Kevin Drum has a couple of excellent posts today on executive compensation being wildly out of line with returns to shareholders, and the Republicans’ stealth drive to eliminate Social Security altogether. Well worth the five minutes it’ll take to read them.
. . . And how deeply surprised we are. (Via Josh Marshall.) After all, the Bush administration is committed to democracy and openness in government, not at all to a bogus, kleptocratic, cargo-cult kind of democracy.
Doesn’t this sound like a terrifically interesting book?
The Company of Strangers, by Paul Seabright. “Modern economics and sociology both have their roots in the problem of how it’s possible for large, complex, highly differentiated societies to exist in any kind of stable way. No other species has anything like the extraordinarily elaborated division of labor between strangers that we do. (The closest analog is ant and termite societies, but their members are all genetically related to one another.) By contrast, we entrust our lives to complete strangers all the time, whether it’s traveling by plane, or simply buying a bottle of water to drink. Seabright asks what institutions have made this kind of trust and cooperation possible, tries to explain how they might have evolved, and wonders about how robust they are, given the delicate balance between self-interest and cooperation they need in order to survive. This is the kind of book that starts conversations rather than ends them — there’s plenty to disagree with — but it’s one of the most engaging and intelligent efforts I’ve seen to put problems of modern social organization in the context of human evolution.”
I got charged an extra $9.02 this month for text messages: 32 messages sent and 63 received over the 100 per month that I prepaid for, at $0.02 and $0.10 per text, respectively. Then 4 international text messages received at $0.02 apiece, and 8 international texts at $0.25 (!) apiece — the latter despite the Verizon salesperson’s insistence that they cost just as much as regular texts.
I realize this is literally quibbling over pennies, and that I can lower the cost by prepaying for more texts. But just think of the absurdity of paying $0.25 for a text message. Imagine if you had to pay $0.25 every time you sent an email to a foreign country. You’d find it absurd. The very idea of pricing email angers a lot of people; it pops up every time some “crisis which will crash the Internet” hits the papers, the latest such pretend crisis being spam. And yet we do this every day with text messages.
I text with a lot of people, but I’m not really clear that I need it. Most of the texts I send are trivial, and with my forthcoming laptop — which I intend to carry with me everywhere — they’ll be rendered even more superfluous.
Can someone give me a convincing reason why I shouldn’t cancel text messaging on my cell?
With today’s completion of Frank Wilczek’s Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics, I’m up to 48 books for the year. I have four more to read if I want to average one book per week, and I have 23 days to do it — 5.75 days per book. Yikes. I’ve heard that The Berenstain Bears is quite good . . .
. . . is apparently hilarious. Check out the quote therein. Lifesmanship goes onto the library booklist immediately after I’ve finished Longing for the Harmonies and The Line of Beauty. I was something like 150th in line for the first copy of the latter that was returned to any of the Minuteman Library Network’s institutions, and now I have it. Yay for me.
I’ve been doing IT consulting on my own for a while; whether it’s a sideline or a fulltime gig, it ought to have a name. I want a name that suggests a) that I know a lot about system administration, and b) that I’m ultimately a people person and won’t intimidate clients the way that a lot of tech-savvy people do.
I’m working on this on my end. If anyone has any suggestions, please chime in.
On Cosma’s recommendation as always, I got Longing for the Harmonies out of the library and am having an absolutely amazing time reading it. Wilczek tries to explain modern physics from the perspective of its daily practicioners, describing the evolution from a physics of things (atoms, etc.) through one of relations (fields, etc.), to one of transformations (gluons, etc.) and on to higher-order concepts (symmetries and their breakage). It’s almost unbearably fascinating; it’s like a great novel whose resolution you ache to reach. Perhaps it’s not coincidental that Wilczek describes physics in a theme-and-variations form borrowing from music; this would explain the tension and (hopefully) resolution in Longing for the Harmonies.
I’m still a little confused about where some of the earlier physics concepts stand. For instance, I’m pretty sure there are still things in this universe: there are still electrons, for instance, and atoms. And I’m wondering what the virtually-unquestionable parts of physics are — the parts that any physicist would say are almost certain to still be with us 100 years from now. Einstein noted that the laws of thermodynamics would almost certainly never be overthrown, for instance. And despite their revision and deepending by general relativity, I gather that Newtonian mechanics is more or less set in stone. There are centuries of experiments backing it up. I gather that every time someone builds a skyscraper that manages to stand, that person owes Newton a debt.
Likewise, it seems to me that certain basic elements of quantum mechanics are beyond question. Without a lot of very strong hypotheses about the atom being true, nuclear weapons and computers would be simply impossible. Or without Maxwell’s equations, telephones, televisions and radios would be unimaginable. It hardly seems true that these devices would be conceivable under any model of physics. We need very precise experiments to establish their truth; not just any physics will do.
