Tom Noir.com

What does it feel like to be you?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:49:00 +0000

You read books and see movies about people who are very smart, or very rich, or who are kidnapped, or who are undercover cops, or who are victims of rape. You might have even personally met people who have actually experienced some of these things. But what does that experience actually feel like? How does it affect a real, living, breathing individual? What is the subjective experience of being a mathematical genius or a chess grandmaster? How does it impact someone to be kidnapped or work undercover? How do those experiences set you apart from the rest of us?

There are a lot of 'question and answer' sites on the web, but Quora is perhaps the most interesting, because there are people on there asking and trying to answer questions like these. The following are just a few Quora questions which people have offered interesting, in-depth answers to. Some of them are dark, some of them are tragic. But they are all worth reading, because just for a moment they might break you out of your world and let you experience someone else's.

What does it feel like to...

Understand advanced mathematics?
Play grandmaster-level chess?
Understand very advanced physics?
Have a trophy wife?
Be an undercover cop?
Be kidnapped?
Lose a spouse?
Experience rape? (not for the squeamish)

Obviously I'm finding Quora to be a very interesting resource. If you've found other good questions with interesting answers on there please pass them along.

And you might consider answering some too. The human experience is so various and subjective. What does it feel like to be you?

Links of the Future, Leap Day Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 14:59:00 +0000

Mr. and Mrs. Assad

Welcome to Wednesday, Leap Day 2012, traveler! It only happens every four years - unless we decide to abolish it. In the meantime, let's synchronize our atomic watches and I'll bring you up to speed on what's happening:

The wives of others - brutal, oppressive dictators and the women who love them.
The last words of the world's smartest bird.
Teenage girls: vapid trend-followers or linguistic trailblazers?
The Netherlands is the bicycling capital of the world. Dutch city-dwellers largely eschew cars in favor of bikes. That didn't happen by accident (or maybe it did).
Will we ever grow new organs? - Actually, we're doing it now! But how hard it is depends on the organ.
Can Weather Underground predict US weather better than the National Weather Service? - How WUndeground is crowd-sourcing its forecasting to predict microclimatic variances.
Google expected to begin selling Google Goggles this year - Ladies and gentlemen, Augmented Reality is here.
Meanwhile, the smartphone patent wars are heating up - But who stole from who? A sobering reminder that innovation requires freedom to borrow. Alex Tabarrok has a suggestion that might at least spread the credit around.
Why don't Jews farm? - A simple question with an interesting answer.
The pitfalls of fame in the indie music scene - You probably haven't heard of tUnE-yArDs. They're pretty underground.
Will eBooks kill literacy? Or will they be its salvation?
How trustworthy are online customer reviews? - "Who reviews the reviewers?"
Is new anti-obesity drug Qnexa too risky? - The FDA may approve it simply because it's 'better than nothing'.
An FBI G-man calls the TSA a failure
The secret agreement that revolutionized China - On the farms of Communist China, a capitalist experiment was meeting with great success.

A couple other links for your enjoyment: Big bada-boom! Video of the US military (circa 1948) disposing of 15 tons of sodium in a lake. If you're not up on your chemistry, sodium + water = explosion. A cool flash app shows you the comparative sizes of just about everything in the universe: from atomic nuclei to earthworms to galactic super-clusters. Just scroll in and out! It was whipped together by two ninth graders. What kind of jobs did people do in a medieval city? A list of pre-industrial occupations.

History in the Breaking: The OTHER World War

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:58:00 +0000

German Emperor Wilhelm II

Mental_Floss is running an excellent series of articles commemorating the centennial of World War I. For beleaguered high school history students, the first World War often feels like the most confusing of wars. Whereas World War II had clear villains (Nazis! The Japanese!) and sharply-defined causes (Pearl Harbor!), World War I had a much more convoluted chain of cause-and-effect and no clear-cut bad guys. You might count the Germans again, but they weren't especially villainous during this period in history. In fact they were basically playing the same imperialist expansionist game as all the other European powers, which is really what lead to all the problems in the first place.

At any rate, if all you know about the 'The Great War' is that it started because someone shot the Austrian Arch-Duke while he was stopping for a sandwich, you might enjoy this series:

I can contribute a little bit to this subject as well. My perennially popular article on Prussia mostly touches on the history of that state in the nineteenth century, but Prussian politics were quite relevant to what happened later on too.

Europe in 1910

As I wrote before, the state of Prussia benefited from an unusually long run of outstanding political leadership, but unfortunately by the beginning of the twentieth century their luck had run out. The extraordinary chancellorship of political genius Otto von Bismark had ended and Prussia was saddled with the deluded and out-of-touch leadership of Wilhelm II, German emperor and last king of Prussia.

Germany (with the exception of Austria, which remained independent) had been officially unified under the leadership of Prussia, its strongest state, in 1871, just a few decades prior. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but the truth was that there were large political and cultural differences between the various 'German' states. On its own Prussia had been a fairly stable political entity, but after unification things were much more unstable. Even though the Prussian leadership remained nominally in charge, there seemed to be a deep-rooted insecurity within the unified government that fed the need for bluster and grandstanding on the international stage.

To put it simply, the Kaiser and his political allies hoped that cultivating an us-versus-them mentality would boost (conservative) German nationalism and distract people from troubles at home such as the rising influence of socialism.

So they entered into a series of ill-thought-out and escalating series of confrontations with rival European powers.

Unfortunately, by 1812 Europe was a real political powder keg and the Germans were playing with fire. The fashion for building far-flung colonial empires had reached its zenith and the European states were jockeying for influence over what little pieces of the world were left to parcel up. To the east, Russia continued to grow in size and strength, which frightened virtually everybody. The European powers played each other against each other with an increasingly tangled series of alliances and counter-alliances. Meanwhile at home, nationalist and socialist movements were threatening the authority of the various monarchies.

Everyone was on edge, everything was in flux and in short it was a really bad time for Kaiser Wilhelm II to start strutting around and making warlike noises.

Obviously, that would not stop him.

The Kaiser is an easy target for vilification, but the first World War was really the result of an unsustainable political system where nationalistic monarchies pursued aggressive policies of colonial expansionism to gain power and prestige. Something was eventually going to give, and when it did the First World War was the result.

Links of the Future - Culture Shock Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:17:00 +0000

Welcome to Thursday, January the 19th, 2012, traveler. It's a brave new world. Brace yourself for some serious culture shock.

The rise of the NBA nerd - ballers trade gangsta-styles for prep school.
The French walk on the right side of the sidewalk, the Chinese on the left. Why?
The Chinese town where they only speak English? - And they're building an English castle there to boot.
Here's a darker piece on China: Is CCTV extorting businesses?
India's "missed call" system - Cheap cell phone users use a "ring once, hang up" system to page their friends.
Speaking of India, are couples in arranged marriages happier?
Sweden lets citizens run its Twitter account.
London burglars don't consider CDs worth stealing - More bad news for traditional media.
Is the state running the Russian mob? - Key quote: "To be shot by a Kalashnikov assault rifle is the ultimate form of respect."
9288 kilometers from Moscow - take a train to the Far East of Russia.
Hatred in Budapest - Is Hungary turning to fascism?
Back in the US, state-ordered sterilizations - Should North Carolina and other states pay restitution to victims?
Is Al Qaeda dead - At least in Afghanistan and Pakistan it seems there's not much left of it.

Ever wondered what it would be like to have a trophy wife?

This is a pretty funny 'informational' flyer: So... You've Been Indefinitely Detained!

3 Links: SOPA law won't make the judicial cut; how to learn eleven languages; and why Chinese football sucks

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

US courts unlikely to give SOPA a pass even if Congress does

Today marks a massive, internet-wide protest against two internet censorship bills currently before the US Congress: SOPA and PROTECT-IP. Wikipedia has blacked out its English language website, Google has blacked out its ubiquitous logo, and even that venerable bastion of cute cats on the internet has joined the protest.

At this point it looks like no legislator in their right mind would touch these bills with a ten-foot-pole. House sponsors are already ripping out some of the most offensive and dangerous provisions of SOPA and the Senate looks all set to kill their version of the bill with procedural 'discussions' that will probably lead exactly nowhere. On top of all this, the Whitehouse has voiced its disapproval.

But suppose, just suppose that somehow SOPA or something very like it were to pass both houses of Congress and be signed off by the President. Would the bill have a chance against the inevitable legal challenges that would follow?

Ars Technica says no: the courts have already spent a decade shooting down a similarly over-broad censorship law called the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA:

From the get-go, the case did not go well for the government. A judge for the Eastern District easily saw matters from the plaintiffs' perspective. COPA would deny access to legitimate content to adults who did not possess credit cards, and put serious interactive content behind verification walls, he noted.

"Evidence presented to this Court is likely to establish at trial that the implementation of credit card or adult verification screens in front of material that is harmful to minors may deter users from accessing such materials and that the loss of users of such material may affect the speakers' economic ability to provide such communications," Justice Lowell A. Reed wrote in a preliminary injunction against the law.

In addition, Reed challenged the legislation's insistence that it was the least burdensome approach to the problem. He invoked a crucial Supreme Court decision to bolster his argument—the "least restrictive means" standard outlined in Elrod v. Burns (1973): "If the State has open to it a less drastic way of satisfying its legitimate interests, it may not choose a legislative scheme that broadly stifles the exercise of fundamental personal liberties."

It is "not apparent" to this court that the government can prove that COPA is the least restrictive means available for protecting minors from objectionable content on the 'Net, Reed concluded.

Read the whole thing.

Are there really people who know dozens of languages?

Journalist slash linguist Michael Erard has written a book about his efforts to track down some of those legendary individuals who supposedly speak eleven, twelve or even dozens of languages - fluently.

CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a secular saint. Though he never performed the kind of miracle needed to be officially canonised, his power was close to unearthly. Mezzofanti was said to speak 72 languages. Or 50. Or to have fully mastered 30. No one was certain of the true figure, but it was a lot. Visitors flocked from all corners of Europe to test him and came away stunned. He could switch between languages with ease. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their sins the next morning and saved them from hell.

Thus begins a very interesting piece from The Economist.

Mr Erard says that true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few. Ziad Fazah, raised in Lebanon and now living in Brazil, once held the Guinness world record for 58 languages. But when surprised on a Chilean television show by native speakers, he utterly flubbed questions in Finnish, Mandarin, Farsi and Russian (including “What day is it today?” in Russian), a failure that lives in infamy on YouTube. Perhaps he was a fraud; perhaps he simply had a miserable day. Hyperpolyglots must warm up or “prime” their weaker languages, with a few hours’ or days’ practice, to use them comfortably. Switching quickly between more than around six or seven is near-impossible even for the most gifted.

OK, so eleven languages might be less impressive than fifty but most us stumble badly when it comes to picking up even one extra language. Does Mr. Erard figure the key to hyperpolyglottery?

At the end of his story, however, he finds a surprise in Mezzofanti’s archive: flashcards. Stacks of them, in Georgian, Hungarian, Arabic, Algonquin and nine other tongues. The world’s most celebrated hyperpolyglot relied on the same tools given to first-year language-learners today. The conclusion? Hyperpolyglots may begin with talent, but they aren’t geniuses. They simply enjoy tasks that are drudgery to normal people. The talent and enjoyment drive a virtuous cycle that pushes them to feats others simply shake their heads at, admiration mixed with no small amount of incomprehension.

The whole thing is here.

Why a country of 1.6 billion people can't produce a decent football (soccer) team

This is one of those simple questions with answers that have profound implications. Chinese people love football. There are 1.6 billion Chinese people. Why can't China produce a single star player? Why is their national team a national joke?

One more from The Economist:

In a country so proud of its global stature, football is a painful national joke. Perhaps because Chinese fans love the sport madly and want desperately for their nation to succeed at it, football is the common reference point by which people understand and measure failure. When, in 2008, milk powder from the Chinese company Sanlu was found to have been tainted with melamine, causing a national scandal, the joke was: “Sanlu milk, the exclusive milk of the Chinese national football team!”

Everyone is free to take aim, and publicly. When China was dispatched 2-0 by Belgium in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing (pictured above), a presenter on national CCTV said: “The Chinese football team decided to get out quickly, so as not to affect the people’s mood while they watch the Olympics.” Chinese fans chanted for the ouster of the head of China’s Football Association, Xie Yalong. The authorities sacked Mr Xie shortly after the games.

All this hints at something rather unique and powerful about the place of football in Chinese society. It is, like all organised sport in China, ultimately the domain of the government; so, according to the Communist Party’s normal methods, senior football officials should be provided at least some protection from scrutiny. In general the secretive state machinery of sport is shielded from public inspection, as it manufactures medal-winning Olympic athletes in dozens of disciplines. Chinese football, though, is so flagrantly and undeniably terrible and corrupt that all potshots are allowed: at officials, referees, owners and players—even, implicitly, at the heart of the communist system itself.

Solving the riddle of why Chinese football is so awful becomes, then, a subversive inquiry. It involves unravelling much of what might be wrong with China and its politics. Every Chinese citizen who cares about football participates in this subversion, each with some theory—blaming the schools, the scarcity of pitches, the state’s emphasis on individual over team sport, its ruthless treatment of athletes, the one-child policy, bribery and the corrosive influence of gambling. Most lead back to the same conclusion: the root cause is the system.

To find out why The Economist thinks that a country that is able to virtually mine gold medals at the Olympic Games can't master a team sport, you should read the whole thing.

The War on Cancer... Phobia

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:44:00 +0000

'Cancer' is a scary word. Many patients consider it to be equivalent to a death sentence. And it's not just any form of death, it's a terrifying, excruciatingly painful one that attacks without warning and is impervious to all treatment.

Isn't it?

David Ropeik writing for The Crux gives the following statistics:

“Cancer” is no longer the automatic death sentence it was once feared to be. From 1990 to 2010 the overall death rate from cancer in the U.S.has dropped 22% in men and 14% in women. (Incidence in the U.S. has stayed about the same.) In the U.K., the male mortality rate has dropped 26% and the female rate has declined 16% since 1980, (even while the incidence rate in the UK have increased 22%).

OK, so cancer isn't quite the killer it used to be (Ropeik notes that in the US it actually plays second fiddle to heart disease). But it's still bad and should be treated aggressively when identified, right?

If you were to be diagnosed with cancer, how do you think you would feel? It would depend on the type of cancer of course, but there’s a good chance that no matter the details, the word “cancer” would make the diagnosis much more frightening. Frightening enough, in fact, to do you as much harm, or more, than the disease itself. There is no question that in many cases, we are cancer-phobic, more afraid of the disease than the medical evidence says we need to be, and that fear alone can be bad for our health. As much as we need to understand cancer itself, we need to recognize and understand this risk, the risk of cancer phobia, in order to avoid all of what this awful disease can do to us.

...

Many prostate cancers grow so slowly they don’t need to be treated right away…the unnecessary treatment causes significant harm…and one of the reasons nine men out of ten men diagnosed with slow-growing prostate cancer accept, indeed choose these unnecessary harms, is because “cancer” sounds scary.

Consider more evidence for cancer phobia. In “Overdiagnosis in Cancer,” doctors at Dartmouth classified “25% of mammographically detected breast cancers, 50% of chest x-ray and/or sputum-detected lung cancers, and 60% of prostate-specific antigen–detected prostate cancers,” as “overdiagnosed,” which they defined as “1. The cancer never progresses (or, in fact, regresses) or 2. The cancer progresses slowly enough that the patient dies of other causes before the cancer becomes symptomatic.” The doctors described the negative health effects such patients suffer from a range of treatments that often involve radical surgery and noted; “Although such patients cannot benefit from unnecessary treatment, they can be harmed.”

Ropeik's conclusion (and this is apparently also the opinion of the National Institute for Health) is that 'cancer' needs better PR.

We have learned an immense amount about cancer, allowing us to treat, or even prevent, some types that used to be fatal. But we have also learned a great deal about the psychology of risk perception and why our fears often don’t match the evidence. We are failing to use that knowledge to protect ourselves from the significant, tangible health risks of our innately subjective risk perception system. The proposal of the NIH panel to replace the “C” word with something else that is medically honest but emotionally less frightening, is a tiny first step in the right direction, to open a new front in the War on Cancer, the battle against cancer phobia.

I have no doubt that the idea that a diagnosis of cancer should be treated as anything less than a DEFCON 1 situation will horrify many. But the truth is that so often the cure is literally worse than the disease. Unnecessary surgeries and treatments can drastically reduce quality of life, and even kill you. Because we have been ingrained with such a deep horror of cancer we make personal health decisions that are dangerous and costly.

Maybe it is time to re-brand cancer.

Read the entire article here.

And don't forget that demographically speaking, cancer is a good problem to have.

The Dark Art of Computer Programming

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Over at Marginal Revolution a commentor asked Why are some programmers paid more than others?

I’m curious about the reasons for the wide regional variation in wages for software engineers. Computer software would seem to be the ultimate tradeable good, as it can be sent instantly around the world at zero cost. I’m a computer programmer and have recently been looking into employment opportunities in East Asia, and was surprised to find that typical wages for programmers varied by as much as a factor of 5, with the US and Japan at the upper extreme and mainland China at the lower extreme. Wages in Singapore are less than half of US wages, despite a similar per-capita GDP. Wages in Shenzhen are less than half of what they are in Hong Kong, just an hour’s train ride away.

What’s going on here? Why do firms continue to hire overpriced American and Japanese software engineers when they can get them for half price in Hong Kong, even less in Singapore and Taiwan, and at a 75-80% discount in China? I’ve had some people tell me that American and Japanese programmers are just better, but I’m skeptical of this, especially considering the difficulty level of the interviews I had in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

There were lots of responses in the comments that are worth reading. One commonly cited factor was the communications barrier:

Dan Dostal: As a software engineer who is recently surrounded by H1Bs, one important point is the cost of translation. I as an American can talk to the business producer and tech lead in their native tongues and societal norms. The cost to keep me on board is roughly equivalent to my wages + equipment. The H1Bs make less than I do because their cost is wages + equipment + additional time for communications. I’ve only been here for 2 months and already I’ve been fought over by PMs who want me over the Indians because they can communicate efficiently with me. Perhaps the real cost is on the PM’s inability to communicate effectively across the language/culture barriers, but as I have yet to meet a PM with that ability, I’m not ready to place the cost there.

Now it seems you’re more interested in why there is less out-sourcing. And although infrastructure for outsourcing is non-trivial, it’s an initial cost with trivial rent. However, it goes straight back to the language/culture barrier. Even if HR is comfortable (and often they are not), communication over the internet is less effective than in person. Now multiple that problem with the language/culture problem and tack on the drastically lesser communications because of timezone issues and even a back-of-the-envelope calculation will show that paying me $40/hour here in Oregon is a better cost than paying someone around the world $10/hour. And if anyone is out-sourcing to Hong Kong they are doing it wrong. I would suspect programmers in Hong Kong work for Hong Kong companies.

A number of responses pointed out that computer programming is much more than simply a technical discipline:

Newt: Of course, programming is not a technical discipline. It is a creative and social act. The essence is not moving bits around but understanding the users and their quirks and mistakes. Machines have to adapt to men, not the other way around. Programmers need to be in close contact with their customers to do a good job. The business process, the cultural context, the hopes and dreams of the users add up to a living system that software has to grow into, not an engineering specification.

