Steve Reads

My friend Jamie Forrest (the curdnerd) and I just came up with a great little email idea that all email clients — or plugins for them — should implement. How many times have you sent a message with “see attached” or something similar, then forgotten to provide the attachment? I’ve done it many times. Clients should check for a small set of phrases (“see attached,” “attached, you will find,” etc.); if they find them but find no attachment, they should ask, “Did you mean to provide an attachment?” Seems like this would be a great little usability bonus.

I could probably hack this onto mutt without much trouble.

The standard question that libertarians ask during every presidential election is: if you could stop paying taxes for the rest of your life by killing your favorite federal-government program, would you do it?

I’ve always thought this question was silly, but today it really hit me what’s so fundamentally preposterous about it. The guiding assumption to that question is: “You’re getting something from the federal government; what they do benefits you. At the very least, you get positive utility when you see, for instance, basic science being researched with federal money. Would you give up this benefit in exchange for some extra money in every paycheck?”

What’s ridiculous about this is that it denies any wish that I might have to help my fellow-man without benefit to myself. My ‘favorite’ federal program may well be one that provides health insurance to poor people. Or it might be Head Start. What I want out of my government is something that makes it, in a word, more Rawlsian: we don’t help out the wealthier people until we’ve provided for the poorer ones; we don’t help the healthy until we’ve helped the infirm; and so on.

So the whole thrust of their question is: would you give up something for yourself in exchange for getting something else for yourself? Which is proof that they’re thinking about society in a way that’s totally incompatible with justice or humanity.

In a discussion about how the Iraqis are incorrigible, primitive tribalists who deserve what they’re getting, Chris Young links to a great series of posts (1, 2, 3) on Explananda about the myths that govern how we view foreign conflicts. They’re fantastic reading. I’m especially intrigued by The Myth Of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s, which seems like it will clear away some latent racist misconceptions:

“The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground.”—from Chapter 1

V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.

Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon’s view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon’s noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.

Bill Frist won’t run for president. Color me surprised.

No, wait. I meant “not surprised at all.”

So Chris Young points to an experiment to measure the speed of meme-propagation across the web. It seems valuable.

If you have a blog, maybe you’d want to link to the experiment and ping Technorati when you’re done. You know you want to.

It seems like there should be some easy way to hack Google Maps to answer questions like, “Find me an apartment for less than $1,000 that’s at most a half-hour walk from work, at most a ten-minute walk from a grocery store, and at most a five-minute walk from the subway.” In full generality, I guess this is equivalent to finding the intersection of the interior of N circles, but Google Maps has it somewhat easier: there’s only a small number of apartments — say, k of them — so Google just has to check each of those k to see if they satisfy the constraints specified. It doesn’t seem like it should be that hard, right? The biggest challenge is probably searching relative to vague queries like “close to a grocery store.” But I’m sure Google can use its data to automatically figure out where grocery stores are located.

I’ll look around to see if someone’s already hacked this.

Having spent a most excellent few days in Manhattan, I spent a lot of time marvelling over just how many interesting places there are in the city. There appear to be far more than proportionally more cool things to do in NYC than there are in Boston — much more than 16 times as much to do, with 16 times the population. And certainly Boston has much more than 30 times as much stuff as my hometown of Burlington, VT.

I wonder if there’s any good rule of thumb relating the amount of interesting stuff in a city to that city’s size. The rule of thumb I’m looking for is like so: for certain values of the word “value,” there’s a rule of thumb that the amount of value in a network grows with the square of the number of nodes in that network. This is no more than a tautology if you accept the premise that the value of a network is, in fact, equivalent to the number of connections between nodes in that network; the number of connections in a network of n nodes is n(n-1)/2, which is proportional to n² for n large. And there you have the profound truth that is Metcalfe’s Law.

So anyway, that’s the kind of rule of thumb I’m looking for. I wonder if there’s any good way to approximate the amount of awesomeness in a city as a function of the city’s density or raw number of people. Granted, this will be one of those “to first order” hand-wavy things, but I wonder if D’Arcy Thompson would have been able to give me a nice rule here — sort of like his observation that while the weight of an organism tends to grow with the cube of its height, its surface area grows with the square, whence the pressure in pounds per square foot grows linearly with height. Since there’s a maximum pressure beyond which a given material will break, this sets a nice rough guideline on the maximum height of an organism. Not that I expect the reliability of physics when looking at a problem of urban planning, but still: I wonder if some nice guidelines exist.

