Focus

Ezra Klein links to an Johann Hari's account of taking Provigil. I think some of Hari's fears are unfounded:

And if this drug becomes as popular as, say, anti-depressants or Ritalin, won’t there be a social pressure for workers to take it? Many parents feel intensely pressured by schools today to drug away their child’s disobedience; will they feel pressured by their bosses to drug away their natural fatigue?

Although he is supposedly talking about "popular" drugs like "anti-depressants [and] Ritalin," the pressure he's worried about really only applies to the latter: nobody is pressured into taking anti-depressants themselves. The case of children in school is unique because of the incredible pressure our society puts on parents. I think people who aren't bosses (but I repeat myself) would already see the immense inappropriateness of any pressure from an employer to use any medication, let alone one that impacts productivity. Also, more flippantly, what boss actually wants smarter worker drones?

For myself, I love the idea of Provigil. I sure wouldn't waste it on making myself more productive at work, though.

Moped

I saw this cool moped parked on Smith Street the other day:





The gas tank is on the top tube, and the motor drives the rear wheel. There was a neat chrome exhaust pipe on the other side, but it looks like I didn't get a good picture of it.

Unjustified Presumption of Good Faith

Kathy G. gives Mickey Kaus and Megan McArdle too much credit when she proposes that "[Kaus] needs to let a few facts penetrate his thick skull" and that "McArdle...makes the same kind of mistake Kaus makes." The bad anti-union arguments they make are not due to a want of "facts" and are not a "mistake." Both pundits oppose organized labor in principle; they will never be swayed by empirical evidence because theirs is not an empirically-derived position.

(Kathy G. is no doubt aware of this, and presents her rebuttals for the benefit of impressionable readers.)

Lunch On Me!

My lover and I watched a documentary on Harvey Milk last night. Somewhat of a downer, of course, but a great film.

One segment I found particularly interesting came in a speech Harvey was giving, I believe in opposition to California's Proposition 6. After defending the right-ness of gay rights, he moved into a passionate call for closeted gays to come out to their family, friends, and coworkers. He framed it as an obligation to the gay community, to come out and help break down anti-gay stereotypes. At the very end he tagged on something like "oh, and you'll feel better about yourself too."

I found it interesting that today's mainstream discourse on coming out basically flips these two arguments around entirely: the primary benefit of outness is one's own individual well-being and mental health, and "oh, and it'll make it easier for others" seems sort of tagged on as an afterthought. Or such is my perception anyway.

I find the older framing more appealing, though that might well be due to its novelty from my perspective. I feel like in general we see a lot of arguments, even (or especially) for positive things, made through appeals to self-interest rather than obligations to others: buy local produce because it tastes better, seek out school diversity so you can learn more about others, ride a bike to lose weight¹, and so forth. Any notion of personal sacrifice is limited to religion (or environmentalism).

I can see why people like these arguments, since they do seem more likely to meet with success, but they have the unfortunate side effect of reinforcing the attitude that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and that the more you can live responsibly and morally, the more strings-free personal benefits you will accrue. It's a dangerous implication, because giving up or trying to counteract real privilege (and staying closeted can be a privilege) does necessarily result in personal detriment; otherwise it would not be privilege.

There are movements away from the pure self-interest appeals. Sarah sent me a link yesterday to a Q&A with the author of a book that deals with closeted rappers and the damage they do to their (both gay and straight) communities. There is very much a sense of "yes, coming out could in all probability be disastrous for your career, but you owe it to society." It's an encouraging turn.

¹ This one's a particular pet peeve of mine. One hundred fifty years of technological innovation has gone into making bicycles as poor exercise as possible. Bikes are great for going places, but if you want exercise, jump rope.

Copies of Famous Buildings

I had this idea the other day. Blueprints for famous buildings are pretty easily obtained, right? Like I assume architecture students can buy books of Frank Lloyd Wright designs. So does anyone ever build a home based on those?

One day I shall live in a scale model of the Lincoln Memorial.

