Some fluff, some info

topics covered:

Today, I'm writing you from a law firm, where I'm temping to the tune of $21/hour. The lawyers write their little bios, they get emailed to the manager, she prints them out, and then one of five temps (including me) goes to a little web form and types in the info.

As much as I harp about the inefficiency of the whole click 'n' drag paradigm, this has been by far its most spectacular failure yet. For example, today's project is to go through every bio and replace /U.S./ with /US/, and /D.C./ with /DC/. Since we only have a feature-rich and easy-to-use web interface, it takes about 25 temp hours=$525. If there were any sort of direct access to the files (i.e., a command line), you could teach somebody perl from scratch and guarantee that nothing gets overlooked in maybe 20% of the time. Later, when you get the note from one of the lawyers that (not making this up) bar regulations prohibit the use of the word /expertise/, so every instance has to be replaced with /experience/, re-running the script takes no time at all. Part of why I'm temping is that I want to feel like I'm adding value to the world instead of just filching, but I'm just not getting that feeling here.

But fortunately, it's not my project, so I can vehemently not care about how inefficient it all is. I have a spreadsheet which calculates how long I've been here and how much I've `earned' (before & after taxes). I can use it to calculate how much it costs to remove one period (50 cents), or what I'm charging for a single trip to the bathroom ($2.09). Fortunately, I'm a luddite, so I can get a command prompt on my home computer and write this while I wait for windows to pop up in the background.

It helps that the law firm breaks no stereotypes. When I first got here, I had to sign a fifteen page waiver before I could sit down and start clicking on things. The lawyer bios themselves alternate between dull lists of topics or cases, and boasting about how large the corporations are for which the lawyers have worked. Here's one: "Recent actions include [...] defending international financial companies against purported class action [regarding mishandling of retirement funds]." I guess, technically, somebody has to do it. Few of them are attempting to smile in the little black-and-white photos, since `friendly' is not the number one priority of the web site.

They do get points for a lot of asylum and immigration advocacy. One guy talked about how he's been instrumental in gathering evidence against President Bush in the September 11 inquiries, but the managers put a big X through the entire narrative, so that's gone from the public record.

The WB The other thing I've been working on while waiting for the web interface is a new proposal for the World Bank. I first met with one of the Bank managers about two weeks ago, in the lobby of their building on H & PA. I had been told that the building is really amazing, with a waterfall in the fifteen-story lobby and a big sign in gilt lettering above with their motto: `Working Toward A World Without Poverty'.

As it turns out, there's no sign.

The guy I met with, a manager in what stood out as a beautiful suit, was very quick to point out that the WB had bought a set of existing buildings and renovated them into what I saw here, so it was among the cheapest office buildings in DC. Since the WB is a non-profit established by international treaty, it's tax exempt on the profits it doesn't make, so I suppose taking up land doesn't cost them anything. [This is, by the way, a huge problem for Columbia in general: all of the prime real estate keeps getting taken up by people it can't tax.]

He bought me a coffee and forced a cookie upon me. We joked about how SBUX has fifteen different types of coffee, only one of which indicates anything about fair trade. Every trash can has recycling bins, and I didn't get the impression that people ignored them the way they do here at the law firm. As with many people in DC, he advised me about making my product less academic and more focused on the final product, which in this case would be results about immigration's effect on the poorer countries of the world. They're interested in the effects on the developing world of proposed taxes on remissions to home and the brain drain (if any), and getting a better handle on immigration from one developing country to another (south-to-south migration, he called it).

He forwarded my abstract around, and it wound up on Ali's desk. When I met with Ali the other day, he also failed to break any stereotypes, in his tie and short-sleeved dress shirt. He talked about supply and demand, and I thought about how infrequently I think in such terms (which is not a good or bad thing, just different). His office is in a different building, on the twelth floor, which gives you a really fabulous view of the city. The walls are half-glass, so that when standing, you have a panoramic view of the city, but when sitting you have enough privacy to pick your nose. The conference room looks down to the tidal basin, surrounded by cherry blossoms, and the Jefferson Memorial.

The project is to work out policies to dry up the black market in the EU. This becomes an immigration project pretty quickly, and the model I've put together could be readily applied. Ali was very excited and he sent me a half-dozen emails over the next two days about data we can get and things we can do. I like the approach, giving a justification for opening up immigration which has across-the-political-board appeal. So I've revised the proposal while here at the law firm.

So that's my life. Sorry if it was a bit too verbose there, but I've got time on my hands here. Update: one of the lawyers just informed us that /US Court/ is "very wrong" and should be /U.S. Court/. So you get two blogs today. Happy birthday.

[link][no comments]

Oh, I am so depressed again. I apologize to those of you who were hoping for deep, incisive economic analysis, but this is a blog, so I have a whining-about-me quota to fulfill. Those of you who don't know me will (eagerly) want to skip to the auxiliary rant, which I wrote after the drugs kicked in.

Most SSRIs have a half life of about two weeks, so in one day, the level in your blood drops about 4.8%, and that's normal, but anything beyond that is bad for you. It's been about three weeks, so I'm 65% below my normal level (=73 mg in my blood, vs normal=207 mg).

