South Bend Seven

Skipping a step

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

An Economist's View | Mark Thoma | "A World with Healthy Middle-Class Societies"

I hate to be Mr. Negative today, but I'm less than fully convinced that we are anywhere near embarking on a path that places the welfare of the middle class at the forefront of economic decisions.

I'm sorry, but is that something we even want? I don't read Thoma often, so maybe he's already laid out reasons for why the middle class should placed be "at the forefront of economic decisions." In lamenting that we are close to achieving this goal it rather seems as if he's skipping over a very important question about whether that's actually a goal we should be trying to achieve.

Sure, it plays well to say "put the middle class first!" but why should we? It sounds nice, it seems intuitively correct, but it's directly at odds with plenty of other priorities that also sound nice. Why not put the least fortunate at the forefront of our decisions? Or the most deserving? Or the most creative and innovative? Or the most productive? Or those who create the most gains for others? Or the young? Or the old? Or generations in the future? How are we even defining "middle class" in this context? By income? Wealth? Consumption?

Why is the current median by any of these metrics the most morally deserving of priority?

(via Arnold Kling)

This does not make me want to buy your orange juice

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:11:00 +0000

You know what really grinds my gears?

Television actors who appear in commercials, clearly playing their current character, but under their own name rather than the character's.

Jane Krakowski is on 30 Rock playing Jenna Maroney, an exceedingly vain, psychotic, easily confused woman. Krakowski also appears in ads for orange juice as a vain, psychotic, confused woman named Jane Krakowski.

She claims to be endorsing Tropicana as herself, but behaves in the same way that her entirely fictitious character does. This means one of two things is true: either Krakowski's real personality is that of a punishingly narcissistic fool just like her character, or she is pretending to be someone else, and that someone likes Tropicana. Either way that's a terrible endorsement.

Put that aside for a minute. Why would you want your product endorsed by an unlikable character? Yes, Krakowski's Jenna Maroney is a funny sitcom character, but she's not likable. I'm glad she's in the show — as one-note as she is — but there are literally no people in the audience who want to be more like her. None with healthy psychological profiles, anyway. No one is sitting on their couch thinking "I want to be just like Jenna Maroney! I should start by drinking the same juice as her!"

Mindy Kaling does the same thing for frozen meals.

Oddly, Kaling's character on The Office is also vain, stupid and manipulative, like Maroney. Again, that's not a character I would want to associate with myself or my product.

I think half the cast of Modern Family has done the same thing in different commercials, including the gratingly precocious kid, the clueless dad and the Latin bombshell, so this isn't a trend limited to vain bimbos.

I am obviously no genius of marketing, but I can see no reason to do this besides hoping that the punters will make a lizard-brain connection between the product and some face I've seen before in a positive context and stop thinking before they realize they are getting an endorsement from a real person pretending to be a fake person pretending to be their real self, and that the fake person in an asshole. "Buy this because you recognize this person!" is half a step above "Look at this hot chick in a bikini! Buy our stuff!"

Elsevier boycott thought

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:16:00 +0000

Daniel Lemire | Should you boycott academic publishers?

There is a growing list of famous scientists who have pledged to boycott Elsevier as a publisher. If I were in charge of Elsevier, I would be very nervous: academic publishers need famous authors more than the famous authors need the publishers. After all, famous scientists could simply post their work online, and people would still read it.

One wrinkle: the famous scientists' post-docs and grad students still need these publishers.

My advisor isn't quite famous enough for him boycotting Elsevier to matter to them, but let's pretend he is. Since he is a co-author on almost all the papers I write, his boycott means that I am also boycotting, by default. Even if not appearing in the journals currently recognized as top-tier doesn't matter to him at this point in his career, it would very much matter to me. And since he's a good advisor, he cares that I have a lot to lose even if he does not.

This is not to say that Elsevier, Springer, etc. don't have a lot of problems, or that they don't deserve boycotting, or that there aren't a host of other problems with academic publishing. The divergent preferences of co-authors makes trying to solve these things more complicated.

SOPA

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:02:00 +0000

Enough ink has been spilled about this already by other people, and I've already written up way more than I should have about it on a message board my friends and I use.

But there is one aspect of this debate that I want to mention, and that's the tendency to reduce the question "should this legislation regarding piracy be passed?" to the question "is piracy a problem?"

There's a really destructive trend in politics for thinking like this:

1. There is a problem.
2. Something must be done.
3. X is something.
4. Therefore X must be done.

As a result, both the pro-X and anti-X crowds tend to line up and debate #1, as if determining if there is a problem, and how severe it is, is the end of the line. Relatively little attention is paid to whether X will actually work, or whether X is an appropriate, proportionate response to the problem.

By my recollection, we spent most of the HCR debate arguing about whether insurance and medical costs and bankruptcies were a problem, and didn't really bother so much with whether ObamaCare would actually solve those problems. Same deal with Dodd-Frank. Same thing with most security or gun-control legislation that follows some National Tragedy.

Take a look at Greg Mankiw's post about SOPA. His entire line of thinking deals with whether protecting intellectual property from infringement is important. That's fine, but it doesn't tell us anything about whether SOPA is a good idea.

He's graceful enough to admit he doesn't understand the technical details, which I appreciate. I don't want to pick on Mankiw too much; his is merely the first example of this problem I put my finger on. People asked him to weigh in, and he did, with caveats. But those caveats are little comfort. If I was a public figure with no zero understanding of finance, it would be irresponsible of me to weigh in on some new property and lending legislation with "Well I think foreclosures are just terrible!" Okay fine, but is this new legislation a good idea? "I'm against foreclosures!" Terrific. Good to know.

I also want to pull out this one part of Mankiw's post:

In a free society, you don't have the freedom to steal your neighbor's property. And that should include intellectual property. Moreover, it is the function of the state to enforce those rights. We don't leave it up to civil litigation to protect property rights (although that is part of the solution). We give the state substantial powers to stop theft.

I could use that same observation to oppose SOPA.

One of the major problems I have with it is that it would remove the State from the process.* Under SOPA, someone who thinks their IP is being infringed could demand that the offending website be taken offline, processing of payments to it cease, and advertisements for it stop being placed, all within five days of the complaint. At no point is their an investigation to determine if the accusation is correct, and at no point does the accused get to step in and defend themselves. The accusation is the beginning and end. The clock starts ticking when the accusation is made, and it doesn't stop. That's not giving the State "substantial powers to stop theft," that's giving substantial powers to whoever in the room is most willing to fling accusations around.

(* I can't believe I just typed those words.)

Yes, we want the state to protect property. But that doesn't mean I can walk into a pawn shop, claim some goods in it are stolen property, and force the shop eeper to take them outside and burn them within the hour on my say so. I must go to the police, who go to a prosecutor, who goes to a judge, who initiates a robust, adversarial process for determining the legal status of the goods in question.

Mankiw continues:

Just as owners of tangible personal property have good cause to call for a police force and a system of criminal courts, owners of intellectual property have good cause to ask the state to stop those who would infringe on their rights.

Yes, but the legislation necessary for this already exists. This is a good argument for piracy to be illegal, but piracy is already illegal. This is a problem we already have a solution to, and so Mankiw's claim doesn't tell us anything at all about SOPA.