Craig: Computer programmers are communicators: translators, interviewers, readers, writers. It is not entirely fair to say that ours is not a technical discipline, because there is a bit of technical work, but it is far more important to be a good communicator than a good technician.

Systems Analysts, such as yours truly, are often former programmers who have found they can do their jobs even better if they don’t actually write code: if they focus exclusively on the human-to-human communication parts of the job.

Tim goes a step further and says that programming is not a technical discipline at all, but an art:

As a writer and a programmer I can tell you it’s almost certainly because programming is essentially creative-writing. You could say the same thing about books. In this age of electronic books why can some books cost $.50 and some $500? Exactly the same reasons. There are Steven King’s in programming. There are Faulkner’s. And there are tons of self-published authors with little command of spelling or grammar.

A few commentors cite management culture. I believe this is very important:

Ross W: One big complementary factor is management. The rise of Agile software development as a system for productivity enhancement has been difficult to implement in cultural environments that place great importance on hierarchy and rigid roles for managers and their subordinates. Agile requires individual programmers to be much more involved in planning and decision making, leaving the manager to a role more akin to that of a coordinator. American culture is well suited to this approach and it has paid off well, but I often see it fall apart in other cultural contexts.

More generally, here is a test: tell your manager her/his idea is wrong in front of a group, and walk through step by step why it is wrong in 10 different ways. Then show why your idea is better. If you can’t do that, the product will suffer.

Sigivald adds: Also an excellent point – I have a boss. He is quite smart and usually right about things, but also occasionally completely wrong.

I can tell him “you’re smoking crack” (I, in fact, often literally use those words) and, with a good argument, get him to change his mind, and nobody gets upset.

I shudder to think what kind of anti-productivity we’d have if nobody could do that…

Numerous commentors claim that there are huge differences in competency between programmers in the same field:

James Moore: The skills of software people vary widely. People usually talk about the good people being 10x better than the mediocre ones, and the bad ones have negative productivity. It’s hard enough to figure out whether or not someone’s good when you’re sitting with them and don’t have to deal with things like language barriers. Hiring software people is _HARD_; hiring software people remotely is even harder. An 80% discount isn’t interesting if you can’t figure out where the person is on the “smart and gets things done” scale. (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html)

Mike: As many other people in these comments have noted, programmers are not a commodity good. The difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is huge, and more importantly, is often inherent in the programmer’s mental models or otherwise deeply-rooted, and very difficult to overcome even with good training and management, let alone bad/remote/outsourced management. Of course, not all American programmers are good, but the good ones are definitely paid more and bring up the average price for American programmers.

Ron Strong: Two big reasons for the wide range in salaries.

First, there is a huge difference in the productivity of average and very good programmers. The classical view in the industry is that the difference is 10 to 1 between average and a very good coder. A couple years ago Alan Eustace, a Google VP of engineering, claimed the difference was 300 to 1. My guess after 20 years of software development is somewhere in between. Most programmers are quite mediocre. You can throw huge numbers of them into a project and not see the kind of progress that occurs with the addition of one really good coder.

Second, there are big differences in understanding of the product domain. A really good US based programmer is likely to have a far better feel for the business rules that he’s trying to implement. For instance, suppose you’re putting together a project that involves finance. You might find a programmer in India who has solid technical skills, but is clueless concerning accounting. A developer with a basic understanding of the product domain is going to be a lot more productive than one who has no understanding of the underlying product.

A commentor who identifies himself as "Software Company Owner" posted the following:

I own a software company — with twelve software engineers on staff. 8 local, 4 overseas.

Specifically to outsourcing to China — we would never outsource to a Chinese development team because of the lack of respect for intellectual property. Way too many horror stories from friends of mine who’ve seen multi-million dollar investments in software developed in China, only to see the same code (line-for-line) a month later being sold by a new State-owned company.

Specifically to outsourcing to India — Speaking from multiple experiences, working with remote Indian (and Pakistan) teams takes a LOT of hand holding to ensure quality. It takes a lot of time and costs a lot to manage outsourcing. This is often the case when there is a cultural divide.

Specifically to hiring locally in the USA — nothing beats having your development teams sitting in the same offices. The marginal cost savings of outsourcing often do not scale well as teams grow in size. Plus, the best talent often wants to live here and are often willing to immigrate.

My two favorite countries for outsourcing – Russia and the Philippines. But nothing beats a good locally based developer who you can sit down with face-to-face every day.

TallDave adds:

As an American programmer who works with foreign imports, I’ll chime in:
1) The ESL barrier is often a bigger problem that you’d think, moving from functional design to technical design to code without losing meaning can be a challenge. Americans who are able to do all three are very valuable. 2) Cultural differences also matter. Some of these can work in favor of Asians, but not all — American software programmers are better at providing creative solutions in my experience. Shame cultures tend to struggle in some situations where intellectual honesty is of paramount importance. 3) Credentials have an effect too. A Master’s degree or a business cert like CPA seem to make a large difference in earning power.

'I also second Mike’s point above, and James’ point 1 is particularly important.

Finally, regarding the interviews — per 2 above, Chinese programmers particularly tend to be very good at memorizing technical answers, but less good at innovation. This matters more in some contexts than others, of course.

I've been a web-programmer for a decade now. Before that I got my four-year Bachelors in Computer Science. In the course of earning my degree they taught us how to write assembly boot-loaders, compilers and operating systems. Highly technical stuff. We always joked that they were preparing us to rewrite computer software from the ground up should the apocalypse occur.

In my actual career I'm a web programmer. I use a wide suite of different technologies on a daily basis. Math and arcane theory about finite state machines matter a lot less to me than being able to understand a client's needs and select and quickly implement a technology that will meet those needs. I've found that the 'best' programmers in the modern work place are not those who can write 1000 lines of assembly code in a day but those who have a broad-based knowledge of a lot of different tools and technologies and know how to find information quickly when they don't know something (which is often).

Here was my comment:

I had a job a couple years ago where for cost reasons the company decided our US-based team could only hire new programmers in Singapore. It was a nightmare. Besides the timezone and communications issues, we had a great deal of trouble finding quality programmers who didn’t require us to constantly hold their hands and recheck their work. We had programmers who would write exactly the code they were instructed to write and then send it to us without even bothering to verify that it ran.

Management suggested that we hand off the really easy pieces of the project to the Asian programmers but these pieces were all things we could write ourselves very quickly. We would spend more time explaining it to the Singapore guys and checking their work then we would spend writing it ourselves. It was the hard parts that we really needed to be able to hand off, but the Singapore team simply didn’t have the skillsets to handle that stuff.

The number one issue with the programmers in Singapore was simply that they did not do creative problem solving. The most competent of them could write a program that delivered, in the most literal fashion possible, what you had asked. But the ability to step back from the problem and ask questions like “Is it efficient? Is it maintainable? Will it meet the clients’ needs in a broad sense?” was virtually nonexistent.

Hiring was also a big, big problem. We would ask a general question over the phone, there would be a brief pause, and then we would get a word-for-word quote of some piece of Microsoft documentation. I have no idea if they had memorized all this stuff beforehand or were just really fast Googlers. Eventually we began requiring candidates to actually be present in the Singapore office when we conducted the phone interview with them so that we could verify that they were not reading their answers out of a manual.

Cost-saving corporate managers have attempted to reduce code writing to a rote technical skill which can be performed anywhere by anyone, but programming is simply not amenable to this approach, at least not yet. Until the tools get a lot, lot smarter, writing programs will continue to require non-fungible abilities such as creative thinking, adaptability, big-picture thinking and wide-ranging generalized knowledge of technical subjects. Even the idea that good programmers can be produced by a four-year degree program is illusory. Good programmers must be trained practically from birth. Of course very few parents are sitting their five-year-old down “C in a Nutshell,” but Western parenting would seem to currently have the advantage when it comes to imparting the critical mindsets necessary for high level abstract problem solving.

The truth is, I don't believe that Americans or Westerners in general have any sort of genetic advantage when it comes to fields such as programming. But culture is vastly important. A culture that emphasizes freedom and creativity and deemphasizes hierarchial, authoritarian management is more likely to produce individuals who are creative, highly adaptable, open to new ideas and willing to experiment to see what works. Failure is an option for such individuals, and this is important because programming is all about failure.

Every programmer and manager starts with a plan, but when that plan hits a wall the team that is willing to step back, consider different approaches, and try them is the team that will be successful. The team that continues to beat its head futilely against the problem because management is wedded to a specific approach will experience cost overruns and produce an inferior product.

And of course all the technical prowess in the world will not help you if the software you deliver does not meet the customer's needs. Delivering a product that is useful to the customer is the greatest challenge of all. Customers are generally unable to describe what exactly it is that they need. After all if they could they would have built it themselves. It is critical to spend time with the customer learning their business processes and then to go through constant interations of the software to see what helps them and what slows them down.

Communication is important, face-to-face communication doubly so. And again the willingness to accept 'failure' and recalibrate accordingly to deliver a better product is critical.

When I meet someone interested in programming they always ask me "How many languages do you know?" I don't know - a lot? Learning new languages is trivial. The important thing is that I have a grasp of what technologies are available and whether they present viable solutions for my customer. And when something isn't working I (and my manager!) are willing to let it go and try something different.

If someone comes up with a way to commodify that, let me know.

Links of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:45:00 +0000

Greetings traveler, welcome to Monday the 12th, 2011. You're just in time. This may be the week we find the Higgs Boson.

