Alpha Sierra Juliet

Day 4 Of My Captivity

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 28 Oct 2016 13:32:00 -0400

Due to a combination of extremely unfortunate scheduling conflicts and surprising velocity in modern Mac porting, Civilization VI has been sitting on my laptop, unplayed, for the last 4 days.

The guard, Firaxis, continues to taunt me. Late in the night he awoke me from my restless slumber to show me the new opening credits. "Yes, Arthur, that is your favorite Character Actor / Typecast Double-Crosser, Sean Bean." I marvel at the subtlety of Christopher Tin's "Sogno di Volare". As my tears well at the sight of the astronaut blasting into space with her photograph of CGI Sean Bean taped to the dashboard, Firaxis slams the laptop shut. "What is permitted to others is not permitted to you." I scurry back into the darkness of my cell, and dream of Domination Victory...

I hope the rest of you are enjoying One More Turn, and more fervently, I hope I am able to join you very soon.

City Living 3

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 16:38:00 -0400

Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBE, writing about Death's unique perspective on city life. Death obviously speaks in all caps, to denote his place on the autism spectrum:

THIS IS THE CITY, BOY, said Death. WHAT DO YOU THINK? “It’s very big,” said Mort, uncertainly. “I mean, why does everyone want to live all squeezed together like this?” Death shrugged. I LIKE IT, he said. IT’S FULL OF LIFE.

The motto written upon Terry Pratchet's coat of arms (#OBEProblems) is:

Noli Timere Messorem

Don't fear the reaper.

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Tue, 8 Mar 2016 10:27:00 -0500

Competence Porn - This one comes from the venerable technology site Ars Technica as a catchall for our collective admiration of every smart, innovative ass-kicker in fiction from Ulysses to Ellen Ripley. On the one hand the idiom is a good reminder that competence porn is not competency, just as pornography is not sex. On the other hand there are far worse things to fantasize about than being competent, and a generation that seeks to emulate Mark Watney over John Holmes is a generation that inspires confidence.

New merch is coming to the store soon, so get ready to Mars-Rock the Vote… pic.twitter.com/VCOs6Sbano
— SarcasticRover (@SarcasticRover) February 24, 2016
Nobody ever got fired for _____ - In the tech industry the traditional form of this idiom is "Nobody ever got fired buying IBM equipment", a recognition of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD)¹ created by IBM in the 1970's to enforce their monopolistic position in computer hardware. The fear of being fired for defying IBM's death grip was Very Real², as was its counterpart in the 1990's of blaspheming the Microsoft orthodoxy, and the advice was a career cautionary tale of Making It in business in that era. With the eventual decline of IBM at the hands of smaller, lither competition and the disastrous fall of many of IBM's core technology offerings, the elephant in the room was the fact that many of IBM's own employees were fired because of the decisions made by market monopolists at Big Blue who had been blinded to their internal bloat by their own FUD and by the lack of market signaling the climate of fear created. Today the idiom takes on that irony, and when spoken is (hopefully) a different cautionary tale of being overly fearful of at the prospect of losing your job when making controversial decisions that you know are right in the face of commonly accepted market dominance. Conversely, when spoken unironically the idiom serves as a handy shibboleth to inform the listener that they are speaking to a coward.
Choice of Protein - Had to throw in a food-related language gripe. The notion that there are more protein-rich foods out there than the usual complement of red, white, or sea-based meats is legitimate and should be captured in our fast-casual food menus (clearly Chipotle's beans and seitan are our go-tos here), but there's still something overly specific about even this generalization of food choices. Dietary fads are infantilizing in their pseudo-scientific smugness, and trifling in their desperate trendiness, with the obsession about high protein meals being no exception. Are we not adult enough, with a long enough view of history, to simply say "Choice of Ingredient"?

FUD can also be found in Eric S. Raymond's (ESR) Jargon File, between "fuck me harder" and "FUD wars", and the "idiom watch" vein of this blog, along with other topics, can clearly be seen to have drawn influence from ESR. (How's that for passive voice, MS Word 97?)

So real in fact, that the AMC television show "Halt and Catch Fire" devotes their entire first season to it.

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 11 Dec 2015 13:40:00 -0500

Checks out - Many great idioms tend to involve an irony that measures the difference between the importance of what is being said against the ephemeral nature of the topic at hand. "Checks out" is no exception, and the joke involved in suggesting that "I researched the offhanded comment you just made thoroughly, and would like add my extremely scientific evaluation of your bon mot to the discussion in order to bolster your argument," gets at least a chuckle if not a literal laugh out loud every time.

Sadly I don't have any other idioms on the radar, I just didn't want 2015 to go by without any posts going on the record. If this blog starts to look like my resume, I'm going to have to hire an archeologist to figure out what the hell I was thinking during the twenty-teens. ("Checks out.")