I have some backup Wellbutrin. Wellbutrin always comes with a little can of desiccant (Do Not Eat.) because if it gets the slightest bit soggy it starts to smell and taste like sulfur. But that's what I'm choking down lately, and maybe it'll kick in any minute now.

The primary way in which this depression thing manifests itself is, coincidentally, the same way that age manifests itself: the realization that everything has been done before, and it's not funny any more. It's like being trapped in a room full of high school students. Oh, they're not bad or evil or anything, but in your mind the jokes are already worn to tatters, all the cadences and politics and things people do to be unique that they'd just come up with feel awkward and less-than-brilliant to you because your pals had been doing exactly the same things to be funny and unique for a decade. Everything is tedious from the repetition.

So that's what being depressed feels like, except I'm the only person in the room.

There are only so many adequately sullen pop songs out there, and I've worn out their grooves on the hard drive, so to speak. I've probably heard Alfred Schnittke's "Collected songs where every verse is filled with grief" over a thousand times; it's a nine minute track, so that's about a week. Even Transatlanticism is getting old, and I've had the thing for just a month or two. Gee, Ben, tell me again how the Atlantic was born today?

I've already lived in this apartment and sat in this chair. I could go for a walk, but how many times have I done that before. How many thousands of times have I written sentences with `I' as the subject? You don't have to laugh, dear reader; I know you've seen self-referential humor before. Every time I do a half-life calculation, I have to start from scratch: OK, so exp(-k * 14) = 1/2, so what's k again? You don't understand how many dozens of times I've solved for k. Solving for k is just not fun anymore.

I don't know what to do. Everything has been done before, all of it, and that knowledge is causing me to age faster than the speed of light. The joke that is living is just not funny any more.

Maybe I just need a hobby.

Auxiliary rant Type II errors are when you give somebody drugs but they don't need them. Here in the U.S.A., the medical rule makers are obsessed with type II errors. [In another context, the type II error would be when you diagnose somebody to be a terrorist but they're not. Somehow the rule makers don't care about those errors so much.] Access to Lexapro is so carefully controlled that I can't get any unless I pay somebody several hundred dollars to certify and verify that I really do feel depressed, and I'm not just taking it `cause I get a kick from the side effects (nausea, anxiety, and in my case, tooth grinding).

Since I hang out with goths so often, I know that there exist people who believe they're clinically depressed but aren't, and the drugs they think are helping are either a waste or harmful. But what is the harm from a type I error (depressive doesn't get drugs) and the harm from a type II error (nondepressive takes extraneous drugs)? If the harm from a type I error is orders of magnitude greater---which it is---then don't build barriers around blocking access to the darn drugs. No offense to my dark pals, but writing the nation's drug policy around goths is just silly.

On the other hand, working in concert with the medical establishment, are the folks at Adbusters who believe that depression, panic disorders, and even PMS are "inventions" of drug companies to sell us more drugs. The conclusion follows the same puritanical streak as the Congressmen who pass laws blocking access: if you don't need a drug, then you shouldn't take it---and in the case of anxiety or depression, you never need drugs, because these states are inventions of the drug companies.

I am sorry to say that my emotional state is not a product of advertising.

I actually generally follow a life the Adbusters would approve of: I have no TV, don't let my browser load ads, and generally just don't see advertising, and yet the drug companies still got through to me that I have the ailment they invented. When I briefly lived in Venezuela, a short walk to the stream we drank from and bathed in but a long walk to the nearest town, subsisting on the mangos that fell from the trees in the yard, I was still depressed, and I knew it.

Yes, drug companies are evil multinational corporations. They also manufacture stuff that makes us better. Further, I have to give the evil multinationals a big YAY! for advertising aggressively that depression shouldn't be stigmatized, and that we shouldn't feel ashamed for our brain chemistry, and that it's OK to come forward and seek constructive treatment when just getting more sun doesn't work. The adbusters would point out that they're destigmatizing it to sell us more drugs, and so write articles that re-stigmatize depression.

So why, then, is the rate of depression so high in the U.S.A. compared to everywhere else, as shown in the articles in this sporadically scholarly Adbusters lit review? Some of the citations have quite the literary flourish, saying that there is a mismatch between what my psyche needs and what is provided by the consumerist culture in which I live. But I have a simpler answer: since there are drugs that can adjust the chemistry of my body to make me feel less miserable, and there is a gatekeeper between me and that drug who won't allow me to have that drug unless s/he is absolutely certain that I need it, I'm going to report the most severe depression I can conjure up. If only I could cry on command.

How does one collect statistics about depression? Any survey of people who got out of bed this morning and are willing to talk to the surveyor is going to be horribly skewed away from depressives. In other countries, and before SSRIs became prevalent in the U.S.A., there was just no reason for me to find myself a statistician and report my depression, while now, because of the philosophy espoused by both Congress and the adbusters, there is every reason for me to over-report.

[link][2 comments]

OK, so I closed on the house. A few people have asked me things like `Do you feel like an adult now?' and I have to answer no, less than ever.

The process is (1) wholly standardized and (2) absolutely overwhelming. At the closing, you're in a room with a few people who do nothing but close houses all day long, and they present to you a sheet, which they've done a thousand times before, listing every imaginable charge. The HUD-1 statement is a nice, standardized form that our benevolent government has put a lot of effort into making clear and fraud-free. Nonetheless, the line numbers go up to #603 on the thing, and it's all filled out before you get there. Every question I asked received a slightly condescending `you want that' or `that's already been arranged'. By the time you're at the closing, zero percent of it is negotiable, so why bother asking.

Figure 1: my house.

It was on the one hand comforting to not have to worry about all this stuff, because there are a thousand details that the title company takes care of that I never would have thought of myself (has the water bill been paid?), but on the other, the lack of control leaves me feeling used, like a dozen people simply proclaimed that I owe them money and there's nothing I can do about any of it.

There's a gnawing feeling that I got taken on at least some of it---I didn't agree to pay the $55 pest inspection, but there it was. Part of this is my brain's attempt to work on multiple scales at once and failing miserably. Fifty-five bucks will buy a very nice dinner for me and a pal, but it's 0.02 per cent of the price of the house, and therefore negligible. I just can't deal with the internal dissonance.

All I really have to say about it for now, and I guess even that can all be summarized to `gee, I had no control over anything at the closing; what an odd feeling.' More on comparative advantage or something next time.
[link][no comments]

I've been a bit distracted lately, mostly by the class I've been teaching. I lecture to 84 undergrads, twice a week, about Game Theory. Yes, eighty-four students is a lot. I'm delighted to say that I'll have minimal involvement in grading the homeworks, which is the really painful part---paid those dues already, I guess. The lecture hall itself has a grandiose feel: if the classroom were a movie theatre, it'd be a good one, with a steep slope, and the chalkboard (and me) waay down at the bottom. If you've ever wondered what it feels like to be a movie, well, it's a bit intimidating.

The students don't really want to say much. They sit and stare at me, and despite my best efforts to be fun and animated, they still sit and stare, not wanting to say something dumb in front of 83 of their peers. Occasionally, I'll see vague nods in response to simple yes/no questions.

At first, I think every teacher wants the students to like them and get all animated at the sight of such a wonderful teacher. I wanted to be the cool teacher about whom the students say `I wish every professor were like Professor Coolio!'. But I'm over that desire, having realized that it's simply impossible: I have a pretty narrow sense of humor, which works great with about three of the students in the class---and there's no sense of humor that they'd all like. At this point, I've revised the original goal of `maximize the number of students who love me' down to `minimize the number of students who hate me'.

I'm absolutely certain that at least one of them is reading this right now (hi.), so I won't say anything too nasty. But there are certain types of people whom I never got along with. Erat gregius, holding a conversation with a fraternity boy has always been an abortive effort all around. This is not to say that I or they are evil, just that our conversational ideas, our forms of play, our ideals, our frequency of use of incidental latin, just don't match. So if I were to meet one of these folks at a party (which would not be surprising; I'm probably the oldest guy in the room, but only by a year or three), then they would pretty certainly either give me the cold shoulder entirely, or would attempt a brief conversation, decide I'm a dork, and move on.

So imagine my awkward surprise when such a person calls me `Professor' when nervously approaching me with a question. I guess it's great that the social set-up is such that two people who would never get along elsewhere manage to have a beneficial exchange of content---society at its finest; I'll have to work it into a lesson somewhere---but it still feels somehow incongruous to me. They're not really talking to me as much as the concept of professor they have in their heads.

Then there's the question of content provision. If you estimate about three thousand dollars per student (which is low), then 84 students collectively paid a quarter of a million dollars to hear me speak. What the *uck do I have to say about Game Theory, or anything else, that's worth that?

This is exacerbated by the fact that the content is entirely at my discretion. The class isn't a prerequisite for anything, so there's nothing I have to cover; almost all of the students would be perfectly happy if I told them `You've all got an A. Class dismissed.'; I'd guess if you asked the parents, most of them wouldn't know what Game Theory is outside of a vague idea. If I'd announced on day one, `Game Theory is the study of chess openings and sex', I'm sure the world would continue to spin, none the wiser.

One guideline from the people in charge is that they want me to teach a topics class---start off with the mechanics, but then apply them to different fields like politics, auctions, and prisoner interrogation. This is incredibly fortunate for me, because I've had heaps of practice doing this---right here on this blog. Yup, most of the class consists of recycled blog entries. Yesterday's topic was how to bid optimally on ebay, which you'll recall from this entry. It's a bit more detailed and technical in class, with more frequent use of the term `Nash equilibrium'. The format---a giant lecture hall and a fixed meeting time---makes the content somehow more important and valuable.

[The eternal conflict remains, however, that I need to provide new content twice a week, every week. As noted, I'm waiting to run out of content on this here blog, and it's the same in class but with time pressure. I've already had a few close calls, and even yesterday's class ran a bit short at the end there (not that the students care).]

I don't want to imply that I hate my students, or enjoy the odd power I have over them, or that I'm not taking the task seriously. But I'm just a guy, some loser with a blog and a PhD and an old mattress on the floor in the bedroom. I can play the character of Professor just fine, and deliver exactly the kind of lecture required for a good Game Theory class, but it still all feels like a strange kind of act.

It's like the first time I realized that the math teacher flirts with the language arts teacher, or the first time I went out drinking with somebody who teaches in an elementary school, or the first time I had lunch with a Nobel Prize winner. We've all had those experience where we realize that even people with a title and status are just people---except now it's me that the pretentions and expectations are directed toward.

[link][no comments]

[Today's guest blogger, Mr. GK of San Diego, CA, works for (cellular telephone company). When he first started there, he had the job of measuring the effect that cellular telephones would have on the brain.]

So everyone's walking around with these cellular phones stuck to their heads and some people are wondering about possible effects. One obvious effect is that people on the phone drive slower and swerve a lot. But what about the biological effects of placing a transmitter against the head? Beats me what the effects are, but I can tell how we to measure the power entering the brain and try to design around it.

First off, a little basic intro into the world of cellular phone antennas. Anything that can carry current on its surface is an antenna. [Antennae are the rods that stick out of a bug's head, and some antennas resemble them, but not all.] By the laws of physics, the currents on the surface will create radiating waves, and radiating waves striking the surface will create currents. Of course, the amount of energy crossing over could be very low, making a bad antenna, or close to all the energy could be converted, making a good antenna. Every mobile phone has an antenna, even if you can't see it. Actually, the phone itself makes up a large part of the antenna.

In a typical situation, there is a port or line near the top corner of the phone circuit board to which attaches a length of straight line (a whip antenna) or a metal spiral (a helix antenna). Frequently you'll get both, with the whip retractable and the helix hidden in a plastic stub at the base. So the current goes on the antenna part, right? Nope. When broadcasting, the current comes out of the port and spills all over the place since there's nothing to stop it. Some goes on the antenna, and some goes on the circuit board. So actually the whole phone is the antenna. A dipole antenna has two symmetric metal rods with a gap between them where the source goes; here, the whip or helix is like the top part of the dipole, and the phone body is like the bottom part. What about phones that don't seem to have an antenna? In those cases the antenna is inside the casing, usually as a wire or a little conducting plate along the top edge of the phone. Well gee, you may be wondering, why not always use nice, compact, invisible internal antennas? Much like Mister Ed being a horse, it's because of money, of course. Not the money involved in making the internal antennas, which is not that much, but the money in building more base stations so the phones will be in a higher-signal environment. It's when you're far from a base station and the signal is weak that you need a big antenna. In most metropolitan areas the signal is strong enough that you don't have to extend the whip antenna. There's also a psychological factor. Big antennas that aren't needed are sometimes called "placebo antennas".

Designing an antenna usually doesn't involve much since the phone is so small and the price is very constrained. There's just not much you can do, so as a cell-phone maker, you'll go to an antenna manufacturer and order an antenna from the catalog. The only real freedom in the design is in the matching circuit. That's a small collection of inductors and capacitors placed at the antenna port to try to maximize power transfer. There's a device called a network analyzer that sends a signal into the port and measures the reflection. So you sit there with the phone and try different positions, including holding the phone and putting it up to your head while measuring the reflected energy. Hopefully, the matching network will still work somewhat well in the different positions. Then come the radiation pattern tests. We take the phone and put it on a rotating stand in an antenna chamber. That's like a quiet room but the echoes being absorbed are radio waves. Imagine a dark little room with big, blue foam cones covering every surface. On one end is the rotating podium with the phone, and at the other end is a horn antenna. The network analyzer is attached to the phone and the horn antenna, but now it's measuring the power transmitted between them, rather than the reflection at one port. The podium rotates the antenna and we get a picture showing how much energy goes in which direction. Those patterns are always measured, and they're always a half-step above worthless. That's because the pattern changes completely when held in the hand up to the head.

There are fake heads that can help with the measurements. These are plastic heads with mannequin-like general features and filled with brain-imitating goo. The phone is strapped to the fake head and the antenna pattern measured. This is a better indication of how the phone radiates, although the best test is to have a person sit in the chamber and hold the phone. For that we take out the podium and place a chair on the rotating platform. The subject sits there holding the phone and gets rotated. I went to a conference presentation once where a university presenter mentioned that they couldn't get permission to do this kind of test since it involved human subjects, even though the power involved is actually less than when the phone is in operation.

That's the antenna design process to get it to radiate the most power; now we get to the opposite process, where we try to minimize power going into the head.

The important parameter when considering radio waves entering body tissue is called SAR. That stands for specific absorption rate, and is indicated in W/kg or mW/g [Watts per kilogram or milliWatts per gram]. There are various SAR limits set by the FDA and some agencies in other countries. The limits depend on frequency, exposure time and other factors, but for the frequencies we're interested in, the limit is 0.2 mW/g for the whole body. Since that's averaged over the whole body, it's actually not difficult to meet this limit. Perhaps you've got an antenna irradiating your left arm, but the rest of your body has no radiation and the average could be minuscule. So we don't worry about this limit. The rule that sends us to the measurement labs is the local SAR limit for brain tissue. That's 1.6 mW/g, and we're only allowed to average over a single gram cube. Some other countries follow the same limit, but for Europe and Japan it's a much easier to meet 2 mW/g averaged over a 10 gram cube. So how do we measure the brain tissue absorbing energy?

Imagine a plastic sink shaped like half of a human head. It's like someone cut the mannequin head in half, laid it on its side, and put an edge on it to avoid spills. Into that we put our brain-like goo. That goo is home-made, and actually quite simple. It's just water, salt and sugar. We start with water in a bucket, add some salt and sugar and then take a reading with a device to measure the conductivity and permittivity of the liquid. That device is a network analyzer again! This time it has an attachment that can be stuck into the liquid. It again puts some energy out into the attachment and measures the reflection. Roughly speaking, we add salt to increase the conductivity and add sugar to increase the permittivity. (What's permittivity? That's related to optical index, as in refraction, although this isn't in the optic range. It's like a measure of how electrically dense the liquid is.) If you go over the target values, add more water.

Once the fake zombie-food is ready, we pour it into the hollow head. Then comes the stirring. The ingredients will settle towards the bottom and throw off the carefully calibrated density. So about every hour the mixture has to be stirred with a long stick. The stirring has to be very slow; if bubbles develop, we'll have to wait for them to dissipate. A few minutes of slow stirring should do it. Now we're ready to take a measurement.

The phone is attached underneath the fake head around the ear and turned on. We program the phone to just transmit at maximum power. The measurement is done by a big robot arm set up over the head. The robot arm holds a long straight rod, and at the end of the rod are a couple of little dipole antennas. That's the near-field probe. The robot arm puts the probe into the head and starts measuring the field strength. The operator can kick back and relax as the robot arm sweeps the probe in a 3-D pattern over the head volume. We then look at the results. Did the SAR exceed the limit at any point? If not, we're set, right? Once again, the answer is a big opposite-of-yes. While the FDA sets the SAR limits, they don't say much about how the measurements should be made. How should the phone be positioned against the fake head surface? Can we include a fake hand? How about a fake ear? Is the whole concept of using a fake head with fake brain-goo valid? Who knows, but it's all we have to go on. And what happens if we measure areas where the limit is exceeded? That's when the witchcraft really begins.

To get the SAR down we can do things like metalize the inside of the plastic casing. Try different patterns; maybe one will work. There are metal screens available on the market that you can put over the earpiece that will supposedly cut down on radiation into the head. They must be meant to be used in the bizzaro universe, since by those pesky laws of physics they won't do anything in our universe. Unless the metal screen is attached to a ground, it will be invisible to static fields, radio waves, and any electromagnetic wave up to nearly optical frequencies. The metal patterns we put on the inside of the casing have to be attached to the circuit board, and they work by drawing the current away from the ear area rather than by shielding. Or maybe there is some shielding going on. It's all trial and error.

In the usual whip or helix antenna configuration, the electric current hotspot is around the ear. That's also the area where the SAR will be the highest. An antenna at the bottom of the phone would bring the hot-spot down toward the chin, but there isn't enough room in the phone for it. Probably the only way of reducing energy absorption into the brain is through distance, like with those ear-piece cords. Although on the down side, when you use those you look like you're walking around talking to yourself.

The issue of long-term low-level exposure is another mysterious area. SAR deals with heating of tissue. As long as you're at the SAR limit, the tissue will not heat up (there's actually a safety factor of about an order of magnitude, so you could go over the SAR limit and still not experience heating). Bad effects from radio waves caused below the heating level have so far not been found. A typical experiment involves putting a dipole against a mouse's head for a long time and then dissecting the mouse. That hasn't turned up anything. There has been the suggestion that long-term exposure could cause a benign (non-cancerous) tumor to develop around the ear. It's hard to talk about long-term exposure since cell-phones have been developing and power levels are dropping. An old analog phone is like a portable FM radio station, pumping away almost continuously. And 10 years ago it could have been trying to reach a distant base station. Digital phones are able to operate at lower power (analog maximum is 600 mW, digital maximum is 200 mW). They also switch on and off to save power, so across any second it may only be on half or a quarter of the time, further lowering power levels. Also, there are base stations everywhere now, so the phone doesn't have to raise its power output much.

Does this mean that there is now no danger? Don't know. So I can only offer these words of advice: Trust us.

[link][no comments]

So the book is almost done, leaving a vacuous hole in my life which I could ostensibly fill via social relations with my fellow man, or maybe trying to find a real job. But instead, I'm focusing on the usual `what am I gonna do with all these twenty-four hour days' question.

The subject of software patents had a few advantages. First, it's what basketball-playing lawyers describe as a slam-dunk case. I didn't have to have long internal debates about how to address this one situation where software patents are propping up the sky, because there are no such situations. There are a few business models that depend on patents, but for each such model there are a dozen that don't. From every perspective, the arrows point in the same direction.

Another bonus is that there's only so frigging much you can say about the topic. I have about two pages of extensions in mind (which my editors may let me include yet), but there will certainly be no volume II. That made it a great starter book, which I could watch develop for a year and then, to the extent possible, move on. I _could_ build an entire career about software patents, but that would depress even perky ol' me.

Finally, software, economics, and to a modest extent intellectual property law are all things I know about. If I were feeling juvenile, I could even point my finger at the other guys who write about the subject: how many function libraries have you written? Why are you writing about this when you've never suffered the pain of implementing n-dimensional arrays in Perl; have never even sketched game-theoretic simulations let alone programmed them? Like that.

development IP

If I were ever to write a comedy, it would be about finding roommates. It's the perfect setup: a long string of mismatched characters show up at your house and try to impress you with how well-matched they actually are. Hilarity ensues. If I did write the script, I wouldn't actually have to write in the sense of inventing original content, but would just take a transcript.


[Applicant is a white female, maybe 27. People passing in and out while I was interviewing her insisted that she was trying to flirt with me, but I missed it entirely.]
Me: So, what was your worst roommate experience?
Her: Well, there was this guy, I mean, he was nice enough most of the time, but sometimes he would just seriously lose his temper. He's just all-out yell at the TV during sports. Sometimes when we told him to wash the dishes he'd left in the sink for a month, he would throw things.
Me: I can see how that would be pretty unpleasant.
Her: Well, it got unsafe sometimes too. We were right by a Chili's, and sometimes people would park in his space. He'd leave them a note to come to his apartment. So people would come up to our address—_my_ address, and he'd tell them that they owed him fifty bucks an hour for parking in his spot.
Me: People would actually go to an address posted on their windshield?
Her: Yeah, so I have this not-so-bright person standing at my door, yelling at my roommate, and my roommate is yelling back, and you can imagine I'm a little scared.
Me: Yeah, this guy's gotta go. How long were you with this ass?
Her: Um, three years. [commences sobbing.]


[Applicant is a white male, about 20. His phone message turned us off, because he sounded like the perfect stereotype of the stoner.
Him: Yeah, um, I saw your roommate wanted ad. [pause] So, um, is that still open, `cause, uh, I'm lookin' for a place. [pause] Gimme a call, at [phone number].
We didn't call back. Fortunately, he left a message again. The third time, I picked up, because we were expecting Thai food and it could have been a lost delivery guy. Within five minutes of giving applicant our address, he was at the door.]
Me: So what brings you to sunny LA?
Him: Well, my wife and I left our apartment in Seattle last month, because, uh, our roommate was a heroin addict and he kept stealing—I mean, that's not us, and our landlord can give you a pretty good recommendation. We're clean. [pause] But our roommate was pretty bad.
Me: Your wife? You seem pretty young.
Him: Yeah, well, we found out that she's pregnant a few months ago.
Me: Would she be moving in with you?
Him: Uh. [Pause] No. Now she's at her parents' house in Las Vegas, and I'm here in LA, y'know, trying to find a job and an apartment. I guess she'd mostly be living there.
Me: How's the job search going?
Him: Well, I just got back from a job interview for a manager position at the Barnes and Noble. Yeah.
Me: That's the sort of thing you were doing in Seattle?
Him: No, but the interview went pretty well.
[Rustling at the door. The Thai food arrives and various roommates begin laying out containers on the table by the kitchen.]
Me: Well, I guess I'll let you know about things. Good luck getting things together with your wife and all. I wish I could help you out more.
Him: OK, thanks.
[He stands up, and sort of inspects the Thai food. He lingers a little.]
Me: Um, would you like some drunken noodles?
Him: Yeah, I haven't eaten all day!
[I'm not sure how this one ends, but it took under an hour to get him out of the house. I did feel bad for the guy, but there was no way he was going to be our roommate.]

Leave your own in the comments, people, because I know each and every one of you has a story that can top these.

[link][3 comments]

[PDF version]

The Great American Novel

We inspected the world's largest stalagmite in a cave where three southeastern states have a family reunion ... A granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Blue Licks, with old bones and Indian pottery in the museum nearby ... The present log cabin boldly simulating the past log cabin where Lincoln was born ... a collection of European hotel picture post cards in a museum devoted to hobbies at a Mississippi resort ... Collections of frontier lore. ... and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. ... Always the same three old men, in hats and suspenders, idling away the summer afternoon under the trees near the public fountain. ... Indian ceremonial dances, strictly commercial. ART: American Refrigerator Transit Company. ... A winery in California, with a church built in the shape of a wine barrel. ... A man having a lavish epileptic fit on the ground in Russian Gulch State Park. ... A chateau built by a French marquess in N.D. The Corn Palace in S.D.; and the huge heads of presidents carved in towering granite. ... A zoo in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus' flagship. ... Lincoln's home, largely spurious, with parlor books and period furniture that most visitors reverently accepted as personal belongings.

[from Lolita, part two, chapter two]

So picture Vladimir Nabokov standing before the Corn Palace. Is he merely admiring the architecture with innocent awe? Does he approach it as a hick attempt at splendor, with a touch of disdain and superiority? Is it merely an intellectual curiosity to be cataloged for future use? Is this his form of expressing admiration at a world filled with quirks?

T-shirts

Hipster t-shirts are typically billed as `ironic'. I put that in what are called `irony quotes' because they are frequently not actually ironic like an O. Henry story, but just sarcastic. These folks are all collegiate, and generally an urban-oriented bunch, so we can ask the same question we asked for Nabokov, without the literary genius part: how do these well-educated individuals relate to working-class and rural institutions?

From here, I hoped to get a little more quantitative. How many people really were wearing such sarcastic shirts? Can I determine sentiment from the shirt? I wrote down as many shirts as I could recognize, probably about 150 total. Since a great number of people were in blank t-shirts or other non-t-shirt apparel, this was a less-than-trivial sample of the audience's messages. [Interested parties may inquire about the full inventory.]

Sports jerseys

The big winner among recognizable national teams was Brazil's futbol team, which scored four supporters, beating out the Irish for coolest nationality status. This may partly be because Os Mutantes, a Brazilian band from the 70s, was the headliner on the bill. [Incidentally, they rocked.]

Band shirts

Location markers

Abstract designs

Local shirts

Political shirts

Attempts at humor

Better are the semi-weird vaguely humorous one, such as:
Plate of spaghetti, cowboy sitting on top, using a strand as a lasso
Computers are fun and useful
A Mexican wrestler yelling “Escuche”

`Ironic' shirts

Shirts directly referencing solidarity with the laboring class (a pose originated by Bertold Brecht, I am told) were barely to be found: I counted one Teamster's local shirt, and that's about it unless you want to count the Pabst Blue Ribbon and the Old Style shirts. So for almost all cases, the class warfare story often given with regards to trucker's caps doesn't work.

So I'm stuck again about what message these shirts, and some of the above categories like the tourist locale shirts, are attempting to send. Perhaps the main message is merely `I bought this at a thrift store', which translates to `I buck the fashion mainstream--in exactly the same manner as everybody else'. Perhaps it is merely an aggregation of quirks.

But in some cases, I don't see a love of quirk, but something more negative. Consider how an interaction between a hipster guy wearing an airbrushed cat shirt and a woman wearing her crisp new airbrushed cat would play out. The girl would probably be offended, and the boy would probably not want to continue the conversation. There's no innocent admiration of simple fun as Nabokov may or may not have had, no wannabe attempts to be a working-class Joe like Brecht, but simple mocking. Fortunately, shirts with an obvious mocking tone were a minority.

Findings

Personal PS: On day one of the festival, I wore a t-shirt for the Valois Cafeteria, a place on the South Side of Chicago that is famous for its motto: See Your Food. The second day, I wore a shirt with the logo for Hair: The American Tribal Love Rock Musical. I've been a happy consumer of both, and willingly endorse them both for their own sakes. I have a long story behind both of them, and both started brief conversations at the show. Of course, we can only guess at the personal stories behind the t-shirts listed above.

[PDF version]

I used to have arguments with some economists about how one would model people of limited rationality. The economists in question assumed that because you can't work out what somebody smarter than you is thinking (otherwise you'd be that smart), your mental model of other people's minds must be that they're either as smart as you or less so. If I can think forward three moves in Chess, I must assume that everybody else thinks ahead three or fewer moves. But this is often not the case: Kasparov can play against Deep Blue, and he knows that Deep Blue is looking further ahead.

But the question of what Kasparov is thinking remains. He is not just assuming that Deep Blue is exactly as smart as he is, but has to take some sort of action knowing that he doesn't know enough. If I were Kasparov, and I'm guessing that you're with me on this to some extent, I'd just put Deep Blue out of my head and try to play the best darn Chess game I can. Anyway, there's no point guessing what Deep Blue is thinking because a computer doesn't really think in any human sense of the term.

On to Theology

Our senses are crappy, our brains are in some ways impressive but easily screw up when adding a column of numbers, and as a collective we can barely get bond referenda passed. And with these string-and-duct-tape tools, we're supposed to develop an understanding of the motivations and underlying machinery of our existence and our surroundings.

Premise D (we are dumb) takes seriously the standard claim that the average theologian gives about how ” is infinite and incomprehensible. To some extent, this is axiomatic--no, wait, it isn't. Baruch Spinoza derived it from other axioms over several steps in his Ethics. The most famous snippet from the Ethics is a proof that, for appropriate definitions of God and Nature, God and Nature are identical.

Baruch basically cut to the chase on the Socratic approach. Socrates was famous for asking people to motivate their motivations. E.g., “You're a baker? Why? You like giving people good food, why? Why do you like to see other people happy?” The other party would eventually break down into confessing that he or she has no idea what their underlying motivations are, and the whole thing was eventually resolved by putting Socrates to death. Spinoza's treatise skipped the endless questions and posited that there is something that is the fundamental cause of all things, which itself has no prior cause. Let this fundamental cause be represented by the term God.

The trouble with infinite and incomprehensible

The easy course is to posit that there's some Guy who has created us all, whom we look like, and who is generally like we are, but generally wiser. The same people who say that their deity is incomprehensible and infinite are happy to put a face and a beard and simple human motivations on the guy. Taking a line from Spinoza's Ethics, “[...] those who confuse the two natures, divine and human, readily attribute human passions to the deity [...]”

The White Beard story is an attempt to get around the premise that we have cognitive abilities on a too-piddling scale to get any of this. By positing a deity who is just like we are but cooler, we can apply all of our quotidian reasoning. We can take the standard story (bad person does bad things, good person does good things, events happen, and in the end bad person is punished and good person rewarded) and apply it on the cosmic scale to grand questions of the human condition and such. It's really easy, but it throws out infinite and incomprehensible, and flies in the face of Premise D.

The basis of the White Beard story is Genesis 1:27, about how man was made in His image, which by the most literal interpretation possible means that the eternal creator of the universe has arms, legs, lungs that breathe sea-level air, et cetera. Maimonides takes this non-literally to mean that Man has an intellect that can conceive of things and then build them; others similarly take verse 27 to indicate that there are divine characteristics that Man has that dirt and trees don't have.[Spinoza, for his part, will have none of it: “For intellect and will, which should constitute the essence of God, ...would have nothing in common with [the human intellect and will] but the name; there would be about as much correspondence between the two as there is between the Dog, the heavenly constellation, and a dog, an animal that barks.”]

Frankly, HP Lovecraft probably did a better job of picturing the infinite and incomprehensible than the the best of the White Beard storytellers. Lovecraft's monsters were gigantic, barely describable in human terms, had absolutely no motivation that the narrators could work out, and made the trees sway without wind.

Atheism? Also ignores Premise D, but in a different way, saying `I can't imagine anything on a theological scale beyond the White Beard stories, so I'll assume away the problem by stating with confidence that there's nothing there.' It's like Kasparov insisting that, since he can't prove anything about his opponent, the pieces must be moving of their own accord.

No, Premise D does not imply Nihilism, nor does it imply Agnosticism. Nihilism would say `I know there is nothing beyond what I see', which I take as overconfident; Agnosticism would say `I don't know', which I take as underconfident. Here, I am saying `I am absolutely certain that I have no clue'.

My position raises the hard questions that Nihilism, Atheism, and company all raise: if there's no Guy With White Beard telling you what to do, how do you develop your ethics? How do I draw a chain from the substance that has no predecessor and motivates all else to what I should have for lunch?

Nobody takes the approach of having no ethics at all. Even Objectivists have certain principles of what is Good. Some take a minimal-regret approach--Pascal's wager, presuming that you may as well behave as if the White Beard story is true, because there's some chance that it really is. Nobody takes this to its logical extreme, which would be to simultaneously subscribe to multiple, contradictory religions, just in case it's not Jehovah, but Oshun or Vishnu that wins you the jackpot. My own approach has been more along the intersection of the various religions of the world, which all have a few principles of trying to be nice to each other, and leaving it at that. This is frankly as much a cop-out as any other approach.

Politics

As you are no doubt aware, Spinoza's writings produced all sorts of annoyance among the powers-that-be, and led to Spinoza's excommunication. [See Wikipedia.] But hey, he did better than Socrates did when he called people out on their ignorance and the arbitrary nature of their social and private existence. The lesson from these lives is that the harshest possible critique is not `you are wrong' but `there is no right answer.'

Relevant previous entries:
The one about how Jewish theology generally does better with Premise D than most
The one about the never-ending Christian-Muslim war
The one about how academics handle uncertainty (and businessmen don't)

[PDF version]

• half a jar of peanut butter
• soy milk
• red pepper to taste; maybe some ginger sauce

Pour soy milk and optional spices into peanut butter jar, screw lid on tightly, and shake vigorously.

Sample usage:

• pasta
• soy sauce
• sesame seeds--white and black

I'm not entirely sure of the difference between pasta in the packaging with the colors of the Italian flag and the peasant woman carrying wheat, and the pasta in the packaging with Japanese text on it and a delighted-looking cartoon girl. They're both about a buck, take seven minutes to cook, and are entirely wheat plus water. Trader Joe makes a curry noodle that goes very well with this peanut sauce.

Anyway, throw out the wrapper and you won't have to worry about the implied ethnicity of your pasta. Cook pasta as normal, stir in the peanut sauce, add soy sauce to taste, top with sesame seeds, serve.

Asst notes:

You can mix the soy sauce into the recipe above, but I like to give the user the option of adding more or less.

If you haven't worked it out yet, never buy spices from a place that calls itself a supermarket. Enough black and white sesame seeds for thirty servings is three bucks at any shop in Chinatown, and about ten at the supermarket.

Since soy milk requires refrigeration, so does this sauce. It thickens in the fridge.

Thanks to Ms ABR of Washington, Columbia for helpful additions.