The NYT has an interview with a physicist explaining what all the fuss is about.
Meanwhile the Beeb reports that CERN scientists are expected to announce a 'glimpse' of the Higgs Boson on Tuesday.
Study: "One of the most consistent findings in educational studies of creativity is that teachers dislike personality traits associated with creativity." Alex Tabarrok has more.
In other education news, a school board member took a standardized test required to pass 10th grade and failed miserably. Does anyone seriously still believe this kind of high stakes testing is a good idea?
There is no teen sexting epidemic - you mean media hysteria blew a problem way out of proportion???
Economist Roland Fryer has taken a look at the five habits that make a charter school effective.
13-year-old arrested for burping in class. At least he didn't do it during a standardized test.
In an effort to crack down on the rapidly proliferating industry of synthetic cannabinoids (ahem, 'weed'), the US Congress has passed a bill which bans specific brain functions.
How Universal Is The Mind? - If psychology had been invented in Asia, would it look the same?
Jodi Ettenburg quit her job as a lawyer to travel the world. She talks about her decision here.
Globalism and the banana - Apparently Stephen Dubner watches Arrested Development.
The FCC is trying to block AT&T's merger with T-Mobile. Here's why.
Will Yelp put Chili's out of business?
Kodak is facing bankruptcy - The company that used to be as globally recognized as Coca Cola has taken a beating from the death of film.
While most of Europe flounders, little Estonia's economy is booming.
Facebook has built a huge data center in the middle of the desert - here's why.
Another good NYT article - The Rise of Invented Fantasy Languages. Includes Elvish, Klingon and Dothraki from Game of Thrones.
The Beginning of Japan? - Has the Fukushima disaster opened the doors to societal revolution?

This NYT article on Kohler's $6,400 'toilet of the future' is hysterical. It's Dave Barry-grade stuff. Elsewhere, New York Magazine identifies a new leading indicator for the economy: The Hot Waitress Index.

When Do Doctors Refuse Medical Care?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:27:00 +0000

Answer: When they're dying.

Saw this piece via Tyler Cowen @ Marginal Revolution. It is both thought provoking and beautiful. The site that hosts this article has been experiencing slow response times, so I'm going to excerpt a large chunk. But please go read it yourself, if you are able.

It's called How Doctors Die.

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

...

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.

The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.
...

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Read the rest here.

I have a close friend who is a doctor. For a while we were roommates while he worked at a local hospital. He was deeply frustrated by the expensive and pointless medical procedures that they routinely performed on the terminally ill and the dying elderly. These people typically had very poor prognoses. Hundreds of thousands would be spent on procedures that would extend their lives by a few months at most. And that short time would be spent in a hospital bed with tubes routing vital functions through machinery. Then they would die anyway. "Futile care" indeed.

I don't know if it's really the case, but my friend felt that these expensive and ultimately pointless procedures were responsible for a big chunk of the rising costs of medical care.

I imagine that very few people want to spend their final weeks or months eating through a tube. So why do they choose things like this for their loved ones? The author offers up a few possible reasons. I think that part of the answer is that death has become unpalatable to us. We want to control it or cure it, but we can't. Often we just make it worse.

During the last century, medical science plucked a lot of low-hanging fruit. It eradicated smallpox, brought down infant mortality and stopped people dying of the common flu. But there is still a lot about our own biology that we don't understand. The human body is a complex network of non-linear systems all feeding back into each other. The exact mechanisms for things like chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome and aging continue to evade us. And that includes the mechanisms for aging and death.

But we still want to believe that there's a magic pill that can cure everything. There isn't.

How you die is a very personal choice, but that choice has become distorted by some very perverse incentives. Doctors prescribe unnecessary tests and procedures to shield themselves from malpractice suits. The burden of paying for these expensive things falls on taxpayers and the insurance companies, not the families of the dying. The incentives are all wrong. And lest you think that this is a case where incentives don't matter, here's a study that found that people are more likely to die after payday.

There's a fine line between fatalistic acceptance of death and a race to extend life by a few days or even minutes, whatever the cost. I'm all for living a full, healthy and very long life. There are places I want to visit, languages I want to learn, experiences I want to try. But I wouldn't be able to do any of that drugged up to the eyeballs and breathing a machine. And I don't think that perspective is much different from most people.

People often suspect doctors of keeping all the best secrets for themselves. Well here's one that they really have kept: they've learned how to die. Maybe it's time to take a lesson from them.

The Google Baby Name Arms Race

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:12:00 +0000

The NYT has posted a piece on how parents are using Google to help them select baby names:

KALIA is a stripper name, but Kaleya is not, her parents-to-be concluded.

...

A search for Kalia pulled up several images of scantily clad women. “I didn’t want there to be a Google identity for her to wrestle with,” said Ms. Kaslofsky, a corporate investigator in San Francisco. So the couple, who wanted an uncommon name, came up with a creative spelling that sounds the same as kah-LEE-ah: Kaleya.

Another Google search didn’t raise any red flags, and thus a name was born. “The Kaleyas online were an illustrator of goth posters and a Spanish metal band,” she said.

It's arguably a pretty good idea to vet a potential baby name by Googling it before you commit. The Kalofskys don't want to give their child a name that would saddle her with an unwelcome stereotype. That seems fair. But how many parents Google their baby names, and why?

While there are no reliable statistics on the matter, a small survey on LilSugar, a parenting and pop culture site, found that 64 percent of respondents had Googled their baby’s name before settling on it.

Uniqueness seems to be a primary motive and has spurred an unspoken competition among parents to find the most original names, said Laura Wattenberg, author of “The Baby Name Wizard,” a guide for selecting a name. “Parents thinking of a baby name will type it in and say: ‘Oh, no, it’s taken. There are already three others with that name.’ ”

There used to be a popular game (okay, popular amongst bored web developers, which may or may not have included Yours Truly) called Googlewhacking. The idea was simple - find a two word search phrase (no quotation marks allowed) which returned only one result from Google's web search.

As more people began to play this game it rapidly became more difficult, because they would post their winning phrases, thus guaranteeing that there were now at least two search results for that phrase. As a result, finding unique search phrases has gotten much more difficult and winners now tend towards the incredibly obscure. Where once you could 'win' with fetishized armadillo or panfish interrogation now you need to pull something like yooper radioimmunoassays out of your hat. That barely looks like English.

"Yooper Radioimmunoassays" would probably make a terrible baby name too, but at least the doting parents could rest easy that it would be unique, Google-wise. Temporarily, anyway. With over two billion people online and counting, the chance that somebody else out there shares a parent's predilections for odd nomenclature is skyrocketing.

Google-proofing your baby name is an arms race, one that is likely to drive parents towards increasingly outlandish names. Creative misspellings are likely only the tip of the iceberg. Just wait until numbers and punctuation get involved.

While there's an inarguable value in being unique you have to wonder if names are the best way to go about this. Maybe we should just assign everybody a GUID.

For Tom Noir's money, and the NYT's for that matter, these parents are selling a 'common' name short:

But maybe common names are more prudent. A recent study by the online security firm AVG found that 92 percent of children under 2 in the United States have some kind of online presence, whether a tagged photo, sonogram image or Facebook page. Life, it seems, begins not at birth but with online conception. And a child’s name is the link to that permanent record.

“When you name your baby, it’s a time of dreaming,” Ms. Wattenberg said. “No one stops and thinks, ‘What if one day my child does something embarrassing and wants to hide from it?’ ”

The truth is that an 'Elizabeth Jones' can hide comfortably behind the relative anonymity of millions of search result. But if you're Kalia Kaslofsky the only thing between your online profile and a Googling employer is a couple of strippers.

Links of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:23:00 +0000

Welcome to Tuesday, November 29th 2011, Traveller!

Um, has anyone seen my pants?

Tyler Cowen consigns six ideas to the ash heap of history - Can you think of any more received wisdom that hasn't stood up in 2011?
Maybe our problem is that we're really bad at estimating risk - So bad that one risk expert factors our misunderstanding of risk into his calculations.
The rise and fall of BitCoin - Not an economics story! Involves a mysterious founder, a bulletproof algorithm and a lot of nerds with their heads in the sand.
Another good one via Wired: The fiber optic salesman who turned pyramid scam vigilante.
Fashion designer Viv Westwood has a plan to save the human race from extinction.
More fashion faux pas: the magazine industry's penchant for photoshopping is starting to verge on ridiculous. Fortunately some new software is good at spotting fakes.
Conpsiracy theories about Phobos-Grunt - It's HAARP's fault! Alternatively, maybe Phobos-Grunt is a Russian bioweapon.
The tweet heard 'round the nation - A Kansas teenager starts a massive political fracas when she tweets disparaging remarks about Governor Sam Brownback
Ebook lending really makes publishers skittish. Have you followed this story? First Amazon announced its own ebook lending program, then everyone got mad at them, then Penguin pulled it's books from the public library system's virtual shelves. But now maybe they're not? I really can't keep up.
My life as a white supremecist - This man spent a decade infiltrating right wing fringe groups for the FBI.
Has file sharing killed good music? - No.
The psychology of pepper spray - Guess what, it's not just a food product!

Hey, I found my pants after all. Turns out I was wearing them all along!

The Oatmeal thinks Wikipedia needs to be more careful about where those banners featuring Jimmy Wales asking for donations appear. And, have you ever wondered how fire behaves in zero gravity?

Links of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:13:00 +0000

Welcome to Wednesday the 16th 2011. Traveller. I hope you didn't come here hoping to experience manned space travel!

Just as we become completely dependent on the Russians for manned orbital flights their space agency admits it has major problems.
Someone out there must still be optimistic - NASA is currently accepting applications for their astronaut program
Anyway you don't want to go up there, space drives you mad - or so it was once believed.
Discover has an excellent new science blog called The Crux. Here's a cool article on how biology defies medical logic.
And here's one about how we're less than ten years from all becoming cyborgs.
Lies about lie detectors - This is one field where you shouldn't believe the hype.
"Let's go tickle some rats"
Conspiracy theories about the McRib - via the always fascinating Marginal Revolution.
Top 10 Reasons Not to Donate to Wikipedia - In wiki form, just to be ironic?
"XBox, meditate!" - Deepak Chopra has made a yoga game for the Kinect. Reviews are positive.
"This is what it looks like when the machines come for you." - Ken Jennings was the keynote speaker at this year's Singularity Summit.
Transmitting wireless data through light bulbs - Cooooool.
The 1% are getting richer - And when they say 1% they are referring to IQ.
What happens when the 99% lose faith in capitalism? - An interesting long piece entitled "Who Killed Horatio Alger?"
Our brains are still the wildest new frontier: Schizophrenic man improves after scientists induce out-of-body experience
Here's some things you need to know before buying a tank.