This situation reminds me of much of the proposed legislation after Giffords got shot. Attempted murder is already illegal. Are crazed gunmen going to be deterred if we write specific new legislation making it extra-illegal to kill people at political rallies? But that doesn't matter, because There Is A Problem and Something Must Be Done.

Danny MacAskill in Edinburgh

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:55:00 +0000

I usually refrain from posting videos with seven-figure viewership, but in this case I'll make an exception.

That is all.

Myth of the American Sleepover

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:40:00 +0000

Filmspotting has this thing called "The Golden Brick," which is an award they give out every year for an under-appreciated move. I'm a year late on recommending "The Myth of the American Sleepover," but that's my Golden Brick. See this movie.

This A.O. Scott review sums it up well. Scott identifies "longing" as the central theme of the movie, which I think is spot-on.

What [Director David Robert] Mitchell gets splendidly right in this quiet, observant film, is the unsteady mixture of sophistication and naïveté that is central to the modern American teenage way of being in the world. These children — the oldest character is home from college, and there is not a parent in sight — hardly know what, or who, they are supposed to want, but yearning seems to be both their birthright and their responsibility.

I think MotAS nails the fun-mixed-with-sadness feeling that permeates many adolescent nights.

One big question I did have while watching this is when it is supposed to occur. The idea of "sleepovers" seems somewhat antiquated already. The clothes and grooming are modern, but the cars and many props are indistinctly old, and there's not a cellphone in sight. Did this happen a long time ago, or has the present not yet arrived in this sleepy Michigan suburb?

I'd guess this vagueness is mostly on purposes, because it allows people of pretty much any age to latch on to nostalgia by setting the movie to no more specific a date than "sometime in the last 25 years."

Edited to add — I forgot to mention that the acting is a little rough. This didn't bother me, because these characters are supposed to be awkward. Awkwardly delivered lines reinforce the theme of the movie, rather than detracting from it.

"Still Russian"

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:33:00 +0000

Taki's Magazine | John Derbyshire | Down, But Still Russian

Walking around central Moscow, the thing you notice is the Russians—I mean, the near-total absence of non-Russians. [...]

That small tourist element aside, well-nigh everyone here is ethnically Russian. The cab drivers are Russian. The waiters and waitresses are Russian. The staff in barbershops and nail salons are Russian. The maintenance men in the subway and the ladies issuing subway tickets are Russian. The beggars are Russian. The guy selling fags and candy from a sidewalk kiosk labeled PRODUKTY (“stuff”) is Russian. The girl serving me in the pharmacy is Russian. The models shown in ads for escort agencies and “Private Club and Restaurant” are Russian (just as they are in New York, come to think of it).

Even—good grief!—the lady who cleans our hotel room is Russian. She spoke fluent Russian, anyway, though her features had a slight Mongolian. To make sure, I asked her. Yes, Russian—from Yugra, up in the north Urals somewhere, and so presumably with some Siberian-aboriginal blood contributing to the physiognomy. Where in the Anglosphere nowadays would you have your hotel room cleaned by a native of that country?

Grand Rapids, MI, where everyone from the scullery maids to the burger flippers looked like extras from a Mellencamp video.

Does this tell us that there are Jobs Russians Won’t Do? I doubt it. There are plenty of fair, blue-eyed Russians down there among the Kyrgyz and Buryats doing the drudge work. The overwhelming impression in central Moscow is of a city populated almost entirely by Russians. I have not had the opportunity to call any major firm or government office in Moscow, but I feel fairly sure that if I did, I would not be instructed to press “1” for Russian.

To see how striking all this is, imagine yourself wandering around central London, Manhattan, Los Angeles, or even—more rapidly this past few years, it seems—Washington, DC.

Simple reason: Russia is not an appealing place to move to. Few Ethiopians or Jamaicans or Filipinos or Vietnamese are scraping together enough money to move to Moscow, or hoping their cousin can find them a job in Yekaterinburg, or camping out in the front of a consulate to enter a visa lottery to move to Novgorod.

Russia is only a slightly more appealing place to move to than Namibia and significantly less appealing than Rwanda, judging from world-wide migration statistics.

It has nothing to do with the sinisterness Derbyshire sees in Western immigration policies, it's just that people from elsewhere have no preference for moving to Russia.

Rule of thumb: if you can find numerous immigrant workers from Country A in a developed nation B, you will not find people from B emigrating to A to work.

Derbyshire goes on about how "globalists" and other upper-crust Americans and Brits have encouraged immigration in order to benefit from cheap labor, "smashing up any kind of national feeling," etc. Then he contradicts his own argument by saying the Russian ruling class hasn't gone in for that.

None of this [increased immigration] has got much purchase in Russia—an odd thing, since Russia’s ruling classes are even more corrupt, unscrupulous, and contemptuous of their lower-class citizens than are Britain’s and America’s.

There are four ways to explain Derb's supposed paradox:

1. What benefits posh Anglo-Americans (in this case, cheap immigrant labor) would not benefit posh Russians. Hard to see why this would be.

2. Ruling Russians are far more nationalist and xenophobic over the last several decades than Westerners. This is not in evidence, and also fairly hard to believe.

3. Ruling Russians are unable to implement open borders in the way Americans or Brits have been. Again, why? What's stopping them? Is there some Super-Arpaio that's stopping the famously corrupt Russian oligarchs from throwing open the gates?

(Don't miss that link; it applies equally to explanation #2.)

4. Something else is driving immigration besides the nefarious plots of the upper income groups.

The explanation for this paradox Derbyshire gives is:

Perhaps that’s why Russia’s rulers, as cynical and ruthless as they are, hold off on bringing in Muslims and Africans to break the ethnic back of their people. Nobody has yet managed to make any large number of Russians hate their own ancestors.

My explanation is far simpler: "rulers" in both the West and Russia don't allow immigration for the purpose of "breaking the ethnic back of their people" in the first place. Boom. No paradox to explain.

Nature-Inspired AI : Wings :: Good Old Fashioned AI : Blimps

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:11:00 +0000

NY Times | Steve Lohr | Creating Artificial Intelligence Based on the Real Thing

I work on the algorithms/software side of biologically-inspired computing, not the hardware side this article describes, but I still really like this overall approach.

Other than "yeah! more of this please!" I don't have much to say about the article as a whole or the research project. I can address this part though:

If it succeeds, the project [to make neuromorphic chips] would seem to make peace with the “airplanes don’t flap their wings” critique. “Yes, they are different, but bird wings and plane wings both depend on the same aerodynamic principles to get lift,” said Christopher T. Kello, director of the Cognitive Mechanics Lab at the University of California, Merced. “It’s the same with this project. You can use essential design elements from biology.”

I've run into the "airplanes don't flap" objection before. My stock answer is to compare our current computing paradigm to hot air balloons.

Imagine a world where no one ever invented planes, and never tried all the wacky Da Vinci-like flapping flying machines. But this world does have a lot of hot air balloons, and even some blimps, and some people were researching dirigibles. Those are all cool and all, and they're up in the air like birds, and they even have some advantages over birds. But they're nothing like birds, and they have a lot of limitations that birds don't. Furthermore we've been hearing about how lighter-than-air machines are going to catch up to birds any year now for decades, and they never seem to get there.

In that world doesn't it make sense to look into wings and airfoils and more natural methods of flying? Maybe you don't end up with something flappy, but shouldn't you start looking there? Doesn't it make sense to take a good long look at birds, and make sure you know how they work before you write off airfoils as a method of flight? Or do you really want to ignore the one example nature gave you of flight and stick it out with Good Old Fashioned Flying Machines?

