes for an accessible and readable starter for anyone interested in economics or economists.
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Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege 1942-1943 by Anthony Beevor: Stalingrad was the linchpin of the war between the stubborn megalomania of Adolf Hitler and the impulsive paranoia of Josef Stalin. Their clash resulted in unimaginable suffering on both sides in the frozen wasteland of the Don steppe in the winter of 1942-1943 as two armies fought over the rubble of what is now Volgograd. Beevor covers not just the battle for the city itself, but also sets the stage for everything leading up to it, bringing you into the action with individual stories of heroism and villainy. It's an excellent look at what was quite possibly the pivotal battle of the war with Nazi Germany, giving us perspective on how truly close a thing it was. Highly recommended.
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The White Lioness by Henning Mankell: this mystery takes place as the end of South Africa's apartheid system neared. There are those who don't want it to end, and they're willing to kill Nelson Mandela to spark a race war to do it. An unlikely mistake connects this conspiracy to Sweden, where we come back to our hero Kurt Wallander. While the series is focused on Sweden, and much of this particular book takes place in Sweden, the strongest parts are actually those taking place in South Africa or from the perspective of the South African characters. The feelings and politics around apartheid were surprisingly interesting to me. Beyond that it's a serviceable mystery, exceeding the previous novel in the series.
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The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell: dark, grisly tales of human exploitation may be normal for the jaded readers of American mystery novels, but they're a lot more jarring when they happen in small-town Sweden. Once again Kurt Wallander is on the case. Early on, the identity of the villain is clearly telegraphed, which makes the mystery at the core somewhat less thrilling. This is more a story of whydunit and howtoprovehedunit than the standard whodunit. Mankell still manages to produce a serviceable novel, but it's not what I'd hoped for.
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Sidetracked by Henning Mankell: serial killers aren't really a Swedish phenomenon, which makes the crimes in "Sidetracked" all the more bewildering to the small-town Swedish police force. Kurt Wallander takes the lead again, but may have found his match against a murderer whose scalped victims appear to have little in common. The high point is the killer: the identity is an unlikely one on the surface, but Mankell writes it to fit, and the viewpoint is a scarily convincing one. There was one sour note that Mankell can't be blamed for, and that's that I had very recently read Malcolm Gladwell's debunking of criminal profiles; it made it hard to swallow the parts featuring the profiler. Aside from that, however, "Sidetracked" is an excellent mystery which stands enough on its own that you can read it without having read the previous 4 books in the series.
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Hinterland by James Clemens: an underwhelming sequel to his previous "Shadowfall." The creative elements Clemens brought to the epic fantasy genre are no longer novel, and some of the areas where he was uncreative are even more annoying. The story is also less epic; it doesn't feel as grand as the previous book. The settings are limited and the plot of the book too skimpy for the time devoted to it. Not enough happens to move the story forward for 480 pages it uses. Clemens's writing style feels like what I expect he produces for his action-adventure novels (written as "James Rollins"). Not an inspiring effort.
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I found Stephen Baxter's Evolution to be rather annoying at first. Baxter traces the evolution of mankind from the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event to the death of Earth in the far future, by way of vignettes of various members of species in the ancestral line. Many of the early ones were rather cutesy, hence the annoyance. Either they got better or I got used to it, as my annoyance diminished as I proceeded. Most of the book should more properly be considered pre-historical fiction rather than science fiction; it's only once Baxter reaches the modern human era that he gets into truly speculative territory. One thing is clear once again: Baxter ain't no optimist. Given the story involves characters separated by millions of years, there isn't much continuity in the traditional sense. The overall arc seeks to make a point about the significance of the environment in human history, and a warning about our future should we fail to heed the point. That characterization makes it sound far more preachy than it actually is; the point is made with relative subtlety. Overall, I'd rate it a fair effort. Baxter's stories are less than compelling, but his imagination and attention to detail warrant respect.
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Fantastic. Our sewer pipe burst. Maybe big grand trees aren't such a good thing after all. It's probably the same one as last time, and the one that tried to kill me last year. Choose an expletive. Don't feel like you have to use only one. I've said it more than once, I'll say it again: houses are terrible investments. Don't buy one unless you have to.
How good are you at guessing? I got 5 clearly right, 2 clearly wrong, and 3 just barely wrong. I am among the 99% of people who are over-confident. Ironically or appropriately, depending on how you look at it, I read the comment about over-confidence and was confident that I was not over-confident.
Extra time in debates is one way the "front-runners" get preferential treatment from the media. "Front-runner" status becomes self-reinforcing. I'd like to steal an idea from the chess world. The candidates are each allotted the same amount of time at the beginning of the debate. From the moment the moderator finishes the question until the candidate finishes answering, the candidate is on the clock. If a candidate runs out of time, that's it; they can't talk anymore throughout the debate. If you want to spend your whole time budget talking about fishing, you can do that. If you want to allocate the same amount of time to each topic, you can do that too. I figure for a 90 minute debate with 8 participants (the current Democratic field), you'd give each candidate a 10-minute clock, with 10 more minutes for the moderator to ask questions 1. For the 9 Republican candidates, it would be 9 minutes each, plus 9 minutes for the moderator. This would also nerf the biased tactic of questions directed at particular candidates. Of course, since this would take power away from the political machines at the center and distribute it more towards the fringes, it would never happen, but it's nice to dream.