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 14:16:00 -0500

You want what you want when you want it. - This phrase is often used to express sympathy to someone who may or may not be getting what they want at a given time, saying "Yes, it's understandably frustrating that you can't get what you want right now, because you want what you want when you want it and if you get it any later than that you will get what you want, but you will still be perfectly justified in being less satisfied than if you got it when you originally wanted it." Taken as such you can of course use the phrase sincerely or ironically, perhaps the person is in no way justified in their dissatisfaction, or should just suck it up and take what they want when they can get it, but the explicit or inverted meaning of the phrase is clear depending on the sarcasm leveled.

The sideways meaning that prompted an Idiom Watch however is the implication hidden in a slightly different grammatical interpretation. What if you are the type of person who wants something when they want it, but often no longer wants it any time thereafter? What does this mean about you as a person? That your desires are entirely time-sensitive? Perhaps, which again could be a justifiable position in many cases (someone in need of a heart transplant could justifiably be said to want what they want when they want it). On the other hand, perhaps you are just the kind of person who has fleeting desires, and if you don't get what you want when you want it then the desire flees and you're not much worse for not having gotten something you wanted an hour ago.

A third option is that you have not fleeting, but rather powerful and fluctuating desires. The desire doesn't run from you when the clock strikes another hour passed, but it looks different than it did an hour ago. Maybe the person offering something to you then has made you a new proposal, the alternative they proposed an hour ago looks more desirable with an hour's thought, or you were just downright wrong in wanting the thing and could only learn it with reflection. Getting what you want when you want it then can even pose a risk of not get what you ultimately want.

A person who wants what they want when they want it then has three possible outcomes in descending order of satisfaction. If they have strong, temporal desires, they will often be dissapointed by delays. If they have fleeting desires, they can never experience lasting contentment. And if they have powerful but fluctuating desires, they will strongly favor things they wanted then at the expense of better things they could have gotten now.

"Guardians of the Galaxy" -or- Shut The Fuck Up

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 8 Aug 2014 12:48:00 -0400

I loved "Guardians". I wish I could just drop the mic right there, but so many people are saying so many stupid things about this terrific movie that now I feel obligated to bash heads and spit venom. Herewith, a list of the top 10 complaints (rights reserved to add more) about the film and why you should shut the fuck up about them:

"You mean the racoon movie?"
Yes motherfucker, the movie set in space, in a multi-species galaxy necessitating faster than light travel, implying a vast multiplicity of technology trees and their disparate outcomes including, but not limited to, genetic-cybernetic augmentation of lower life forms. This has poignant implications that they address in the fucking film directly. STFU.
"Why bother casting Bradley Cooper if you aren't going to use him?"
Motherfucker, why are you making me say this? I'm not the Defend Bradley Cooper Guy! Fine, I'll say it: Bradley Cooper is more than just a pretty face. He's a pretty decent actor, and in this movie he does a damn fine bit of voice acting. He's also the funniest fucking character in a movie starring Chris Pratt, so STFU.
"The guy from Parks and Rec?"
Yes. The funniest fucking lead actor in America right now. See also "The Lego Movie" and STFU.
"Isn't he just playing Han Solo? This whole thing sounds very Star Wars."
OMFG STFU! There can be more than one space movie! NOTHING ABOUT THIS FILM IS LIKE STAR WARS!!! Except for the bit between Rocket and Groot, I'll give you that one. But then I'm taking it right back because fuck you, it's also narratively appropriate that Rocket is hyper intelligent enough to understand Groot's inflections and speaks to their deeper bond.
"And why is John C. Reilly in this?"
Because he's fucking hilarious. Why the fuck not? I'll concede that it's odd that Vin Diesel was so excited to reprise such a limited role as the Iron Giant in tree form, but seriously STFU about the casting, it's all gravy. Karen Gillan is fully legit, Bautista held up his corner, and Michael Rooker is always a pleasure. Hell, even Zoe Saldana was strangely magnetic.
"Fine, then what was up with all the music?"
It was great, it made narrative sense, it grounded the film (which again, to remind you, was set in space, in a galaxy far the fuck away, but we already covered the Star Wars thing) for the audience, it served well as a character device and plot driver. Next question, or do I need to tell you to STFU again?
"Yeah but they already used that one song in "Reservoir Dogs"."
Shut the fuck up.
"And that other song was in "Boogie Nights"."
You are a fucking moron. Do you understand what the use of pop songs in film is for? See answers 6 and 7.
"Okay, okay, okay... you're right. But there's too much exposition."
Now you're just saying "too much exposition" because you always say that about any kind of movie that isn't about two middle class white Americans of opposite sex on present day Earth being physically attracted to each other in a fashionable American city for 30 minutes, having a minor miscommunication, fighting and lying to each other about that miscommunication for 45 minutes, and then reconciling without ever resolving any of their core differences for 15 more. Was that too much exposition?
Seriously go fuck yourself with this one. The team behind this movie trimmed down 4 decades of acid-fueled, cosmic, comic book crackpottery into 122 minutes of action packed, comedic, movie-going gold, and you're complaining about the 5 minutes they took to set up an easy to follow plotline about an errant warlord gone rogue?
"Yeah, I didn't get that part. Why does Ronan hate the Nova Core? And what's an Infinity Stone? Who's Thanos? Why is that lady pink and that one blue? What's with the big skull? Who put the----"
ARGH GHGH GHGARF SLKG HJFS:L BHOS{DA HGRBFJS SHUT THE FUCK UP!@#!%! #%$^&$ !%$&#*&!% #*$%&^ @!* #&!@^)$_
Seriously, can you even hear yourself? Too much exposition or NOT ENOUGH? What the fuck do you want? WHO BEAT THIS MUCH STUPID INTO YOU? SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