Redbox Missing Features

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:06:00 +0000

In the last month Mrs. SB7 and I have been making heavy use of our local Redboxes. It's a great service, especially as a complement to Netflix streaming.

I'm struck by two missing features with Redbox, though.

The first is the ability to save movies currently in theaters to a list and be reminded when they are eventually released on DVD. This is partially available, but as far as I can tell, only for movies which are being released on DVD in the next month or two. I want to set a reminder right now that I want to see Hugo, for instance. (Maybe there is a way to do this, and I haven't noticed.) Instead, according to Redbox, Hugo doesn't exist.

The second feature is a wish list. There are several movies out now on DVD that I want to rent at some point, but not tonight. I'd to be able to make a list of these, and have Redbox remind me what they are. They could also pre-sort my list to the options currently available at my location. That would short-circuit the this recurring conversation:

SB7: Do you want to rent a movie tonight?
Mrs. SB7: Sure.
SB7: What do you want to see?
Mrs. SB7: I don't know. What do you want to see?
SB7: I don't know. What's out?
Mrs. SB7: I don't know. You choose something.
SB7: Well what are you in the mood for?
[etc.]

Both of these, and especially the second, seem pretty trivial. Why don't they exist? What am I missing?

The Angel Hunter

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 21:14:00 +0000

A friend of mine, L.B.D., is doing some PR for a fantasy novel, set partially at my alma mater, and asked if I would like to review it. This isn't something I've ever done before, but I feel like a real professional, getting a free promo copy and everything. Since writing a proper book review isn't something I've ever tried before, I'm going to go about this the best way I know how, which you might see as off-the-cuff rambling, but I prefer to think of as a non-linear collection of thoughts. Here goes nothing.

• The book is J.A. Leary's The Angel Hunter. The main character is a young, windowed business executive whose infant twins are kidnapped under mysterious circumstances. It becomes clear that she, and her offspring, have a particular destiny. She struggles to recover her children, with the help of a modern day alchemist/archeologist/mad scientist, while trying to outwit two different secret organizations and a skeptical policy force.

There is also some corporate espionage, organized crime, a secret cabal of clergy, intelligence organizations, nazis, shadow governments, zombie hitler (well, sort of), the ark of the covenant and other relics, the antichrist, fallen angels, occult wisdom, and what I can only describe as computational astrology. Oh, and a landmark on the Notre Dame campus is actually a cosmic gateway.

• If this seems like a lot, it is. The Angel Hunter has lots and lots of ideas. Which is great!

But I can't help but think this book would have benefited a lot from paring these different subplots down. Indiana Jones tracked down the Ark of the Covenant and fought off Nazis. He wasn't also trying to find the Image of Edessa, the Crown of Prester John, and Pope Joan's pontifical knickers all the while keeping the Masons from finding the Philosopher's Stone with the help of the Theban Legion and also escaping from the US Marshals, who are trying to arrest him and the Wandering Jew for insurance fraud. That would be a little too much.

• The stage has been set for sequels featuring the same main character, so perhaps some of the elements in this book could have been saved for later books. On the other hand, if Leary has used up a dozen or so conspiracies and mysteries and devices already in the first volume, he must have a lot more in the tank for the next volume.

• Advice for all authors of the "everything you know is wrong!" genre of conspiracy/fantasy books: nail the small stuff. I'm not going to believe that the structure of the universe is fundamentally different than I have always been told, or that there is a millennia-old conspiracy revolving around esoteric ancient wisdom, or that secret societies control the world, or that everything the Church has taught us is a lie if the mundane details are off. Incorrect trivialities may be trivial, but they makes it much harder to suspend disbelief.

For example, the main church on Notre Dame's campus is the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. It is, as the name suggests, a basilica, not a cathedral, as Leary calls it several times. A cathedral is not just a big, important church. It is the seat (literally and figuratively) of a Bishop. Calling Sacred Heart a cathedral hurts your credibility as a story teller and takes me out of the narrative.

I put down Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol over a matter like this. This isn't a surprise; he's notorious for being careless with details.* I could deal with secret chambers under the Capitol, and lost Masonic secrets, and even mental energy affecting the material world. Using "convergence" when he clearly means "emergence" in the middle of a monolog about the properties of emergent systems made me realize there are a ton of better books to be reading right now. You've got to nail the details if I'm going to believe the big lie.

(* Changing details in the service of a story is one thing, but getting things wrong which are irrelevant is just sloppy. See Megan McArdle's similar complaint about the treatment of Washing, DC geography in Homeland.)

• Speaking of small matters, there were a lot of problems with the typography in my copy.

Some caveats: (1) I care way more about typography than most. I keep a spreadsheet of books I've read, and one of the few columns is "type face." (2) IIRC, this was self-published, or at least somewhat so, and that's hard. I get it. I wrote up several hundred pages last quarter, with figures, equations, TOCs, lists of figures, tables, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, and so on. Typesetting is hard, and requires a lot of work, so errors are bound to creep in. (3) This was a review copy, so perhaps it had not gotten the final proofing yet.

I understand this is hard, and most people don't care as much as I do, but damn it, I do care. Angel Hunter is, primarily, a pulp adventure. (I don't mean that to be dismissive; I love and need some pulp in my diet.) This is the kind of story that asks you to sit back and enjoy, and don't think too hard about how it all works. But that process is thrown out of whack when there are inexplicable line breaks in the middle of paragraphs, or when sections oddly switch from being fully justified to ragged right.

I've looked around, and the process of getting your text ready to print physically is not easy, apparently. I'm judging mostly by the numbers of online tutorials (eg); everything I've written and had printed has gone through an editor. Besides having editorial support, I've also created everything I've written in LaTex, which nicely removes all of the problems I noticed in Angel Hunter. To be sure, it introduces complications of it's own, but you don't have to worry about the leading changing from paragraph to paragraph without you knowing it. It blows my mind that anyone could typeset a book-length text using Word or other WYSWIG editors. Why would people subject themselves to that?

• Maybe I only feel this way because I'm an ND alumnus, but I think the idea of using Notre Dame's campus as a setting is a pretty good one. I would have liked to see even more of that used. Most of the stories in this subgenre are very Old World-focused. It's always Rome and Paris and maybe London or Prague, and maybe somewhere in the Near East like Alexandria, Istanbul or Jerusalem. And there are very good reasons for that. Phoenix, Arizona just doesn't seem like the kind of place where occult mysteries are hidden.

But college campuses, especially older (or older-styled) campuses like ND and Princeton and Yale, where practically every building has some story behind it, do seem like the types of places that house mysterious secrets. And I think Notre Dame is an especially good choice for this because it does have that link, through the Church, back to the Old World.

I could see a fun occult adventure comic being set at ND, with a BPRD-like organization with a secret headquarters in the subbasement of the library. Somebody get on that.

• Foucault's Pendulum, I believe, pointed out that a lot of conspiracy fantasies revolve around the this could be true therefore this is true gambit. ("It's theoretically possible that the Egyptians sailed to Mexico and taught the proto-Mayans how to build pyramids; you can't prove they didn't to my satisfaction; therefore the Egyptians did sail to Mexico, etc.") This is another thing Dan Brown loves to do.