Some earthbound thrills: The most frightening bridge ever and a graphic visualization of the true depth of the Mariana Trench. In the dishonorable mentions category here is a page debunking Victorian sex myths.

Why Is America Weird?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:19:00 +0000

The United States: once we were the radical young upstarts, the newcomers, the pioneers of true Western-style democracy. But then a funny thing happened: everyone else decided to give this democracy thing a try as well, and over the last hundred years the USA has gone from being the new kid on the block to the elder statesman of democracy.

Even so, no other country does democracy quite like America today. We have a President instead of a Prime Minister and a Congress instead of a Parliament. We only have two parties that count for anything, and we don't require them to compromise to form a government. Our citizens carry guns and we execute criminals. We give our corporations the run of the place and we're addicted to making and spending money, but we're also notoriously generous. We're polite to a fault, but we aren't shy about dropping bombs on people if we feel the situation calls for it. What is up with that?!

As an American abroad, I've found that both the politics and attitudes of the United States are confusing to people in other countries. I'm not talking about only those people with strong anti-American sentiments; I often find myself attempting to explain our oddities to people who are perfectly sympathetic and friendly to Americans. Our politics especially confuse, and since American politics seem to wind up impacting everybody else, people really want a better understanding of why Americans do what they do.

You might conclude that Americans are just crazy, or perhaps the our culture sets us apart. There's no doubt that we have a rather unique culture! But I would argue that culture is not the most important difference between the United States and other Western-style democracies; it's something else. Foreigners don't understand where this difference comes from; and Americans are bad at explaining it, because the cause is so self-evident to them that they don't even think about it. But our most critical unique quality is staring us all right in the face all the time.

You see, it is right there in our name: The United States of America.

In a world where every country calls itself The People's Democratic Republic of Etc. Etc., these titles start to seem meaningless; but the name "United States of America" actually tells you something really important about our particular country: our nation-state is actually made up of a bunch of smaller, separate states.

'State' isn't just the American term for 'province', it actually refers to an independent sovereign government. Of course America isn't really made up of independent countries today, but it was when it was first founded and our entire government and political system is built around an attempt to preserve the rights of these 'miniature governments'. People don't really think of American states as separate governments anymore; after all, it's not like one of them is going to close its borders to Americans and start printing its own money. But the way our central government is arranged pays a lot of lip service to the idea that states have the right to govern themselves.

People think of the USA as being a single homogeneous entity, but the truth is that part of our 'weirdness' results from the fact that it is not. This is a really a large country governed by a patchwork of different laws and governments. For example, in some states guns there is little restriction on gun ownership, but in others the laws are strict. Laws on marriage and divorce vary from state to state; so do laws on banking and insurance, prostitution and gambling and of course crime and punishment. Living in Alabama is a very different experience from living in California, and people's political viewpoints in both places differ widely*!

How did we get to this state of affairs? (just a little joke in English, sorry!) To explain that we have to have a short history lesson. Stay with me.

The first thirteen states were thirteen independent British colonies. They banded together to successfully throw off the rule of the English Monarchy in the late 18th century, but the colonies had no intention of just handing themselves over to be ruled by someone else after that. They didn't want to trade one dictator for another. So they haggled over a system that would give them the strength that comes from unity without giving away too much power to any one state or government.

Americans must seem fairly obsessed with our Constitution to outsiders; we often talk about the high-minded ideals of liberty and freedom which it embodies. Those are important. But the real reason that the Constitution is so important to us is that it is a contract: a contract between the states which agrees on how they will be governed.

One of the earliest US flags

Before 1787 the States actually had a different governing contract called the Articles of Confederation. These documents gave maximum authority to the individual states; the central government did not even have the power to tax. But by 1787 it was clear that this wasn't working and that a stronger 'Federal' government was necessary.

The sticking point was how many representatives each state would get in the 'parliament' of this theoretical Federal government. Big states wanted to be represented on the basis of population. Small states wanted every state to have an equal vote. In the compromise that was finally worked out, they each got both. The 'parliament' would actually have two 'houses': one house was the Senate, with each state having two senators; and the other was the House of Representatives, where the number of representatives a state had was based on its population. Laws had to be approved by both houses to pass.

Even then, the debate was far from over. The original two American political parties formed at this time, but they weren't Democrats and Republicans. They were the called the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists, lead by Alexander Hamilton (the first Secretary of the Treasury) believed in a strong central government with extensive powers to tax, fight wars, and regulate the economy. The Democratic-Republicans, lead by Thomas Jefferson (a future president) were the Anti-Federalists who feared tyranny and wanted more rights for the individual states. The reason that two parties aren't around anymore is essentially because the Federalists won. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

The US Constitution is very concerned with who gets to govern what. Generally speaking the power of law-making and enforcement rests with the individual states, but there are of course exceptions. The Federal government regulates trade between the states (a clause that it has used to grant itself rather sweeping powers through the years) and has the power to tax (although the income tax was actually added to the constitution much later).

A vivid example of this splitting of powers is the police. If you rob a bank in the State of Florida, the Florida police will pursue you, and if they catch you you will be tried in Florida under Florida law (watch out! Florida still has the death penalty.). But if you should be so foolish as to cross state lines trying to escape, then you are no longer just a Florida problem. Now the Federal Police are after you (we call them the FBI - you have no doubt seen them in movies). Federal laws tend to have much sterner punishments too (although generally speaking the Federal government doesn't execute people itself).

Okay fine, but why do we all get to carry guns? What do states rights have to do with that?

Remember, the USA was formed out of a rebellion. The fact that our citizens possessed weaponry at the time prevented them from being completely outgunned by the powerful and well-organized British Army and Navy (France was also a big help, as amazing as it might seem!). So the second amendment of the Constitution specifies that citizens will be able to carry guns for the purpose of self-defense. The idea was literally that if the Federal Government was taken over by some power-hungry dictator that the states would be able to rebel and fight for their freedom once more.

Of course today the success of such a venture would be highly unlikely. The US government has a lot more than just guns at its disposal: it has aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, long range missiles and killer drones. While just about anyone without a criminal record can own a handgun in the US, it takes special permits to acquire even a low-power automatic rifle. But even a machine gun is not going to do much good against a tank.

It doesn't matter in any case because historically our country has already decided that no state gets to just walk away from the Union of the States.

I wrote earlier that the Federalists won their argument for a strong central government. They did this initially by persuading all thirteen original states to ratify the Constitution, but even then the Federal Government was quite weak compared to the power it has today. What really shifted the balance of power away from the states and towards the President and the US Congress was the American Civil War from 1861-1864.

A map showing slave and free states in 1860.

At this time the rights of people to own slaves was an extremely contentious issue in America. Initially the solution was, as usual, to let the each state decide for themselves whether they would allow slavery. Originally the states were split about fifty-fifty, with most of the southern states allowing slavery and the northern ones banning it.

But as new states were added to the west, they mostly voted against slavery. That shifted the balance of power towards the bloc of free states. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, not a single southern state voted for him (in Presidential elections, whoever gets the majority in a state wins all the votes for the entire state). But it was too late - the balance of power had shifted and a president was elected whom the southern states felt did not represent them.

So the slave states attempted to secede and elect their own president. This was the ultimate test of the US Constitution. The Constitution says nothing explicitly about whether states were allowed to leave the Union, although there is a good argument to be made that it implies that they can (remember, the founders were very much afraid of governments with too much power!). If the Federal Government fought against the rebellious states, it would be seen as acting like a tyrant and betraying constitutional principles. On the other hand, the nation wouldn't survive for long if any state could leave whenever the other states voted for something they didn't like. It was a very sticky problem.

Well of course you know what happened: the Union did go to war with the southern states (who called themselves the Confederacy, no doubt partially in homage to the old Articles of Confederation) and ultimately prevailed. After that there were 10-20 years of 'reconstruction' where the southern states were only nominally self-ruled; northerners were trucked in to govern state offices and the US Congress at times refused to seat delegates sent by southern states who were known Confederates. Military might had ultimately decided the question of whether the Federal government's rule trumped that of the states.

So it was really in the 1860's that the Federalists won their argument and everyone stopped pretending that the Federal Government didn't have the final say in governance.

Signs of American democracy.

Fortunately the Federalists were right about one thing: the rise of a powerful Federal government did not immediately result in a tyrannical dictatorship. People kept on voting for presidents, senators and representatives and even the southern states eventually got all their voting rights back and became citizens in good standing once more. What kept democratic government alive? Perhaps it was luck or good leadership; or maybe the institutions that make up a government are more important in protecting rule of law than we think.

At any rate, even though the Federal Government of today is almost unrecognizably more powerful than it was in 1787 it remains organized around the principle that states should govern themselves when possible. Every state in the United States has its own constitutional document and a state legislature with one or two houses, plus a governor. Governors are in a sense the presidents of their own states, so much so that a governorship is often considered a trial period for politicians who are serious about running for the office of President (Barack Obama is the first US President not to have been a governor since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1969). If you move to the US you will soon feel like you are constantly seeing campaign signs for elections. This is because between the city, state and Federal governments there is usually some kind of election going on** somewhere!

The point is: even though the United States is one country with one Federal government, it is also in many ways fifty different countries with fifty different governments (in fact more - Washington DC is considered separate and there are 'territories' such as Puerto Rico and Guam). It runs from one side of the North American continent to the other and includes nearly 300 million people. It is a big country with a big and very diverse population.

