turdlog

Scanning Electron Microscopy

2012-02-01T15:02:00.001-06:00

My advice for macroeconomic stabilization is preciselythe same as my advice for scanning-electron-microscope image focusing. Briefly,it’s “Do something to fix it until it starts getting worse in the otherdirection.”
Inexperienced SEM students will sit there with a blurryimage and timidly roll the focus, getting nowhere nearer to a good image. Thekey here is timidly: the student rolls the focus knob so slowly, like EddieIzzard’s safecracking shower-user, that it is unclear whether the image isgetting better or worse. The better wayto focus the image is to roll the focus back and forth in long, manly strokes,so that the change in the image is plain, and the optimum focus (both itsquality and where the knob needs to be to get it there) can be ascertained.

As Matt Yglesias points out, the people in charge of our macroeconomy are beingexcessively timid. Half of them are taking the conventional route, i.e.pursuing looser monetary and fiscal policy in the face of a recession, but theyare doing it so timidly that as a result we don’t really have a good test ofthose policies’ effectiveness. Did we really even fight the recession? On thefiscal side, Paul Krugman says the gigantic stimulus really just helped fill inthe hole left by state and local budgets. On the monetary side, Scott Sumnersays that money is too tight, even at today’s low, low interest rates.

The other half of our leaders are suggesting we turn theknob backwards, i.e. move towards tighter monetary and/or fiscal policy. Theythink the SEM image will get sharper if we move in an unconventional direction.

I suggest what I would tell any timid SEM student: ROLLTHE GODDAMN KNOB until the image is clearly better, and keep doing it until itgets worse—that’s the way you know when you’ve gone too far. Then go back. Theeconomic equivalent would be to try a two trillion dollar stimulus and QE 4, 5,and 6. When we get full employment and then inflation, we’ll know it’s time tocut back.

Or do what Republicans want and cut back now. But cut wayback—make the Social Security retirement age 75 and stop unemployment insuranceafter three months (and see who votes for you). But only after moving decisively in one direction or the other will we gain some understanding of the dynamics of what's going on.

Komputer Kvetching

2011-11-14T09:21:00.005-06:00

Windows 7 took many pages out of the Mac OS handbook, most of which are for the better. A notable exception is the whole "downloads" idea. When I find some file on the web that I want a copy of, I used to enjoy clicking on its link and having a dialog box ask me where on my computer I want it saved. This way the PC is structured like a big filing cabinet, the C drive, with lots of smaller and smaller file folders that aren't conceptually different except that they are stored in other folders that are stored in other folders that are stored in . . . that are stored in C. Now, however, when I click on a file online it is automatically stored in the downloads folder, which is who-knows-where. I can access the folder from the desktop, but now I have this extra folder whose location within my overall filing cabinet is unclear. Worse, Microsoft also took Mac's terrible idea of making a list of downloads which is clearable but which is independent of the actual downloads folder. I just clarified for myself that the downloaded files are not deleted when the list is cleared. What is not certain is whether I have copied the files I have downloaded to folders that are filed the way I like them, and thus whether I can delete them off the dumb nebulous downloads folder. Arrgh.

Today's Square Community As Proletariat Of The Future

2011-11-12T10:00:00.004-06:00

Via Interfluidity, on aversion to our current negative real interest rates:

Current spenders assume risks of future deprivation that current savers are unwilling to accept. Why shouldn’t spenders be paid to bear that burden? Transforming present resources into future wealth is uncertain and difficult work. Savers’ expectation of a positive real interest rate amounts to a demand for time travel cheaper-than-free. Why should such unreason be accommodated? The sense of entitlement carried by savers in our society would put any welfare queen to shame.

Up On Fecal Creek

2011-10-06T10:36:00.003-05:00

Forgive your faithful 'Dlogger if this is old hat, but shouldn't the phrase be "Down the creek without a paddle?" If one is up the creek, can't one just relax and let the current do the work? Of course it depends on where one wants to go, but if the oft-used adjective is applied to the creek, presumably one just wants to get back to where he got in.

Moron Chess

2011-09-29T12:25:00.003-05:00

In this post I posited that R and I are Gods of Chess because in our games white had an overwhelming advantage. An update: since then (April 2010) I have played on chess.com a variety of opponents. As white I am 45-38-7; as black, 47-33-9. A decidedly mortal record. But what else does that say about my playing? Likely either

--I am a defensive, counterattacking player, as opposed to an offensive, attacking one (I don't have an intuitive opinion), or

--The website preferentially selects the higher-rated player as black, to counterbalance the natural advantage of playing white. (This isn't too likely because most of the time I play two games per opponent, one as white and one as black.) Or

--R and I bring out the best in one another. Maybe.

When I get a round tuit I'll investigate further.

Temporal Absurdity

2011-09-05T15:42:00.004-05:00

From SI:

Oklahoma president David Boren said just before the season's opening weekend that the Sooners would decide within the next three weeks, if not sooner, if they would leave the Big 12 for another conference.

You can't make this stuff up.

Finally A Laugher With A Ring Of Truth

2011-08-20T17:35:00.003-05:00

Via the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore:

"All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand," Arthur Laffer reminds us.

Well said. Presumably the solutions are about just exactly vice-versa.

Enforce Fluorescence?

2011-07-20T13:57:00.001-05:00

A conversation the other day yielded three opinions about the extent to which the government should mandate the use of fluorescent light bulbs and impede the use of incandescent ones.

Let us first consider the facts. These are gathered from gelighting.com, wattwatchers.com, howstuffworks.com, ajdesigner.com, and amazon.com (to validate price estimations), none of which provided meaningfully contradictory information.

Fluorescent bulbs use about one fifth of the energy that incandescent bulbs use, but cost about five times as much. Fluorescent bulbs last up to ten times as long. The ‘Dlog doesn’t have statistics on bulb life, so it grants conservatively that fluorescents last five times as long.

Fluorescents contain mercury – about as much as is found in a ballpoint pen. Fluorescents take a few seconds to light up and emit a qualitatively different light (more about this below). Fluorescents can work with dimmer switches but a special kind of bulb is recommended.

In summary, in the name of energy efficiency the government has a strong motivation to encourage the use of fluorescents. Fluorescents are also plainly more cost effective except that they require a larger up-front cost, so the economic benefit is realized at time scales of months and longer. Fluorescents’ environmental benefits of energy efficiency and waste reduction likely outweigh the mercury cost. There is a small convenience cost to fluorescents from the warmup-time and the dimmer-switch deal.

M began the conversation by asserting that the market should determine what type of light bulb is used, and that the government should do nothing to encourage fluorescents.

Your faithful ‘Dlogger (YFD) countered that the government should do everything within its power to encourage fluorescents, comparing incandescents to lead-bearing paint.

R, ever the voice of either reason or wishy-washiness, suggested the government incentivize the use of fluorescents by increasing taxes on incandescents. He maintained that further action is warranted only for issues of safety (e.g. for lead paint). The conversation then trailed off in the direction of motorcycle helmets.

Who was correct? Should the government do nothing, uses taxes to incentivize, or, to put it simply, ban the use of incandescents? (As YFD is not a constitutional scholar he will intentionally not get into how such a law would be written and/or justified.)

Important, for M’s argument, is the qualitative difference in the type of light emitted by the two bulb types. YFD characterizes the light from fluorescents as whiter and softer than that from incandescents. As to which one he prefers, it’s a close call. YFD’s bedside table has a lamp with a fluorescent bulb which YFD’s wife calls the “lizard lamp,” implying it looks like it belongs in an aquarium. Fluorescent light is aesthetically not for everybody, and that’s important in a free country. To some extent, if a consumer wants to spend extra money on the warm crisp light of an incandescent, he should be free to do so.

Of course, a smoker’s freedom ends where a non-smoker’s lungs begin. Thus no smoking on airplanes and, in light of overwhelming climate change evidence, no incandescent bulbs. And that consumers quibble about lizard light or the Chevy Bolt’s weak acceleration when our energy security and ultimately the fate of the planet is at stake is a source of unending frustration to YFD. Nonetheless, it’s a free country, and Americans are thus at an impasse. R’s pisswarm approach wins the day.

A final note though: the economic argument for fluorescents is all but unassailable. Nobody who doesn’t snap his fingers to stream-of-consciousness poetry would really miss incandescent light. If such light bulbs still sell, it is because people can’t do basic budgeting on anything past a scale of months. It is a fool who puts his faith in such an irrational animal as the free market to produce desirable outcomes.

Make Football Safer And Better

2011-06-08T09:31:00.002-05:00

Andy Staples explains a great idea from Rutgers head coach Greg Schiano. Schiano would get rid of the kickoff and replace it with a 4th-and-long. The idea is that kickoffs are dangerous because collisions occur between players running in opposite directions with full heads of steam. I think kickoffs are more dangerous, though I have searched for injury statistics and can't find them. I think if it's true then the tendency to put less-experienced players on special teams might also have something to do with greater injury rates. But probably more important is the very nature of the play, as Schiano claims. The stories of Eric LeGrand and Kevin Everett illustrate what the proposed change is designed to avoid.

We can split hairs about the details. Schiano admits it may need fine tuning. My sense is 4th-and-20 from the 35 would be better than 4th-and-15 from the 30 in that it would give results closer to what we now get from kickoffs and retain the added safety. But any troglodyte who complains that these types of changes mollycoddle players can go and get a couple of vertebrae cracked.

Dumb And Less Dumb

2011-05-16T23:21:00.006-05:00

Matt Yglesias's blog apprised your faithful 'Dlogger of a study and an update of the study by D. Klein and Z. Buturovic, from Econ Journal Watch. The original study, published last year, suggested liberals have a worse understanding of many economic issues than do conservatives and libertarians, based on responses to an eight-question survey. The trouble, as the authors point out in the update just published, is that all eight questions challenged liberal positions, e.g. "Minimum wage laws raise unemployment," to which statement disagreement is "unenlightened."

In the update, nine questions were asked that challenge conservative positions, e.g. "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person" (disagreement unenlightened). Liberals scored better.

The 'Dlog concurs with Yglesias that what the studies demonstrate is confirmation bias: people focus on things that confirm their own convictions. The 'Dlog just wishes to quibble a little further with question wording: the final two questions on the update are as follows (italics theirs):

16. When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off.

and

17. When two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction.

In true/false questions, words like necessarily (and always and never) are big hints that the answer is false. Any child should be able to imagine a voluntary transaction wherein one party comes away worse off. (Cases of fraud, for example.) So in the half of the quiz that's supposed to stump conservatives, the answers are being broadcast--in italics, no less. No hint words or italics were used in the original study.

So we may also conclude that 73.2% of libertarians are dumber than children.

On Frugality

2011-04-08T11:52:00.004-05:00

An interesting take from someone named Marshal Cohen, via Morning Edition this morning: consumers are now suffering from "frugal fatigue."

"We're tired of being so frugal with what we're spending and at the least expensive place."

"We" referring, presumably, to a broad base of retail consumers - or at least those who have frequented The Gap since 2008. The story then explains that high-end retailers like Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue are doing well while The Gap's profits are sharply down. Now, the 'Dlog certainly has no privileged insight into retail economics, but let it propose an alternative narrative: that the current economic distress has fallen disproportionally on Gap shoppers as opposed to Nordstrom shoppers. Perhaps Cohen has some data to support his claim over mine, but this (surprise, surprise) was not mentioned on Morning Edition. Then later:

Cohen says a customer might buy one pair of fancy jeans that no one else has, and then buy underwear, socks and shirts from a discount retailer.

This could certainly be demonstrated with data, which I am sure Cohen has. But until the 'Dlog is supplied with said data, or at least a concrete assurance that such data exist and fit the narrative (your 'Dlogger is a lazy man), the 'Dlog wages class warfare. Cohen's is a narrative in which economic distress affects us all, and in our emergence from the downturn, luxury shopping is returning. But were this the case, why the dowturn for The Gap? Shouldn't its profits be bolstered by the 2009 Wal-Mart shoppers who, feeling the economic recovery in their weightier wallets, splurge on some higher-end merchandise, themselves? Or are the interests of the haves and have-nots not so aligned after all? Are the former doing okay while the latter continue to struggle?

Budget Buster, You Are

2011-03-29T16:06:00.001-05:00

Please everyone take this quiz.

We'll See

2011-02-11T10:31:00.003-06:00

The New York Times

Nothing New Under The Sun

2011-02-01T12:20:00.003-06:00

Why not let William Jennings Bryan, circa 1896, tell it like it is:

There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.

Don't You Get It?

2011-01-06T10:03:00.004-06:00

My honest-to-God, university-level research compelled me to draw this.

Survey Says

2010-12-14T10:19:00.002-06:00

The survey's statement is Your spouse helped you out with something important in the last couple of weeks. I am to respond anywhere from 1 (never) to 7 (all the time).

Where does 1-for-1 fit in?

Hands Of Fate

2010-10-29T16:23:00.003-05:00

The Pickle Research Campus is guarded on the north side by automatic gates, which (in theory) sense remotely the permit tag on your faithful 'Dlogger's windshield and open for him and other employees when they drive up.

Frustration #1: someone lost his job to a machine.

Frustration #2: said machine does not work well.

Irony surpassed in deliciousness only by sales of the Chevy Nova in Mexico: the maker of the automatic job-stealer is Amano.

Galbraith On Production

2010-10-14T21:42:00.007-05:00

When your faithful 'Dlogger dies, he wants to go wherever John Kenneth Galbraith is. And if economic opinions play any meaningful role in deciding where one ends up, this prospect seems reasonably secure. For other than the latter's tendency to pick on comic books as prime examples of Man's obsession with trifles, they pretty much see eye-to-eye.

For comic books, pistachio ice cream, and Gilbert & Sullivan are all assuagers of manufactured needs (your 'Dlogger admits this; it is Galbraith's high-horseplay with respect to comic books with which your 'Dlogger takes issue). That is, these trifles provide people with things to aspire to, things to desire, things to work and make money for, and spend that money for, so that others can make and spend money, and on and on. They are not like food, air, and warmth, which are essentials we need in order to propagate. They are things we like, and things people can work on since we have enough people who grow food and build shelters.

Here is the problem, says Galbraith: there is nothing wrong with the production and consumption of all these unnecessary things; the problem is that when demand is insufficient for them, people suffer. There is nothing inherently abnormal about insufficient demand for - what shall your faithful 'Dlogger pick on? - fabric softener. But some people's well-being depends on money made selling the stuff, so when people cut back, fabric softeners get laid off, demand drops further, and a vicious cycle begins. In The Affluent Society, page 217-8 Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Galbraith likens our situation to

a factory which must be operated at top speed for three shifts and seven days a week even at some risk of eventual breakdown, not because the product is in demand . . . but because any lower rate of operation will leave some of the people in town without a livelihood.

The Affluent Society was first published in 1958. The chapter from which the above was quoted is called The Divorce of Production from Security, an idea that enchants your faithful 'Dlogger. Can we run the factory at a lower speed without subjecting ourselves to privation? Can we make less of the stuff we do not explicitly need, while keeping ourselves well fed and sheltered? In 1958 Galbraith seemed to think so, and by 1998 presumably he was not so disillusioned that he felt the need to remove the idea from his book's new edition.

But in The Good Society, first edition 1996, page 24, Galbraith writes that even the society to which he aspires (to say nothing of the one we have)

must have substantial and reliable economic growth - a substantial and reliable increase in production and employment from year to year.

It is unclear whether between 1958 and 1996 he gave up on the idea of divorcing production from security. But, ominously, on page 3, ibid., he writes:

In all the industrial countries, there is the firm commitment to the consumer economy - to consumer goods and services - as the primary source of human satisfaction and enjoyment. . . . There is also the even more urgent need for the income that comes from production. In the modern economy . . . production is now more necessary for the employment it provides than for the goods and services it supplies.

Any useful identification of the good society must therefore take into consideration the institutional structure and the human characteristics that are fixed, immutable. They make the difference between the utopian and the achievable. . . .

Galbraith here seems to dismiss the idea that we can rid ourselves of the need to produce things in order to keep ourselves happy and healthy. So that even though we may only strictly need what farmers and a few others produce, by God, the rest of us had better find something to do and someone to pay for it or we are going to die in the gutter.

Your faithful 'Dlogger's idea for a new power plant is, arguably, a step towards cranking down our factory's conveyor belt speed. That is, it is a suggestion that although we can produce energy more quickly and efficiently - through burning fossil fuels or with nuclear power - it would be socially advantageous to produce energy using stationary bicycles. Though less efficient and therefore inconceivable in a libertarian economy, this production source could compete with conventional energy if supported sufficiently by the state. Offsetting the tax money withdrawn from the economy would be the paychecks disbursed to the producers, most of which would likely be spent on consumable goods.

Is this a pipe dream? Isn't it analogous to publicly funded police forces that forbid the physically strongest among us from efficiently taking by force whatever they would like from their weaker neighbors? Isn't the reason we have the factory supporting us at all that we draw a line between the easiest way to do something and the way we could do it that would maximize human happiness? And isn't that the ultimate goal?

Booyah

2010-09-03T12:21:00.003-05:00

To thee the laurels belong,

Best car, because the starriest!

Merrily live, and long!

Newsflash!

2010-09-01T10:37:00.002-05:00

David Brooks said something smart, or at least intriguing: Every society has to engird capitalism in a restraining value system, or else it turns nihilistic and out of control. To engird means to encircle, and the first two google-returned definitions identify the word as archaic, so you shouldn't feel any worse than your faithful 'Dlogger for not knowing it.

But Brooks thinks that western European countries do this to capitalism by law and that we United Statesians do it with "quasi-religious spirituality," and the Glenn Beck rally was about re-kindling that spirituality. (I have no idea whether Beck would agree.)

Is this true? First, that capitalism must be girdled? Second, that it is ineffectively girdled in the USA? Third, that ineffective girdling is responsible for our current economic distress? Fourth, that a renewal of Judeo-Christian spirituality can be that girdle?

Discuss.

Correct 2010

2010-08-31T11:47:00.009-05:00

From AK at UNT:

Sustainability exercise: UNT students helping power rec center

DENTON (UNT), Texas • The University of North Texas is converting the Pohl Recreation Center into one of the largest human power plants in the country by capturing the kinetic energy produced by exercise machines and converting it into electricity. The 36 elliptical machines that are included in the project are fitted with a device from ReRev, a Florida company that developed the system, which feeds electricity produced by each machine into the recreation center’s power grid. ReRev says during a typical 30-minute workout, each machine produces 50 watt hours of clean, carbon-free electricity, enough to power a compact fluorescent light bulb for 2.5 hours or a laptop computer for an hour.
“UNT has a vast array of sustainability programs under way on campus and this project underscores our commitment to saving energy,” said Laura Klein, senior associate director of recreational sports at UNT. “It’s a great educational opportunity for our students, faculty and staff. This system provides a lesson in sustainability and energy use. As they work out, they’ll be thinking of the energy they’re producing and perhaps it will influence them to consider sustainability in their daily lives.” A monitor will be set up near the ellipticals that will indicate the amount of electricity being produced, giving users a clear picture of how much energy is being saved.

“Students are huge proponents of renewable energy projects and the ReRev system gives them a chance to participate while getting a good workout,” Klein said. “Students are very aware of sustainability and the need to find alternate, clean power sources, which bodes well for our future because they will be the ones who will be leading those efforts in a very short time.”

ReRev captures and diverts the kinetic energy produced by exercise and given off as heat. Instead, ReRev’s system converts it into alternating current that’s used in the recreation center’s power grid. That converted electricity is fed directly into the building’s electrical supply, lowering the buildings overall use by a small amount. Because each of the elliptical machines normally dissipates heat into the room, the system also means slightly lower air conditioning costs.
“We’re not going to power the building from these machines, but we are generating clean electricity and helping educate students. The real value of the system is both in showing how much work it takes to make electricity as well as the lesson in making buildings more sustainable,” Klein said.
Approximately 20 universities in the U.S. are using the ReRev system.

Good to know the Turdlog's advice is finally getting through. I wonder when tuition can be covered by manual labor.

Let Me Explain Something To You

2010-08-30T15:34:00.004-05:00

To make fancy-pants guacamole is to suggest, hubristically, that you can do better than mashed up avocadoes and salt. And yet: the top three recipes returned by googling guacamole include onion and tomato as ingredients. Guacamole should not contain onions and should not be made in a kitchen containing a tomato.

Addition of flavorings is acceptable, especially if salt is an issue, but stick with black pepper or maybe even garlic if you really can't stand the taste of avocado. The recipes also each call for cilantro, which is another good way to ruin your guac, but I will admit this is a matter of opinion (as opposed to every other point addressed herein).

I am told that lemon or lime juice can help preserve freshness, but tangy guacamole is an abomination. Use these sparingly and keep the avocado seed in the guac to preserve freshness instead. (I am skeptical that this works. But generally, if guacamole is made correctly, it will be eaten before freshness becomes threatened.)

Poverty is the only legitimate excuse for having avocadoes make up less than 97% of your guacamole by volume.

Thank you.

Bugs In The Sky (In Sensationalist Units)

2010-07-15T15:28:00.006-05:00

Let me be clear: I do not wish to make the Turdlog a journal of everything dull or dimwitted that comes out of NPR. I have a day job, and there simply isn't enough time.

But every so often one something is broadcast that warrants public disdain. In a story run this morning Robert Krulwich talks to some scientists about how many bugs are floating around in the sky at any given time. The number, we are told, is "staggering" and "ten times the population of the United States." That is, three billion.

Of course, I am 1.8 million microns tall, so let's have some perspective. This is NPR, so the details are fuzzy, but that's three billion bugs through a "column a mile wide that goes way up into the sky," per month. What on Earth does that mean? Let us assume Krulwich means a plane of some height that is a mile wide. That height could mean up to probably 7 miles or so, where presumably bugs could live, but let's be generous and use the greatest height they quote, which is six thousand feet (for ladybugs, incidentally). Or hell, let's be even more generous and call it a mile. Three billion per month through a given vertical square mile translates to three and a half bugs per day through a given vertical square foot (a unit much easier for your faithful 'Dlogger to visualize).

Awful.

Even Myths Are True Twice A Year

2010-06-21T22:31:00.003-05:00

You can balance an egg upright on the equinoxes. You can also do it any other day of the year, including on the solstices:

Conference Unrealignment

2010-06-15T12:16:00.003-05:00

So it looks as though the Big XII will live on and not be split among the Pac-10, SEC, and other conferences. Your faithful 'Dlogger is happy about this, if for no other reason then because he relishes the opportunity to explain to uninformed college football fans how, as currently constituted, the Big Ten has twelve teams and the Big XII has ten.

