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Dear reader, I have no idea who you are or what your financial situation may be, but let me share some simplified points of financial planning, that you may find useful on the off chance that you find yourself with a few bucks to invest.

The market

If that advice is too simple for ya, let me kick it up a level of complexity: put your expendable income into the S&P 500. It's a decent proxy for the entire stock market, and many a study has shown that on average, attempts to beat the market fall behind the market. That's because the sum of all these specialized strategies are the market--minus management bonuses and fees.

A pal beat my don't-think-about-it strategy via an “emerging markets” fund that leaves the USA entirely and invested in China and India. So bear in mind that when I say the S&P is the market, I mean one market in particular, and you may decide to instead put your cash in a worldwide fund or a fund focusing on one not-USA market. But unless you really know what you're doing, you're better off investing in a market-wide investment rather than one company.

How does investing in the S&P 500 compare with putting it all on red? Here's a list of numbers that I cut and pasted from Wikipedia:

So during this period, the S& P 500's annual returns averaged 12%, with large variance, and some years of loss.

You can buy the S&P 500 in a few ways. Lots of companies provide a mutual fund keyed to it, or keyed to some similarly broad list of stocks. There is a corporation, stock symbol SPY (pronounced `spiders'), whose sole purpose is to track the S&P 500 as closely as possible, and thus act as a single-stock equivalent of the S&P 500.

Debt

If you are expecting that the stock markets of the world are going to fail you in the near future, then a better alternative is to pay down your debts.

It's safe to assume that you, as a member of society, have some sort of debt. A regular reader, Ms BCOH of Baltimore, MD, would like you to know that she has no debt of any sort. U.S. consumer credit (every type of loan that isn't a mortgage, including credit cards, student loans, cars) totals about $2.5 trillion. For comparison, the total of global wealth is $97.9 trillion. I almost wrote an entire blog post on the question of what a total global wealth statistic means, and the implications for our concept of value and its change over time. But I scrapped it and leave it as an exercise for the reader.

From an accounting perspective, paying a debt has exactly the same effect as investing in a fixed-rate investment. If you have a loan for $x that bills you 5% interest, then every year you're flushing $ x×5% down the toilet. By paying off some portion of that, then you're holding on to a few dollars instead of sending them out to the ocean.

I get the impression that people generally understand this with credit card debt, and are very clear that paying off any balance will save them money. For other types of loans, including student loans and mortgages, many folks seem to take the monthly amount flushed as fixed. It ain't.

For student loans, if it's federally-backed--and most of them still are (PDF, thanks to Ms ABR of DC)--then there can be no prepayment penalty. For mortgages, the general standard is that you can pay off the mortgage principal early (with no fees); relatively shady dealers may charge you for the privilege.

Interest is always charged on the remaining principal for the loan, whatever that may be. So if you pay off D dollars on a loan with n% interest, then you will definitely be flushing D×n% less interest down the toilet every year, but how that looks depends on the type of loan. An amortized payment scheme has a fixed monthly payment, but the percentage that repays the loan and the percentage that's flushed down the interest toilet changes every month; if you make an early payment then the percentage that you don't lose goes down accordingly. Other payment schemes may also find ways to keep your payments constant, like just reducing the number of payments. But in all cases, when you sit down to do the math, you'll find that your overall interest payments are reducing by D×n% dollars a year.

I wrote a mortgage calculator to test the change given all sorts of odd strategies. This was fun because it always came out to a savings of D×n% dollars a year, no matter what trickery I tried in the payment scheme. Those situations where ten different things all turn out to be identical have to be the funnest part of mathematics.

So the payment is very much an investment in the sense that it will pay off whatever percent every year, but you may not actually receive (or fail to lose) that money until the mortgage comes to an end. As with any long-term investment, that means you're long-term better off, but your payments and cash on hand today may not change.

You have to read the fine print on your own debt (or give your loan sharks a call), but it's the norm that you can make an early payment of principal and save the corresponding interest. If you have money to invest and believe the stock market will be rickety in the near future, then that's an eminently sensible option.

If you think the stock market will have returns greater than 12%, and your debt has an interest rate under 12%, then the advice is the opposite of the above: don't pay your debt. Say you've got $100 to invest, a debt at 7%, and you believe the S&P 500 will return 12% in the near future. Then your options are to pay your debt, which means you don't lose $7 and are thus $7 up from the do-nothing option of just carrying debt and stuffing the money in your bra; or to invest the money, which means you lose $7 in interest, but make $12 from stocks, so you're $12 up from the do-nothing option.