Thankfully, Leary engages in little of this. There was one point however, and I've lost the page number, sadly, where Victoria's mother literally says this. (She can't know that psychological damage definitively didn't cause physical wounds, therefore she concludes that these physical wounds are the result of psychological damage.) It was annoying that Leary would stoop to the can't-prove-it's-false-therefore-it's-true move, but also very amusing that he would do so so explicitly, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was doing it on purpose with a wink and a nudge.

• As I said, there is a lot going on in this book. The theme I found most interesting, however, was the link between divinity and technology. We've all heard Clark's Third Law, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Lev Grossman's The Magician King extends that with the premise that any sufficiency advanced magic is indistinguishable from divinity. I think that continuum from technology to magic to godhood is a very fertile one for authors to explore, and I'm glad to see Leary doing so.

(See also Braak's corollary: "any technology that is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.")

This was handled a little roughly in Angel Hunter, however. There was a scene in the first act or so which portrays an argument between two archangels. It's a little unclear whether they are traditional angels, that is, divine beings in a heavenly realm, or just beings in another dimension of the physical universe, or beings with extremely high technical mastery, or what. My confusion lasted throughout the book. I wasn't sure what frame I was supposed to be coming at this from. Things clear up somewhat in the climax, during the the descriptions of Purgatory and Hell, but I'm still unclear what Leary's point of view is on this.

Hell, Satan, etc. were described with terms about different energy levels and vibrations and such, apparently wanting me to think of them as physical things, in our universe, describable with the right set of physical laws and constants, just like the world we know. If that's the situation (in the story world, of course) then that materialism demotes God a bit. He might still be the most powerful guy on the playing field, but now we're all on the same, physical, field. If divinity is a matter of mastering the appropriate wave mechanics and harmonics and so forth, the God isn't some sui generis thing, he's just a very good engineer.

But at the same time, Leary's book is quite pro-religious and pro-faith. Victoria's triumph revolves around God as a divine being whose love sustains life itself. So which is it? I think either point of view has the potential to tell a good story, but I'm not sure which one Leary was working from. Is God an ineffable, immaterial being who saves and redeems us, or is he a material thing, open to scientific understanding?

• Does being a super engineer/wizard make you Jehovah, whose loves sustains life, etc.? No, but it might make you pretty close to Mars or Hephaestus or Athena.

• Speaking of divinity and technology being two sides of the same coin, Kenneth Branagh's Thor movie from last year used this device. I thought that was a good way of fitting what are essentially gods into the same world as people like Iron Man. (This is a problem that comic books writers have struggled with, to various degrees and in various dimensions, for a long time.)

For instance, look at the way the art department depicted "The Destroyer." How Hephaestus-ian is this thing? He's straight from the bowels of Mount Etna.

Is he some kind of iron-and-fire demon? Some sort of golem created by a wizard? A nanotech artifact? Who knows?

In Thor's case it doesn't matter. Thor comes right out and says "science and magic are the same thing." That's fine, because no one still worships Thor or Odin, so no one is going to have to reconcile any dissonance if you claim their gods are really aliens with advanced engineering skills. I don't think you can be that coy when you're dealing with a judeo-christian mythology like Angel Hunter does. Especially not when that theology plays a major thematic roll in your story.

• For more on the divinity/technology confluence see Iain M Banks' "Sublimed" and Vernor Vinge's "Transcendent" civilizations in their Culture and Zones of Thought novels, respectively. Note that even the names given to these societies use words usually associated with religion or mysticism. This theme isn't that deeply explored by either writer, but it's definitely there.

• This is only tangentially related, but this recent piece in the International Herald Tribune touches on the overlap between religion and science outside of fictional narratives, specifically whether CERN and General Relativity "prove" the Quran is right. It all sounds like those "proofs" that people like Athanasius Kircher cooked up during the Counter Reformation.

• I think we can evaluate Art on two different dimensions. One is more academic, and perhaps more objective. Did this film make good use of editing? Is this photograph under- or over-exposed? Is this character a fully-fleshed-out person? Are the stakes appropriate and properly motivated?

The other dimension is more personal, and consists of only one question: Do I want more of this?

(Don't take this too literally. I wish there were more Casablanca, because I believe it is a perfect movie. But I do not actually want their to be more scenes in it, or for it to have a sequel. Intellectually, I do not want there to be more of it. But some sub-rational part of me wants to continue experiencing it over and over and over again, and so the answer to "do I want more of this?" is entirely affirmative.)

Typically my answer to this question is pretty open-and-shut: I'm either interested in more, or I'm not. With Angel Hunter I'm sort of in-between. While I physically had the book in my hand, I wanted to keep reading, check out one more chapter, and stay up a little later to keep going. But when I put the book down I didn't have a ton of desire to pick it back up.

The only other thing I can think of having the same experience with is the third and fourth seasons of Sons of Anarchy. When I'm watching a particular episode, I really want to keep watching until it's over. But somehow between episodes I'm not compelled to start up the next one.

I think with both Angel Hunter and SoA the problem is too many plot threads. If Leary had half as many mysteries to unravel I probably would have been more interested in getting back to the book to find out what the deal was. If the Sons had only two or three enemies to fight or internal disputes to resolve each one would be seem more important. As is almost every character has their own little drama, and I'm not that interested in any of them.

Part of the problem might be that the profusion of mysteries, combined with the small errors mentioned above, made it hard for me to believe that returning to the book would get me any answers.

• Another possibility is that individual scenes seem well written, even if the structure of the book as a whole doesn't hang together as well. I'll refer you to the memo David Mamet sent to his writing staff on The Unit:

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn't, I wouldn't. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

We, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions.
1) Who wants what?
2) What happens if [she doesn't] get it?
3) Why now?

[...] Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene. This need is why they came. It is that the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure -- this is how the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene. All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.

Some of the more fantastic elements of Angel Hunter do get a little informational, for instance when the Mad Scientist is explaining his discoveries. But on the whole the scenes do tend to make it very clear who wants what and why, they get foiled, and then they move on to the next attempt.

• When LBD approached me about reviewing this, she said she knows I like to read fantasy. My first reaction was "no, I don't."

But then I realized, wait, yes I do. I've just never thought of myself as a fantasy reader.

I read a lot of Sci-Fi, always have. I think I never thought of myself as a fantasy reader because I never got into any of the big, "High Fantasy," Tolkienesque swords-and-wizards-and-dragons-and-dwarves epics. (Well, besides, Lord of the Rings itself, which I've read several times and will always hold a special place in my heart as the first "adult" book I remember reading back in elementary school.)

But I've realized that, besides Lord of the Rings, I loved Narnia as a kid, the Earthsea books are the stories I would most like to see turned into a good movie, The Magicians was the best novel I read this year, Discworld is great, and many of the comics I love, like Fables and Hellboy, are unquestionably fantasy. So yes, I guess I like to read fantasy. Thank you to LBD for helping me to realize that.

• Conclusion: if you're in to this genre of books, Angel Hunter will make a decent beach read sort of book. It's something you should be able to sit down, switch off, and enjoy, with a fast pace and lots of different elements to keep you on your toes. There are plenty of interesting ideas at play, though the execution is unpolished. I'm interested to see if future volumes smooth out some of that rookie roughness, and if there will be the same wild profusion of ideas shown here.