Friend Ken has a most excellent language suggestion: prepend the word “illegal” to lots of things other than “alien.” For instance, “illegal parker” or “illegal jaywalker.” Lots of things are illegal; why do we append the word only to those who violate immigration laws? There’s some insidious racism afoot in most discussions of immigration (legal or not), and I like calling it out. I intend to use “illegal” everywhere it’s appropriate from now on.

Via Not Even Wrong, it appears that David Foster Wallace’s novel Brief Interviews With Hideous Men has been adapted into a movie to be released next year. What. The. Hell. This could be great or terrible. I didn’t especially like the book; on the bright side, slicing a book down to a movie may bring Wallace the editing without which he’s often slack. (Though Infinite Jest appears to be one of the least-edited books ever, and it’s one of my favorites. So I dunno.)

One of the many small geniuses of Ze Frank’s show is his ability to analyze some idea that has become so debased that we stop considering it as an object of analysis. He spends three eminently viewable and well-thought-out minutes making the subject interesting again. See, for instance, his explanation of why JonBenet Ramsey is a brand. Or — what made me write today — his discussion of the phrase ‘thank you.’ It’s been a while since I’ve thought about the phrase, which is precisely the point and precisely why Ze is so valuable.

Also he’s funny as hell.

One thing I’ve noticed when I install Ubuntu on a desktop machine is that it takes me a while to figure out all the packages that I need to install to make things work perfectly. Say, it’ll take me a month to notice that I’m missing Abiword or deborphan. But after a couple of months, everything’s working right. The last thing I needed to make work was Totem, so that I could play Ze Frank’s show. To make that work, I needed to install some codecs that are (presumably for licensing reasons) unavailable in the main Ubuntu repository.

So anyway, it might be handy for other people to have a list of all the packages that I’ve got installed, and the list of Ubuntu repositories from which those packages came. It’ll definitely be useful for me on future Ubuntu installs.

Having progressed through Book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions, it really does seem to me that the world he envisions would be an impossibly dreary one. I realize that this is the dream world of many an ascetic, but I myself have a hard time pulling Augustine any closer than arm’s length when he writes things like this (Book 10, Chapter 35, Penguin Classics edition, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin):

We can easily distinguish between the motives of pleasure and curiosity. When the senses demand pleasure, they look for objects of visual beauty, harmonious sounds, fragrant perfumes, and things that are pleasant to the taste or soft to the touch. But when their motive is curiosity, they may look for just the reverse of these things, simply to put it to the proof, not for the sake of an unpleasant experience, but from a relish for investigation and discovery. What pleasure can there be in the sight of a mangled corpse, which can only horrify? Yet people will flock to see one lying on the ground, simply for the sensation of sorrow and horror that it gives them. They are even afraid that it may bring them nightmares, as though it were something that they had been forced to look at while they were awake or something to which they had been attracted by rumours of its beauty. The same is true of the other senses, although it would be tedious to give further examples. It is to satisfy this unhealthy curiosity that freaks and prodigies are put on show in the theatre, and for the same reason men are led to investigate the secrets of nature, which are irrelevant to our lives, alhtought such knowledge is of no value to them and they wish to gain it merely for the sake of knowing. It is curiosity, too, which causes men to turn to sorcery in the effort to obtain knowledge for the same perverted purpose. And it even invades our religion, for we put God to the test when we demand signs and wonders from him, not in the hope of salvation, but simply for the love of the experience.

The ideal world Augustine seems to envision, like Plato’s, is a world without much joy. Plato would have us do without plays or poets, and in general would arrest all change here on earth, because change by definition is movement away from the perfection of the forms. Augustine would have us subsist on the meagrest diet possible to keep us praying all day, because the only world he’s interested in is the one he hopes to enter after he dies.

