Inspired by this tweet from Dave Weigel

Is this the real news?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in the cycle
No escape to reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see
I’m a swing voter (Poor boy)
I watch news on TV
Because I’m easy come, easy go
Polling high, polling low
Any way the wind blows
Doesn’t really matter to me, to me

Mama just saw a man
With a ballot in his hand
Pull a lever, take a stand.
Mama, the race has just begun
But now he’s gone and thrown it all away
Mama, ooh
Didn’t mean to make you cry
If I’ve not change my mind this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters

It’s too late, Glenn Beck has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Mind is aching all the time
Goodbye, everybody
I’ve got to go
Gotta leave the truth behind and live the lie.
Mama, oooooooh (Anyway the wind blows)
I don’t want to choose
Sometimes wish I’d never been given the vote

[Guitar Solo]

I see a little silhouetto of a man
Ezra Klein! Ezra Klein! Will you do the Fandango?
Thunderbolt and lightning, very, very frightening me
(Yglesias) Yglesias (Yglesias) Yglesias, Yglesias Figaro
Politico-o-o-o-o
I’m just a voter nobody loves me
He’s just a voter from a rich family
Spare him his life from this monstrosity

Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?
Dave Weigel! No, we will not let you go
Let him go
Dave Weigel! We will not let you go
Let him go
Dave Weigel! We will not let you go
Let me go (Will not let you go)
Let me go (Will not let you go) (Never, never, never, never)
Let me go, o, o, o, o
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
(Oh mama mia, mama mia) Mama Mia, let me go
Conspiracy! Have the Palins put aside for me, for me, for me!?

So you think you can sway me with ads that are fly?
So you think I will love you for ads that you buy?
Oh, baby, can’t do this to me, baby
Just gotta get out, just gotta get right outta here

[Guitar Solo]
(Oooh yeah, Oooh yeah)

Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters
Nothing really matters to me

Any way the wind blows…

But that MacBook Pro was getting old, so work got me a shiny new one with an i7 inside. Nice! I used the Migration Assistant and pulled all my stuff over from backup, and was off and computing in no time.

But then yesterday I opened InDesign and it told me I had to reactivate. Stupid Adobe. I went through the motions and it denied me because I needed to deactivate the old machine. I pulled it out and did so. Now, trying to activate the new machine game me a useful error message:

Repair 93:-4

Oh, of course. That means… who has any idea what that means?

Google told me it meant “invalid serial number,” but since I was reading the serial number off the box I doubted that that was correct.

I tried the obvious things like a reinstall, an uninstall and a reinstall, reading the readme and doing all the things it told me to do to uninstall, then a reinstall, etc. No dice.

This was 2am, so I went to bed and in the morning I called Adobe Support. The tech was bright and chipper as he told me that CS2 wasn’t supported on Snow Leopard, but I could shell out $200 to get an upgrade to CS5. I was not amused.

So I started doing some more spelunking. I found a few more files to try deleting, but nothing seemed to help. Then I found an article on Adobe’s knowledge base that talked about setting permissions on /Library/Preferences/Adobe Systems/. I went over there and deleted the file entirely, relaunched, and activation went off without a hitch.

So if you’re seeing Repair 93:-4, just delete /Library/Preferences/Adobe Systems/ and relaunch; you should be good to go. If only their support line knew.

I looked over the results and decided that the methodology was a little suspect. Any category that had a large average distance weighed disproportionately into the results, so a good guess on hour (most people guessed late afternoon) or minute (which just had a huge spread) was a big boon. Similarly, results were pretty split between high-seven pound guesses and low-eight pound guesses, and because those were two different categories the much farther-off low-sevens were actually better in the game’s rules. I tried all sorts of averaging and grade-curving, but didn’t come up with anything that made the results more sensible without arbitrarily weighting some other category too heavily, so I stuck with the rules as written and present the results below, for the social network league, the work league, and the combined World Series.

Social Network League

Category Winners

• first name: Tie between Elizabeth Hess and Erin Sells, both off by 4.
• middle name: Gay Roby, off by 3
• pounds: Ben Roby, the only one to guess a correct 7
• ounces: Ben Roby, off by only 4
• inches: Andi Ardisone, off by only 0.6
• day: Gay Roby, the only one to guess the correct 18
• hour: Erin Sells, off by a mere 1
• minute: Ben Roby, off be only 7

Overall Winner

• Kairi’s new uncle Ben Roby

Ben Roby

• first name: guessed amelia, which was off by 5.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed elizabeth, which was off by 6.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 7, which was off by 0.0
• ounces: guessed 8, which was off by 4.0
• inches: guessed 16, which was off by 3.0
• day: guessed 20, which was off by 2.0
• hour: guessed 17, which was off by 16.0
• minute: guessed 23, which was off by 7.0
• total distance: 21.3541565040626

Gay Roby

• first name: guessed tiffany, which was off by 7.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed gail, which was off by 3.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 8, which was off by 1.0
• ounces: guessed 0, which was off by 12.0
• inches: guessed 21.75, which was off by 2.75
• day: guessed 18, which was off by 0.0
• hour: guessed 17, which was off by 16.0
• minute: guessed 23, which was off by 7.0
• total distance: 23.9491649123722

Andi Ardisone

• first name: guessed madison, which was off by 5.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed emma, which was off by 5.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 8, which was off by 1.0
• ounces: guessed 2, which was off by 10.0
• inches: guessed 19.6, which was off by 0.600000000000001
• day: guessed 23, which was off by 5.0
• hour: guessed 17, which was off by 16.0
• minute: guessed 27, which was off by 11.0
• total distance: 24.5633873885505

Elizabeth Hess

• first name: guessed olivia, which was off by 4.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed rose, which was off by 5.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 8, which was off by 1.0
• ounces: guessed 7, which was off by 5.0
• inches: guessed 20, which was off by 1.0
• day: guessed 22, which was off by 4.0
• hour: guessed 5, which was off by 4.0
• minute: guessed 43, which was off by 27.0
• total distance: 29.4957624075053

Erin Sells

• first name: guessed lauryn, which was off by 4.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed hannah, which was off by 4.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 8, which was off by 1.0
• ounces: guessed 2, which was off by 10.0
• inches: guessed 18, which was off by 1.0
• day: guessed 21, which was off by 3.0
• hour: guessed 0, which was off by 1.0
• minute: guessed 47, which was off by 31.0
• total distance: 33.7194306001747

Work Leauge

Category Winners

• first name: Kevin Hartsock, off by only 3
• middle name: Kevin Hartsock, with an exact match of Faith.
• pounds: Four Way Tie Between Mike Sheffey, Loren Bland, Nick Lassonde and Charlie Bosson. Epic Rock Paper Scissors War to ensue.
• ounces: Tie Between Nick Lassonde and Charlie Bosson. Epic Rock Paper Scissors War to ensue.
• inches: Loren Bland, off by a mere 0.3
• day: Kevin Hartsock, off by just 3
• hour: Charlie Bosson, off by 2
• minute: Tie Between Nick Lassonde and Charlie Bosson. Epic Rock Paper Scissors War to ensue.

Overall Winner

• Although Kevin Hartsock won both double-weighted name categories, the well-rounded guesses of Charlie Bosson win the day! Candy bar of his choice when next I am in the office!

Charlie Bosson

• first name: guessed aeioulz, which was off by 6.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed aeioumr, which was off by 6.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 7, which was off by 0.0
• ounces: guessed 10, which was off by 2.0
• inches: guessed 18, which was off by 1.0
• day: guessed 24, which was off by 6.0
• hour: guessed 3, which was off by 2.0
• minute: guessed 23, which was off by 7.0
• total distance: 15.4272486205415

Kevin Hartsock

• first name: guessed maria, which was off by 3.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed faith, which was off by 0.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 8, which was off by 1.0
• ounces: guessed 3, which was off by 9.0
• inches: guessed 20.1, which was off by 1.1
• day: guessed 21, which was off by 3.0
• hour: guessed 12, which was off by 11.0
• minute: guessed 5, which was off by 11.0
• total distance: 18.7672587236389

Nick Lassonde

• first name: guessed pink, which was off by 4.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed shrimp, which was off by 5.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 7, which was off by 0.0
• ounces: guessed 10, which was off by 2.0
• inches: guessed 18, which was off by 1.0
• day: guessed 27, which was off by 9.0
• hour: guessed 17, which was off by 16.0
• minute: guessed 23, which was off by 7.0
• total distance: 21.7485631709315

Loren Bland

• first name: guessed jacklyn, which was off by 6.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed lainer, which was off by 4.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 7, which was off by 0.0
• ounces: guessed 4, which was off by 8.0
• inches: guessed 18.7, which was off by 0.300000000000001
• day: guessed 23, which was off by 5.0
• hour: guessed 21, which was off by 20.0
• minute: guessed 25, which was off by 9.0
• total distance: 25.9632432488701

Mike Sheffey

• first name: guessed madison, which was off by 5.0 (counts double)
• middle name: guessed anne, which was off by 4.0 (counts double)
• pounds: guessed 7, which was off by 0.0
• ounces: guessed 0, which was off by 12.0
• inches: guessed 20, which was off by 1.0
• day: guessed 27, which was off by 9.0
• hour: guessed 16, which was off by 15.0
• minute: guessed 35, which was off by 19.0
• total distance: 29.8998327754521

World Series

Category Winners

• first name: Kevin Hartsock, off by only 3
• middle name: Kevin Hartsock, with an exact match of Faith.
• pounds: Five Way Tie Between Ben Roby Mike Sheffey, Loren Bland, Nick Lassonde and Charlie Bosson.
• ounces: Tie Between Nick Lassonde and Charlie Bosson, off by 2.
• inches: Loren Bland, off by a mere 0.3
• day: Gay Roby, the only one to guess the correct 18
• hour: Erin Sells, off by a mere 1
• minute: Three Way Tie Between Ben Roby, Nick Lassonde and Charlie Bosson.

Overall Winner

• Charlie Bosson pulls through with his impressively small 15.4.

This Baby Game seeks to be the geekiest it can be. It’s powered by a Ruby script, it uses Levenshtein distances, and involves an eight-dimensional Euclidean space.