And there's a little schadenfreude in there, too - now the Hawkins problem is squarely shouldered by the Pac-10, which serves them right for trying to pick and choose what teams they take along with Texas. But more giggles towards Nebraska, which shucked tradition for some quick bucks but will head off into the coming decades scheduling a bunch of rust belt schools that suffer from exactly the same long-term troubles as themselves: who will carry on all this winning tradition we have accumulated for a century, when we have no recruiting footprint anywhere warm, where people actually want to go to college?

And lastly, to Missouri: no hard feelings. Just make sure, next time you jump ship, that the ship you're swimming to has already thrown you a life raft.

How To Make Your Faithful 'Dlogger's List Of Things To Do Today

2010-06-09T15:33:00.005-05:00

Step 1: park on a high-parking-demand street in such a way that you take up two potential spots:

Step 2: advocate for something called a "Fair Tax" on your rear window:

Why is it that people whose actions tend to maximize their own personal benefit, disregarding the actions' broader effects, are usually the same people who extoll Neoliberal and or Libertarian ideas? It's like Lenin said. . . .

I Gotta Right

2010-06-02T11:22:00.002-05:00

The good news is that the newest Supreme Court justice voted wisely; the bad news is that it was in a dissent. The majority appears to have decided that not officially demanding your Miranda rights constitutes waiving your rights. The case in question revolves around the police interrogating one Van Chester Thompkins as to whether, effectively, he has stopped beating his wife yet.

Awful.

Dear Diary

2010-05-28T14:04:00.002-05:00

I did something I would have thought pretty un-John-like in years past; I got married. Love has, as the fellowette says, been a little bit hard on me, and harder still on some of the people who tried to share it with me before.

But love decided to give me a break, and introduced me to Jill, with whom I will spend my life. I have never felt so good, so relaxed, so excited about my (our) future, so at peace about nearly everything.

Notes On The Strategic Advantage Of Playing White In Chess

2010-04-27T16:33:00.002-05:00

R. and I play chess and are of roughly the same skill level (probably a result of well over 50 percent of our games being played against one another). I think he would agree that I am better in the early- to mid-game; my strategy is to gain a material advantage at the outset and trade off to an easy endgame. He is better late - if he can survive until the endgame tied with me he usually wins. So one day I will compare the number of moves to the eventual winner, testing the hypothesis that he wins the longer games.

But here's a stat: in our games played over a popular internet social network, which archives our results, White has won 16 out of 20. According to Wikipedia, White is usually found to win between 52 and 56 percent, with the advantage less pronounced for weaker players. Presumably that makes R. and me chess gods.

I recall about six moves into a chess game (this one played in person a few years ago), after each of us had developed our bishops and knights in the smartly conservative way that we know will not lead to any serious early gaffes, R. remarked that we begin this way so often that we might as well start from that developed position instead of the legally prescribed way. (This is entirely reminiscent of our adopted rule that Twenty Questions shall begin with the answerer identifying the subject as animal, vegetable, or mineral, so that we might dispense with the first one to three formality questions and get to the point.) I have ever since found it fascinating how quickly each game becomes virtually unique (I know, like you could even know that) within the subsequent few moves. But what is almost as interesting is that despite this remarkable spin into vagary-dom, White seems to maintain the upper hand. At least between R. and your faithful 'Dlogger.

I Am A Tenor

2010-03-12T10:09:00.002-06:00

I was officially diagnosed as a tenor by someone who knows this kind of thing. To anyone who has listened to the first seven seconds of They Kill With Automatics this may seem like old news. But I always assumed that I was a baritone-bass with a ripping falsetto, based on my speaking voice and my father and older brother's singing voices. Now that I know better I feel like I can make some meaningful pipe progress.

Zoltan The Star Car, 2003-2010

2010-03-08T14:07:00.005-06:00

It is finished. Here he is at the gallows:

He belongs to KUT now.

Zoltan
By John Noel Hooker

I fasten up the strap across my lap, for if, while leering
From out my eyeball flaps, at girls, or maps, and not ahead
The weighty boom of objects and the throb of doom ennearing
Overtakes my deftest steering, still the belt will hold, unveering.
Zig-zags on the loom, I thank, and whom did pull the thread.

But rolling to a standstill at the hand upraised before me,
Of a white-gloved man who seems entranced with traffic crossing mine,
My pebbly knuckles whiten and a fighting lust detours me
A biting need implores me, like a maiden (“Me so horny!”)
But I impotently hold the pedal, peddling my time.

For duration nigh eternal how I yearn to be released!
How the ulcer acid churns and blithely burns away my guts!
How sour is the pus that roils thus through every crease!
For my car will never cease to bestow unhappy peace
When what is needed direly is fire for the thrust!

My carriage, with a lurch, moves from its perch (as if a chasm).
The sit-stand-sit of church, which I besmirched, in juvenescence,
Now seems a swollen breeze compared to these frail gasps and spasms.
Drivers back there try to fathom, “What’s the handicap that has him?”
Hazard lights ablaze, and eyes aglaze, I hazard guesses:

Are your plugs a-sparking as you park yourself at will?
Is your oil darkened by a sharp and spiny grit?
Is your line of fuel filled with stool, or some swill?
What venom makes you ill? And price for me, the pill,
Will he, whose name’s on breast embroidered, then dark juices, spit.

January 2007

Goodbye, Zoltan!

Live Shorts II: The Suckening

2010-03-08T14:04:00.002-06:00

Wow. The New Tenants probably was the worst of the five, maybe excepting Kavi. I would have been happy with any of the other three taking it. Had this not been the Year of Bridges, His Dudeness, it would have simply been the worst Oscars ever, and that's saying a lot.

Live Shorts

2010-02-21T18:36:00.002-06:00

I just saw the Oscar-nominated live-action short films. Single-adjective descriptions to follow may count as spoiler content (if you're like your faithful 'Dlogger).

As eye-opening as Kavi was, as well-performed as The New Tenants was, as unexpected as Miracle Fish was, as sad as The Door was, and as goofy as Instead Of Abracadabra was, my initial reaction was I would not like to sit down and watch any of those again right now. The last three are getting better and better in my memory though.

I agree with J. that The Door will likely win. I think I will be pulling for Instead of Abracadabra.

Massachusetts

2010-01-20T12:02:00.001-06:00

More like "assachusetts."

Stan, Thy Name Is Ston

2009-12-02T10:26:00.003-06:00

How are we, as Americans, to proceed with the modern security threats from Pakistan and Afghanistan? is a question I hope our elected officials continue to put lots of thought towards. Our relatively blessed Turdlog readers can help their faithful 'Dlogger with a simpler question: How do we, as Americans, pronounce Afghanistan and Pakistan?

President Obama does what most NPR correspondents do: pronounce Afghanistan with three short A's (as in cat) and a schwa for the I; then pronounce Pakistan with two long A's (as in taco) and a long E (as in sleek) for the I.

In general I am a fan of the way Obama et al. pronounce Pakistan, and I use the same techniques for Iran and Iraq (sleek tacos). My Iranian-American friend does so, too. In general, non-Germanic languages don't feature the schwa and short vowels sounds that we use, and because these sound lazy (as in uhhhhhhh and yeaaaaah) it seems a little disrespectful to pronounce non-Germanic country names with them. The mother of this phenomenon was Wolf Blitzer suggesting we pronounce Qatar as cutter a few years back. He interviewed quite a few Qataris to determine how they pronounce the place. (Classy move on one level, but on another level asking them this as we move the troops in to fight Iraq is a bit like asking a prostitute what you can call her, mid-thrust.) And they respond with a mellifluous Qatar, there being no real way to pronounce it in English without using a Qatari accent, so its pronunciation necessitates a transformation by Americans. Blitzer then decides to schwa all over the place and hold up a pair of hedge trimmers to remind us all that it's cutter. Ridiculous. The Turdlog ridicules it.

But so that all brings me back to the rub: Afghanistan. I cannot taco that name. Perhaps the stan part but Ahf-ghahn-ee goes against years of curling up in Mama's knittings, as well as what every American says, which crowd-control-level effects would totally paint the Ahf-ghahn-ee-stahn sayer as obtusely P.C.-slash-America-hating.

But for now it seems better to sound inconsistent, and gratingly so, as frequently as Pakistan and Afghanistan are mentioned in the same sentence. I suppose it comes down to priorities.

Solipsism II

2009-11-24T18:10:00.002-06:00

If I die by plummeting out of the sky it at least won't be for another month or longer. Such tends to be my outlook after returning home safely from a (plane) trip abroad, with the time until my next planned plane trip substituted as necessary. Villahermosa is so named for good reason.

When seated on the plane and visualizing the unthinkable (which of course is entirely thinkable and consists of the plane violently losing lift whilst at maximum altitude and therefore maximizing the time-length of my shit-losing terror during plummet, which of course is the part of the imagining I find most distressing), I always imagine that all of my fellow passengers' shit-losing terror is accompanied by high-volume shrieking while I alone panic silently. It occured to me on the plane today to wonder why that is.

I often think that I am more hyper-aware of my inner reflective state than the average person. For example, I can't help but narrate my thoughts to myself in complete sentences most of the time. I try to make sure, from time to time, that I do not silently mouth these sentences out. I picture other people tooling about their days thinking only abstractly; their brain function rides along with them in real time with no need for literal inner monologue. This habit of mine, I believe, is part of the reason I read so slowly. Not just that I have to sound out in my head each word as I read it, but that when interrupting thoughts arise I have to manically entertain them, word for word, before I can let them go and resume dictating to myself what the book in question is trying to relate to me. Consequently, I believe that others' brain-body divisions are fuzzier than mine, and that their brain-dictated actions are more directly in tune with their immediate causal stimuli; their actions require less in the way of reflection. I am also, ask J. or H., or the good folks at Bellavision Eyewear, an awful decision maker (from a time/decision efficiency standpoint, anyway). I think I imagine that other people would do what comes naturally (i.e., scream like hell) in a plummeting aircraft, while I would sit there thinking holy shit this is so horrifyingly like how I imagined it would be all those times. And that I would be experiencing the torment of plummeting death on a deeper, more cerebral and hence exponentially more terrifying level than my neighbors' gut-level reactions could involve.

I worry that what I claim, in a value-neutral sort of way, is a sharper brain-body distinction than most, will be interpreted by the reader as vanity; that the reader will feel that I feel superior to my fellow passengers (and those around me as a whole) in that I think more than others. At one level I vehemently disagree; I find serious fault with the commonly-uttered Nietzschean (I think, though that may be unfair) belief that everyone is stupid but a select few, which group typically includes the utterer. But at another level, when the plane lands, and stops at the gate and the seat belt lights dim, and the woman behind me and across the aisle not only immediately rises (stupidly enough by itself, twenty rows back from the exit door on a nearly full flight) but also proceeds towards the front as far as she can make it before she is stopped by other exiting passengers, which distance is precisely two rows, so that she stands there for a full ten minutes, her impatient, self-serving splendor on display directly in front of me and the other people she has thoughtlessly cut in front of (whole level-leaps stupider), it does suggest that at least one of my neighbors could use some deeper reflection time, at least with respect to prioritizing actions in social contexts.

And don't even get me started on spatial arrangement of selfish people waiting at the baggage-claim carousel (i.e., What's Wrong With The World).

A Weekend Of Culture

2009-11-06T18:12:00.002-06:00

Got tickets to AC/DC (thanks M.L.), UT-UCF football (thanks S.G.) and La Boheme this weekend. If you know of anyone experiencing a more balanced cultural weekend, please let me know.

Awful

2009-10-01T08:40:00.003-05:00

On The World yesterday Bill Kirby, of some university called Harvard, lamented "the dimunition (sic) of the humanities" in Maoist China.

Sic, too, about the parentheses; the Palm Pre has no brackets. Don't let that diminish my SNOOTy reputation.

Monday Night Fallacies

2009-09-22T15:28:00.002-05:00

I didn't see last night's game (the bad thing about Colts-Dolphins games is that one of them has to win). I did just hear it reported that the Colts had the lowest time of possession (TOP) of any winning team since some time in the seventies. Thesis statement: TOP is probably the most overrated stat in football.

My blood boils when I hear some commentator talk about how Pitt's offense kept the ball for 41 minutes against West Virginia, thus limiting the amount of time Pat White and Steve Slaton had to pile up points. This does not translate into any useful advice to a future opponent of West Virginia's other than don't turn the ball over.

TOP can be illustrative of how a game went. For example, if TOP is lopsided but the score close, perhaps one team's yards came mostly from rushing (which plays tend not to stop the clock, so that team racks up the TOP) while the other team passed more (the clock stops on incompletions, so their yardage piles up more on quick plays, without draining much clock time).

On the other hand, if TOP is lopsided and the score is, too, it is usually the case that the winning team also won TOP. This correlation is, I think, often misinterpreted as causation. Whether the winning team built up an early lead and handed the ball off to drain the clock in the second half, or whether the losing team threw four interceptions and kept giving the ball away, letting the winning team accrue TOP throughout, is not explicit by the final TOP figure. And either way, it's not as though any pre-game strategy of maximizing your team's TOP is one that will also help you win. If Pat White and Steve Slaton are your quick-scoring opponents, then holding onto the ball longer will indeed limit their ability to score, but no more than it will your own.

Put another way, Pitt should always run the play that gives Pitt the best chance to score (until, of course, the time remaining in the game is low compared to the score differential, when it makes sense to run out the clock if Pitt is ahead). Otherwise, why not have a receiver take a knee in the open field, taking a fresh set of downs instead of a score?

But so last night the Colts did a rare thing by winning a game while holding onto the ball for less than 25% of the time. More than half of their points came with an 80 yard touchdown on the first play from scrimmage and a quick drive in the final two minutes to go ahead at the end of the game. Add to it that Miami runs the ball a lot and the result is still unusual but now sensible. And that's the (only) real use of TOP: it's something that makes one say How queer! and want to discover how it happened. It's not something you should build a strategy around. At least, not a winning one.

My Skin Crawls

2009-09-20T16:52:00.004-05:00

At what point does a parochial pronunciation go too far, at least for national TV? I refer specifically to Phil Simms's Kentuckian eem for him. Am I an elitist for even going here?

Does my use of going here negate my elitism?

Is the answer no?

I Got A Poll

2009-09-01T10:59:00.002-05:00

I feel like a Republican from 2005.

So this guy, George W. Bush, runs for re-election promising to continue bombing brown people and to dismantle Social Security and American voters are like, "sounds good!" and they elect him. Then six months or so later the voters are like, "Hey! He's bombing browns and dismantling Social Security! He sucks!" as evidenced by his plummet in opinion polls.

So then this guy, Barack Obama, runs for president in 2008, promising health care reform and actually to raise taxes on the rich. And the voters are like, "Awesome!" and they elect him. And less than a year into it, voters are like, "Hey! Keep the government out of my Medicare! And don't raise my taxes!" and public opinion of him plummets.

Your faithful 'Dlogger is getting upset! Politicians are famous for lying, but these guys have been scrupulous to a fault! It forever will remain a mystery to me why Bush's poll numbers fell in 2005, considering he was re-elected in the first place. He did precisely what he said he would do, and voters were incensed. I want to shake the collective weave out of the American electorate's hair! Our misery isn't the fault of our politicians but of lazy, impatient, uninformed citizens who have no earthly idea what they even want government to do except fix this stupid place.

Stupid America. Grow a brain, and until you do, you deserve whatever your elected officials give you. And as extra incentive, if you grow a brain in the next couple of weeks, you'll get publicly funded health care.

Don't Pull The Thang Out

2009-08-20T15:07:00.002-05:00

Austin will lose three of its most outstanding citizens when J.I., J.N., and K.O. leave, without concrete plans of returning, this week. Last night I was celebrating with two of them at a local eat-drinkery. The jukebox, or its modern equivalent, was on a roll, playing Creedence, Cream, The Doors, The Stones, and that granddaddy of them all, Zeppelin. I was naturally getting into a fervor, and at the end of Thank You I caught myself insisting that the guttural G to G-sharp bend at the beginning of Heartbreaker simply had to be played, just the way Living Loving Maid is required listening after - uh - Heartbreaker. In the future, how about just not even teasing me with the Zeppelin unless you're going to go all the way through the disc with it?

Bloody Hell

2009-08-14T16:20:00.004-05:00

J and I conducted an experiment yesterday on the effects of V8 on blood pressure. I am a fan of the beverage and it irks me to no end that people feel the need to warn me of its high sodium content as I prepare to enjoy its tastiness. So here are my blood pressure readings from last night:

Time___Systolic___Diastolic
20:38__110______60
20:49__106______64
20:51__110______64
21:00__110______66

(12 oz. regular V8 vegetable juice consumed, 21:03)

21:04__112______66
21:14__120______74
21:30__120______78

Normal blood pressure is 90 to 119 systolic and 60 to 79 diastolic. I did eat supper at around 7:30, so the next experiment will be done on an empty stomach. Nevertheless, the preliminary results indicate that a single can of V8 (and the store was out of spicy, which I prefer and has higher sodium content) made me pre-hypertensive, at least in the systoles.

Still, be quiet.

INFJ

2009-08-12T16:47:00.003-05:00

According to a Facebook test, and therefore as a matter of freaking Gospel, my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFJ, meaning that I prefer Introversion to Extra-, iNtuition to Sensing, Feeling to Thinking, and Judgment to Perception. Another website told me I was INFP. Either way I am rare; Wikipedia says the occurrence among test takers is 1.5% for the former and 4.3% for the latter.

I am not proud of my last three characteristics (N, F, and J, which result I'll focus on for the rest of this short post). And you, dear reader, are probably less likely to seek surcease of sorrow from the writings of an F-ing J in the future. Bear with me for now.

I will say that I find it weirdly accurate what Wikipedia says that result says about my personality, particularly the bad parts of it. I'll let you, dear reader, guess at what I might be talking about. But at this point I am trying to be skeptical, wondering to what extent its evaluation is like saying "Libras strive for abstract fairness but may feel compelled towards emotional bias in specific, heated situations."

Lastly, I find it interesting that Adam Sandler is a purported brother INFJ. I felt uncontrollably sympathetic towards his character in Punch Drunk Love, and I think it's for his very INFJ-ness I just read about. It seemed to me he played his same old type-cast self, just in a drama - Sad Gilmore, if you will - and the profound chord it struck in me rings on today.

JFC

2009-08-05T17:19:00.003-05:00

Atheists do not like being called fundamentalists, and from what I know of capital-F Fundamentalism, this dislike is well-founded. But I am not sure the Economist's blogger does a good job defending atheists, or contrasting them with religious fundamentalists.

The blogger bothers to define the fundamentalist mindset in the fifth of six paragraphs, and does so as "one that cannot be changed by evidence." I believe the original accuser (uncited bloggers) would have defined it as rigorous adherence to a set of basic principles, which definition does indeed apply to many atheists I know.

Now, most atheists I know are fundamentalist skeptics, meaning that the only basic principles they adhere to are empirical evidence and reason, which, let me aver, are the best principles we humans have to rely on. When going about our daily lives, teaching our children, hopping on airplanes, healing our sick, etc., they're what we all go by, and the religious fundamentalist who forgets this can go and give up bacon.

But strictly speaking, it takes a fundamentalist point of view to espouse atheism. For to deny that there's a god because you haven't been shown sufficient evidence for one implies rigid adherence to a system of understanding the universe based on human capabilities. I grant that such a system is practically superior to anything preferred by those who believe they have some kind of personal insight to, or communication with, a god, but it's fundamentalist all the same.

A step away from such rigidity is to admit that a god, as defined by most who believe in one, is outside the realm of judgments that a rational skeptic may make. That may be called agnosticism, which tag for subtle reasons I don't really like, but more on that another time. An atheist friend once said that what I have described is essentially a coward's atheism. What's in a name?

I don't advocate for people believing in god; I don't feel qualified to. I am skeptical of anybody who does. But atheists, agnostics, and whatever I am shouldn't pretend that the underlying reality of the Universe defers to the human mind. It is the other way around, and our mind should be open to that. How else is that majestic Hypothesis step of the scientific method to form?

The Perfect Storm

2009-07-30T17:32:00.002-05:00

. . . of metæl is about to descend upon Room 710 (Austin, Texas) this evening. Blackholicus has been rocking my balls off (on CD) ever since I finally checked them out (at that same venue) several weeks ago. They're apparently opening for Ignitor, who rocked my self-same pair off a couple of years ago and are apparently to play The Spider Queen, their new rock opera.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Cultural Perspective

2009-06-30T10:15:00.005-05:00

From a Facebook quiz, which purports to determine What Color Are You?:

3. What type of music do you like to listen
to?
Miley Cyrus
Jazz
Mariah Carey
Beethoven
50 cents [sic]
Britney Spears
Madonna
Ocean waves

Holy shit. Now, it's a fool who throws a fit every time something dumb is posted onto Facebook, but this really gives me pause. Given eight categories, four are dedicated to what can loosely be called pop divas, one to classical, one to jazz, and one to hip-hop (I think anybody who cared to contemplate it for a couple of seconds would find lots more variation between Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, or between Beethoven and Bach, or between 50 Cent and Dr. Dre, than between Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears*); and lastly, New Age/White Noise outgains a little genre called, umm, "rock and roll," 1-0. Also shut out: country and western, anything from south of the Rio Grande, anything from anywhere white people don't originate from.

Now if the quiz purported to explain What Color Of Lip Gloss Are You? or What Color Of Nail Polish Are You? or What Grade Did Your Brain Stop Functioning In? then I would understand. But the quiz's title provokes general appeal, then sourly disappoints. I mean, does anybody score black on this thing?

* No, I have not listened to enough MC and BS to support this claim, and I might be surprised. Still: OMG.

Push Hands

2009-06-05T10:30:00.007-05:00

There is a parallel concept between my understanding of traffic flow and economic trends. Let me explain.

Both the traffic on a freeway and the economy of a nation are nonlinear dynamic systems; they are composed of players who follow rules based on what the other players are doing. The feedback among players' actions produces some literally chaotic results, making the long-term behavior of the system difficult or impossible to predict (at least when it is possible to do something about it, meaning that I can predict that traffic will be backed up on I-35 southbound between 51st and Riverside today at 4:30 pm, but I could not have predicted that when the road was being built).