Hip-Hop is DYING

Amanda links to a Salon piece lamenting the decline of hip-hop. And it is a weird article. There are always going to be border cases that are tough to judge when laying out any sort of real hip-hop/ring-tone crap dichotomy, and usually this kind of piece will steer well clear of any of them in favor of gimmes proclaiming, say, the superiority of Tupac to Rich Boy.

But here, author Paul Kix seems to take it as a given that Paul Wall's rapping about how many diamonds he wears on his teeth obviously transcends Boosie's tribute to strong women. Which no disrespect to Paul Wall—and props to Kix for going on-record in support of both Paul Wall and Mike Jones, whose flow does not often get the recognition it deserves—but it's hardly a settled judgment in either performer's favor, and most self-appointed arbiters of hip-hop quality are just as likely to look down their nose at both of them as to choose either one over the other.

Especially when you've only just finished lauding Paul Wall for his funny lyrics, to not recognize the sense of humor that permeates pretty much every Lil Wayne verse reeks of bias dressed up as objective criticism. I mean, to each his own and there's no accounting for taste, but if you're going to knock Weezy's repetitive chorus then you can't very well expect people to take your defense of Mike Jones all that seriously.

I mean, fine, you like Houston's aesthetics or personalities or whatever it is better than other Southern rap. More power to you. But please don't pretend that you perceive some objective quality distinction between Chamillionaire and Young Jeezy.

And to echo Amanda, there have always been and shall always be shitty pop hits with shitty line dances associated with them. Sometimes they are hip-hop flavored and sometimes they taste like something else, but in neither case do they herald anything other than that the pop cultural world continues to spin on its metaphorical axis.

Visible Pinball

Rob Cockerham's Maker Fair coverage led me to the Visible Pinball Project, a complete working Surf Champ game with a fully transparent cabinet and playfield. I couldn't find any video of it, but the stills look amazing.

Rob did post video of a neat-looking sculpture repurposing some pinball parts.

Update: I thought of this observation right away when I read about visible pinball, but then somewhere during the search for video it slipped my mind: Michael Schiess teaches people to play pinball using a transparent pinball machine the same way Tristan Taormino teaches people to have anal sex using a transparent dildo.

Bike to Shea Day Addendum

Oops, forgot to link to the other pictures I took, and Blogger won't let me edit the other post. Some pics along the ride and then some at the game, including some 3D anaglyph ones.

Bike to Shea Day

Bike to Shea Day was a blast! Peter changed two flats, Nate spotted a couple warblers, I only almost drove us on to the Grand Central Parkway once, we all got All-Star ballots, and the Mets won 12-6!



Johan Santana was good, but I don't think at the top of his game. The game started out with a goofy error and a good old-fashioned pickle, and there were a lot of other fun moments. You know, as baseball tends to have. Emma and her friend Jose both know their baseball, so it was fun talking to them.

Nate had his "field glasses" (bird-watching jargon for "binoculars") with him, and took advantage of Shea's location in former wetlands to try to spot some birds. He'd been birding earlier that morning, so he had his field guide with him as well.


View Larger Map

As Andrew had predicted, it really did turn out to be "Bike to Shea Day," with the emphasis on the "to": the TransAlt tent wasn't even up anymore when the game let out, there were no cue sheets for the return trip, and people were kind of just clumping up to try and blaze a trail home together, post-apocalyptic road warrior style. I believe one pair even said they were taking their bikes on the 7 train. We muddled our way home without too many missteps.

Overall, a great afternoon. The ride isn't as scenic as the trip up the West Side bike path to Yankee Stadium, but you do go through some neat different areas, including some crazy industrial parts of Queens, and it's all nice and flat with no grueling climb at the end. Really it's not much farther than the Cyclones, though the beers are a lot pricier when you get there.

Search Engines Instead of Domain Names

Cam links to an article talking about people who don't even try guessing at domain names for things like corporate websites, and just use search engines to find what they're looking for.

It's interesting, this is actually how people were originally expected to access internet services: you'd look up what you were interested in in a directory service of some kind the same way you look up a phone number in the yellow pages. It was really the popularity explosion the internet went through, coupled with the incredible shittiness of search engine technology at the time, that made corporate vanity domain names necessary in the first place.

