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.