Players will submit guesses in each of these categories:

• First Name
• Middle Name
• Birth Weight in Integer Pounds
• Birth Weight in Ounces-Over-An-Integer-Pound
• Birth Length in Inches (fractions allowed)
• Day of the Month
• Hour of the Day (Military time)
• Minute of the Hour

The script then takes all the guesses and plots them in an eight-dimensional Euclidean space.

• The closest point in that space to the actual point created by the actual values will win.
  • That basically just means you should try to be close on everything
• The name guesses are double-weighted.
• To convert the strings into numbers we use the aforementioned Levenshtein distances, which measure the similarity of two strings by determining how many additions and subtractions are needed to turn the first string into the second string.

In this league, the winners only reward is gloating (I can’t yet email you a candy bar, but I am hard at work on the technology to do so).

Comment/Email/DM/Wallpost/StatusComment your guesses; we’ll see who comes out on top!

PS If you want a leg up, Mikayla Grace was due March 15th and was born the 18th; she was 7lbs 15oz, and was born at 3:57am

PPS I assure you that if we do have to pick a day to induce, we will absolutely be using this as a means to screw with the game

PPPS If you’re part of the work league, you can have new guesses in this league, or the same guesses in this league; Sonja and I just wanted to open it up to other people

But they’re important not because it defines what the device “can’t do”; in the fullness of time the App Store will likely bring us all sorts of new and interesting workarounds to the limitations.

Rather, the limitations are important because it delineates the boundaries of Apple’s concept of “what you do with your computer.” Look between the boundaries and see the shape inside, and note how different it is from the shape we had in old WIMPy designs.

Let’s contrast with netbooks. Netbooks are a vision of computing where the primary use case is web access, and your computer has little power. The shape between those boundaries fits snugly into the shape we had before it: netbooks do what we could do with our old computers, but less of it.

The iPhone has a different shape. You’re not ever going to write a novel on the thing, and you’re not going to create a new website from scratch. But it turns out that you can draw New Yorker covers with it. It allows new social networks and redefines how you interact with others. The shape of “iPhone computing” has lost some of the useful corners of the shape we were used to, but it has some large new areas that we’re still in the process of exploring.

The question, then, is if the “iPad computing” shape is different enough that it really is another revolution. We know that the iPad doesn’t allow you to do everything you could do before; the important thing to discover (and I don’t think anyone has the answer yet) is whether or not the iPad allows you to do things you never could before.

The area of “software that should be patentable” exists between a floor defined by “algorithms and math” and a ceiling of things that are overbroad and are already used by everybody. The rub is that I’m not actually sure there is any room between those two.

It should be noted that “algorithms and math” technically can’t be patented right now, but if you claim to be patenting a “system which” performs that algorithm, you can effectively patent that algorithm. This is a perversion of the process, and that’s bad, both because it allows things to become patent-encumbered that need to be free and because it becomes an argument for there being a larger space of patentable things in the software world.

Further complicating matters, software patents do not require the code to be made public, whereas physical device patents require blueprints. So when your butter churner patent expires, the public is enriched by open access to your invention, and until then other people can see what you did and make their butter churner work differently to avoid your patent. With software patents it’s a minefield where you can never be sure you’re safe and no one gets to see what you’ve done.

Finally, software patents have historically been overseen by people who have no idea how software works, leading to horrible patents on things that are obviously covered by previous use, other things that are just obvious, and things that aren’t possible when patented but will be later (so you can lock your competitors out of a market before the market even exists).

This leads to the entire industry living in fear of a massive patent war, with everybody arming themselves with defensive patents and being overly cautious, with the result that we as a public lose out on innovative products

Joseph is probably in his late sixties. He’s gruff, jewish, and has a trace of an eastern european accent. He’s bald, with a circle of hair that reminds one of bristles on a broom.

Until a few months ago, he owned and operated the 7-11 on the corner by our house. He knew me and I knew him and we chatted little small talk chats whenever I would pop on down for a soda run or to pick up a gallon of milk. Then one day he disappeared and two vaguely middle eastern guys in their early thirties took over. It was a little transition, but it made me sad. I miss Joseph.

Today I found out that Sandella’s– the restaurant by my office that I go to literally every day that I’m in the office– is closing effective Sunday. There’s just not enough traffic to keep them in the black, my nine visits in the last two weeks notwithstanding. For me, this is going to be a big transition, and it’s bummed me out ever since I found out around noon.

I walked into Sandella’s for the first time on July 6th, 2009 and I ordered their Chicken Delicato Panini with a side salad and a drink. It was delicious. Better yet, the whole meal was only 877 calories. I was less than one week into calorie counting with Lose It!, and finding a place close to work with good food that wasn’t bad for my caloric budget was a godsend.

I went back the next day. My first of many Brazilian Chicken Flatbreads, which quickly became my favorite. Two days later the Hummus Wrap. The next week Monday the Brazilian, Tuesday the Delicato, Thursday the Brazilian. Since that fateful day last July I’ve logged seventy six visits in Lose It.

But even though I love their food, what I will miss vastly more are the people. On about the third trip I was asking for the staff’s names, and I made a point of addressing people by name, and found that courtesy reciprocated. I’ll miss Carrie and Kim and Adam and Lindsey and Kate and Barbara and Marc… well, Barbara and Marc aren’t really staff: they’re the owners. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they’re my friends. They’ve met my wife, my daughter, my parents; we’ve talked about each others kids and weekends.

And as hard as my losing a lunch spot is for me, what’s bummed me out so much is the thought that my friends are going through so much more. I can’t begin to think how much they’ve poured into this place that I love, and how much more they love it and how much it has to hurt to say goodbye to it. After leaving today I was wracking my brain for ways to help: shuffling all my acquaintances there; getting them to cater whatever event I could dream up; robbing banks. But I’m just one guy, and an increase in my already copious business isn’t going to be enough to turn the tide.

So instead I just wanted to write this out and share with the world that until Sunday there’s a little place in Aliso Viejo that’s just perfect, and that it’s helped me lose fifty pounds in a year, and that I’ve passed many a lunch hour there enjoying their music and their willingness to let me sit and read, and that I’m going to miss is very, very much.

Let’s do it anyway.

The book, for those of you who haven’t read it (you should; it’s a good romp if a mite predictable), is the story of a small town being overrun by demonic forces, and the people and angels who drive those demons out. The rest of this is full of spoilers, so if you care about such things you should stop reading now.

It’s got some silliness inherent in its origin; the bad guy is a conglomeration of everything the Religious Right feared in the early eighties (the UN, psychics, foreigners, video games, and academics all play a part), and the portrayal of some aspects of the world are odd thirty years on (cell phones really changed the suspense genre), but it holds up pretty well.

I do want to point out one bit of hysteria that’s notable for it’s absence, though: Marshall, one of the main protagonists, is a journalist hot on the trail of the real story, bravely standing up against corruption, trying to find a calm place for this family after leaving… the New York Times. Today he’d be from Fox News. Or the AP, or something. But not the Grey Lady; she’s too liberal.

Hank, a small-church pastor and the other protagonist, is bland to the point of boredom. He’s a praying man (which gives him power to expel the demons, which is handy), and he’s standing up to the corrupt board members, but his strong faith defines him so much that he’s got no conflict and no character. He’s a goody two shoes, which makes him useful, but not interesting.

But Marshall is enough to drive the story, and largely does. He’s screwed up and conflicted, trying to slow life down from his previous hunt-the-big-story days by moving to a small town, but caught up in something bigger than he bargained for. He’s doubtful and cynical and smart, and makes a very good vehicle to explore the town. His efforts to get to the bottom of everything are what makes the plotline move.

The plotline is mostly good, but does get a little muddled. The demonic forces want to take over Ashton, the small town where all the action happens, but it’s never made clear why that’s a reasonable goal. The college in town is largely theirs already (book learnin’ jus’ makes ya forget yer Bible!), and it’s implied that they could use the town as some sort of base of operations, but it’s directly stated that there are other towns that the demons already control, and it’s never said why this town is special enough to merit the showdown that the book describes.

More problematic, though, is how the book describes the spiritual warriors that are the reason the book stands out from most suspense novels.

The demons are split into two categories: most of them are named for some dark deed (Divination, Fortune Telling) or inclination (Lust, Deception), but some have proper names and rule over the others (Rafar, Lucius, The Strongman). The demons are always intimidating each other and jostling for rank; there’s a lot of infighting and back biting, with predictable results. But the demons are also always scheming and plotting; they take matters into their own hands and use their initiative to catch the good guys flat footed and turn the situation to their advantage. The demons can scare the humans and screw up their lives by latching onto them and eventually possessing them.

The angels, meanwhile, are hiding. They come into town and keep a low profile, and protect Hank and his church buddies. They’re always seeking “prayer cover” to help them in their fight against the demons. They talk about God and his foreknowledge, but they seem rather unsure of their own plans. They never, ever take the initiative, because they want the humans to get everything done; they step in to protect and to aid, but never to do it themselves.

This is necessary to make the narrative work; the demons have to look like they’re going to win, or the book would be a very long series of uninteresting routs. And the forces of darkness appear to be doing well for most of the book: they’re screwing things up, pushing the town closer to the brink and making life more miserable, while the Angels stand by and do very little (sometimes intentionally, sometimes because the demons overpower them). But this is rather troubling theologically; if the Angels are present, why can’t they manage to win anything?

This is a small subset of the larger problems with this kind of Spiritual Warfare: it moves the focus off the battle for souls and puts it onto an actual battle. The tactics and strategies used by the Angels and the Demons become more interesting (and more influential) than the actual people that should be the whole point. The humans need to be the ones resisting, and they need to be able to do so with or without angelic assistance. Demons reaching into the humans’ minds and convincing them to follow bad theology breaks the primal role of man making the right decisions. And perhaps most important of all, the battle only makes sense if there’s a possibility that it can be decisive; God has to be in a position to lose, or neither side will show up on the battlefield. But putting God in that position is difficult to pull off, since you have to have a pretty bizarre reading of Revelation to think that these battles happen and that a divine loss is a possibility.

But even with this Amazing Unravelling Armageddon Thread, this book is a well-executed suspense novel intertwined with a neat supernatural complication that’s well written if a little kooky at times. If you take it for what it is and don’t try to read too much into it, it’s an enjoyable read.