Virtual and Augmented Realities

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 16:51:00 -0500

The old metaphor of the internet as a "place", or cyberspace, comes from science fiction notions of a virtual reality that is separate from the real one. When we enter cyberspace, as imagined through cumbersome means like virtual reality goggles, haptic feedback devices, or more typically and coarsely through keyboard, mice, and computer screens, we leave our current reality and enter into a place other than the one we normally inhabit. This virtual travel comes with costs akin to real world travel: load times, fidelity degradation, jet lag.

By contrast the new metaphor of the mobile internet, the social internet, the distributed internet, is not virtual reality or cyberspace, but rather augmented reality. One need not leave the real world any longer to experience the powerful forces of technology applied to daily life, one need only look down at a mobile device, look through a set of reality enhancing glasses, or connect to one's data streams though an internet ready kiosk. One doesn't go to Facebook, one checks Facebook, checks into a real place with Foursquare, orders a cab with Uber, logs the drinking of a beer with Untappd, Tweets, (Google) Hangs out, and performs all sorts of other tasks and interactions through the use of Internet enabled technologies without ever going "there".

Social technologies like phreaker "party" lines, IRC chat "rooms", and Second-Life virtual "properties" are all places that require a buy-in akin to make believe or fantasy role-playing for the experience to be of value. This transaction cost has been largely eliminated by higher and higher fidelity communication methods (audio, video, collaboration tools), and with it the need for "place-ness" as a crutch to the believeability of the social experience. With today's technology, users feel comfortable being in the place they are in while experiencing a social interaction with someone 2000 miles away. They can see them on the screen, they receive constant SMS updates from them on their phone, they watch them typing into a shared Google Doc. The social interaction is seamless without the need for the metaphor of physical proximity, without the need for place.

This trend away from virtual reality and towards augmented reality is inexorable, even for those of us who are not leading on the cutting edge of technologies that will draw it closer. Technologists that can grab hold of this metaphor now will be better prepared for it's ubiquity in the near term.

For further reading on this topic, pick up literally anything ever written by William Gibson.

The NSA, Bruce Schneier, and the Bottom Line

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 14:19:00 -0500

Because one can never say enough about Bruce Schneier.

The NSA secretly inserting back doors into standards-based encryption algorithms and enforcing compromising security practices on US businesses has undoubtedly already had, and will continue to have, a negative impact on the bottom line of those businesses. US privacy laws are behind other competitive nations and this makes it difficult for US companies to upgrade the privacy standards of their data security policies to meet the needs of global customers. Legally enforced crippling of these security policies and technologies only further widens that gap, putting US businesses further in the lurch.

The undeniable fact of the matter is that any backdoor in any cryptosystem is available to the creator of the backdoor and to anyone else who figures out the backdoor is there. So even if one believes the NSA has a duty to protect US citizens by disabling security systems around their data and spying on them, one still has to admit that this opens US citizens up to being spied upon by clever foreign intelligence agencies and increasingly clever organized criminals getting into the cyber insecurity game.

Most tech folks and many politically inclined citizens at least sort of know who Bruce Schneier is, but in case they don't he's a famous cryptographer who wrote the book on applied cryptography (conveniently titled Applied Cryptography) and became internet-famous after the terrorist attacks of 2001-09-11 for criticizing the "security theater" that constituted the bulk of the federal government's domestic response. Predictably enough he's been all over the Snowden leaks like white on rice, including assisting Glenn Greenwald the lead Guardian journalist working with Snowden in working through the best practices of handling Snowden data and explaining the technical implications of the leaks in the Guardian:

Schneier writing for the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/bruceschneier

Schneier's blog, a must read for anyone interested in technology, security, politics, or People Taking Things Seriously:

https://www.schneier.com/

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 07:30:00 -0400

Heroic assumptions - This one I hear a lot from people who are skeptical of the ability to draw actionable conclusions from statistical analysis: your black swan theorists, your big data naysayers, your typical principled cynics with a sense of humor. They admire the heroism of the hard work and intellectual acumen demonstrated in attempts to elevate soft science to exact science, but recognize that the most significant findings require some assumptive leaps. It's a smirking form of appreciation because they still don't quite buy it, "But keep it up there, champ!"
Tuck into - I'm going to stop apologizing for all the food idioms. This one is probably inoffensive to me (unlike other gustatory sayings) because of it's foreign roots (tuck shops, etc). You hear it in the States, but as often as not in the context of a beef stew or a shepherd's pie, and latent Anglophilia of my American nerd upbringing takes over. I say tuck away.