Carrying debt to invest it elsewhere requires the businesslike attitude that you've gotta spend money to make money, and that there's nothing wrong with debt. There's just a bunch of accounts, some of which have negative balances and some of which have positive. In fact, if a business isn't in debt, then its accountants are probably doing something wrong.

We humans are uncomfortable with debt, and most of us feel awkward paying to borrow money so we can invest it elsewhere. I wrote this whole piece because many of you won't do the rational accountant's debt-cost versus alternative-return comparison--your student loan is oppressive, and you want it dead. Emotions are worth something, and for many, passing on a few hundred bucks a year from playing the market is worth an early freedom from debt. And hey, if you think most of the equity alternatives are going to tank in the near future, then you're not forgoing anything at all.

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I've been looking forward all year to writing this blog entry, even though I knew that it would take me two weeks and cost me hard cash.

See, here's a bitTorrent of every act on the SXSW lineup: 765 bands, 46 hours. I of course had to listen to every track.

I did last year, and it seems to have brought joy to many, including myself. To some extent, it dicated what I would listen to, and what albums I would buy, for the rest of the year.

So, here's a link to my favorite 2 hours, and below are many notes on the process of listening to two days' worth of music.

• A Mr. PF has put up a review of all 763 tracks. So if you want infinitely more detail and reviews of the one-star tracks, you know where to go.

  Not surprisingly, most of the things to which I gave five stars got five stars from him as well. I was especially amused that his response to Anthem by Born in the Flood was exactly like mine: by all objective measures, this song really should suck, but it's somehow stuck in my head anyway. So that's the support for the argument that some tracks just have that mojo that works for every (estadounidense white male) brain. On the other hand, he gave one star to some of my faves, and seems to have a low-grade vendetta against anything that could be construed as girlfriend music.

• Green Day killed music. There's a whole thread of pop, headed by Green Day, but followed by lots of bands with numbers in their names, that don't really have anything particularly impressive about them. It may just be that this is what the New Rock Alternative stations are looking for, so you're getting a lot of bands that realize that the only way they're going to get played is by conforming to that sound. So it's not Green Day that killed music, but radio stations that decided that they want the Green Day sound.

• The city that got the most mentions was Los Angeles, including the Los Feliz mention below and a few songs in both Spanish and Japanese. The city that got the second most mentions was, of course, Baltimore. There was the classic Baltimore-as-sad-place in the Perpetrators' song entitled “Baltimore”. The New Rock Alternative band You, Me, and Everyone We Know had a song about alcoholism: “Tonight I'll be a classic work/ like Edgar Allen Poe/ and I'll die on these streets of Baltimore/ like [incoherent yelling]” I can't tell if it's just observation bias on my part of whether Baltimore really has developed sufficient cachet as the Saddest Place on Earth, but I get the impression that the hipsters and goths are increasingly showing love for the town. After all, it's the only city in the USA with a goth-friendly major league football team.

  I asked Ms AM of Baltimore, MD about this after one of her shows. Her opinion of the Baltimore scene is that there are a few people working very hard and doing great things, and then that's it.

• Hip-hop became cinematic when I wasn't looking.

• I think many of these bands would be super-fun live. The things that we want from a live show are often different from the things that we want from headphone music. You'll see that the list below leans heavily toward headphones, because frankly, that's how you'll be listening to a big stack of MP3s.

• I will admit that I was somewhat self-conscious about genre in picking the list of recommendations that I put forth to you, the reader. If I weren't, you'd have two hours of nothing but whiny ambient stuff like the Sleepover Disaster, and none of us would be better off.

• Ever since offending Steaming Wolf Penis last year, I really wanted to have a metallic, yelly track here. I almost managed it, with a 48-second Spanish/Japanese track. If it were much longer, I'm not sure if I would have kept it.

Clare & the Reasons: Pluto

Amy Cook: Coming Home

Bitter:Sweet: Dirty Laundry; Restlesslist: Butlin Breaks

Born in the Flood: Anthem

anthem, n.
DRAFT ADDITIONS FEBRUARY 2003
A popular song with rousing, emotive, qualities, often one identified with a particular subculture, social group, or cause. Chiefly with distinguishing word, denoting either the associated cause or subculture or simply the genre of music, as football anthem, rock anthem, etc. Sometimes mildly derogatory.