Bike to Shea Day Tomorrow!

I slept on this last year, but tomorrow I'm totally going to Bike to Shea! I'm totally psyched. I'm not the baseball cap or jersey type (though a fitted t-shirt could tempt me), but I did have to grab some kicks:



It looks like Johan's going to start. I'm psyched to see him strike out Ken Griffey!

I'm A Petty Jerk

The picture of John McCain watching Arizona host my Mets drove me to go check on the results of that game. It warmed my heart to know that he watched his wretched D-Backs suffer a dramatic 9th-inning defeat. In your face, Insane McCain.

No symbolism should be implied by New York's righteous defeat of Arizona on that day, however. Clinton is a fan of the unholy Yankees.

More 3D Graphics

Microsoft just released the "community preview" of the new version of their C# game development libraries, and it happens that someone has already done a demo of anaglyph stereo for it:



Looks good! The cool thing about XNA is that you can use it to make Windows games, and then target the XBox (and with this version, the Zune) with the same codebase.

I think if I mess around with any of this stuff in the future I'll still be sticking with Axiom, because targeting Mac and Linux is more practically useful than targeting the XBox and Zune. And an XNA render platform for Axiom is already under development in any case.

Against "Spam"

I won't bother railing against unwanted email solicitations (though it's true I consider this a problem that is basically solved and not worth complaining about). But I happened to notice today that the Thunderbird email client has taken a bold stand in refusing to label said email "spam":

.

I agree with and approve of the decision. "Spam" is overly informal, and nerdy in its allusion to Monty Python. The term "junk mail" was already around and there's absolutely no reason it can't be applied to emails.

How About "A Round Of Applause"?

Andrew just posted the first episode of our new podcast, A Round Of Applause With Travis And Andrew. Packed with news, commentary, and interviews, it's the midweek program of choice for the discerning listener.

I think we'll be shooting for a Sunday taping and early weekday posting schedule. The taping part was really fun, but the editing was a bit grueling from what I gather (that was all A-Train's doing). Hopefully it will be a bit more streamlined as we get practice.

Excellent

Atrios is talking sense. Getting rid of the single and five dollar notes would be the bare minimum for sensible currency reform, but we really don't need paper tens anymore either, in my opinion.

Tom Friedman on the Rational Lazy Worker

Lindsay at Majikthise has a good post objecting to Tom Friedman's placing the blame for Americans' economic woes on their own moral lassitude. I'm skeptical in general of this kind of disdain for the general populace. But it is particularly rich that Friedman's delusional neoliberal economic ideology relies in no small part on the assumption that people behave rationally in making economic decisions in their lives. Rational but lacking in moral fiber, I guess.e

Putting the "Frustum" in "Frustumerated"

DU was right in comments to my last post. Pointing both cameras at the same place (midway between the robots) results in almost identical left- and right-eye images:

.

If you look very closely at the full-size image you can see the red/cyan separation along the antennae, but there is essentially no 3D effect at all.

He mentioned "photons," which leads me to suspect this may be related to how when you look through a telescope and cover half the objective lens with your hand, you see the exact same thing you were seeing before but half as bright, when what you should see is half of the image and then a very large hand. I hate physics.

You Can't Frustum and You Can't Frust Withoutum

That title is just a joke. Contra my graphics (and award-winning user interface design) instructor in college, it certainly is possible to discuss 3D projection without resorting to the term "frustum."

I'm a little confused about what kind of camera setup creates the best anaglyph images. All of the custom hardware setups I've read about people using either have identical cameras exactly side-by-side and pointing in the same direction,

,

or a single camera mounted so it can slide right and left perpendicular to the direction of the lens,

.

Either of these setups result in two images that reproduce the effect of looking at an object (a duck, say) with your eyes facing exactly the same direction:

.

(Those are eyeballs at the bottom.)

And that's the kind of configuration I've been using for the anaglyph 3D graphics display: move the virtual camera slightly to the left and render the red channel, then move the virtual camera slightly to the right and render the blue and green channels.

But I think the way human vision actually works is that both eyeballs sort of independently point at whatever you're focusing on. Which is why when a butterfly flies up to you and lands on your nose you end up crossing your eyes. More like this:

.

