Steve Reads

I saw 21 Grams yesterday. It is a lower-intensity, more mass-market version of the director’s first film, Amores Perros. Same themes, same general structure (lives come together in one big event, everything changes, etc.), but 21 Grams has been slightly tailored for the American audience (no subtitles, Naomi Watts). I feel about 21 Grams after seeing Amores Perros the same way I felt seeing Snatch after Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: the predecessor was a lot better, and the new one was made palatable to Americans. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’d probably feel a lot differently about the later film if I hadn’t seen the earlier one first.

(Similar comments apply to the American versions of Insomnia and The Vanishing.)

 . . . to Kieran Chapman, with whom I used to work and whose site is just wonderfully well designed. And he’s put up photos of his daughter, which are just too adorable for words.

Via Brad DeLong: Fafblog! is hilarious and great. I’d like in particular to recommend the post where Fafnir makes the whole world cute and cuddly, like a basket of warm puppies, and also the post where he explains what the terrorists’ positions on gay marriage and tort reform are.

P.S.: But Fafblog! appears to lack an RSS feed, which is upsetting. (I wonder if I’m willing to say that RSS is the best thing to happen to the web since HTML. I may be willing to say that. It’s certainly the best thing since the <BLINK> tag.) And while I’m on the topic: why do a great many RSS feeds think it’s a smart idea to display only an excerpt of each story, rather than the full story? Doesn’t that just defeat the purpose of RSS (namely, that you should be able to do all your reading within a single program)?

I’ve meant to mention this for a while: if you only want to view certain subjects on my site, the blog package I use makes this easy. If you only want to view what I have to say about books, because you think everything else I say is nonsense, go to http://stevereads.com/weblog/books. Similarly, if you want to access my RSS feed on books, but not on any other subject, load http://stevereads.com/weblog/books/index.rss in your newsreader. Same goes for ‘politics and policy’, ‘tech’, ‘law’, ‘law/copyright’, ‘law/patent’, and the rest.

There’s no way, as yet, to load “all subjects except for law.” Maybe someday. In the meantime, I hope this satisfies those of you who worry about my butt-emanating monologues.

As usual, I was reading Safire (my cache) and thinking about all the places where his argument — this time about today’s pledge of allegiance case — falls apart. Then he does this great bait-and-switch:

The only thing this time-wasting pest Newdow has going for him is that he’s right. Those of us who believe in God don’t need to inject our faith into a patriotic affirmation and coerce all schoolchildren into going along. The key word in the pledge is the last one.

Nicely done, Safire.

A few things fit together in my head:

1. I am confused enough about my career direction that I have chosen to get career counseling.
2. It has occurred to me more than once to email Dan Savage.
3. Lots of people are on antidepressants or visiting psychologists. There’s no shame in admitting it, and I freely admit to having visited a few psychologists in my life.

My question: why does it seem that people aren’t self-diagnosing anymore, or nearly as much? We turn to others to explain what’s wrong with us or what we ought to do. And not just people within our social circles or families, who are the traditional places to turn for such advice — a lot of us turn to professionals. Why is that? And am I mistaken in believing that this trend has really exploded in the last 30 years?

This all fits with the philosophical therapist that my friend Josh pointed me to recently. I like the idea of coming to terms with really tough ideas — the inevitability of death, the ethics of everyday life, and so forth — on your own.

Again, I’m pragmatic about this: if Prozac helps, great. But I wonder whether this is a sign of something deeper and worse. Do we feel that we can’t talk with our family or friends about our problems anymore? Is the decline of American community to blame here? Would fixing the larger problems — while more difficult — address causes rather than symptoms? And would it just be better for all of us if we could solve these problems on our own? How about: have people always had a hard time addressing these issues on their own, and they’re just now feeling that psychological counseling is acceptable?

This is what Savage Love makes me think about.

I took the hated Myers-Briggs personality inventory today. I had never taken it before, so perhaps my hatred was misdirected. But the very idea of classifying people along four binary attributes seems prima facie ridiculous. 16 total personality types in the entire world?

So all right, I’ll now grant that it has some more value. The main value seems to be that it helps you figure out careers that would be a good fit for your personality, which you might not have known otherwise. It’s also good to help you know which managerial style — micromanaging versus letting you create your own path — is right for you. And if it helps you toward that goal, then great; I have no problem with it. Inasmuch as it’s useful, I support it.