Chocolate Horse: The Carribean

Foot Patrol: Footography

Little Jackie: The world should revolve around me

Eagle Seagull: I'm sorry but I'm beginning to hate your face

Emmy the Great: Easter Parade

Gougers: Everybody knows

Hard Lessons: See and be scene

Jens Leckman

Low Line Caller: Over the couter kids

Rebekah Higgs: Parables

Sleepover disaster: Cathedral

Chingo Bling: Do it; Tech N9ne: Caribou Lou

Mr. Mike: No More War

Peelander Z: Me Gusta Lucha Libre

Sabaton: Primo Victproa

Sxip Shirey: My Own Dirge

White Ghost Shivers: Everyone's Got'em

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I don't think there are all that many actual economists out there who really think that people are interested only in maximizing their profits. Academically, it's something of a straw-man that some sociologists like to attack. But it remains a favorite among people who have only read a bit of economics.

Gosh, I can't find the original reference, but I've read a party or two pointing out that hipster “irony” is just an easy way to sound smart without actually being so. I call it “irony” because, as I'd noted in the context of t-shirts, it's certainly not irony in any O. Henry kind of way--it's just sarcasm. Similarly, it's easy to use cynicism to sound smart. Any time somebody comes up to you and says that Joe is being nice, you point out Joe's self-interested inner motives. Half the time, you're right, and the other half, nobody can prove you're wrong. Cynicism is a win all around: you don't have to think very hard, you sound worldly and possibly insightful, and nobody ever abuses your non-existent trust.

The typical definition of a cynic--somebody who presumes that everybody's motives are always purely self-interested--matches the definition of all of human nature adopted by the typical armchair economist.

From there, you could take it two ways. The narrow path says that it's simply material gain that matters. The humanists characterize this as want of money; those with a biologic bent call it a drive for reproduction. Either way, all the other things people do during the day, like helping others, reading fiction, building ships in a bottle, are all surface activities which the cynic recognizes as mere attempts to get paid or get laid.

Although it is actually true in limited contexts, this approach gets preeminently boring. When I meet somebody who is substituting cynicism for intelligence, I start to wonder why I'm having the conversation. If the machine only has a few moving parts, then I can work out what it will do by myself.

And when the hypothesis is true, that means that the subject is boring too. We can comfortably describe the drive to reproduce and get paid as mechanical. That's why IBM is boring: all they do is maximize revenue. Oh, they've found a new way to sue people for the sake of extracting a cash settlement? How enthralling. Although I never would've thought of it myself, it's still predictable. But when I meet somebody who tells me that they like to build and fly kites, well, that's fun and actually unexpected, and gives me the impression that the person is not a robot.

It is the digression from the cynical baseline that makes people interesting.

Back to economics, the wide path takes humans as much more complex in motivations. People can have all sorts of goals, like bolstering their self-image as good ship-builders, or enjoying various types of play just because they're fun.

I'm comfortable saying that within academia, the wide path is winning out. If you pressed the economists who espoused the narrow path view, many of them would say that they never really believed it anyway, but it is a useful model nonetheless.

After all, if it really is just about cash and getting laid, what are these people doing in academia? Your average University of Chicago economist is very smart, good with numbers, and well-connected with Chicago's large financial community. Why is he wasting his time trying to get papers published in journals nobody reads? He could be on the North side of town snorting coke off the ass of an options trader in the peak of her fertility. Simply by their actions, our neoclassical economists show us that human motives can include far more than just cash income.

And if you bother to read their papers, you'll find more wide-path thinking, which is why so many sociologists and political scientists are annoyed: economists keep writing about things like elections and environmental preferences that they're not supposed to care about.

In other words, economics is interesting again, because economists are increasingly willing to accept that people are interesting.

I like the current crop of pop economists--the ones with book titles in the way of Xtremonomics--for not being about cynical self-interest so much as just applying mathematical reasoning to human affairs. Sure, their statistics are famously sloppy, but at least they're fun, and their focus on quirky facets of humanity acknowledge that people really do things beyond eat, sleep, and reproduce. Now we just need the armchair economists (including every year's incoming class of econ majors) to pick up on the hint and stop equating economic theory with unabashed, mechanical cynicism.