The Confessions are a crystallization of everything that I’ll need the most work to respect in Christianity. First in line is probably the assignment of all virtue to God and all sin to man himself, which seems unsupportable; if God is omniscient, then he knew from the beginning of time what my sins would be, and knew that I would or would not be able to resist them. So why not blame the creator who knew the consequences of his actions, just as you’d blame an airplane manufacturer who foresaw that the wings would fall off midflight? At no point does Augustine help me understand why god shouldn’t get blame as easily as he gets praise.

Then there’s the view that the human body is a corrupt vessel for the soul, and that the sooner we cast it off the better. More generally, Augustine views all the world’s material things as so many tests that he has to run through to prove his virtue before god. This seems like a highly cynical view of god. His only purpose in creating this world that’s seemingly so beautiful is to tease us with fake beauty, that we may ignore it and learn the real thing, which is the beauty of knowing god. His purpose in making lovemaking so enjoyable, and so essential to the continuance of the species, is merely that we may fend it off and preferably live the life of the ascetic virgin. How dreadful. No wonder Nietzsche described Christianity as the longing for death. From my limited vantage point, that seems about right.

At home with only the dog to keep me company for a few days this past week, I spent a lot of time throwing an oddly-shaped blue rubber toy that Rocky would go chasing after and bring back to me. Because of its shape, it would bounce in a seemingly unpredictable way, though of course its motion could be predicted quite accurately using Newtonian mechanics.

How difficult is it to model to motion of a complicated real-world object (i.e., not a point mass, not a rigid body, etc.)? What I’d like to quantify, if I can, is the computational complexity of this sort of modeling problem. First of all, the model must be realistic, such that — say — rendering the flight path of the dog toy on a computer would look indistinguishable to a human from the real thing. (Or indistinguishable at least 50% of the time. Something like the Turing test.) Now, how does the computational complexity of this model increase with a certain set of variables? Let’s assume, for instance, that we have some measure of the shape-irregularity of the object, such that objects like spheres have high regularity and some three-dimensional analogue of the Dirichlet function has regularity zero. How does the computational complexity of the model increase with the irregularity? Or maybe rigidity is another variable: throwing a brick is presumably an easier thing to model than throwing a slightly deflated basketball (though I’m not sure).

I hope I’ve posed the question well enough. It makes sense in my head, anyway.

Here might be the place, incidentally, to recall a paper that I read years ago by the great Persi Diaconis, who among his other brilliances seems in some ways to be Richard Feynman’s natural heir (though maybe with less of Feynman’s knack for self-promotion). Diaconis was trying to explain why coin tosses should be random, when we know perfectly well that they’re governed by Newtonian mechanics. He modeled the flight path of a coin, as I recall, based on a few variables. What he concluded was that whether the coin comes up heads or tails is exquisitely sensitive to wind resistance, how close the coin is to mint condition, etc. I believe the most important variable was how many times the coin spins while in the air; each spin makes the face on which the coin lands that much less predictable. If I find the citation to the paper I’m looking for (and initial indications are that it was Diaconis and Keller), I’ll post it here.

P.S.: Looks like I may have read Joseph B. Keller’s paper “The Probability of Heads”, though I could swear it was Diaconis’s that I read. Somewhere on the Tubes, it says that Diaconis and Keller worked independently and came up with very different models for the same process which nonetheless agreed to three decimal points. So it’s conceivable that I did, in fact, read Diaconis’s, and just remember results that I’m seeing in Keller’s.

Owing to Sandy Levinson’s recommendation (“a truly stunning book”), I think Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, King’s Last Campaign will have to go on the list.

I just got around to reading the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Effector newsletter from yesterday, and I see that Sun has open-sourced Java — i.e., they’ve released it under the terms of the GNU General Public License. If I’m not mistaken, this is huge. I’ve heard some really cool things about what the HotSpot compiler can do, and now open-source developers can use them in their own code. Bravo to Sun.

Some months ago, I think I may have mentioned that the Washington Post was surveying Washingtonians on their Best Bets — their favorite restaurants, clubs, etc. One of the readers at the time, an acquaintance of mine, made a very funny post on the WaPo website about how lame the selections were. I only bothered to check back now: Starbucks was rated the #1 coffee shop in the city. Yeah, not so much.