However, I encountered a lot of problems with the “instrument” today, and noticed something at the end that could have short-circuited the whole process. First, the inventory asks a bunch of questions of the form “Tell us which of the following words is more appealing to you, based on what it means rather than how it sounds or looks.” One such pair of words was, for instance, “kindhearted” versus “hard-headed.” I don’t see how this could be a valuable question to ask someone, or at least ask me. Depending on the time of day, I might answer that question completely differently. Today when I answered these questions, I was thinking a lot about people I know: would I prefer to be friends with a hard-headed person, or a kindhearted person? Surely a kindhearted person. On another day, I might have had difficulties with someone over a project that didn’t move ahead quickly enough, and I consequently might have more positive associations with the phrase “hard-headed.” It depends.

A lot of the questions play out the same problem: depending on context, I might answer one way or another. This translates into difficulties in the final four-letter analysis of the person taking the test: if you had to describe yourself as either Extraverted (E) or Introverted (I), which would you use? For me, it depends; there are days when I don’t want to see anyone, so I turn off my phone, hide in my room and read a book. Other days I want to be with my friends. In a job setting, I’d prefer to work with a team of people, but every now and then I find something at which I’m much better than my coworkers; when that happens, I want to go off and do it on my own. So am I an E or an I?

At the end of the test, they give you a few personality profiles that seem to match what you answered. It turns out that the personality profile I thought I was (INTJ) is different than what the test says I am (ENTP). Looking at the descriptions of both side by side, ENTP does seem the better fit. But then  . . .  why didn’t they just give me sixteen descriptions of the various personality types and ask me to choose? Why go through a large set of questions? I’m sure there are good reasons, but it all seems bassackwards somehow.

I also messed up the test. It works by giving you a bunch of more-or-less redundant questions, probably as a statistical check on the others. Presumably a lot of the seemingly redundant questions are slight perturbations of the others, just to see how resilient your responses are to little changes in the questions. Fair enough. But along most of the four dichotomies, my answers were just barely over the line into the personality type assigned to me; like I said, on a different day I could have gone another way.

There must be better ways to measure personality than this. I’m just deeply skeptical of this test, more so after having taken it.

Adam Kessel makes an incredibly good observation (note that the little dots after each link are Adam’s locally cached copies of each article):

A Moment of Silence for Spain?

I attended a lecture· yesterday as part of the Spirit of Fès·, an interfaith festival of sacred music that started in Fès, Morocco, and has spread throughout the world. The discussion concerned the possibility of bridging the divide between the great faith traditions to achieve peace in the world. One of the panelists made a startling observation: after last week’s bombing in Madrid, Spain·, there was no official national moment of silence or mourning of the tragedy in the United States.

On September 14, 2001, all of Europe observed a three-minute silence to remember the victims of the September 11 attacks·, as did most of the rest of the world. Yet, even though this was the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history, and Europe itself observed· a transnational moment of silence, there was no such response here.

Why is it that our tragedy is the world’s tragedy, but disaster elsewhere is reflected here primarily as fear of more terrorism on American soil?

If anyone has an electronic copy of Herbert Simon’s 1955 paper entitled “On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions,” (Biometrika 54, 1955, pp. 425-440), I’d love to have a copy. I’ve been interested in this paper ever since Simon explained the intuition behind it in his book Models of My Life, but I’ve not gone to the obvious place — namely my readers — to look for it.

Update: Many thanks to Cosma Shalizi for providing me with a copy of the paper.

By the way, if you’re not familiar with the paper, the idea is that there’s a very strange statistical phenomenon: the ith largest city tends to have a population 1/i the size of the largest city, the ith most-frequently-occurring word in a book tends to occur 1/i times as often as the most-frequently-occurring word, and so forth. It’s such a strange phenomenon, and I want to see why Simon says it happens.

It is safe to say that having very little to do this weekend, in combination with unemployment, has driven me crazy. Unemployment during the weekday is quite hard, because all my friends are at work. The evenings are better, but everyone has to leave early to get some sleep, perchance to wake up early the next day for work. That’s why I really look forward to the weekends as times when I can finally get out of the house and feel somewhat normal. A weekend that’s low on social engagements (except for a really wonderful time with my friends Britta and Liz — thanks, guys) is a major bummer for the unemployed guy.

I’m looking for jobs, and I interviewed last week with a company that seems quite promising. Fingers crossed. This unemployment dealie is no good.