Recruiter's Advocate & Engineer Arbitrage

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 15:42:00 -0400

Recruiters have a reputation in the tech community for being annoying, overbearing, backstabbing, overly-forward, uninformed, loose-lipped, technically ignorant, spam-prone, conversationally dull, would-be pimps who would sell their own mothers into prostitution (or an equally debased QA position) if it meant an extra commission for a placement. The premature demise of many an engineer's LinkedIn account has oft been blamed on the overwhelming barrage of recruitment offers from these so-called parasites living off the wages of the people doing all the work. Not to mention that awkward moment at every tech MeetUp when the one sheepish engineer left in the room (the rest, being engineers, having gone to the bar) looks up to find themself surrounded exclusively by salivating recruiters ready to wolf down 20% of their next year's salary. This reputation is no doubt well deserved, but if I may play Devil's Advocate for a moment, the proliferation of recruiters in the tech community is due to an arbitrage situation we as employees and employers created.

Recruiters are a form of traditional merchant, sailing from the far east ports of expos and hackathons back to the eager bazaars of Jobvite and HR departments to hawk their wares in front of eager hiring managers. They buy low, finding underpaid, underappreciated, underrepresented talent hidden away in the windowless dungeons of the first companies to flash them a paycheck, and they sell high to new employers who have finally realized their dire need for the expertise required to try turning it on and off again, shave the yak, or [_____] all the things. The supply of people with expertise in this or any other STEM field is low, as anyone will tell you, and yet many engineers are still paid well below their potential salaries. With the market for hiring new engineers paying one price, and the market for employing existing engineers paying another, the arrival of arbitrageurs is inevitable; enter the Dread Recruiter.

Why are recruiters dreaded so? Someone out there is still hiring their next employee from a recruiter. It's like wondering aloud and with fearful disdain why the quality of beef in a McDonald's hamburger hasn't improved in the past decade of organic this and probiotic that, only to look down and find a double quarter pounder in your hand. It was there, and you were hungry! Even so, it's clear why employers dislike recruiters: recruiters capture a commission on top of a candidate's salary, and in performing this arbitrage function they are incentivized to raise the salary of the employee higher than any employer would otherwise volunteer to pay. Unless the recruiter is brokering a higher salary, the engineer has little incentive to switch jobs. Employers still need to find engineers, and they'd be happier not to pay recruiters on top of paying engineers more to switch, but at the end of the day they are still happy to get the engineer in their door at a higher price than their competitor was paying them given the limited supply. After all, employers are making even more money by selling the goods and services produced by this limited pool of engineers.

So then why do engineers dread recruiters? Engineers don't hate raises, and they are discerning enough not to take jobs they will hate if the tradeoffs aren't worthwhile, but they will mark a recruiter's LinkedIn invite as spam faster than they will a cold calling vendor offering free entry into an iPod raffle with every purchase. What engineers really don't like is wasting their time on extraneous conversations with people they don't know (or sometimes even with people they do know). They're the ones who listened when their parents told them not to talk to strangers, and maybe, as with many other things in their lives, took it a step farther than most. They've also taken Adam Smith's division of labor to heart, and become highly specialized in communication regarding their jobs. Can a recruiter help them solve the load balancer SSL problem they are working on? Can a recruiter tell them about a new development in motherboard bus speeds? What is the recruiter's opinion on the relative merits of Haskell vs Scala? These are conversations that interest engineers; this is efficient communication. Efficiency is priority number one, recruiters. Because waste is a thief.

Recruiters have at least one thing right though: engineers are underpaid. Engineers are not ones to actively seek out interviews or passively accept communication from recruiters that will help them increase their own market value. The market for engineers, to abuse an economist's term, is not clearing. This is largely due to the aforementioned lack of supply, but supply is forever linked to demand. Demand is expressed in this market by the employer's willingness to pay, and underpayment of engineers is potentially a root cause of the much lamented lack of STEM graduates and job applicants. As the Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager pointed out in N+1's Diary Of A Very Bad Year:

Finance started sucking people from all over. You'd walk around our trading floor and there were guys who were math Ph.D.s and physics PhD.s, ... The bubble in financial assets had a derivative bubble in people. There was a misallocation of financial resources and a misallocation of people resources. [The bubble bursting]'s a good thing, you know? Some of these physicists should be doing physics; some of these computer scientists should be doing computer science.

