That's a total of 19341 pages in 49 books 1 over 151 days, or one book every 3.08 days and 128 pages per day. Combined with the August numbers, it's 46023 pages in 113 books over 365 days, or one book every 3.23 days and 111 pages per day. The genre breakdown for the year looks like this:
3 Biography
26 Fantasy
10 General fiction
6 General or miscellaneous non-fiction
6 History
21 Historical fiction
1 Horror
2 How to
10 Mystery
3 Science
22 Speculative (science) fiction
3 Technical non-fiction
I was pleasantly surprised that nearly 60% of my reading was neither fantasy nor science fiction; I guess I'm broadening my horizons after all. I can't imagine that I'm ever going to read this much in a single year for a long time, if ever again.
I'll renew my prediction from last February that the Democratic ticket will be Hillary Clinton for President and Barack Obama for Vice President. To that I add that they'll win. I don't know what will happen for Republicans, and I don't much care as long as it's not Giuliani; he's both scary and seems to have a chance of winning. Mitt Romney isn't scary (just disagreeable), and Mike Huckabee won't win.
While looking up something else, I found a handy chart1 showing the age distribution of people in the United States (broken up by 5-year groups, using 2000 Census data). It looks like people about my age (± 2 years) are in the lowest population cohort except among the elderly 2. I wonder what the consequences of that are. One thing appears to be that it was a lot easier to get into competitive universities because there was less competition. Perhaps the same will be true of jobs seeking a particular experience level. I imagine being in a statistical minimum like that would have primarily beneficial effects like those I mentioned, but I don't really know.
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of Craig's List. Here's what I've learned:
Always deal in person and in cash.
The phone is quicker than email.
To get the best deals, you have to respond fast. You also have to invest your time and watch the list for a while before pouncing.
There's someone for just about anything if it's free, whether it's broken floor tiles, used peanut oil, or ancient computer parts.
On the other hand, for things that cost money, it's generally a buyers' market.
You should never buy appliances, consumer electronics, children's clothes, toys, some tools, and some computer parts at retail. Even the Austin list, which is probably no more than a medium-sized one, has a lot of pretty decent items. I scored an excellent dishwasher for just $100.
You get extra for things that are "new in box."
When buying gift cards or store credit, meet the seller at the store in question so you can verify the quantity. In some cases, like with Whole Foods, you can just call a 1-800 number and verify, but since you need to meet the seller somewhere anyway... Gift cards usually go for 85 cents on the dollar, but it can be less for more obscure retailers (or from more desperate sellers; today I got $100 of J. Crew gift cards for $50 from an unemployed seller).
Whenever possible, put up a picture of the item for sale. Unless you're selling a generic commodity like an icemaker hose, people are going to want to know what it looks like.
In your subject, state what the item actually is (blue jeans, a drill, a microwave, etc.). It seems obvious, but people often forget it. Also include the two or three key attributes of the item, whether color, manufacturer, or function.
Describe the item thoroughly. Don't just say "Dishwasher $75." Where applicable include the manufacturer, model, color, size, condition (cosmetic and functional), count, expiration date, whether necessary parts are included.
Always make sure you include a way to contact you; I suggest using their email forwarding to a secondary email address that you check frequently.
If you have multiple items of a similar type to sell, like toddler boy clothes, list them together. If they're significantly different, like a hand mixer and a rocking chair, post separate listings. This is true even if you have 20 items (though you might want to stretch it out). I have little interest in scanning through a posting that says "Lots of stuff for sale;" there are enough posts in a day that I just read the titles.
Manufacturers are mostly interested in selling their current product line; it can be hard to find specifications and manuals for items even 2 years old (like my dishwasher). That's just the way it is.
The literacy level is appalling.
People will flake out. You'll get an inquiry and then never hear from that person again.
When arranging a meeting, go beyond just picking a place to meet. Specify (say) which entrance and exchange physical descriptions (including clothing). Always get a cell phone number.
Make appointments for a specific time rather than a rough time range, even when people are coming to your house. You can loosen this for free things that you're going to leave in front of your house, but you still want an idea so you don't have a box of broken tiles sitting on your lawn for a week.
Sometimes people will try to change the deal when you meet, figuring that you'll give up $5 or whatever when you're face-to-face with a willing buyer. These people are jerks. Don't bend, and definitely don't try it.
Make sure you have the exact amount in cash before buying. If selling, make sure you have plenty of small bills for making change. You don't want your buyer to have to go somewhere to get change; she might not come back. This doesn't apply when meeting at retail stores that can make change, of course.
Keep a record of your transactions. Note down what the item was, the cost, the other party, the date, the location, and the time (if you feel like being especially complete).
Respond to every inquiry, if only to say "Sorry, it's gone."
Respect first-come first serve unless you explicitly stated "best offer."
Uma likes this obnoxious Berenstain Bears book about Easter. In one part of the story, Mama Bear chides Sister Bear for thinking holidays are all about stuff, whether it's presents or special food. Now, I realize these are fictional characters, but it's a common sentiment. If they're anything like most people, that's because most of the parents' emphasis is on the stuff. How much time do you spend at Thanksgiving thinking about all the good things in your life? And how much time do you spend stuffing your face (or preparing to stuff your face, or cleaning up after stuffing your face, etc.)? How much time do you spend on presents at Christmas vs thinking about the birth of Jesus?1 The kids think what matters is the stuff because the parents demonstrate it through their actions. If they want kids to pay attention to the sentimental stuff, then they'd better demonstrate it through their actions.
Of course, I don't think there's anything wrong with seeing Thanksgiving as an excuse for a party and gorging yourself. That's fine by me. For us, Christmas is all about tacky decorations, shiny lights, and presents. I'm A-OK with that. But if you're not, make sure your actions reflect it. Kids are smart. They can tell what you think is important. Don't blame them for getting it right when you got it wrong.
I'm standing by my Hillary as President, Obama as VP prediction, even after her Iowa loss, and even after she loses in New Hampshire today. I just don't think Obama has staying power. I know Clinton's performance in the debate is going to hurt her 1, but that'll blow over; what won't blow over is that Obama only has 2 years in the Senate as a qualification. As much as he's supposed to be the candidate of change, I don't see much different between him and the mainstream Democratic platform. He and Clinton aren't that far apart. I think that will become more evident. Iowa and New Hampshire aren't everything.
I certainly don't want Hillary Clinton to win; this is just a prediction. She's also very close to the core Democratic platform, which, like that of the Republicans, is just a bundle of positions lacking conceptual coherence and unifying principles. The people who are consistent and make sense are the ones I like, and are inevitably longshots: Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul.
So. Obama's going to run out of steam. Clinton is going to be humbled but win through, and the two of them will unite to make an unstoppable pair. I don't think John Edwards can make it, and this time being #2 is not going to be good enough; the Clinton/Obama synergy is just too strong. Bill Richardson was just in the race to become VP, which is also not going to happen. He's got the most impressive resume of the field, but that's apparently not important, and Obama has trumped his Hispanic heritage. Joe Biden I think was running just for fun.
Of the Republicans, the main thing that matters to me is that Giuliani lose. He's such a bellicose law-and-order authoritarian. Somehow Americans seem to like him in spite of his many, many flaws. George W. Bush got lucky with September 11th, but then screwed up the aftermath; Giuliani got similarly lucky, but term limits scooted him out of there before he could screw it up, too. Romney I could live with, but I don't see him winning. Huckabee kind of worries me, but I don't think he can win, either. The other one to watch seems to be McCain; he has a broad appeal in spite of his staunch conservatism, and could give Clinton/Obama a run for their money.
If I had to summarize my prognostications, I'd put my dollars on Clinton/Obama beating McCain/Huckabee in November by a respectable but not large margin.