Someone recently sent the pho list a partial list of online music retailers, I think all of which sell MP3s rather than CDs:

• Apple iTunes
• AudioLunchbox
• BuyMusic
• DiscLogic
• Emusic
• MusicMatch
• MusicNet
• Napster
• NetMusic
• Rhapsody

And it occurs to me: presumably this list will whittle down quickly. Are there any good economic models to predict how many firms will eventually sell a given product? (Suppose we’re talking about the idealized free market, rather than a real market that features antitrust regulations, various tax benefits and so forth.) Suppose the market price of the good has converged to its marginal cost. (Is that a reasonable assumption?) Why would there be any more than one firm selling the good at its marginal cost? Why would firms compete for such paltry profits?

If any more economically astute minds can chime in, I’d love to hear a proposed model.

Another case of ridiculous trademark threats:

Rex Bell, known as “Wrecks” to his buddies, is a bar owner in Galveston, Texas. His bar is a laid-back place called the Acoustic Cafe. One night last February a customer asked for a “Lone Star . . .  uh . . .  make that a Shiner Bock.” And Bell said, for some reason, “I’ll give you a Star Bock.” And then he thought, hey, that’s a good joke, and a good name. The Lone Star state with its own bock beer, Star Bock. So he set up an arrangement with Brenham Brewery to ship a version of its high-rated Brenham Bock to the Acoustic Cafe labeled as Star Bock.  . . . 

Starbucks have instantly issued legal threats.  . . .  Bell is being ordered to abandon his Federal trademark registration efforts and “immediately [their emphasis] cease any and all use of the Starbock Beer and/or Starbock mark” and that he “destroy any signage, menus or other materials bearing the Starbock Beer and/or Starbock.”

I’d imagine this kind of lawsuit is more or less inevitable, given the existence of trademark lawyers. Is there any way to head off all such lawsuits at the pass? Is there any general principle by which the law could discourage people from trying these lawsuits in the first place? Presumably corporations do this sort of thing rationally: the expected loss of income if they don’t sue is greater than the expected legal expense if they do. Maybe if they don’t continually act against even tiny encroachments on their names, they lose trademark protection; I’m not a trademark lawyer, so I don’t know. But clearly it wouldn’t make sense to enforce such a trademark claim if one couldn’t expect to get anything out of it.

Have there been any legislative attempts to cut down on such frivolous lawsuits? They’re less prominent than, say, medical-malpractice suits, but in their own way they’re just as harmful. These suits are certainly a dead-weight loss on the economy: it seems doubtful that they reduce brand confusion, they cost money to enforce, and they stop small businesses from getting on with their work.

Via Slashdot: a man googled for information about himself, found “alarming, false, misleading and injurious results,” and promptly sued Google. Presumably to get around the defense that Google has no control over the information it indexes,

Girardi said the problem lies with Google’s patented PageRank algorithm search system.

According to the suit, PageRank, created by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “reformats information obtained from accurate sources, resulting in changing of the context in which information is presented.”

He said PageRank “scans the source, but in doing so, it’s not a literal transmission. A literal transmission would be fine.”

Girardi wants a court order to prevent Google from using PageRank. He said members of a class action could include anyone also allegedly libeled by the search engine.

He also seeks unspecified monetary damages.

This is obviously nonsense. But it does bring up some interesting questions. First among them for me might be: what happens if I link some fiery phrase, like pigfucker or intellectual dwarf or symbol of all that is wrong with the world, to someone’s ethically bankrupt accountancy? Let’s assume lots of other people follow my lead. Am I now guilty of anything? If I’m not, why is Google?

The guilty party here (to the extent that there is one) seems to be PageRank, not Google. If the algorithm operates on page-neutral properties (like the number of links to a given page, or the page’s age), then it hardly seems reasonable to sue Google, and the algorithm doesn’t seem at fault.

Then again, Google isn’t entirely automated: I believe humans can come in to remove objectionable material or to keep items out of the Google Cache. I suppose the tiniest bit of human intervention opens them up to a lawsuit. So: would a completely distributed, completely automated search engine be vulnerable to lawsuits?

I didn’t go into much detail attacking Stephen Manes’s review of Larry Lessig’s new book, but fortunately Larry has. Lessig brought Manes in for the scathing he so richly deserved (‘Attending “international IP law” night school these days?’).

Jhumpa Lahiri came to speak today as part of Cambridge Reads. I was glad to note that, even though she read aloud a portion of a book that I finished just a few days ago, I was still totally taken away by it; I was living inside of her story, even though she read it in rather a monotone. Her stories are just that good. It also didn’t hurt that she is astonishingly beautiful and looks at least a decade younger than her 36 years.