I think that's more like how I take 3D photos with my digital camera. I don't have a horizontally-sliding mount or two identical cameras, so I just take one picture pointing at an object, move over, and then take another pointing at the same object. I think the result should be more like looking at an object in real life, assuming the viewer is focusing where you expect them to be.

I'm going to try this out in my graphics setup and see how it works.

3D Graphics

I've been dicking around with the Axiom 3D engine in my free time for a couple days. It's a C# port of OGRE, and someone had figured out how to do a red/cyan anaglyph display in OGRE, so I was trying to get that to work in Axiom:



I had to make some changes to some of Thieum's original material scripts to account for features that aren't supported yet in the current Axiom alpha release, but it seems to basically work.

I'll be sure to let people know when I start producing the next Björk video.

Not Alone

I guess I'm not the only one to notice. Not that I read Slashdot, but I just happen to be trying to get at something on Sourceforge, and I guess they haven't changed their server configuration since 2001. Which make sense, as it was also the last time they updated their site design.

Computer Fun

A while ago I was looking through the software that came bundled with my laptop, and I came across something called "LightScribe." I hadn't heard of that before, but it turned out to be this crazy feature that uses the laser in your CD burner to print labels onto specially manufactured blank CD's:



This was my first time using it, and I guess the results are about what you'd expect. It took a full 20 minutes to print a label that was mostly empty space, the color is a dull gray on khaki, and I paid $15 for 20 of the special CD-R's, which I think is what blank CD's cost in like 1998. But it does actually work, and even the smaller type came out nice and crisp.

Really I'm just happy that this kind of goofy invention gets made. It reminds me of Thunderscan, the product where you replaced your ImageWriter's ribbon cartridge with an optical sensor to turn it into a scanner.

3D Björk Video

Peter sent me a link to the "Wanderlust" video in anaglyph 3D. Really nicely done.

The Evil Resident In Us All

Someone somewhere linked to a blog that linked to a blog called Token Minorities, which has some recent posts looking at some of the controversy stirred up last year by the the Resident Evil 5 video game trailers. The game appears to feature a white hero mowing down hordes of zombified black people.

What I find interesting about this is that the zombie genre has always dealt with the fear of the mindless avenging horde. The classic point almost always being the danger that said fear could lead us to commit or condone horrific atrocities, or that society's injustices could blind us to the real threat.

My feeling is that, even if a given zombie story doesn't explicitly portray racial conflict, the very invocation of the mindless avenging horde archetype resonates along those lines when situated in a societal context that includes a strong undercurrent of racial fear. Stories about supernatural mindless hordes tap into actual fears, so in a way all something like Resident Evil is doing (both with this iteration and in the last installment, in which I gather players had to kill waves of marauding Mexicans) is making that culturally-imposed subtext explicit.

Which isn't to excuse the racism. Even when done intentionally (a la Night-Wight) to prompt a meta-conversation about subtext, the racist content is still there and still real. Hopefully the Resident Evil creators will do the mature thing in response to the public outcry, and change the problematic content before the game is released. But it's also worthwhile to take the opportunity to reflect on the feelings that are triggered by the whole series, and by zombie narratives in general.

Some Bloggers Are Wankers

I don't read GrandGood, but I greatly enjoyed R.H.S.'s two posts responding to some sort of whining about "racism" directed at white hip-hop bloggers. R.H.S. pegs the motivating sentiment as discomfort with black nationalist type views.

And who can blame him, really...black nationalism is inherently discomforting to white people, and that's sort of the whole point. But responding with the tired we-should-be-talking-about-class-rather-than-race/blacks-can-be-racist-too lines (with a bonus dose of why-can't-I-use-the-N-word) is completely out of order.

Especially when the comment that set him off (along the lines of "you should blog about something you're more qualified to comment on, like banking") is a) far less offensive than what you can find in any randomly-selected Byron Crawford post, and b) actually pretty funny.