My biggest complaint is that there are too many elements, in fact. Fewer subplots and devices, each given a little more attention, would make for a stronger story. Personally, I would have liked a clearer view on the metaphysics of the world to help me get situated as well.

Theatre Pricing Speculation

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:48:00 +0000

The Atlantic | Derek Thompson | Why Do All Movie Tickets Cost the Same? At the AMC Loews in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., every evening ticket is $12, plus taxes, whether you want to see Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, the holiday-season juggernaut starring Tom Cruise bouncing off Dubai's 2,700-foot Burj Khalifa tower, or Young Adult, a small, dark comedy starring Charlize Theron. Like tens of millions of Americans, I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult, which has made less than $10 million over the same span. Nobody is surprised or impressed by the discrepancy. The real question is: If demand is supposed to move prices, why isn't seeing Young Adult much cheaper than seeing Mission: Impossible?

Thompson has a good post about this, with some pretty graphs, but I think he misses something important. As does Tyler Cowen, who rarely misses things. He has this to say:

I would rephrase the question to be a little more specific. Especially in the days of robust DVD sales, why did they not offer first weekend modest coupon bonuses — as distinct from price discounts — for the most popular movies? That would drive up attendance, without damaging the gross (as a lower p would), and boost “advertising” for the DVD and the subsequent foreign openings.

Allow me to take a stab at an explanation. IIRC from my undergrad film class,* theaters get a bigger cut of ticket sales the longer a film has been out. Typically -- again, IIRC -- the theater owner gets nothing for opening week tickets. Then their cut gradually increases, so they get 10% of the second weeks, tickets, 20% of the third, and so on, with their cut plateauing before they get 100%.

(* And perhaps things have changed, and so neither Thompson nor Cowen are in fact missing anything.)

So while the studio and exhibitor could potentially work out some arrangement to cut opening week prices to boost DVD sales, the exhibitor alone can not. (And indeed, has no reason to.) Considering different prices for different films doesn't make sense unless you also consider how long the movies have been out.

The length of runs of niche, art-house movies is very different from those of blockbuster films because they rely more on word-of-mouth. It's likely that a theater owner is making more money on each $12 ticket to Young Adult than they are on the $12 ticket to MI:GP (which came out later), or they will be making next week on Underworld: Awakening.

Spaceships

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:27:00 +0000

Cafe Hayek | Russ Roberts | Spaceship Earth Here is Joel Achenbach writing in today’s Washington Post:

Spaceship Earth enters 2012 belching smoke, overheating and burning through fuel at a frightening rate. It’s feeling pretty crowded, and the crew is mutinous. No one’s at the helm.
No one’s at the helm. That’s what makes Spaceship Earth such a potent metaphor for those who would like to be at the helm. [...]

Sure, it’s an antiquated metaphor. It’s also an increasingly apt way to discuss a planet with 7 billion people, a global economy, a World Wide Web, climate change, exotic organisms running amok and all sorts of resource shortages and ecological challenges. [...]
Kind of like a spaceship? We’re pretty good at managing or re-engineering actual spaceships. Human beings have a mediocre track record for aggressively managing or re-engineering a modestly complex system such as a city. An even more complex system, such as an entire economy or Yellowstone Park or the entire planet? That we have no clue about how to do well.

Are we? Compared to managing something like Yellowstone, sure. A non-complex, fully-Newtonian object like a space shuttle is easy. But are we actually very good at even that straight-forward task? Think carefully, and then present your answer to the families of Scobee, Smith, Onizuka, Resnik, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Husband, McCool, Brown, Chawla, Anderson, Clark, and Ramon.

How many people have been bureaucracied to death by the space program? And that makes the space program a good argument for centralized management how exactly?

What a terrible metaphor. This is like saying "Controlling the economy from the top-down will be as easy as riding a bike" to someone who was paralyzed in a biking accident.

Achenback continues:

More and more environmentalists and scientists talk about the planet as a complex system, one that human beings must aggressively monitor, manage and sometimes reengineer. Kind of like a spaceship.

What? That's the opposite of what scientists say about complex systems -- by definition they defy management. The inability to predict how a system will respond when you change something is what separates complex from non-complex systems.

Action Scientist!

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:02:00 +0000

I wish I could say that I've knocked off for some holiday break, but some malevolent journal editor has decided to make the submission due date for their special issue the 31st of December, so I'm still scrambling to finish up one more draft of this paper before Christmas.

While I wait for my postprandial coffee to kick in, I'm going to plug in my new headphones (thanks, Mom!) and crank up Adam Warrock's new Atomic Robo homage, "I Am An Action Scientist."

Boom! Now I am ready to do some Science!

(Sketch by Scott Wegener.)

The CK Method

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:05:00 +0000

The Economist: Babbage Blog | G.F. | Digital content: Take it all off

Now, of course, [Louis] C.K. has the advantage of millions of fans from his live and television performances. He receives praise from his fellow comedians and appears regularly on late-night television. His [DRM-free, low-cost, independent] approach would probably not work for someone appearing at open-mic night in Duluth once a month.

But the guy grinding out open mic nights on Duluth isn't going to be able to sell the DRM'ed, $25, studio-backed album either!

I'm getting tired of this argument that you need to already have an audience in order to use non-traditional distribution models. People like Jonathan Coulton have already used the low-cost, no-DRM model to launch their careers. A lot of comics artists have used similar approaches.

Counter-examples aside, in what other industry would you hear "Don't try a different sales strategy; you can't break in unless you do everything the traditional way"?

Stern's Lesson

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:58:00 +0000

National Review Online: The Agenda | Reihan Salam | Andy Stern’s Peculiar Idea

To be clear, Andy Stern believes that the United States needs a Chinese-style central plan to flourish, one that will be executed by a streamlined government.

To really learn from the Chinese, and to enjoy such staggering growth rates, we should go about things differently: let’s have a Maoist insurrection followed by a civil war that lasts for several years. Then let’s destroy most of the wealth in the country, and drive out millions of our most enterprising and educated citizens by launching systematic terror campaigns during which millions of others will die in violence or of starvation. Next, let’s have a modest economic opening in coastal regions: impoverished citizens will be allowed to launch small-scale township and village enterprises and components will be assembled in a handful of cities by our stunted descendants. Then let’s severely curb those township and village enterprises because they represent a potential political threat and invite large foreign multinationals and state-owned enterprises [let's not forget those!] to work our population to the bone at artificially suppressed wage rates, threatening those who complain with serious reprisals up to and including death. Let us also initiate a population control policy designed to improve our dependency ratio for a few decades. As large numbers of workers shift from low-value agricultural work to manufacturing, we will experience … rapid growth! Mind you, getting from here to there will involve destroying an enormous swathe of our present-day GDP. And that sectoral shift from rural to urban work will run out of gas pretty fast, as will the population control policy that will guarantee rapid aging.

(0) When you go to the PRC you get shown exactly what the regime wants you to see. No more, no less.

(1) The US produces almost six times as much per person as does China. Remind me again why we we are supposed to be taking lessons from them?

(2) Stern thinks we need more centralized control of the economy. That's fantastic for Andy Stern, who naturally imagines we would get to be one of the lucky ones centrally controlling things. Did it occur to him that things would like different if he could be one of the impoverished agricultural peasants who gets denied permission to move off the farm and seek work in the city, and is instead doomed to a life of back breaking subsistence farming?