The book is a curious beast, though: it has a meandering style that belies the tour-of-the-countryside method of a magazine writer, which Wakefield is. This can work in a longer piece, but only if there is some thread tying the whole together; some theme that the author seems to be following that drives the tour forward. Wakefield fails to deliver that. Instead, he delivers a book with a few excellent chapters, a great overview of the history, and a total lack of a thesis.

He definitely has opinions: he’s against the Moral Majority and especially against Dobson, Falwell, and D. James Kennedy; he’s pro-choice; he’s pro-gay-rights; he’s against megachurches (for somewhat mysterious reasons having to do with their having production values); he’s a big fan of Jim Wallis and William Sloan Coffin; he’s for collaborating with people even if you disagree on some things.

But what he fails to do is tie all that together into something more than “Mainline Churches Good; Evangelical Churches Bad.”

In those places where he’s not expected to make a point, however, this is fine: his history is great and exhaustive (chapter four is almost worth the cover price by itself) and his theology is well put (and excellently contrasted with the pro-war, pro-control, pro-discrimination Evangelical mindset).

But even here the tour guide motif sometimes runs dry. The thrust of the book is the takeover of religion by the right and the atrophy of the Mainline Churches, but Wakefield fails to make a case for what drove the Mainlines out. He theorizes that it might have been watered down theology in favor of social activism, or maybe too much theology and not enough activism, or perhaps not enough of either. But his indecision on this point ultimately hurts his case when he tries to say what the problem was and how it should be fixed.

His discussion of the wedge issues is better; he identifies abortion and gay rights as the tools of the trade here (and civil rights and the Vietnam War as their historical antecedents). He quotes the rather balanced United Methodist Church statement on abortion, and notes that it is a battleground being fought over by the Institute for Religion and Democracy, which is attempting to take over the UMC from the inside and refashion a historically Mainline church into a more Evangelical one. And he talks about gay rights as the “line in the sand” that evangelicals are not willing to cross, after giving in (in his telling, reluctantly) on “integration” and “women’s ordination.” (p122)

But when the historical path crosses the current wedges and enters the future battles, the book largely falls apart. His history casts the Evangelicals as aggressive and theologically misguided, but it’s hard to say that they were doing anything more than attempting to spread what they saw as the truth. The utter collapse of the Mainline churches is the heart of the matter, along with the parallel collapse of the Dixiecrat coalition, which leads to a similar shift in the political arena (although this parallel receives very little attention in the book). And since he has failed to assign blame on the Mainliners for anything, the problem cannot reveal itself to be solved.

Instead, the final chapters of the book talk about how various groups– Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and Michael Lerner’s Tikkun foremost among them– are mobilizing to confront the horrors yet to be visited on us by the Republican administration that’s now out of power. We’re told of the gathering forces and how many people are on their email lists, but not how these lists are supposed to revitalize a flagging tradition with new blood and new ideas. Their focus on “poverty, environment, equality” seems good to me, but at the same time seems like exactly the things that no one in the largely-Republican Evangelical community is going to cross the church aisle for.

Ultimately, then, this book is a poor substitute for Jim Wallis’ God’s Politics, a much more actionable take down of the idea of a politicalized religion, whose aim is not to inform you of how we got here (for that, Hijacking is better), but instead to point the way forward, and hope that we can get there.

The Shack (Amazon Link) is this big little book that is really popular in Evangelical circles of late. Eugene Peterson compared its potential impact to Pilgrims Progress. My mom bought a copy and I read it.

This entire entry is chock full of spoilers for The Shack, so you shouldn’t read it if you care about that kind of thing.

It’s interesting in a number of vectors. The backstory is neat; some guy wrote it and no one wanted to publish it so he did it himself and it’s been a great success for him. The conceit is clever; guy loses a young daughter to violence and then is invited to talk to God about it. And the fervency is admirable: it is not shy about making big statements of theology.

I want to talk about this book in three almost completely unrelated ways: as a work of fiction, as a work of theology, and as a polemic. The first two are obvious; this book is shelved with the novels, probably in the Christian section. But the last is more subtle; if you read closely there’s an undercurrent of thought that propels the entirety of the narrative, and that undercurrent is more interesting– and more troubling– than the other two aspects.

As Literature

Let’s say this right away: The Shack is not very well written. Young is overfond of flowery language and tends to emphasize narration when it’s unimportant and deemphasize it when it is.

Nearly the first half of the book is the backstory of how Mack, our main character, gets to the Shack. There are moments where the story flows along nicely (the abduction/chase sequence is well done), but overall it relies too heavily on a sense of foreboding that is utterly destroyed by reading the jacket cover, or thinking for a moment about what’s going to happen to make the story work.

Mack, the main character, is boring and confused. His entire personality is the fact that his daughter was abducted, and he has very little depth beyond that despite getting an entire foreword dedicated to telling you how awesome he is. Said foreword tries to sell him as a scholar and a gentleman; a man of the world who’s been in a war and gone to seminary. But the rest of the book tries to treat him as an everyman, making him astounded at simple theology and failing the reader by not bringing up the sometimes obvious follow-on questions.

But none of that really matters, because The Shack is a novel only as a ruse to get you to read its views on Theology.

As Theology

The heart of this book is the theology, and it’s got a lot.

But just as Young can’t decide if Mack is a scholar or an everyman, he seems unsure about how to present his theology. To give it power, he puts the words in the mouths of his trinitarian characters. But to make that work, they need to make the theology sound like second nature; there’s nothing interesting in it for them; they live it. To counterbalance that and make sure the reader understands that these are Big Ideas™, Young then dumbs down Mack and makes him the incredulous human who receives each bit of doctrine as if he had never thought that way before.

This approach would work if the doctrine was some radical rethinking of Christianity, but it’s simply not. It’s presented in an interesting way, and given some emphasis that makes it easy to convey (and here Young does well), but the vast majority are things that I was familiar with from my Westmont Religious Studies Department schooling (GE track!), and it was disappointing when the gone-to-seminary Mack is made to know none of it.

That said, let’s just be explicit about where the book does and does not focus.

Quite a bit is about the nature of God, which is a good thing to talk about when three of your four main characters are God. Young hits the high points; God is better than we can imagine (Young explicitly disavows the Anselmian greatest-possible-composite-of-attributes Godhead), essentially mysterious, trinitarian with three co-equal persons, and the trinity is necessary because it allows God to be in a relationship.

Relationships, it quickly becomes obvious, are the center of Young’s theology. The trinity is a model of the relationship man is to have with God: trusting and loving the other and allowing them to work in you. Independence, seen in this light, is a subversion of the relationship where one party (that’s the humans) fails to love or trust and takes everything into their own hands.

More explicitly, Jesus is a model of the proper relationship; in this telling, Jesus is fully God but his kenosis means that “he has never drawn upon his nature as God to do anything” (p99); instead, God-the-Father (Elousia, in this telling) works through Jesus to accomplish everything: “so when you look at Jesus and it appears that he’s flying, he really is… flying. But what you are actually seeing is me; my life in him. That’s how he lives and acts as a true human, how every human is designed to live–out of my life.” (p100). This brings up all sorts of thorny issues (did Jesus pre-incarnation “draw upon his nature”? if not, how did he survive? where “was” he? does this break immutability, which is also ascribed to God? If the Father is doing the work, doesn’t the Father have the agency in his actions, thus making Jesus not only impotent but also pointless?), but Young sadly ignores these entirely. It’s not what the book is about, so it’s understandable, but it’s disappointing all the same.

Man is kind of problematic in this whole deal, though. “Never creating at all” was “never under consideration;” (p222) “we created you… to be in face-to-face relationship with us” (p124). So man is supposed to be in relationship with God, but at the same time God “has never placed an expectation on [Mack] or anyone else.” (p206) This is the point where I jumped off the rails. Expectations are necessary, or the whole unravels. Sin is a failure to live up to expectations. Righteous Anger is either impossible or stupid without an unmet expectation of something better. No expectations and the perfect foresight attributed to God in this narrative cannot mesh; either God knows what’s coming and therefore expects it, or he does not know and does not expect it. The small sliver of middle ground here is redefining “expect” to imply uncertainty, but Young doesn’t try this trick, which is good because it would be a lame word play that wouldn’t solve the basic problem of God wanting one thing (good on everybody!) and reality being another (evil happens).

Because the big issue that this book attempts to tackle is our old friend the problem of evil. There are really two and a half problems here, so let’s look at each in turn.

First, Young wants to make sure that defining evil is left to God, because humans tend to make it “pretty subjective” (p134) and “become the judge” (p135) based on how things affect them. So feelings aren’t a good guide here, but Young also dismisses “following the rules” to “do good and avoid evil” by “reading the Bible” with the Holy Spirit saying “How’s that working out for you?” (p197) Instead, Young wants us to rely on God to define evil and we will respond to that… somehow. How word reaches you what is good and what is evil is left unsaid, except that what you think and what you read are suspect, which kind of leaves nothing.

Far more fruitful is the second tack, which talks about the moral calculus of evil. “Everything that has taken place is occurring exactly according to this purpose [to bring mankind into relationship].” sayeth the Lord (p124). But Mack, for once, pushes back: “How can you say that with all the pain in this world, all the wars and disasters that destroy thousands? And what is the value in a little girl being murdered by some twisted deviant?” (p125) God, in reply, claims to “use every choice you make for the ultimate good and the most loving outcome,” which is a weak assertion of Leibniz’s best-possible-world idea, which is stunning in its simplicity and horrifying in its failure to assuage any of the revulsion of the problem of evil. “But the cost!” Mack says, bringing that revulsion to bear, “Look at the cost… is all sounds like the end justifies the means… I can’t imagine any final outcome that would justify this.” (p125-7). God then makes a distinction that makes all the difference: “We’re not justifying it. We are redeeming it.” Justification implies a balancing of the whole’s benefits with the whole’s costs. Redeeming, though, is a holistic making-better: each individual part becomes justified in and of itself.