Oops, Ding Dong

Wish I had known about this latest Amanda Marcotte controversy going into last night's reading. Not that there were any fireworks or anything, but it would have added an interesting subtext. I am sure I'm not the first to find it ironic which "politically inhospitable environment" Amanda has found herself in.

To What?!?

The other day while I was lying in bed either falling asleep or waking up, I had the flash of insight that the phrase "to wit" means "to make a witticism." That is, one should use it only as a lead-in to a punchline: "The vet informed me that my prize-winning ewe was doomed to a life of incontinence. To wit: my sheep had lost her peep."

I looked it up today, and it turns out I'm wrong: "to wit" just means "namely."

No, You Save Us

Matt Yglesias is "getting really tired of [primary season]." Well, I'm sure he's not alone. It is possible to ignore the day-to-day bickering, the debates, the new polls that are always coming out. He should try it. As a member of the DC media, he might even by doing so make it a little less tiring for everyone else.

Mets @ Cubs

I turned it off after the grand slam. :(

Ron Darling Catches Himself

Reflecting on Japanese players in the US following a Kosuke Fukudome at-bat in the fourth:

When I played, nobody thought Japanese players would ever be able to compete in the US, because they just weren't as big, couldn't throw as hard. But now today, with their level of schooling—

Pause, no doubt while Ron is berated by his producer via headset.

—and with new training techniques, they're now just as big as some American players.

Whew, nice save.

Too Perfect to Check

This is sort of, uh, hard to swallow, but it sure does draw the employer/employee relationship in pretty stark terms. Yes, in all likelihood, your management will subject you to whatever it thinks it can get away with under the Geneva Conventions. It wouldn't be management otherwise.

Awesome

Edith's Baby-sitters Club update. Killed it.

Deference

I read the responses to the recent Feministe Feedback question on Being a Feminist Boyfriend with a lot of interest, and I was surprised that Amanda at Pandagon took issue with the first comment, which suggested that "deference is a privileged person's best friend." I had actually thought that a really succinct way of putting my thoughts on the issue.

It turns out I was just mistaken on the definition of "deference." There are a couple different ones, but they all seem to hinge on being "courteous and respectful" in "submission," or "yielding," to another. Sounds a lot like chivalry, and I agree, totally inappropriate.

But I think there is a related attitude, on the part of anyone in a discussion with someone over whom they enjoy privilege, that it is important to have. And that's to never assume that "awareness" of the issue at hand can ever substitute for that issue as seen by someone who must experience it first-hand.

The flawed behavior the attitude addresses can manifest in two ways, dismissal and self-righteousness. The dismissive version is basically, "look, I know all about feminism, and you're overreacting." And the self-righteous version is some variation on "I know all about feminism and you're being a bad feminist." In either case, the privileged person is claiming that their theoretical knowledge of oppression should trump another's actual experience of that oppression.

(I'm sticking with gender and feminism here since that's the discussion that brought it up, but the same dynamic obviously applies to any sort of societal oppression.)

By dint of the very privilege that's at issue, the privileged person's voice is going to have more weight behind it, and so it is even more vital that the privileged person takes other voices seriously. Which is what I would have wanted to call "deference," since one "defers" to the relevant experience of another. But it's not really "deference" because you're not doing it out of "respect and courtesy," but because they are in a position where they are more likely to know what the fuck they are talking about.

It's like when you're trying to squeeze into a tight parking space and your friend hops out to help direct you in from the sidewalk. You don't follow their instructions out of "respect" or "courtesy," but because they are positioned such that their perspective is more likely correct. No matter how sure you are that you're about to scrape the car on your left, if they assure you that you have more room, then you trust them. Unless you have reason to think they're trying to make you crunch your fender, you have to acknowledge that they're in the best place to judge the relevant distances.

As someone who has read a little in feminism, and who tends to didacticism in all things (but who has lived not one second as a woman under patriarchy), my tendency is to err on the "self-righteous" side (though I have certainly had my share of dismissive moments as well). But obviously, whatever little use I may be lies in being able to speak about oppression to other privileged people, from a shared position of privilege. Discussion with others should not primarily be about making myself feel good about my "awareness"; rather, it is a good time to listen, and should be valued as the learning opportunity it is.