The two systems often behave in an undesirable way - the traffic flow by jamming and the economy by recessing. Both periods of undesirable behavior arise non-linearly; a tiny problem becomes big, through feedback. A driver taps his brakes to avoid a squirrel, causing the car behind him to brake instead of switching lanes, so that he now has to slow down even more to let a slow driver go by, and in sufficiently dense traffic the braking cascades backwards. In the economy, one little company gets the bright idea that housing prices will skyrocket so they decide to lend money to just anybody who will buy a home with it; other companies want in on the deal and follow suit, and soon you have, well, 2007.

Now, no system on Earth works perfectly. Google that shit. You can't stop minor fluctuations from the norm from occurring. The problem (a.k.a. beauty) of nonlinear systems is that tiny fluctuations can have amazing consequences. So yes, slow drivers should be punished for driving in the passing lane, and yes, foolish entrepreneurs should be punished for gaming the system, but those measures really amount to attempts to trying to smoothen out fluctuations, which will be there anyway. More effective measures would be to linearize the system itself, damping or eliminating the effects of the natural fluctuations.

I see both systems as nonlinear beasts that go into bad periods, and the way the systems are set up, the bad periods are unavoidable. What is needed in both systems is a new element that is there specifically to counteract the feedback loops that bring about the downturns.

For traffic, I think the best solution is to seed the highways with drivers who do the DEW. A traffic jam develops because in laminar traffic flow, if one driver slows down, the drivers behind him will have to slow down, and a jam ensues. If enough drivers (and the true efficacy of the method will depend on what portion it takes; I admit I have no idea) diligently drive in a way that runs counter to the natural feedback loops of traffic, they might be able to maintain laminar flow. That is, the drivers must move faster than normal traffic during a slowdown, and slower than normal traffic when normal traffic speeds up (which is accomplished by opening and closing space ahead of the driver).

For the economy, I think Keynes had it about right. The natural, unadulterated market will have nonlinear ebbs and flows. In the long run they may balance out, but I believe Keynes is credited with noting that in the long run we are all dead. Meaning that if a recession lasts thirty years, it is dandy that it's followed by a long boom, but what of those would-have-been careers, down the toilet? The feedback loops of the economy are many, but an illustrative one is earning and spending money by workers. The less a worker makes, the less he spends, and the less he spends, the less businesses profit, so the less he makes. What an economy needs is a new element, outside the natural market, to spend wildly when players in the economy are saving, and to save when the economy is otherwise booming. Sort of like a national piggy bank. This new element will naturally smoothen the ebbs and flows of the market, much as DEWers smoothen traffic flow.

Radio Blah Blah

2009-05-21T17:52:00.004-05:00

It is to my unending shame that I have yet to donate any money to KUT, my local NPR station.

Or at least that's what I've thought until recently. The stories have done nothing for me lately, with the ever-present exceptions mostly coming from Marketplace.

To wit: this morning they wasted half of my drive to work talking about the sequel to that wretched film, Night at the Museum. I don't know whether the Smithsonian will benefit from its popularity, nor do I care. That that travesty of a dungheap, to say nothing of a movie, warrants a sequel means that the moviegoing public belongs in a museum of things so ridiculous they're almost worth staring at.

A possibly more putrid example is a story from May 6 about the economic effects of the Sichuan earthquake a year later. On the face of it, it seems an exciting story for me, as it combines, potentially, two of my favorite subjects: geology and economics. Naturally for NPR these days, though, it is five minutes of aural torture. M. Block and A. Kuhn talk to two workers who are working very hard or trying to find work and come to no conclusion whatsoever. They can't come to any conclusion that you or I couldn't come to by tooling around China for a couple of days, because all they do is talk to two people. And then they admit, 4:11 into the piece, that they indeed have nothing to say except "Wow, China is big!"

Now, there's something to say for honesty, but there's even more to say for the editorial gumption to admit that uhh, I don't have anything to say about the economic impacts of the earthquake, so let's run a different story.

It's a good thing I am not paying for this.

How Yusuf Islam Broke My Heart

2009-05-15T16:52:00.006-05:00

King of Trees, by Cat Stevens, is a very good song - a little melodramatic, maybe, but very good, music- and lyrics-wise. However, my original interpretation of the lyrics was better than the real thing, which I deciphered listening closely one day, and have confirmed by Googling the words. The official version, first verse:

He was the King of trees
Keeper of the leaves
A deep green god of young
Love stained memory
We used to meet by him
Far from the hustling town
I loved you
Now they've come to cut you down

Like I said, a little melodramatic. The thing is, though, that I had translated the ultimate line above as now I've come to cut you down, lending the song a whole guilt-racked, age-coming-of, Giving Tree quality that's really touching. As it turns out, however, it's they've, not I've, giving it a whiney, pop-star, I-(Stevens)-want-to-live-in-Candyland feel that's cute but relatively shallow.

But he did write

I wish I had, I wish I had
The secret of good and the secret of bad
Why does this question drive me mad?
'Cause I was taught when but a lad
That bad was good and good was bad
So he gets a pass.

Couldn't/Could Not

2009-05-06T16:25:00.002-05:00

The difference in meaning between could not and its contraction just dawned on me:

The meaning of Hank could not eat the steak is ambiguous, but the meaning is clarified in Hank couldn't eat the steak. The likely meaning of the former sentence is that Hank was unable to eat the steak, as from being too full or out of time, but it could mean that recovering beef-addict Hank managed not to eat the steak that was placed before him and therefore is showing great signs of progress. The latter sentence can only mean the former explanation.

In summary, negatives are funny things, and great examples of why infinitive splitting is perfectly acceptable: Make sure not to turn right at Albuquerque lacks the definitive admonition of Make sure to not turn right at Albuquerque. If some grammar prude, in the middle of New Mexico, says to me that former sentence, I'm taking it easy which way or whether I turn.

I'm Gonna Get Me A Gun

2009-04-08T18:06:00.003-05:00

According to All Things Considered yesterday, gun and ammunition sales have skyrocketed since Obama's election. And the purchases have been made by people whose vote counts as much as mine.

This is the equivalent of our man Tom Fulery winning his 1988 grade school mock-election for Dukakis on the promise that Bush 1 wanted year-round school. Apparently, gun seizures go hand-in-hand with a socialist agenda. (And, apparently, the freedom-socialism line is drawn somewhere between 35% and 39.6%.)

The Turdlog doesn't typically deride other citizens' concerns, but I really think this is real-world evidence of a highly skewed understanding of what the 2008 presidential election was really about. Your faithful 'Dlogger will eat his hat if it becomes substantially harder to purchase a gun because of any legislation passed by President Obama.

A New Power Plant

2009-03-27T09:48:00.004-05:00

Let me submit for your approval a model of our economy. I base it loosely on something I read by Einstein, and lots of smart guys have doubtlessly pretty much thought this up before, and even smarter guys have surely thought up why it's full of shit, but let me just go ahead.

Back in the the hunter-gatherer days unemployment was near 0% because one either hunted, gathered, or starved. Life was a meritocracy. Technology, including agriculture, came about and gave us free time. It made it such that humanity's necessities could be produced with 1/3 of the labor. Of course, a parallel phenomenon was the emergence of a non-necessity producing class: that instead of everyone working 1/3 as much, only 1/3 of the people did the work, and these guys worked just as much as before. The 2/3 went on to become politicians and plumbers. This pattern persists today: if one's labor can be replaced by a machine, one isn't allowed to labor any less, but required to find new labor. Just ask a newspaper employee of the 21st century.

Without money, many would doubtlessly just have freeloaded on those who work to make humanity's necessities. In order to be fair to the farmers, who were doing all the work, money was devised as a promissory note that non-farmers were working, too.

So the skeleton of the economy is a bunch of people who need to find something to do. What humanity requires (food and shelter) is entirely manufactured by a small subset of the population. Money serves the purpose of proving that the money owner jumps through hoops. Now, humanity has improved greatly as a result of useful hoop-jumping; it now has air conditioning, penicillin, pistachio ice cream, and Gilbert & Sullivan. So it's not that hoop-jumping is completely useless; just, in a strict sense, unnecessary.

It seems that the alternatives were slavery, which no non-moron wants, or Communism, which induces hysteria in rich people. These are just versions of the hoop-jumping model with the parameters slightly tweaked. Proponents of the current version of the model point out that humanity gets more of the benefits of hoop-jumping faster by giving out more dollars to better hoop-jumpers. Detractors (like your faithful 'Dlogger) lament the instability (e.g. AIG), but never mind: it's basically the same model. The point is that humans have everything they need and may as well jump through hoops to earn their dollars and keep the economy strong. Any benefit attained from the labor of non-farmers can be regarded as gravy.

So when the economy is doing poorly the idea is floated to put people to work come hell or high water. Have half of the indigent dig ditches and the other half fill them back up. Give them all a paycheck which they will spend and help industrious businesses. Humanity will "suffer" through a period during which no benefit is gained through the hoop-jumping.

Which brings me to my idea for a new type of power plant. I walked the streets of San Francisco in December 2007, pestered by able-bodied bums (one with a sign admonishing me to "Support the United Negro Pizza Fund"). It occurs to me that these people aren't particularly lazy (i.e. they aren't much lazier than your faithful 'Dlogger, which may not be saying much) but that various disorders prohibit them from getting and holding jobs. These people may be physically dirty, addicted to alcohol, impudent, violent, demented, depressed, or all of the above, but it occurs to me that if you give them a hoop to jump through for money, they will do it.

So my idea is to line the streets of downtown San Francisco, or the city of your choosing, with stationary bicycles, the power derived from the use of which going to charge batteries. The bicycles should be enclosed such that the rider is alone and secure. After undergoing the meagerest of registration processes, which should not require any kind of home address or past working history, the peddler can commence recharging batteries for around $12 per hour. This peddling is to be done without supervision. This program will ameliorate at least four problems humanity faces.

It will give bums something to do, curbing violence and the hot gas spewed by those annoying people who ceaselessly clamor about the injustice of being asked for spare change.

It will help the economy by giving more consumers a paycheck. These consumers will likely spend nearly all of their money, and if it's a large enough pay rate, these benefits should extend beyond the liquor store.

It will help the environment. How much wasted energy emanates from your conventional gym's stationary bikes?

It will help curb obesity. This is not a huge problem among the indigent, but of course the program is not limited to them. I predict great popularity for a gym with negative membership rates.

The neo-fascist counter-argues that such a power plant would not be economically viable, but recall that we have already established that the benefit of hoop-jumping is all gravy. Give bums a safe, private environment in which they may be industrious without the vulture-gaze of an officious fair-skinned supervisor and they will thrive. So will all of us.

What's YOUR Favorite Planet?

2009-02-25T18:43:00.003-06:00

I walked to tech sessions on February 19th, as I am required to do twice a week for advancement in the PhD program at good ol' UT, expecting the usual, for what else is there to expect, unless you can expect something else? But the usual means a talk by some departmental member, whether student, faculty, or research staff. Occasionally we get the outside scientist, invited here to show us what's what. What was here on February 19th was not the usual.

I was early, as usual, as I have to judge my departure-for-campus time conservatively, and sat down. What was initially the usual ample space became standing room only, and who should appear but one Fred Singer, leader of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. He says:

That there is anthropognic CO2 and a greenhouse effect, and that human-caused global warming is plausible.

That water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than CO2 but is not talked about because no one can do anything about it.

That human-caused global warming is not realistic.

That satellite data is more reliable than surface data for recording global temperature, and that most apparent temperature rise is a result of surface temperatures showing us the urban heat island effect.

That the NIPCC does not draw support from industry and so has no vested interest in its own scientific conclusions.

That Al Gore's "hockey stick" temperature curve, which he got from the 3rd IPCC report, is based on statistical errors.

That polar bears should not, and do not generally, swim in the Arctic Ocean.

That the real temperature curve, replete with the historically-documented Medieval warm period, shows that we are emerging from a mini-Ice-Age since, and nothing is statistically freakish about the weather these days.

That the agreement of temperature data to climate warming models is based on the range of predictions, not the mean.

That satellite and/or radiosonde data refute the "Fingerprint of man-made global warming."

That the true, non-freakish, modern increase in global temperature is caused by the Sun, as evidenced by near-perfect anticorrelation between 14C and 18O in a stalagmite in Oman.

Was he right? I don't know. According to the website of his own Science and Environmental Policy Project he has been a consultant for everyone from GE to Exxon to Lockheed-Martin, so his assurance that the NIPCC has no vested interest in its own conclusions has an awkward Dick Cheney feel to it.

I don't know what polar bears think of swimming. I grant that the computer-generated polar bear in An Inconvenient Truth was awfully appealing to emotions. But polar bears do feast on seals, according to Sea World, and I don't suppose the seals travel more than a couple of miles from the icy coast to greet their predators.

Do radiosonde and satellite data refute anthropogenic global warming? I have to see more than two figures to be swayed one way or the other. It did seem that one was closer to predictions than the other, and I would have loved to have asked why, but the Q&A session afterwards was pretty hot stuff.

One Q of which wasn't a question at all, but an explanation that 18O values are a proxy for rainfall, not for temperature. As I understand it, since 18O is heavier, physically, than normal 16O, 16O gets preferentially evaporated, so when snow, which is 16O-enriched, falls onto growing glaciers instead of rolling back into the oceans, the oceans become 18O enriched (i.e., ocean water has higher 18O values in colder times). So if that's the case I can imagine that any water not locked up in glaciers would have a higher 18O value when it's cold. So if 14C goes up with increased solar radiation and 18O goes down, it seems reasonable to me that solar radiation is positively correlated with higher temperature.

But correlation isn't always causation.

And we should not base base our understanding of global climate on a fixture in what may be Osama Bin Laden's den.

And I don't understand the hydrogeologic plumbing chez Osama.

Another Q was really a C-for-comment on models, and how Singer should not dis them, as they incorporate physics. I have to admit that I find this point of view anathema, in that modern-day physics does not even begin to touch the complexity of dynamic systems like the climate on Earth.

A scientist from Stanford once told me (and several other people gathered to hear him speak) that balancing geological cross-sections is a fool's errand because there is no Newton's Law of Balanced Cross-Sections. If that sounds opaque (to mix a metaphor), the man tried to argue, as far as I could tell, that one's observations are not as reliable or as important as Newton's.

But listen to me - I'm rambling. We need to keep studying the climate on Earth, and whilst studying it, we need to take careful action. And at this point it's better to carefully wean ourselves from hydrocarbons than drillbabydrill. The upside of weaning is clean renewable non-terrorist energy; the downside is some lost revenue.

Pen-etariats

2009-01-17T17:28:00.003-06:00

I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got tired of not caring.

-Mitch Hedberg

I always lose pens, too, Mitch. And up until a startling revelation a couple of days ago, I had convinced myself that it was my fault. I thought that my lackadaisical attitude towards where I place my pens (et possibly cetera) led to my losing pens. I imagined pen loss by simple thermodynamics: I held a greater concentration of pens than that which exists in my surroundings, so unless I were to spend energy retaining the pens, they would go missing regularly. I now believe this picture to be inaccurate.

I possess three Uni-Ball (sounds like something one should get checked out) Signo Gelsticks 0.7, quite possibly the most God-awful pen on the planet. One is pink, one is purple, and one is a radioactive orange. As I recall, the pens came free in a package of some black pens that I actually wanted. Regardless, I have owned these pens for at least two years, which is far longer than my average pen residence time. I conclude that the disgusting nature of the pens makes them unattractive to the pen thieves who take instead my good black pens. I see the world now as a struggle between hard-working pen purchasers like myself and ne'er-do-well pen handout-takers. The latter prey upon my upstanding, yet naive, character.

Well no more, you bums! Your days of free writes are over. Condolences!

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

2008-12-17T15:08:00.003-06:00

Did you know that negative or zero values cannot be plotted correctly on logarithmically-graduated charts? And that only positive values can be interpreted on a logarithmic scale? And that the problem can be corrected by doing one of the following:

-Entering only positive values (greater than zero) in the cells used to create the chart, or

-In the chart, clicking the axis you want to change, clicking Selected Axis on the Format Menu, clicking the Scale Tab, and then clearing the Logarithmic Scale check box?

Did you know that? Well Excel and I do. My problem is that Excel doesn't know that I know that. And as I use a complicated spreadsheet that I need to display log-log charts, and there isn't always data in every cell that is plotted on such a chart, Excel feels the need to apprise me of all the above information pretty much every time I click on anything in the sheet. Not only that, but Excel insists I acknowledge its warning (by pressing "OK") before continuing. Excel even occasionally flashes warning lights at me when I'm using a different goddamn application, just to make sure I know that Excel can't plot negative or zero values on a logarithmically graduated scale. Excel loses no functionality when I do nothing to correct this problem; it simply does what any sane person would expect and doesn't plot the motherfucking data.

I pray someone out there knows a button to click that will suppress this warning, because the next time Excel warns me that negative or zero values can't be plotted on a logarithmically-graduated scale, I am going to cut someone's head off, incapable as I am of exacting revenge on Excel itself, which, sadly, I don't think has the ability to feel pain.

Whale, Bat

2008-12-07T12:49:00.005-06:00

I commonly make the mistake of pitying various animals for their lot in life. It's something I'm working on.

A whale has to spend most of its time holding its breath. On the surface (no pun intended), this seems rather uncomfortable. But I am confident that a whale's perception of breath-holding is largely different from ours, and not only because it is "used to it." A whale only needs to take a breath every so often - what is it? Every thirty minutes? Longer? (Is anyone here a marine biologist?) As well, the surface is always just lying there; the whale can go up for a fresh breath essentially any time it wants. I can imagine, therefore, that a whale's experience breathing is more analogous to a human's experience eating. The whale gradually hungers for air, and decides with slowly-mounting urgency that it needs to stop what it is doing and refill.

Conversely, a whale's experience eating may be much more analogous to our breathing experience than eating. According to Wikipedia, blue whales intake a great deal of water per krill swallow. It seems then that whale food is all around the whale, dissipated through its atmosphere. Granted, a whale could likely last longer on krill-less swims than could a human on oxygen-less breaths, but the action of eating, for a whale, may be mundane compared to a lovely trip up to the air-water interface. And when boy whales muster up the gumption, they may ask girl whales whether they might join them for a breath, rather than a bite.

Similarly, I think humans are disposed towards pitying bats for their blindness. Yes, we know they have radar detection, and can navigate through caves and detect insects using echolocation, but echolocation is not vision, so as sophisticated a system as echolocation might be, the poor bat is still blind and can't see where it's going.

All true, if to see is to detect and interpret a certain range of electromagnetic frequencies. But this is a narrow definition, I think, compared to what the important aspects of sight are to those of us who have it. What we rely on is an image of our surroundings that our brain can make something of. Our eyes supply this by detecting what we biasedly call visible light.

A bat emits sounds and uses the loudness and delay of the echoes to tell what is around it. We humans can hear as well, and we know that hearing is not sight; indeed, to us, hearing is much less sensitive and useful, in most cases, than sight. But I imagine, and this is basically pure conjecture here, but I imagine that were a human to have a truly batty experience, that is, to have his sight removed and be blessed with echolocation, aside from being really funny to look at, screaming all the time, it would not be long before he described his echo-locating as an image of sounds around him. That it, I think bats have an image in their heads of their surroundings, and therefore should not be thought of as blind at all. Indeed, I would understand the bats pitying us: all we can detect are bouncing lights. In their absence, we are blind. So long as a bat isn't hoarse it can always see.

Picture (a loaded word that I can't escape) the perception of a fly by a bat. We can't really know what it's like. But it's much more acute than a normal human's: bats literally survive by doing the Mr. Miyagi chopsticks thing. What we do know is that there is a fly ahead of the bat, which fly the bat senses and eats. My guess is that the bat makes what most people would call an image of the fly, and therefore the bat is only blind by a very narrow definition.

But taking this line of thinking a little farther, the crux of the matter is what the bat-homunculus is like. For at one (rather objective) level, what does it matter? Humans detect energy and consume it; bats do, too. Molecules dance around and find themselves at lower energy states. NEWSFLASH!

But the cool thing, to your faithful 'Dlogger, is that objective nature is examined by subjective agents whose very subjectivity is also examinable, but only by other subjective agents, who have a hard time objectively characterizing it. A fun time, but a hard time.

An Argument With Some Libertarians Raised An Important Point

2008-11-20T15:13:00.004-06:00

That title should be blog-post enough, but I will continue.

I kid - I love y'all crazy bastards. But I think Keynesian economics is a pretty good tool to calm an otherwise-free market. This (admittedly hypothetical) free market will be fraught with positive feedback loops. My favorite historical example is the Dutch tulip craze of the 17th century - the more expensive the tulips got, the more people wanted to buy (and sell) them. The same thing happened over the last few years with houses. Once people started buying homes as investments, to be sold later at a higher price, it became a game of trying to get money for nothing, which will never last in the long term.

These bubbles in free markets are often followed by crashes. I think that this boom-and-bust cycle is too cruel for people to accept, and that's why the government should act as a counterweight to the economy, pressing the brakes during a boom and hitting the gas during a bust. The brakes include raising interest rates and taxes, and cutting spending; the gas is the opposite. Note that the government's debt will grow during a bust; it should be paid off during a boom.

Seems simple enough to me: private industry sees, the government saws, and vice-versa. The economy is kept stable. But An Argument With Some Libertarians Raised An Important Point, even if it wasn't exactly the point the libertarians were trying to make: what if the government is a bunch of morons?

If the government (and of course I am oversimplifying when I imply that it is a single agency that acts unilaterally to counter the economy, but what am I, an economist?) acts to exacerbate the natural ebb or flow of the economy, the country can be quickly headed towards a violent shitstorm. E.g., if, when the economy is doing well, the government behaves as if it's doing poorly by cutting taxes and increasing spending (let's say, again just e.g., military spending), then you might have all kinds of trouble doing otherwise-doable things like paying for healthcare for your citizens and developing clean energy sources, because you're about to have a (natural) bust coming up and a huge deficit to greet it. The government sawed at the same time the economy did, and made matters worse. A la 2003-7.