The final subset of the problem of evil bleeds directly into the last major theological point, which Young tries to avoid but runs roughshod over instead: free will. Multiple times Young’s godhead assert that free will is ascendant, and that free will is never trampled on or limited. But repeatedly, God is seen as omniscient about future outcomes (see p187 for an example), which requires all decisions to be predestined, which in turn robs the humans of agency for their actions. If they have no choice in the matter, they cannot be properly blamed for the outcomes; that blame shifts to God, and the book makes it very explicit that judging God is a big mistake that boils down to putting yourself in God’s place. This little knot is taut; given the assumptions the book makes there is no way to make all these assertions correct, but the book doesn’t seem to notice in the slightest.

As an Artifact of the Right

Underneath all of this, however, is an incorrect understanding of how the world works that is very prevalent in today’s political right: railing against institutions as the bad guys without realizing that the institution is just us, in aggregate. Here is a little speech put into Jesus’ mouth:

I’m not too big on religion… and not very fond of politics or economics either. And why should I be? They are the man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about. What mental turmoil and anxiety does any human face that is not related to one of those three?… Put simply, these terrors are tools that many use to prop up their illusions of security and control… Systems cannot provide you security, only I can. (p179)

This anti-establishment vibe is incredibly strong throughout the book. We are told that “power in the hands of independent humans… does corrupt” (p148), and that “first one person, and then a few, and finally even many are easily sacrificed for the good and ongoing existence of [a] system” (p123) and that “educated Westerners’ access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligencia.” (p66) Science is belittled at every turn; “what you call science” (p132) is puny; “some say” (p34) the Earth is nine million years old, and Eden was real (p134). Mack’s wife’s “black and white” view of the world is “common sense” (p11).

Instead of systems and establishments, Young wants relationships. But politics and economics aren’t systems; they’re attempts to understand how groups of people interact. Pretending that a thousand people can rule themselves with relationships that don’t complicate into politics isn’t idealism; it’s a willful denial of how people work.

This is my biggest problem with the book; not it’s anodyne theology pretending to be great insights, but that it takes one of humanity’s great strengths– our ability to compound relationships into larger and more complicated things– and pretends that doing so is not a powerful extension of relationships but is rather a perversion of it that hollows out the benefit and provides nothing in return.

Politics, Economics and Religion are how humanity interacts with each other on the grand scale; it is not a substitute for the smaller scale, but it is the small scale continued in other means. My church does charity work that I would never be able to do alone; my government promotes the general welfare in ways that none of us could accomplish by ourselves. These help real people, and in so doing make the world a better place. Does God not care about that?

Ladies and Gentleman, Good Evening.

Let us get straight to the point: the State of our Union is dire.

We are on a precipice and we are teetering. Our past is catching up to us, and our future is uncertain. Our politics is constrained by nihilism and cowardice, and we have spent too long not getting anything done.

It is time for that to change. We must stand together and face our problems, or we allow ourselves to be swept over the edge into the abyss.

We face a host of problems and we should be clear about what they are. For too long we have allowed the screaming heads on television to cloud the issues and pretend that the status quo is good enough; to confuse us into inaction; to slow down the arc of history’s slow bending toward justice.

We face a deficit that is too large, with income cut too small by an overzealous era of tax cutting when we couldn’t afford it and expenses growing too large as health care speeds us toward the brink.

We have an economy that is overbalanced, with fat cats in finance earning obscene amounts of money while too many of our fellow citizens lose their jobs, their homes, and their security.

We have ignored too long a looming disaster as our actions change the very world around us and hurt our planet, with effects that will cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

But most dangerous of all, we have a divided country that cannot even agree on what the problems are. We are too blinded by ideology and too constrained by our struggle for power to come together to even talk about solutions. We cannot find it in ourselves to put aside our childish bickering and come to an accord on how to move forward, so instead we chase each other around in circles in hopes that the other guy is smiling at the cameras when the world explodes.

It is time for that to change.

During the course of the campaign and during my presidency, I have traveled all across this country and heard heart-breaking stories about families who were bankrupt because they got sick. I have heard stories of families who lacked insurance and needed it, who had health insurance that disappeared when they needed it, who could not get insurance because they needed it. And those people are the reason that I have spent the first year of my presidency trying to make our health care system better with the bill that the House now can and should pass, because the people of this great nation deserve it.

The people.

Remember the people? They’re the one’s we’re supposed to be here for. We’re the “people’s servants.” We’re not called into office as a game to see who can stick around the longest, or who can get the nicest office in the Capitol Building. We’re supposed to be working toward a More Perfect Union, providing for the Common Defense, and Promoting the General Welfare.

How much of that have we done lately?

It is time for that to change.

I am calling tonight for an end to the bickering. I am calling instead for the best and the brightest to come forward with your ideas and your commitment and to lay them on the line when your country needs them. It is time for us to come together and make our country work again by acting to solve our problems instead of acting like we don’t have any.

Making our country work again is not going to be easy and it is not going to be painless. It is going to hurt a lot and it is going to upset some people who are quite happy with the way that things are. But we must live up to the dreams we have instead of the fears we harbor. We must stop being afraid of our problems and instead work to end them.

That work starts by making it possible to act. Our current system is tied into knots trying to avoid action, and our first act must be to loosen those knots and set ourselves free to be a great country again.

We must streamline our legislature by ending the filibuster, which allows a tiny minority of the country–a bit less than ten percent–to turn a debate over the issues into a cul-de-sac. A majority of Americans elected me to my position, a majority of your constituents elected you, and a majority of you should be able to move us to a More Perfect Union. This is why I support ending the filibuster immediately, but fully support an elimination far enough in the future that no one party will be the guaranteed benefactor of the change.

So, too, must we eliminate the Senate’s practice of the “hold.” This is a procedural tactic that allows a single Senator to bring action to a halt. Holds are the reason why so much of my administration is working without heads of departments or proper staffs. Holds literally hollow out our nation’s ability to act. We should end holds not next Congress or next year, but immediately.

We must find a way to move toward a balanced budget. The health care bill has since its first draft been a budget reducing bill, but we need more. That is why I support a blue ribbon committee chartered with the goal of raising revenue by 2% and lowering expenses by 2% over the next five years. They should take a hard look at streamlining our tax system to remove some of the loopholes while lowering the tax rate. They should have a final proposal by December that would require a vote before the next Congress is seated. And the next Congress should have their own committee with the same goals, as should the congress after that, and the one after that, and the one after that until we find a way to live within our means.

The surest way to help our budget is to jumpstart the economy again. In dark times the government steps in–as it should–to fill the void. Medicare helps those who need health care. Social Security helps those whose retirements were consumed by catastrophe. Unemployment helps those who are hit directly with the loss of their job. Each of these helps our General Welfare; all of these are necessary and proper roles for us to fill, and all of them are cheaper when times are good and fewer people need a helping hand.

Toward that end I am proposing the creation of a permanent Infrastructure Bank. This new agency would finance large construction projects over the entire country, so that the nation that built Hoover Dam and the Eerie Canal can continue building great things that push us forward. Part of the agency’s charter would be counter-cyclical spending: when times are tough, the Infrastructure Bank should ramp up production to put unemployed people to work making our country a better place.

We must also work to limit the power held by a few financiers to put our economy in peril. If you are too big to fail, you are too big. We gave you a loan to avoid the worst possible outcomes, and now we want our money back, but we also need to make sure this can never happen again. My proposal to tax large banks and my request for authority to limit bank’s size will give us the tools needed to make that assurance. But we also need the ability to unwind those banks who are already too big in case they should find themselves once more imperiled and imperiling; Congress must empower the Department of the Treasury with that ability as soon as possible.

But what we must do more than anything is begin to listen to each other again. We must begin again to act like grown ups, to seize our Manifest Destiny and ride it to the greater heights that we can now only dream of.

For too long we have allowed our greater glories to be relegated to the past, to believe that our best days were behind us and that the world is too dangerous for us to brave the frontiers of the possible again.

And it is long past time for that to change.

In autumn 2006, Sonja was pregnant, we were looking to buy a house, and I was pretty happy with my job at ACS. We were doing alright.

And I can remember coming across that last payment for that car and thinking “Wow; I own my car. I’m all growned up now.” None of those other things had pushed me over that mental threshold; it took paying off my cheap Korean car.

•

We took Dewey (that’s the Rio’s name) in to the shop last week and were told that my $10k college car needed $2.5k work done. We balked. That was a bit ridiculous: was it worth putting that much money into the car at this point?

And so we unexpectedly found ourselves looking at new cars last Wednesday. I have long wanted a Prius, so that was where we started, and that was where we were Saturday when we were test-driving, and that was where we ended up. We got a Silver Pine Mica Prius with Option Pack #6 (the works).

I’m very excited. It’s a big tech toy I can drive!

But what struck me as we went through the process was how totally, totally different it was since the last time I was buying a car, back in 2002 when I was in college and buying Dewey, my first car. Then, I had gone out looking for something crazy cheap. I had gotten a terrible rate for the financing. I had co-signed the loan with my parents. And I was giddy with the possibility of buying a car, and I am painfully aware that it showed and I got a worse deal because of it.

But this time, we went out looking for a specific model of car that we had researched online quite extensively. I kept my excitement in check. The dealer treated us better, and we got a much better deal on the car. We were laughing with the financing guy and telling jokes back and forth. It felt like, well, I felt all growned up.

• This got me started
• This got me interested
• This got me hooked.
• This took longer than it should have.
• And this one is distracting me while I try to do other things.

All pretty normal, but the poll worker was probably 18. So were two of the other volunteers, in addition to the four senior citizens who are there normally. It was an interesting–and revealing–Change.

Instead, the most interesting parts of “W” are when we get to see how those around him react to him. The narrative follows Bush the Younger (played uncannily by Josh Brolin), but in almost every scene he is–instead of the initiator– the catalyst that pushes the other characters to show us who they are.

We see Condi Rice being the obedient yes man, never offering an opinion and mirroring the President’s petulant rage when Brent Snowcroft– Brent Snowcroft, her mentor– writes about what a bad idea a war with Iraq is.

We see 41 (“Poppy”) saddened and confused and simply overwhelmed by the tide of history as he is swept aside despite “winning that war.” And to add insult to obvious injury, his screw-up son steps into office and, well, screws up.

We see Dick Cheney bring up torture over lunch (“Wow,” you think to yourself, “that guy is a dick”).

We see Donald Rumsfeld talk airily about everything, without ever touching ground or making much of a point.