So maybe this explains why Americans seem a little strange by the standards of other democracies. In some sense America is an ongoing political experiment. We allow our citizens to try out different methods of governing themselves, up to a point anyway. We also, by the same logic, allow ourselves a lot of freedom to try out different ways of getting rich or having a better life. And generally we think the government should have to justify itself when it wants to restrict people's ability to do these things. The truth is that suspicion of the government might be the most American virtue.

But of course at the same time that we're experimenting we all have to live with each other. Perhaps this is where the notorious American politness comes from - "You might be strange," we are all thinking, "but you are also my countryman!"

We are also, I admit, a little bit pleased with ourselves. No one would really have expected a ragtag bunch of colonies to successfully rebel against a powerful nation and come up with a new style of government that actually works! But somehow we did. We built a new nation from the ground up, intentionally rather than by historical accident. And we are proud of that.

Americans are a people of contradictions but hopefully you now see that this is because we have had to deal with a lot of contradictions historically: balancing the rights of states with the rights of the union, protecting individual freedoms while still building a strong central government; advocating life and liberty for everyone while being ready to protect that liberty by force. We are not exactly the same country as the one that was founded over 200 years ago, but we are a product of its history.

I don't believe that Americans are all that much weirder than the citizens of any other country. Take a peek at any nation from Austria to Zimbabwe and I feel confident that you will find a strange mishmash of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, customs and traditions - some will seem odd, others self-contradictory. This is a simple truth about humanity and Americans are no different. The real difference is that thanks to historical accident we spend more time in the world spotlight than most other countries. So our oddities really stand out.

I hope this post can help people to understand thos oddities a little better. But the truth is that American Exceptionalism is not all that exceptional.

* States may enforce their laws differently or have different laws entirely, but generally speaking they are required to respect each other's laws. If you are married in one state, for instance, and you move to another you do not have to get married again under the new state's laws. All states are also assumed to have full extradition treaties with any other state, and they cannot tax or restrict imports from other states. The Commerce Clause of the US Constitution gives the Federal government the power to make sure that everyone plays nice.

** Most Americans deal with this constant barrage of elections by ignoring the unimportant ones. For some Americans, any time you are not voting for the president it is an unimportant election.

A Clockwork Computer

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:08:00 +0000

I've written before about Charles Babbage's failed attempts to build a computer out of Victorian-era technology (see: Why was the first computer built in the 1940's and not the 1840's?). One of the reasons that the subject continues to fascinate people is that we now know that Babbage's plans for a powerful mechanical calculator called the Difference Engine would have worked, because someone actually built one.

But the Difference Engine is not a true computer: it lacks things like persistent memory and a capacity to execute sequential instructions. Babbage's vision for a true mechanical computer, which he referred to as the Analytical Engine, never got off the drawing board. The NYT reports that there are now plans to build a working version of it, just as was done for the Difference Engine. The Analytical Engine represents a much stiffer challenge however:

In the case of the Difference Engine, a complete set of plans existed. The Analytical Engine, by contrast, was a work in progress, as Babbage continually refined his thinking in a series of blueprints. Thus, the hope is to “crowd-source” the analysis of what should be built; plans will be posted online next year, and the public will be invited to offer suggestions.

"There is no single set of plans that design a single machine." said Tim Robinson, a docent at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “It was constantly in a state of flux."

The project is significant in part because there has been a heated debate over whether — given time and resources — Babbage would have been able to build the machine he foresaw.

Time will tell whether or not the project is possible, but I can't see why it wouldn't be. There are really very few technological limitations on building a computer; there is no requirement that a Turing-complete machine use silicon, vacuum tubes or even electricity. And if Babbage had the genius to design the Difference Engine, which we know would have worked, there's no reason to think that the Analytical Engine would have been beyond his capacity.

But just because something is possible does not mean it is likely. 19th century Victorian society saw no need for computers and lacked the manufacturing and engineering proccesses to make their construction cost effective. Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine would have been a massive undertaking which would have required a revolution in Victorian manufacturing and engineering techniques, not to mention the deep pockets that only a government could have hoped to provide. The possibility space of a history where the British built the first computer a century early is probably quite small.

That said, I think that successfully building a working Babbage Analytical Engine would be amazing; if there are really engineers who want to undertake this project than I wish them godspeed and the best of luck!

Mind Blindness

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:31:00 +0000

Mind reading is usually considered the stuff of science fiction, but in recent years neurological scientists have demonstrated that in fact the typical human brain is highly adapted to do just that. Large chunks of the typical cerebral cortex are devoted to things like analyzing the faces of other humans for clues to their emotional states. In fact there is a large and important region dedicated to simply recognizing the faces of others and damage to it can result in face blindness.

But most of us, the 'neurotypicals', possess a startling array of tools for deducing the mental states of others: we gather clues based on expressions, body language, verbal cues and context; and then we use these clues to build an internal model of the other person's mind. All of which happens subconsciously. To someone who lacks these abilities, it must all seem a bit spooky, very much like real mind-reading.

And there are definitely people who lack these abilities.

Francesca Happé recently gave a lecture to The Royal Society titled When Will We Understand Autism Spectrum Disorders? You can watch it online and you should, if you have any interest in the autistic mind. The body of the presentation is about 45 minutes long.

Dr. Happé views autism as an amalgamation of separate syndromes which, when presented together, have the synergistic effect of suppressing the context-sensing abilities we use to 'read' each other's minds. Mind blindness.

This blindness goes way beyond simply being able to figure out what someone else is thinking or feeling, though. Because autism presents at a very young age this mind blindness has a huge impact on child development. A very important part of the learning process of a child is modeling and understanding the mental states of the adults around it. Without this ability the child is on a very different developmental path, one which results in many more differences between autism spectrum people and neurotypicals than a simple neurological comparison would predict.

For neurotypicals, our reservoir of mind-reading abilities often has the consequence of making us obsessed with the mental states of others. We aren't just aware of other minds; we can't stop ourselves form focusing on them, often to the exclusion of important details. Autism spectrum people have a well known propensity for picking out details without being distracted by context. When they walk into a room the people in the room or no more interesting to them than any other object in it. Social context neither informs nor restricts their parsing of informaiton. This is both a disability and a gift.

I'm generalizing here as autistic disorders are indeed a 'spectrum'; someone who is considered autistic may have more or less of this odd combination of ability and disability. But it's telling that something like 30% of autistics have above average abilities in the domains of mathematics, music and art. These are fields where presumably an eye for detail and a disregard for context allows one to cut through the clutter and see what others have missed.

Unfortunately for autistics, human society is largely made up of the 'mind readers', so their 'style' of mind is likely to be a disadvantage to them more often than it is an advantage. I find that my brain is in many ways the opposite of the autism spectrum: obsessed with piecing together amorphous context clues into a larger picture and completely uninterested in the fine details*. Perhaps in a society where mind-readers were the exception rather than the norm, I would be the one with a disability.

* This is true for me mentally but also observationally. If you want examples of this all you need to do is scan this blog for my favorite bad writing habit - accidentally substituting similar sounding words for each other. My inability to spot these mistakes amazes even me.

Will We Need A Universal Language At All?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:51:00 +0000

I started in on Nicholas Ostler's follow-up to his survey of 'international' languages (which I wrote about here), The Last Lingua Franca, this week.

It's very good so far, although I'm really just getting going. But it's already clear that one of his most interesting premises is that English might be the last 'universal' language because technology will obviate the need for one.

In other words, if Google Translate can convert any language to any other language fairly seamlessly, does it really matter what language something was originally written in? In fact, improved translation technology might even allow language diversity at a local level to increase: you could speak any obscure dialect you like with your village without losing your ability to communicate with the world-at-large.

It's an intriguing idea for the future, but I think it's safe to say that the technology is not quite there yet.

Links of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Wednesday, July 27th in the year 2011, traveller! Today's post was delayed due to anomalous temporal distortions. In the meantime, NASA's manned spaceflight program has ended, the world's first piece of serious government-sponsored malware has been cracked and the Arab Spring has taken a darker turn. You may want to slow time while you catch up on our accumulated backlog of noteworthy historical developments.

The World's only analog blogger - this is a great way to avoid comment spam!
Sparkles for Blood - ComicCon attendees this weekend got the chance to trade in their Twilight books for the gorier and grittier 30 Days of Night series.
What's the likelihood that your marketing campaign will go viral? - Much, much smaller than marketing companies would like to admit.
Brain-training that actually works - sometimes. (I'm much more likely to believe claims like this when they are qualified)
How would the 25 largest US corporations rank if they were countries?
How digital detectives deciphered the world's first military-grade malware - StuxNet, if you're not familiar with it, was a worm apparently designed to bring down the Iranian nuclear weapons program.
Chinese prisoners get hard virtual labor - That World of Warcraft gold isn't going to farm itself.
The space shuttle program - An unmitigated disaster from beginning to end? Thought provoking, to say the least.
The clock of the long now - A project that teaches us to look at the long term. This blogger discusses one organization that has mastered this.
Don't blame Facebook - study shows that you're still responsible for ruining your own life.
Immigration reform done right - We should be letting the smart ones in.
Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei? - The Chinese government, mostly. But his image has been hard to stop.
What are the roots of Arab Spring? - I've got one word for you: globalization.

Lastly, this is the very opposite of new, but it's amazing: a massive prehistoric site at Göbekli Tepe turns out to be 12,000 years old. On a related note, I recently watched Wernor Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave paintings, beautifully rendered art that dates back 30,000 years. These are two spectacular pieces of evidence in favor of my deeply held conviction that we profoundly underestimate our prehistoric ancestors.

Jacksonville Triumphant? Part 2 - To Sprawl or Not To Sprawl

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Is this the city I grew up in growing or dying?