1 I suspect Obama is mellower because he's had to deal with 2-year olds much more recently
I've mentioned my preference for longshot candidates Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, and Ron Paul. I'd also consider a 3rd party vote for Michael Bloomberg if he ran. The conventional wisdom is that I'm throwing my vote away. That's not just wrong, it's backwards: you're throwing your vote away if you vote for a mainstream candidate. When you do that, all you're doing is affirming the status quo. I don't know many people who think the status quo is as good as it's going to get. Votes aren't like bets; you don't get anything, regardless of how your candidate does. That's why the winnerism of American politics is so confusing to me; what exactly do you get for having cast your vote for the eventual winner? It seems like you get nothing, because that candidate was going to win with or without you (it's a country of 300 million people, after all).
For mainstream candidates, what matters is winning. Every vote beyond a plurality for a mainstream candidate might as well be an abstention or a spoiled ballot. Bush's solid victory in 2004 bought him nothing; in fact, it lead to overreaching that squandered the "political capital" Bush thought he had. Once a candidate has one, more voters piling on is irrelevant. Another way of saying that is that the average vote for the winner isn't worth a full vote.
For the smaller candidates, what matters isn't winning so much as making a respectable showing 1. Every vote for one of those candidates is another iota of credibility to the views they espouse. You're not throwing your vote away like when you vote for the candidates of the establishment; you're sending a message that you reject the whole establishment. You're keeping them on their toes, knowing that there are votes out there who can't be taken for granted.
Jessica's just hit week 30. Maybe it's a little early, but I want to hear predictions: sex, weight, date of birth. As a reference point, Uma was a girl, 6 lbs 9.6 ounces, born 15 days before the precisely useless due date. Whoever guesses closest gets... well, I'll figure out something.
On NPR on the way home, they were interviewing some New Hampshire women about their votes in the primaries. One exchange appalled me. This is my best recollection of what they said:
Interviewer (to a Hillary voter): The polls all said that Clinton was going to lose. Why do you think they were so wrong? Do you think they underestimated women voters?
Interviewee: Yes, I think they did underestimate women voters.
W... T... F... How the hell does she know? In fact, what does that even mean? And this is NPR, which is better than most other mainstream media outlets. That's just pathetic.
Being "a regular guy" - Given how uniquely varied and stressful the job of President is, we must seek out freaks for the job; it's just not for normal people.
Charisma
Creativity/Ideas - Ideas are like... belly buttons. We don't lack for ideas.
"Electability"
Empathy
Endorsements
Personality - Insofar as we can even get a realistic picture of someone who we only know about through carefully selected and edited video clips of that person performing a part in a very strange stage play
Public speaking skills
Race
Sex
"Strong leadership" - I honestly believe people don't even know what they mean by that.
"Values"
What does matter:
Good judgment
Good policies
Open-mindedness - which overlaps with...
Pragmatism
Principles - I am not contradicting myself when I put this one in the same bucket as Pragmatism; lots of policy choices don't involve a clash of principles.
Experience - which is necessary to demonstrate the above
This clip from a Clinton speech really annoys me. Watch:
C'mon, Hillary; your campaign is so carefully calculated, and you make a mistake like that? His name wasn't "Mahatma;" that was a title. His name was "Mohandas."
Anyhoo. The Indian joke itself doesn't bother me. I can't explain why.
People should be complaining about the spike in food prices. That's something more essential that the government can legitimately do something about, like eliminating the corn ethanol subsidy (since farmers are switching fields from other food crops to corn), eliminating other farm subsidies (so as not to prop up prices), and getting rid of tariffs (like on imported sugar).
I can feel it. Note that the image is actually deceptive; "high" cedar pollen are usually in the 1,000 range. If the image had been scaled properly, the bar would be many times longer.
Note that according to the qualitative judgment, the current 538 is still "high." The previous measurement was apparently even worse than I thought, being at least some 35 times higher than high.
Scientology indoctrination video. Remember, next time you hear "Scientologist," just replace it in your mind with the word "absolutely crazy." You may think you don't care, or that 10 minutes is too long, but really, you need to watch this video. When he laughs, it's kind of disturbing, and I've got no clue why he's laughing when he does.
"Why, as a New York-based paper, are we not backing Rudolph Giuliani? Why not choose the man we endorsed for re-election in 1997 after a first term in which he showed that a dirty, dangerous, supposedly ungovernable city could become clean, safe and orderly? What about the man who stood fast on Sept. 11, when others, including President Bush, went AWOL?
That man is not running for president.
The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.
Mr. Giuliani's arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn't share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.
The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city's and the country's nightmare to promote his presidential campaign."
I often get asked by non-vegetarians whether a vegetarian diet is healthy. To me it's a silly question, but now at least I can point to someone with a more extreme physical regimen on an even more restrictive diet doing just fine. The Wall Street Journal profiles NFL tight end Tony Gonzales, the 247 lb. vegan.
I've gotten relatively comfortable with plumbing and electrical work around the house. The one thing that aggravates me just as much as it always has is drywall. It's such an aggravation. I can't believe we haven't come up with anything better yet. The mess, the dust, the weight, the lack of strength, the tedious finishing... I hate drywall.
I have found that dabbing a little bit of petroleum jelly into paper cuts and similar injuries makes them sting a lot less. I use a cotton swab to make sure I don't spread it too widely, and then I put a bandage over it to make sure the jelly doesn't rub off. It especially helps on hands because they can get dried out and the skin flexes a lot. I got some fierce slices in my palm from ripping off laminate countertops (sharp edges), and this made it feel a lot better.
Florida gave me what I wanted: Giuliani got thumped. Again the NY Times got in some choice hits1, starting the article with: "Perhaps he was living an illusion all along." Also the more subtle "Voters seemed to embrace a man so comfortable wielding power..." Then: "Perhaps a simpler dynamic was at work: The more that Republican voters saw of him, the less they wanted to vote for him."
1 Although they belong in an editorial, not a news article
My pet theory is that Barack Obama entered the presidential field hoping his longshot bid would get him a VP slot, with that setting him up for a real run at the top office 8 years later. I don't think he really thought he'd have a shot at the nomination. I mean, c'mon, 7 years in the state legislature and 2 years as Senator 1? Obama's too smart to have expected to get much mileage out of that. He's hidden his surprise well.
1 At the time he officially became a candidate, 3 years now.
A research team has made aluminum look like gold without any kind of tint or stain, possibly almost to the point of fooling a spectrascope (my inference). They use a laser to etch small features into the surface of the metal that alter which frequencies of light are emitted. It sounds to me kind of like the same thing as butterfly wings. This is certainly not restricted to making one metal look like another; I'll bet they could make all kinds colors and patterns once they refine the technique.
It seems like all of the remaining candidates can point to one or two key attributes that distinguish them:
Ron Paul: freedom, principle
John McCain: character, independence
Mike Huckabee: Christian conservatism, "everyman"
Mitt Romney: executive competence
Barack Obama: charisma, "freshness"
Notably absent is one Hillary Clinton. She claims "experience," but that's a pathetic claim. I can't reduce her to two adjectives. Does that mean she's a weak candidate, or does it mean she has a broad appeal1?
I'm sticking by my prediction of Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination and getting Barack Obama as VP. To go slightly further out on the limb, I predict that if Obama does in fact win the nomination, the situation will not be reversed. Hillary's already been a bit player in the big show; she's not going to do it again. Can you imagine Bill Clinton as "Second Gentleman?" I think not. She'd rather wait 4 years (see below) and take another crack at it. My guess for Obama's VP candidate is Bill Richardson. His depth and breadth of experience will provide a nice backstop, and the Hispanic appeal won't hurt 2. I don't think they'll win, though. McCain/Huckabee will hammer Obama's lack of experience, and it will work, because it's such a weakness. I'd go so far as to say that they will crush him.