But most impactfully, we see Colin Powell struggle as he is overruled and outgunned in his fight against the war. We see him deny himself in order to support the president, and we see him capitulate in the worst way at the worst moment. When Cheney tells him “I think you made the bigger boo-boo: you could have been president” (“Fuck you,” says Powell) we see both how much that cost us as a nation, and we realize deeply how painful such a Powell Presidency, unwilling to take a stand, could have been.

The history, of course, is chopped up into slaw and stirred liberally to put quotes in the wrong places and scenes in an orderly narrative line. But this is not a movie about history. If it were, it would feature the 2000 election as more than a throw away line. It would show how Karen Hughes balanced Karl Rove to season the conservatism with compassion. It would feature 9/11 as more than a talking point.

But “W” is about Dubya. And Dubya never cared that he squeaked into office. Karen Hughes had a single success– No Child Left Behind– and then faded into the background.

9/11 is, however, a notable omission. Bush was going nowhere before 9/11. It transformed Bush the man and Bush the presidency, and started both on the trajectory that the movie traces. But putting the events of that morning onscreen was, I think, simply unnecessary. It would have further polarized an already polarizing movie, and taken away focus on who the players were that reacted to the crisis. “W” is stronger because it doesn’t get distracted by the single biggest event of W’s presidency, and instead focuses on the long, messy aftermath.

And though we don’t see Bush as a man of action, we see how much his reactive worldview has hurt. He is content and even happy with these people who surround him, from the bumbling to the incompetent to the downright evil. By drawing the line between “the good guys” and “the bad guys” and assuming that he and everyone he knew was on one side, he let a profound opportunity slip by: he could have been a uniter. He could have been the compassionate everyman that led by example in dark times. He could have been the one who faced down evil and, by resolve and will, brought the world together and waited for the other guy to blink. George W. Bush could have been a great president. And this is the story of how he went about not being one.

After a while, the woman goes outside, where a huge crowd is gathered. Out of a trailer comes another woman, The Performer. She straps on wings and flies above the crowd, to the delight of all. The crowd disperses.

Two men are sitting inside the church, which has been hastily converted into a restaurant. They are eating oddly crunchy salads while The Interviewer asks The Interviewee about Hollywood. The Interviewer laughs at the replies.

The Interviewee mentions that this restaurant is usually pretty bad, but tonight it is rather good. The Interviewer notes that he put a brick at the door when he arrived, which is how you make the restaurant good while you are inside. In a flashback we see that this is a lie; the woman from the church actually put the brick there.

Dinner done, the men walk outside, and look over the cliff there. One of the men turns out to be me, and one of them is my friend Dustin. Joined by our wives, we look out over the cliff (it is now midday, so the view is very nice) to see a quaint italian town.

Our attention is drawn to one building in particular, which is rotating at a furious pace. Inside, there is a wedding going on. The Bride is dressed in a too-large gown with a train that takes up most of the room. She tells The Wedding Guests to shoo out The Dog, who is intruding on the party. The Guests oblige.

The Dog, now outside, is reveled to not be a real dog, but a life-sized stuffed dog. He wanders the streets as those of us on the cliff narrate his journey. He runs into The Clown, also a toy.

In fact, those of us on the cliff are now– in the same positions– watching the scene in a toy store window. We laugh.

I wake up. I wonder what the hell that was all about.

So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan’s simple call for less government and lower taxes.

He paused for a few seconds and then said this:

“I think I can tell a pretty simple story. Ronald Reagan ushered in an era that reasserted the marketplace and freedom. He made people aware of the cost involved of government regulation or at least a command-and-control-style regulation regime. Bill Clinton to some extent continued that pattern, although he may have smoothed out the edges of it. And George Bush took Ronald Reagan’s insight and ran it over a cliff. And so I think the simple way of telling the story is that when Bill Clinton said the era of big government is over, he wasn’t arguing for an era of no government. So what we need to bring about is the end of the era of unresponsive and inefficient government and short-term thinking in government, so that the government is laying the groundwork, the framework, the foundation for the market to operate effectively and for every single individual to be able to be connected with that market and to succeed in that market. And it’s now a global marketplace.

“Now, that’s the story. Now, telling it elegantly — ‘low taxes, smaller government’ — the way the Republicans have, I think is more of a challenge.”

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

A suggestion:

The era of incompetent government is over.

One guy was surprised by the success. Translation: everyone else wrote that the iPhone wasn’t worth it, but fully expected it to succeed. This says something about their Jeremiah-like journalism or their complete cynicism for page views. Probably a little of both, but I’m leaning toward the latter.

It’s not until page three that someone mentions Android, Google’s big phone play. Then Enderle does, too, which is a pretty good indication that Android will fail.

Also this, from Enderle:

Apple could probably sell refrigerators to Eskimos

Well, yes, but that’s because Eskimos already buy refrigerators. They use them to keep food from freezing.

Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could have just as easily been delivered through the browser?

Jeff– whom I met at WWDC last month at a party and had a blast talking with– is just wrong here, because iTunes falls into a breed of application between Web Applications and Desktop Applications, which I have taken to calling Network Applications: they live in the desktop and inhabit that world, but some large part of their functionality– sometimes but not always all– is based on having a network connection. Your feed reader is a Network Application. So is your Email client. So is MarsEdit, which is the application I’m writing this blog post in.

But Network Applications live in a continuum measured by how much they do with the network. Email and Feeds are useful offline when you’re reading the stuff you’ve stored, but needs the network to get new stuff. MarsEdit is useful for writing and revising, but needs the network to post. Most networked games have a fully playable single-player mode that works without the network. Etc.

What distinguishes iTunes is that it’s a Network Application for only one part of its functionality– the iTunes Store– but that is a tiny part of the whole application. Moreover, it’s a function that a lot of competitors built on the open web. But iTunes builds the store into the application so that it can offer a more seamless experience for downloading. Should they replicate the entire store online for people who want to browse, but then force people to open the app if they want to buy? That thing we just tripped on was a seam in the downloading process.

Now a more reasonable suggestion comes later in the article:

At the very least, I might want some basic information about the media I just clicked on. Right here in my browser where I already am. Information like what the heck it is, some artwork, maybe some audio clips, how much it costs — sweet talk me. Make me want to buy it through the Apple Store. Dazzle me with your simplicity and ease of use. Beguile me with your wares!

In the case where iTunes can’t be found, this would absolutely be the right way to go. But it should be pretty minimal because you don’t want it to become a backdoor way of browsing. It should show the song or album that was linked to, and that should be it. And they should keep that big fat “Download iTunes” button that would let you see more.

Setting up a family tree on Geni. It’s like a little Facebook for your relatives. You click and add your siblings, your parents, their siblings, etc. Then you can post what’s new, share photos, plan events, and all that fun stuff.

Bad Idea

Doing this when you’re my coworker from Hungary, whose wife is the youngest of thirteen children, and whose three brothers are also married to women with twelve siblings each (a bizarre coincidence, he claims). His tree is now over 400 people, and its growth is now self perpetuating. Eventually it will consume us all.

Yes, Mitchell is my mug. He’s insulated, well-worn, has a great seal, and has been with me for just about a decade. He was named Mitchell after the MST3K version of the Joe Don Baker movie because he was huge, hold the potential to hold a lot of alcohol, and inexplicably had a woman on him.

The biggest problem in those early days was that Mitchell had no straw. For almost a year I made do with swigging, but then, on a trip to Disneyland, I found the flexible tube straw you see in the picture above. It’s the perfect size to fit into the hole provided, and it bends whichever way you want. Sure, if you leave it in the fridge it gets all stiff, but it’s fine after a few minutes. Disneyland stopped selling those straws right after I purchased one.

Mountain Dew has always been my drink of choice, and it was what I put into Mitchell the most in the beginning. 52 ounces of Mountain Dew is far more than you should drink in a day (a two-liter is 67 ounces), but I did it with frightening regularity. When Dew was scarce I would brew up some Kool Aide right in Mitchell: packet of flavor, a goodly amount of sugar, water, stir. Recently, though, Mitchell has been used almost exclusively for water. One tray of ice plus Brita water to the top will get me through the day at the office; I usually slurp the last drops out on my way to the car.

Mitchell likes to travel. Aside from riding shotgun with his handle snugly latched over the reclining trigger of my passenger seat, he has followed me on three trips to Europe, plus numerous car rides hither and yon. Fill up Mitchell and he’ll take you far. Sonja and I have made it to San Jose from Costa Mesa on one mug full. He’s been to the weddings of numerous friends.

Which is why it came as quite a blow when we lost Mitchell today. We took him out to a ball game and apparently left him outside the car as we got Mikayla and her ten thousand assorted accessories safely ensconced inside. He’s ten but he doesn’t have a cell phone to call us, and he doesn’t know his way home, so I went looking for him as soon as we figured it out.

I kept checking my speed as I drove over there; I felt like I was speeding (I wasn’t).

I looked in the area around where we parked. I looked under the cars that had taken the spots in the ensuing three hours. I checked the nearby curbs to see if some kind soul had perched him there to wait for his family. I checked the grandstands where a girl’s little league game was going on, trophies at the ready. I peered into the office to see if he had been locked inside. I looked in the trash cans. I looked in the dumpster. If I had found him in any of those locations, I would have brought him home and washed him.

But I didn’t find him. Tomorrow I’ll go back and see if maybe he was turned in after I left, or beforehand but wasn’t visible in the office. I’ll make another round and see if he’s turned up. I’ll call around to see if anyone from the game has him. But it doesn’t look good. Who would rescue a battered old mug?

Mitchell, if you’re out there, I hope that whoever did find you plans on putting you to use. You’ve been a good mug to me, and if it was time to move on, I understand. But I would have liked to say goodbye to you directly. This meager internet post will have to suffice to carry my heartfelt thanks and grateful memories. Godspeed to you.

So I keep track of each time we run and keep an average of how long the job takes every time. But I don’t want to keep around every run time, so all I do is keep around the average, and how many times the job has actually run. From those two numbers plus our current run time I can approximate a new average and use that to schedule the next run. I came up with a nice little algorithm that pushes the average around whenever a new number comes in. It works great:

def find_new_avg(old_avg, old_count, new_number)
  weight = (new_number.to_f - old_avg.to_f)/(old_count+1)
  old_avg + weight
end

But in my tests, I noticed something; this doesn’t just approximate the average. It actually calculates the average. It’s right all the time.