Previously I explored the history of Jacksonville, specifically how a swampy parcel of Northern Florida temporarily took the title of 'The Largest City in the World'.

To recap: from the 1960's until now, Jacksonville has been something of a quiet success story, gradually but steadily amassing a sizable population, a robust economy, two universities and even its own pro football team. Consolidation of the county and city governments gives the area the necessary beauracracy to provide services and infrastructure to the entire region without being paralyzed by government corruption.

At the same time, the city is not without its problems: it boasts a sizable population of urban poor, a school system that has more than its fair share of notoriously bad schools, a downtown that struggles endlessly with 'urban renewal', and a case of urban sprawl that renders its rudimentary public transportation system hopelessly inadequate. Even the city's own residents often seem divided: is their hometown a burg or a backwater?

Jacksonville has also been hit fairly hard by the current recession: its unemployment rate remains a point or two above the national average and many homeowners are saddled with houses that are worth less than they paid for them. What does all this mean for the future of 'The Bold New City of the South'? Are we on our way to being the next big commuter city, a la Houston? Or will urban sprawl and economic depression force us to accept that we're a small town with delusions of grandeur?

Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City is nominally about why big cities are the key to our future, but it also has a lot to say about why cities succeed or fail. Glaeser looks at twenty-first century urban success stories like New York City, London, Singapore, Bangalore and Houston to see how they've stayed afloat and even thrived in a changing global economy. Then there are the cities that have failed to adapt, Detroit being perhaps the most notorious recent example.

Glaeser identifies several specific factors that can kill a city - and several factors that can make it stronger. So I thought I would see how Jacksonville stacks up to his criteria. And there's one criteria we definitely have in our favor: warm winters.

Two key numbers - college education and temperature in January
I'm no statistician, so I have to take Glaeser's word for this, but apparently the most critical number in determining the long-term viability of a city is its temperature in January. There's no question that Jacksonville has a natural advantage over, say, Cleveland in this - our average January day is a balmy 64 degrees Fahrenheit (17.8 Celsius).

There is one other number that seems to track closely with how successful a city is: the percentage of college-educated adults. Unfortunately the best number I could find for Jacksonville was from 2000, when about 30% of the local population had bachelor-equivalent degrees. This is pretty middle-of-the-road compared to other cities.

But the ace in our sleeve is that we have two very solid universities within our metro area and a third within driving distance. The University of North Florida is a public university that was basically a commuter school fifteen years ago; it has since blossomed into a very competitive traditional school with a student population that seems to grow by leaps and bounds every year. Jacksonville University is a private institution that is very well regarded. And in nearby St. Augustine historic Flagler College continues to flourish.

These two factors - weather and education - bode well for our city's future, statistically speaking. But what about the challenges it faces?

The uban poor: While Jacksonville's poorer neighborhoods represent a challenge, it's a challenge every city faces, and successful cities more so. Cities that represent economic opportunity actually attract poor people. So the question is, are poorer people coming to Jacksonville because it presents them with new opportunities? Or are they just stuck here, and biding their time until they leave? This one is hard to answer without more information.

Mass transit: If there's any area where I would give the City of Jacksonville a big fat F on its report card, it's this one. We have a bus system, but that's about it (the 'skyway express' elevated monorail is more of a joke than a serious mass-transit solution). Admittedly, the spread-out nature of the city makes mass transit solutions more difficult, but we haven't even tried. There's no reason there couldn't be a commuter train running, say, from downtown to the Beaches, just for starters. This is a city addicted to cars. Which leads to our next challenge...

Urban sprawl: How bad is sprawl for a city? Maybe not as bad as people assume. There are lots of successful cities that sprawl like crazy (Los Angeles and Houston, to name two). That said, Glaeser is at pains in his book to point out the many advantages of high density living: it's greener, it's more efficient, it encourages the exchange of ideas. So when we let our city sprawl we are missing out on some great opportunities.

The other problem with sprawl is that keeping up with traffic is a rat race. Studies have shown that when you build more roads, traffic just increases to fill those roads. We can add as many lanes as we want to the I-95/I-10 interchange. It will still always be a mess. Mass transit would help. And it would be easier to build if we sprawled less.

So we face challenges; but solvable ones. Our weather is good and our education is improving. In addition, Jacksonville is not economically dependent on a single industry, a la Detroit. And we are friendly (some might say too friendly!) to new development. These are all key success factors that Glaeser identifies.

I'm guessing that if asked, Glaeser would say that Jacksonville has a bright future if it can continue to improve its educational outcomes. It also needs to enact policies that discourage sprawl. This will encourage neighborhoods to consolidate and make it easier and more cost effective to build mass transit between them.

Glaeser wouldn't be too hung up about downtown - if people don't want to live there, we shouldn't try and force them. But many of our suburbs could stand a lot more development. There are policies that the city could adopt that encourage upward growth instead of outward.

Jacksonville is my hometown. And I see a lot of opportunity for it. It has a number of natural advantages that make for healthy, growing cities. It just needs not to squander them.

The Bold New City of the South may become a big city yet.

Are The Laws That Govern Everyday Life Fully Understood, OR Do You Want A Revolution?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 14:18:00 +0000

Via my favorite science blogger Ed Yong: Sean Carroll proposes that the physics of our everday world are completely understood. Just to make sure that I'm not misrepresenting his opinion, I'll quote him:

Personally I have no idea how close we are to a comprehensive theory of absolutely everything. But I do know how close we are to having a comprehensive theory of the basic laws underlying the phenomena we encounter in our everyday lives — without benefit of fancy telescopes or particle accelerators or what have you. Namely, we already have it! That seems to be worth celebrating, or at least remarking upon, but you don’t hear it mentioned very much.

...

All we need to account for everything we see in our everyday lives are a handful of particles — electrons, protons, and neutrons — interacting via a few forces — the nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetism — subject to the basic rules of quantum mechanics and general relativity. You can substitute up and down quarks for protons and neutrons if you like, but most of us don’t notice the substructure of nucleons on a daily basis. That’s a remarkably short list of ingredients, to account for all the marvelous diversity of things we see in the world.
A hundred years ago it would have been easy to ask a basic question to which physics couldn’t provide a satisfying answer. “What keeps this table from collapsing?” “Why are there different elements?” “What kind of signal travels from the brain to your muscles?” But now we understand all that stuff. (Again, not the detailed way in which everything plays out, but the underlying principles.) Fifty years ago we more or less had it figured out, depending on how picky you want to be about the nuclear forces. But there’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the easily observable world works was one that was achieved once and for all in the twentieth century.

You can read the rest of his original post (complete with qualifying statements) here.

I am certainly no physicist (although I've watched a lot of Big Bang Theory) but this post struck me (and a lot of other people, it would seem) as a little bit premature. Couldn't a Newtonian physicist a century ago have written roughly the same thing - and been dead wrong?

In a follow up post, the author argues that he's not claiming that we understand everything, just the important, every-day things:

The Big Bang is not within the realm of our everyday experience. Even the collapse of the wave function, which comes closest to a true mystery, doesn’t qualify. For one thing, wave function collapse isn’t something you see happening in your kitchen on an everyday basis. But more importantly, we do have a theory that describes what happens, handed down to us by Bohr and Heisenberg. You might think that this theory is unsatisfying and incomplete, and I would be extremely sympathetic. But it fits all the data we have. I’m not trying to make a deep philosophical point about the meaning of “understanding”; just noting that things obey laws, and in the everyday regime we know what those laws are.

My question for the writer is, does he really want to take the position that there will be no further revolutions in physics? Maybe he does. But if so he and any other physicist who takes this position are setting themselves up for what Nicholas Nassim Taleb would call a black swan. Just because our general understanding of the universe has reached a sort of plateau for the last several decades doesn't mean this state of affairs will continue. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

One of the commenters responds very eloquently, and I'll let their response stand for my own:

At the turn of the 20th century, those problems about why tables are solid and why the sun shines were not seen as big issues. Like you mentioned, many eminent scientists of the time claimed all that was left in understanding the world was to fill in a few decimal places. In fact, there were all sorts of unexplained phenomena back then (as there is now), but they were so far at the fringe of what people considered every-day problems that most thought their discovery would just fill in the final piece of the puzzle.

Of course, what really happened with those little corner issues was that the only way to solve them turned out to be revolutionizing physics. Twice. What seemed to be unimportant problems caused a change in the theory of not only fringe issues (how really small stuff worked and how time seemed to crawl for fast things) but also everything else as well. Relativity didn’t augment Newtonian mechanics, it *replaced* it. Newtonian mechanics is only a special case of Relativity in hindsight, as his definitions of mass, space, time, etc. were vastly different than Einstein’s.

On the same token, we currently have many unexplained fringe issues – if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have science – and their final explanations may well change everything we thought we knew about the basic stuff. I’m not calling your post presumptuous because angels may be keeping Mars in orbit and consciousness may require a new sort of physical law; I’m suggesting that there is no difference between the current smugness and the smugness of a century ago.

Which is OK! Back then, we didn’t have to deal much with stuff like radios, and our “every day lives” were a good deal simpler than they are now. By and large, they did understand everything that mattered (to them), just as we do now, which is pretty awesome. But given that every scientific model except our current ones have been replaced, and most of them numerous times, it is not going out on a limb to suggest that ours might as well.

Tyler Tuesday

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Who is Tyler Cowen?

I was introduced to him through his very thought-provoking book on art, culture and globalism, Creative Destruction. More recently his e-book The Great Stagnation (which will set you back a mind-blowing $3.99) has been making waves everywhere.

He also cultivates one of the best link collections on the internet over at his blog Marginal Revolution. He's not afraid to link to stuff that's interesting even if he disagrees to it, and generally sticks to opining about things he thinks he can prove.

Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To say that he is an 'avid reader' is an understatement. He's also a multi-linguist and a foodie. He's an interesting guy to say th eleast.