Now, I would never advise someone to vote based on "electability;" you should vote for the candidate who best represents your views and whom you think would do the best job regardless of what anyone else thinks. However, I recognize that many people won't follow that advice. As such, if you're leaning Democratic, do not vote for Obama in the primaries. He'll lose. In fact, if you truly want Obama to be president, the best way to get him there is by voting for Hillary. That way he can be VP for 4 or 8 years, fixing his fatal flaw of inexperience and making him a much stronger candidate in 2016.
I myself am strongly considering holding my nose and voting in the Republican primary to give Ron Paul another iota of support. I am indifferent to all the other candidates. I think my vote is more valuable going to him; maybe the value of one's vote is inversely proportional to the total number of votes the candidate gets.
I've given some thought to how I'd feel about the various candidates winning. I don't think I'd be too bothered by Mitt Romney winning. I think the accusations he's gotten of being socially moderate are probably right. To me that's a plus. As far as actual competence goes, I think he can deliver, probably to a greater extent than any of the other candidates. I wouldn't freak out over Hillary Clinton winning, either. I'm concerned about McCain; he's a little too unpredictable, and very, very conservative. And he apparently doesn't know anything about economics, which is worrisome because economics are basically the key to everything. I'd worry about Obama as president, and Huckabee is both socially conservative and worryingly weak on policy issues. Ron Paul I'd be fine with because the worst case scenario is that nothing happens; I don't have to worry about him going off and creating some debacle like the Iraq War or Star Wars.
So. to summarize... Clinton/Obama will barely beat McCain/Huckabee in November. Or McCain/Huckabee will crush Obama/Richardson. And vote Clinton if you want Obama for president (someday).
$515 billion for defense? Not including Afghanistan and Iraq? What is that buying? The military isn't growing by that much. Islamic terrorism is by no means the existential threat that the Soviet Union was. This makes no sense.
to use an Internet-connected messaging device while moving one's bowels: Elzar brownberried in the upstairs bathroom to help pass the time while he processed his lunch.
At a New York or Los Angeles cocktail party, few would dare make a pejorative comment about Barack Obama's race or Hillary Clinton's sex. Yet it would be easy to get away with deriding Mike Huckabee's religious faith.
Those things are not the same. Sex and race are not choices. You don't criticize people for things out of their control, especially when there's nothing wrong with them. Religion, on the other hand, is a choice, and a candidate's philosophy and outlook are important. Of course, that also means one can justify voting for the religious candidate based on that distinction more than one can justify voting for the black candidate or the female one based on those ones.
On second thought, I think Obama could win the general election. His self-assured confidence and charisma will overwhelm a boring consideration like weakness.
The first few years in my house made me highly reluctant to buy another used house. The plumbing was rotting, we had aluminum wiring, which can cause all sorts of problems, the previous residents half-assed a lot of repairs, etc. Now that we're getting closer to being done, though, I'm thinking it wasn't so bad. For one thing, we're getting things the way we want them. To some extent we've restrained our inclinations because we know we have to sell this house. The next house we won't need to be so conservative because we'll plan on sticking around for a while, so we can use bold colors and more interesting features. An older, already-renovated house will cost more but won't be updated the way we like. New houses will likely have the same drawback, since builders limit what they offer. Doing it ourselves will mean getting exactly what we want, plus it's one of the few expensive hobbies that will keep me out of real trouble. Not to mention I can get some payback off all the learning this house has forced me through, and amortize my investment in tools. Odds are pretty good we'll look for an older, ugly, and above all cheap1 house in a few years. It's weird to have changed my mind like this in such a short time when I thought I felt so strongly about it.
Hyundai should have followed Honda, Nissan, and Toyota's lead(s) and created a new nameplate for its new luxury sedan, the Genesis. Hyundais have come a long way, but I don't think quite enough. They should have gone with something that dripped class, like Leganza. Or maybe just use Genesis for the marque. Then they should have given the car itself a cryptic alphanumeric name. Of the "cool" letters, 'K' and 'N' are the only ones that are still unused. 'K' is superior to 'N' not just because I think so, but because of where Hyundai is from. 'K' by itself is a non-starter because of the ill-fated Chrysler K-class from the 1980s. 'N' by itself would be confusing in use; "I just bought an N!" As a South Korean company, they certainly can't do NK, and KN risks sounding like cane. 'K' plus one number would sound too much like Audi's 'A' plus one number scheme. '300' and '500' are out because of Ford and Chrysler respectively. It's got a V8, but 'K' followed by '8' is hard to say: kay ate. That strikes 'K8,' 'K80,' and 'K800' from the list. Letters after numbers imply a trim rather than a model, so something like 'N8K' is out. It can't be 'N8' because then people would call it "nate." 'N80?' I guess that's the best I can do.
No doubt you've seen Clocky by now. To refresh your memory, it's the alarm clock that runs away so you can't keep snoozing. It's a neat idea, but it doesn't seem so useful in practice because there are much easier ways to achieve the same ends. You could have to type in a code to turn off the alarm. Or the alarm duration could get longer every time you hit snooze. The Clocky has the problem that it must be battery-powered, it can knock stuff over 1, it has more mechanical parts that can break, and your animals might think it's prey. It's a clever idea, but it should have stayed on the drawing board.
1 In its defense, slipping in a pool of water filled with the shards of your water glass will certainly wake you up in a hurry
If you transport a minor from one state to another to another, does that count as two felonies even if it's one trip? You don't have to travel very far to go from, say, Virginia to West Virginia to Maryland to Pennsylvania, or Connecticut to New York to Pennsylvania to New Jersey, or Utah to Colorado to New Mexico to Arizona (Four Corners). Given the aggressive nature of our "justice" system, my guess is they'd pin as many counts on you as they could, regardless of how accurately they reflected the severity of the crime. Or, let's suppose I transported a minor from Texas to Oklahoma and then back. I'll bet they'd try to get 2 separate counts.
It's bizarre how easily otherwise intelligent people freak out about Hillary Clinton. That's why it's nice to see a sober, considered explanation of why she'd be a bad President (scroll down a bit)1. The leadership comments are especially significant; that jibes with what I've inferred from her actions. Too much pandering and triangulating. She doesn't seem like someone who has a coherent set of core beliefs, at least not ones that inform her actions.
Given that there are legitimate criticisms backed by evidence from her record, it's really strange the degree to which people loathe her. The same thing happens with George W. Bush. Let's be clear: Bush has been an awful president. It's hard to think of one worse in the last century, or even longer. That says practically nothing about him as a person. I know some people with rather disturbing beliefs who are great friends. I'm sure there are plenty of people who believe the same things I believe for the same reasons whom I'd absolutely hate. If you've seen "Journeys With George," you know that he can be a charming and pleasant fellow. The personal and political are separate. George W. Bush is a great guy and an awful president.
Here's the thing: you don't know these people. At all. You've almost certainly never met them. If you have, it probably wasn't for very long. You might have seen them in person, but probably at a distance. Most likely, though, you've only seen them on TV or read about them. That's all mediated. What you know has been selected and edited and sliced and diced six ways from Sunday. Furthermore, it's never about anything natural; they're in unusual situations, and they're performing. What can you infer about somebody's personality based on their ability to deliver a speech someone else wrote? Do you think that Hugh Laurie is an American doctor? Of course not; he's playing a part. There's a word for people who can't distinguish between the actor and the character: crazy.