The libertarian answer seems to be that natural economic cycles are bad enough (I haven't heard an argument that they won't be there at all); the last thing we need is a government of dunces making matters worse. I think they throw the baby out with the bathwater, and that smart fiscal and monetary policy (like that, I think, we've seen from Bernanke, whose deftness just couldn't keep up with Bush's daftness, but at least the latter was smart-or-lucky enough to appoint the former) can effectively make the world of money a better place for your average American (or anybody) to live.

Incidentally, and I know this is dead-horse flogging at this point, but incidentally, Republicans accusing Obama's Democrats of socialism, as though they were not themselves just as in favor of "spreading the wealth" as their better counterparts, is hypocrisy most foul. Both parties actively tax and spend; Democrats tax the rich and spend on the poor; Republicans tax everybody and spend on Iraq. Were the Republican Party what Ron Paul would make of it, Republicans would have a point.

Also incidentally, and also in defense of libertarians, I don't really know how the housing bubble got started. I know it is the nature of bubbles to get started from small things and grow weirdly and explosively and so now its origin might be impossible to trace. But to whatever extent Bush's ideas of an Ownership Society, and Democrats' refusal to rein in Fannie and Freddie, contributed to the mess, we big brother-types owe libertarians and everyone else an apology, and I give it without reservation. Just don't go acting like the Federal Reserve created the tulip craze.

Muschamp, Eh?

2008-11-19T11:14:00.002-06:00

My Longhorns have decided to annoint defensive coordinator Will Muschamp as the Head-Coach-In-Waiting, to succeed Mack Brown when Brown decides to retire (for which there is no timetable, nor will there be if Brown keeps winning 10+ games a season). To entice him to stay, Muschamp will be paid head-coaching dollars (I have heard $900,000 per year from the local news and Wikipedia; this is apparently more than any other assistant coach in the nation; answers-dot-Yahoo tells me the average head coach salary is $950,000).

Cool. Continuity is wonderful for recruiting. Your 'Dlogger is optimistic now that UT need not experience a rebuilding effect when Brown retires and could keep rolling up 9+ wins per season for the next twenty years. And as wealthy as the university is, $900,000 seems a small price to pay.

However: we are not having a good defensive year. This from cfbstats-dot-com: 58th in total (yards allowed per game) defense, 111th (out of 120) against the pass. Yeah, right there behind Idaho. Yes, the Big 12 is a pass-happy league, but we're 9th in conference, worst in the southern division.

Colorado lured Dan Hawkins from a precocious Boise State squad in 2005 (a typical move, hiring a brilliant coach from a school that can't adequately pay him, by larger schools that can), and it seems that correlation didn't equal causation: Hawkins, 53-11 in five years at Boise State, is 12-21 in (nearly) three years at Colorado (from Wikipedia). Since Hawkins's departure, Boise State is 33-3 (from ESPN-dot-com). The lesson: be careful correlating success with a particular coach.

When Muschamp left LSU in 2004 the Tigers' defense went from allowing 252 yards and 11 points per game to allowing 257 and 17, respectively. When he left Auburn the (other) Tigers went from allowing 292 yards and 14 points per game to allowing 298 and 17. These stats are all Ibid. one way or another. So it seems his defense made a difference, especially in scoring (the one stat that counts). But: a difference substantial enough to build your program upon?

Too, he has never been a head coach. And chest-bumping players may get them fired up for the next play, but it might be perceived as weird when visiting with a high-school kid's parents. Just saying. . . .

Good Times

2008-11-05T18:02:00.002-06:00

"That's a good [V.P.] pick by McCain. Uh oh."

- R., G-Chats With A Genius, 29 August 2008

The American electorate, ficklest of lovers, came through. As per my Phillies post I can't argue that it has been forever, but it sure feels that way. Thank you America!

The Phait Is Phover

2008-10-30T10:16:00.003-05:00

The wait is over, announces Sportsillustrated-dot-com, the Phillies win their first World Series since 1980. I am glad to hear it, and happy for the rare Phillies fan who has entered my life, but let's have a little perspective: in a league of thirty teams, the Phillies won it twenty-eight years ago. I don't know, and won't research, how many teams were in the league in 1980; it won't have been many fewer.

Oh my God! That wait was so average in length!

Three Nights Still Remain In October

2008-10-29T17:19:00.001-05:00

Everybody stop what you're doing and read Ulalume.

The Athletical Is Political

2008-10-21T13:07:00.004-05:00

It's a great, if nerve-racking, time to be a Democratic voter and a fan of The University of Texas football. Our boys are Number One, but will they be at the end of the year?

Sit back and enjoy the ride, I think, and my sentiments were echoed by the drunk fan who, being driven away from the stadium after UT's 56-31 victory over Missouri by some (hopefully) sober friend, regaled the gaggle of burnt-orange-clad smilers milling about on the street with the result of the previous week's game: We beat OU!

Yes, take her easy. Relish. We won't always be Number One, so make sure not to let the atmosphere of hope and good feelings be wasted with teeth-chattering and ulcers.

Before the Mizzou game I picked the winner (correctly) and the score (closely, 48-24, deemed optimistic by the consensus). Late in the game, with the score 49-24, I admit to hoping backup Texas quarterback John Chiles's lone pass of the game would fall incomplete instead of being caught for the touchdown. But its catch means more for the quarterback and receiver than the brilliant prediction would have meant for me; I was being childish.

Childish, like an American voter when it comes to tax policy. There is virtually no political discussion of the absolute, ideal tax-rate scale our government should use (except from flat-tax proponents, who are probably wrong). Everything is framed in relative terms to the current (poor) tax-rate scale: are we being given a tax cut or a tax hike - let alone what the damned tax rate should be.

I think that there is an efficacious rate at which to tax each income bracket - one that pays for what Americans want the government to pay for without stifling incentive to do work and expand business. One that will result, at times, in yearly deficits without leading to explosive debt buildup. These rates change with the economy: broadly speaking, you raise taxes when the economy is doing well and cut taxes when the economy falters. Which brackets to cut, and how much (i.e., to favor the rich or the poor) is hotly debated, and we have the economy of the last eight years as evidence of what happens when the rich are favored.

Our economists and politicians should feel free to argue where we are with respect to the ideal tax rate schedule without fear of being electorally castrated if some tax rates are currently too low. A good-faith adherence to the American ideal of never raising any tax rate above 50% should keep any politician from being labeled pro-big-government, that cruellest of labels in a right-wing country. Beyond that, let the politician's record speak for itself: is he a responsible steward of tax dollars?

The economy is now poor, as a result of tax cuts targeted towards rich people. But never mind the reason. Because the economy is poor, our man Obama should raise taxes, even on the highest brackets, at his (and our) own peril. It would be wise for him to freeze the tax rate at the top and, as he has promised, cut taxes for the lower and middle classes.

But Senator McCain's tax argument is the height of inanity, Einstein's insanity: cutting taxes for the rich has gotten us into this hole; let's get out of it by . . . cutting taxes for the rich. The political brilliance of it is that he may now claim that every American deserves a tax cut, and he, and not our man Obama, is the one who will deliver it. That is, Senator McCain uses a premise that is literally correct to support a conclusion that ignores the underlying reality.

Sort of like when my man R. claimed he had been a better prognosticator of the Missouri game's final score when he guessed a common-sensical 37-31 UT: at least he had the score half-right.

Oh What A World

2008-10-16T16:53:00.002-05:00

When everything else in life is going well - not, mind you, that it is - but when everything else in life is going well I will worry about the fate of the Universe. I will also worry about aging and death; it seems to be my outlook's lot to hover just above some horrifying inescapability, now managing the resolve to rise above and gather rosebuds, now sinking below into the blackness of the things I cannot change. I am blessed to have an equilibrium sufficiently above despair that I don't do anything stupid.

When I was studying astronomy as an undergraduate Dr. Wills discussed the Big Bang and framed the current, broadly accepted scientific debate as to whether the spreading Universe was sufficiently dense to cave back in on itself or not (in which case it would expand forever).

Now, let's be reasonable: railing against the True State of things (and I do believe there is one, objectively speaking, although I won't get into why, here) is taking windmill-tilting to a ridiculous extreme. Given the chance, I would actually not shatter this state of things entire, nor remold it nearer to my heart's desire, Old Khayyam, because my heart is a fickle little bastard and I would bet on the Universe being a bit more beautiful than anything I, little piece of it, could dream up. Although, yeah, it's tempting sometimes. So whatever is going to happen is fine by me, at least officially.

But I, at 18, pretty quickly hoped for the former, denser alternative: the Big Crunch that would suck all of space and time back in. Whether this would mean a following Big Bang (as I imagined and hoped) or just the end of it all, anything would be better than the slow decay of all energy, momentum, and life, until all is dust, forever floating away towards an expanse exceeded only by what it would be the day after. For the next Big Bang would mean rebirth (excellent) and a sucking in, not to be followed by another Big Bang, would at least leave room for other Big Bangs to come along instead. (For if it happened once it is the height of vanity to suppose it won't happen again.) But the never ending expanse of our pitiful little mass-glob would sweep out all potential space and dash any mortal dream of a happier future. (Is this really right? I have no idea. It's fun to conjecture, but I am an earthworm trying to read Khayyam - what place at the reality table may I claim? I will leave it as it lies.)

Then a couple of years ago I was informed by a posthumous footnote in The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan that in 1998 the Universe was deemed too light to support my bold hope - we would continue to expand forever, wrapping all existence in deadly gray. Shit.

But now Scientific American and Martin Bojowald have come to my rescue: Bojowald claims that space, like matter, is not infinitely divisible but is made of a fabric of tiny - well, maybe particles isn't the best word, but that there's a tiniest size that's appropriate for something to be thought of as a piece of space. Pack too much mass into it (a trillion Suns per proton-size!) and gravity regurgitates it. Pack all the matter of the Universe on the head of a pin and it will explode. There is no case of infinite density, as was previously thought to precede the "first" Big Bang. Redemption!

So I hold out hope for eternal existence. I personally won't be there, for I am alive now, and will die well before the next Big Bojowald Bounce. And call me vain, but once you leave existence, you never come back. . . .

205-228

2008-09-29T14:33:00.003-05:00

What an interesting vote! Economic libertarians voting against government protection of economic libertarianism. (Democrats supported the bill 140-95; Republicans opposed it 65-133.) Call these guys what you will; they are not, for the most part, hypocrites. What I will call one of them, namely Darrell Issa (R-CA), is astonishingly poorly prioritized, because he proclaimed his opposition to the bailout would amount to "a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan's coffin (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/business/30bailout.html)." Aside from this just being a rhetorically weird thing to say, it's not comforting to know that our representatives place some early-eighties economic project ahead of our, umm, economy.

There are lots of reasons to oppose this bailout, the main one being that without it our financial system can finally take its 30-years-of-Reaganomics medicine. The shenaniganical argument that cutting taxes for rich people magically makes everybody money is finally getting its day in court. I hope enough of our representatives voted against the bailout because it's no alternative to smart regulation of the markets and an economy grown by the development and sale of something truly useful, like green technology, as opposed to the bubble train that's kept us afloat this long.

Sorry All Over The Place

2008-09-15T11:33:00.002-05:00

Part 1

David Foster Wallace has killed himself. No other writer I know of linked academic curiosity and soul-searching so well. DFW made it clear that taking apart a concept - even a relatively harmless one like grammar, but including more profound ones like identity, life-purpose, and math - and probing its intellectual depths is not only worthwhile but possible, for laymen. You don't need to be a genius (like DFW) to shove something down your brain's gullet and get it clicking on levels you didn't even previously know were there. In this way his genius mirrors Einstein's: a genius that has that forehead-smacking of course-ness about it. Like the answer was hanging there in front of all of us the whole time. DFW was a map leading to understanding in any pursuit under the Sun, and now that map has been erased.

Part 2

I have just done the hardest thing in the world for me to do, and that's to hurt someone's feelings. I feel ripped apart on so many levels right now, and if I try to heal myself on one it hurts even more on the others. Not even writing about it helps, but thanks for reading.

From Chortles To Guffaws

2008-09-05T16:38:00.003-05:00

It occurs to me that two of my favorite Simpsons quotes are funny for the same reason.

The context of the first one I forget, but Marge pleads with Bart to try to do something, to which he responds "I can't promise I'll try - but I'll try to try."

The second one, I think, is from the episode Bart the Mother. Bart needs to learn how to care for an unborn bird whose mother he killed, so he watches a Troy McClure documentary. When introducing himself, Troy says, "You might remember me from such nature films as Earwigs Eew! and Man Versus Nature: The Road to Victory." It's the latter fictional documentary that applies here.

Both jokes poke fun at bits of indisputable-if-hackneyed wisdom: like Yoda said, do or do not; there is no try. Bart's line flies in the face of every high school football coach's motivational creed, under which trying itself is unacceptable.

Similarly, advocates for holistic medicine, organic groceries, animal cruelty prevention, etc., will insist, correctly, that humans are a part of nature; we cannot do without it and harmony with it is desirable. Troy's documentary is therefore ridiculous.

As someone who tries with very limited success to engender a laugh or two at most any social gathering, I have precious little understanding of what technically makes something funny. But I think I can break down these examples in this way: they imply a person or group of people who completely lack the basic pieces of wisdom that I discussed above. Not that these pearls are indisputable fact, but that anyone contradicting them needs to take care to carefully justify his statement, lest he look oafish, like Bart and Troy.

Has anyone already classified all jokes in such a way? Or, preferably, in a more concise way? Am I re-inventing the wheel and, therefore, to be made the subject of fun?

Schwa?

2008-08-27T10:55:00.004-05:00

Maria Hinojosa used to piss me off. She still does, but she used to, too. (How I miss Mitch!)

But really, though, in the middle there was a time when I thought I saw eye-to-eye with her. My dispute with the excellent host of Latino USA is the way she pronounces her name; she snaps quickly out of her appropriately lazy Anglo voice and into the schwa-less militancy of Spanish vowel sounds. She confuses her first name's R with a D; she drops her last name's H. Then right back into Gringo-ish. The change sounds forced and awkward, like bad radio.

But by some train of thought I realized one day I was being unfair. As great as one day I might become at speaking Spanish, I can't imagine ever pronouncing my name with a long O. (Incidentally, my good friend R. has a short O in his name as well. To further erode his anonymity, let me say that his Philippine in-laws can't pronounce his name. They must get caught up on the spelling; re-spell it with an A, silly as it would look to United-Statesians, and they would get it perfectly.)

But traveling last month, a United-Statesian friend of mine, who speaks excellent Spanish, would introduce himself with an Argentinian accent, including pronouncing the double-R in his own last name with a trill of the tongue. Now, granted, when he gave his last name it was often, for example, to hotel clerks, etc., who needed to write it down on some form or other, so his Spanish pronunciation was likely, in part, to facilitate phonetic spelling. But so then when, in general, is it preferred to slip into a different accent? Another friend, H., goes virtually apoplectic when still another, mutual, friend, J.L., who is United-Statesian but of Hispanic descent, orders "tortillas" schwa-lessly, as though in solidarity with the restaurant waitstaff.

Not knowing another language, I don't think I ever change my accent, either for words that I say or for my audience. Word choice is a different matter. I do notice that my vocabulary gets meaningfully less erudite when I'm asking for directions in a San Antonio gas station, as opposed to explaining how I measure fracture strain to a scientific audience. And not simply because I need to use fancier words; I'm much more likely to, for example, avoid ending my sentences with prepositions in the latter case.

So I tailor my speech for my audience. I think most everyone does. (J.G. tried to explain to me once how her father's accent drastically changed as he drove from, maybe, Essex to Liverpool, but my unfamiliarity with England prohibited the details from cementing into my brain. Same point though.) What one says, and how he says it, communicates not just the content of his words but any number of things about him. What region of the country is he from? Is he educated? Is he a high-falutin' city-boy? Is he, like my traveling companion, considerate of other people's phonetic capabilities?

What does Maria Hinojosa's pronunciation of "Maria Hinojosa" say about herself? I absolutely abhor the thought of judging her. I would rather wince at the beginning of every episode.

Notes On Texas Tea

2008-07-15T14:42:00.002-05:00

It’s my guess that there are a good deal more producable hydrocarbons in the subsurface than most people estimate. 70 percent of sedimentary rocks are shales – a type of fine-grained, low-porosity rock that has been classically viewed as a trap for hydrocarbons. I.e., the oil and gas flows through coarser sandstones and is held in place by overlying shales for people to dig it out from the high-porosity rocks. Now it turns out that shales themselves can house gas by the boatload (e.g. the Barnett Shale in North Texas). New (1990s-era) stimulation techniques have turned 70 percent of the sedimentary rocks out there, previously thought to be barren of useful hydrocarbons, into potential reservoirs. (I exaggerate: nobody is saying all shales will produce like the Barnett. Still, it seems there is lots of carbon left to burn.)

As someone who believes in the link between CO2 emissions and climate change, this is bittersweet news to me. I think we can make natural gas a long-term (five decades, say), affordable energy source. Most Republicans seem to agree, and so: the motion to remove the restrictions on US offshore drilling. I think we’re going to cook ourselves to death. The emissions we’ve belched out since the start of the Industrial Revolution were enough to melt the icecaps, and we have not yet begun to fight. Economic recovery and expansion in India and China, in combination with a fancy new hydrocarbon production technique, will probably mean we’ll emit more CO2 in the future than we have in the past. We may well make the Earth too hot a place to live, and in a hundred years our planet will be as life-sustaining as Venus.

That’s obviously a worst-case scenario, and most experts’ predictions aren’t quite so sour. But even environmental rose-tinters can pick their reason of the day to kick the carbon habit. National security. Economic stability (though like I said above, the key to that, for now, seems to be dig more up). Conventional pollution (air quality, Exxon Valdezes, etc.). Ancillary benefits of technological innovation.

Still, it’s not unreasonable, today, to be environmentally and economically rosy, and lots of people are. Oil leaks into the ocean naturally, from seeps. More CO2 is emitted by volcanoes than vehicles. Ice has been disappearing since the Ice Age. Once oil becomes too expensive we’ll naturally move to an alternative. Let the market work. Et cetera. And perhaps we’re seeing the market work now: SUV sales are down, and hybrid sales up, with gasoline at $4/gallon. But right now, with offshore drilling on the table, Americans have the choice between continuing our progress away from oil and gas, which even geological optimists like me must admit has to continue at some point, or we can open the Pandora’s Box that is offshore drilling, committing substantial infrastructure towards digging up more hydrocarbons that we’re darn-sure gonna burn.

How easy would it be to let the remaining oil and gas lie, and diversify our nation’s energy resources? Writing for Physics Today, Thomas W. Murphy, Jr. estimates it would take solar panels covering an area of the southwest about 160 km by 160 km to entirely cover our nation’s electricity usage. A large area, yes, but: entirely. T. Boone Pickens writes:

The Department of Energy reports that 20% of America's electricity can come from
wind. North Dakota alone has the potential to provide power for more than a
quarter of the country.

which makes no literal sense, but he seems to be saying that wind energy has potential for supplying non-trivial amounts of electricity. Geothermal energy is clean and cost-effective. This blog has argued for expansion of nuclear energy in the past.

There is no rule saying that we can’t both drill offshore and develop these alternative energy sources. For those who say oil use isn’t environmentally pernicious, I can only ask that they meet me at this halfway mark. But if hydrocarbon emissions are influencing the climate, then offshore drilling and any other further serious investment into getting more oil and gas out of the ground are likely to exacerbate the effects intensely especially with increased demand from the East. We need to curb our emissions, quickly.

Our president agrees – in theory. He is, however, “realistic enough to tell you that if China and India don't share that same aspiration, that we're not going to solve the problem.”

If we don’t solve the problem, it will be because the people who had the ability to do something about their oil addiction, and therefore to show budding economies by example how green technology can work, chose not to. Chose not to tackle the problem, others’ reluctance notwithstanding. Chose not to undertake the difficult task in favor of the quick fix. Chose not to – what’s the word? – lead.

Don’t take my word for it:
http://www.bseec.org/
Murphy, Jr., Thomas W. “Home photovoltaic systems for physicists.” Physics Today, July 2008, p. 42-7.
http://www.pickensplan.com/
http://www.ucsusa.org/
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/07/business/AS-G-8-Bush.php

A Good Start

2008-06-24T16:32:00.003-05:00

I'm back in Buenos Aires. I am here to describe fractures in core from the Quintuco Formation (Jurassic-Cretaceous). It's going okay, but this type of thing can be challenging to the point of frustration, especially in vertical core, which is poorly oriented to intersect vertical fractures. Nightly I try to relax and recharge. This morning's alarm helped greatly. I've always thought, and I don't believe I'm alone here, that Grieg's Morning from Peer Gynt is basically the ideal wakeup music, and what do you know? on the classical music station I programmed my hotel's clock radio to wake me up to (at a pleasant, low volume nonetheless) it came on, nearly exactly on time. Best wakeup call ever! I positively floated to the lab.

Rigil Kent Sighting

2008-06-03T11:09:00.003-05:00

I finally made it down to the Southern Hemisphere (Buenos Aires, to be exact) last week. My handy-dandy Peterson Field Guide to Stars and Planets informed me that the Southern Cross would be high in the sky at night. I, of course, would be in downtown Buenos Aires, which is not the fertilest ground for stargazing, if not for light pollution then for the close spacing of tallish buildings near my hotel. Nevertheless I thought I'd go out front Thursday night and take a peek.

So as not to appear like a moron looking for stars in downtown Buenos Aires, and so to keep my hands warm and in my pocket while looking up into the wintry darkness, I left my Peterson Guide in the hotel room. Before heading out I stared hard at some pictures of the Cross, and nearby Alpha and Beta Centauri, in hopes that I would be able to recognize them. Sure enough, in a little, say, twenty-arc-degree swath of that greenish city night sky exposed on the street (Roque Saenz Pena Avenue) in front of my hotel, there they were, perfectly framed, unmistakable.

On the flight back I was afforded another view of them, but I had to twist my neck around really awkwardly to obscure both the reflections from cabin lights on the window and an annoyingly bright wing-tip bulb. I could still see the Milky Way, and get an only slightly muted version of the tingly awesomeness that always accompanies it.

Guinness: Beautiful Dreamer

2008-05-05T00:07:00.003-05:00

In Chapter 163 of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, author Mark Haddon’s hero Christopher makes an intriguing, if not quite compelling, argument against the homunculus. Christopher claims that because the eyes aren’t literally windows that let light directly into the brain but sensors whose signal to the brain is actually shut off while the eyes are flicking back and forth, there is no little man inside our heads representing our “selves.” In the short chapter Christopher compares and contrasts human brains, animal brains, and computers. Like in a previous post, A’s dog, Guinness, has something to say (through me) on the matter.