Relevant previous entries:
The first time I used the terms wide path and narrow path

The second time I used the terms wide path and narrow path

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I did work on a contract basis for the NIH in early 2007, and got paid today. Over the year of trying to get compensation for my labor, I have learned a whole lot about the NIH's billing system. This column will share with you what I've learned, both because it offers some interesting points about bureaucracy in general and because those of you who got here via a search engine may be in a similar position and will benefit from what step-by-step instructions I could manufacture.

First, a useful vocabulary, attributed (I am told) to Mr L Lessig: East Coast law is the typical legal code that the US Congress comes up with. West Coast law is computer code: what the database is actually capable of doing.

The problem is that the two sometimes disagree: The US Code says that the database must do some trick, but the guys who wrote the database somehow failed to include that trick. In this case, West coast law wins.

The NIH's Office of Financial Management (OFM) recently installed a new database system, with the pathetically generic name of New Business System (NBS). The NBS has very limited abilities. For example, I was repeatedly told that the technicians using the system are unable to look up a contract by taxpayer ID or name. They can only look it up by contract number and invoice ID. This is the first hint of trouble.

When you get your contract, a portion of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) will be stapled to the contract. But to the extent that the NBS manual and the FAR disagree, the OFM exempts itself from the rules laid down in the FAR. The example of this that hit me hardest was that the FAR does not list an invoice number as required for a proper invoice, but as above, an invoice number is absolutely essential for the NBS to keep track of the invoice. Therefore, an invoice with no number at the top is an invalid invoice, even though it complies with the FAR. Why can't the data entry technician just make up a number? I have no idea--there's probably not a law about it given that the FAR doesn't require an invoice number to begin with--but you'll see that, as a matter of actual practice, the OFM's technicians have only two responses to an invoice: process it or reject it, and they are very inclined to reject.

To continue my personal anecdote, my un-numbered invoice was just thrown out. The FAR states that I must be notified if an invoice is invalid within seven days, but being that they just threw the invoice out, I wasn't notified until a lengthy drama that took four months. The FAR states that I am entitled to interest, being that their non-notification delayed the payment process, but since the NBS can't possibly track owed interest on an invoice that never got entered, I ain't never gonna see an interest payment.

This is very clearly a problem of East coast law versus West coast law, with a system that does not do a very good job of implementing the East coast law is it charged with executing. As above, where there is a discrepancy, OFM employees will cite their internal NBS manuals as the rules governing the contract, rather than the FAR. Too bad you don't have access to their internal manuals. I repeatedly asked several people for complete rules for invoice processing, and finally established that there is no such document.

But one thing is for certain: if you follow the invoicing instructions on your contract, you will not get paid. Instead, you need to comply with the unpublished rules of the internal system.

So, here are some notes and suggestions for those of you who are faced with the problem of receiving payment for a personal services-type contract with NIH:

• Avoid being a contractor: Push for a part-time job of some sort. The normal payroll department is doing fine, and doesn't suffer the dysfunction that the contract invoice processing system has.
• Bill immediately: Nothing in the FAR says you have to do the work before sending the invoice, and neither the FAR nor the NBS are looking for a signature of approval or other proof. So send the invoice the day you get your contract.
• Bill for billing time: If they're going to make you do the OFM's job for it, you might as well bill them for it. I sincerely hope that it takes you less than the several work-days of effort it took me to get paid, but be prepared for such an outcome by marking your hours from the start--don't just assume you'll write one invoice in five minutes and be done with it. If that means you're a PhD electrogeneticist billing $300 an hour to do clerical work that a decently-programmed database could do, so be it.
• Read the West Coast law: Here is the list of NIH billing rules that I was given. Note well that this requires much more information than the FAR requires, because it seems that NBS makes it impossible for the invoicing people to look this information up themselves. This is in no way a comprehensive set of rules: I've submitted invoices that complied with these rules but were rejected for other ad hoc reasons.
• Do not mail your invoice: The FAR says you should just mail in your invoice and that's all you have to do. That is simply hopeless advice from the East Coast. My lab has transmitted many pieces of paper to the OFM's Commercial Accounts division which were never heard from again. Gosh, I have an invoice that was stamped as officially received and then thrown out. My own experience has been that items sent to no one in particular have good odds of being lost, but individuals are very good about responding to emails. [Many seem to just check their email once a day, but that's sufficient.]
• It takes two people to process your invoice--find them: There is one person who does receiving, and another who does the billing. I'm not very clear on why these two people are necessary and what distinct things each does, but there you have it. Call your contracting officer--the one listed on the bottom of your contract--and ask them who does receiving on you contract. While you're there, if you don't know any information in the extensive list above (I still don't know what a 2-way or 3-way match is) then be sure to ask your contracting officer.
• Get immediate feedback from Receiving: Email your invoice to the person your contract officer specified, and in your email, ask for immediate follow-up on whether there are problems with the invoice. This is a dialogue: expect something to be wrong, and expect to be asked to resubmit. If you only follow the eight mandatory steps in the FAR, you are guaranteed a rejection; if you follow the instructions in the PDF above, then maybe you have a chance that it will be accepted on the first try.
• Get immediate feedback from Billing: You will have to wait a day or two, and then start calling the OFM's Commercial Accounts division and ask if your invoice has appeared in their system yet. They have a "Customer Service" line--the name mystifies me because I'm a semi-employee, not a customer--but that line is frequently very busy with people trying to work out why they're not getting paid. Expect to wait an hour on hold before talking to anybody, though you might get lucky and have a significantly shorter wait. Once you do get through, ask if the invoice has been processed. The fact that receiving was able to process your invoice is no proof that the Commercial Accounts people will give your invoice the time of day. If your invoice was not processed, then get the email address of the billing person you're on the phone with [hint: if you wrote it down wrong, check in the online directory] and begin the dialogue again: email them a new invoice immediately, wait for them to reject it, email a new one, repeat until the invoice is accepted. You may want to cc your receiving person.