Your judgments about people are calibrated to your normal life. You meet people at social gatherings, in school, at church, or at work. It's usually in intimate, personal settings. How many of your friends hold press conferences? Do they give speeches to the Sierra Club or the NRA? Do they spend hours shaking hands and kissing babies? Of course not. All of your instincts about personality are useless in these situations. The problem is they keep telling you that they're working, even though it's garbage in and garbage out. Actually, it's worse than that. Your instincts can work against you because they are no secret. It's not like the politicians don't know you're watching. They and the media work together 2 to manipulate you into reaching a particular conclusion. Their relationship can be cooperative or it can be adversarial, but the result is still due to their combined efforts. Sometimes that's to make you think well of someone, like George W. Bush or Barack Obama. Sometimes it's to make you think poorly of them, like Hillary Clinton or Al Gore3. Your judgments about a public figure's personality aren't just worthless, they're of negative value because you're being manipulated. You know practially nothing firsthand, and even if you know a little bit, it's swamped by all the junk they throw at you until you can't tell whether you think something because it's your own thought or because it was planted in your head. These people are very, very good at this. They want you to think you know these people because that's an easier way to get your vote than substance.
What can you do? Take the personal completely out of the equation. Aside from the above, just think about it. There are people with personalities that are complete opposites that are identically qualified. Colin Farrell, notorious party boy, casual drug user, and womanizer is a great actor. So is Christopher Walken, who's apparently reserved and has been married to the same woman for almost 40 years4. There are professional athletes who drip charisma, and then there's Ricky Williams. All that matters are the basics: can they work with others? Do they learn from their mistakes? Are the open-minded? The rest is at best a distraction, at worst, well, much worse. Focus on the evidence. Look at their record. Read their speeches; definitely do not watch them or listen to them. Look at their proposals. Look at what's real, and don't let your judgment be hijacked.
1 Actually, read the whole thing. Even if you disagree with the conclusion or the priorities, the method is right. It's an excellent example of how you should go about making a decision
2 This isn't a claim that there is a nefarious conspiracy, just a recognition of the way things work
3 Who, by many accounts, is a genial, relaxed, and funny person (his daughter had to have gotten it from somewhere), which you'd never be able to tell from his public performances in the 2000 campaign, like that awful Tipper kiss
4 And is apparently nothing like any of his characters, not even The Continental
I am increasingly cynical about the way medicine is practiced in this country. The economics and politics are all messed up, and create incentives for the wrong things. You need to protect yourself, both in body and in wallet. I've devised a simple script to follow in case your doctor recommends a prescription drug1, surgery, or other significant medical intervention:
Can I do nothing? If not...
How long can I put off doing something? If the answer is not very long...
Can I address the problem with diet or lifestyle changes, or some kind of behavior modification therapy? If not...
Can I treat it with over-the-counter nutritional supplements? e.g., iron for anemia, cranberry extract for bladder infections. If not...
Can I treat it with over-the-counter drugs? e.g. ibuprofen (works just as well as Vioxx or Celebrex for most people), Benadryl (works as well as any other anti-histamine for most people, so if it doesn't make you drowsy, you're good). If not...
Is there a generic drug to treat? That's not just about cost; generified drugs have been around longer, so they're more likely to be effective and safe. If not...
Can I treat it with an older, more established prescription drug? If not...
When all else fails, ask if there large-scale, rigorous, long-term studies that demonstrate that this is significantly better than alternatives?2
I left off a last question because both it and the desired answer may vary. In some cases you can substitute surgery for a drug or vice versa. There are many kinds of surgery with varying risks and impacts. Ditto for the many kinds of prescription drugs. You'll have to make your own call about asking about substituting one for the other. Devices like stents or pacemakers are similarly ambiguous. Are there any questions I missed?
I don't expect this to blow your mind. Instead, I wanted to compile a complete list so that you don't have to think about the questions to ask when you're on the spot. More importantly, I want you to understand that you are in charge of your health, and that you cannot trust our medical system to do what's best for you. The individuals involved may have the best of intentions, but the system is broken. Even in the best of situations, there is rarely a single best course of treatment. There are always tradeoffs, and some of them can be pretty tricky 3. You have to make up your own mind about what's best. Only you can know what's best for you.
1 Especially if it's a long-term thing, like an anti-depressant, a cholesterol drug, or prophylactic antibiotics.
2 You'd be surprised how often there aren't. Bleeding edge medicine can be disturbingly unempirical. Update: John says I need a citation here. Some of this comes from various articles that have come out recently about pharmaceutical companies cherry-picking data. Some of it comes from the book "Overtreated," which I recently read but have not posted about.
3 Meaning highly personal. Sometimes you have to choose between a single major surgery or a prescription drug for the rest of your life. Or maybe a treatment will extend your life, but reduce its quality. Different people are going to have different answers to such questions.
I've found this Google Maps app to be pretty useful. All it does is overlay colored areas designating different ZIP code areas. Note that ZIP codes to map perfectly to geographical areas as they are defined as "delivery routes," but I doubt you or I would run into any problems because of that.
Remember the vaunted Patriot missiles that protected Israel and Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein's Scud missiles? The ones that George H.W. Bush claimed had a 97% success rate (41 of 42)? Well, that rate is lower. It might even have been zero. Mind you, that's with 3 or 4 fired against each Scud. Zero shot down. Zip. Zilch. At $1 million to $3 million a pop, even.
She may still have an edge in delegates, but Obama has won 6 primaries in a row, and by no small margins. That O-mentum is going to influence voters, even if it's something of a distortion of the actual level of support. This could be settled by Ohio and Texas on MArch 4.
Am I the only one who thinks that the 40 members of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee have better things to do than to find out if Roger Clemens is a juicer? Maybe they can switch to something involving oversight and reform of, you know, the government. I tell you, next time any one of those Representatives claims that we need to make sacrifices because "we're at war" or anything like that...
The premise: two artists battle back and forth, each concocting a super-hero that trumps the others. So far they've come up with 134 funny, clever, silly, and occasionally lame super-heroes in their battle. Who is the superest hero of them all? Nobody knows yet. But we know the least super (the Superlest?). Start there.
Kevin Kelly1 is "Senior Maverick" at Wired Magazine. Um... If your company has a structured seniority ladder for a position, it's not exactly being a maverick now is it? Not to mention the title just smacks of trying too hard.
There's Billary and Bennifer, Brangelina and TomKat. For John McCain and Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, I'm hoping for Huckain, or, even better, McAbee. Barack Obama and Bill Richardson give me nothing to work with. The best I can do is Barichardson, which even I admit is pretty weak.
I've been alarmed by gaps in the knowledge of otherwise well-informed and sensible people. I'm going to make it a minor mission to fix those deficits as I encounter them, at least for my small cadre of readers.
Antibiotics are medicines that work on bacteria. They don't work on viruses. That means they can help with a sinus infection or an ear infection, but are useless against the common cold, influenza, or other viral diseases. Different antibiotics have different degrees of effectiveness against different bacteria. That can vary even within a species of bacteria. That's where a big problem lies.
Suppose you have a staph 1 infection. Your doctor prescribes 10 days of the antibiotic Methicillin to treat it. You take it for a few days, and then stop when you feel better. Guess what? You just helped to breed the bug that will kill us all. See, you haven't killed off all the bacteria. Furthermore, you've only killed off the bacteria with a weak natural resistance to Methicillin. The ones that are left are more resistant. They're in a weakened, vulnerable state. You need to take the full dose for the full duration so the levels of the antibiotic in your blood build up high enough and wipe out enough of the bacteria that your immune system can wipe out the rest. If you leave them alone, they'll regroup and recover. The next time you might not be able to use Methicillin on them.
Not finishing a dose is just part of the problem. Some people hoard antibiotics for the next time they get sick. Not only do they fail to wipe out the first infection, but the next time around, they expose the bacteria to low doses of the antibiotic. There are bacteria in and on you all the time. Most of them are beneficial. There are some that are dangerous, but they are often kept in check by your immune system, competing bacteria, or simply not being somewhere dangerous 2. These bacteria will acquire a resistance to the antibiotic; the vulnerable ones will get killed off, leaving the strong ones to form the base of the next generation.