(3) Don't compare China-now to the US-now. Compare China-now to China-then. You'll get a different conclusion than Stern.

(4) Put another way: The proper question isn't "How has China gotten richer recently?" The right question is "Why was China so poor for so long?"

They've got 1.3 billion people, have a staggering supply of physical resources, are largely ethnically and linguistically homogenous, enjoy a good geographic location, and have a solid societal tradition of business and trading. If you stop asking "what has China done in the last two decades to grow?" and instead ask "why didn't they grow for the fifty years before that?" you'll reach a very different conclusion than Stern.

Digest: 21 Dec '11

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:36:00 +0000

This batch of links and excerpts is a bit on the older side. I got it all ready to publish then the new Blogger design ate it (twice), and I didn't get around to reassembling it until now. Apologies.

~ ~ ~ ~

∞ Going to the Mat | Matt Johnson | ATF and Obama Administration have used Fast & Furious to push gun control

∞ Nathan Torkington | Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong

Somebody needs to give a version of this talk to the USPS. (Short version: forget what you used to do. What are you doing right now to create value for users?)

∞ NY Times | Sebastian Thrun | Leave the Driving to the Car, and Reap Benefits in Safety and Mobility

∞ Koushik Dutta | The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars

And if cars are receiving 20 times more actual use, that would imply that there would be 20 times less cars sold.[1] This is the kind of disruptive change that can reshape the automotive industry. The recent GM/Chrysler bailout may have been for naught.[3]

[3] Of course, car companies realize this. And I can guarantee you, they will lobby against driverless cars.

And yet the first out of the gate with driverless cars will see huge sales. Will car companies be able to effectively collude to keep them off the roads? In every jurisdiction? Once they've been shown to be safe in Singapore, Korea, Germany, Poland, and Sweden (let's say) are there enough lobbyists in all of K Street to keep them out of the US?

∞ Sarasota Herald Tribune | Anthony Cormier & Matthew Doig | Unfit for Duty: How Florida's problem officers remain on the job

Part 2: Despite ‘moral character violations' — allegations of violence, drugs, theft and forcible sex — Florida officers keep their badges

[...] Even those officers with multiple offenses have been given chance after chance through a disciplinary system that has been reshaped in their favor by the state's politically influential police unions. As a result, officers around Florida carry personnel files that are anything but heroic.

Corrections officer Kurt Stout, already dogged by allegations he groped and had sex with prisoners, was arrested on allegations he raped two teenage girls. Nick Viaggio capped a string of violent outbursts at the Ocala Police Department by attacking his girlfriend in a crowded nightclub until bouncers dragged him away. Palm Beach County deputy Craig Knowles-Hiller, under investigation for sleeping with a 14-year old, had to explain why the girl's DNA was found on one of his sex toys.

In each case, state law enforcement officials let the men keep their badges.

(1) Where's Dexter Morgan when you need him?

(2) Do we want people with (potentially deadly) authority over citizens to be held to higher or lower standards than the rest of us? Very simple question, but a lot comes down to that.

∞ The Bluth Company

How dare you, Rick Perry?!

∞ Inside Higher Ed | Steve Kolowich | The Problem Solvers

“I think too much conversation about Khan Academy is about cute little videos," Khan said in an interview last week. “Most of our resources, almost two-thirds of [the staff], are engineers working on the exercises and analytics platform. That, I think, is what we’re most excited about.” [...]

Using math and computer science concepts decidedly more advanced than most of those in Khan’s video library, the Khan engineers have trained the website’s exercise platform how to predict, with startling accuracy, how likely it is that a student will correctly answer the next practice problem -- and whether that student will be able to solve the same type of problem a week, two weeks, and a month later.

The birth of quantitative education?

(Side note: has the introduction of quantitative techniques into a discipline ever not been opposed by the current practitioners? Outside of the natural sciences?)

∞ IEEE Spectrum | Warren Toomy | The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix: The classic operating system turns 40, and its progeny abound

∞ The Money Illusion | Scott Sumner | Two anecdotes and a complaint

(About unemployment insurance. His fourth point is the most interesting.)

SOPA is SOP

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:58:00 +0000

I have not complained at all about SOPA here. This is not because I don't despise it. Quite the opposite; I have nothing good to say about it. Indeed, I have not even read someone else who has something good to say about it.

However, I do find it deeply amusing how many statists have come out of the woodwork screaming about the Government quashing freedom. People (*ahem*) are attacking SOPA as if this isn't standard operating procedure for the State.

(Above image from @petridishes' twitter feed. I have no whether she thinks SOPA is the exception of business as usual.)

I'd like to see some more people concluding their attacks on SOPA with "And this is a great example of why we can't trust Congress to control things" rather than "Don't pass this particular bill." How do you look at SOPA and conclude that you can't trust Congress to abridge free expression in the interests of protecting intellectual property, without also concluding can't trust them to abridge free expression in order to enact "campaign finance reform" or to silence those who believe in jury nullification, or who want to talk about national security letters? How do you not reach the broader conclusions that Congress shouldn't be trusted with too much power over us?

Yes Virginia, SOPA is a way for Congress to empower a few people who they want to please at the expense of trampling the liberty of everyone else. But you could replace "SOPA" in the previous sentence with a thousand other laws and programs: TARP, bank bailouts, car bailouts, farm subsidies, Green jobs subsidies, sugar tariffs, ethanol subsidies, the Durbin amendment, transportation earmarks, the mortgage interest deduction, Fannie Mae, eminent domain, most zoning laws, and on and on and on. Don't act like SOPA is some kind of anomaly; this is what governments do.

~ ~ ~ ~

PS:

The Guardian | Chris McGreal | Military given go-ahead to detain US terrorist suspects without trial: Civil rights groups dismayed as Barack Obama abandons commitment to veto new security law contained in defence bill

Barack Obama has abandoned a commitment to veto a new security law that allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay.

Human rights groups accused the president of deserting his principles and disregarding the long-established principle that the military is not used in domestic policing. The legislation has also been strongly criticised by libertarians on the right angered at the stripping of individual rights for the duration of "a war that appears to have no end".

What. The. F.

~ ~ ~ ~

PPS:

The legislation's supporters in Congress say it simply codifies existing practice, such as the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Seriously, so what if it's existing practice? If you're doing something bad, the appropriate response is not to legitimize it, it's to stop doing the bad thing.

Career floozies -or- Atypical lifestyles require sacrificing typical benefits

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 16:02:00 +0000

Sofiastry | Sofia | Sluts

The problem with being a slut only arises when they want to simultaneously reject social expectations but also indulge in the larger framework of wanting conventional partners, children, marriage, etc. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong or immoral about being a whore, but when you’re rejecting the status quo, you really have to commit to your beliefs and not still harbour insecurity or unhappiness at potentially being “single” for the rest of your life. Or, at least, be happy with the kind of partner who can accept your previous life [...]

I think you could say the same thing about careers for a lot of my contemporaries, especially many of those in the OWS crowd. They want to "follow their bliss," and "pursue their dreams," and "change the world," and "be their own boss," and "put people before profits" and all the other stuff you hear at commencement addresses. And that's cool. Good for everyone that wants to do that stuff.