1 Maybe the moderator should be on a clock as well.
There's this recent trend in giving women gifts after they give birth. It's enough of a trend to have made the NY Times. I've heard them called "birth gifts" and "push presents" (in the aforementioned article). Regardless of what you call them, they're a terrible idea. I can think of nothing that could possibly measure up to the pain and sacrifice of pregnancy, labor, and raising children. Any trinket or bauble I gave would just cheapen the event. She's not some woman I hired to be a brood mare, she's my wife. That's not to say she deserves no consideration; indeed, such a gift is insufficient consideration. True consideration is not nearly so easy or simple.
The practice also implies something about compensation and equality. The new father gives the gift because the new mother endured far more. Giving such a gift in theory works to return things to equilibrium. That's stupid. A successful partnership isn't about equalizing responsibilities and rewards. "From each according to ability, to each according to need." As a general principle for organizing a society, that fails miserably, but it seems like the only sane system in a marriage. Some abstract notion of equality is irrelevant; you don't keep accounts with family. What matters is whether each member is satisfied with the division of duties and dividends.
Such a gift also suggests a lack of equality. Any gift that I give Jessica comes out of our money, regardless of whose name is on the paycheck. Indeed, it is impossible for me to buy a gift for her 1; rather, we are buying something together for her (though she might not know about it [yet]). Saying it's a gift from me to her implies a distinction between my money and her money, and furthermore that my authority is higher than hers2. It's not the 1950s anymore; that's not how things work.
1 Except in the sense of implementing the mechanics of the transaction.
2 We (not I) didn't get her an engagement ring for similar reasons. The money would have come out of our collective assets, and we both would have been poorer for it.
A woman becoming President of the United States is a victory against sexism. A vote for a candidate (even partly) because she is a woman is a victory for sexism.
I haven't come up with a complete and articulate expression of my opinion on affirmative action, but since I was asked directly...
I'm not going to bother with any of the issues of fairness or equality because those are a quagmire, and I'm not really sure of what I think about them anyway. It matters more that affirmative action is misguided and ineffective. Affirmative action is the solution to the wrong problem. Some people's level of achievement is diminished by social and economic consequences of their race. Instead of helping those people reach their true potential, affirmative action says we should just pretend they already have.
Affirmative action is an attempt to solve a special case of the problem of heritability of advantage and disadvantage. Kids from rich families tend to be rich. Kids from poor families tend to be poor. Frankly, I don't really care what caused your misfortune if it wasn't your fault 1. I want to help the kid who starts off with the disadvantage of being from Louisiana just as much as I want to help the kid with the disadvantage of being black. In either case we have a kid who through no fault of his own is starting life at the back of the pack.
To take an extreme hypothetical example... Suppose you're a young black child of an unwed, uneducated mother. In spite of a chaotic home life, you manage to show up to school regularly. Your mother doesn't read to you, but you discover books on your own, turning your back on the babysitter TV. While your peers are getting distracted or in trouble, you forge ahead through school. Finally, after 18 years, society notices you and asks if you want to go to Texas State instead of nowhere. Gee, thanks. Where were they when you were hungry and cold? Where were they when you got beaten up for being a know-it-all? Where were they when your mom wanted you to drop out of school to help support your younger siblings? By the time affirmative action shows up to help, the damage is already done.
If we're really sincere about helping those with disadvantages, we'd start much earlier. Is race really the root cause? Or is it just a strong correlation? I think it's the latter. We should focus on helping disadvantaged children regardless of race. Will that help more blacks and more Hispanics? Certainly. In that way, it won't differ from affirmative action. Affirmative action does too little too late. They need to start getting help as early as possible. Affirmative action is more than just an inadequate solution, it's an impediment in the way of doing the right thing. As long as it's there, we privileged few can kid ourselves into thinking we're helping.
Since I seem to be in a mood for tearing down the liberal orthodoxy...
I don't think we should have a minimum wage. It has nothing to do with economics. Rather, if we as a society believe that we should guarantee a minimum standard of living for each of our citizens, we should all bear the burden. Instead, what we do is force employers like Wal-Mart to do it. Then the help only goes to those who have the minimmum wage jobs, the costs are borne primarily by one small part of the overall economy, and a lot of the help is wasted on people who don't need it as much (teenagers, for instance). Nobody is owed a living wage, nor is anyone owed a job. It's not Wal-Mart's job to help out the less fortunate, it's all of ours.
On vacation for the last 2 weeks, I haven't been reading any of my regular weblogs, comics, news sites, etc. I've barely opened a newspaper, and the latest Economist is still in my inbox. I guess I read all that stuff as a break from work, but since I'm not at work, I don't need the break. I don't miss the infoload.
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