I did few quick Google searches and checked Wikipedia couldn’t find anything. I looked at it again. I pared down the code to the above (it used to be a bit more complicated). I tried more tests. It still worked.

I asked my friend Nick if he had ever heard of this algorithm. He hadn’t. He pushed some numbers at it and decided it did work. We did a video conference over Skype and worked out the algebra, and we proved that it did work. I said: “It just seems insane that I could have invented–by accident– a new way to average numbers that uses less space than any other way I’ve ever seen.”

I searched online again, and finally found it. It’s from The Art of Computer Science, Volume 2, by Donald Knuth.

Knowing that I’m not the first one to discover this algorithm restores my faith in how much research has been done in the past (although my faith in Google’s capabilities was somewhat shaken), but the fact remains that, not knowing about it beforehand, I discovered a reliable algorithm that does what I need in a fraction of the space it could take. And that makes me happy, even if I did reinvent the wheel.

But TracRedirect does not play nice with the latest version of Trac, 0.11. In fact, it makes 0.11 die. This is bad.

I don’t really know Python. I mean, I can get by, but I don’t really know it. So the prospect of patching some code for a plugin in a language I don’t know for a project whose code I’ve never seen is at once intimidating and exciting. The reason I’m a programmer is because the exciting won, and I fumbled around until I got it working. The diff between the latest svn code and my own is after the jump; it’s mostly just updating IWikiMacroProvider to take the new args 0.11 passes its way, but there’s another little fix to include the redirect stylesheet using the new method, as the old method didn’t seem to work reliably.

Index: redirect.py
===================================================================
--- redirect.py(revision 3245)
+++ redirect.py(working copy)
@@ -47,6 +47,7 @@
 import re
 from trac.core import Component, implements
 from trac.wiki.api import WikiSystem, IWikiMacroProvider
+from trac.web.api import IRequestFilter
 from trac.web.chrome import ITemplateProvider, INavigationContributor, add_stylesheet
 from trac.wiki.formatter import Formatter
 from trac.util import Markup
@@ -80,19 +81,20 @@

 class Redirect(Component):

-    implements(IWikiMacroProvider, ITemplateProvider, INavigationContributor)
+    implements(IWikiMacroProvider, ITemplateProvider, INavigationContributor, IRequestFilter)

     # IWikiMacroProvider methods
-    def execute(self, req, args):
+    def execute(self, formatter, name, args):
         """
         Main routine of the wiki macro.
         """
+        req = formatter.context.req
         preview = req.args.get('preview', '')
         shouldRedirect = req.args.get('redirect', 'yes') == 'yes' and (not preview)
         curpage = req.args.get('page', '') or 'WikiStart'

         out = StringIO()
-        link, missing = RedirectFormatter(self.env, req).format(args)
+        link, missing = RedirectFormatter(self.env, formatter.context).format(args)

         if link and not missing:
             out.write('<div class="system-message">')
@@ -133,8 +135,8 @@
     def get_macros(self):
         yield 'redirect'

-    def render_macro(self, req, name, args):
-        return self.execute(req, args)
+    def expand_macro(self, formatter, name, args):
+        return self.execute(req, formatter, name, args)

     def get_macro_description(self, name):
         from inspect import getdoc, getmodule
@@ -156,7 +158,6 @@
         return 'redirectedfrom'

     def get_navigation_items(self, req):
-        add_stylesheet(req, 'redirect/css/redirect.css')
         redirectedfrom = req.args.get('redirectedfrom', '')
         if redirectedfrom:
             yield 'metanav', 'redirectedfrom',\
@@ -164,3 +165,11 @@
                          '(<a href="%s">hide</a>)</span>',
                          req.href.wiki(redirectedfrom) + '?redirect=no', redirectedfrom,
                          req.base_path + req.path_info)
+
+    # IRequestFilter methods
+    def pre_process_request(self, req, handler):
+        add_stylesheet(req, 'redirect/css/redirect.css')
+        return handler
+
+    def post_process_request(self, req, template, content_type):
+        return(template, content_type)

Yglesias is one of my must-read bloggers; when I’m behind a few days, I’ll plow through his feed first because he makes great points, ties it into the larger picture, and doesn’t belabor the issue. All of these things are true in his book, as well.

It has been said elsewhere, but the transition from blog posts to book chapters went very well for Yglesias’ style. In large part this is attributable to the decision to tie the book into a narrative following the last decade of American foreign policy, and make the points along the way. This allows Yglesias to follow his normal method of commenting on events “as they happen,” which is why reading the book feels a lot like reading the blog or his articles.

But it’s a two-edged sword. Too often the points Yglesias is making are directly related to the background they are surrounded by, but the background tends to bury the commentary by dint of leading rather than following. This makes the principals Yglesias puts forward somewhat harder to find in the text.

The exception to this pattern is the final chapter “In With the Old,” which dispenses with the narrative and instead takes a more forward-looking view to the next administration and how they should go about foreign policy. This chapter benefits greatly from this freedom, and makes some of the best points in the book.

But enough about the structure of the book; the content is the important bit. The book as a whole advocates not new ideas, but a return to the “liberal internationalism” that Yglesias says the US followed from World War II until the current administration. Early on, the yardstick we are given to measure foreign policy decisions is:

The question, then, that must be asked of any proposed policy is… whether it brings us closer to or further from the dream of a peaceful, rule-governed liberal world order. p8

Those four attributes: peaceful, rule-governed, liberal, and world order are the keys. The first is the goal, and the rest are how to achieve it in a sustainable way. If you abandon the latter three, you will inevitably lose the first.

Yglesias establishes the heredity of the idea: Wilson as grandfather, FDR as father, Truman as mentor. The first Iraq War proves that it works; bringing an international coalition together to enforce the rules and keep the peace is a success. But then we immediately trip over Kosovo.

Western leaders of the period were, and are, often accused of a selective approach to humanitarianism, acting forcefully in Kosovo, while being less concerned with more serious humanitarian problems in Africa and elsewhere. The charge is essentially accurate but largely misses the point: that Kosovo presented a mixture of humanitarian and interest-based reasons for intervention was precisely what strengthened the case for playing fast and loose with the UN rules, making intervention a reasonable option. p17

As Yglesias has conceded, Kosovo is somewhat of an edge case, but how much of one is debatable. The problem is that Kosovo is rather obviously a use of force outside of the approval of the UN Security Counsel, but it seems right anyway. Seeming right isn’t rules governed, though.

This highlights one of the shortcomings I found with the book; in its desire to hew closely to the chronology, it spends its time on what happened and why it worked or didn’t, and misses opportunities to talk about what should have happened. In the case of Kosovo, what is the US to do if the UN won’t act? (We chose asking NATO instead, and Kevin Drum makes the point that that was good enough). But in other cases this just left me wanting a few more pages.

One such case was the (excellent) discussion of the 2004 Presidential Race. Yglesias makes a good argument that Dean fell in the primary because he “was, in various respects, a less-than-ideal candidate” (p88), and that Kerry fell in the general because he couldn’t properly distance himself from his previous pro-war stances. But none of the other Democratic candidates could have done so, either. So what should have been done?

This oversight is especially sad because it ties in with Yglesias’ view that being the opposition party means being unafraid to oppose the other party. Bush was for the war, but for political necessity, so was most of the Democratic Party. As Yglesias puts it:

The 2004 primary offered the best possible opportunity for a Democratic course correction: a change to reject the errors of the congressional leadership in favor of the greater wisdom demonstrated by the bulk of the party’s rank and file, both in and out of Congress. But that opportunity was squandered, and the Democrats would up deeper in a political quagmire of their own making. p89

This comes close to getting to what should have been done, but misses the mark by being too abstract. Who was the candidate who could have done this? How would they have avoided being painted with the Dean smears of being “a throwback to post-Vietnam quasi-isolationism and left-wing radicalism” (p98)?

Another thing that seemed to be alluded to but missing is a real strategy of how to fight al-Qaeda. Specifically, is Beinart’s idea of “democrati[zing] the Muslim world” p121 a key to combating al-Qaeda, even if it isn’t the key, and Iraq wasn’t a useful means of obtaining that goal? Yglesias comes close to an answer:

The relevant sort of resentment, however, is not resentment at the absence of democracy, but resentment at the absence of democracy’s logical precursor–self determination. p135

And with this great quote from Michael Lind:

Woodrow Wilson said “we must make the world safe for democracy.” He did not say we must make the world democratic. p143

But going against Bush’s narrative that “Democracy is on the March” is too easily painted as being against democracy or– worse– being of the opinion that Muslims can’t handle democracy. Granted that we shouldn’t accept this framing, but how does one reject the argument without tripping into it?

The beginning of an answer is there, and I think it lies in the line that “Democracy is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of empire” p144. This idea– more fully explored by Dave Meyer here– is interesting, but stands without any support in the book.

Another glimpse at the larger context for this question is elsewhere in the book:

It was fashionable for a long time for liberals… to argue that the Bush administration was right about the need to promote democracy in the Middle East but wrong in the way to go about it. What was needed, perhaps, was a new national commitment to a new method of promoting democracy. I myself wrote some articles along these lines, and there is some truth to that way of looking at things. p194

Yglesias outlines some of the ways to go about democracy promotion, and acknowledges that they’re not riveting, but still important. (And what does Yglesias think of Thomas Barnett’s rather riveting TED Talk? Too much like Max Boot’s proposal?)