This misallocation of labor resources described by the Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager is even less efficient than engineers talking to recruiters, and at some level engineers know this as well. They know it when they see the proliferation of employees in their organization that don't appear to do anything. They know it when they see entire businesses that don't appear to produce any value. They know it when they read about an entire economy in the throes of an inflating or deflating economic bubble caused by the inefficient allocation of resources and labor at a mass scale. But what can just one engineer ever hope to do? What can they do to pull the world's economies away from the path of another bubble / burst recession? What can they do to solve the STEM education crisis? What can they do just to get recruiters to stop calling them?

They can ask for a raise.

Further Reading:

Nathen Harvey suggests engineers Quit Their Jobs to achieve similar results (or at least go on more interviews).
Dave Zweibeck suggests engineers become their own recruiters by taking the long view and ...drumroll... help each other find better jobs.

Chronological Ethnocentrism

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Sun, 3 Mar 2013 20:00:00 -0500

The ideology of progress amounts to a chronological form of ethnocentrism. -James W. Loewen

A friend of mine often remarks that they are rarely captured by fiction writing, instead preferring nonfiction for its edifying properties. In these discussions I unfailingly counter with the argument that fiction offers a unique form of knowledge that comparatively dry books on math, science, or philosophy rarely do: information modeling in the form of illuminating metaphor and allegory. I'm known to recommend speculative fiction in particular for it's unique ability to smoothly integrate topics of interest like technology, politics, and metaphysics into these metaphorical models of potential outcomes. Stories that involve time travel, alternate dimensions, or a combination of the two are doubly (triply? infinitely?) suited to aid the learning process for their ability to observe a given model from as many different facets as there are wave functions to collapse into a narrative¹.

The final season (spoiler alert) of the J. J. Abrams produced television series "Fringe" (which incorporates alternate dimensions and time travel to an above average degree of success) posits a far future in which humanity picks up where evolution leaves off and follows a course of self-directed genetic "progress" to a level of apex-predation that spans universes and timelines. Some might say humanity started this process the moment we grabbed up the femur and started smashing tapir skulls with any kind of self awareness, but that's a discussion for another time. What's relevant in the "Fringe" plot-arc is that the primitive, present-day human protagonists of the series resist invasion, subjugation, and replacement at the hands of their time-traveling, dimension-hopping, lebensraum-seeking descendants in spite of the apparent progress their own species has made. They reject the argument that simply because future versions of themselves exist and are vastly superior in many obvious ways that they should therefor roll over and accept these descendants as their betters. They reject a chronological form of ethnocentrism.

In the series the protagonists are rewarded for their pugnacious spirit with the discovery of an even more superior future version of humanity without all the patricidal tendencies that, with a just a bit more time travel, can take the place of the bad guys in The Darkest Timeline² and save humanity from a nightmarish dystopia. What's interesting to imagine however, is if the villains had not expressed such obvious antagonisms (time-colonialism, failure to emote, head a'splodin') and were instead simply mild mannered future versions of all of us set on a collision course of no one's design. If looked at from another facet, this is in fact exactly what happens, but the collision course is the simple progress of time and the replacement of one second with the next, one life lived with another born, and the slow erosion of one era's morality with another's. How could any rag tag group of protagonists defend their ideals against the inevitable march of time?

The introductory quote suggests one answer: a reconsideration of the idea of progress. Explaining the implications of revisionist history in American textbooks, Mr. Loewen wrote in his work of popular anthropology "Lies My Teacher Told Me":

Besides fostering ignorance of past societies, belief in progress makes students oblivious to merit in present-day societies other than our own. ... Ethnocentric faith in progress in Western culture has had disastrous consequences. People who believed in their society as the vanguard of the future, the most progressive on earth, have been all too likely to indulge in such excessive cruelties as the Pequot massacre, Stalin's purges, the Holocaust, or the Great Leap Forward.

Much ink was spilled in the last decade lamenting an increase in partisanship, often ascribed to the loss of impartial writing in modern media. Journalists wrote as if a halcyon era that began with Woodward and Bernstein were coming to a close with the end of the network and print news oligarchies at the hands of the comparatively anarchic Internet. Other media observers heeded Mr. Loewen, hearkened back to journalism's yellow past and the brutal politics of prior eras, and pronounced the cycles of partisan and impartial media as entirely normal given a modicum of (accurate) historical perspective. Today, participants in the debate about the merits and degree of modern partisanship seem to agree on at least one thing: moral relativism is a thing of the past³. Ideological proponents may disagree bitterly about their vision of progress, but they agree that theirs should be the one to win out in the end.