At one level, it seems undeniable that atoms exist. Einstein’s paper on Brownian motion tackled the doubters head-on, establishing that the motion of large particles under continuous bombardment from a surrounding medium (air or water, say) is best described by the assumption that there are finitely many objects jostling around the particles. The possibility that air and water are continuous media is explicitly ruled out. As a side benefit, Einstein’s paper allows us to derive Avogadro’s number as the consequence of a model and some measurements of macroscopically-visible quantities. I understand that his paper, and those that built upon it, agree with the observed value of Avogadro’s number to an astonishing degree.
But clearly atoms are not indivisible: atoms are composed of electrons, neutrons and protons, which in turn are composed of quarks, which each possess a color that can convert to other colors using gluons, and . . .
At this point my actual understanding of Wilczek’s book is fairly limited. I understand it on an abstract level, as a sequence of rules for manipulating other symbols. But I don’t really get this stuff, because as far as I can tell a lot of it is a pure mathematical abstraction, and I don’t know the math. Electrons exist, from what I can tell: the streaks in a bubble chamber — including characteristic curls resulting from the electric charge on the electron — match predictions really well. But as far as I can tell, things like gluons and virtual particles and spin are pure consequences of certain differential equations (spin apparently falls out of the wave equation when relativistic effects are taken into account, which I find an awfully neat trick); one can observe their effects on real objects, and falsify the predictions resulting from them, but one can’t actually touch a quark in one’s hand. (Though, as always, I welcome any corrections to this view.)
So would physicists count electrons, protons and neutrons as beyond doubt? There’s a large body of theory depending upon them (namely chemistry), and that theory works really well. Clearly we must be on to something.
I’m not suggesting that all the i’s have been dotted and the t’s have been crossed and we can put the books up on the shelf and fire our physics professors. But it does seem likely to me, as a physics outsider, that something very much like atoms, protons, neutrons and electrons will be with us 500 years from now. (Yes, a bold statement from a non-physicist. So sue me. Or correct me.) There’s just too much that works for it to be ultimately wrong. Is it reasonable to suggest that within 500 years we might have something that doesn’t use the same elementary particles as today, but that still gives predictions within a few percentage points of today’s predictions?
Newton wasn’t spectacularly wrong. The earth behaves precisely as Newton suggested; it took a while for anyone to find any data that agreed with Einstein while disagreeing with Newton. But when scientists measured the orbit of Mercury around the Sun, they found that it fit Einstein’s predictions perfectly. That’s a compliment both to Einstein and to Newton.
Clearly Einstein’s theories led to a whole new class of possibilities (black holes, gravitational lensing, the Big Bang hypothesis) that were impossible before. Again, my point is not that physics has reached the End State; new models suggest new questions. My point is simply that in a pragmatic sense, have we discovered true answers to some questions? There may be an infinity of questions we’ve not asked yet, but aren’t we justified in saying that we have answers to at least some?
Bruce Schneier thinks about security more than most people, and writes with more clarity than nearly anyone I’ve ever read. He has the bullshit-freeness of a good computer scientist (“Want me to believe that? Fine: give me a proof, show me some evidence, or give me a simulation. Otherwise shut up.”). Now he has a blog. And in one of his recent posts, he gives a great little tip that I never would have thought of. In response to a reader who received a probable scam phone call asking him to type in the last four digits of his Social Security Number, Schneier writes,
I regularly receive calls from the anti-fraud division of my credit card company checking up on particular charges. I always hang up on them and call them back, using the phone number on the back of my card. That gives me more confidence that I’m speaking to a legitimate representative of my credit card company.
I find that neat and very helpful. I thought I’d pass it on.
Seventh Circuit judge Richard Posner and Nobel economics laureate Gary Becker (the latter famous for extending economic methods to non-market interactions, like the choice of a mate, the former famous for bringing economic analysis to the law) now have a blog. This excites me, as someone with a fair bit of exposure to Posner’s ideas, if not the same background understanding that informs a law student’s reading of Posner.
And now the first shot against Posner has been fired. And ohhh, it’s a delicious cannon blast.
They had me right until they claimed that AOL-Time Warner owns the New York Times.
In an article about the death penalty that seems to explain the issues fairly well (though I invite lawyers to chime in), the New York Times makes a statement that could be purely innocent, or could be a misunderstanding of the system:
The cases all involved challenges to the fairness of the procedures used to convict and sentence the defendants rather than arguments about their innocence.