So, that's the best I could work out from the process. Once you have both receiving and billing accepting your invoice, you are theoretically done: the NBS has digested your invoice and should therefore be able to send you a check or deposit. If it hasn't, well, I'm happy to say that I haven't explored that part of the system (yet).

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The Net seems to be full of amateur (and occasionally professional) designers who've all got advice for ya.

I've complained before about how usability to many people means `how well could a lobotomized person operate this device?' And hey, the lobotomized are legion. If I want my toy to be the next iPod, then I can't have more than five buttons on the thing--wait, wait, iPod digression! How is it intuitive that you turn on an iPod by holding down the menu button? If I recall right, holding down play/pause turns it off. Why do people praise this as so perfect and intuitive when there is no way to know how to turn the darn thing on without having to RTFM?

These posts by designers, and the sporadic email sent to me, often begin sentences with “People want ...”. Does this mean that if I don't what the current design community consensus then I'm not a person?

This came to mind from a post about the interface for a wget GUI. It's a hideous mess of buttons and checkboxes and, well, seems pretty useful to me. I've actually been paid for a couple of wget scripts, which I guess makes me a professional wgetter. I have the manual for wget open on another screen every single time I use that program, because there is so much to tweak. As a substitute for the man page, this application works great. Good job guys. As a substitute for, uh, Internet Explorer, it's goin' nowhere, but nobody intended it to be an IE replacement. A colleague embarrassed me the other day by downloading a set of sets using DownThemAll while I was still trying to get wget to accept cookies. DTA wouldn't have worked in the cases I was paid for above, but in this case wget's endless command line switches totally lost out to a system with virtually no switches at all.

All of this advice about reaching the largest audience by choosing the lowest common denominator doesn't appear in other fields besides graphic design/usability. Imagine somebody writing advice for musicians that they should make sure that they not write anything more challenging than Coldplay, or a writer who advises other writers that they must only write about sex, puppies, and shiny objects.

Figure one: If you write about anything but shiny puppies, you run risk of losing your audience.

Andrew Gelman is a statistician who is big on this sort of thing as well. The linked article, like just about all of his article reviews, opens: “First, I'd replace the tables by graphs.” Have you ever tried citing a plot? `Quantmael [1814] found that the regressor for wheat consumption was significant with, oh, uh, maybe 98% confidence, I think. Give or take.' The entire concept of the metastudy is based on the fact that journals publish tables. Does this mean plots are evil and all have to go? No, but they provide and hide different information from the tables. It's fine to use plots as well as tables, but to propose plots instead of tables is to propose hiding information.

From Gelman and Hill[2007], p 254: “As we move on to more complicated models, we present estimates graphically but do not continue with formulas...” This guy is sooo not invited to my parties.

Also, graphics can be fun. Have a look at the splash on this page of visualizations. But then, text is fun, too.