Beware the End Of History!

The worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. -Francis Fukuyama

If any ethos ever truly wins out, it blankets not just some large area or volume of human space, but some long epoch of human time as well. We may not experience the boredom Fukuyama hoped might rekindle a lively debate, we may simply change our core selves to better suit the winning ideology. From the lens of multiple backstories (pasts), universes (presents), and plotlines (futures), each party's morality is another protagonist armed with a fighting chance to resist a tyrannical outcome. Today your ideological foe may drive you to froth at the mouth and flail at your radio dial, but tomorrow they are a potential ally against a grinding monoculture intent on snuffing the both of you out of the history books. Or against time traveling telekinetics. Can't rule them out either.

Anathem, Neal Stephenson's incomparable novel on quantum mechanics and the clash of philosophies in and against the secular world, is perhaps the best example of this phenomena. It is the underlying source of this post as well, I simply did not feel qualified to write about it at length without at least a third read through.
A satirical examination of short run moral decision making via multiple timelines can be found in an episode of the television show "Community" entitled "Remedial Chaos Theory".
The final prompt in the writing of this post was the recent This American Life episode on gang violence in and around Harper High School in Chicago, where Officer Aaron Washington remarked: "There is no neutrons anymore. It used to be if you play sports, or you were academically better than the average kid, [gangs] didn't bother you. Now it's different. It doesn't matter. If you live here, you're part of them."

Endorsing the City

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Wed, 5 Sep 2012 19:04:00 -0400

For anyone interested in seeing a reurbanization of the American landscape, Stanley Kurtz's recent OP/ED in Forbes Magazine "How Obama Is Robbing The Suburbs To Pay For The Cities" is a ringing endorsement of President Obama's reelection campaign:

Once voters realize that there has never been a president more ideologically opposed to the suburbs, or more reliant on redistribution as a policy, they should know what to do.

As with most ink spilled opposite the editorial page, the piece is tragically empty of facts supporting these pie-in-the-sky, would-be campaign promises like:

"an initiative to systematically redistribute the wealth of America’s suburbs to the cities"
"policies designed to coerce people out of their cars"
"take from the suburbanites to give to the urban poor"
"quit building sub-divisions and malls"

Too bad for Obama! Having your staunchest ideological enemies talking up your political prowess and mastery of urban planning is the kind of get Democrats rarely luck into under their own steam. When was the last time any Democrat promised a platform so boldly progressive, or any of their constituents believed those promises as passionately as Mr. Kurtz believes in Obama?

But enough about the professionally outraged class, the bizarre sense of entitlement they hold so dear, and their world-class ability to theorize conspiracies. What's so great about the cities? After all, as Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissmann point out in a recent article for The New Republic "The Cheapest Generation", cities seem to be responsible for an entire generation of Americans abandoning the endless business cycles of the disposable auto, hotel, and fashion industries:

The emergence of the “sharing economy”—services that use the Web to let companies and families share otherwise idle goods—is headlined by Zipcar, but it also involves companies such as Airbnb, a shared marketplace for bedrooms and other accommodations for travelers; and thredUP, a site where parents can buy and sell kids’ used clothing.

And don't even get them started about what these selfishly possessionless Millenials are doing to the real estate industry!

If the Millennials are not quite a post-driving and post-owning generation, they’ll almost certainly be a less-driving and less-owning generation. That could mean some tough adjustments for the economy over the next several years. In recent decades, the housing industry has usually led us out of recession. When the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in the midst of the sharp recession of the early 1980s, for instance, a construction boom helped fuel the “Reagan Recovery.” With the housing market moribund, the Federal Reserve has lost a key means of influencing the economy with lower interest rates. The service-led recovery we’ve gotten instead is not nearly as robust.

Damn you kids, buy my lawn! After all, the construction boom that fueled the GOP's dreams of an "ownership society" and the financial sector's love affair with sub-prime real estate markets didn't cause our current Great Recession, it simply provided the majority of the air released from the bubble that preceded it. So if they aren't going to buy the cars or prop up the next housing bubble, er, market, how does this new generation plan to feed the financial sector's endless need for lightly taxed capital gains?

Economic research shows that doubling a community’s population density tends to increase productivity by anywhere between 6 percent and 28 percent. Economists have found that more than half of the variation in output per worker across U.S. states can be explained by density. Our wealth, after all, is determined not only by our own skills and talents, but by our ability to access the ideas of those around us; there’s a lot to be gained by increasing the odds that smart people might bump against each other. Ultimately, if the Millennial generation pushes our society toward more sharing and closer living, it may do more than simply change America’s consumption culture; it may put America on firmer economic footing for decades to come.

As Mr. Kurtz says, you "should know what to do."