I previously argued that the emotions that humans associate with dominance and submission (or at least that I and most males associate with dominance and submission), namely and respectively, pride and shame, need to be applied with care toward dogs. Let’s say I dominate another male in our society (first time for everything) by means of throwing down a tomahawk dunk over him in a pickup game at the park. The aftermath would be flooded with emotions for both of us: I strut back down the court with Kate Moss confidence; he is devastated and is never seen at the park again. It’s my experience, watching dogs play together, that dogs recover from such encounters more easily. A few seconds later both dogs will likely not be playing together, but will seem to have gotten over it. The alpha dog is not particularly strutty and jocular, nor is the beta dog tender and irritable. Christopher’s argument explains why: “people are different from animals because they [people] can have pictures on the screen in their heads of things which they are not looking at.” Humans are much slower to come back to “neutral” after being either dominated or submitted to because we can a) keep the image of what happened in our minds, b) imagine alternatives to what really happened, and c) imagine what others think of what happened. The dominator focuses on (a), the submitter on (b), and (c) perpetuates and intensifies the emotions associated with each. The dog can do none, so he quickly forgets the encounter. Certainly he stores it deep in his memory, and these memories will build over time and reinforce one another such that the dog will become, in general, dominant or submissive. But because dogs can’t imagine things in their heads that aren’t actually happening, any emotion that the dog feels during the encounter virtually disappears after the encounter is finished.

But can dogs imagine things that don’t really happen? Guinness can. It was obvious to me, playing fetch this afternoon. She races after the tumbling tennis ball like it’s an injured baby bat that’s even more terrified than usual. Her intensity demonstrates her primal lust for the prize. Tears is the best word I can think of for what she does across the yard; she wants the ball. Bad. But aside from the time she poked her eye on a branch – and that was at dusk, with A throwing the ball for her – she has shown a remarkable ability to avoid obstacles, even letting the baby bat flutter away to do so. Guinness shows me she is capable of imagining the skull-crushing that the tree or side of the shed will deliver if she doesn’t desist, and it’s this imagined event that affects her behavior. It could just as easily be the case that she can imagine a world wherein I’m not yelling at her after she eats off my plate, and can therefore feel a pang of regret that she did. It seems, therefore, that I need to moderate my argument against dog emotion, and admit that they probably feel a muted, ephemeral pride or shame at times. I hereby do. But what does Guinness’s imagination imply for the homunculus?

Christopher says that the brain is just a fancy computer, and that humans are dissatisfied with this opinion because it means they’re not special; that they’re just fleshy robots. I agree that people don’t want to think this, if for no other reason than it suggests we have no soul and will fade into nothingness at death. I also begrudgingly agree that because an argument’s conclusions make one uncomfortable, one shouldn’t use that as reason to disagree with it. But there is also a temptation to agree with such an argument out of self-consciousness, as opposed to its firm logic, especially if the listener has an inflated affection for “common sense.” I believe this to be a reason why most people who buy Christopher’s argument do so, but it’s hard to explain why.

Here’s why I don’t buy it (beyond a superficial level). I think humans are different from computers in a fundamental way that is unknown but completely compatible with the laws of physics (although possibly with a branch of physics we humans haven’t approached yet). Furthermore, I think that dogs can be considered to sit somewhere on the spectrum between human and computer in terms of their capability to learn and understand. But because dogs seem to have a rudimentary point of view, which for argument’s sake I’ll call a homunculus-illusion, I’d say they sit much closer to the human-end of that spectrum. To this point, I don’t think Christopher would disagree. But Christopher’s argument against the homunculus is a straw man. He suggests that the homunculus is a physical little noggin-dweller, a la Herman’s Head, who looks out the eye-windows and into the world. Because technology has proven that the eyes aren’t windows, it follows that there’s no homunculus; a being inside the head is an illusion experienced by a robot. But the point that Christopher misses is that the illusion is the homunculus, and is real. It’s not some physical manifestation inside the skull, detectable by an MRI, but it exists with all the reality of a color contrast or an ironic twist. It’s a perception, and humans have them, computers don’t, and dogs do, sort of.

What I think has been the grand disconnect between monists, naturalists, atheists, and their ilk on one side, versus dualists, true believers, and holy rollers on the other, is the neglect of the collective properties of natural systems when considering reality. One side insists we’re all just piles of little inert balls, and the other side is incensed at the idea. This other side keeps insisting that there’s an aspect to reality that is undetectable by man. In a sense, they’re both right. Naturalists are correct that everything in the universe can probably be physically accounted for, and any phenomenon can probably be explained to any given level of satisfaction if studied scientifically for long enough. Holy rollers are right that there is something more to this grand system (the Universe) than any subsystem within it can figure out. We get in trouble when naturalists neglect the importance of extra-material factors like perceptions and feedback that guide material happenings in unrealized (and probably unrealizable) ways. Likewise, it is unfortunate that holy rollers attach their ideas of beauty and goodness to ephemeral ideals, destined for antiquity (like Zeus’s lightning). I consider my opinion to be that of the collectivist, and it is reductionism, in both “camps” I have alluded to, that is the source of confusion.

What does it mean to be a human? That is, to be a robot with a homunculus-illusion? I think it’s like being the roiling surface of a pot of water on the stove. It’s all just particles moving back and forth, trying to find a spot where they’re more comfortable, not aware that they’re organized into a dance that is hypnotizing to beings of higher awareness. It’s a dance that is completely invisible to reductionist description, but plainly obvious to any robot with the meagerest of homunculus-illusions. Dogs, I think, just have the stove turned on a little lower, while computers haven’t found the gas yet. Once they do, I’m sure they will rise up to destroy us, but then maybe we’ll all be reincarnated as robots.

But so now that I have efficiently torn asunder an argument propounded by a kid with Asperger’s, good night!

Metasketball

2008-04-28T19:49:00.004-05:00

In kung fu class we students routinely spar against one another, meaning we fight without making (much) contact. The object is to practice fighting your opponent without really hurting him (or vice-versa).

How much this helps the student become a better fighter is a topic of interest to me. Certainly a drawback to the technique's effectiveness is the lack of fear, rage, and any other adrenaline-involving response that a real fight would certainly involve. But this lack of adrenaline might have a benefit: the sparrer can think more rationally about what moves he should be employing. There can also be trial-and-error in sparring, whereas I can't imagine getting swept to the floor by a genuine assailant and then telling him ooo - try that again but this time let me double-crescent-kick your face.

So while sparring is not perfect practice for fighting, it, with all its optional little rules you can impose, like kicks only, half-speed, and using a form, is probably the best option aside from real fighting, which is expressly not cool. What's more, it has advantages that real fighting lacks. I can envision a version of basketball that has parallel advantages over the real basketball.

I am almost certainly re-inventing the wheel, as I'm sure numerous coaches have already tried this. But I haven't been formally trained in the sport, and basketball coaches don't appear to be avid bloggers, so I will continue my thoughts.

In metasketball, the court is the normal size and the ball and rules are the same, except that there are no baskets. Players dribble and pass, trying to get open shots just like in basketball, but of course there never are shots taken. The idea is that since no shot has a 100% chance of success, there is always theoretically a better shot that could be taken. It is the player's job is to find the best assist possible.

Of course a fast-break layup is, in practice, probably the highest percentage shot there is, and the basketball player who looks to pass instead of take such a shot is a poor basketball player. But the equivalent happening in sparring is an open shot to the opponent's head, which of course the sparrer must never land. Nonetheless, both experienced sparrers will concede that, had this been a real basketball game, the puncher would have been ejected. So will metasketball players concede that the goal would have been scored.

The metasketball player has the advantage of a mind free from scoring baskets, outscoring the other team, and beating any kind of a clock (unless coach imposes one). I think it would be invaluable basketball practice. Whether a shot actually goes down is of course all that matters in basketball, but it's a matter of individual player accuracy, and is essentially a dice roll once the ball leaves the shooter's hand. At any given non-critical point of a game the coach will favor a well-executed miss over an off-balance prayer that goes in.

The idea translates to other sports and games, but if I described them all I would deny my beloved 'dloggers the thrill of discovery. So onward, dear reader! And upward!

Why I'm Reppin' The 'Bahmer

2008-04-02T14:21:00.003-05:00

It's funny how you need to spell words more phonetically when you abbreviate. This post is a.k.a. Why I Am Representing Barack Obama and Why I Support Barack Obama's Bid For President.

The wonderful news is that the president who takes office in January will be much, much better than the one we have now. Of course the chance that it will be John McCain, Hillary Clinton, or Obama is astronomical. Any of the three will be a breath of fresh air. Even McCain, ostensibly the most Bush-like, at least opposes torture, about the softest-ball issue that a U.S. president should ever have to take a side on.

And for brevity's sake let me just say that I think it is pretty much 100% okay to vote straight ticket (either for the Democrats or Republicans) in this country. I think there is enough difference in the parties' platforms on meaningful issues - health care, war, and the environment, to name a few - that the voter need not go to intangibles like character, or worse - charisma, which if anyone ever confessed to voting for someone based on such an attribute, he should turn in his grown-up card immediately.

So my preference for either Clinton or Obama over McCain can be said, in short, to spring from my preference for the Democratic Party's platform over the Republican Party's. But which Democratic candidate to choose?

Using the same reasoning, let me say that I'm an issues guy, and you should be, too. Or an issues girl. When voting for president one selects the person better/best fit to head the executive branch of the federal government. I keep that in mind, to such an extent that Bob Dole's wondering aloud in 1996 whether most Americans would rather have him or Bill Clinton watch their kids held little sway in my decision tree (which by then was admittedly pretty much branchless - see above). I'll worry about my kids (which by now admittedly don't exist); you worry about the war.

So which candidate has, in my opinion, a better stance on the issues? Probably Clinton, by a hair, if only because she has a more robust health care plan. They are pretty indistinguishable otherwise, to me. So why, if I may get back to the point, am I reppin' the Bahmer? This is admittedly where the issues-character thing gets clouded - plus you have to consider strategy, that 800 pound gorilla.

I'm a bald-faced liar - if I really were an issues guy, I'd do like I did in 2000 and vote for Nader. Take health care: McCain of course will not meaningfully change the system we have. Obama will try some modest changes that insurance companies will be okay with, which, mark my words, will be next to nothing. Hillary will make everyone buy health care, which is an awkward step toward what needs to happen, which is Ralph Nader's plan (I don't think he came up with it, but you get my drift): national health care. In such a system, if one is a) a U.S. citizen, and b) sick, one c) goes to the doctor and d) gets better. It will mean a bit more in taxes, but the reduction in health care costs will more than take care of it. Google that shit. We spend more - lots more - on health care than do countries with nationalized health care, and we get less for it. This is because private insurers spend gobs of cash on adjuster-like people who go around finding reasons not to pay for certain people's claims. These people then get nothing for what they spent their health care money on and instead have to go to the ER, for which costs they are still held responsible. A serious waste.

But I won't vote for Nader this November. His argument compels: the Democrats and Republicans are one-and-the-same, so would-be Democratic voters who instead vote for Nader needn't worry that they're giving the election to the more unified right-wing Republican voters. Democrats are just as bad. Look at the records of JFK, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton: they could drop bombs with the best Republicans.

But there can be a difference between the parties, if one of the candidates were to faithfully uphold the party platform. Even though this platform is much weaker than Nader's, the added bonus of really getting a mediocre candidate elected would far outweigh the glory of going down in electoral flames with a great candidate. A real baby step is better than a fantasy giant leap for mankind.

So Hillary's stance on the issues is 5% better than Obama's. They both fall painfully short of Nader's. The only reason I should support a Democrat is if I believe they will do what they're supposed to do and make that 5% of the progress away from the barbarism of 21st century America.

I think Obama might do that. Perhaps this is naive - he's certainly had to take some less-than-sparkling money. He has had to do all those things one must do to rise up in the monolithic institution that is the Democratic Party - from being charismatic to playing by a set of rules, written and un-, that sucks the very spine out of the politician, and gives that word its connotation. A. and I spent last Saturday being Obama delegates at the Travis County Democratic Convention, and the delegation process is both boring and subtly confusing - it commonly elicits the why not just count the dang votes? reaction. Its contrast with straightforward democracy is striking. It is institutionalized strategy; it rewards a hearty mixture of cold calculation and zealous ambition. It is soulless - heartfelt speeches (including one by Lloyd Doggett, for whose presidential election I would eat something disgusting) notwithstanding.

But Obama voted against the Iraq invasion. He showed just enough guts to prove to me that he will follow his heart at the possible expense of political popularity. Clinton has not ever really done that for me. She ducks issues; she equivocates now for flexibility later. And we don't need flexible Democrats; we need ones with spine.

Laduzi Carpets

2008-03-07T13:27:00.014-06:00

My recent Asia trip was very fun. I got a little sick, and my weakness compelled me to let the Asians write some of this short summary for me.

I disagreed with C. D. over whether Chaco brand sandals were a consumer monopoly or a fad. He thinks they're simply the next Tevas. I should probably defer to his judgment.

Philippine Airlines is the only carrier, to my knowledge, that gives the faintest hint of a damn whether my window shade is open.

The subject of conversation was evolution. Those present were: me, R., his mother, and his wonderful new wife, V. V., who is Filipino, asked with a straight face why Asians have squinty eyes. Tact prevented me from telling (or showing) that joke, but not from giggling spastically.

I'm such a "have."

A goocher: the morning of 16 February 2008, my mental chain of thought-associations led me to recall my final performance in my college Beginning Piano class. I had told my teacher I would try to play "Memory" from Cats, even though several easier pieces were equally acceptable. She was excited. Alas, I found it too hard and played "Careless Love" instead. Anyway, later that day, between touring the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall, my tourist group visited the Long Di jade factory, where they played a muzak rendition of "Memory." When the dawn breaks, tonight will be a memory, too.

C. R. and M. had advised me some weeks before I left on this trip to begin a probiotics regimen. I should have heeded their advice, as I now know well the meaning of laduzi. The design on my hotel room carpet so resembles a Gary Larson unicellular parasite that it's threatening to make me even sicker.

I was under the impression that as little as, like, twenty years ago, the bicycle was the preferred way of getting around Beijing. If this is the case, there must have been some heartbreaking property seizures since, because the city streets are plentiful and wide.

Between 1996 and 1999, the one-yuan note changed in design from one featuring two women who look like empresses of some kind to one featuring the same portrait of Chairman Mao that is on the 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100-notes. I don't know when the larger bills adopted the portrait; regardless, weird timing.

Correction

2008-02-25T10:47:00.003-06:00

Mark Clayton played for OU; Michael played for LSU. Relation? Dunno. But that bumps Michael Clayton up a notch, then. I'm still glad the Coen brothers got their due (or a bit more - give P. T. Anderson the Director award, huh?).

A Rare Opportunity

2008-02-24T15:47:00.004-06:00

For maybe the second time ever I have seen all five movies that have been nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award. These are No Country For Old Men, Michael Clayton, Juno, Atonement, and There Will Be Blood. So, because you asked (yes, navigating to turdlog.blogspot.com, intentionally or otherwise, constitutes asking), here's what I think.

I hope either No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood wins. Partially because either would be a well-deserved lifetime-achievement-like award for the Coen brothers or P. T. Anderson. I also think they were the best two movies of the bunch, and I can't really pick my favorite between them.

Michael Clayton and Atonement were both very good, although I typically don't care for movies named after Oklahoma U. football players (so help me God, if I have to hear "touchdown, Jimmy Atonement!" again I'll . . .).

Juno was a solid movie, but easily the worst of the five. The complaint that the lead actress's dialogue is too clever for a teenager has been well-registered, but for good reason. It really makes the whole thing unbelievable. A good movie, but up against those four its victory would be a mini-travesty.

I'm not a betting man, at least for enough money that I'd miss a month later, but I'd bet NCFOM's gloomy surrealism takes it. But I'll be happy for any of the four. Ever since The Aviator lost to - what? Mystic River? - I've not considered the Oscars worth my brain activity, much less a turdpost, but a non-Juno selection tonight will go a long way toward setting things aright.

Add This To The Pile

2008-01-25T12:06:00.000-06:00

What are the effects of taxes on the economy? Prevailing neo-fascist thinking emphasizes the negative, and of course, to some extent, this line of thinking is correct. Taxes reduce gains and therefore discourage investment and spending, which are two of the biggest economy-boosters around. The laugher - ahem, Laffer curve clearly shows that taxing 100% of something's profit completely removes the incentive to undertake that something. (That tautology, by the bye, represents the sum total of the wisdom of that curve.)

Where the taxes go is so often left out of the debate that if "the economy" were "the temperature inside a rustic cottage" and "taxing and spending" were "collecting logs and burning them in the fireplace," the debate would center around the extent to which taxation was depleting our firewood supply (ignoring all the heat the "spending" produced).

The neo-fascist counters that the free market generates more heat than the government can. This is debatable, and like most real-life debatable things, is true some of the time and untrue at other times. Nevertheless, spending does heat up the economy to some extent, and it is unfair to examine taxes, as the Laffer curve does, as though the money simply evaporates.

What's more, if tax dollars go toward strengthening our country's safety net, i.e. the social programs that help the (temporarily and chronically) poor, then investment and spending are encouraged. This happens because the investor/spender is confident that if he loses in his investment or if he overspends, he doesn't end up on the street, penniless.

This is as much of an oversimplification as the Laffer curve. What's the best way to strengthen the safety net? is just as complex a question as What's the best way to collect taxes? Is the safety net best strengthened by fighting wars? Guaranteeing health care? Supplementing income? All good questions. But by only analyzing the negative effects of taxation, we miss half the point.

The neo-fascist emphasizes the need to cut taxes to increase revenue, but I think it's difficult to argue that we're on the right side of the Laffer curve right now. No, most tax-cutting advocates in the 2000s are those so rich that the safety net is of little concern to them, or are those who, on the advice of the super-rich, only look at half the story.

So add that to the pile of arguments that centrist politicians need to use to fight the Reagan-Bush-Bush machine that delivered us from the frying pan of '70s stagflation and into the fire of today.

Solipsism

2008-01-18T17:39:00.000-06:00

Stuart Scott said that some layup or other was "cool like the other side of the pillow." Everybody seems to say that about something now, but his usage was the first time I'd known for sure that a single other person knew the pleasure of turning over the pillow in the middle of the night. For all I knew, as a nine year old, it was my little secret.

The Sserpent Iss Crawling Insside Of Your Ear

2008-01-10T15:36:00.000-06:00

I have never heard a good reason why Social Security is a special part of the US federal budget. I realize this is the hot-button issue of, like, three years ago, but I don’t think anything substantial has been done about it. (This absence of progress, by itself, is indicative of the pretty-much-inarguable fact that politicians use issues, truly important or not, for political purposes, i.e. to scare up votes, and that, important or not, any issue will get lots less attention if there is no political leverage to be attained by attending it. But everybody knows that, so I will spend precisely zero more time dwelling on that, at least in this post.)

SS is funded by a payroll tax, whereby I think 6.2% of a worker’s pay is deducted from the first roughly $100,000 of his yearly paycheck. This is matched by the employer; the self-employed have to pay 12.4%. Incidentally, Medicare works roughly the same way, and everything I’m going to argue for in this post is pretty much applicable to Medicare as well, except that there’s no upper-income limit to Medicare deductions.

In the 2004 presidential elections, the upcoming bankruptcy of SS was all the rage. Right now, the funds paid into SS by today’s workers are being taken out to pay today’s retirees. There’s some money in reserve, I think, and that’s what Al Gore’s circa-2000 lock box was supposed to hold. Either way, the funds are currently expected to be depleted in 2017, or 2042, or some time, probably within my lifetime. In 2004, President Bush’s solution was to invest what would have been normal SS funds in the private market as a means of getting more bang for the buck and, hopefully, getting more trickle out of the economy. This would have effectively ended the way the system is currently run, because Bush’s plan would have made it so that today’s worker is putting money into his own retirement account (not paying today’s retirees, although they would doubtlessly have been grandfathered). The Democratic solution was basically some kind of “mend it, don’t end it” un-sexy plan.

So what I mean when I say SS is a special part of our budget is that it’s its own separate fund, fed by its own special tax, spent in its own special way. It would seem that if it runs out of money, then indeed, later retirees would have no SS to rely on. My question is: since when does the government need to have the money it’s spending? The government is supposed to consistently run a manageable debt, which it does, although where it becomes unmanageable is up to debate, and there are a lot of respectable arguments out there that conclude that we passed that Rubicon several trillion dollars ago. But regardless, why not make SS just another budget item, like the Department of Defense or Health and Human Services? Then the fear of SS going broke at least gets lumped in with the fear of the US national debt skyrocketing out of control. We’ll call it “fear consolidation.”

There are other advantages. You get rid of the silly, regressive SS payroll tax (the progressive federal income tax, or estate tax or whatever, would of course be increased to make up the difference). You simplify the tax system, which is a popular, bipartisan goal. And a likely effect is that you change SS into run-of-the-mill welfare, which I think would be a good idea.

Today’s retiree accepts his SS check gladly, as well he should – he has earned it. However, the SS of tomorrow would be largely funded not so much by other middle class wage earners, but, proportionally, by the rich, like any old unemployment welfare is. Therefore, SS becomes state-mandated income redistribution. We could make it so that US citizens and permanent residents over age 65 (or, let’s face it, bumping that up to 70 would solve lots of problems) are automatically eligible for welfare. They have to apply for it, but a non-forged birth certificate from more than 70 years ago means they’re in. I believe that the result would be that people who have planned adequately for retirement (and most lifelong wage-earners these days have) will forgo the new SS out of pride. Not that there’s any shame in an old person getting some help from red-blooded Americans – we’re rich enough so that they don’t need to die in the gutter – but I think there’s a substantial portion of the population that is OK accepting a check they believe they’ve paid for all their life, but not one someone else is paying for.

Combining SS with the rest of the federal budget is the way to save it, or at least make it as safe as anything the government promises you.

My Life Is A Mentos Ad

2007-12-07T10:55:00.000-06:00

Or at least this morning's part of it was. Let me explain.

The Turdlog reader will recall the ads. I think one went roughly this way: a man in a business suit, looking like he's about to go to a big-time important function, sits on a white bench just before the painter puts up the WET PAINT sign. Oops! Suit's ruined; painter gives a goofy, not-very-sympathetic shrug.