Really Good Idea

Surveillance Camera Birdhouse.

Stephen King, Awesome at Any Age

A blog comment linking to a post about series with crappy endings led me to refresh myself on the plots of the Narnia books on Wikipedia (the next movie comes out in May!). I totally didn't remember how (spoiler alert) it all ended with Aslan talking about how in England he was called "Jesus." And actually I was retarded enough when I read those books that it probably still went over my head.

Anyway, somewhere I saw a mention of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, and I was all "oh yeah! I remember those!" I think when I read them there were only three, and I was so anxious about when the next one would come out and how it would all end, and what if Stephen King died in his mid-40's unable to complete the saga? But I guess I forgot about reading them, though I still remember (spoiler alert) the gunslinger fighting lobsters on the beach and learning about tunafish.

And it turns out (spoiler alert) Stephen King still isn't dead! And in fact, he actually finished the Dark Tower series, though I gather it was pretty disappointing in the end and at some point someone needed to obtain "the Pink Grapefruit." And so I've been reading all about Randall Flagg and about Stephen King's other books, and I came across this:

Roland's wine is poisoned, Roland drinks it and dies in three days, Roland's youngest son watches in horror as he drinks the poison. Peter is blamed for it, and is locked up in the enormous tower...Peter has made two requests for things he wants in his cell: his mother's dollhouse, and a napkin with every meal. Peter takes 5 threads from each napkin and with the help of a working loom from the dollhouse weaves them into a rope.

I just want to propose that anyone who comes up with that is awesome. A tip of my hat to you, Stephen King, or to whoever hacked all the Stephen King articles on Wikipedia and made them hilarious.

Weird Observation

Sadie from Itty Bitty Titty Committee has the exact same accent as Carcetti from The Wire.

Also, one of the McPoyle brothers is the plastic surgeon.

Also also, I'm sure I wasn't the only Mets fan who watched a BitTorrent of Itty Bitty Titty Committee because his roommate was watching Simpsons reruns.

Nerd Party

I wrote this C# class for reading INI files on my own time and I think it's cool so I'm posting it up. It uses reflection to populate the fields and properties in a class with values from an INI file.

If you want to read a Windows INI file that looks like this,

;test.ini

[Shape]
Width=100

[Name]
First=John
Last=Williams ,

then you just make a subclass like this,

class TestIni : IniFile
{
   public TestIni() : base("test.ini") { }

   public class ShapeSection
   {
      public int Width = 10;
   }

   public readonly ShapeSection Shape = new ShapeSection();

   public class NameSection
   {
      public string First = "";
      public string Last = "";
   }

   public readonly NameSection Name = new NameSection();
} ,

and then you can use it like this:

TestIni ini = new TestIni();
Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}", ini.Shape.Width, ini.Name.First); .

It's cool because the structure of the subclass mirrors the structure of the INI file it represents, with a member class for each section containing a field or property for each key.

There are a lot of INI access utility classes out there (thanks to Microsoft not providing any in the Framework), but all the ones I saw used things like dictionaries to look up values by string. I think the reflection approach makes for neater client code.

Potential improvements include the ability to specify alternate names for member data, allowing you to access key or section names that are not valid C# identifiers; and the ability to write out changes to the member data to the INI file.

Developers and Other Scum

Dallas Penn has some amazing photos up showing neighborhoods eaten up by real estate development. As he points out in the text, developers are yet another group who have an interest in letting drugs and crime tear apart communities.

It should be illegal to own residential property that you do not yourself live in; commercial property out of which you do not yourself run a business; or agricultural property which you do not yourself farm. Existing rentals would be collectivized and ownership handed over to current residents, employees, and farm workers.

Who's Gonna Train Me Cats?

Some dog training book I read (Cesar Millan's?) pointed out that in any movie that features a bunch of animals together in a room not chasing each other (the example given was Dr. Dolittle), each of those animals has a trainer standing just off-set, keeping them on task with their positive energy (this is what makes me think it was Cesar's).

This caused me to realize that, duh, you see cats in movies, and therefore they must be trainable, regardless of what people say. I know people train cats to use toilets, after all, so getting them to respond to commands can't be impossible. And indeed, I have found some information on training cats.