The scariest thing I've left till last: bacteria can swap fragments of DNA. Your use of antibiotics may only directly spawn resistance in some benign bacterium, but that bacterium can contribute those genes to a completely unrelated nasty. That's another way to create a bug that could kill us all. There's no way to avoid these risks, but there are ways to reduce them. Don't take antibiotics based on your own judgment. Take them only for what they've been prescribed for, and finish the dose. In my experience, doctors have not been emphasizing those steps enough. There are only so many antibiotics out there, and the bacteria are evolving resistance faster than we're discovering new ones. Don't be the one who creates the superbug that wipes out the human race.
Addendum: The elephant in the room I'm leaving out is antibiotics in meat supplies. The animals are fed bad food, kept in bad conditions, and are given megadoses of antibiotics in lieu of humane treatment. That means you probably get antibiotics in your meat, and they definitely flood the ecosystem from animal waste. I'm doing some part by not eating meat at all, and tending to buy organic animal products. I don't think there's much more you can do at an individual level without significantly amping up your commitment.
1 Genus Staphylococcus. Staph species cause skin infections, wound infections, catheter infections, etc. They reside in the soil, on your skin, and even in your mucous membranes, often doing little harm
2 Intestinal bacteria can be devastating in the bladder, for instance
First, name all the United States. Eliminate the ones you've lived in for a while, like more than a year. Then try to name as many cities, towns, villages, townships, etc. that you can in each state. It doesn't matter how big or small they are; if it's on a map (and incorporated), it counts. I noticed a wide variation in the number I came up with for each state. Some of the ones I could come up with little for were obvious, others it was appalling. I was pretty impressed by the number I knew in our largest (by population) state; maybe it's because of my industry. Here's a freebie: Springfield.
Not everything can go in the trash. Batteries and fluorescent bulbs/tubes contain nasty stuff; they need to be disposed of properly. I know the City of Austin's web site tells what to do. Supposedly electronics retailers will take back batteries, and I've read that both Home Depot and Lowe's take back fluorescents, though I have not tried any of those.
Hillary Clinton might become the first female President of the United States, but who will be the second? Where are the female politicians with the national stature and appeal to run in 2012 or 2016? Few other potential candidates have had the luck of being married to a President, so they'll have to make their way the old-fashioned way, through their own careers 1.
Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and Dianne Feinstein will all be too old, not to mention they're probably too liberal; Elizabeth Dole and Kay Bailey Hutchison will also be too old. Barbara Mikulski is too old and too obscure. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine are too moderate to get the Republican nod. Also in the Senate are Lisa Murkowski, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu, Debbie Stabenow, Amy Klobuchar, and Maria Cantwell, but none of them has attained any kind of national recognition.
There may be better candidates among the state governors. Republican Sarah Palin of Alaska is already rumored to be a desirable vice presidential candidate2. Jennifer Granholm of Michigan was born in Canada, so she's out. In our shallow media culture, Janet Napolitano of Arizona won't get anywhere. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut will likely be too old, and Ruth Ann Minner of Delaware definitely will be. Linda Lingle of Hawaii is Jewish, not to mention being from Hawaii, a freak state. Christine Gregoire of Washington barely won the first time, so who knows where she'll be in 4 or 8 years.
Personally, my money is on Kathleen Sibelius. She's a blue governor of red Kansas, and generally well-respected for her ability. She attained office by being directly elected, rather than falling into office as Lieutenant Governor. She also won a convincing re-election in 2006, with 57.8% of the vote to her opponent's 40.5%. She's already been rumored to be a potential VP candidate, is chair emeritus of the Democratic Governor's Association, and is a supporter of Barack Obama 3. Furthermore, Kansas has term limits, so she'll be looking for a new job in 2 years anyway. Watch out for her in the future.
1 Although even Hillary Clinton had to go through the Senate, first.
2 And could make a good choice for McCain if Hillary is the nominee to appeal to undecided women
"The candidate for (modest amounts of) change." If people really wanted change, they would vote for Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich or a third party.
Used to be that living in Texas meant avoiding political advertising during the presidential campaign. The state was irrelevant in the primaries and unshakeable in the general election. *sigh*. I miss those days. Stop calling me already.
Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave. Two months of paid paternity leave.
I'm feeling some warm fuzzies towards Bank of America, that's for sure.
I've been wondering about UT's choice of mascot. Texas culture about boldness. Aggression. I realize the longhorn is significant in Texas history, but why would they name themselves after a prey animal? And not just a prey animal, but a domesticated, ranch-raised one, not even a wild one. It doesn't fit.
It has been brought to my attention that I have (somehow) some readers here that I don't know personally. If that's you, you might not be aware of a recent event in our house.
I can't be certain that these are the exact same birds, but there are two of them, they're in the same location, and they look like slightly older specimens of the same species. What's weirder, that they're the same birds or that they are two different birds that are almost exactly the same? They definitely look like the adult Yellow-crowned Night-Heron, just like they looked like juveniles last year.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was the novel that made John Le Carré famous. In 200 pages of unassuming prose he sketched the bizarre world of the foot soldiers of the Cold War in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, submerging the reader so persuasively in the world that occasionally over the last few nights in a sleepless daze I was convinced Kieran's gas was a plot by the East Germans. This work has become the standard by which all other spy novels are measured, and justifiably so. It is a true and enduring classic.
0802714544978-0802714541
There's not much difference between clothes dryers. You've got energy source, size, noise, and whether there's a moisture sensor. They all use the same methods and the same amount of energy; Consumer Reports doesn't even bother rating them on energy usage. Broadly speaking, if you have a working dryer, a new dryer is a waste of money. Where they get you is this idea that washers and dryers come in matched sets. There are all these pretty, sleek, colorful sets out there. You buy a new washer, and they try to take you for a ride on a completely unnecessary dryer. The internals of washers vary. There are lots of reasons to get one washer or another, or to replace the one you have. Dryers are basically all the same. Matching is nice, but is it really worth $500 or $1000 just to get a shiny new box around a machine nearly identical to the one you already have?
I made the mistake of doing a load of laundry with a free sample of detergent. They never give out "Free & Clear" samples, or product with no added fragrance1 or dyes. It's astonishing how repellent these odors are once you've spent a few years avoiding them.
1 Note: "fragrance free" and "unscented" are not the same thing. The former means absolutely no stinks; the latter means they may have added some stinks to cover up other stinks
The Lexus brand was introduced by Toyota in 1989. According to the Social Security Administration, the name Alexis was the 92nd most popular name in the country that year. Since then, it ascended to #3 in 1999 before falling back down to #14 in 2006. All of the Alex* names have seen similar spikes over the last 20 years, which you can see with the handy Name Voyager. Coincidence? I think not.
As you might have guessed, we got a new washing machine. Two kids in cloth diapers means doing a lot of laundry. It cost $700 regular price (same price at Lowe's and Best Buy). All told, it cost us less:
-$35: On sale. Lucky us.
-$50: I asked. Mind you, I am a terrible negotiator. However, I have two things going for me that help a lot. One, I'm willing to ask. Two, I know what I'm willing to pay, and I'll walk away if I don't get my price. The corollary is that I'm ready to buy if I do get my price; I'm not just playing games, and I want the salesman to know that. Apropos, the NY Times just had an article about negotiating at big box stores (the gist is: you can). I told the sales guy: "This can be the easiest sale you make all day. Take $50 off and I'll buy it now."
-$60: Free delivery and installation promotion (in-store only). Luckier us. I did ask if we could skip the installation for a discount, but no dice.
-$85: I bought gift cards at a discount ranging from 8% to 20% on eBay, Craig's List, and Card Avenue.
-$50 (forthcoming): City of Austin water rebate for buying a high-efficiency washer.
-$50 (forthcoming): Texas Gas Service rebate for same.
-$50: sale of our old washer, which was perfectly good, just not very efficient. Best Buy offered to take it away for free; while convenient, that gets no moneys.