There’s a pretty frequent misunderstanding in this country that you can differentiate between the process by which people are tried, and the results of that trial. This goes along with the idea that people can “get off on technicalities.” There are no technicalities. If we want to adhere to the rule of law, then we have to establish principles that prosecutors and defense attorneys agree to before a trial begins, and indeed before anyone commits any crimes at all: everyone has to know the consequences of his or her actions before he or she commits them. The alternative is to adhere to rules sometimes and not others; doing so is a very long step on the road to arbitrary law and tyranny.
If you agree so far, then it’s unreasonable — and a very bad misunderstanding — to suggest that people can get off on technicalities. Prosecutors and defense attorneys either follow the rules or they don’t; either justice is blind, or justice is meted out unfairly.
The process of justice is inextricable from the results of justice. If a prosecutor can introduce evidence that he was not entitled to introduce, then we have no confidence in the conviction that he obtains. If juries are not drawn from “my peers” (a term that needs to be defined through case law), then I am less assured of their impartiality. If the system can routinely produce skewed juries, then society as a whole loses confidence in the system. And since democracy is fragile and depends on numerous “gentlemen’s agreements,” we cannot afford to lose confidence in the system; it rests on nothing but our confidence.
All of this is obvious, I think, but there’s enough talk of “getting off on technicaliities” that it seems necessary to point out. Maybe I’ll talk about “activist judges” some other time.
One of the more irritating sights in the American cultural landscape is pretend shock. We’ve even developed a turn of phrase for the surprise-that-isn’t: “We are shocked — shocked!” Breasts during the Superbowl? Shocked, shocked! No WMDs in Iraq? Shocked, shocked! And now Jason Giambi confessing to steroid use? The heavens will soon fall as a result of this deeply unsurprising bit of news. We’ll also soon pass out upon learning that children are fat because they eat too much sugar.
Could we just drop the fake surprise? Please? Just for a moment? It would help cut through the bullshit so that we wouldn’t need to go through the perfunctory news cycle of surprise-resignation-fines. Giambi will be fined, or maybe the Yankees will use this opportunity to rid themselves of a fading player. Life will go on. Everyone already knew he was on ‘roids: at Fenway earlier this year, Sox fans chanted “You do steroids!” every time Giambi or Sheffield came to the plate. So let’s move past the first stage of the cycle and move on to the symbolic punishment followed by the pretend contrition. Maybe we’ll get an extra-special dose of the media treatment, containing some articles about the “crisis” in baseball. The crisis will fade by the first day of spring training. (How odd that the BALCO scandal didn’t turn into any fines during the season. How very odd.)
In broad outline, these stories write themselves. The meta-story might merit a few weeks’ coverage in the papers . . . followed by a few weeks of navel-gazing over the “crisis” in the media and some symbolic firings . . .
I find it neat that googling for “TiBook” — which I did because I think they’re beautiful (yeessssss my preciousssss) — brings up Debian on a TiBook as the first link. This, I think, would be my ideal machine. It’s still ideologically shy of where I want to be, because it’s putting money in the hands of proprietary software manufacturers. But it’s some fraction of the way to the correct solution.
Now if only someone would just manufacture a beautiful piece of hardware that looks like the TiBook but is intended for use with Debian . . .
Imagine I have some Internet connection open on a laptop in a moving car — something like SSH, say, or FTP. (Anything other than HTTP will do for this example.) Say I move out of the range of one WiFi hotspot and into the range of another. Does my connection keep working? Or does it die as soon as I get handed off from one hotspot to another? If my understanding of the protocols is correct, the only devices that matter in that SSH connection are my endpoint and the other endpoint. If that’s true, then it shouldn’t matter whether I switch to a different WiFi hotspot mid-connection, right? The SSH connection should stay up?
In this continuing wireless fantasy, I’d like to get a high-gain antenna and give wireless access to my whole neighborhood.
Via Slashdot: If you’re a Google fetishist — and who isn’t nowadays? — you might dig a ZDNet article about the backend technology that makes it happen. Drool drool drool.
Another wireless idea: suppose I’m sitting somewhere where I have access to multiple strong WiFi signals. I want to download a large file, but I don’t want to tax any one WiFi hotspot very much. Shouldn’t I be able to split that download amongst the available WiFi channels? Of course on their end, if they’re using the proper equipment, they can throttle my downloads so that they never get taxed. But that’s an unfortunate solution; better would be if my download never hurt their throughput enough for them to care about me. Possible?
This is pretty bloody cool: Linksys has open-sourced much of its firmware. Predictably, the community loves it. There’s OpenWRT, and probably a buttload of other such sites.
It just makes business sense. If you want proof that I’m not just a pie-in-the-sky optimist about such things, I suspect that paying attention over the next few months will make it clear that open-source is the wave of the present. AOL’s new browser is based on Firefox. Little by little, I think you’ll see more and more projects that use open-source because it makes financial sense.