If everybody absorbed information and learned in the same way, life would be pretty easy for the world's teachers, but instead we've got all kinds. Visual learners are the majority, but many people are not. Auditory learners--I think of myself as one--want text, because it turns into a mental dialogue with the page, while a diagram does not. At the extreme, blind computer users are as common as blind people, and whether they are visual or aural learners, they still rely on screen readers that pass over graphics as blank space.

Now, if you are a design professional, then the odds are pretty darn good that you're a visual learner. Further, the majority of humans are primarily visual learners, so the design professionals who pound the pulpit and insist that you must design for visual consumption are right that you must if you want to reach the majority and be the next Coldplay. But this is the classic case of the tyranny of the majority, because these pulpit-pounders are saying that you should design for the majority at the expense of the minority who want other forms of information and feedback. Some people want text, but the design world says that text like the wget GUI is clutter. Some people want kinetic action to the extent possible with a screen and keyboard, which means turning pages and tabs, but the design world says that as much as possible should be visible from one static view.

The correct solution is a balanced presentation of all types of learning technique, including visual, textual, spatial, haptic, and I don't know what else. Which is not to imply that striking that balance is in any way easy--people devote their lives to that balance. And yeah, I probably post too few graphics.

But the need for a balance isn't coming through in the infovis world, which is still in love with being able to produce graphs that were impossible a decade ago. So let me offer some balance: people (by which I mean me) want text. People acquire language skills early in life--as I understand consensus, the ability to learn and use language is innately wired into the brain--and use language to communicate with alarming regularity. Use that in presenting information. Text, people. It's great. Yay, text.

Relevant previous entries:
A previous, more general discussion of designing for dumb people

@book{gelman:hill,
author = "Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill",
title ="Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models",
publisher = "Cambridge University Press",
year=2007
}

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Today's artificial division of the world into two types: those who are productive because of constraints and those who are productive despite them.

As with any `two kinds of people in this world' distinction, it's artificial, but I'm gonna run with it anyway. My favorite distinction of this type is from Pink Flamingos: `There are two kinds of people in the world: my kind, and assholes.' That just sums up the worldview of so very many people.

Igor Stravinsky was decidedly on the side of constraints:

My freedom thus consists in moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further. My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit. (Stravinsky, 1942, p 65)

On the other end, you've got the joke about how Michelangelo carved David: he started with a block of marble, then chipped away all the parts of the block that don't look like David.

You could argue that the constraints are just a question of degree: Michelangelo still had the constraint of the limited tools and techniques he had on hand, and marble has certain properties that preclude some techniques that would be fine on other slabs. But for the length of this column, I'm standing by my arbitrary distinction. E.g., at the extremes, you start to see the differences in people's reactions. When you list a hundred considerations before anybody can do anything, some people get engaged and start exploring the possibilities and combinations and some get frustrated; when you present a blank piece of paper and say go, some people get flustered and some attack.

I used to play a lot of Chess--I won the junior division Chess championship at the Champaign Public Library--but quickly gave up on it, because playing the game stressed me out. When you set up a Chess board, 50% of the board is covered in pieces. The pawns are in front, which means that you have to get them out of the way before you can move the pieces you want to move. That is, Chess is a game of constraints. There are many shelves' worth of books on Chess openings, and you could read them as a catalog of constraints: if you move here, this constraints loosens, but this other constraint binds more tightly, whereas if you do this the situation is reversed.

So I still play Chess at about the level of a skilled fifth grader, and have since moved to playing Go. The full game is played on a 19-by-19 grid, which means that the first player can pick among 361 options, though there are only a hundred or two that are salient. The second player then has 360 choices for the response, and so on until a structure and its constraints emerge out of nothing. I won't claim to be more than an OK Go player, but I feel better playing it.

So I'm coming to a close on my second book. I have about a dozen pages that need a heap of research and rewriting, and then I can count the whole 450pp of it as done. That is, I'm in the endgame, where there is a structure and its attendant constraints--that I built for myself--and I have to work within them to solve problems. So I came over here and filled a blank screen with text.

But that's why I like writing, be it stupid columns like this, full books, or code. It's the process of building something out of nothing--creating meaning.

Just as a block of marble is not perfectly malleable, a blank screen is not entirely constraint-free, being that you need to fill it with some coherent sort of language (English, HTML, C, some combination thereof). Further, you need to accommodate the sort of constraints other humans impose. A theory of the audience's mind is absolutely essential for good writing--and good sculpting, good coding, and any other sort of filling of the blank slate. Unless you put “Dear Diary” at the top of the page, you'd better have something that other people find coherent and useful.