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 23:35:00 -0400

Inside baseball - I can't tell if I like this one because it is always used in the context of some secret knowledge (the best knowledge!), or if the idiom has inherent worth. After all, I am not the biggest baseball fan in the world (ChiSox!), but any kind of respect paid to those who would study a field to within an inch of ridicule has a tip of the hat and five on it from me.
Hit the spot - Again with the food idioms, I know. What is the spot? Is it the bullseye of your consumptive target? What happens when you hit it? Are you supposed to feel some sense of satisfaction, as though you had trained yourself over time through repetitive practice sessions to find exactly the right combination and amount of foodstuffs to satisfy your dietary needs? If so then by all means, because that sounds laudable now that I've written it out, but this phrase is far more often uttered in response to less condonable desires.

City Living 2

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 9 Mar 2012 16:19:00 -0500

Alec Baldwin reads Colson Whitehead's "Lost and Found":

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I read this piece for the first time back during the 10th anniversary recap in September when folks were linking to articles written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It's got two of my favorite quotes about urban living that apply equally well to New York as they do to any city:

You are [from a place] the first time you say, ''That used to be _____''

And this quote about change, maturation, acceptance, and / or forgiveness:

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us. To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. The kid on the uptown No. 1 train, the new arrival stepping out of Grand Central, the jerk at the intersection who doesn't know east from west: those people don't exist anymore, ceased to be a couple of apartments ago, and we wouldn't have it any other way. New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy.

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 2 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

That's my speed - You instantly picture Steve McQueen in place of whoever utters this phrase, and he's a cool dude who drives fast (which is itself a cool thing to do), so you want to match his speed. That's what separates this phrase from generic "I like ____" statements: it implicitly invites the listener to agreement, if only they would step on the gas to catch up, or equally, one supposes, the brakes to chill out.
Walking around money - Nothing says class like old timey political grift, and this phrase connotes the fattest of ward bosses doling out dollars in exchange for votes on the correct side of the ballot. Try it out on your partner the next time you need a couple bills from your (ultimately, if not explicitly) shared bank account but forgot to swing by the ATM before meeting them at the bar, and see if it doesn't put a smile in the corner of their mouth.

SOPA / PIPA and the 2012-01-18 Blackout

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:49:00 -0500

Here's a form letter I created that you can feel free to adopt for you own usage:

Dear Senator / Congress Person _____ ['s legislative aid],

I'm writing today about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), but now I'm annoyed that your office doesn't even have a "Topic" on your contact page for Technology. I imagine this is an outcropping of the same lack of technological awareness that has lead our Most Deliberative Body to unanimous past support for the horrendous Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). I can only assume it is this chronic misunderstanding of America's high tech economy that now prepares support for SOPA / PIPA, without regard for the underlying structure of the internet that everyone claims to value so highly as the source of our nation's future revenues. As a _____ professional at _____ that greatly benefits from unrestricted, uncensored internet access, I can only say that I am figuratively shocked and literally appalled that this kind of legislation has gotten so far, especially given the lip service paid by politicians to the "job creators" in the technology sector. If Congress truly values the creation of 21st century jobs, if the Democrats really want to "Win the Future" (seriously, whoever came up with that slogan watched way too much "X-Files"), then lobbyist fodder like SOPA / PIPA should never live to see the light of day outside of its authors' offices on K-Street.

To quote the most useful source of general knowledge every created in the history of mankind, Wikipedia, on this the day of their historic (and heroic) blackout:

SOPA and PIPA cripple the free and open internet. They put the onus on website owners to police user-contributed material and call for the blocking of entire sites, even if the links are not to infringing material. Small sites will not have the sufficient resources to mount a legal challenge. Without opposition, large media companies may seek to cut off funding sources for small competing foreign sites, even if big media are wrong. Foreign sites will be blacklisted, which means they won't show up in major search engines.
I wholeheartedly agree, and I hope your office does as well. These bills don't need to be 'adjusted', they need to be torn up. The content cartels in Hollywood and elsewhere don't need any further anti-competitive protections, or any more custom written laws from their lobbyists straight into the law books; they need new business models. New technology, not new laws, will save the wages of our artists and content producers. Bills like the DMCA, CTEA, SOPA, PIPA, et al, can do nothing but stifle our greatest innovators in a blind effort to save a stagnant oligopoly chronically uninterested in changing it's ways to meet producer or consumer demands.

Thank you for your service to the great State of _____, and to the United States of America,

_____

Occupation

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 7 Oct 2011 23:01:00 -0400

Oddly enough, today I was mistaken for someone who doesn't support the Occupy Wall Street movement. While it is certainly true that I am pushing the boundary of heart versus head, I was still taken aback by this mischaracterization. I don't believe that OWS will be the start of any lasting reforms, I don't believe it will tip the scales in any relevant election cycles, and I don't believe that most of its constituents even really understand (much less agree upon) what it is they are protesting. In spite of those beliefs, I think a populist movement advocating economic solidarity between 99% of the American populace can be counted as a Good Thing™.