But a problem arises when people expect to be able to do all that and also have job security, and live in a nice apartment in a nice part of town, and have a stable retirement, and get medical benefits, and eat out at good restaurants, and have new gadgets, and pay for their children's educations. Those are all noble things to pursue as well.

Just like the problem of sluttiness only really becomes a problem when you try to reconcile it to more traditional lifestyles, the problems of being bohemian really flare up when you expect to be able to produce like a bohemian but consume like a bourgeois.

I'm not trying to pass judgement on either of those paths. And they're not entirely mutually exclusive. I think everyone needs a little from column A, a little from column B. But there are trade-offs. You don't get all of A and all of B.

OWS Care Bears

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:05:00 +0000

Studiously Uncool | Jules Aimé | Imagine unicorn sweat Pt 1

That title was inspired by a great line from Walter Russell Mead:

... greens shrieked hysterically and furiously that the world’s house was on fire. That may be true, but the greens were suggesting that all we had to do was collect enough unicorn sweat and then we could use that to put out the fire.
He's writing about global warming but the line applies to all sorts of political issues. To take just the great protest of the day, think of how the Occupy protestors resisted putting up any coherent list of demands. They thought it was enough to point at a problem.

As I've said before, this movement is anarchistic in spirit: it is driven by a magical belief that if we destroy the thing we don't like something we will like will most wonderfully grow in its place. All we have to do is care enough. [...]

There is no Green Lantern Ring of Power, and the State is not a Fairy Godmother with a bippity-boppity-boo magic wand.

Not having workable proposals to deal with things you dislike does not earn you bonus points for "transcending traditional politics through consensual consciousness raising." Yes, identification of a problem is good, but that is only Step Zero.

It's not an accident. For generations now, well-meaning people have taught kids that imagination and will are all it takes. Do you remember the adult who told you that, "You can be anything you want to be, you just have to set your mind to it". [...]

I remember, way back in the 1980s, hearing gay activists say that the only reason a cure for AIDS had not been found was that governments didn't care about gay men. Similar arguments are made about breast cancer and women. The implication being that all we have to do is care enough and we'll cure these diseases. With it goes the corollary that any failure proves ill will.

This attitude really annoys me. Not only is it completely wrong, it's counterproductive. Dangerous, even, because attributing bad outcomes to ill will and hoping someone will magic-wand them away prevents us from addressing the real causes.

Let's take a more recent example. Perhaps the disaster response to Katrina was so bad because "George Bush Hates Black People." But on the other hand perhaps the response was so bad because FEMA is a screw-up organization lacking the proper incentive mechanisms and insulated from the consequences of poor performance.

Which one of those diagnoses is going to lead to interventions which make disaster relief more effective the next time around?

The protestors have no intention of fixing anything themselves or even of indicating what they think will solve the problem. Someone else who is somewhere else is supposed to already know how to solve the problem. This has to be the case because, in the protestors' view, the problems only exist because of ill will.

And thus the reason why these protests always end in violence and disorder. That's not an accident but the intended result. The point is to keep attacking and tearing down until someone else makes all the things you don't like go away.

A protest founded on fairygodmotherism, besides sowing the seeds of it's own uselessness, actually reinforces the status quo system because it teaches people that the real problem is that elected leaders don't care enough, so if we only elect some other people who care even more all our problems will be fixed. Rather than revolutionizing politics, protests like OWS only serve to further entrench the cult of personality.

Umberto Eco, AUSA

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:43:00 +0000

Popehat | Ken | Reminder: Oh, Won’t You Please Shut Up?

Here’s how it works. The feds identify some fact that they can prove. It need not be inherently incriminating; it might be whether you were at a particular meeting, or whether you talked to someone about the existence of the investigation. They determine that they have irrefutable proof of this fact. Then, when they interview you, they ask you a question about the fact, hoping that you will lie. Often they employ professional questioning tactics to make it more likely you will lie — for instance, by phrasing the question or employing a tone of voice to make the fact sound sinister. You — having already been foolhardy enough to talk to them without a lawyer — obligingly lie about this fact. Then, even though there was never any question about the fact, even though your lie did not deter the federal government for a microsecond, they have you nailed for a false statement to a government agent in violation of 18 USC 1001. To be a crime under Section 1001, a statement must be material — but the federal courts have generally supported the government’s position that the question is not whether a false statement actually did influence the government, but whether it was the sort of false statement that could have influenced the government.

Hence, the government’s chickenshit false statement trap works — even though the government agents set it up from the start. Now, however weak or strong their evidence is of the issue they are investigating, they’ve got you on a Section 1001 charge — a federal felony. In effect, they are manufacturing felonies in the course of investigations.

This sounds like something out of Umberto Eco's new novel The Prague Cemetery, the protagonist of which is a double agent espionateur and forger who is very concerned with making "true fakes." If Eco wrote a novel set in 21st century America, I can imagine a modern Baudolino explaining to the reader how a Section 1001 charge is legitimate and moral thing to do.

(Note to lawmen who have not read Eco — at no point should you be happy to have a regime you participate in compared to something one of his characters would like.)

Business/Education Thought

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:35:00 +0000

If I were Amazon, I would curate reading lists for different topics and make the whole set available as a single product.

Perhaps pair up with The Great Courses or one of the universities like Stanford or MIT who are embracing online learning to generate them. Maybe get a nobel laureate or other luminary to sign off on the list in a subject they're familiar with.

I need to shore up my knowledge of statistics. I can go out there and read reviews and use the Amazon ratings systems and so on to find the best stats books, but that takes time and is hit-and-miss. That distributed, peer-driven recommendation system works great for novels and niche non-fiction, but for large topics like Data Structures there are some more-or-less canonical books. I want someone to quickly point those out to me so I can get started.

I want to be able to go to Amazon.com and have them give me the three or four best books on Linear Algebra so I can dive in without having to poke around in reviews and ratings and so on.

Magical Tax Bargain

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:58:00 +0000

Kids Prefer Cheese | Angus | Infra-marginal garbage

If we want to sock it to these "most fortunate Americans", by all means let's do. But let's not think that the fact that it's a marginal tax rate increase means that it will have an attenuated effect on their future economic activity.

PS: another bogus argument is to refer to the proposed increase as a "modest 3.25 percent surcharge". It's a 3.25 percentage point increase. If the current top rate is 35%, then the proposal is actually a 9.3% surcharge.

Hey Treasury department: Do what you want to do. Just stop lying about what it is you are doing!

If I had a genie granting me wishes — check check; scratch that. If I had a genie who drove very hard bargains but still did magical things for me, I would accept a deal in which public policy became less pleasing to me, but it was always discussed in a way I found to be forthright and rational. So, in Angus' example, I wouldn't so much mind a world with higher tax rates, but in which the arguments for high rates could not do things like ignore the difference between percentage points and percentages, or ignore incentives.

(Actually, screw genies. If there was an actual political deal on the table in which I paid more of my dollars in taxes but did so under a dead-simple consumption tax system so that I would never have to fill out a 1040 or hear someone bitch about "fair shares" again I would take that in a heartbeat.)

Digest: 9 Dec 2011

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:47:00 +0000

∞ jwz.org | jwz | Watch a VC use my name to sell a con.

[The VC is] telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.

∞ Slate | Sam Kean | The Inventor in Hollywood: Richard Rhodes explores Hedy Lamarr’s other career

I'm now perfectly used to seeing something in print or on TV and thinking "Oh yeah, I saw that online days ago." It's still a strange feeling when I see something reported online that I remember seeing in print several days beforehand. I feel like I'm living in Bizarro World. Or the real world more than 10 years ago.