We started Monday with "sit." I've been introducing the Colonel to the vocabulary for "kiss," "lap," and "tummy," but not trying to get her to do any of it on command yet, and of course Lucy already fetches on her own. But I did get them each to "come" and "sit" for me a couple times.

Fan Pro Tips

While I was trying to find the link for my Sex and the City fanfic the other day in preparation for reading it at Lindsay and Gabe's show, I came across this page of advice for aspiring fanfictionists. The bullet list regarding sex scenes is especially amazing, and two or three of the items were absolutely essential to my piece.

Inside, outside, Holiday Inn

Sarah and I were going to look at an apartment this weekend (we ended up not even getting to see it because someone else took it before we got the chance) that was an "eco-renovated" brownstone, everything redone with sustainable materials and designed for efficiency and conservation. E.g., they had the toilets common throughout the rest of the developed world where you get one little flusher for pee and a bigger flusher for poo.

I was pretty psyched about the possibility of living someplace like that. I find something satisfying about efficiency. Must be my Germanic ancestry. With my current landlord, getting storm windows to replace the paper-thin panes in the living room was a huge coup, and we lobbied for months trying to get him to fix a leak in the bathtub tap...it was wasting gallons and gallons of potable water, but even though he paid the water bill, it wasn't costing him enough to justify hiring a plumber.

And of course, he was right; even if we had succeeded in getting the leak fixed, there's doubtless a dozen other leaky taps in the building and a hundred among the rest of the buildings on the block. If it's not worth fixing to him then it's not worth fixing to anybody, and taking care of our tiny leak would literally amount to a drop in the ocean.

A small minority of building owners, like the landlord of the building we wanted to look at this weekend, are sufficiently opposed to wasting water on principle that they would keep things leak-free, but that's ultimately not a rational decision based on sound economics. The question is, how do you change the system so that the people who are deciding things rationally make the choice that we want, which is to prevent so much wasted water?

In economics terms, the rational decision to let water go to waste is the result of an externality: wasted drinking water has a certain cost to society that is not fully represented in the dollar cost of tap water to the person paying the bill. This is why communities experiencing drought need to enact ordinances against watering your lawn: if water prices in those communities accurately reflected the marginal cost of water to the community as water became more scarce, then pretty much everyone would decide to stop watering their lawn all on their own; but since water, as a basic requirement for living, is subsidized, there's no price signal to respond people and you have to tell them explicitly "don't do that, we're running out of water."

Dealing with externalities wisely is like driving a boat or building a bridge: if you can set things up so the prevailing winds or gravity do a lot of the work, then there's a lot less for you to handle yourself with paddles or poured concrete. If you can manipulate prices so that the market does the heavy lifting to conserve precious resources or whatever, then there's a lot less left over to clean up with regulation.

What the case of water-wasting tap leaks made me realize is that the easy way of internalizing externalities in the case of conservation of resources—imposing a "Pigovian tax" somewhere along the line—sort of falls apart when you're talking about a resource that you want everyone to have essentially unhindered access to as a matter of rights.

It's simple enough to raise water prices to the point where most landlords will start looking after their plumbing. But as soon as water is priced anywhere above a nominal level then you'll have people going unwashed (the masses will basically go unwashed at the drop of a hat), letting their gardens dry out, and drinking inadequate water to stay healthy. And slumlords will just let their taps leak away and make their tenants responsible for the water bill. Basically, by trying to internalize one externality you end up creating another.

Which is just too bad.

Couldn't Agree More

Cheese has fat. If you don't want to eat fat, don't eat food with fat. Don't try to cheat by eating food that has had the fat removed via artificial means. It is an affront to God and Nature.

Splenda eaters and decaf drinkers, you also test the Almighty's patience.

Pretty Smart

This dude made 3D images by sticking subsequent frames from Alien together: corridor, bridge. That's a really good idea, and it would work with any panning shot without action. It would never have occurred to me.

This one did occur to me, and I'm glad to see that someone's done it, even if it totally doesn't work (the blue is wrong).