One of the things that Yglesias does incredibly well, though, is present the current situation and show how untenable it is:

The Bush administration’s embrace of militaristic nationalism has not brought democracy to the Middle East and has not frightened Iran or North Korea out of conducting nuclear research, nor has it intimidated Iran or Syria out of supporting Hezbollah, spooked Pakistan into ending its support for Kashmiri radicals or into clamping down on al-Qaeda sympathizers in its border areas, owerawed China out of efforts to become a grat power, or frightened Russia out of reasserting itself. p187

Ultimately, I liked the book rather a lot. It was a quick run-down of most of the important foreign policy decisions in the last decade with good interpretations of the meanings and repercussions behind them. And I look forward to the next book, where Yglesias can answer his own challenge:

There is no panacea ere (just look at Singapore), but it is in many ways the best thing we can do. The subject lies largely outside the scope of this book, but one of the real challenges of liberal economic policy in the coming years will be rebuilding te domestic social contract in a way that once again makes further expansions of global trade acceptable– and, indeed, beneficial– to the American working class. p196

Well, the global key combo can be had in any number of ways, but here’s an AppleScript that’ll do it for you. It finds the screen size using the technique Craig Hockenberry showed to John Gruber, then finds the current frontmost window and resizes it. Saved as a Script into my Script Menu, it seems to work fine.

on run
tell application "System Events"
set fma to first process whose frontmost is true
end tell

tell application (name of fma)
set fmwBounds to bounds of first window
end tell

tell application "Finder"
set desktopBounds to bounds of window of desktop
end tell

set fmwWidth to (item 3 of fmwBounds) - (item 1 of fmwBounds)
set fmwHeight to (item 4 of fmwBounds) - (item 2 of fmwBounds)

set desktopWidth to (item 3 of desktopBounds) - (item 1 of desktopBounds)
set desktopHeight to (item 4 of desktopBounds) - (item 2 of desktopBounds)

set newX to (desktopWidth / 2) - (fmwWidth / 2)
set newY to (desktopHeight / 2) - (fmwHeight / 2)

set newBounds to {newX, newY, newX + fmwWidth, newY + fmwHeight}
tell application (name of fma)
set bounds of first window to newBounds
end tell
end run

My nephew, aged 5 days. Congratulations, Fred!

Non Volunteer Old Man: It’s been nice talkin’ to y’all. Say, who you voting for?

Old Man 1: Not Hillary.

Old Man 2 shakes his head and smiles.

Old Man 1: I’m voting for McCain. And let me tell you, I’m thinking about that. Thinking real hard.

It taught us Apple BASIC, and we used it to program our Apple IIc that had one external drive. We had a bunch of floppies, a few of which we loaded ProDOS onto and toiled away.

If I recall correctly, my older brother was the one who had actually purchased the book (or convinced my parents to buy it for him) so it was ostensibly his, and he assuredly read through the thing quicker than I did, and understood more of it that I did even when I had read most of it. I was, after all, 8 at the time.

But with that book and that computer we set about to write our own games. I still believe that every programmer of my generation gets into computers for the games. I wrote a little game where you could run through computer systems a la Shadowrun, breaking ICE and finding valuable files. I tried to do HiRes graphics, which was why the game never got finished.

This was before I understood anything about design. Not that you could design in BASIC, but still.

What I did was try to figure out everything I would ever need to do, I wrote it down in a big list, and then I started at the top of the list. I wrote the main screen. I wrote the login. I wrote the first bit of navigation into the fake computer system. I got overwhelmed and never returned.

I was following what is now called the Waterfall model, where you spend a whole lot of time figuring out what you’re going to do, and then you write it all down in excruciating detail and make sure that it covers everything, then you check again. Then you check again and start programming.

This model was invented when you programmed with punch cards and had to make sure that everything worked reasonably well the first time. If it didn’t, you’d have to change something, and changing things was nigh impossible, because you can’t just insert a new row on the punch card: it’s cardboard. So you do proofs and flowcharts and loop invariants and whatnot, trying to make sure that when you go to the trouble of making the punch cards, everything works out.

Contrast that with what most programmers do today, which is sometimes referred to as Extreme Programming, XP, Agile Development, or simply Iterative Development. Whatever you call it, you figure out only what the next step is and you program that. Then you test it. Ideally, you write a test for it so that the test can be run by an automated process. Then you move on to the next step.

Developers like this method because they get immediate results (and they do a lot less paperwork). Managers like it because they get lots of feedback (and they do lots less paperwork). Customers like it because it allows the developers to respond to feedback, which means the customer gets something he actually wants, instead of something he kind of wants.

Iterative Developement is part of a larger trend in the computing world toward deciding things later, because later you will have more information with which to make the decision. It’s called Lazy because you make the decision only when you need to, as opposed to Eager decision making, when you make a decision when you think of the question.

Static typing is eager decision making. You have to decide everything up front when you don’t know enough information, and if you change it later, you’re screwed.

This is one of the reasons why the trend in computing is toward dynamically typed languages, and away from static typing. It allows you to make decisions later (at runtime), when you have more information. That allows you to be freer in your programming because you’re not making decisions based on guesswork. But most of all, it allows you to skip an entire step of development (laying out a class hierarchy) that will inevitably cause you pain in the long run when class A doesn’t inherit from class B, and neither implements interface C. This step becomes a much looser and more manageable hurdle when you can just make sure that the right methods are there, or better yet just mix in a module you already have.

The obvious next question is: what other decisions are we making too early? I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some huge ones out there. Paul Graham is fond of pointing out that the startups he funds often create a completely different product than they set out to create, and that seems like a pretty large decision to make lazily.

Man #1: But the planes couldn’t have brought down the towers. The physics don’t work. And the Democrats are in on it. Howard Dean is not a dumb man; he’s inquisitive. He’d figure it out.

[Man #2 is not buying it. He's too smart for that.]

Man #2: But what about Castro? Who told him to be quiet? Bush and Castro have the same master.

I really, truly wish that I were making this up.

Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan – Yahoo! News:

Wal-Mart… has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Wal-Mart has seen Apple beat retailer after retailer on this, and sees the writing on the wall: buying online is cheaper and faster, so there’s no reason to buy from a store. If they want to keep sellng music, they need to change the rules. And that’s what they’re proposing.

But, as the article makes clear, that’s only if they want to keep selling music, and that’s not necessarily true:

One label executive said, “This sounds like the Hail Mary pass, and if it doesn’t work, they could be out of the music business; or maybe they reduce music down to a couple of racks” from the 4,000 titles carried by Wal-Marts with larger selections.

That’s a huge play for Wal-Mart, and it sounds eminently reasonable from Wal-Mart’s perspective. Basically, the Labels have given Apple the sweet deal (cheaper prices) that Wal-Mart is used to getting, and because Wal-Mart is all about cheaper prices, they’re not able to compete. And if they can’t, then they’re willing to cut off the non-competitive part of the business. Wal-Mart is nothing if not ruthless.

Note, though, that there’s a giant gap between “non-competitive” and “not profitable,” and therein lies the interesting part. As long as Wal-Mart is making money selling music, why would they care if Apple is making more money selling music? Unless Wal-Mart is just feeling stilted about not being given the best price, it has to mean that they don’t think they can fend off Apple given the current pricing scheme. And seeing as how Wal-Mart’s online music store did have the lowest price when they were still in business, I have to guess that it’s the later.

All told, it’s great news for Apple. Wal-Mart is in a reactionary position, but if Wal-Mart wins against the labels and holds onto the number one slot, Apple can argue that lower pricing is better for sales and demand it themselves. If new pricing doesn’t keep Wal-Mart up top, it’s Apple who takes the crown. On the other hand, if Wal-Mart doesn’t get better deals and does cut their music shelf space, Apple catapults into first place, and again has more leverage.

And of course, this is really bad news for the labels, who are going to have to choose to lower their margins or lose a chunk of business, or both. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of guys.

Yet the striking thing about Obama, and the enthusiasm he has stirred up, has little to do with the specifics of the policies he advances. It is rather his almost pitch-perfect echo of the John F. Kennedy we heard in 1960 and the Robert Kennedy last heard in 1968. It is a call for national unity and national sacrifice — not in the interest of military prowess but in the cause of social justice, both in the nation and around the world. His appeal is for more civic engagement, not necessarily more government. He has the voice and wields the techniques of a community organizer (which he was on the streets of Chicago), asking people to join together, calling the nation to form a more perfect union. Not since the sixties has America been so starkly summoned to its ideals. Not since then has America– including, especially, the nation’s youth –been so inspired.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Great article on the appeal of Obama, by one of the Clinton’s oldest political allies, Robert Reich (who I love hearing on Marketplace, I would like to say for the record).

Personally, there are some things about silly season that I like.

How is it that this is so awesome and this and this are so terrible?

The lack of cheesy 90s graphics is a definite difference, but the music is the deciding factor. The Obama video is fast and happy and loud, the Clinton video is cloying and saccharine, the Huckabee video is like a bad 80s sitcom opening or a lounge act. But that describes the campaigns, too.

• Issue a signing statement that annexes Cuba. For the greater good.
• Claim that the text of the speech you are currently giving cannot be reproduced, due to executive privilege.
• Also claim that it’s a state secret.
• Announce that you will be holding a secret trial to determine the guilt of (let’s say) the Supreme Court Chief Justice.
• Pause dramatically.
• Announce that he has been found guilty, based on the ample secret evidence.
• Claim that tomorrow, you will be picking a name out of a hat, and that person will be put in jail for suspicious activity, with no trial and no habeus corpus rights. A new person will be chosen each day.

For best effect, announce these in your inauguration.

Obama:

McCain:

(Both Via Talking Points Memo.)

Obama sounds like he is surrounded by hundreds of people who are attentive to his every word. He is. McCain sounds like he’s in a little room with a dozen people behind him and another dozen behind the camera. I don’t know if he is or not, but it sure struck me as a contrast.

(Via Tim Bray.)

I have lost files doing very similar things.

Strauss, Father of Neoconservatism

One of the two groups the documentary charts the history of is the neoconservatives, and it traces them back to the political philosophy of Leo Strauss. Strauss’ basic argument is that in a liberal system, the individual freedom is more important than the community freedom, which leads to a breakdown of community as individuals choose the selfish route over the greater good. The neoconservatives point to the riots in the 60s and 70s as evidence of this breakdown (Irving Kristol is the one who says it in the film).

This Straussian view got me thinking. It sounds right, but it feels wrong. I paused the show and spent a bit of time examining the disconnect.

What the matter with Liberalism?

Okay, there’s a breakdown of the community in the 60s, I can grant that. Sure, it’s a countercultural breakdown, and it’s largely a liberal movement. But is it because those people were given too much freedom?

“Wait,” says I, “why is freedom suddenly a bad thing? Freedom in markets is good, right? Freedom of religion is pretty nice. Freedom of speech is a perk, too. Freedom to vote seems to be popular.”