Man pops a Mento. It doesn't matter what comes, fresh goes better in life . . .

Man rolls around on the wet paint. With Mentos fresh and full of life.

Painter looks astonished. Nothin' gets to you, stayin' fresh, stayin' cool . . .

Man has a white suit. With Mentos fresh and full of life!

Well, all I needed this morning were some Mentos. I had long put off taking my bike on the bus, as those racks in the front look complicated. I'm the type of guy who is mortified at the thought of holding everyone up while my dumb ass fumbles with a device any bus rider should be able to use. But I have watched enough people use it recently, now that Zoltan the Star-Car is kaput and I have been riding the bus to work, that my confidence was sufficient to try it. My heart pounded, nevertheless, as the bus neared. But it arrived, and the bike rack was already full! (Meaning, by the bye, that it already had two bikes in it. Awful.) The other guy who had been waiting at my stop gave me a glance and got aboard. Neither bike rider got off. I pointed at my bike and looked at the driver, wondering if perhaps I would be permitted to take it on with me since the rack was full. The driver just gave me a - you guessed it - not-very-sympathetic shrug.

I pedaled as fast as I could, going north on Burnet Road. It doesn't matter what comes, fresh goes better in life . . .

The bus passes me. Not wanting to be killed, I had to get off the street and go through parking lots (there are few good sidewalks along Burnet). With Mentos fresh and full of life.

A couple of stops ahead, I catch up. Still two bikes. I imagine everyone on the bus is looking at me with mild amusement and anticipation. Nothin' gets to you, stayin' fresh, stayin' cool . . .

I duck underneath a low sign and speed around a high parking lot-dividing curb to make it to the next stop, where a biker gets off. With Mentos fresh and full of life!

Next thing you know, I mount my bike flawlessly and am off to work. Fresh goes better, Mentos freshness, fresh goes better with Mentos . . .

Now, I'm sure I'm not the first person to catch up with a bus in this way. But it being my first time to take my bike along, I thought I did pretty well. Today, December 7th, 2007, I am indeed fresh and full of life!

Thanksgiving Eve

2007-11-21T11:07:00.000-06:00

I dare say my most fascist opinion is this: today, the Wednesday immediately before Thanksgiving, should be a workday. In college, my fellow students would consider it a travesty should a professor hold an exam on this day, as it would prohibit them from leaving for the extended weekend a day early. My blood boils at this complaint; can't we simply be thankful for the long weekend itself? Or are we like the roadside beggar, indignant with fifty cents when we could have been given a dollar?

We Americans are a hard-working (or at least long-working) bunch; one could easily argue that we need a few more paid holidays per year. Let's have that debate, by all means. But given the god-awful "shopping holiday" after Thanksgiving (on which everyone should instead observe Buy Nothing Day), this break is long enough. Another personal floating long weekend, where the vacationer doesn't have to fight airport crowds, would be great. In the meantime, get to work!

Upwards, Not Forwards

2007-11-12T14:16:00.000-06:00

One thing that confounds me, when I think about it, is why US politics is dominated by two parties. It’s pretty obvious to me that there are more than two kinds of Americans, even when you take out non-voters. So why is that sacred choice of those who would govern (i.e., tell us freedom-lovers what to do, even sometimes) limited, for all practical purposes, to two alternatives? There is, of course, no law that says it must be so. I think, though, that once you get such a system started, it is pretty easy to explain how it can be perpetuated.

I don’t know enough about US history to explain why the framers split themselves into two camps (Federalists and Antifederalists), but from what I do remember, these two parties represented the two primary schools of thought on the degree to which the USA would be run by a central government, and that although the result was a compromise (including the bicameral legislature, etc.) the Federalists broadly won out. The details are unimportant; the point is that there were TWO groups then and the number of viable parties has not changed since. What I believe has happened since is that alternatives have been systematically marginalized by a “throw your vote away” mentality, and that single-party dominance has been rendered impossible by reliance on wedge issues to stimulate voters. I call an issue a wedge issue if it is divisive by two, that is, it is something that is easy to be for or against. The proposed size and power of the federal government may indeed have been the first wedge issue. Importantly, though, it is a common attribute of modern wedge issues to be of little real importance to the citizenry as a whole.

Why not three parties? Or four or five? Because once two parties crystallize themselves in our political structure by 1) appealing, collectively, to the vast majority of voters, and 2) distinguishing themselves from one another by the use of wedge issues, any third party’s attempt at winning a major election will be thwarted by the resulting voters’ decision tree. The voter tells himself, in brief: wow – third party C much more closely represents my views on how to govern a country than mainstream parties A and B. However, by 1 above, I’m generally OK with party A, and by 2 above, I am wedged into a horror of seeing my country run by party B. My vote for party C increases the chance of success for party B, and, by 1 above, will not actually put party C into power (A and B being too popular), so I will vote for party A so that I will not have thrown my vote away. Ralph Nader’s blues.

Why not one party? Because Americans aren’t monolithic enough to tolerate it. If a given party won 85% of the electoral vote, the 15% party would seize on the victors’ worst failure and become virulently anti-that. Of course, in reality, it never gets as far as 85%, and the wedge issue doesn’t, in reality, have to be a failure of the winning side. It simply needs to be something that will both get voters to the polls, and will make the opposing party uncomfortable to support.

I will now list some modern wedge issues that are unimportant to the well being of most Americans, at least when compared to some more nuanced issues: gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action, teaching evolution, personal faith (of the office-seeker), and school vouchers. The voter whose primary (or secondary, or even up to quaternary) motivation for selecting a candidate is his stance on one of these issues helps more than any other type of voter to perpetuate the two-party system. This voter also spends lots of his time worrying about an issue that has little to do with his own success in life (future blog post: That Guy: Don Quixote or Dumb Loudmouth?).

There are numerous issues that are truly nuanced but that the two mainstream parties have so oversimplified as to make them seem like wedge issues: immigration, gun control, welfare, even taxes. No one in his right mind thinks there is a simple solution to any of these issues, and yet the public seems to become a herd of sheep, bleating some canned response any time one of them is brought up. A friend of mine called a simple for-or-against standpoint on one of these issues a false dichotomy – an incorrect conclusion that these are issues to be simply either supported or opposed, and that there are two types of people in the world, separable by their support or opposition to this issue.

Imagine a candidate who is against gay marriage, abortion, affirmative action, and teaching evolution; who is for student vouchers (and closing down failing schools) and unabashedly Baptist. The reader has probably already decided whether he would support such a candidate.

But now suppose that the candidate, when asked what he would do about immigration, said, “it’s unfortunate that we can’t let in everyone who would come; I would make modest changes to increase border security, as well as streamline the immigration process for those who wish to attain citizenship.” On gun control: “our constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, and I wish to respect both the letter and spirit of that line; however, as we cannot allow any citizen who simply wants to own a nuclear warhead to do so, we must draw the line somewhere, and I will try to draw that line in a reasonable place.” On welfare: “it is the government’s responsibility to care for those who have fallen on hard times while minimizing abuse.” And on taxes: “the US must maintain our public defense and social services as well as our fiscal responsibility.” Throw in some foreign policy/diplomacy experience, some qualified judicial/Federal Reserve nominations, and just a hint of a the ability to look up at the ceiling at night wondering whether he himself is totally full of shit, and I’m on board! Suddenly my kid having to sit through a “maybe there’s a God” class doesn’t seem so horrible.

But I’d have to think about it. (Another layer of complexity is how much federal money is going to go into this God class, because then it becomes part of the budget, which is a serious issue.) All fine; the point is that this guy doesn’t exist as a successful politician because it’s too easy to take him down by wedging voters out of his camp. So Americans can’t get a diverse array of choices. They can get a guy who has serious command of the issues, but he has to be a firebrand about some meaningless shit, one way or another, or else he’ll be taken down by the opposition.

One interesting thing is the way our ideals have aligned themselves – how they’ve been wedged together. When one takes a step back, one realizes it didn’t need to be that way. Are not the gun-nut and the Christian strange bedfellows? The pot-smoker and the car-maker? These groups vote similarly because of the vagaries of historical wedging. In the US, cultural and economic authoritarians (your traditional Christian) have found they haven’t enough numbers to get a candidate elected president, so they (probably wisely) let culture trump economics and vote Republican. A classic wedge-job in our two-party system. But what if they had been wedged into the Democratic Party? This joining of forces between the working poor and the Christians may have been enough to force scientists and pot-smokers to start voting with the rich Wall Street types, giving us a choice between Libertarians and Nazis instead of Rs and Ds.

But I’ve spun my wheels enough. What we need are some new thinkers, some new ideas. Something to break us out of the same-old same-old and into a new era of informed debate, reasoned alternatives, mutual understanding. Maybe soon the Moon will enter the seventh house. . . .

The Nuclear Option

2007-10-04T10:33:00.000-05:00

From The New York Times:

"The North Korea agreement, announced in Beijing on Wednesday, sets out the first specific timetable for the North to disclose all its nuclear programs and disable all facilities in return for 950,000 metric tons of fuel oil or its equivalent in economic aid. "

To me, this is a real mixed bag. Kudos to President Bush and the six-nation pact that got North Korea to stop building nukes without killing anyone. But this is a step backward in humanity's energy-source evolution. If anything, we need more nuclear power.

Climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions is doubted by a segment of scientists that can be characterized as a "fringe" with ever-increasing accuracy. But give the fringe-devil its due. Even if emissions aren't changing the climate, we still need to kick our "addiction to oil" or it will be kicked for us when the supply effectively runs out. It's arguable how traumatic an experience that will be, but the more we move to alternative fuels, the less traumatic it will be.

What alternative fuels? To be brief, all of them. Diversity of energy sources has to be the name of the game in the future (it's exactly what the game isn't right now), and nuclear has to be a part of that diversity. It's the only source, I think, that could pretty much supplant oil right now, using existing technologies. Hell, using technologies that existed before I was born. But in thirty years nuclear power has become much safer, for man and his environment, than it was. We needn't fear Mr. Burns. There are still issues of what to do with the waste. But, from the Nuclear Energy Institute:

"Over the past four decades, the entire industry has produced about 56,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. If used fuel assemblies were stacked end-to-end and side-by-side, this would cover a football field about six yards deep." Italics mine.

Think about how close to nothing that is. About 5% of the mass of oil needed to get the North Koreans to give up nuclear power. And once we get annular fusion going, nuclear haters won't have a leg to stand on.

What It DEW?

2007-08-30T16:28:00.000-05:00

Slow traffic is bad in every possible way. It wastes time and gas. It spews harmful emissions. It hinders emergency vehicles. It sucks.

What should be done about it? Pretty much everything that can be done, from the vapid (building more lanes) to the lucent (see below). Guess which route my moronic state favors.

Building more lanes will help, but it requires seizing land and destroying vegetation. As well, it does nothing to reduce the number of cars on the road, so, beyond slightly boosting commuters' fuel efficiency, this solution isn't "green." In Austin, we have much more highway than we need for about 18 hours per day. (Middle lanes of varying-flow-direction-by-time-of-day strike me as profoundly more useful than empty spaces between medians.)

Mass transit will help. It should be pursued with utmost fervor. However, it costs money and angers morons.

Staggering work hours, telecommuting, and any other clever workplace arrangements that can be made to alleviate traffic are applaudable. Our government should provide tax incentives to businesses to encourage them. I'd also love to see a break for those of us who live within ten miles of the workplace.

These solutions are all evident to even the dullest of road users. Their underuse is our shame. But these solutions are but David Spades compared to the Will Ferrell of Driver-Engendered Wavebreaking (DEW). DEW is a completely accessible driving technique that can potentially alleviate highway rush-hour traffic without removing any cars from the road. How much alleviation is uncertain, and it doubtlessly increases with the portion of drivers who perform DEW, but I estimate that its widespread use could keep the thickest of highway rush-hour traffic rolling along at 30 miles per hour.

Brakelights propagate in backwards-moving waves along crowded highways. This is because of the rule that rush-hour drivers follow: go as fast as you can without hitting the person in front of you. This means that when the person in front of you (who isn't going as fast as you'd like) brakes, you then have to brake, too. Of course, the only reason the person in front is braking, as though his already-snail's pace was too fast, is that the person in front of him braked. And of course, your braking makes the person behind you brake, and so on. The result is the familiar stop-and-go motion of the urban highway at rush hour.

It is reasonable to ask why, and where, the wave starts. The frustrated commuter imagines some lollygagger about five miles up, trundling along, oblivious to the anguish and environmental damage he's causing behind him, possibly saying hello to his equally-idle friend in the neighboring lane, which explains why that lane isn't going anywhere either. This is silly - we often get near the edge of town, and traffic starts picking up speed, without any apparent obstruction. The true reason for the wave is that, like a drop in a pond, all it takes is a tiny tap of the brakes to send a ripple propagating for miles. There are any number of reasons to tap the brakes - rounding a sharp turn, entering a Pittsburgh tunnel (A.K. once told me), passing an accident scene (whose brake waves are often misinterpreted as the result of rubbernecking), or, importantly, letting onto the freeway entering traffic. I interpret the particularly slow Austin traffic in areas with closely spaced on-ramps as waves originating from this last kind of brake tap. Another way of putting that is that too many cars are trying to get onto the freeway at once, and excessive slowing down to accommodate them turns into complete stopping because of the backward-propagating waves.

DEW is accomplished by supplanting the one primary rush-hour driving rule with another: leave adequate space for a vehicle to pull between you and the next vehicle up, at all times. Doing this accomplishes two things: it gives merging traffic more spaces to smoothly enter the freeway, and it helps the driver to break backwards-propagating brake waves (you will have to brake later, or perhaps not at all, with extra spacing between you and the next car up). DEW has the added benefit of safety, but the dangers of rear-ending someone at rush-hour speeds are minimal.

The effectiveness of DEW has not been measured, although with some organization it could easily be. Timing the trip along IH-35 from the Yager exit to the Onion Creek exit (through Austin, going north to south), beginning at 4:30 pm, every business day for two weeks, then getting 50 cars to enter at Yager between 4:25 and 4:35, and practice DEW all the way down, and timing their trips over the following two weeks, would, I think, provide an effective test. The primary goal would be to have the overall trip time lowered using DEW, and I believe that would happen, although the wavebreaking effect would compete with the effect of the lower maximum speed an individual DEW car attains (compared to a nearby non-DEW car, which accelerates more, briefly, to close the gap in front of it faster, in accordance with the non-DEW driving rule). I am compelled to disclose that I take an immense personal satisfaction practicing DEW in the rare occasion that I am in rush-hour traffic, regardless of the fact that I am passed so often that I usually end up ten or so cars back from where I would be, had I not done the DEW. Nevertheless, even if the overall velocity is not increased, the fuel efficiency lift and lack of wear-and-tear associated with less braking would still make DEW worthwhile.

The beauty of DEW is that one person doing it helps. 50 people doing it within ten minutes of each other would likely help even more, but DEW is not something that has to sit under review by a government of dunces, or be built using taxpayer dollars. It is free to anyone who wishes to dabble in it. The cost is being passed by a few cars; the rewards are breaking a wave, possibly increasing everyone's overall speed, and, if you're like me, smug satisfaction that you're doing the right thing and helping everybody out with your superior style.

POP Go The Weasels

2007-08-17T10:49:00.000-05:00

Robert Siegel told me (and plenty other people, and they weren't, I suppose, really his words, but some NPR staff writer's) yesterday that "to make a mortgage crisis, you've got to make a lot of risky loans to a lot of home buyers who are less than credit-worthy." I think that although risky lending has helped cause the current mortgage crisis, the above quotation is not true. Or, if risky lending is a necessary condition, it is at least not sufficient to explain our current crisis.

I wrote a post not long ago about economic bubbles that I think more closely reaches the heart of the matter. To make a mortgage crisis, what you really need is speculative buying. People have been buying homes over the last several years with the idea that the price of the home being bought will continue to rise, so that they may sell it (or get a cheap second mortgage for it, or otherwise accrue wealth on it) at a higher price down the road. Why would people be more interested in buying a product as the price goes higher, except by speculation? If hamburgers tomorrow all cost $50, burger inventories would fill up fast. This is the case of normal supply-and-demand pricing. Price naturally increases with demand (although I think this is more a flaw of human nature than most economists are comfortable letting on), and speculation means that demand starts increasing with price: a positive feedback loop. A bubble.

This loop can't go on forever, and all it takes to pop it are the first people on it who decide it's going to pop, so they hop off. At some point people realize the price has blown up way too high, and it's a mad dash to cash in that house at that highest price, because price and demand are both about to tumble. That's what's happening now (though not, local real estate agents assure me, in Austin).

So let's get back to Siegel's claim. I'm sure it is exacerbating our situation that many people were awarded loans that were too expensive for them to afford. (The story goes on to talk about a website that will, for a $55 fee, furnish pay stubs that "prove" the fee payer is a paid consultant to the website's company. The pay stub is then used to prove sufficient income for receiving a large loan. Many people doubtlessly pursued excessive loans, by any means necessary, on the speculation that as their house tripled in value, they would easily be able to pay off that loan. After all, as a friend of mine said to me a few months ago, the only risk-free investment is housing.) But the situation would still be bad even if everyone were able to pay off their mortgages. The trouble is they never intended to pay off their mortgages. Most of them intended to pass their mortgage off to somebody else at an inflated price.

And if the home buyer doesn't think about it too much, it's actually not morally disgusting. If he really thinks houses can do nothing but appreciate in value, then he isn't doing anybody a disservice by selling him a high-priced home. The new buyer can just sell it at yet a higher price down the road. Magical, isn't it?

In other news, the Turdlog is more than one year old. Twelve months of infallible information from a bespectacled scientist. Dear reader, you were wise to come here, and you leave even wiser.

Here Is Something You Can't Understand

2007-07-03T10:57:00.000-05:00

I have never been able to grasp Objectivism, in the Ayn Rand sense. Her own explanation of it is briefly summarized here. From what I can make of it, Rand believes that reality is objective - that is, it is what it is, regardless of what anybody wishes it was, but that it can be figured out through reason - and therefore laissez-faire capitalism is the economic ideal. I'm pretty much on board with the premise, but the conclusion is a leap that, to me, comes totally out of left field. Or maybe right field. To be sure, there are volumes of essays and silly novels that attempt to bridge the gap between her premise and conclusion; it has been my attempts to get through them that have fallen short. So I do not wish to disparage Rand or any of her followers - it is your humble 'Dlogger who is the true ignoramus.

But today I discovered a parallel sort of philosophy - one that, like Objectivism, starts with a simple premise and quickly ventures off into socio-political ramifications. This philosophy is Naturalism, and its website is where I learned about it. Naturalism's basic premise is that in the Universe there is only physical matter: no spirits, otherwordly matter, weird psychic energy, or the like. As was the case with Objectivism, I am inclined to agree.

In fact, the basic premises of the two philosophies are very much alike, and I doubt an Objectivist and a Naturalist would disagree at all about the real, small-o objective nature of the Universe. Both philosophies hold natural science in the highest regard. But the conclusions and real-world ramifications of Objectivism and Naturalism are, at least to the hip urban 21st century American that I so am, polar opposites.

Naturalism takes its monistic premise and concludes that humans are wholly the results of their genes and issuing environments, that our lot in life is largely beyond our control (the philosophy takes pains to distance itself from Fatalism), and that compassion, cooperation, and forgiveness are of utmost human importance.

Now, my genes and environment bind me to Naturalism; I hiss at Objectivism. I fully understand neither. I hope all 'Dlog readers appreciate my disclosure and put my ramblings in an appropriate context.

Both philosophies use a powerful approach - an appeal to reason. Most rational people accept science as, if not absolute truth, then a mighty tool for understanding the Universe and, importantly, doing something with our place in it. So to begin a philosophy with only the basic premise that There is a world out there, outside of you, the observer, that you don't control with your thoughts, but that you can at least begin to make some modicum of sense of by using your brain will appeal to all but the most solipsistic of fringe thinkers (it will even appeal to fundamentally-inclined religious thinkers, who simply have a different idea about who (or Who) does have control over the Universe).

But the approach is just the approach; if what follows is utter hogwash, the philosophy should be dismissed (and even further reviled for having enticed the audience with such a sexy approach). Both philosophies immediately enter weaker argument-ground (like I said, you can't get much stronger than that premise). So neither philosophy should seduce for having an attractive basis. Their introductory statements should be viewed as a cheap trick to disarm skeptics.

Without getting into the nuts and bolts of the arguments, which I've already admitted I can't do, so please, call me an idiot and click somewhere else and avoid the Sunk-Cost Fallacy, which you're committing by continuing to read this bucket of bile, "because you've already made it this far." Or, grant me that we can judge these two philosophies' utilities without knowing how they get from their sexy beginnings to their stark-contrast ends. Followers of either of these two reason-loving philosophies would turn in their metaphysical badges in a heartbeat if it were shown conclusively that the real-world consequences of their beliefs put into action were pernicious to humanity.

First, we can judge utility empirically. Is laissez-faire capitalism good and useful? Do compassion and collectivism make our lives better? There are 231 years of data to examine. I submit that asking whether Objectivism trumps Naturalism is equivalent to asking whether modern American conservatism trumps modern American liberalism, in terms of which is a better (fairer, more effective, stabler, whatever . . .) guiding philosophy for governance. I am going to flesh out a thorough and coherent argument on this topic. And this suit is black.

My point is that the utility of each philosophy is something that is still hotly contested now, and although I know the answer, I prefer the Socratic method of teaching and will let 80 years of life on Earth draw it out of my readers.

Second, let's do the crazy thing and deny the philosophies' strong premises. How useful are these philosophies in an irrational world? This is going to sound a lot like Pascal's Wager, which is horrendous, but hear me out. The consequences of Objectivism are only good ideas if its basic premise is true: take away a reality that is accessible to each man, and you take away the heroic Man, his Tool of Reason, his perfection-fulfilling Drive of Self-Interest. You replace them with devious Man, his Affliction of Imperfect Understanding, and his destruction-leading-to Drive of Various Interests, and suddenly the resulting Objectivist ideas of individual choice and consequences and anti-collectivism don't seem likely to produce the best situation for human life on Earth.