Part of the trouble may be that there are no criteria for those who can submit votes. If you’ve only drunk coffee from one of those places, you’re not qualified to compare it to others. But of course they can’t check your experience level.

Anyway, lameness. I frown upon thee, sir!

I was remembering something William Zinsser wrote in On Writing Well, about how, before Nixon’s aide Al Haig brought us the phrase “at this point in time,” no one would have thought of using that many words to express something as simple as the concept “now.” I remembered that Haig also brought us “at this juncture of maturation,” so I googled for that and found a wonderful interview with David Frost, of the famed Frost/Nixon interviews. Just this little snippet is captivating:

Have you ever walked away from an interview or finished an interview where you’ve gone, “I wish I’d asked that” or “I’ve missed that on the kernel of what I really wanted from this?”

FROST: Well, actually, one classic example of that was the Nixon interviews, because we researched cleverly, we worked for a year, and between the 12 taping days, we examined what — and we finished and we covered everything, every question, in the 28 and three-quarter hours, we had wanted to ask.

AnG afterwards, when we had finished, we suddenly remembered that we had not asked him, “Who was deep throat.” We had absolutely, 28 and three- quarter hours, and we just left that out.

Now, on the other hand, we realized we hadn’t lost much, because he had no idea who “deep throat” was. Today we know, but back then, he had no idea who was “deep throat.” So we didn’t lose a lot.

Other people said it was Al Haig. I did an interview with Al Haig. I mean, this was at a time when quarantine for people suffering from HIV, quarantine was a big issue on the Republican right, you know.

And I said to him, you know, “Do you believe in quarantine for HIV sufferers?” And Al Haig said, “No, no, I don’t, but I do believe in a measure of prophylactic segregation.” And I said, “What’s the difference between quarantine and prophylactic segregation?” He said, “Nothing, really. It just sounds better.” A touching, honest answer.

He also, in that interview, Nixon pioneered instead of saying “now,” saying “at this moment in time,” which just meant “now.” And at one point, Haig said, “At this juncture of maturation,” wonderful bit of gobbledygook.

Here might be the place to remind people of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language”. It never goes out of style.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Until an acquaintance pointed it out to me, I hadn’t noticed that there’s something eerily missing from Starbucks, namely the sound of beans grinding. Starbucks now uses a push-button system of some sort, to make their product even more aggressively mediocre than it already is. There is no prospect of greatness in any coffee from Starbucks, but neither is there the prospect of failure. There is just sweet, sweet boredom.

I googled a bit, on the well-known website Google.com, and found a decent argument for the positive effects of Starbucks. (Ignore the bit about its being written by a libertarian. Normally that would give me hives as well.) The strongest argument seems to be that Starbucks has introduced people to new kinds of coffee, from which they can then branch out to other, better stuff (like Murky Coffee, say), and that Starbucks is just one step in a long sequence in which Americans have moved away from, say, Maxwell House to higher-end Starbucks stuff. Nick Cho of Murky describes what the third stage in the evolution will address:

If wine was sold the way coffee is usually sold today, you’d go to a store and see a row of five to twelve bottles, with labels that say, “FRENCH WINE,” “AMERICAN WINE,” “ITALIAN WINE,” “AUSTRALIAN WINE,” etc. No vineyard or winery name, no vintage year, no nothing. Just country of origin, and that’s it.

The next step, so they say, is to make coffee into a real artisan product.

Adam and I, incidentally, lament the lack of artisanal coffee in Boston. I was deeply saddened to note that one of my favorite near-downtown coffeeshops in Boston, Torrefazione Italia (at the top of Newbury Street, across from The New England and a block or so from the Public Garden), was bought by Starbucks and then promptly shut down. Bostonians of a certain age remember the Coffee Connection fondly. I also remember fondly that there was a time when the New York Times would bother to describe Starbucks as “a 300-store, specialty coffee chain based in Seattle”. As of ‘98, Starbucks was planning to invade Italy; until my friend Laura told me recently that it failed, I had no idea of the project’s status.