So let’s step back. Strauss is characterizing liberalism as a choice between individual freedoms and community freedoms. It’s the social contract; you give up your rights for the greater rights. But is liberalism really about putting the individual above the community? If it’s not, what is it? What is the greater good of liberalism?

The odd part is that as soon as I asked myself this question, the first thing that popped into my mind was that Conservatives want to “reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” They want a limited state, the better to secure the individual’s freedoms. That’s a nice concise philosophy, and it dovetails into the long tradition of government-as-necessary-evil. Madison tells us in Federalist #51 that “if all men were angels, then there would be no need for government.” I had never put those two together before, but now it seems quite obvious.

Calling out the Founding Fathers

But what also seems obvious is that Madison is wrong. Katrina was a problem because it was a hurricane, not because the people weren’t angels, and the government was needed in that case. When someone gets cancer and needs to pay a huge medical bill, it’s not angel deficiency that’s the problem, and a governmental health care program would certainly help. Sometimes life throws you lemons, and it’s not a lack of heavenly hosts that’s keeping you down.

If the purpose of a government is not merely to protect us from the insufficiently angelic, what other duties is it to have? Mr. Madison, meet… er… Mr. Madison, who says that government is to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” There seems to be more than one item on this list.

A Governing Philosophy

But these are all reasons to have a government; they are the goals that the government reaches for. What they are not is a governing philosophy, which constrains how the government goes about its work. Conservatism has such a criteria: be as small as possible. This includes defining the problem as small as possible so as to make the government equally small. Again, that concise “small” philosophy is useful. But why didn’t a similarly concise liberal philosophy jump into my head at any point?

What is the liberal philosophy? What do liberals want in a government? It’s not just government for government’s sake; there’s a reason in there somewhere, but it took me the better part of a day to figure it out.

From a liberal standpoint, government is like any other organization: it’s a group of people getting together to achieve common goals. A company is a group of people who want to make money. Many non-profits are groups of people trying to fix something. Masonic lodges are groups of people supporting each other. A government is a group of people trying to make the lives of those people within it better, by ensuring their freedoms, protecting them from enemies foreign and domestic, and otherwise aiding the club’s membership.

The social contract is that every individual wants those things, and so gives up some freedom so that those goals can be achieved. Instead of a necessary evil, the government is the populous acting on the better angels of their nature, and helping each member because it’s the right thing to do, not because you have to.

Liberalism’s guiding philosophy, then, is helping each other out, because doing so will help you out in the end, too. A rising tide raises all boats.

As it turns out, however, the political views of most Xers are more complex and more interesting than that.

Like conservatives, they favor fiscal restraint—but unlike the conservative leadership in Congress, only 15 percent believe that America should use any budget surplus to cut taxes. Like Democrats, they want to help the little guy—but unlike traditional Democrats, they are unwilling to do it by running deficits…

[A] recent poll suggests that the highest priority for the majority of young adults is building a strong and close-knit family…

Improving public education is one of the highest policy priorities for Xers…

Xers are eager to do away with the two-party system. They register particularly strong support for third parties, for campaign-finance reform, and for various forms of direct democracy…

[A] commitment to environmental conservation.

If Xers had their way, the collection of taxes would become more progressive and the distribution of benefits more widespread.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

It’s odd reading an article that was written eight years ago and finding almost every paragraph describing my views very closely, despite the fact that I’m not even technically a Gen-Xer, having been born in ‘81 (the article puts the cutoff date at ‘78, which is later than most would have it).

Still, a lot of this resonated with me quite clearly, but reading it with the Obama mindset that Andrew Sullivan had put me into with the link, I’m failing to see a lot of crossover here. These policies are all pretty well accepted by the majority of the candidates, at least on a high level. But then there’s this:

Xers may be poorly informed when it comes to public affairs, but they know enough to believe that our political system is badly in need of reform. At a very basic level they recognize that the political system is rigged against their interests. For one thing, Xers continually see a large gap between the issues they care most about and the ones that politicians choose to address.

That sounds distinctly Obama-esque. But it sounds even more like Edwards, who was my first choice. And that paragraph goes on to say:

Xers long for leaders who will talk straight and advocate the shared sacrifices necessary to correct the long-term problems that preoccupy them most.

And this article was published a month before McCain announced his presidential bid in 2000, which heavily emphasized straight talk and shared sacrifices, topics he still runs on today.

But then, the article also says:

A glimpse of the future may come, strangely enough, in the election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota.

If that’s the yardstick we’re using, the outlook doesn’t look so great.

I’ve always been fascinated by fractals, even though the math is far beyond me. But here’s a guy who not only is finding fractals all over, but puts up all these little applets to play with them!

We have been told we cannot do this by a chorus of cynics. They will only grow louder and more dissonant. We’ve been asked to pause for a reality check. We’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope.

But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Yes We Can.

In this respect the Obama campaign is uniquely circular: his political appeal is rooted in the fact that he’s so politically appealing. This means that when he loses, the loss affects him worse than it would other candidates, since it also cuts against his message. But when he wins, particularly when he wins big, as he did in Iowa and South Carolina, the win means more because it reinforces the basic argument of his campaign.

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)

Until recently, I was torn between voting for Edwards (the get-the-lobbyists-out agenda speaks to me) and Obama. That choice was made for me when Edwards “suspended” his campaign, but if it hadn’t already been decided, this article might have pushed me over.

I especially like the circular reasoning in this quote, because it’s absolutely true; the reason Obama is a good primary candidate is that he has the potential to be a great general election candidate. It’s not just “electability” (truly, I’d be happy with any of the Democrats and maybe even McCain), but one of (dare I say it) change. Obama has the potential to plow into office with such force as to change the system, just like the Reagan Revolution did twenty-odd years ago: by bringing the country with him.

Now all they need is a catchy alliterative term for it. The Obama Overrun? The Barack Barrage?

Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn’t happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it’s quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display.

(Via BitWorking.)

I admire Alan Kay for a lot of the things he did, but this video is one of the slowest, most meandering talks I’ve ever listened to. He is talking about incredibly important things that I’m genuinely interested in, but it’s really hard to plow through.

He is very obviously whip-smart and well-read. He cites academic papers and historical incidents with ease. He uses things like cystic fibrosis as metaphors. It all makes perfect sense, but the pacing and the delivery are so deadpan that my attention is wandering.

It does have some kickin’ quotes in it, though:

• I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you that I did not have C++ in mind.
• There is no idea so simple and powerfule that you can’t get zillions of people to misunderstand it.
• At the very least, every object should have a URL.
• It’s very easy to grow a baby six inches. They do it a couple dozen times in their life and you never have to take them down for maintenance.
• One of the reasons why this meta stuff is going to be important… is this whole question of how do we really interop over the internet five and ten years from now?
• Let’s not do it in Smalltalk; that’s too slow. Well let me tell you something: there’s nothing more inefficient than spending ten years on an Operating System that never works.

All told, it is a strong argument against “Worse is Better.” His point is similar to extreme programming, whereby you build a small thing (Smalltalk) that works, then use that to bootstrap the system and slingshot yourself forward. But he comes at it from a classic “MIT approach” of figuring out a good design for the bootstrap, and then using incremental development from there. That all sounds perfectly great– and indeed it seems to be what the web has ended up as (as Joe Gregorio was pointing out)– but it sure as heck didn’t work for the things Mr. Kay was trying to do it with. Why is that?

(Via Boing Boing, via Laughing Squid)

One of the best scenes from Friends, dubbed into one of the worst shows ever. Classic.

(Via The Daily Dish.)

This makes the entire war seem like an endless loss by the south, where they were continually giving up territory. The Ken Burns documentary (which they borrowed the music from, smartly) shows the war as much more of a struggle, with the north continually losing battles and searching for a general to lead them to victory, while not speaking much of territory.

The focus here is on the map, so it’s natural that the loss of territory is obvious. The focus in the documentary is on the people, so it’s natural that the political situation is at the fore. But it’s interesting how, in two video presentations, the same war seems like such a different thing.

(Via Megan McArdle.)

Two things; first, this guy is absolutely right. The government really has no right to do anything about what’s in his head, and shouldn’t try.

Second, he’s a jerk. But being a jerk doesn’t make him wrong.

And this is what actually happened. Yeah, a little bit with the too-optimistic for me.

Things I got wrong:

1. I called the Mac Pro based on John Siracusa’s (who made the game, and the rules) assertion that it’d count “if and only if the new Mac Pros are mentioned in the keynote.” I figured they would be, and they were, but it’s not marked in this “official” what-happened version.
2. The displays haven’t been updated in forever. It seemed a shoe-in.
3. I was skeptical of the MacBook Thin, which turned out to be the MacBook Air, the major announcement of the keynote.
4. Having just got a new MacBook Pro, I figured Apple would announce a new version to spite me. It’s happened every other time I buy something, so it seemed a reasonable guess. I was happy to be proven incorrect.
5. Jobs didn’t use any of his catch-phrases. I think it was an intentional effort to spite Bingo players. He used the word “Zhoom” for crying out loud.
6. I expected a new iPhone, and SDK details. Mostly this was just hope on my part, since I want to buy an iPhone, and play with the SDK.
7. Schiller got a mention, but no appearance. I miss that guy.
8. Vista got by without any mockery. And really, I think that it came down to the fact that Jobs couldn’t come up with anything new; it’s all been said. Over and over.

So obviously, I’m not too great at this. When I posted my predictions before, I almost went back and updated my bingo chart (I had done it almost a week before my post), but decided to go with my first impressions. Big mistake; my second guesses (no iPhone, no Blu-ray, no One More Thing) were far closer to the truth.

So there’s this “cleaning tool” for the Mac that’s actually a scam and/or trojan horse. It always reports that you have something awry on your system, and offers to fix it if you cough up some dough.

This kind of stuff has been all the rage in the Windows world for years, now, but I can’t see this one taking off, because the app itself is ugly as sin and we Mac folk just don’t take too kindly to that.

(Via Slashdot.)

We should change that around to “The enemy of my enemy is just some guy, y’know?” Deal with them on their own merits. If we actually like them, great! But if the only thing we have in common is a shared enemy, it’s probably going to come back to bite us later.