In the case of Linksys, there seem to be few reasons why they wouldn’t choose open-source. If they release their code and the open-source community butchers it, there’s no reason that Linksys has to reabsorb the bad code into their stock firmware; they can ignore it. Now, it may be that some poor Linksys developer has to spend too much time monitoring an influx of crappy code, but in that case I’d expect Linksys to stop accepting submissions and fire the guy whose job it is to trawl the Net for hacked firmware. Its open-sourcing of the firmware would count as a dead-weight loss. But it doesn’t seem that they’re doing that; according to Cringely, Linksys’ “use of Linux is no secret. Linksys, now owned by Cisco, not only doesn’t mind your hacking the box, they are including some of those hacks in their revised firmware.”
So why wouldn’t a rational company pursue open-source? If they don’t get code from the open-source community, they at least get ideas. They’re getting free labor, basically.
And why would someone Out There want to contribute code for free? Probably for the same reason that I treat other people nicely: I want to make the world a little bit better in the little ways that I can. Or maybe it’s ego: by attaching your name to something that goes out into the world and that other people use, you gain a little bit of fame. Or maybe you just have fun programming. Or maybe, like Cringely’s description of Sveasoft, you found that the world hadn’t addressed one of your needs and decided to fix it yourself; after you’ve spent the work on it, why not give it away, particularly if you did a lot of the work based on someone else’s open-source generosity? It certainly seems unfair to take a benefit from the rest of the world, add to it, and not give back. If you get help, you owe others help; this basic fairness principle is at the heart of the open-source community.
There are lots of reasons why people might help others for no financial benefit to themselves; it strikes me as a sad commentary on American society that it has taken work to convince people that their own behavior might sometimes be unselfish.
With the prospect of my buying a laptop getting a little more real every day, I’m getting more and more excited about the uses of wireless. If the numbers and quality work out right, I’d like to use Vonage or Skype and cut back my cell-phone minutes. Also, I remember reading a while back about a Motorola cell phone that used VoIP when available, and fell back to the cell network if necessary. That’s a great idea, but I’d have to insist on an open-source phone if I were to use this. It always happens with closed-source software that I find some feature that’s really vital but that isn’t available to me. E.g., what if I’m in an area where VoIP service is spotty? Or what if VoIP signal quality has been too variable? Shouldn’t I be able to force the phone to use the cell network if certain quality standards on the VoIP network aren’t met? (Likewise if cell quality is low and VoIP quality is better, though for now that’s less likely than the first scenario.) This is precisely the kind of problem that the open-source community fixes quickly.
Cringely gets me very excited about the possibilities of “disruptive technologies.” Check out his fascinating explanation of how a Canadian man got rid of his cable and telephone, and how the rest of his neighborhood did the same. (Link via Adam Kessel.) I dream about doing this for my own neighborhood. Cringely’s article about the WRT54G suggests the possibilities of mesh networks: my wireless router is connected directly to my cable modem, and your wireless router gets its Net access through me. In turn, maybe there are one or two other wireless routers between me and the person who’s ultimately connecting to the Net. If there are enough wireless routers in the mesh (and if routing details that I don’t have the technical competence to conceive of are solved), the Internet becomes truly decentralized. Right now, blowing up the root DNS servers would cripple the Net; we’re nowhere near the goal of complete decentralization. I understand also that if the big Network Access Points (NAPs) were blown up, there’d be no way for big nationwide networks to communicate with one another: traffic from MCI would only get to other MCI hosts. As I understand it, the structure of the Internet in this country and worldwide is that your local ISP connects to a regional network, which pushes its data onto a nationwide backbone network, which interconnects with other networks at NAPs. This centralization seems efficient, but it comes at the cost of survivability: the network is easier to shut down. Mesh computing shows one way out of this.
Wireless gets me thinking about all of this. And we’re really only at the beginning of the wireless era. How exciting is that?
There’s a decent chance that I’ll be buying a laptop in the next couple months, so I’m thinking: could a laptop substitute for an iPod? Could you connect a Bluetooth adapter to the laptop, put on a set of Bluetooth headphones, start your laptop playing a selection of music, then close the laptop and put it in your backpack? I’m told the answer is yes. I’m wondering whether you’d lose much from the iPod. Is it that much of a loss, for instance, that the laptop isn’t at your fingertips? Do those who use iPods change their music selections frequently enough that the device’s accessibility matters?
P.S.: I’m using “iPod” here in the generic sense of “portable MP3 player.” In turn, I’m using “MP3” in a generic sense to mean “digital audio format.” I tend to aim at weakening trademarks.
This evening’s shopping experiences led me to the following chain of reasoning, which is unquestionably true:
It is time.