Note that you can also use coupons. Sometimes they have restrictions, so make sure they're valid for what you want to get. You can get these coupons on eBay or elsewhere. Little known fact (even to employees): some stores will take competitors' coupons; I've saved about $60 over the last few weeks using Lowe's coupons at Home Depot.
Overall, our net hit will be something like $380, after figuring in taxes and such. We're currently on a rate of 2-3 loads of laundry per day. High-efficiency front-loaders save you money by using less water, but they also save money because your clothes are less sodden when you put them in the dryer. In the current economy, getting a 5% yield on a safe investment is pretty good; 10% is great. I estimate we'll save between $60 (very conservatively) and $120 (more likely) each year, which is a yield of 15%-30%.
We're also saving money by getting our detergent1 through Amazon's "Subscribe & Save" thingie; that gets us down to $0.15/load2 (which still costs more than we were paying before, but that's because we were using the super-cheap (and quite good) Purex).
1 Generally considered the best widely-available high-efficiency fragrance-and-dye-free detergent for cloth diapers
2 Incidentally, chances are, you're using too much detergent. Their cups have 3 markers on them; intuition suggests that you want to fill to the middle or top one, but filling to the lowest line is usually enough, unless you've had some kind of rotavirus shitstorm in your house (makes it come out both ends; for some reason, I have a vision of one of those double-sided S-shaped lawn sprinklers).
In software, there are two processes for making software support different languages. One is "internationalization," which is where you make the software look up the various phrases and words from external sources (dictionary files, etc.) rather than having them embedded in the source code. That makes the software merely capable of supporting other languages. The other is "localization," where you actually produce the files with the text for Swiss German or whatever and package a version of the software containing them. Some people decided that the words "internationalization" and "localization" were too long. Rather than abbreviate them the way normal people would, they abbreviated them as "i18n" and "l10n," meaning "'i' then 18 letters then 'n'" and "'l' then 10 letters then 'n'" respectively. I figure I can follow that model and abbreviate my name as "k3n g9r" (and put it on my license plate?), pronounced "Ken Gee-Niner." Kieran would be "k4n," and Uma would of course be "u1a."
This 2 month paternity leave has been a huge help. I think everyone should get a chance at it. The civilized thing to do would be for every father to get 3 months and every mother 6 (even 9) months. However, it's not fair to make employer's foot the bill for something like this; it's good for us all, so we should all pay for it. My half-baked idea is to have the checks come for the government. They'd be on a sliding scale, so that someone who makes $20,000 on an annual basis gets their full pay, while someone making $60,000 gets three-quarters, and all such pay is capped at (an annually-adjusted) $50,000. Those numbers are just for illustrative purposes; actual numbers would depend on a number of factors, not least of which is real data.
Where would the money for this come from? Simple: eliminate the child tax credit. At $1000 per child, the child tax credit is worth approximately $18,000 until the child reaches majority. Average annual household income in the United States is about $45,000. In the simplest case, where the mother and father earn equal amounts, 6 months pay for the former and 3 months pay for the latter works out to about $16,000, which is roughly the same. Obviously, the present value of the child tax credit isn't $18,000, but the numbers are in the same ballpark.
One oversight in this scheme is what to do when only one parent works outside the home, especially in the case where one parent decides to stay home. There are other details I haven't worked out, but I'm confident such problems are relatively minor and could be worked out easily.
The Payphone Project aims to document the locations and numbers of the (fewer and fewr) pay phones in this country. Along the way, someone decided that Post Office drop boxes would be a good thing to keep track of too. I have to drop off my taxes, the post office is out of the way, and I don't want to leave them in my own mailbox with the flag up 1 since it is, you know, tax information. What to do? Payphone Project mailbox locator and Google Street View:
Totally cool.
1 A benefit to an older house/neighborhood is that each house has its own mailbox, but that also means no local locked drop box
I like it when writers sneak hidden obscure jokes into movies and TV shows. By "hidden" I mean the sort of thing that doesn't even register for someone who doesn't get it, as opposed to making them feel left out. "The Simpsons" are consistently good at that. "Shaun of the Dead" had at least two. Early in the movie, the background music was the late 90s trance hit "Zombie Nation." Nobody who didn't recognize the song would have noticed anything beyond background music, but it added a little bit if you did recognize it. There was also a passing reference to a character named "Ash," which was also the name of the Bruce Campbell character in the "Evil Dead" movies (that one I only barely caught, since I never got into those movies). It makes me wonder how many I missed, in that movie and in other works. Seems like there's a web niche that needs filling.
Now there are four Yellow-Crowned Night Herons. Or maybe five. There's now a pair building a nest in the neighboring tree in my neighbor's yard. There are at least two that hang out in my tree; there may have been a third one chilling out in the nest in my tree; it's hard to tell from 40 feet below 1. That also makes hard to take good pictures. It looks like there's a second nest under construction in my tree. It's not clear to me whether that's another pair or whether the birds just didn't like the first nest they built. I've also been hearing curious honking squawks at night, and disturbingly large bird poops decorating my driveway and the sidewalk in front of my house.
As exciting as that is, it wasn't the only bird action around my house. We've been leaving the door from the patio to the backyard propped open so the dogs can get in and out easily. A couple of Small Brown Birds built a nest over the door in the last month. I decided to let them be. Unfortunately, Sadie didn't get the memo. One of them banged into the window, and in its post-concussive stupor was vulnerable to our fierce predator 2. I did get the bird away before she ate it, but it was dead dead dead. It got a hasty "burial in the air" (thrown over the fence). Later that day, the other dog, somewhat less fierce and less predatory (hapless, really) managed to have a go at the other one. This one survived, but it might be permanently crippled. Over the fence with that one, too. I'm going to have to see if the nest has small residents; I heard a lot of little cheeping last night while I was trying to sleep (the boy was having none of it).
1 I wonder if I need a permit from the city to build a blind on my roof...
2 She's the sweetest dog in the world if you're not a small animal. She killed a squirrel last week, too.
I've been seeing sale ads for telephone poles and shipping containers pop up on the Austin Craig's List. Not just one, either; one guy posted today that he had 17 telephone poles. Maybe I can use those to build a bird blind... I'm not sure I could find a use for 20' or 40' shipping containers. As much as I liked reading a book about them, I don't exactly have the space. Still, it might make someone an inexpensive, large shed or something. Ugly, too.
One classic joke on "The Simpsons" was in the episode "Much Apu About Nothing," where Apu reminisces about coming to the United States and attending the fine Springfield Heights Institute of Technology. If the joke isn't obvious, think about what we call the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. It was a completely optional joke; if you got it, you laughed, but if you didn't get it, you didn't even know it was there.
I've always found it awkward to describe ratios as "n times fewer." Having a multiple when describing a smaller value doesn't seem right. For example, if one value is 2 and the other is 8, one might describe the first value as 4 times fewer. I've always preferred saying it one fourth as much, or describing the second value as 4 times more.
Actually, I don't like that either because of the use of "more" and "fewer." Those seem additive and subtractive rather than multiplicative. Consider "20 oz more." That means adding 20 oz to whatever the base amount is. "4 times more" implies you have your base to which you add 4 times the base, for a total of 5 times the base. I'm sure that is at least occasionally the intent, but it doesn't appear to be the usual meaning when using that phrase.
I prefer using "as much" instead, which is multiplicative rather than additive. "4 times as much" is clearer. That's another reason why "4 times fewer" seems awkward; you take 4 times your base and subtract it, leaving -3, which usually makes no sense at all.
Over time, familiarity and fluency in certain areas has become increasingly essential to functioning in society. There was a time when only a minority needed to be literate or numerate, but today, everyone must be. I am hardly objective on this topic, but I am increasingly convinced that familiarity with the principles of computing. Devices are becoming more sophisticated and more pervasive. Barring some awesome leap in artificial intelligence or the like, that means people are going to have to adapt. That doesn't mean everyone's going to have to learn how to program, but people are going to have to know more than they do now.