The conclusions of Naturalism, on the other hand, actually rest on firmer ground if its basic premise is denied. That is, Naturalism is generous to rational people, but appealing to them is equivalent to jumping through hoops. Naturalism essays regularly reiterate their reliance on nothing but cold hard atoms in the void. They have to reiterate this, because Naturalism draws conclusions that are coherent with belief in God, purpose, order, and even Love. So if skeptical rationalists are all wrong and there are spirits and magick and dualism, the conclusions of Naturalism emerge unscathed - they are good ideas for either conception of Reality.

I discovered Naturalism after reading this essay. I have long wanted to write an essay on what I think happens to us when we die, but I have had tremendous trouble putting it into words. (To those who say it doesn't matter, I say "Go to Hell.") Thomas W. Clark almost exactly illustrates my thoughts on the subject. His argument still has the same weak point mine would, were I to articulate it, but I found the essay last night in a book I bought for freshman-year philosophy class, and I would have believed you if you'd told me Thomas W. Clark has a time machine and went to the future and copied the text right out of a Turdlog post from 2022 or so.

You Sunk My Cost Fallacy

2007-06-11T09:17:00.000-05:00

The sunk-cost fallacy is committed when one factors costs previously spent (and therefore "sunk") into present-day decisions. People have a tendency to hang on to projects in which they've invested a lot of resources, even beyond the point at which the project has proven futile, simply so that their past efforts won't have been wasted. The rational human must always consider the best choice from here on out; to select a worse choice because of past decisions is to commit the sunk-cost fallacy.

A famous example (so famous, in fact, that the fallacy has been renamed after it) is the Concorde supersonic jet. The story goes that although it was obvious to the British and French governments that the Concorde would never be a profitable form of transportation, they kept investing money and work in it because of all the money and work they had put in it so far. This until the first Concorde crash in 2000 finally ended the dream. This crash was not due to any flaw of the Concorde, so although it was fallacious to end the project because of the crash, at least two fallacies met and destroyed one another. Along with 113 people.

I have never read an example of the sunk-cost fallacy wherein the committer irrationally "jumps ship" because of previous efforts, yet I have avoided the fallacy twice in my life in just that manner (and never in the classic Concorde manner). That is, the committer of the sunk-cost fallacy is commonly seen as putting a Herculean effort towards a lost cause, simply because he doesn't want his previous Herculean effort to have been wasted. However, the committer may well do the opposite and quit a cause because he adds the effort he has already put towards the cause to the effort he now realizes he will have to further put in, and deems the sum too Herculean. If he had known the entire effort required to begin with, he would not have thought it worthwhile, but already having put forth half the effort, he should weigh the cause against the remaining half of the total effort.

Here is my example: in 2004 I bought a ten year old Mazda for $1000. There was a motivated seller; the car was pretty much a steal. But $2300 would have likely been too much to ask. The car was stolen in 2005 and driven so carelessly for more than 200 miles that it cost $1300 to fix. (Well, theft of tires, battery, &c. contributed to the cost, also.) But I was left with the decision of whether I wanted to pay $1300 for the same car I considered a steal at $1000 just a year ago. The fact that I would have spent $2300 total on the car, though brought up to me by friends, is neither here nor there. It includes the costs of outrageous fortune, which, if added to this particular car, must be added to any alternative car I would consider. No, the cost of that car, at that point, was $1300, and it was well worth it. I still drive it today, and it has needed only a ~$300 tuneup since.

My other example is having to pay $80 for breaking a lawnmower A. just bought for $60. Maybe the lawnmower isn't worth $140, but at the point of my decision of whether to pay the $80, the $60 was a sunk cost.

Back to the Concorde fallacy: by all accounts, and a good account is available here, the Concorde could very well have turned a profit. I think it's sad that the fate of the plane is so verbally tied to a logically fallacy, when it was likely other fallacies of human judgment that are ultimately responsible for its demise. Of course, what I think could fill a warehouse.

Excerpt From an Email

2007-06-08T13:50:00.000-05:00

Concerning my recent travels:

[To A., with affection,] it all started this morning, when I dropped some serious flow on the cherriest of all shoes. By which I mean when my puddle-jumper from Inverness to Edinburgh was, like, 15 minutes late. As my layover in Edinburgh was only 30 minutes, this slight delay in Inverness made me miss my flight to London, and made me six hours late for arriving at M.'s place. The deal in Edinburgh wasn't too bad for a missed flight - my luggage went God-knows-where but stayed inside the airport and was recovered for me (a disappointment, actually, considering the bags were heavy and I of course now had plenty of walking to do, prefacing a later mix-up); the people at the counter were slow; I had to walk back and forth with my heavy-ass bags between the ServiceAir desk and the British Airways check-in because the latter was confused as to whether my new London-Madrid flight was operated by British Airways or Iberia (a word which still makes me shudder). What was certain was that my new flight would go through Heathrow and not Gatwick, as had been originally planned. It did not occur to me for a moment that this deal would have been important for M.'s plans of retrieving me in Madrid, but it was. My flight arranged, I called you but you couldn't hear me; I emailed M., whose phone number I didn't know, and told her my new flight number and arrival time (but not issuing airport). The plane was near to boarding when I checked my luggage ticket stub and it revealed a different incoming flight than that which I had told M. (Iberia, a word which makes me heave, dryly, and not British Airways). So I quickly logged back on and told her that dreaded incoming flight number - fortunately the internet stations were near the gate. Unfortunately, I could have emailed her my underwear size for all the good it did in getting me more easily to my destination. I flew to London Heathrow, a confusing place, where I checked my email to discover my flight-change warning letters unanswered. I then waited an extraordinary length of time behind about ten people checking in with Iberia (several unfortunate ones of whom were in the process of missing their flight to Barcelona; they were delayed only an hour and a half or so). But I made it on the plane. I got off and was quickly approved into Madrid Barajas (a name which renders me, as you well know, powerless to stop short-periodic onslaughts of exasperating diarrhea). I walked towards the baggage reclaim and heard my name, for the first time in an airport, over the loudspeaker. The Spaniards stress the second syllable of my middle name, as if to assure listeners that I am, in fact, not the Hooker. My luggage was not on the plane. I was not worried; they assured me it would arrive at the airport that night or in the morning, and that they would deliver it to the address at which I was staying. As I (importantly, for oncoming bits of this story) did not know M.'s address, I assured them she would call them and tell them it. The disappearance of my bags was a gigantic blessing. M. was not waiting for me where I thought she would be. I tried to use an internet machine that would not make contact with my credit card's bank. The phones were no more receptive to the same, so I withdrew 50 Euros, bought a Coke, and put change into the telephone, which phone was very difficult, for me, to follow. Even once I discovered the number for information I was quickly drained of my coins without any leads as to what M.'s phone number might be. The guy didn't speak English, but he asked if I spoke French, to which I replied, stutteringly, "Oui, un peu." But by which time I was so entrenched in my poor-Spanish mode that I found it impossible to switch into my poor-French mode, so I blathered "Necessito el numero de telefono de M. Ma. de Madrid," at which point a recorded message rattled off a string of numbers, too quickly for me to take down, and hung up on me, not giving any change. My eyes burned with anguish and anger. I bought a train ticket and headed towrds Pio XII. A nice guy on the train reminded me how they work in Madrid (color-codedly, a system for which I, as you know, am at a distinct disadvantage). He also offered me the use of his cell phone, but said he didn't have access to directory assistance. I thanked him profusely and made my transfer from the 4 train (lavender) to the 9 (navy). The similarity of these colors was enough such that it escaped me that the platform signs were color-coded with the correct train color and that the transfer signs were written with words, so it took me walking up and down some escalators for a good ten minutes before I decided which train I needed to be on (invariably, the one that was just leaving). Eight minutes later I was on the number 9. One stop down the track, I got off at Pio XII and relied on my memory to get me to M.'s apartment. This is where the lost luggage really worked out well for me - I walked around for over an hour looking for it. I remembered to cross the street and turn right (to the north), then left. I turned left after I was sure I had gone at least far enough, and explored the three or four blocks to the south of M.'s place like a moron. There were buildings that reminded me of the place sufficiently that I rang doorbells (no one answered, fortunately). A porter let me in and we combed the residents list for the names Ad. or Ma., to no avail. I saw a telephone book behind his desk and pointed to it, and asked for the "libro de telefono," to which the man explained that the name I was searching for was not on the residents list. I tried to convey my clear understanding of that, and that I wished to see the "libro de telefono" so that I might retrieve the number for someone who lives outside this apartment complex. He either didn't understand or refused to let me see it, so I thanked him as rudely as possible and left. (M. later explained to me that the term for "phone book" is "guilla (guia?) de telefono" but agreed that my intent should have been decipherable, if not to the porter, then to the convenience store clerk or to the hotel concierge, on both of whom I tried the same term.) Idealess, I got the idea that perhaps I hadn't gone far north enough; I blessedly encountered an unmistakable doorway with a note from M., including her phone number, telling me to stay put, as she had gone back to the airport. For the fourth time, it turns out - the details of which trips are opaque to me except that she was at least part of the time waiting in the wrong place, having expected me to arrive from Gatwick. But I'm here, and I have this great (to me, if no one else) story to append to my long list of Iberia-related mishaps (a word I use in order to avoid hyperbole, especially with respect to air travel).

I love you and I'll see you soon!

I Hate London Heathrow, But

2007-05-29T10:41:00.000-05:00

I love this.

It's Posts Like This That Make the Turdlog Number One

2007-05-15T12:42:00.000-05:00

A high-caliber persuasive writer anticipates criticism and nullifies it before it is levied. Five days have proved to be insufficient for my astute readers to formulate the obvious objection to my overtime denunciation. I count my blessings.

In the playoffs it is necessary to have a winner and loser, so that one team may advance to the next stage of competition (or be crowned champions). This may require overtime. In such a case, I prefer basketball's method: more time is added to the clock, and there is no sudden death, whereby the first team to score wins. The NFL features a sudden death, and I remember hearing that something like 70% of coin-toss winners choose to receive the ball first and go on to win the game.

It's too easy in football, when all that is needed is a single score, to get that score and win. Lots of sideline passes until field goal range, then runs up the middle, and toward the middle of the field, will get you there. Why not just flip a coin and let that decide the outcome?

(The success of this overtime field goal scoring strategy got me thinking a while back about why teams don't use it all the time, and frankly I don't have a good answer. It's possible that, done enough times, a sideline pass's susceptibility, not just to interception but to interception and defensive counter-touchdown, render the technique too risky.)

Oh well. I do admit that sudden death basketball would be a riot. But I think that when overtime is necessary, the rules and strategy of the game should be sullied as little as possible. In football, sudden death changes the game too much. In NCAA football, overtime is a different game entirely. The head coaches should just arm-wrestle for it. Hockey and soccer shootouts are exciting, but if I wanted to watch an individual sport, I'd watch tennis. Tennis, on the other hand, should follow baseball's ideal overtime example: just keep doing what you're doing until one team or side blinks.

Completed What Was Assigned

2007-05-10T16:14:00.000-05:00

Overtime represents everything that is god-awful about America. And I'm not even talking about the workplace, although I could be. I'm talking, as I have been known to do in the past, about football.

Or any sport, really. Whatever happened to ties? Two teams get out there, beat the crap out of one another, and the final gun sounds with the score even. I suggest shaking hands and calling it a day. Sports are supposed to be, among other things, a metaphor for life. We force children to play them knowing full-well that they will never be good enough to make a living playing them. But we do it for their fitness, and to get them out of our their guardians' hair for a little while, and to teach them lessons. Think of a strategy. Work hard. Listen to your coach. Cooperate with your teammates. Expect a concrete solution to every problem within three hours.

This last lesson is, of course, a terrible one for adult-life preparation. Things often don't work out the way one wants them to, but they rarely work out disastrously. The mediocre results far outnumber the solid wins and losses. The ability to make what good one can out of imperfect results is about the most valuable one a human can have. Sports today are quite unrealistic in that sense. Football, basketball, and hockey feature overtimes. Baseball has extra innings, which is slightly cooler, but numbers of outs as opposed to clock time has always been baseball's biggest (and possibly only) advantage over other sports. Tennis goes on hasta la victoria.

Why have most sports adopted OT? Certainly increased commercial TV time has much to do with it, to which I have nothing to say in this post and everything to say in a later one about how money is everything in our society but doesn't need to be. But a baser sports fan than I would answer that neither team, or team's fans, are happy with a tie, so why not fill the glass halfway, as opposed to leaving it empty? Keep ties and other life-lessons for little league; TV sports are the territory of dollars and fantastic gratification.

I disagree. A hunger is built after a tie. Both teams will pursue the rematch with an augmented sense of having something to prove. It's delayed gratification, yes, so I understand if it won't sell, but a little coitis interruptus can be a wonderful thing.

Let me conclude by saying that as awful as some aspects of pro sports are, they are in summation nowhere near as ridiculous as the fantasy sport Quidditch and its Golden Snitch. People should think things through before putting them down on paper for others to read. That's the Turdlog's stand: are you in good hands?

Guinness May Not Come Through, But You, Dear Reader, Will Never Fade

2007-04-07T17:51:00.000-05:00

It is early April and a rainy 36 degrees Fahrenheit in central Texas. Very ridiculous. I have been relaxing at home, doing that scrapyard thing, but the dogs are getting restless, cooped up as they are. So Guinness, a Rottweiler-Blue Heeler mix who is not quite 50 pounds, I think, has a slobbery tennis ball (minus outer felt layer, and therefore rubbery) that she keeps bringing to me so that I might throw it somewhere for her to run after. We do this outside from time to time; it's a great way for the dog to get quite a workout and for me not to. So we're both happy. It's not quite as effective for her indoors, but there we were, about an hour ago, trying our hardest. One of my throws bounced around a while and ended up under a living room chair.

The chair is a normal sized cushiony shair - maybe a square meter in area. But it's quite light. I lifted one side of it up, so that it stood, two legs on the floor and the opposite side in my hand. I expected the dog to retrieve the ball. I had the chair up more than 45 degrees from the floor. Guinness wanted the ball; her tail wagged. She didn't get the ball. She looked at me. I pointed to the ball and instructed her, in a language she doesn't really understand but I thought the tone of voice and gesture should relay the message accurately, to get the ball. She just stood there. After a couple more tries it became apparent to me that although she still wanted to play with the ball and me, she wasn't going to get the ball. So I reached down and got the ball. I tossed it; she ran after it and retrieved it, confirming my suspicion that she still wanted to play.

Fury exaggerates my reaction to her behavior, but not by much. She has shown trepidation about retrieving the ball in the past only when it lands near the bicycles, which we keep in the living room. The reader is familiar with bikes falling over, seemingly causelessly but actually because there is a nearly-indistinguishable line between a bike that rests sturdily against the wall and one on the verge of collapse. Guinness is familiar with cataclysmic gravitational bike failure as well. This is my best hypothesis as to why she doesn't like to go near them. I have had to go and retrieve the ball myself on occasion, not because Guinness is physically incapable of it, but because she is afraid the bike will fall on her and she won't risk it. (Future blog post: Whatever Happened to Kickstands?) Her demeanor, as I waited for her to take the ball from under the chair, was identical to that which she wears when the ball rolls to a stop near the bikes. So I conclude that she thought I might drop the chair on her as she retrieved the ball from under it.

One of the things that interest me, but not to such an extent that I have been motivated to try to learn anything about it,* beyond casual empirical observation that is motivated by things other than pure curiosity, like making sure I don't kill my girlfriend's dogs out of neglect, is animal psychology. I am very curious as to what really drives dogs to behave the way they do. And I think animals are much more "honest" than humans, in that they probably possess neither the ability nor the compulsion to lie (well, maybe the compulsion, like after I get home to find the trash knocked over or the cupboard raided). In particular, I wonder about dominance versus submission in dogs. It's plain to see that behavior manifest in any two dogs as they interact. There may be a struggle (I suppose even a struggle to the death, in which case dominance cannot be more convincingly displayed), but one dog will prove relatively dominant, and the other relatively submissive. At the other extreme: dogs that play, and get along, especially in the presence of dominant humans, show a muted form of dominance or submission, but it's there.

Now, we humans can't help but anthropomorphize a bit when we see dogs dominating and submitting to one another. We pity the submissive dog, we admire (or fear, or possibly rue) the dominant one. We fantasize about David slaying Goliath (or at least delivering a solid relationship-reversing bite). But I think we put ourselves in the dogs' shoes (dogs' shoes . . .) inappropriately, to some extent. We imagine ourseles as the submissive dog: head down, tail beween our legs, vanquished. It reminds us of some analogous experience we've had: losing a match, being rejected by a girl, whatever. We imagine the submissive dog feels the way we did after that experience, but does he? The dog can't plot revenge against his vanquisher; he hasn't the mental capacity. He can't dwell on it. And anyone who has ever lost anything knows that the real hurt comes during the dwelling. Submissive dogs are often as happy as clams. We think of humans as having the clear advantage over animals in intelligence, but that there is a smaller gap in our emotional capabilities. Or at least I have thought that, until I thought about it more. Our emotional reactions to events are as strong as they are because of our intelligence. If a girl rejects me, I can think about it and anticipate the same response from every girl I ever approach. I can imagine her being attracted to, and happy with, someone else. I can plot to kill him. A dog can't do any of that; in fact, by the time I've planned where to dump the body he's already had three more lovers.

Dogs are honest; they respond to stimuli however they feel fit. They don't have this outer layer of brainpower with which they can scheme, or even consider how their response is going to look to high society. We imagine the submissive dog being laughed at by onlooking dogs, but dogs don't laugh.

So Guinness's fear of my hurting her, or my inability to prevent her from hurt by the chair suddenly becoming unbearably heavy, was her honest response to the situation. Sorry about the awkward sandwich of a blog turd. But here's my point, my olive-on-toothpick: that's cool, Guinness. Whatever.

* I have read about Pavlov's Dog, which is, to me, the most overrated scientific phenomenon in existence.

Silly Chitter-Chatter

2007-03-20T15:37:00.000-05:00

I went to the dentist today for basically the first time in my life - I had braces in middle school and I vaguely remember having my teeth looked at when I was five or six, but certainly this was my first dentist trip with these teeth. I bought dental insurance last summer (at my job we can only change coverages in the summer). It costs $7 per month. February rolled around before I made sure to make it worth my $84 this year. I got my teeth examined (for a $10 co-pay) by a nice enough guy. He recommended a "regular" cleaning, I think as opposed to a "federal pound-me-in-the-mouth" cleaning, and said I might want to get my bottom-right-rear wisdom tooth pulled (which is tooth number 32; they number them like bowling pins) because it hasn't completely peaked out over my gums and is at risk of an abscess. Then he suggested some cosmetic work, but was careful not to be too pushy. He told me I might benefit from something called a laminate or veneer, which should even out my front two upper teeth, the right one of which hangs down a little lower. I should have worn my retainer more diligently. Or my parents should have pushed me harder - I haven't been able to decide.

But the good news is that I don't have any cavities, which, after watching and listening to people's reactions when I've told them I had never been to the dentist, came as a surprise. So believe me, dear reader, when I say that I am the supreme god of dental hygiene, and feel free to contact me for personal tips on how to keep your chompers as chompy as mine. (I'd post them here, but the Turdlog doesn't advertise.)

Correct

2007-03-06T09:42:00.000-06:00

I can remember bragging to my mom, when I was probably thirteen, about how many adult-level books I had read: Pet Sematary, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Talisman, Thinner, The Stand, ‘Salem’s Lot.

She was impressed, but felt somehow compelled to be sure I was aware that there was literature outside of Stephen King. I assured her I was, and she insisted that was all she wanted to do, and that she in no way meant to influence what I read.

Yeah, right: I picked up something else, maybe The Hobbit, and didn’t read King again for sixteen years.

In the meantime, though, I grew enormously fond of a movie called The Shining, which of course is Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 adaptation of King’s 1977 novel. In 1997, probably seven years into my King drought, The Shining was made into an ABC miniseries, which is apparently King’s preferred method of transferring his books onto the screen. It and The Langoliers were done the same way, and maybe others, too. The lengthy miniseries format doubtlessly allows for more faithful-to-the-book renditions, of which King is doubtlessly a fan.

I watched a little bit of The Shining (1997) and couldn’t get into it. My dad told me that King didn’t like Kubrick’s version (!) and that this one would be closer to the book. I’m not sure whether that rumor about King’s opinion is true. But being currently infatuated with Kubrick (Barry Lyndon and Dr. Strangelove are still easily in my top-five, all-time), and still relegating King to that dustbin of writers I enjoyed in adolescence but had of course since grown out of, I decided I would rather spend the night in the Overlook Hotel than watch any more of this pile-of-shit miniseries.

Another effect of the whole affair was that I resolved to go back and read the novel and compare it to the 1980 movie. I would make it clear that Kubrick was a better filmmaker than King was an author, and achieve my final revenge against the guy who had entertained me so thoroughly every night for probably two years of my life. After my Amadeus-Homer’s Enemy exposition, there was no popular fiction commentary I looked forward to with greater pleasure.

So let that serve as the full-disclosure motivation (argh) for the following. I still haven’t seen the 1997 miniseries, so I will refer to “both” versions, meaning the novel and the 1980 movie. This post is filled to the brim with spoiler content.

The Shining, either version, is the story of Jack Torrance, an aspiring writer, who gets a job as the winter caretaker of a remote Colorado hotel called the Overlook. He and his wife (Wendy) and son (Danny) are to spend more than six months locked up together, alone. Jack is a recovering alcoholic who had broken his infant son’s arm in a fit of drunken rage a couple of years before. Danny now has psychic visions, which are often related to him by his putatively imaginary friend, Tony. After the Torrances arrive in the Overlook but before the staff deserts the place, Danny is befriended by Dick Hallorann, who is both the Overlook’s cook and a fellow psychic. Danny and Dick can talk to each other without opening their mouths. Dick calls their collective mental powers the shining. Danny confides in Dick that he is horrified of the Overlook, and although Dick tries to comfort Danny with his response, he admits that evil may indeed lurk there. The reader/viewer gets the impression that these two psychics are incapable of hiding much from each other.

The rest of the story chronicles Jack’s progressive descent into madness, his attempt to kill his family, and Danny’s psychic shout-out to Dick, who gets the message all the way from Florida and goes to save Danny and Wendy from Jack.

That basically wraps up what the two versions have in common; the differences are striking.

The hedges around the Overlook play a large part in both versions. In the book, the important hedges are carved into a topiary. The bushes are carved into a lion, a rabbit, and a dog (and possibly others I have forgotten about, but those are the ones most mentioned). These bush-animals come to life and menace the characters at various times.