However, I’m sad to say that she came off as condescending and insulting. When one woman asked a very natural question about The Namesake’s focus on Russian authors, Lahiri responded impatiently and derisively, then told the woman she wasn’t sure what she was asking and left her hanging there for a full minute while the woman heartbreakingly tried to rephrase the question in a way that the prima donna would answer. It was at this point that I asked my friends whether we could leave. Lahiri did a little better in the final minutes of the Q & A, but she couldn’t really recover from that. I got Lahiri to sign a copy of her book, and was hoping that I could have it dedicated to my as-yet-unnamed niece (that being relevant to a large portion of the book’s theme). Lahiri just stared at me blankly as I explained her book’s relevance, wrote in her signature, then didn’t say a word and moved on to the next person.

I don’t think everyone needs to be super-friendly. I go into grocery stores nowadays and just expect meanness. But in Lahiri’s case there is no justification for it: when I put that book in her hand, let’s assume she’s making 10% of the cover price. That’s about $2. Even with a special inscription, it will take her 20 seconds to do this. That’s $6 per minute, or $360 per hour. I can possibly justify a grocery-store attendant paying me little mind, given that he or she will be making the same amount of money whether I buy trucks full of cabbages or a single box of Life cereal. But I am putting money in Lahiri’s pocket by my presence. I feel she owes me something for that. She doesn’t owe me a glare.

Just to be clear: I would naturally choose to be friendly to everyone who comes my way — and did so choose, when I worked in low-paying grocery-store and bookstore jobs. I realize that everyone is not the same way, however. Hence I appeal to the financial instinct, which says: the next time Lahiri is in Cambridge with a new book, I am much less likely to buy it. She owes me 20 seconds of kindness.

Via Wendy Seltzer and Ed Felten: James Gleick has a great article in this week’s New York Times Magazine on the legal trouble with domain names (my cache) — why it is that, for instance, someone claiming britneyspears.com as a fansite would probably lose that domain name to Britney Spears’s record label. Gleick argues well and writes well, as he has for years. His article from way back about the lunacy in the patent system is more relevant today than it’s ever been. Highly recommended.

I’m really surprised that I hadn’t read Hamlet until this week. Now that I have, some observations:

1. Quite a lot of other artistic works just make sense to me now. E.g., when Prufrock says that he’s not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, I’m now not quite clear on what he means by that. Prufrock is just as powerless as Hamlet, unable to act to go after the woman he loves. He may not be powerless for the same reasons (namely that Hamlet seems to overintellectualize everything), but he’s still got a lot of Hamlet in him. Also, Moses Herzog, the title character in Saul Bellow’s book, is a very Hamletty character, this time trying to save his own life through the use of philosophy.
2. Shakespeare has a certain set of stock routines that he goes through. In one, a character who is typically royalty (say, Hamlet) talks to someone who’s unaware that he’s talking with royalty (e.g., the gravedigger), and gets information about how the world views him. In another, someone gets sent a long distance away, and confusion arises because of the communication problems at that distance. Havoc ensues. You’d think he’d get bored with that setup, but it seems to work well. Did this structure appear often in pre-Shakespearean literature?
3. Speaking of pre-Shakespearean lit, I want to read the revenge plays that came before him. I think Bruce Sterling got me going in this direction, via Cosma Shalizi:

   Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable.

Go see this movie right now.

Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Wendy Seltzer nails the value of free WiFi access everywhere. So does The New York Times, apparently. Quoth the Times:

WiFi holds the promise of bridging America’s much discussed digital divide — if we make it ubiquitous and free to use, like the public library system. After all, just as roads and bridges were among the most important public investments in the industrial period, wireless access to the Internet is arguably the most crucial public investment of the information age.

Says Wendy, responding to that quote:

Ubiquitous, unmetered WiFi access can help make the Internet available to everybody, with benefits that should be clear even to those unswayed by notions of “public good.” Just as businesses benefit when their employees are literate (public schools and libraries) and when their customers can get to stores (public roads and mass transit), they benefit when customers can easily search their online offerings to buy their e-commerce or entertainment products.

The thing that really puzzles me is that these observations are obvious. The value of free goods should be self-evident, even if we define “value” in the narrowest financial sense. And yet people seem to be quite skeptical about free music, free information generally, and free Net access. I understand the fear, but I hope an abundance of workable counterexamples will ease their fear over time.

 . . . now.