I’d love to start a little hole-in-the-wall espresso joint in downtown Boston — barely large enough to contain a coffee counter; maybe something the size of Chacarero, where you can get the singularly best lunch in downtown — that just makes good espresso drinks and nothing more. Real estate would still be expensive, of course, and labor costs would have to be kept to a minimum by only keeping the place open during business hours. Maybe eventually it could stay open longer hours, but in order to do so it would have to be in some place that doesn’t go dead at night (like Downtown Crossing) or dead during the day (like any purely residential area).

All of this somehow seems connected to a New Yorker article from a couple months ago on the increased mechanization of baby delivery. Caesarean sections seem to make pregnancy safer, so the article says, but they present their own problems and take much of the artistry out of being a doctor. C-sections exist because medicine has become an industry. I’ve spoken with a few women who’ve delivered babies by now, and the story is frighteningly similar from case to case:

• doctor gets exceedingly cautious and induces delivery
• induction doesn’t get baby out, and mother’s muscles now can’t push
• doctor performs C-section
• on first night in the hospital, baby goes into nursery with all the other babies
• mother, being exhausted, can’t get over to the nursery, and for whatever reason doctors won’t bring the baby to her
• since the doctors haven’t given her and the baby time to adjust to one another, the baby hasn’t learned how to breast-feed from her
• doctors apply great pressure and guilt to the mother, telling her that she is being irresponsible to her baby by not giving the baby formula — even though the only reason it needs formula is that they’ve not let it learn how to breast feed

And so it goes.

In general, I don’t know how to reply to the arguments that all of this industrialization — of everything from coffee to food to birth — is ultimately good. I do see the benefits, of course; the American food supply may well be safer because we can concentrate our food inspectors on one giant factory rather than 10,000 farms. More to the point, industrialization is the reality, and an industry like medicine has to respond appropriately: it can’t expect that doctors will all be able to learn intricate intra-uteral baby-rotation techniques. Or can it? I don’t know enough about the industry, but I have to wonder whether industrialization makes people forget that any third way is possible.

Also, 50 years ago it seems like most American mothers gave their babies formula, because somewhere along the line we came to believe that formula could do the job better than breast milk, which has had several million years to evolve to the perfection of nutrition that it is. The mindset that could believe this has always fascinated me. Are we going to look back on the spread of C-sections in the same way? I realize that it’s in some ways different from breast-milk-versus-formula, but it has enough similarities that I wonder.

In general, some industrialization is obviously good, in the limited sense of standardizing procedures. It’s good for doctors to wash their hands, sterilize their instruments, etc; I’ve heard that American surgeons are always famous for backing into doors rather than walking straight through them, because they’ve been trained not to touch handles before going into surgery. All these procedures are good. It needn’t follow that industrializing everything in the medical process is a good idea. We might get 90% of the sanitation benefits, and none of the dehumanization, if we stopped the industrialization somewhat earlier. But that’s probably impossible, of course; industrialization probably becomes an all-consuming habit (ideology?) like anything else.

P.S.: I should note that in conversation with Friend Laura, I’ve become suspicious that maybe these Big Scary Doctor stories are more true in cities than they are little towns in Vermont, such as the one where she’ll be delivering her baby in early 2007. That seems like a worthwhile caveat.

I’m at home today, having been stuffed full of enough Cipro to immunize all of D.C. against anthrax. My brain has been largely unable to get back to St. Augustine; it seems to turn off the Smart Pipe when one is ill, which I guess makes sense. I wonder how many more joules it takes to power a brain in Smart Mode than in Stupid Mode.

For many years, I’ve turned to David Foster Wallace’s book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again when sick; its essays are nearly bite-sized, and the title essay is one of the most gut-bustingly funny things I’ve ever read.

Today, though, I’m reading Anthony Lane’s collection Nobody’s Perfect. Lane is in some sense the anti-Wallace — short and to the point where Wallace loves footnotes within his footnotes; British in his manner where Wallace is often over the top; and cultured where Wallace is sometimes only academic. I love them both, mind you, but their styles could hardly be more different.

Both those books have served me in good stead while sick over the years. Maybe they’ll do good things for others, too.

Every few years we hear about how the U.S. is failing in its math education, and how we’re going to get slammed by the Asians. I for one am all about kids understanding more math, but I can’t quite subscribe to the paranoia just yet.