The important hedges in the movie are cut into a hedge maze, which Danny explores with Wendy as Jack broods inside the hotel. Later, when Jack chases Danny with an axe, Danny leads Jack into the maze and gets him lost; Jack freezes to death in the snow, ending the movie. (Incidentally, the map of the hedge maze, studied by Jack, and the maze itself, as seen in a bird’s-eye-view shot, are quite different. This difference and the helicopter shadow and blades visible in the opening scenic shots are the only two gaffes I have caught. They are forgivable, but I really expect better from Kubrick.)

Jack’s demise in the book is of course different, there being no maze for him to get lost in. In both versions, it is Jack’s job to run the boiler and heat the hotel. In the book it is emphasized that the pressure in the boiler creeps, and that the boiler is decrepit. Mr. Watson, the open-season boiler watcher, unmentioned in the movie, warns Jack to vent the pressure multiple times per day or the boiler will explode and likely destroy the hotel and all its residents. In the book Jack gets so wrapped up with the idea of killing his family that he forgets about the boiler. Danny saves himself by reminding Jack about the boiler as Jack has Danny cornered on the top floor and is about to murder him.

In both versions Jack obsesses about his job as the hotel’s caretaker and sees his family’s concern for his sanity and their safety as an obstacle to his properly performing his duties. So the only thing more important than killing Danny, as he is about to kill Danny, is protecting the Overlook. Upon being reminded of the boiler, Jack runs downstairs to vent it, but he is too late and dies in the explosion that destroys the Overlook as well.

As is the case when any novel is put on film, much detail is omitted. Most of that left out of The Shining includes tales of the Torrances’ lives before the Overlook job. Jack’s father was abusive, but Jack still loved him. Wendy’s mother insisted Wendy and Jack were terrible parents and was abusive in more of the verbal-emotional sense, so (importantly) Wendy viewed her as a non-alternative to staying with Jack. Jack had been a teacher but had been fired for being a drunk and attacking a student. It was Jack’s old drinking buddy and that-school regent, “Uncle Al” Shockley, who got Jack the job at the Overlook, and was optimistic about getting him reinstated at the school. Jack’s weapon of choice was not an axe but a roque hammer, which was part of the Overlook’s roque court equipment, which sport, roque, is similar to croquet, which comparison was doubtlessly too complicated, and which hammer was too easily replaced by a fire-safety axe, to be included in the film. There was an incident with a cursed wasps’ nest in the book, one of many events that led Wendy to suspect Jack of abuse/neglect while the Overlook itself was really to blame. (Many other such events, including the bruises on Danny inflicted by a ghost in a haunted room, were included in the movie. This ghost’s past, however, was detailed in the book, as was much of the troubled, murder-involving past of the Overlook, which was mostly skimmed over, at best, in the movie. Also, the haunted room wherein the ghost attacked Danny was numbered 217 in the book and 237 in the movie. According to Wikipedia, this room change happened at the filmed-hotel owner’s request, presumably because there actually was a Room 217 in the hotel. Also again, while Danny is forbidden to enter the room in both versions, the book describes his instinct that there is something within that will help his parents’ situation, and therefore implies the hotel’s evil hypnosis over Danny, because his transgression both physically hurts him and drives his parents further into disharmony. The movie viewer supposes Danny enters the haunted, forbidden room out of classic childish intrigue and naughtiness.)

At the same time all this detail is left out by Kubrick, two of the more memorable happenings of the film were not in the book: the blood spilling from the elevator, and the pages and pages of type-written “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in the absence of any progress on the project (play, in the book) Jack had been working on. The elevator was featured in the book, first as a rickety old thing that (imagine this) made Wendy nervous, then as a spontaneously-operating device filled with confetti and party masks left by ancient, festive hotel guests. Jack’s writing plays only a tangential role in the book, although on his path to madness his attitude towards it progresses from optimistic to writer’s-blockish and subordinate to a book-idea about the Overlook he is inspired to write by a scrapbook of its history he finds in the basement, which scrapbook also serves to fill in the gory details of the Overlook’s past.

The overarching effect of the de-Kingening Kubrickization that the story underwent between 1977 and 1980, which I have briefly described above, is a shift of much of the antagonism from the Overlook to Jack Torrance himself, and a transformation of this antagonism from otherworldly evil to psychopathic humanity. King’s hedges are haunted and attack the Torrances (and Hallorann, with much more success) with magical teeth and muscles. Kubrick’s hedges are simply confusing. Kubrick’s Jack dies suffering from cabin fever as his son outsmarts him in his rage. King refers to Jack not as “Jack” in his final scene but as “it,” emphasizing that the thing trying to kill Danny is more a puppet of the Overlook than his loving father. His possessed body ready to bring the roque hammer down on Danny’s head, Jack momentarily regains enough control to tell Danny to run, and to remember how much he (Jack) loves him (Danny). King’s Overlook nearly possesses Dick Hallorann, tempting him to take up the roque hammer against Danny and Wendy after Jack is dead. King’s Overlook can spontaneously generate wasps, animate topiary bushes, and make creepy fire hoses jump off walls. Only one event in the movie is explainable only by the magical wickedness of the Overlook (as opposed to some hallucination or other scientifically-justifiable phenomenon): the release of Jack from the locked pantry by the ghost of Delbert Grady, the last caretaker to correct his anti-Overlook family. (This unlocking is there in the book as well.)

The Shining (1977) is a fairy tale about a haunted house; The Shining (1980) is a story about an unstable father snapping under just the right conditions. King’s novel kept me up, bleary-eyed, into the night; I haven’t finished a 450-page book in so short a time in many tries. In sixteen years I had forgotten his unique ability to hold the reader transfixed. Kubrick’s movie, though, is a timeless chiller, a classic Jack Nicholson performance, and a thought-provoking look into insanity. In an old rant of mine I discussed how important it is to see Hitler as crazy as opposed to evil, and Jack Torrance is no different.

King’s Jack is a complex character; make no mistake. He is a drunk who broke his son’s arm and can’t keep a job; he is a devoted father who gave up drinking and works tirelessly. As I said in another rant, I like that complexity. King describes how Jack likes that complexity for his own characters. Jack feels it is important for the author to tell the story of a child murderer who is let out of the sanitarium because of budget cuts and goes around murdering more children with detachment and neutrality, and “let the reader lay blame.” But King was not describing his own philosophy but that of his fictional character. King lays blame himself – directly on the Overlook. Jack Torrance, if he existed, may have been proud of the way he was depicted by Kubrick.

You Positively MUST Read This Post

2007-02-06T16:26:00.000-06:00

What I get paid to do is be a Research Scientist Associate (II - The Sequel?) at the Bureau of Economic Geology, which is part of The University of Texas, where I got my master's a couple of years ago. One of the big requirements for research types is you have to publish papers of your research, and I have found myself none too good at this. I wonder: if I publish something on the 'Dlog and it gets more than one comment, can I count that as peer-reviewed?

But this type of writing is kind of up my alley: to the point, correct spellings, etc. (Please don't laugh; I do have feelings. And I can see you.) But I have been going over some of my supervisor's revisions to a version of my master's thesis I hope to publish, and a common response to everything I've ever submitted for revision jumps out at me: motivation. Why should I care about (fault timing, sealed microfractures, or anything I've ever written about)? my reviewer asks.

My reviewer paints science readers as a bunch of major-league philistines. Isn't anything ever just interesting anymore? So you've cured cancer, the science reader thinks, how is this going to make me money? My motivation sections invariably include the search for porosity in rocks (in the hopes that these pores might be filled with hydrocarbons, which motivation renders my study completely useless in fifty years, when no one will give a damn about the little holes), and the ways in which this study will broaden our general scientific knowledge (noble, yes, but it should go without saying. And as well: if listed as a motivation, this reason risks an infinite regression of well why do I care about thats?).

Were I a movie maker, would I include such incentives in the previews as this movie will doubtlessly be brought up in conversation by sexy women at parties this spring or watching this slasher will increase the viewer's general understanding of how to get scared shitless or attending this film will help Regal Cinema's bottom line this quarter?

No. I would say what the movie is about, and if you're cool enough to find that interesting, it starts Friday.

Why Can't the Bears AND Colts Lose?

2007-02-05T16:28:00.000-06:00

I am absent-minded in that I tend to do things that I'm used to on auto-pilot. When I back out of my driveway I almost always turn west on Justin Lane, towards Burnet Road, simply because I'm used to my route to work. I'm often halfway there before I think about where it is I'm headed. Once I have something down, I do it compulsively. This helps in practicing kung fu or playing guitar, but I fear it will be the death, or serious dismemberment, of me.

I have imagined two events that could likely happen to me in the future because of my habit. One is that I will mangle my hand in a garbage disposal while shoving old vegetables down it. I could be reaching down into it to dislodge some asparagus, alternately manually dislodging and running the thing, and just lose track of which hand should be doing what and, more importantly, when. The scene in The Hot Zone, I think, where the lab tech is reading a magazine and he reaches into the centrifuge full of ebola samples, while it's still spinning, and cuts himself and infects the world really got to me. I can totally see myself doing the same thing. Mangling my hand in a garbage disposal would be decidedly bad for my guitar playing.

The other, even scarier, thing I predict for myself is going to work and leaving my hypothetical future child in the car seat in the back until 2 in the afternoon when I realize I didn't go by the day care center, cooking his brain, and making myself look like an awful person. Kind of à la Trainspotting. I have heard of people doing that and it makes them seem like such idiots, but please see my opinion on judgmentalism, two posts back.

I obviously seek help for this condition. My thinking now is that I will work my brain into a parnoid frenzy every time I use a garbage disposal (this has worked so far). If I'm ever a parent, I think I will tie a piece of twine to my child's carseat and tie the other end to my wrist whenever I drive. But these solutions are, of course, treating the symptoms (although before they occur, which is nice). I would love to treat the disease, although not with drugs.

Future post: the overuse of prescription drugs in modern America. Now that's original.

Ssshhh! I'm Listening to Reason!

2007-01-30T11:28:00.000-06:00

The only movie I saw, at the theater, between the summers of 1985 and '86 was Pee Wee's Big Adventure. I just saw it again on cable last week, and it is a national treasure.

Moving on: on a road trip to Chicago and the surrounding area last fall I and my good friend R. listened to Reason, by Robert Reich (on the car CD player). I think it was unabridged. It was thorough, regardless. Reich was President Clinton's Labor Secretary, and the whole book is a pretty good argument for that strong yet sensible brand of liberalism that 43% of American voters seem to find compelling.

I listened to it once, and that was two or three months ago, so I won't argue explicitly for or against any point that Reich made in the book. I'm not going to buy it or get it back from the library. What I will do is recall for you, enchanted reader, an argument the book spawned between R. and me.

Whether the economy is good, or whether it is healthy, are questions that have begged savage debate since the dawn of economics (I'm sure). To ask whether the economy is good right now is slightly less subjective, of the two, for one needs only to study the economy of the present. The main source of contention is the metrics: GDP, poverty rate, infant mortality, unemployment, cost of living, inflation, national debt, trade deficit; the list goes on and on. Economists seem to pick their favorite one, or the one that best illustrates the point of view on the goodness of the economy that they independently wish to espouse. All this devilry, for what's happening right now.

To ask whether the economy is healthy is to ask what all those figures are going to be like in five to ten years. Roll the bones, friends - roll the bones.

But I strongly believe that income distribution is important. Which specific metric to measure it could be debated until the cows come home, and I don't have any cows, so it could pretty much be debated forever. If the standard distribution of cows per household is your metric - okay, I'll stop.

The phrase a rising tide lifts all boats is commonly attributed to JFK. It means that as long as everybody (in the economy being discussed) is doing progressively better, it doesn't matter whose wages are skyrocketing and whose are creeping (adjusted for inflation, of course). It means that it is preferable that everyone does better in ten years, regardless of the drastic inequalities in how much better, than have some do better and some do worse. It is not the argument over the legitimacy of this claim that sprang from Reich and landed between R. and me, for we all three agreed that it is, in fact, not true. We agree that a rising inequality of incomes makes for a bad and/or unhealthy economy. What R. and I were not able to agree upon is the reason(s) why.

I think the saying is flawed for two reasons, one of which is plebian and ultimately almost invalid. R. agrees with me on this reason. The other reason is bold and insightful - the kind of thing one would, were he so quick as to think of it, write about in his blog. I was unable to convince R. of it.

The obvious flaw with the rising tide theory is human jealousy. If my inflation-adjusted income is $35,000 in 2007 and $44,000 in 2017, while my neighbor's income goes from $110,000 to $550,000 over the same time period, then although we are both doing better, I still struggle with the car note (only a little less so after ten years), while he no longer struggles with the yacht note.

Now, this sort of reptilian jealousy for others' successes is a part of human life. Mediocrities everywhere, including your faithful 'dlogger, are no stranger to it. It would be alleviated by more evenly distributing income. But it's too easy to argue against government action intended to achieve that end. What harm might be done to the overall national wealth by forced redistribution? What message does that send to the entrepreneurs of tomorrow? Not very many white people starve in the streets today, and in fact the real wages of the poor are increasing, so the market is working; leave it alone. The standard trickle-down objections.

But, and this is the second, more virile but, there are broadly two kinds of things money can buy: absolute goods and relative. A BMW is an absolute good, as is a head of lettuce, a diamond, and a blue pair of pants. You buy them, and your quality of life is as better as you feel it is. This, make no mistake, is capitalism in all its beauty or lack thereof. We could, in theory, all drive BMWs and eat fancy romaine lettuce to our hearts' content (it will never happen - more about that in a later post). But there are relative goods one can buy - political favors, labor, possibly elections - at the public's expense. That money is power is obvious to the most dimwitted among us. Each member of a group of people can't increase his power over the group; it can only be moved around. The democratic ideal is a group wherein power is shared among its members, so as long as money is power, unequal income distrubution is uneven power distribution.

The solution? Spread the money evenly, or take the money out of politics.

R.'s response? I don't think that's as important as the human jealousy thing. Pathetic.

The Deciders

2006-11-27T11:52:00.000-06:00

When I was growing up (oh, Jesus . . .), one of the worst things you'd want to be labeled was judgmental. Matthew 7:1 was everybody's favorite Bible verse. Today judgmentalism is making a serious comeback.

I see two forms of judgmentalism. The first form is the decision between whether a person is guilty of a crime, be it murder, lewdness, heresy, or plain old rambunctiousness. This form comes into play when not all parties involved agree on the facts (e.g., when person A stands accused by person B of murder; they plead their cases and allow for some person or group, C, to decide whose story is right).

The second form of judgmentalism is the labeling as morally wrong someone else's deeds. This type of judgmentalism applies to situations wherein there is no "accuser" and "accusee" because there is no debate as to whether the deed was done, only whether it was wrong. (E.g., when person A warns person B that he is hell-bound for sodomizing person C, an act which both persons B and C remember as a pleasant time.)

I have grown up believing that Type-1 judgmentalism is a necessary evil in this world, and that it is the purpose of a fair justice system to do all that is humanly possible to arrive at the truth in cases where justice needs to be served. I believe Type-2 judgmentalism should very rarely be committed, because in most cases of moral misdeed, the Golden Rule, or some manifestation of it, is broken, and virtually all human beings today will agree that the deed is morally wrong, regardless of each person's creed or lack thereof. When two people agree on the facts but disagree as to whether the deed is right or wrong, appeal to the sanctity of the Golden Rule should settle the argument. I think this viewpoint is becoming less popular over time, but I will leave Type-2 judgmentalism for another blog entry.

Type-1 judgmentalism, which I argue is necessary but unpleasant, is reveled in today. Consider the popularity of court cases in the media, whether actually televised or just continually covered by in the news. From Judy to Ito, from The People's Court to Court TV, from Hussein to McVeigh, America is in love with court cases. Ask fifty Americans who Scott Peterson is and who Ben Bernanke is, and you will get a glimpse of how our burgeoning judgmentalism has eclipsed other, seemingly more important, interests. (Then ask them who John Paul Stevens is and have a hemorrhage.)

The reason I believe the justice system is a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless, is that we humans can never be completely certain about any case. There always remains the distant possiblity that an absurdly intricate frameup was executed. It is therefore the terrible burden of a jury to draw a line at, say, 97% certainty ("reasonable doubt"), across which a suspect can be labeled guilty and made to suffer a just punishment. I seem to be of a dying breed who think this is a grave matter.

Strictly interpreted, to punish a criminal is to violate the Golden Rule (which, I should state for exactitude, is Do unto others as you would have them do unto you). For justice to be served, and for members of our society to feel safe and happy, we allow this violation, so long as the punishment somehow fits the crime (that's a whole nother can of worms).

In murder cases, premeditation is pivotal in deciding the punishment. Whether the murderer thought about his cruel deed in advance, calculating how to do it and get away with it, or whether he sliced up his victim in a sudden fit of rage, makes all the difference in how the deed should be punished (for who hasn't felt the sudden urge to slice up his life partner or bank teller from time to time?). To send a man to jail for thirty years, or life, or to electrocute him, is done with great care and premeditation. So if the man is not guilty of the crime for which justice is thereby sought, he is gravely wronged. Nevertheless, it's the sad duty of the jury to proclaim a fellow human guilty of a crime (or not) and allow the punishment to be given (or not). It is their sad lot to live with the 3% possibility that they have condemned an innocent man.

For me, not sitting on the jury, it is better to assume the absurd frameup. What I believe has consequence neither for the suspect nor the victim, so it is my happy lot to be able to forgive the crime and hold blameless the man whom the authorities think most likely did it. I do not think that ignorance is bliss; as a scientist, I chase knowledge for a living. But I do think that because ultimate ignorance is a simple fact, those who are not charged with deciding the outcome of a trial should embrace their ignorance and forgive the suspect. I think, like Blackstone, that it is better to let ten guilty men go free than to condemn an innocent one.

When O.J. was found not guilty, I was happy for him. My cursory attention (and wasted attention - I wasn't as enlightened as a teenager as I am today, of course) to the case had me convinced that it was about 80% likely that he killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend. So, were I a betting man, with God taking the wagers, I would have put $100 on "guilty." But I would not have sent a man to jail for life, based on the sublunary evidence given the jury. It's more important to assume men are innocent, until proven otherwise, than to punish crimes. I don't think 80% is proof, regardless of what my vodka bottle says.

The main thrust of my opposition to Type-1 judgmentalism is that because no one knows what happened, it is everyone's responsibility to forgive what happened.

But it goes beyond deeds. You may observe someone doing something, but still not know why. After watching Borat, my friends and I were stunned at some of the things Sacha Baron Cohen got people to say. People sang along about throwing Jews down the well, and hinted that perhaps our society would be better off without having abolished slavery. We were disgusted to hear such bigotry. Then there was the Michael Richards explosion. Revolting.

John McWhorter, in reply, found Richards's apology meaningless and done purely out of practicality. He said that the apology could not signify a "miraculous" change in Richards's feelings about black people. My question is, how does McWhorter know Richards's feelings? Why does he put unswerving faith in Richards's words one night as Richards is being heckled at a night club, and dismiss his words the next day as meaningless?

The irrefutable fact is that one cannot know what goes on in another's heart, especially on such flimsy evidence as what comes out of his mouth. Richards's words were terrible. But as long as there remains the possibility, however remote (and for Richards, I don't think it's that remote), that Michael Richards is not a rabid bigot with a seething hatred for black people, why go on NPR and say that it's obvious that he is? One explanation for the outburst is that the Klansman mafia were at the show and were aiming a high-caliber bullet at Richards's temple and forcing him to yell the n-word repeatedly at their African-American undercover agents who had been heckling him. Not likely, to be sure, but there are more likely explanations that fall short of the rabid bigot one, so why not believe one of them? Why not forgive Richards's sin, in the knowledge that you too might one day say some thing that you regret and need the forgiveness of those who heard it?

As for Borat, I just heard Baron Cohen on Fresh Air conclude from his experiences making his hilarious movie that the chorus of throwing the Jew down the well sung by the American drunks was indeed disturbing because, as Ian Kershaw put it, the road to Auschwitz was paved with indifference. I think Baron Cohen and Kershaw are spot-on, but that Baron Cohen is pretty danged hypocritical to accuse others of indifference tantamount to National Socialism as he portrays a Muslim from a country, he admits in that very interview, that no one has heard of, and therefore portrays Muslims in general, as oafish, dirty, immoral, and racist.

But the movie was hilarious. And I don't think Baron Cohen is racist; I simply think he tried to have a good laugh and even make fun of racists, without thinking too deeply of what a racist picture he is unfairly painting of others. That's the key: I give people the benefit of the doubt. Richards, Baron Cohen and victims, Reggie White, Mel Gibson, anybody who has said something and been labeled a racist, they are forgiven in my heart so long as they insist that they themselves are not racists, and their deeds back that up (or at least don't contradict it). It doesn't mean, David Duke, that I'm going to vote for them for president. But in the interest of being non-judgmental, if it doesn't help end racism by me believing in my heart that Michael Richards is a racist, why would I want to? Why should I feel compelled to?

My Brain is Like Oatmeal

2006-11-15T15:08:00.000-06:00

I feel bad, yet intrigued: my frequency of posting has decayed almost perfectly exponentially since I started the 'dlog.

Is it harder to apologize when you don't mean it, or to forgive someone who is unapologetic?

A dracula stood at a billiards table. His face was bathed in a sunbeam that penetrated the window. It was pleasant to him. He cracked his knuckles, as he had since his youth, and noted the absence of arthritis in his digits. Near to victory in the game, he gallantly approached his ultimate shot. He carelessly fired the cue ball, which missed the eight ball entirely and rolled into a nearby pocket. This did not dismay him as his less talented opponent, Rick, would likely not win the ongoing game this turn, and he would get another chance. The local Texas sun tea had so delighted the dracula that he had drunk too much, so he pissed in a nearby toilet. On flushing, he admired the clockwise-swirling maelstrom of the yellowed water. When he returned, Rick had accidentally pocketed the eight ball. Rick smiled at the dracula, and said, “OK, you win, with an axe to Rick.” The dracula was puzzled, but, thirsty for something other than tea, he honored his opponent’s request.

Is it better to slog through or to take a break?

Yours in tolerance,

John

p.s. This is my review for every Kevin Smith movie: if I want to hear banter, I visit a friend.