(To be fair to the internet, this Slate piece has much more information than the print piece I saw a week earlier week.)

∞ Bng Bng | Jason Weisberger | Boars, Gore and Swords: 3rd best Game of Thrones podcast

Note to Self: Check this out when you get around to read Game of Thrones and follow along with their book club.

Note to Others: Podcasts and book clubs seem like they would go together very well. Sort of like Filmspotting's Marathon's feature.

∞ Threat Quality Press | Jeff Holland | Crap, Pirated Digital Comics Got It Right

Everyone recognizes that pirated media is appealing because the price is lower. But that is only half of the picture. The other, equally important half is that the pirated copy is typically a better product.

∞ Venonmous Porridge | Dan Wineman | Gaze Back

The only acceptable demeanor for a TSA officer toward a passenger, especially when the TSO is male and the passenger is female, is abject humility. No one made you take a job where you clinically deprive innocent people of their dignity under threat of force. You signed up for that, and I expect to see the apology on your face at all times. I expect to hear it in your voice; I expect to smell it in your goddamned sweat. And I expect you to wear that apology long after your disgusting daily routine is finally found unconstitutional and your hideous organization is disbanded and its leaders imprisoned. I expect you to wear that apology not because it makes up for all the years you helped ruin America — which it doesn’t — but because it’s simply the bare minimum standard of behavior someone in your position must meet in order to call himself a human being. [...]

People in power never see the abyss on their own, no matter how near to it they push us. It must be shown to them.

Be the abyss.

Hallelujah!

∞ Marginal Revolution | Tyler Cowen | “The moral superiority of the Germans”

I could not be more with Cowen and opposed to Avent on this score.

∞ Coyote Blog | Warren Meyer | I AM Doing Good

Once startups get going, Branson said, they need to start doing good for people, meaning I guess that they buy carbon offsets or something.

Guess what? If my startup is succesful, I am already doing good. I can’t make a dime unless I create value for people net of what they pay me. Every customer walks away from our interaction better off, or they would not have voluntarily elected to trade with me [...]

This, from Carpe Diem, is along the same lines. He looks at an editorial from the DC paper about the entry of Walmart, which says among other things

Despite the peacocking by Gray and others after the agreement was signed, the District is receiving mostly crumbs. Walmart has committed to providing $21 million in charitable donations over the next seven years, an average of $3 million a year. That’s a pittance.”
Walmart does not have to do squat for the community beyond its core business, because selling a broad range of goods conviniently and at really low prices is enough. Or if it is not enough, they will not make money. The promise of $21 million to some boondoggle controlled by a few politician’s friends is just a distraction, I wish they had not done it, but I understand that this is essentially a bribe to the officials of the DC banana republic to let them do business.

(1) The idea that a profitable business is definitionally making the world better by creating values for others is such a bedrock postulate of my worldview that I don't think I can have a productive conversation about anything economic with someone who disagrees.

(2) I've been following this case of the DC Walmarts through all the bullshit demands that both the DC government and "concerned citizens groups" have been making. They could not be built soon enough for me. Forget crumbs, DC stands to gain several of the most advanced, revolutionary retail outlets of the last century! Is that "crumbs"?

∞ Popehat | Ken | What Law Enforcement Thinks of Us

Via Radley Balko, we learn of a police raid on smoke shops, including one called Capitol Hemp. So far, so banal — another pointlessly mastubatory gesture in the financially and socially ruinous War on Drugs. What’s notable about this particular raid is that the police, in drafting their affidavit of probable cause in support of a search warrant, argued that display of materials about constitutional rights was probative of criminal activity and criminal intent: [...]

Yes, that’s the same 10 Rules publication that we wrote about here last year — an utterly straightforward, inoffensive exposition about protecting your rights (and your safety) when interacting with law enforcement. The video tells people that they have a right — a right set forth in the United States Constitution — to remain silent and to refuse to give consent to searches. Taking a page from modern pro-statist “what do you have to hide?” rhetoric, the police say that a typical citizen “would not need to know” such information and that it is intended to “deceive law enforcement.”

Whenever I hear someone in authority ask "what do you have to hide?" my first reaction is "From somebody arrogant enough to ask that question? Everything, up to and including the time of day."

Time Magazine

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 22:14:00 +0000

Partial Objects | The Last Psychiatrist | Does Time Magazine Think Americans are stupider than Europeans?

I see one of these comparisons every year or so, and I'm always baffled by the people who are so scandalized by them. These are different products, marketed to different people, in different societies and economies. Just because they have the same umbrella organization and use the same trade dress does not mean we should expect them to cover the same issues. (Last Psychiatrist addresses some of this; for example the average income of a Time Asia reader is orders of magnitude larger than the income of the Time US reader.)

You know how competition shows often have versions in different countries, so there's an America's Next Top Whatever and Germany's Next Top Whatever and Brzail's Next Top Whatever?* We don't expect the winner of the American, German and Brazilian versions to be the same. We don't expect the judges to look for the same things, or the audiences to respond to the same things, or the producers to emphasize the same things. Even though they're all called Next Top Whatever, we realize they are different products.

(* Sidenote: The Economist did a good piece on global reality television programming last month. This also explained a lot, like why I'll only get to see 24 episodes of IT Crowd ever:

Alex Mahon, president of Shine Group, points to another reason for British creativity. Many domestic television executives do not prize commercial success. The BBC is funded almost entirely by a licence fee on television-owning households. Channel 4 is funded by advertising but is publicly owned. At such outfits, success is measured largely in terms of creativity and innovation—putting on the show that everyone talks about. In practice, that means they favour short series. British television churns out a lot of ideas.

)

Time US and Time Europe and Time South Pacific and Time Asia are all different products.

The Coke you get here is not the Coke you get in Argentina or Russia or Korea.

The Milky Way bar you get in America is not the Milky Way bar you get abroad. Mars just re-uses the same name to sell two different things. And that's okay. Why can't Time do the same?

PS To be very clear, I think the American version of Time is a crappy product. Do not read this post as standing up for Time US in particular.

Calculating the SEM of a set from the SEMs of two subsets

noreply@blogger.com (SB7) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 00:50:00 +0000

Before moving on to more relevant blogging I should say that I got my statistics issue from last week sorted out. Thanks to my anonymous commenter and a tip I got out-of-band.

The OOB idea was to generate artificial data sets with the given SEMs and then calculate the SEM of the combined data. That sort of experimental approach is the kind of thing I like.

Anon pointed out what should have been immediately obvious to me: use the SEM of each subset to get their standard deviations, calculate the standard deviation of the whole set, then calculate the SEM of the whole set. Anon unfortunately had the incorrect method of finding the overall std.dev, but the correct method is readily available. I used both formulas listed here, and both gave me the same results, as well as matching the "experimental" results I generated earlier. I confess to not really understanding what the difference is supposed to be between those two methods. (That's why I need to go back and learn stats for real, rather than the ad-hoc way I've gone about it up until now.)

For the record, here's the two ways you can get the SEM of the full set given s_x = SEM(X), s_y = SEM(Y), n_x = |X| and n_y = |Y|, and the mu's being the means for the appropriate sets.

(Click to enlarge.)