Right now, many people have a superficial degree of familiarity. They know how to touch-type, use a mouse, and the WIMP interface metaphor. That's not going to be enough. We need the familiarity with computing that we have with cars. While there certainly are people who get by just knowing how to use the shifter and steering wheel in a car, they're are the exception. Many people have at least a vague idea of how internal combusion engines work, or what a transmission does, or the importance of the alternator, even if they can't build a car themselves.
Obviously, actually knowing how to program would be best of all, though even that is no panacea; there are surprisingly many people who are capable programmers who nonetheless know very little about the machines they work with and are disturbingly incurious about them. Naturally, I'm going to have to follow through on this and try to teach Uma and Kieran how to program. We'll see how that goes.
It is generally accepted that the best way to learn a foreign language is to start early and immerse yourself. In spite of that, people will look at you like you have two heads if you suggest children learn foreign languages. At least, they've looked at me that way, and I'm mostly certain of my head count. Many people seem to think it's something to put off until high school, even college, which seems nuts to me. The dissonance between what people know and what they do is appalling. I'm hoping I can find some way to get Uma and Kieran started learning a foreign language 1 around the age of six.
I also have opinions on which languages to learn. It's a simple formula based on maximizing your odds of being able to communicate with a randomly chosen Earthling. Take all the people in the world. Eliminate the ones you can already communicate with knowing languages you and they have in common, even if neither is native 2. Pick the language that would enable you to communicate with the largest number of the rest. Rinse and repeat.
Naturally, you should tweak the formula based on your personal circumstances, goals, and interests. For instance, if you live in Texas, Spanish is going to be more important than if you live in Ougadougou. If you're pursuing a career in vocal musical performance, Italian won't be useless. I also add a small bias for how widely spread the language is; lots of people speak Bengali, but they're basically all in Bengal (East or West). As a result, I figure native Bengali speakers will be likely to learn another language anyway. That doesn't apply to Chinese because there are so freaking many of them.
Based on that, my list of most useful languages to learn is as follows:
English - most of the Western world speaks it either natively or as a second language, plus it's pretty good for India, too.
Mandarin Chinese - 1 billion people. The next superpower?
Spanish - the Western hemisphere south of the Rio Grande, except for minor pockets like Suriname, Belize, and Brazil.
Arabic - it'll serve you in a swath from Morocco to Iraq
French - after English, it's the language spoken in the most countries. French is especially good for West Africa.
Each of those languages will give you the ability to speak to at least a couple hundred million people more than you'd otherwise be able to. With those five languages, you should be able to communicate effectively with something like 35% to 40% of the world population. After that, each language will add less and less to your linguistic reach. I also like this list because it represents 3 major language groups, so learning all of these languages will seriously warp your brain (in a good way).
Believe it or else, five languages isn't too many to learn. My dad knows 4 (Marathi, Hindi, English and German3), as does my mom (replace German with Kannada). Jessica's "step-father" knows at least 4 (he's a man of many layers): Spanish, English, German, and Thai. I managed to be pretty fluent in German at age 6, learned French reasonably well in high school, could have spoken to Julius Caesar if it wasn't for that dastardly Brutus, reacquire some basic ability with Marathi every time I return to India, and have a passing familiarity with English. In many parts of the world, knowing multiple languages is normal.
There are some omissions from my list that may seem to be oversights. Strictly speaking, Russian may have more speakers than French or Arabic, but Russia's a demographic timebomb, and I doubt people are learning Russian today at the rate they were when the USSR ruled 300 million directly and a couple hundred million more indirectly. Hindi and Urdu are related. Counting them as one, which may be a bad thing to do, would get you a hundred million or so Pakistanis, and maybe a couple hundred more Indians. However, it's likely that a lot of Hindi and Urdu speakers also know English, so learning those languages won't add 300 million potential conversation partners if you already know English. Portuguese, Bengali, Japanese, and German all have substantial populations of native speakers, but they're not widely spoken outside just a few countries.
Of course, learning just about any foreign language is better than learning none. It stretches your brain and opens your mind. If the top 5 languages above are uninspiring, there are certainly many middle-weight languages with 50 million to 200 million speakers. Besides the ones dismissed from the top tier previously, there are also Bahasa Indonesia (~200 million), Cantonese Chinese (~70 million), Persian (~70 million - ~130 million), and Thai (~60 million). Those 10 might not be as useful as the top 5, but there's still pretty useful, and they're all associated with interesting cultures and places.
I put Mandarin above Spanish in my list because that's what would be most generally applicable, but being in Texas, for us Spanish would be better. That's the language I'd want Uma and Kieran to learn first. It also helps that I want to learn Spanish, too, so it might be easier to get them motivated about it. Chinese would be the next one, assuming I can find somewhere that teaches it. The schools don't look to be much help; even the better school districts in the area wait until 7th grade, and none of them do Chinese.
2 Flying back to Houston after my first Christmas break, I earned a United Airlines voucher by assisting the flight attendants with an elderly Vietnamese passenger who didn't speak English. It will come as no surprise to you that I don't know Vietnamese, either, but since she was older, I took a stab with my (then decent) French and was able to convey the essentials.
Uma was born in a wave of about 9 babies born to people I knew all in a 6-month span (not counting the people in the Bradley class, of course). Kieran's part of a wave of 6 or so 1. It's not that all these people are about the same age, either. I guess it's just coincidence.
Here's another Sesame Street that's gotten stuck in my head. It's really hard to sing along, but I've been practicing all morning, and I'm getting pretty good.
Suppose you're given a list of people and the languages they speak. How do you find the three (or two or four or...) languages such that you're able to communicate with the most people? You can't just pick the most popular languages. Suppose you have 90 of 100 people speaking Finnish, 85 out of 100 speaking English, and 10 of 100 speaking Tamil, and you want to choose the 2 languages that will enable you to communicate with the most of the 100. If the 85-English speakers are all Finnish speakers, then there's no point in trying English; it won't get you any more listeners. Even though Tamil is the least popular, it's more useful than English. This problem is the a version of the one with 6 billion people and thousands of languages that I suggested a 5-language solution for the other day.
My intuition suggests to me that the general version of this problem is a variation on a well-known problem in computer science called the Knapsack problem. That problem is about how to fit the most of a number of objects into a single bag. It's in a class of problems called "NP-complete." These are (roughly) problems that get exponentially harder to solve as the number of objects you're dealing with increases, but it's relatively easy to check a candidate solution for correctness. NP-complete problems are something theoretical computer science spends a lot of time on. The knapsack problem is probably one of the most readily understood one to the lay person. The canonical example is called the "travelling salesman problem:" given a list of cities, find the route that visits each of them while travelling the least total distance. An interesting characteristic of NP-complete problems is that a method to efficiently 1 solve one of them can solve all of them.
If my intuition is correct, then figuring out the optimal languages to learn would actually be pretty hard to do. A problem where the difficulty scales exponentially over a data set of 6 billion would probably take longer than the expected lifetime of the universe to solve 2. That's of course assuming you could get a list of all the people in the world and the languages they spoke. You could probably come up with very good but not guaranteed best solutions based on the fact that language knowledge isn't distributed randomly; most people in Sweden speak Swedish, but not many people in Kenya do. I wasn't intending to give a primer on deep problems in computing, but it struck me as interesting that a simple question I had out of the blue could very well could be one of these unsolvable (realistically) problems.
1 And precisely; there are numerous methods for finding good but not guaranteed best solutions.
The manual for our pressure cooker is printed on ordinary paper. Each page is half of a letter-sized sheet, and the manual consists of a number of those sheets stapled together and folded. The PDF version is laid out the same way, which means that page 5 of the PDF is divided into page 5 and page 24. Even better, page 5 is on the right and page 24 is on the left. Page 6 of the PDF is divided into page 6 on the left and page 23 on the right. Then page 7 of the PDF is page 7 on the right again and page 22 on the left. I imagine reading the manual straight through would look something like the giant slalom, assuming that halfway through the event, the hill tipped over 90 degrees and you finished back at the top.