To formalize this, more or less every published work has a query letter attached, explaining who the audience will be for the book/article/whatever, and why the article will interest and serve that audience. When I'm in a bookstore, I often try to picture the query letter that was attached to any given book. “Dear Editor: I would like to propose to you a book entitled Dancing with Cats, which will consist of photos of people dancing with their cats. Although the cat photography market is crowded and demand is strong, I could not find a single book in which the cats were dancing.”

But anyway, watching things form is fun. My commute passes several construction projects, and I always stop watching the road for a block to see how much more things are taking shape today than they were the last time I passed by. Then they finally finish, and it's just another condo.

OK, The Form says that this is where I'd put a conclusion, which would say something like, `In conclusion, I like writing stuff. I like watching things form'. But instead, here's a picture of a row of Baltimore houses being torn down to build a hospital.

Figure one: Creating a blank slate.

Relevant previous entries:
A prior essay on writing: “Why I blog”

@book{stravinsky:poetics,
title = {Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons: The {C}harles {E}liot {N}orton Lectures},
author = {Igor Stravinsky},
year = {1942},
publisher = {Harvard University Press},
}

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Technology has indisputably advanced. You don't need examples from me to see that progress marches on, and that we humans are doing a lot better than we were a millennium ago. There were mysteries that we couldn't solve even a decade ago that are just run-of-the-mill now.

Meanwhile, you may recall my discussion of the Byzantine-Ottoman war. The interpersonal conflicts we have today are exactly the ones we were having a thousand years ago. People read Machiavelli or The Bible because these books address interpersonal conflicts that we have at the office all the time.

There are a dozen clichés about the contrast: the more things change, the more they stay the same, and history repeats itself, and maybe a few lines out of Shakespeare about the immutability of human nature. But it's worth asking why. ¿Why has our wonderful ability to invent new means of doing things and new technologies had absolutely no effect on how we go about interacting with other people? ¿Why does history repeat itself when biology and mathematics and physiology don't?

Here's my definition of Economics for the day: Economics is the study of conflict as a technological problem. We take the same tools that we used to study integrated circuits and populations of beavers and apply them to the problems of allocating resources among humans. And if you don't like how Economists are doing it, then there are other fields that cover the same questions of how people interact with different approaches and methods: Sociology, Game theory, Anthropology, Political Science, Law.

There's a fundamental optimism to it, that if we think hard enough about conflict, then we can resolve it better. We can actually build upon history rather than repeating it.

When I was at a Social Sciences department in a traditionally physical sciences school, we often got a line in the way of, `well, the social sciences aren't really a hard science.' The standard witty retort is that no, they are much more of a hard science, because human behavior (especially in groups) is the hardest problem science has ever faced. Underlying that little witticism is a faith that the questions are hard but still solvable. Yeah, people's emotions and reactions are hard to predict, but we used to say that about the weather, and our three-day forecasts get better every year.

I'm increasingly losing faith in the fundamental optimistic premise of Economics. Believe it or not, the Iraq war was a big part of my loss of faith, because it destroyed any illusion that I'd had that I was somehow on the edge of history. Nope, I'm just Generation X, a demographic whose key distinguishing feature is its complete lack of any distinguishing features. The real problems of how people behave in groups--the Shakespeare plots--aren't going to be solved, aren't even going to be step-toward-solved, by anybody alive today. We have them better classed and categorized and dissected (Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Matching Pennies), but the final step of teaching people to behave differently when faced with a Stag Hunt is still well beyond anything we economists could even contemplate.

Also on the list of completely obvious statements: a sense of progress is important. To a great extent, I think this is why we geeks are more interested in doing math and building stuff than in dealing with people. It's not that doing math is somehow easier, cleaner, or even less political--the math journals are still edited by humans, after all. But once you've proven a theorem or built a new toy, there it is, and the technique is now a part of our stock of elements, forever more. Meanwhile, any conflict you have now will be had again, possibly by you and the same other party, over and over. Once you kick the bucket, the theorem is still proven, but everything you learned about interpersonal anything is lost forever, and will have to be relearned by the next batch of people.

All of which inexorably leads us to the question of what our technological progress counts for when our social technology is resisting any sense of progress at all. We can rephrase the statement that history repeats itself to say that history never progresses, and I couldn't imagine anything more disheartening.

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