If you're interested in getting a glimpse of the man behind the economics, now you can: Bloomberg has profiled Cowen at length, touching on his habit of 'freeing' books, his interest in chess and toys with the possibility that he's autistic*.

You can also watch the man in action: here he is giving a TED talk on The Great Stagnation.

Whether you agree with Tyler Cowen or not, his ideas are always worth thinking about.

* I doubt it.

Got Issues?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Wed, 25 May 2011 21:11:00 +0000

I am personally experiencing problems with this blog in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. I figure if I am other people are as well. If you see pop-up error messages, pieces of the layout that appear out of whack or have other issues please let me know. Leave a comment on this post or contact me via electronic mail (tom point noir point x @ gmail). Replace 'point' with periods, etc.

In my ideal universe, a blogging tool developed and owned by Google would be a lot more stable than this.

Google Gender Search

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Wed, 25 May 2011 15:31:00 +0000

Fascinating.

Google thinks Baby Storm is probably female:

Click to enlarge.

I don't know which would be more ironic: Kathy Witterick and David Stocker's baby being outed by an algorithm, or the idea that even mindless technology is obsessed with what sex their baby is.
Of course it's hard to know how accurate Google's 'guess' is. Time will tell of course, but even if the search engine is proved right it still has a 50% chance of being lucky, so that doesn't tell us much. The real question is, how hard is it to keep secrets from Google?

Jacksonville Triumphant? Part 1 - The Biggest City in the World

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:52:00 +0000

Is the city I grew up in growing or dying?

If you look at the list of US cities ranked by population, down at #11, just out of the 1,000,000 residents club, you'll find my hometown: Jacksonville, Florida. #11 may not seem like great shakes, but if you eliminate cities not on the Eastern Seaboard Jacksonville rockets up the list to #3, just under NYC and Philly. It is also the most populous city in Florida, dwarfing its more famous brethren Orlando and Miami by large margins.

So is Jacksonville the biggest city you've never heard of? Well, maybe not. That same list contains a column for population density, and here the picture gets less rosy: Jacksonville has only 1100 people per square mile, which puts it in the company of such bustling bergs as Charleston, South Carolina and Abilene, Texas and makes it thirteenth from the bottom instead of eleven from the top.

What's the story here? How can a city you've never heard of with a population density comparable to some place in West Texas be one of the largest cities in the United States?

The short answer is, by having a lot of land area.

The City of Jacksonville has the largest volume of land area in the continental United States. The reason for this is that in 1968 the residents of Duval County, the county in which the city lies, voted to consolidate their government with the city government, effectively turning their entire swampy county into a single 'city'. Essentially, Jacksonville is Duval County, with the exception of four tiny municipalities carved out along its edges (interestingly, the residents of these municipalities still vote in city elections).

In the 1960's, Jacksonville was a city in crisis. According to this history of the city,

the development of suburbs and a subsequent wave of "white flight" left Jacksonville with a much poorer population than before. Much of the city's tax base dissipated, leading to problems with funding education, sanitation, and traffic control within the city limits. In addition, residents in unincorporated suburbs had difficulty obtaining municipal services such as sewage and building code enforcement.

And things got worse. During a major corruption sweep, a grand jury indicted nearly half the city councilmen, two city commissioners and the city auditor, among almost one hundred others, and forced the city tax assessor to resign. During the same period, all 15 public high schools lost their accreditation.

Something drastic needed to be done. The city government needed not just to clean house and get rid of corrupt public officials, but to restructure in a way that addressed the needs of the area's growing population.

"Consolidation," that is, the consolidation of the Jacksonville city government and the Duval County government, gained momentum during this period. It gained support from both inner city blacks (who wanted more involvement in government) and whites in the suburbs (who wanted more services and more control over the central city). The simultaneous disaccredation of all fifteen of Duval County's public high schools in 1964 added momentum to the proposals for government reform. Lower taxes, increased economic development, unification of the community, better public spending and effective administration by a more central authority were all cited as reasons for a new consolidated government.

A referendum was held in 1967 and consolidation was passed overwhelmingly. Papers trumpeted the new berg as 'the biggest city in the world'.

Of course, it wasn't.

Even today a driver coming up the 301 from Gainesville may be surprised to spot a sign proclaiming 'Jacksonville City Limit' planted in the middle of nowhere along the two lane road. That driver still has another 45 minutes to go before they see anything that looks like a city. There are plenty of places in Jacksonville that have more deer than people. And the rest is more strip malls than skyscrapers.

Jacksonville is urban sprawl taken to its logical extreme, the essence of the commuter city. It came of age in the era of the automobile and it is built around cars, with flat sprawling suburbs punctuated by shopping centers and strip malls. It is a city of asphalt, made up of highways, merging lanes and parking lots. The actual city center has been nearly irrelevant for decades. Instead new suburbs like Southside and Baymeadows have become pulsing hearts of commerce, spreading out paved feelers towards the rest of the city. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

Jacksonville is perhaps best viewed as a grand experiment that began in 1968, Is it possible to run a city the way you run a county? Can a large geographic region benefit from having a single municipal government? Can economies of scale work for local government? The people of Duval County bet that the answer to all these questions was Yes.

43 years later in 2011, it would seem that they were right. Over the past decade Jacksonville's population grew by 11 percent and the city is rapidly becoming more ethnically diverse. The city government has gotten pretty good at delivering services and infrastructure to all parts of the county, given how remote some of them are. The city itself remains in a perpetual state of construction as new neighborhoods appear, expand and attract commercial development. Meanwhile the roads race to keep up.

On balance, the experiment looks like a success, as far as it goes. There is no question that the region is more populous and more prosperous than it was 40 years ago before consolidation, the local government functions relatively smoothly and taxes are low. But the question for me is whether Jacksonville can sustain this growth in the long term. Is Jacksonville truly on its way to becoming a Big City in the sense that the rest of the world would recognize? Or is it doomed to devolve into an endless, humid suburban wasteland and watch as other, more compact cities pass it by?

Right now I'm reading through a very good book by economist Edward Glaeser called Triumph of the City. Glaeser has a lot to say about what factors make cities succeed - and which ones cause them to fail.

Next post: I take a look at whether "The Bold New City of the South" is succeeding or failing.

Making History From Your Bedroom

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Mon, 02 May 2011 15:35:00 +0000

How do you go about getting your name in the history books? Become a powerful world leader? Start wars? Invent something for the betterment of mankind? If you're trying for a place in history, you would do well to remember the sobering example of IT consultant Sohaib Athar. His place in history is virtually assured, and all he did was have a sleepless night.

Very early in the morning of May 1st, he was being kept awake in his sleepy suburban home by the sound of a low-flying helicopter, so he tweeted about it. Mr. Athar had no idea that he was livetweeting the US Special Forces raid that would result in the death of Osama bin Laden, the elusive figurehead of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization.

This accidental recording by an uninformed bystander of the capture of a man who killed thousands and set off two seperate wars is likely to mark the moment that Twitter comes into its own historically. And Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) will be remembered as the guy on the scene when it happened.

Sometimes you don't have to force your way into history. Sometimes history comes to you. Like it or not, Abbottabad is no longer just a sleepy suburb of Islamabad. And @ReallyVirtual is no longer just "an IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops." History at least has caught up with him.

How Weird Is Florida?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Noir) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:48:00 +0000

Its licentious divorce laws and extensive bankruptcy protections make Florida the perfect state for the Tom Noir playboy lifestyle. And this AOL article pegs it as the Weird News Capital of the US, so I won't be bored while dodging creditors in my empty mansion. But why is my state of residence so weird?

The author puts forth many theories as to why this is so, but made one assertion in passing that I found interesting:

According to census data, only about a third of Floridians were born in the Sunshine State.

OK, so that's interesting, but is it unusual? For American citizens and residents, there are very few factors restricting mobility between states. It strikes me that a state where most of the population was born there would likely be more unsual than one where it wasn't.

Fortunately, we have the same access to the census data that the writer of the AOL article did, so we can check it for ourselves. A handy spreadsheet of the US population broken down by state residency can be found here.

For those of you following along at home, I created a new column which simply divides the number of residents born in a different state (column I) with the total population (column D). Sorted this way Florida cracks the top 10 list of states with 'immigrant' populations, but only barely. Its 44.1% of residents that were born in another state isn't very remarkable, especially not for a wealthy East Coast state. The US national average is 27.3%, by way of comparison.

Things are a lot more interesting at the opposite end of the scale. The runaway winner of the stay-at-home-state sweepstakes? New York, where only 11.6% of those who are both residents and US citizens were born in another state. This is something of an eyebrow raiser, but unless I'm radically misinterpreting the data this is correct.

Now, these numbers do not factor in the population born outside the US. Add in those numbers and the picture changes dramatically: Florida soars to almost, but not quite, the top of the chart. As noted by the AOL writer, 65.6% of its population was not born there. But it's not really a standout in this category, being only a little bit higher than Arizona (63.5%), Alaska (61.7%) and Washington DC (59.7%).

The runaway winner is Nevada, a whole 10% higher with 74.6% of its population born elsewhere. This certainly surprises me. But we have to remember that these numbers may also reflect a population motivated to get out of the state (if you're wondering how foreign-born immigrants improved New York's standing, it's doing a little better at 35.8%, but is still below the national average of 41.1%).

Overall, I don't think the data supports the theme of the article that that Florida is the state that all the weirdos are drifting into. There are a lot of people from other states here, but not radically more than you'll find in states considered sane and normal. Where Florida really shines is in terms of its immigrant population, which is behind only states like New York, California and New Jersey.

I'm not denying that Florida is a weird state. But I don't know if we can rightfully claim national leadership in all things bizarre. It's possible, as the writer admits, that we're simply better at reporting our weird news.

If I had to pick the nation's weirdest state, going purely by the numbers, I'd pick Nevada.