It is always easy to make fun of people who care, who warm to a topic or movement and expose themselves as uncool by definition. The rebel without a cause would never join any movement that would have him. To be sure, I was among the many who saw the Tea Party protests against Wall Street's partners in crime in Washington and took cheap shots, variations of which are now deservedly aimed at the hodgepodge of conflicting interest groups currently camped out in lower Manhattan. False equivalence aside however, the Tea Party was clearly the product of a sustained campaign by the wealthy influential class, in control of their media outlets for hire, steering, nay shoveling, their avaricious anti-regulatory agenda down the gullible gullets of the electorate via the ever convenient vehicle of class outrage. Occupy Wall Street on the other hand is the typically weak sodded but undeniably grass roots movement of disparate leftist interests succeeding in spite of themselves to steer equally anarchic social media into a virtuous circle of attention that has culminated in something worthy of being called, in the words of Wikipedia, "Part of the impact of the Arab Spring".

Did the true populists in Tea Party think their movement was the one that would be welcomed into the broader global movement for justice? How naive must anyone be to think they've invented the freedom by themselves. Taken together however, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of a coin that deserves our respect. For all the gullibility, racism, and anarchy of the Tea Party, and all the stupidity, paternalism and ... anarchy of the OWS, there is an endemic problem to be addressed by every society on record, that of power. The concentration of power, be it in the religion wielding, land owning, title bearing, gun toting, gold hording, political office taking, money grabbing, or stock selling class, is the problem every generation must confront. And every generation gets to decide for themselves how they will find their voice to do so. In the immortal words of David Bowie:

These children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds,
They are immune to your consultations,
They're quite aware of what they're going through.

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:35:00 -0400

Generous portion - Maybe I just have a general problem with food-based idioms, but this one also bugs me. First of all, one can only give or receive a generous portion, otherwise from who's overflowing bounty stems this generosity? Greedy portion, sure. Take a greedy portion all day long for all I care. Let the language fit the crime! Otherwise talking about portion sizes in 20XX America can't help but raise the question, are your super-sized soda and fries really the products of Ray Kroc's generosity?
His nibs - This Britishism comes to me from a talking bird in the Iain M. Banks book Excession, who used the genderless form "its nibs" to draw attention to actions taken by a sentient spaceship that it considered haughty. Flippant, mocking, and prefuture. Does language get any better than that?

Revisionist History

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 20:37:00 -0400

"I'm just saying, if there is a Heaven, I don't want to go unless or until David Bowie is there." -Me, in a strange little note I wrote to myself in 2011.

Redistribution

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:16:00 -0400

This is the most universal argument for intelligent redistributive policies I've heard:

In a democracy if you don't attend to the interests of the poor in an efficient way you'll just end up attending to those same interests in a less efficient way.

It was made by Cornell economics professor Robert Frank on EconTalk, the flagship Hayek-tinged podcast hosted by Russ Roberts out of George Mason University's Library of Economics and Liberty, which is to say in a context that demanded of anyone making arguments for redistribution that they make them as universally attractive as possible. As someone who has longed believed in the moral and fiscal efficacy of attending to the interests of the poor, and who is personally and professionally obsessed with efficiency, it immediately struck a cord with me. Clearly it leaves open the general question of paternalism, but on the other hand it cuts very close to the quick of the immediate situation we face in America. If we must suffer these heated public policy debates, shouldn't we at least be able to count efficiency as common ground?

Idiom Watch

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:00:00 -0400

I can be a little peevish about my idioms, but I consider it to be a personal problem. If you are reading this, your problem is that you are about to read a list of words that I find pleasing or displeasing, but if I am known to you personally then at least you will be able to recognize the source of an occasional errant smile or grimace alighting my face during conversation.

Wonk - This word has come to take the place of nerd in certain polite circles ("public policy wonk"), apparently popularized in the polite circle of the Clinton Administration of the 1990s. While its necessity is somewhat offensive to my sensibilities (what's wrong, after all, with calling someone a nerd in the year 20xx?), I'm always pleased when people feel comfortable describing enthusiasm or expertise in a non-pejorative fashion.
A Taste For - There's a very specific usage of this phrase in discussing meal plans that I object to ("what do you have a taste for"), but it's a long standing visceral objection that I have had difficulty examining objectively. I can appreciate the usage of the phrase in other contexts ("a taste for the dramatic"), but perhaps it is that appreciation for it's idiomatic usage that makes me bristle when the metaphorical cuts to close to the literal. One should appreciate the taste of food, and have a taste for anything but food.

City Living

noreply@blogger.com (Arthur Jordan) — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:41:00 -0400

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, via Neal Town Stephenson, spoken by Holmes to Watson while discussing the dangers of the countryside:

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger.