I can't believe it's not content!

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part VII

Eric B Blair — 2 April 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I kept it brief here in the text, but this was three months of my life during which I could think of little else.

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part VI

Eric B Blair — 30 March 2013 00:00:00 +0000

This is foreshadowing for the next few episodes where everything falls apart.

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part V

Eric B Blair — 26 March 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I spent a lot of time staring at this photograph. It gave me just enough to start imagining something exquisite.

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part IV—LUST

Eric B Blair — 22 March 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It's not often I get to use a subtitle like that. In the end, the LUST part is just maudlin and depressing, but isn't that always the way.

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part III

Eric B Blair — 18 March 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My life would've been very different if I'd bought The Luther, I've often wondered if for the better or the worse.

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part II

Eric B Blair — 14 March 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Another installation of the series on this infrequently-updated blog, which will only be read by you, the people who subscribe to this RSS feed.

Buying and renovating a house the hard way: part I

Eric B Blair — 10 March 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I really did write (the first draft of) this in one night, as described.

Things that bring me joy IV: the wallet

Eric B Blair — 14 December 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I waited a long time to write this, so that I could thoroughly test it out before endorsing it.

Things that bring me joy III: MSG

Eric B Blair — 9 December 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Visiting Helsinki, we got some Indian carry-away, and were musing why it was so delicious. We concluded that it was because The Finnish have no superstitions about MSG.

Things that bring me joy II: the shoehorn

Eric B Blair — 26 November 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This may be my shortest blog post ever, because these things are so simple.

Things that bring me joy I: the desk

Eric B Blair — 12 November 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In which I write about stuff. You are encouraged to disagree with me in the comments.

The best of SXSW 2012

Eric B Blair — 4 November 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As promised. Now with a ton of youtube links to bonus tracks.

The back catalog

Eric B Blair — 30 October 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Not posting since Februrary turned out to be a nice natural experiment.

DC is drastically under-dense

Eric B Blair — 8 February 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If you're going to TL;DR and not click through, here's the key bullet point: Paris, a capital city with a height limit and somewhat comparable size to DC , is five times (5x) as dense.

Country music creeds

Eric B Blair — 20 Janaury 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The third is the best example, but I tried to be systematic so you wouldn't think I was cherry-picking. Country radio has been like this for years now.

The top 11 of `11 (the singles)

Eric B Blair — 30 December 2011 00:00:00 +0000

This may just be navel-gazing, but I felt like it'd provide completeness, and it's a reminder of how great Bill Evans is. The numbers in parens are last.fm's count of number of plays for the year, so you can compare them to a Zipf distribution.

1: Wye Oak – Siamese (68)
2: UNKLE – Heaven (featuring Gavin Clark) (42)
3: Bill Evans – My Man's Gone Now (35)
4: UNKLE – Cut Me Loose (featuring Gavin Clark) (33)
5: Wye Oak – Take It In (31)
6: Elliott Smith – No Name No. 5 (29)
6: UNKLE – Against The Grain (featuring Gavin Clark) (29)
8: The Velvet Underground – New Age (28)
9: Lower Dens – Completely Golden (26)
10: The Velvet Underground – Ocean (25)
11: brazos – Mary Jo (24)
12: Cowboy Junkies – 200 More Miles (23)
12: Wye Oak – I Want For Nothing (23)
14: José González – Save Your Day (22)
14: Wye Oak – That I Do (22)
14: Alexa Woodward – Boston (22)

The top 11 of `11 (part 2)

Eric B Blair — 30 December 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Number one is not going to surprise anybody. In fact, I'd mentioned it in passing back in my last SXSW listing

The top 11 of `11 (part 1)

Eric B Blair — 28 December 2011 00:00:00 +0000

If you like the sort of music I like, here are several recommendations.

Dear National Park Service,

Eric B Blair — 6 November 2011 00:00:00 +0000

There are some things, like riding bikes and camping, that impress me as just unabashedly wholesome. So I have trouble understanding the people who turn red when they see people on bikes or in a tent.

Against common sense

Eric B Blair — 26 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Balanced budget rhetoric is Democracy at its worst.

On writing books: the pitch

Eric B Blair — 22 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Also, if you're an acquiring editor, ping me.

On writing books: what to write

Eric B Blair — 28 March 2011 00:00:00 +0000

See, the blog isn't dead. Also, if you're an acquiring editor, ping me.

The Combine

Eric B Blair — 14 October 2010 00:00:00 +0000

They didn't find out that I'm a fanatic vegetarian until it was too late.

Killing the trademark joke

Eric B Blair — 28 August 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Articles that don't quite get trademark right do bother me, so this started off as a defense of trademark law.

Rock star crushes I have had

Eric B Blair — 10 July 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The gal from Wye Oak, Jenn Wasner, has a wonderfully crushworthy voice, and even has a few somewhat girlfriend tracks. But I've seen her live here in town, and I suspect her house is a short walk from mine, all of which makes her just too tangible.

900,000 trees

Eric Blair — 22 January 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Visiting Seattle this week. I've only wandered the streets for an hour or so, but haven't yet seen a Starbucks. But it's only natural that my sterile hotel room would have a few packets of the home edition.

Anyway, maybe I'm behind the curve on this, but I read this on the SBUX-branded cup:

This paper cup from Starbucks helped save more than 100,000 trees from being harvested last year. That's why we're proud to brew Starbucks coffee for you.
This cup saves trees by using 10% post-consumer recycled fiber.

OK, by not cutting down 10% of the trees they would've cut down, they save over 100,000 trees. Let's reverse this:

This cup is 90% virgin fiber.
Starbucks harvests more than 900,000 trees per year to make paper cups like this one. That's why we're proud to brew Starbucks coffee for you.

Working out that 10% recycled means 90% not-recycled is not exactly advanced calculus; I'd say it's even low-ball for an SAT question. But by putting this message on millions of cups, somebody in the PR department really thought it would have meaning to some people, that they'd read this and think I'm green for using this single-use disposable cup. Everything is going to be OK. Are Starbucks patrons really that dumb, or does Starbucks HQ just think they're that dumb? Or is the bar for green pride really that low?

The Jews go back to Poland or Germany

Eric B Blair — 8 June 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I'm topical! This happened yesterday. Here's four pages on why Helen Thomas's offhand comment went beyond just a faux pax.

Poison ivy

Eric B Blair — 2 June 2010 00:00:00 +0000

In which I get to spend a week or two slightly limited in abilities and slightly repulsive. Show it to your kids as a cautionary tale.

How you are wasting your time

Eric B Blair — 30 April 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Everything I've ever written about computing is rooted in this brief little rule of thumb.

100 recommendation letters

Eric B Blair — 10 April 2010 00:00:00 +0000

To answer your question: thirty-five.

Best of SXSW 2010

Eric Blair — 2 April 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is probably the last time I do this.

The myth of the buyer's broker

Eric Blair — 24 March 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, a lot of real estate agents are really nice people, and care for your best interests because that's just who they are. I've run into some lousy draws, though.

My life with tablet PCs

Eric Blair — 20 February 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Or, why Apple decided not to make a tablet PC.

The delicate illusion of play

Eric Blair — 18 February 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This picks up on my favorite question of how value is endogenously created (and destroyed). Next time, tablet pcs.

A paean to the keyboard

Eric Blair — 12 February 2010 00:00:00 +0000

This is a lead-in to next episode, maybe a week from now, where I'll discuss tablet PCs.

Metro signage

Eric Blair — 2 February 2010 00:00:00 +0000

See, it's not just computer geeks who come up with pedantic and anti-intuitive customs. This entry is not because I've been screwing up a lot. I'm actually pretty good about this stuff, though it takes a few seconds of effort, calling up my years of experience, every single time I board a train.

Republican census

Eric Blair — 22 January 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A blogger points out that the Republican Party is sending out a fundraising letter with the header 2010 CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT CENSUS commissioned by the Republican Party. The cover letter uses the word "census" 13 times, by my count. It's just another fundraising letter, being mailed to the usual "select few" targeted for this round of fundraising campaign.

Are they trying to unfairly mislead? On the one hand, the word "Census" is just a dictionary word, not trademarked by anybody, that anybody is free to use; on the other hand, there is certainly a strong association between the word and the official, mandatory headcount run by the U.S. Government. To break the tie, some definitions:

Survey: a sampling of the total population, maybe checking .01% or 10% but definitely nowhere near 100% of the population. The usual statistical techniques are run after the survey to determine characteristics of the whole.

Census: a counting of every single head in the population, shooting for 100% minus unavoidable nonresponse. No post-canvassing statistical magic needed, because pains were taken to cover the entire population.

The U.S. Census is appropriately named because it is an effort to count every head. The Supreme Court has ruled that it must be a census, not a survey, though some statistical massaging to fix some specific types of nonresponse is OK. The Republican Party mailing is not a census, because it is mailed to a "select few" recipients, and has no goal or intent of counting every head. As the letter explains to the recipient, "Your opinions will represent literally thousands of or Republicans in your Congressional District..."

Final verdict: the mailing is misleading, because not only does it make repeated use of the potentially misleading word "Census", but it does so in regards to something which is in no way a census.

Be your own chocolatier

Eric Blair — 11 January 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I'm at a loss for the policy implications of this entry.

It's getting chilly, so I've broken out the tealights.

Eric Blair — 27 November 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It took millennia for we, as animals and humans, to work out fire, and Prometheus has suffered ever since for revealing to us such magic. It made civilization possible, it allowed us to live in places where we have no business living, it has destroyed entire cities, and it is the symbol of all things mysterious, ever-changing, and powerful.

You can get a hundred tealights from the drug store for $4.99. Each is identical in size (1.5 inches diameter) and behavior (ASTM standard F2417). Encased in a standardized tealight holder, they are our little, abject victory over everything that is full of wonder because it is more powerful than we are.

I have lousy circulation, so I use them to warm my hands.

It's getting chilly, so I've broken out the tealights.

Eric Blair — 27 November 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I have lousy circulation, so I use them to warm my hands.

Picking a cancer

Eric Blair — 14 November 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Looking forward to comments about how I oppose breast cancer research and/or hate women, because Balkanization encourages those sorts of arguments.

Suspicious Closures

Eric Blair — 24 October 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Feel free to add to the list in the comments.

Enforcing normalcy

Eric Blair — 4 October 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I tried writing a piece about gardening, but this is what turned up. Maybe next time.

Amtrak policy on folding bikes

Eric Blair — 26 September 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A policy piece in which I mostly argue by example.

Sorry about the hiatus, by the way. I've been kinda down and out lately.

The `Net's most conservative site

Eric Blair — 8 July 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Rest assured that I do get it, and have garnered amusement from pretty much every example I present.

In the land of invented languages

Eric Blair — 22 June 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Not really a book review; more just riffing on the author's lead.

My headphones: the social and political implications

Eric Blair — 15 April 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is post number 250. wc tells me I've written about 250,000 words since September 2003. What have I done with my life.

My headphones: saving my life even more effectively

Eric Blair — 4 April 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Because reading while biking remains a practical impossibility, I have overthought everything that I deal with while biking.

Better of SXSW `09

Eric Blair — 3 April 2009 00:00:00 +0000

There were a dozen more worthy tracks after my faves from last time, so I put up another file, at drop.io/fluffinfo2. At some point I might let the nonsubscribers know too.

The password arms race

Eric Blair — 26 March 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Little sociomathematical problems turn up everywhere. Sometimes life is fun like that.

Best of SXSW `09

Eric Blair — 18 March 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Don't bother reading these notes. Just go straight to the music download.

Updates

Eric Blair — 10 March 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Hi. I haven't been updating in a while because what I intend to be the next post---the annual round up of the SXSW torrent of pop---takes a ton of research. I'm most of the way through, so keep an eye out. Subsequent posts should come a little more frequently.

In the mean time, those of you who read this blog for the mathy philosophy of science stuff might want to have a look at this blog on computational statistics. It's by Ben Klemens, with whom I share a close relationship. E.g., we as a unit hacked together the code underlying fluff.info's blog, now recycled for the Modeling with Data blog. [Its core back-end is a modded version of very useful and sadly disappeared Greymatter CMS].

Cut-to-keep ratio

Eric Blair — 5 February 2009 00:00:00 +0000

In the Why Word is a terrible program section of this site, the author mentions the wonderful joy of having a document-writing system that lets you leave comments that don't appear the final document. Besides the general utility of comments, this means that you can `comment out' drafts that you worked on but which might not quite be ready.

I have read many a review of a B-side compilation that used a phrase like `[My favorite band]'s cutouts are better than most bands' best works'. I like to think that that sort of thing more-or-less applies to my writing. This may sound cocky, but that attitude helps to keep my writing from overflowing. If there's a borderline paragraph, I reassure myself that even if my B-sides are still be pretty danceable, they still have to go. So complete crap just gets deleted; B-sides get commented out in case of later regret.

I wrote a little ruby script to elide the commented segments from my documents, and used the wc utility to compare word counts with and without. It turns out that 20% of what I wrote for the textbook didn't get published. That is, for every four paragraphs of final product, I have a paragraph that was basically OK but not quite good enough to use. Of course, the true ratio of cut-to-keep is larger because of stuff that was so bad it wasn't even worth commenting out, but I think this ratio of B-sides to final product is a better measure of how well I'm self-editing (and is, um, measurable). You get to decide for yourself if this is high or low, and compare to your own cut-to-keep ratio.

The journalist and the horse race

Eric Blair — 2 February 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps I should've posted this one before the election--I wrote it about a year ago--but the situation isn't changing any time soon.

My office

Eric Blair — 27 January 2009 00:00:00 +0000

You may be wondering where I do all my work, being that I'm unemployed. So here's a low-quality photo from my `office', where I am writing you (and blatantly avoiding work) now. As you can see, I'm big on windows, so I've got the desk pulled right up to them. I'm told that this is bad chi, so I'm living dangerously. But I do get to watch the birds (which my telephone reduced to a few blobs in the tree at left), watch the snow, and delight in not having to leave the house.

The monitor is mounted on an IV pole, which allows me to mount the thing sideways, so I can see full pages from PDFs and long streams of code. Writing that last book would've been heck without a paper-shaped monitor. Peeking out from behind the monitor is the antenna from the wireless router that is hanging from the same IV pole. Having it right against the window makes it easier to share wireless with the neighborhood.

Where's the keyboard? I posted on keyboard setup a long time ago.

Next time: content. But for now, seeing that it is a soft January afternoon with snow curled about the house, it's back to coffee and bird-watching.

Rubber foot protection

Eric Blair — 25 January 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I sent in my laptop for warranty service, with of a list of ailments gathered over years of heavy use of a device that is in the end just a piece of plastic with a hard drive. Broken this, wobbly that, port stopped working.

Best Buy got it back a month late, but in much better shape. They seem to have disregarded my list of ailments and run down their own checklist, because they did things that I hadn't asked for, like replacing the keyboard, and didn't do one or two things I had listed, like replacing the laptop's little rubber feet. The feet sound silly but are actually pretty important: without them, the machine wobbles when you type. The guy at Best Buy said the parts department would be happy to send me a set of feet and I can stick `em on myself.

Today the UPS guy delivered them. Each foot was in a separate ziplock bag. Each ziplock bag was in its own padded envelope. The four padded envelopes were put in a large cardboard box. The box was then filled with foam peanuts.

A set of four feet is a little under 2 cubic centimeters (ccs). The box is about 30 x 23 x 15 cm, or 10,600 ccs, and so is 5,600 times larger than the set of items it is holding. Thanks to such care, none of the feet broke during shipping.

Parade of motorcades

Eric Blair — 22 January 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I attended a little inaugural party over on the fourth floor of an apartment overlooking Mass ave. On the night of the election, when Obama won, that intersection was taken over by whooping pedestrians until 2 AM. But on the inaugural night, the evening gridlock was punctuated only by the sound of motorcades.

Most days in DC see few motorcades. Are we really going to occupy a dozen emergency vehicles every time the Secretary of the Interior goes out to lunch? So I suspect that the stream of Inauguration day motorcades were more for prestige and a glam night out. The president himself attended a dozen and a half balls, and his motorcade passed by twice that day. By odd coincidence, the DC police made no arrests that day.

Motorcades have a special sound. When an emergency occurs, police from all over have to turn around and get going, but a motorcade radios ahead to clear the path and travels as a pack, where everybody works as a rapidly-moving unit. The police seem more comfortable honking their horns. A motorcade begins and ends with motorcycles, which in a group also provide a distinct sound. So you get the sound of police blocking traffic, silence for a few minutes as the streets are clear, then the motorcycles and sirens.

The Presidential motorcade is worse: you have at least four motorcycles on front and back, and a whole lot of black vehicles in between, including a spare limo, a few vans and SUVs, and what looks like an all-black ambulance, I presume carrying equipment. Two blocks behind, in with traffic, there'll be three or four more police.

The party I was at was nothing unique: that part of Mass Ave is two walls of apartments facing each other, and I'm sure many a party was being thrown that night. In the valley between the cliffs, the motorcades ran all night, as those in the motorcade set travelled among their own ground-level parties.

Columbia

Eric Blair — 24 December 2008 00:00:00 +0000

If you really think its proper name is "District of Columbia", then I expect you to refer to "The District of District of Columbia" from time to time.

A high school geometry lesson

Eric Blair — 28 November 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It must be hard to write high school math books. You have to make the subject interesting without making it too interesting.

Open comments

Eric Blair — 5 November 2008 00:00:00 +0000

In late 2003, I did a post entitled "Should Israel exist?" It's still the first hit on Google for that phrase. The post will be as interesting or not as any of my present posts, and Google tells me the page has only seen 400 readers to date in 2008. But the comments to this post are a li'l train wreck. After all, you don't type "Should Israel exist" into a search engine without having a strong opinion about the subject. So I recommend paging down to the comments for what you will find to be either profoundly funny or profoundly depressing. It's a three-part essay, so continue through to #23 to get to comments like fearsomefire@gmail.com's "Okay I hate jews to the core."

Capital, liquidity, and the crash

Eric Blair — 24 October 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A guest blog today: a macroeconomist who works with issues of bank stability responds to my microeconomist-dabbling-in-macro post from last time.

Velocity, risk, and the crash

Eric Blair — 10 October 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I only worked at the brokerage firm for about a year and a half. I didn't last long partly because I was much more interested in how the various systems of instrument trading worked than the part about maximizing the company's profits.

Causality and ethics

Eric Blair — 24 September 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Thesis sentence: the perception of causality is what makes us human, in both positive and negative ways.

The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keene

Eric Blair — 17 September 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The Cult of the Amateur, Andrew Keene

The thesis of this book is that we need to maintain a division between the producer of a work and the audience. If the amateurs in the audience start producing the work, then we just get amateur results, and the world fills with noise.

Mr. Keene has run a few web sites, including a traditional curated-content music site, where you'd buy Bach or Dylan CDs. But this is not a tech book, because it is only looking at the consumer face of the `Net; his tech-world expertise and experience is therefore not super-relevant. No, this is a Sociology book, on how technology shapes culture, and how different organizational structures lead to different societies (and vice versa).

In the world of Sociology, Mr. Keene is an amateur. He has no formal sociological training. His citations top out at a few books that might appear in a first-year Sociology course. His authority on questions of how society shapes itself is exactly as authoritative as any other curmudgeon with a `Net connection. As an amateur, he doesn't really have the training to hold the debate on his own, as we expect a book to do: we want him to present his argument, then tell us what the best of the best on the other side think, then tell us why he believes his arguments should win. There are good pop press books out there that really peg this dialectic, often by academics.

My own experience writing books via the traditional publishing scheme, with an editor who played gatekeeper and coach, showed me the work that goes into making sure every single sentence is accurate and backed up (which frankly does not go into many online books, but we all know that already). On the level of attention to the details of writing, Mr. Keene is something of an amateur as well, who lowers the quality of his work with unfounded offhand comments, like how Chuck D of Public Enemy was the "first serious rapper", or how the respect of property and not stealing is "Judeo-Christian", or how that Judeo-Christian belief applies directly and unequivocally to intellectual property. [I could go on all day with examples.]

But you don't need to be a published author to recognize bad writing and bad logic, and that's another key failing of the book: generally, people know crap when they see it, and the problem of filtering out crap exists even in plain print. Let us say that only professionals with certification may have license to write (or sing or dance). Just reading the ten or so high-quality peer-reviewed academic journals in a field, cover to cover, would literally be a full-time job. The world blew past our ability to be on top of all of everything all the time, and if you don't design a good filter to work out what to focus on, you're screwed. This isn't about the Internet or the amateur, but about a world where education is common, the population is rising, and the day remains stubbornly stuck at 24 hours.(*)

We have a lot of mechanisms to sort out what is or is not crap, including popularity among the masses, popularity among friends, gut feeling, and recommendations by authorities and gatekeepers. Mr Keene insists that the only correct method is recourse to recognized authorities. This is another place where the literature is dense, and Mr Keene cites none of it, perhaps because there are so many benefits to the other reasons that he can't counter. Because the problem is identical for both old and new media, we can give an example from old media: some people will pick up this book just because they'd heard of it (recourse to broad popularity, more or less), or because a friend handed them a copy (that's my story), or because the theme that the Internet is making the sky fall appeals to their gut. I expect that few will pick it up because of recommendation by qualified authorities.(**)

But hey, Mr. Keene had the opportunity to publish, even via bound-paper means, as he prefers. I can only hope that he recognizes the wonderful empowerment that he has gained from a society where any amateur such as himself has a shot at presenting his or her work.

(*) See also David Foster Wallace's essay in The Best American Essays 2007. He curated the volume, and was thus the Decider whom the reader contracted to select which essays he or she would read. He found the setup to be slightly uncomfortable, and I think he summarizes the emotional state that Mr. Keene probably had when writing his book: "...we are starting to become more aware of just how much subcontracting and outsourcing and submitting to other Deciders we're all now forced to do, which is threatening (the inchoate awareness is) to our sense of ourselves as intelligent free agents."

(**) Head over to Amazon.com, and you'll see that Publisher's Weekly hated it, and the short back-cover platitudes are from folks like Larry Sanger, who is explicitly praised as a Solution in this book. [Notice how you could easily crop the clearly negative Publisher's Weekly comment into praise on par with the back-cover lines, which is a reminder that we should never trust a review that consists only of a sentence fragment, because the next word could so easily be , but....] No comments on Amazon from any sociologists.

Google OS (aka Chrome)

Eric Blair — 3 September 2008 00:00:00 +0000

What happens when I knock out a blog entry in an hour or so. Could've tied in the history of server/client relations a little better, but it does make a comeback at the end.

Statistics as unbearable longing

Eric Blair — 26 August 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This one is a bit meta-, in that it comes close to but doesn't quite get at what I'm trying to express. Maybe next time, when I elaborate on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

The NYT takes a side on the copyright war

Eric Blair — 6 August 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The link is to a New York Times article on Girl Talk, a DJ who does very heavy sampling---running hundreds of samples for maybe only two or three seconds each---and how the record labels claim that every last sample used needs to be paid for. The question is whether a de minimus sample (in a transformative work at that) counts as fair use of a copyrighted work, or whether even the tiniest clip is somebody else's work that needs to be paid for. Now, your newspaper typically tries to be objective and let the sides take their own sides. But here, the NYT did something interesting: they gave us a multimedia box that lets us listen to a minute and a half of Girl Talk's work, and therefore the work of the twenty people whom Girl Talk sampled in those short clips. It is very hard to argue that Girl Talk is infringing the copyright of, say, LL Cool J, and yet when NYT plays that exact same clip in its entirety, the NYT is not. [Yes, I do know how one would go about making that argument; it's not interesting.] By posting the clip, the NYT's lawyers are directly asserting that they believe the labels are wrong and that de minimus use is fair use.

Two sides of the statistical war

Eric Blair — 6 August 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I think that one of the main reasons that people don't know what's going on with regards to modern statistics is that there are actully two fields tied together. Schools teach them as one field, and many people talk about them as one, but their goals and methods often directly conflict. And for those of you who find stats to be boring and are just here on the Internet looking for porn, I also threw in a full-color figure of what may be genitalia.

Press siete to borrar.

Eric Blair — 21 July 2008 00:00:00 +0001

I'm not really bilingual, but I've lived in Spanish-speaking countries long enough that I can hold most of a conversation, and I'd like to not forget too much of it. So, given an option, I put various silly things in Spanish. Instead of telling me to press seven to delete the message, my voicemail suggests that I marque el siete. It's not like any of us really listen to those messages after about the third time anyway.

Using most web sites in not-English is a pretty terrible experience. Few pages are entirely in English, and you frequently get bounced back to all-English pages. I can't say what the average non-English speaker can do, but I frequently hit decision points on allegedly Spanish-ized sites that require a lot of English. My favorite new toy of late has been last.fm, but if you change your language of choice to Spanish, your account gets transferred to last.fm.es, which seems to be a version or two behind on the technology. Why does "musica" get a clunkier interface than "music"? Last.fm is just a toy, but other dificil-a-navigar sites are a little more on the side of vital infrastructure for a person living in modern society.

When you call a corporation's customer service department, the person you talk to will frequently go to your account on the web and read your data to you. I've always been annoyed by that---if I'm on the phone, then I've already spent ten minutes clicking things---though I realize that for some people, reading their own data to them is necessary. Anyway, it's pretty amusing when your service rep (who is much more likely to be in Oklahoma than in India) gets stopped cold trying to select between "Mi perfil", "mi cuenta", and "ayuda". Ha ha, you can't access key information via any means besides the web site anymore, either.

As another point that reveals the workings behind the curtain, I've changed the background color of my browser to a sort of wheat color, which is not as staring-into-light-bulb as the default white. [Right now, I'm typing this text over a pale blue background.] But that change reveals all sorts of interesting choices made by web designers. Some override all colors on the entire page---you're getting a white background whether you want it or not. Some are inconsistent, and have white-background pictures but transparent-background text, or vice-versa. A reasonable compromise is the white box on your choice of background, like the set of of squares on yahoo.com. I also tend to keep my text zoomed fifty or sixty percent larger, again to be easier on my eyes. This used to have absurd effects on most web pages, though designers seem to be learning on this front.

OK, so some of this, like getting your customer service rep to actually confess that they have no more information than you do, is just amusement. The background color thing is cute, and maybe a warning to those of you who are web designers, but I don't care that web builders don't design around my eccentric color preferences or concern themselves with those who have less-than-perfect vision. The language problem, however, is a bigger deal, and shows that as fabulous as this Internet thing may be, we're still a long way from equal information access, even regarding infrastructure-level services. Lots of web sites have contracted a translator to translate most of the terms on their sites, but few web sites truly commit to hosting multiple languages.

A history of telephones

Eric Blair — 7 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

These are all of the cellular telephones I've had, up to the rightmost one that I got last month. [The screen on that one is bright because I was on hold with the IRS when I took the picture (and as I write this).]

All have more-or-less different brand markings: Qualcomm/Kyocera, Samsung, Handspring Treo, PalmOne Treo, American Telephone and Telegraph by Palm. You can see when whip antennas fell out of fashion, and when people started thinking keyboards on a telephone could work (the middle one has a keyboard under the lid). But the software is basically the same: they all run the Palm operating system.

Palm as a company has been a mess, with endless merging and submerging and emerging and remerging: bought by US Robotics, then 3COM, then spun off, then split, then merged, ... and I'm certain that for every step along the way the CEOs got richer while the product got more rickety. You have no guarantee that the company that sold you Palm hardware this year will keep doing so next year.

But right from the start, before the mergers, the software people got a number of things right: the data is in a flat database whose format is at this point simpler than the company's merger history, the operating system's functioning is equally simple, and the company (still) is open about all the software's workings. It's so easy to write a program for the Palm OS that even I've done it.

So that's allowed for commodification of the hardware. Large-form computers (i.e., desktop and laptop machines) are already commodified: the operating system runs the same programs that a hundred other computers from a hundred other brands can run. When your machine breaks, pull out the hard drive and plug it into another.

People aren't so interested in the commodification of small-form computers (like telephones and music players), but it provides just as much benefit. Just load the old software and databases onto the new machine and pretend you didn't drop your telephone trying to open the flip lid while biking. No matter how badly-made the plastic junk, no matter how much the guy on ebay lied about how it's in TOP SHAPE---MINT!!, you have complete continuity.

I've had a Palm machine since a day or two before 28 May 1998, which I can tell you because my current telephone says that I had a doctor's appointment that day at 2:20 PM. Need the telephone number of anybody I've met since 1998? I've got it for ya, such as somebody named "C" in the 626 area code. I've added `file form 8889 so the IRS will give me back my $300' to the to-do list, so that I'll be able to fondly look back on the time the IRS said I had a math error. And that's how continuity across hardware has enriched my life.

Still just parametrized models

Eric Blair — 2 July 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Last month, Wired ran a big thing praising SUVs and not-organic food; everybody was irate but I didn't have much to say. But this moth, they ran a cover story about how parameter searches over large data sets is a paradigm shift from older methods of modeling. Fuck that.

Data is typically not a plural

Eric Blair — 26 June 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Until writing this, I hand't realized what a font of conflict this grammatical quirk is.

Bloggers through history

Eric Blair — 4 June 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I might pick up on this further next month in the context of my trying to get a nice, traditional job.

Unsolicited financial advice

Eric Blair — 24 April 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I dunno, I've just really disliked my writing lately. I wrote this a month ago, and every time I was going to post it just wound up tweaking something. Meanwhile, here's an amusing post about the National Association of Realtors (R).

Best of SXSW 2008

Eric Blair — 22 March 2008 00:00:00 +0000

The entry is just liner notes. Here's a link to 2 hours of fun music.

Hyperrational is boring

Eric Blair — 20 February 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I used to be the Risk Control Analyst at a brokerage firm on Lasalle Street in Chicago. I was just north of the Federal Reserve---had a great view of their loading dock. After a year, I quit and moved to Spain.

On Senator Obama

Eric Blair — 13 February 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Barak Obama came to a lunch at the think tank I like to hang out at a few years ago, before the speech that made him famous, when he was merely the Senator from Illinois. I remember two things from the meeting: first, I recall that he wowed everybody, and that everybody left thinking `this guy is gonna go far!' And for the sake of comprehensively listing my recollection from the meeting, I recall that he's missing a joint on one of his fingers. You'll notice that he very much leads with his left hand, and only rarely will you get a clear shot of his imperfect hand:

And that's all I remember. The guy spoke to a room of about two dozen policy analysts for about an hour and a half, about actual policy topics, and all I can recall is a generally positive affect. That makes him the perfect politician.

NIH Contracting: a how-to

Eric Blair — 4 February 2008 00:00:00 +0000

First, I deserve some kind of award for how few expletives I used here. Second, there are still a few points on the philosophy of organization that should still be interesting to those of you who don't care about the details.

The tyranny of the majority: design edition

Eric Blair — 18 January 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I've had this one on hold since October, debating whether I should post it or not. Well, here it is. A post clearly explaining Jeff Koonz's entire artistic career.

On writing

Eric Blair — 10 January 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From San Diego to Zurich, I got comments that my last entry was a total bummer, so here's the perkiest entry I could muster to make up for it. I could have taken this in several depressing directions---primarily regarding whether our fellow people are a resource or a constraint---but for you, dear reader, I elided all that.

Musical reverse

Eric Blair — 5 January 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I know you've heard Darling Nikki, because it's on the soundtrack to Purple Rain, which sold 8.7 billion copies in the early 80s. Prince was a contrast to the hair rock/D&D metal bands that had tracks that allegedly said Hail Satan! when you played them backward.

So the end of Darling Nikki has a part that is clearly reversed. I found a reel-to-reel tape recorder at a yard sale one day, and it came with a box of about forty Spanish lessons, so I actually had reason to pick it up. I think I got to about lesson three before sort of tapering off, but now that I had this behemoth in my room, I could record Darling Nikki onto a blank tape, flip it over, and hear the ending in reverse. It says: `Hello. How are you? I am fine, `cause I know the Lord is coming soon.'

Shortly thereafter, I had an unpleasant breakup with a girlfriend, who wound up with all my pants and the reel-to-reel player, which she used to add a bit of height to an endtable.

Now that we live in a digital world, it's not so difficult anymore. Just open the track in Audacity (which is free and open and installs via your package manager), select all, and click on Reverse in the Effects menu. Bam! What Prince hid below the noses of millions of listeners is in plain view.

I tried it with Philip Glass. I'm sure you know his music: it's minimalist. Like minimalist art, it produces a large expanse of identical landscape, so minor changes stand out. I've listened to the second movement to his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra several hundred times, so I thought it'd be interesting to see what it sounds like from a new perspective. And ya know what, it sounds very much the same. Most of the instruments in the orchestra are playing something so cyclical that it sounds exactly the same played backward. But over this identical backdrop, the lead violin sounds somewhat different (and is playing a reversed melody). Suddenly, I have twice as many Philip Glass albums.

Social technology

Eric Blair — 24 December 2007 00:00:00 +0000

You may have noticed that I'm very interested in systematic failures and problems that have no solution. Maybe I need a perkier hobby.

Academia doesn't scale

Eric Blair — 14 December 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Much of academic custom hasn't changed for about three hundred years. In other words, the peer review system predates American Democracy.

Single-payer health care and transparency

Eric Blair — 26 November 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The U.S. health care system is in many ways the perfect example of how complexity constraints can cause a free market to fail.

Installing Windows

Eric Blair — 20 November 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I finally broke down and installed windows. Of course, I didn't do it myself; I'm just a loser writing a computational stats textbook, so it's well beyond my technical abilities. So I should say that two guys came over and put in a shift from 8 AM to 4 PM to do the installation. And, as is always the case with these things, at about 3 they told me that they'd be back the next day to finish up, since the whole installation process is taking a total of about three person-days. It's all very high tech, and you can really tell that a lot of engineers put a lot of effort into the product, even if the process of installaing into an existing setup is a complete mess.

But now that everything is installed, it's pretty nice to lean back here in my room, staring at (through?) my three big screens side-by-side, feeling generally warm and cozy. Really, I should've done this a long time ago.

Properly leaving Yahoo!

Eric Blair — 1 November 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you're reading my lil' blog, you know I'm boycotting Yahoo!, because of its enthusiastic cooperation with the Chinese government's torture and imprisonment of pro-Democracy activists.

But I forgot one detail: I'm still handing over all my content to Yahoo! for their use in improving their search engine. Yahoo! depends on us, the content providers, for its business, so we have a large say in how they go about making money.

So, I've added this to my robots.txt file in reference to Yahoo!'s web spider (Slurp), and you, dear reader, are encouraged to do the same.

User-agent: Slurp Disallow: /

You'll still have no problem finding me on search engines that don't endorse torture, and if Yahoo! puts in place a policy of not handing people over for torture in the future, I'd be happy to let them make ad revenue from my content again.

Suggestions for the ISO/IEC C committee

Eric Blair — 30 October 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In which I open a sentence with the phrase `Because you can send an anonymous inline struct whose values are set via designated initializers...'. If that doesn't make sense to you, don't even bother clicking through. If it does, well, don't just sit there in suspense....

Oh, and if you feel like you know C but that still doesn't make sense, then you're eight years behind; have a look at what's new in C99---notably numbers 16 and 17 in that list.

Definition of a crackpot

Eric Blair — 20 October 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Actual dialog I had the other day (that did not inspire this essay, which I wrote about four months ago):
Me: I'm the author of a textbook on statistical computing, forthcoming from [well-regarded academic press], and I have a nifty idea for aggregating information from some genetic tests that I wanna run by you.
Him: But you don't know anything about the chemistry of allele calling mechanisms, so how can your statistics possibly work?

Why your drugs are not vegetarian

Eric Blair — 14 October 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, I do believe there should be some medical exemption, but no, I have no idea of where I would draw the line. But it's not `anything sold in pill form'.

Talk like a statistician day

Eric Blair — 19 September 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Well, it's Talk Like a Pirate day, when computer geeks everywhere discuss BitTorrent, sailing technique, and the R programming language.

I had a brief discussion with a linguist pal or two the other day about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which broadly says that choice of language influences thought. Ms AO of Philidelphia, PA, explains that linguists toss around two versions of the S-W hypothesis: the one that's so literal that it can't possibly be true (that if there's no word for blue then people can't concieve the concept of blue) and the version that's so vague that it can't possibly be disproven (that if it's easy to say something, then it's easy for your little back-of-mind voice to think it).

Working linguists will give you much more subtlety than that, and there are many grey shades in between the extremes to be explored. But computer scientists, oh, they are in love with Sapir and Whorf, and will spend all day bickering about how important the choice of language is.

Bradley Efron, a famous statistician (yes, I know that's an oxymoron), points out in a PDF regarding the future of statistics that we currently have a dozen analysis paradigms all being used at once: there's Bayes and Classical and machine learning and all sorts of weirdness that people are dreaming up every day.

The future will go to those who can synthesize those several threads together.

Statistical languages like R typically have no easy means to do this. This is me putting words to why Apophenia has me so very enthused right now---Apophenia allows the arbitrary combination of models to do synthesis like a linear model estimating metaparameters based on data from clusters of Bayesian-estimated subparameters. If that reads like a gibberish to you in English, imagine trying to code it. The closest I know of to making this work is a thing called BUGS, but its syntax is not superpleasant.

Why? Because the system has no means of using a model as a noun. A model in every stats package I know of is a set of verbs to take the input data (a noun) and filter it in various ways (verbs). The models live entirely at the verb level.

But the model itself can be bundled into an object and filtered: it can be updated, constrained, joined with other models, and otherwise tweaked, just as a data set can be filtered. Taking a base model and modifying its details allows for more realistic models to be written more quickly.

And that's why I'm enthusiastic about Apophenia, even if nobody else cares about it: the syntax for a model is a standard object, not a separate model-specifying grammar that invariably describes only a limited set of verbs.

It would be silly for me to claim that this is original, because nothing in this world is original; let me know if you know stats packages that accommodate specifying and then transforming models, so I can learn from them and steal their ideas. In the mean time, the textbook is now officially forthcoming from [Academic press] so this time next year, maybe a few people will have this idea in mind, and pirates next year will be able to talk about models as nouns.

How to write about being organized

Eric Blair — 18 September 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Is it just me, or is the Web filled to the gills with this stuff?

My immense disappointment with the software industry

Eric Blair — 14 September 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This concludes my five-part series of heavy-handed moralizing. One reader says that I'm being unfair to Jane Austen in comparing her to the modern software industry; if so, I apologize.

Neil Diamond, "America"

Eric Blair — 30 August 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The only version I've heard is the live version (Hot August Night is a concert album), which includes a rousing opening by a string section.

My family

Eric Blair — 22 August 2007 00:00:00 +0000

And now I await the inevitable onslaught of comments politicizing my family history. I may revise this entry as more anecdotes come to me.

Maps are fun.

Eric Blair — 17 August 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Today's web site recommendation is Strange Maps, a collection of maps about the real world viewed askew, countries that don't quite exist, and other arcana about the world, history, and culture. The imaginary line dividing two countries is often the basis of major, long-running conflicts---what your high school teachers called History---so the writeups range from light overviews of the map to full history lessons. Also, being a map site, there are lots of pictures.

[You could also read this as a lead-in to my forthcoming next entry---any day now---about my history with an ambiguous country.]

Yahoo!: a brief follow-up

Eric Blair — 04 August 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is also investigating Yahoo! over a senior VP's evidently false claim that the company did not know why the Chinese government was requesting information that the government would then use to put a journalist in prison for a decade.

Like a coffee shop, but without the coffee

Eric Blair — 01 August 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I'm trying to work in museums more. My normal reflex reaction is to just work at the coffee shop, but why not a museum? Many of them are free every day of the week, the quiet atmosphere is conducive to working, you get wireless if you're lucky (which, evidently, I am), you don't feel obligated to drink lots of iron-absorption-blocking coffee, and the artwork is a step or ten up from the art school student stuff you get at most cafès.

The idea partly comes from the Isabella Gardner Stewart museum in Boston. The little map/flyer explains that the museum's proprietors see the intent of a museum as not aimed toward admiring artwork over there on the wall, but of experiencing inspiration through a sort of immersion. Each room was loosely arranged around a theme, and the artwork included much art beyond paintings and sculptures, including a large central garden and lots of interesting furniture. Unfortunately, because the furniture was a part of the artwork, there was nowhere to sit.

Yahoo: a person lacking cultivation or sensibility

Eric Blair — 26 July 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Me: The next blog is gonna be about Yahoo!.
Pal: Is it going to be about why they're evil?
Me: Uh, yeah. Am I getting predictable?

Next time will not be about an evil government agency or company, I swear. It'll be about why I write about evil government agencies and companies.

The US Trade Representative: Not working for you

Eric Blair — 2 July 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I have made serious efforts to come up with non-corrupt explanations for the USTR's various positions, and there is seriously nothing forthcoming. There are a number of such government offices that do work so technical and dull that the popular media ignore them, and therefore they are free to provide their services to the highest bidder without public oversight. I think it's the greatest flaw in the theory that the media can regulate a Democratic government.

How to make spam

Eric Blair — 28 June 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I learned how to make spam. It is fun.

The algorithm is from the 1980s. I learned from The Practice of Programming, a book written in 1999 by two coding lumniaries, Kernighan and Pike. As an example of fun data structures, they proposed the following Markov chain algorithm:

--Open up your favorite text. --Read in three words. Write down the first two in the prefix table, and the third as a suffix for that prefix.
--Step one word forward, so the text's words two and three are now the prefix, and word four is the suffix.
--Repeat through the whole text. Every word will have a turn as the first, second, and third word in the chain. At the end of this, you have a list of every two-word prefix, and under each such pair, every word that follows that pair.

--Now produce a text. Start with any two word prefix. Go to that prefix's list, and randomly select one successor word.
--Step forward: use the second word of the prefix and the successor to form a new two-word prefix. Go to that point in the list, and pull the next successor from that list.
--Repeat until you have an email-length amount of text.

The end result is a text where every three-word sequence appeared in the original, but the order is otherwise a mess. Kernighan and Pike implemented this in twenty lines of Perl, and my breezy C version is 45 lines (26 semicolons). But the results read semi-coherently:

365 Even if a fool brings suffering on himself. He does not know the true teaching is difficult, and the achievement of Buddhahood is difficult.
182 To abstain from all bonds - that is what one has grasped this as it is. A disciplined mind leads to death. Those who have understood the truth.
70 Like fresh milk a bad rebirth.
316 Seeing danger where there is, by holding to right views people go to hell, the good does travel against the wind, and a brahmin lose his temper. Shame on him who talks a lot. They even criticise him who strikes a brahmin, and nor should a brahmin lose his temper. Shame on him who loses his temper because of their evil deeds. It is a delightful spot.
98 Delightful for them are the well a nd truly restrained.

You can see that some is legible (Shame on him who talks a lot.) and some semilegible fun (Like fresh milk a bad rebirth).

The variety comes in the training text. You can tell that I used a text by the Buddha: the Dhammapada. But using another Project Gutenberg text to build the tree of prefixes and their suffixes will create an entirely different-feeling text. So next time you get a spam email like the above, you can try to guess what the training text was.

By the way, notice that this evil and annoying technique for generating spam combines an algorithm from a well-regarded textbook with free texts from Project Gutenberg. That is, our spammers combined two entirely wholesome and well-meaning projects to produce a product that pisses everybody off.

More Open Source office politics

Eric Blair — 23 June 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The next full entry (next week, I expect) is about the politics of software in a manner that really means something, but for now, here's some amusing turnabout office politics for ya.

It's to be expected, now that there's money to be made from open source, that people would attempt to grab power. Today's event: The Open Source Institute, unable to trademark the term Open Source, asks everybody to please just only use the term when the OSI approves .

They make a fair point that there are a whole lotta licenses out there, and some are a little spurious. And I'd normally think that requests like this are kinda cute. But the request that OSI be the central arbiter of what is Open Source produces just as much potential for abuse as the "problem" of unregulated licenses. The examples they give of abuse are regarding companies that require users to post a link to their website as a condition of use. This more-or-less came up before, with a clause in the BSD license that required users to put a line in the documentation in the way of `portions Copyright Regents of the U of California'. The link to the Free Software Foundation in the last sentence acknowledges that this requirement is "obnoxious" but is still a valid type of free software license.

And ya know, the FSF is not known for being reasonable. I already ranted about how much of an anal-retentive power grab the FSF's GPL v3 is. But their rules for what makes an open source software license are pretty darn simple. There are only four rules (numbered using offset numbering rather than index numbering. Uh, haha.), and they're all pretty basic. By my count (and for BSD, the FSF's opinion too), both the BSD and "badgeware" licenses fit those rules. I mean, adding an acknowledgement or copyright notice is only so onerous.

In this case, the stereotypically hard-ass fanatics at the FSF are being more open and accepting than the open source people. If the OSI power grab were somehow enforceable, it would mean that many thousands of clearly open source licenses could not claim themselves as open source. For example, the Affero version of the GPL adds a single clause to the standard GPLv2 (section 2d), and they got permission from the FSF to do so. But it ain't approved by the OSI, so it ain't open source. Similarly, anybody else who adds a line to the GPL---even one lifting restrictions---is no longer putting out OSI-approved software.

Anyway, since the GPLv3, I myself have been writing software released under the GPLv2, modified to give explicit permission granted to combine my work with GPLv3 software. So that means I'm no longer writing open source software, just free software, which is OK by me.

Stats text ad copy

Eric Blair — 22 June 2007 00:00:00 +0001

Academic press asked me to come up with 250 words for the back cover of my textbook on statistical computing. Here's what I came up with while waiting for a simulation to run. The first and last two lines are lifted from elsewhere.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
but the dynamo was not forthcoming because the machinery was not---despite its straight-faced best promises---could not bear its flesh to suffer the difficulties of arrows and vectors of immeasurable length,
who, when painfully waiting a week for the dynamo to spin its final spin and leave a single number neatly on the doorstep only to realize that it is the wrong number and the wrong doorstep and probably the wrong dynamo
swore that this time, finally, would be the last, the ultimate, the end of the numeric suffering and pulsating of waiting and flagellating, repeat,
but nevertheless succumbed to the computing beast once again, because, after all, the only other well-worn option was to resign, give up, throw oneself into the crowd where there is no one one.
Reader, while you are not well, I am not well, and that A follows B logic means that I am not well and feel the dynamo's slow churn drag a hole through my breast where I can no longer feel the animal heat of speed and knowledge and inexorable truth inexorably coming forward and finding itself lodged inside of me.
Instead, I am left with a simple longing for truth.
Truth is all.
We must love it.

Micronumerosity

Eric Blair — 14 June 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Given that I refer to an article in today's newspaper, this one even counts as topical. Fortunately, having a statistician in-joke as a title should keep my hit-count down.

Your genetic information

Eric Blair — 12 June 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In which I explain that I have no idea what the future will bring, even though I've had some hand in building some of the the tools that may get us there.. I hope it all works out OK.

Here comes the ocean, and the global climate change

Eric Blair — 6 June 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Here you go, Ms ZK of Canberra, Australia. A reminder that that ocean surrounding you is living and breathing.

GPL v3, Microsoft, Patents, and Bloat

Eric Blair — 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Normally, when I write an entry on the politics of software, I tell you here why it's still interesting to those who are not involved in the issue. But this one is all about politics, sorry. Also, it's a little sad.

Pricing information

Eric Blair — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Just make up a number and present it with a straight face.

Notes on health insurance

Eric Blair — 19 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

So I got private Blue Cross/Blue Shield health insurance. Some notes on the process.

* First, let me state how much I hate the language used by insurance providers. The OED tells us that a "Premium" is "A reward given for a specific act or as an incentive; a prize." That is, a premium is a good thing, and you want lots of it. But in insurance-land, a premium is a payment you make, and you want less. On your taxes, you want all the deductions you can score, but on insurance forms, a deductible is a bad thing---a payment you have to make before the insurance kicks in. In short, the language of insurance is from the point of view of the provider, not the consumer. Because it is positive-sounding, it persists in consumer-oriented advertising even though in that context it is doublespeak.

Even the name, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, is redundant. Herein, I will refer to them as "The Smurfs".

* I used this rate calculator to find my rate via various plans. I narrowed it down to two choices: $78/month, with a $1,200 deductible, and $293.00/month with a minimal deductible. By the first plan, I will pay between $936 and $2,136/year for health care, depending on whether I run through the full deductible. By the second plan, I pay $3,516/year no matter what. As far as I can tell, the benefits are otherwise identical between the two plans, but see below.

That is, consumers using the no-deductible plan pay $1,400/year more for their insurance. Two possibilities: the pricing is based on an ex-ante irrational fear by consumers regarding that $1,200 deductible, and they just flinch and pay extra to avoid it, thus making pure profit for the insurer. The other is that users are ex-post unable to commit to paying that extra $1,200 and so pass up on $2,600 worth of services that they would have taken up otherwise. So option one, the insurance company is making major bank; option two, the insurance company is relying on a need to save money sufficiently dire that people pass on medical care. I'm not particularly perked about either option.

* I went with the off-the-shelf high-deductible plan. It comes with vision coverage, and I can't imagine that they did anything special for me. It's via a contractor, so the Smurfs tell me to call the vision contractor to find out my benefits. Contractor tells me that they didn't get the benefit info from the Smurfs, so I should call the Blue folks back to find out what my vision benefits are. After 25 minutes on hold, the service smurf tells me that she has no idea what my benefits are. Let me stress this: Nobody at either insurance provider could work out what my benefits comprised. It's enough that consumers are unable to work out their benefits under a given plan, but when even the insurers themselves have trouble with it, you know the system is fatally complex.

* Two weeks after I sent my payment for my unspecified service, I got a packet of information in the mail about what I had agreed to. I'd estimate that it's maybe 90pp, but it's hard to tell because the document begins with a 35 page exposition, dated July 1995, and then the remaining is a series of, oh, 40 one or two page addenda. [One of them points out that domestic partners of any sex are covered. Neat.]

So let's say I want to know if I can get allergy shots, now that the plants are blooming. I would first check the base specification from 1995, which is not too painful, since I'm used to legalese and it's short enough that the lack of a table of contents is forgivable. Cool: just $5 per visit, no deductible applies---as of 1995. Now I have to check the next 60 pages to find out whether anything has changed since then. Have the smurf lawyers really been so busy that they've been unable to give the basic agreement a revision in the last decade?

Take from this what you will, but I'm just amazed at how many barriers there are to making a rational choice about insurance. It's one thing that the pricing scheme seems to depend on consumer irrationality and that the web site doesn't give full information, but now that I've signed up for the contract and have full-time service smurfs looking at my unexceptional case, I still don't know what my coverage entails.

I thought that I was a fan of single-payer medicine just because I didn't have insurance, but now that I am insured I want it even more.

A tour of DC for political scientists

Eric Blair — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In high school, I lived in an apartment complex at the North end of Silver Spring (in Montgomery County), right behind the NSWC, which sometimes stood for Naval Surface Weapons Center and sometimes Naval Surface Warfare Center. It had a large outer perimiter that was primarily a golf course, and then inside of that a small campus of buildings. It always annoyed me that half of the directions I could go from my apartment were off limits. One holiday, as I was walking somewhere on the opposite side of the thing, I just gave up and walked through. Now and then, in the middle of the golf course, there'd be a little lagoon which was oddly beeping. On the way back, I just went right through the center of the campus, which was a handful of buildings along a main road, and felt like something out of the Avengers. Anyway, that's pretty far off the Capitol-to-Embassies axis that today's meanderings is about.

Philosophizing from the bench

Eric Blair — Wed, 4 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Believe it or not, this one is a survey of mathematical philosophy from 500 BCE to present.

Imagined communities

Eric Blair — Mon, 2 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Essential to your view of a product is your view of who else is using the product. You aren't just using Coca-cola, you're joining a worldwide network of people who are all Coca-cola users. Long-distance callers make long-distance calls. Et cetera.

I could think of no better name than that for this sort of thing than Benedict Anderson's book title, Imagined Communities . [He himself was writing about how the modern nation-state was made possible by the printing press, which made it possible for a person on one side of Italy, for example, to imagine a person on the other.] It goes without saying that advertisers understand this and work hard to make you think that Coca-cola drinkers are the sexiest, most wonderful people alive.

That said, the worst possible thing you could do for your product is set up a Web 2.0-style interactive page for it. After being amused by this guy's pseudohack of John McCain's MySpace page, I thought I'd give the page itself a quick look-see.

i OnLY DanCe WitH Mya writes: Yeahhhhhhhhhhhh McCain rules.

steve writes: you should of won in 2000, i supported u then and i support u now

Ħμŋŋ!çμŧŧ writes: Whats up brother! keep up the good fight... The AMERICAN fight!!!

Before looking at the page, if I had to think of the average McCain supporter, I'd think middle-America, unexciting, not too super-crazy. But now my perception is that this guy's supporters are illiterates and zealots. Sometimes it's better to leave these things to the imagination.

An Evening with the Minister of Culture

Eric Blair — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Saw Gilberto Gil, Brazil's Minister of Culture, this weekend. If you don't know the guy, he became popular in the early 70s during the Tropicalia movement, which was Brazil's response to hippie music. It was all very perky and frequently fell into nonsense syllables. So he's one of those legends who managed to stay relevant, at least in the Southern Hemisphere.

Among those who have vaguely heard of the guy, the show was a hot ticket. He hasn't toured since 1999, and this tour has only about ten dates. Also, he's 64, and as folks get older, they seem to tour less, Rolling Stones notwithstanding.

Though his voice and playing were perfect. He played, with perfect focus and technique, for about two and a half hours, during which I kept drifting of and thinking about multiplying fractions and what I'm going to have for dinner. All of which is to say that he's still on top of his game. The only signs of age were that it was a seated performance (An Evening with Gilberto Gil) and the politician-perfect grey in the temples---which went wonderfully with his dredlocks.

So what does a politician play for an audience? Exactly what they want, of course, with frequent audience participation. The standard recording of Aquele Abraço is a live version that starts with a quick dedication, for example, and he gave exactly that dedication here, which brought about the audience's `I recognize and like this song' applause. The recording has an audience whoop at the beginning of the second verse, which I always found to be odd---I guess it's something that was happening on stage during the recording. Anyway, much of the audience came in right on cue with the whooping.

As for patter, he made limited reference to politics. He dedicated one song to "The spirit of sharing," which fits in with his various efforts to keep music sharable and remixable, and made a mention or two of how being Minister of Culture is cool `cause you get to meet interesting people. But for the most part, he seemed to just be there to have a good time like the rest of us.

Web 2.1

Eric Blair — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

OK, the revolution will not be televised. Will it be webcast?

The protest

Eric Blair — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What stood out for me were the pro-war counterprotesters, some of whom explicitly and proudly used the pro-war label. They were a minority, and homogeneous. They were mostly male, all white, mostly white-hair aged, and all had on either black or cammo jackets. As a group, they looked more like a biker gang than a counterprotest.

By contrast, the protestors were a truly diverse bunch of people. And not college brochure diverse, but the real thing, with all races, ages, and classes healthily represented. There were the usual Communists and dredheads, but they were interspersed through the crowd; there were probably as many Vets against the war.

Which makes me wonder all the more why the proposed troop surge. I mean, the biker gang there probably doesn't have all that much political clout, and the Stop the War message is no longer something just the dirty hippies stand behind, but something Middle America votes for as well.

Hello vs Hi

Eric Blair — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I always took Hi to be a short form of Hello, but I finally asked the nice people at Oxford about it, and they trace them to entirely different roots. Hi, a variant of Hey (a call to attract attention), traces back to Swedish hej, or as the OED explains: "ME. hei: cf. Du. and Ger. hei, Sw. hej, in sense 1. Cf. also HEIGH." Meanwhile, Hello is a variant of hallo, which is old German for to fetch. The OED's etymology line: "A later form of HOLLO (hollow, holloa), q.v. Cf. Ger. hallo, halloh, also OHG. halâ, holâ, emphatic imper. of halôn, holôn to fetch, used esp. in hailing a ferryman. Also written hullo(a, hillo(a, hello, from obscurity of the first syllable."

Policy implication: the short form of a word is typically an informal or otherwise less-preferred version of the long form. Information versus info, picture or photograph versus pic or photo, any contraction (can not versus can't), or if you're in Spain, pelicula verus peli, policia versus poli, and so on. But Hi is not a cutesy contraction of Hello, but a parallel form; both should therefore be on the same level of formality (except when calling a ferryman, when Hello is preferred).

The best of SXSW

Eric Blair — Tue, 6 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This post took a lot longer to write than most, but it was a lot more fun.

Super productivity enhancer

Eric Blair — Sun, 4 Mar 2007 00:00:00 +0000

There are all sorts of web sites with tips on how to stay productive and on task, but I have found that checking this page, updated every few minutes, gets me working like no other. The terminus is coming! What have I done with my life!?

Royalty check!

Eric Blair — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

First, a thought: if you're reading this RSS feed, why is a web page even necessary? So I'm taking the next step in the Web 2.0 XML-enabled craze by making RSS posts that don't have a web page attached.

Logistics aside, here's my news. I got my first royalty check for the book that I spent most of 2005 writing. Hundreds upon hundreds of copies sold last year, which added up to a total income of---$1.31. I'll try not to lose it all in one couch.

How strict constructionism can be judicial activism

Eric Blair — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If this were a topical headline-chasing blog, this entry would be over a year late.

My preface

Eric Blair — Fri, 2 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

This entry is pretty different from the others; I begin a sentence with `and'. And no, I am not making any of it up.

Mafias and bureaucracies

Eric Blair — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I don't know why I always put something in the middle of every two-part series. I guess I just like the variety. In this episode, I explain why it's great that the UN is a bloated, do-nothing bureaucracy.

Incremental backup with rsync

Eric Blair — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Wait! Don't go yet---at least the first half may be a fun read. There's even a diagram. Next time: Mafias part II.

Mafias and governments

Eric Blair — 6 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Even Jimmy Carter supports the two-state solution along (more-or-less) pre-'67 borders. You don't want to piss off Jimmy Carter, do you? That'd be like kicking a puppy.

Taxing value

Eric Blair — 14 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

There's a lot of value in identifying what is an unanswerable question. Having identified the hard questions, make sure not to base the world's largest revenue system on them.

The future of energy

Eric Blair — 6 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Finally! Haphazard pontification about the distant future.

Navel-gazing entry II

Eric Blair — 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

My graphomaniacal gift to the world. Happy holidays.

Is IBM evil?

Eric Blair — 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

First, let me allay your worst fears: this is not another essay about computing. I wrote it in May 2003, and am reposting it here because it is still relevant.

IP Policy for Organizations

Eric Blair — 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

As a matter of fact, yes, I have had trouble with the IT department at [name of think tank] lately.

Crime rates and PR: an ode to Baltimore

Eric Blair — Mon, 6 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I realize that this may read like an apology for Baltimore, but it's really just about the dangers of overreducing data.

Peanut sauce

Eric Blair — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This is sort of an apology for the last entry.

But wait---there's more!

Eric Blair — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The older RSS entries are avaialable at the feed here.