Seems like there's a market opportunity for a pickup truck taxi service. My options for moving heavy things myself are:
Have my own truck - not bloody likely
Mooch off a friend - Hi, John!
Rent a truck - rental period is longer than I want, plus I have to deal with the hassle of picking it up and dropping it off
On the other hand, I could just call someone, have them meet me at my home, drive over to the place I'm getting stuff, load it up, and drive it home. As a bonus, the taxi driver could double as a helper. Home Depot rents trucks at pretty inexpensive rates, but it's not so handy if you want something from Lowe's or some guy named Craig who has this list. I wonder what it would cost to provide such a service. I figure the driver needs to get $12/hour, and it would cost something like $0.60 per mile. Then you've got to amortize a $25,000 crew cab pickup truck over, say, 4 years. So you'd probably charge something along the lines of $40 for a one-hour job. That's basically a guess; does it at least sound right? I think there are probably enough people who'd be willing to pay that. Maybe not in Austin, though; everyone knows somebody who has a truck.
The NY Times summarizes the phenomenal1 earnings of some hedge fund managers. One sentence caught my eye: "Some ... profited handsomely from the turmoil in the mortgage market ripping through the economy." That makes it sound like they caused the collapse, or at least made it worse. In reality, they probably made the collapse less severe.
These managers made their money through short-selling (well, to oversimplify). That means they bet securities would go down. Lots of people dislike short-sellers because they confuse making a profit from a decline to causing a decline, a decline that wouldn't otherwise happen. Consider a simple example. Shares of UDG are currently trading at $10. You're willing to buy them at that price. I think that's too high, so I borrow some shares and sell it at $10. That action pushes the share down to $9. Then your trade goes through, and you end up getting it for $9. If the share price subsequently rises, you make an extra $1 profit, and I get hit. If it goes down, you lose money, and I make money, but you lose $1 less than you would have. Either way, you're $1 better off than if I hadn't sold it short.
That's an example simplified to the point of triviality, but it illustrates the point. Short-sellers smooth out the market. The hedge fund managers who bet against mortgage securities kept the bubble from getting even bigger. They kept other parties in the market from losing as much money because they got better prices than would have otherwise existed. That doesn't mean that their pay is reasonable, only that they can't be blamed for sabotaging our financial system.
1 And excessive, but that's only a problem for the people paying them, i.e., their investors
There are some jokes that just don't work if you have any knowledge of the subject. I saw some comedian make a joke like that. "You know how they have those indestructible black boxes that they dig out of plane crashes? Why don't they make the whole plane out of that?" Because then the plane wouldn't fly. It would be too heavy. Duh. I didn't laugh. Other people did. Ach! Knowledge. Such a curse.
Blog in your native Indic script: Convert English characters to Indic script as you type! Learn more about transliteration on Blogger.
Does anyone else get that? Or are they inferring that I specifically might have a particular interest? I get spam for Indian people, and I figure Google is probably as smart as spammers.
I found a weather station just about ¾ miles from my house1. Weather Underground has this deal where you can buy a personal automated weather station and set it to automatically upload information to their site. I'm sure it's not unique to them, since the hardware and software are off-the-shelf, but that particular site has a decent interface with important things like easily linked/bookmarked URLs, maps, etc. The storm that came through last night dropped between an inch and an inch and a half of rain on Austin; Thanks to that weather station, I know that we got just about an inch of rain in our immediate neighborhood. I like precision. There are lots of stations throughout the country; I'm sure you can find one close to you.
1 On Baltus Drive. That sounds suspiciously like Gaius Baltar compressed into a single word.
I had my first significant reaction to my allergy shots earlier this week. About 40 minutes after the injection, I started having an asthma attack. It was unpleasant, though not life-threatening; I've never had a dangerously bad asthma attack. The allergy nurse suggested it was due to the high oak pollen levels in the air combined with the oak serum in my set of vials. I think she was on the right track, but not quite all the way there, as demonstrated by today's oak pollen count:
Science fiction author Charles Stross has a new book coming out. His blog post talks about how little control authors have over the covers and titles of their books. That's a lot of words. I say skip to the punch line. The cover of the UK edition:
The FBI commits shenanigans. To summarize, the FBI got a legitimate subpoena for certain records, withdrew it, issued a National Security Letter 1 even though NSLs weren't applicable to the type of records in question, got refused, got another subpoena, and then went to Congress saying that they needed wider powers because NSLs were inadequate. They shouldn't have even been given that inch, and they're reaching for a mile.
1 An instrument where the FBI can obtain records without probable cause or a warrant.
Don't drink water when you're coughing unless you're coughing because your throat is dry. If you've aspirated food or water, the last thing you need is to try to sneak something else past your airway. I always see people urging coughers to drink water when they've inhaled something, and it drives me nuts.
I have no news or analysis to add to recent reports of dangers from certain kinds of plastics used in food and beverage containers. However, I do have a linguistic contribution to make that I am rather proud of: polydeathylene.
Tomorrow I return to work. I barely remember what I do. I'm very grateful to Bank of America for letting me have this time. I don't understand why they're so nice; the benefit is so far and away beyond what they needed to do to be competitive. Bank of America is not perfect, but they really seem to be trying to do the best for their employees. I like my co-workers, enjoy the environment, and work on something genuinely useful, but I'm dreading going back.
The last 2 months have been the best 2 months I can remember. A long time ago I said (not here) that I wouldn't mind being the one who stayed home. I didn't know what I was talking about then. I spent the last 2 months learning, and I've reached the same conclusion. My paternity leave hasn't been for Kieran. It hasn't really been for Jessica, either. I've been on leave for Uma.
She is such a sweet girl. She's the one I'm worried about. She's going to feel abandoned. I tried to prepare her for my return to work. She started crying. "I'll be sad when you're not here." I don't get it. I'm not very nice to her. Must be biology, I guess. I can't make her understand. In at least this way, it would have been easier of my employer hadn't been so generous. Then we wouldn't have found a regular, stable, Daddy and Uma routine. Now, though, she's going to have to deal with a lot less attention and time. I can make things easier for myself by reminding myself how much better and easier it is for me than for most people, with generous leave and vacation, as well as flexible working hours, one day working from home per week, and good pay. Uma doesn't have that perspective. All she knows is that I'm not going to be around as much anymore. And that will make her sad.
In all the media coverage of the children removed fron the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints compound, I've seen no mention of the sect's history of banishing teenaged boys to make it easier for church elders to have their pick of the young women for wives. These are some scary people. Note also that the link is a few years old 1; these people have been cause for worry for some time. That is not at all a comment on the wisdom and justice of what the state has done recently, but rather a small attempt to rectify the omission by the media of what seems like pertinent background information.
1 And from a British newspaper. I wonder about the journalistic ethics regarding quotes; a man I assume is American is quoted as saying, "But they all want to go back to their mums." Mums? Really?
I had a minor complication with the IRS. They want me to send my response to Rulon White Blvd., in Ogden, Utah. Rulon Jeffs was the prophet (until his death) of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints father of Warren Jeffs, recently convicted for accessory to rape, also a former head of the FLDS (though he seems to say now that he was a false prophet), and all-around fun guy. The FLDS is the creepy cult who were raided recently and whose members saw many of their children taken away by the state. Which state? Texas. What is the capital of Texas? Austin. I live in Austin. And I am sending a letter to Rulon White Blvd. DUN DUN DUN DUN!
For several reasons, including but not limited to work firewalls, I have switched to using Blogger for the indefinite future. This site will stay as-is for the time being. New posts will appear at blog.ketan.org, with new Atom and RSS feeds as well.