There's a lot of good stuff on flickr that comes up if you search for "3D". Exteriors and landscapes seem to work really well.

Mets @ Marlins

Yay Johan! Way to get out of the fifth, and then eight K's. Not bad a first showing at all. I miss Moises, as usual. Watching baseball rules.

Also it's my centennial post. Word up.

Keeping Currency Current

Matt Yglesias thinks we should get rid of the penny. And of course we should. But as commenter "pseudonymous in nc," uh, notes, that's really too little, too late.

The whole point of having both paper and metal currency in circulation is that small denominations that get used in most everyday transactions are durable and easy to tell apart (coins), while large denominations can be carried around without resorting to a forklift (paper notes). Bills should be used to pay rent, or your taxes, or to make big purchases, while a couple coins should suffice for buying coffee or lunch or movie tickets.

Not only is this currently not the case, but we're not really even anywhere close to this ideal. Almost nothing costs less than a dollar (at least in the city), and the only widely circulating coins much worth paying attention to are quarters, but only because you need them for parking meters and laundromats.

I propose doing away with the penny, nickel, and dime entirely: the quarter dollar (the ha'penny of tomorrow) would be the new lowest denomination coin, and we can keep the Sacajawea (or whatever the current dollar-coin iteration is). To that we'd add $2, $5, $10, and $20 coins. People are used to getting twenties out of the ATM machine, so we can start the paper currency there for the time being, also preserving the fifty- and hundred-spot notes and adding new bills for $200, $500, and $1000.

So nobody gets mad about anyone currently featured on a coin or bill being disappeared down the memory hole, we could just carry them over to the new denominations. Lincoln, Jefferson, and FDR would be on the $5, $10, and $20 coins, respectively; Washington, Lincoln, and Hamilton would be on the $200, $500, and $1000 notes; and whoever is currently featured on the $2 bill would go on the new American Toony coin.

Since the $100 bill will remain unchanged, no rap lyrics that reference "benjamins" need be updated. Everyone's happy.

Update: Here are some mockups. I also forgot about the half dollar, which I guess we may as well preserve.

More 3D Photos

I did some more 3D stuff. Got a couple somewhat blurry ones around the house, and one in particular of some houseplants on the windowsill that came out really nice. Also a good shot outside the post office and one inside taken on my celly (a violation of the 3D PATRIOT Act X-Treme). And one of my blood getting drained by the vampires at the NY Blood Center.

I decided to put everything into a 3D set on Flickr.

More 3D Stuff

I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, but it's totally easy to take 3D pictures with a regular camera. I found a tutorial on how to do it, but it basically just boils down to dropping the green and blue channels out of the left eye image and the red out of the right and multiplying them together.

My first attempt was kind of wack, I think because the two images were too far apart and not parallel. It's my mouse and tea mug:



Then I took this picture of my bike, which I thought would be a good reference for my 3D pencil drawing. It came out amazing, despite the right image being a little blurry. It looked good enough that I went back and redid it in color. Still awesome. The handlebars and near pedal really jump out:



And finally I did this picture of my messy desk and bookshelf. It looks alright:



I think the first and third images both suffer from too much variation in depth. You can see that, e.g., the laptop screen in the first picture and the phone cord in the last one are way far apart from each other in the two channels, and when you look at them through the glasses those parts are not easily resolved into coherent objects without refocusing your eyes.

Now that I had more of an idea how to work with this stuff on the computer, I scanned in my original ink line art that I had traced for the 3D pencil drawing. I separated it into red and blue/green layers and then moved stuff around and the results are actually okay:



I plan to keep playing with this stuff...I definitely need some 3D cat photos, and I want to try the drawing kit with some better pencils.

3D Bicycle Drawing

A couple months ago Peter and I were talking about how to do 3D drawings. I was thinking of just doing line art and then shifting stuff around in different colored layers on the computer. But Peter happened to come across this little 3D drawing kit and picked one up for me:



It's this little plastic "compass" that holds a blue and red pencil in place so you can draw with both of them at the same time at a fixed distance apart from one another. Here are the instructions from the back of the package:



And here it is in use as I draw some practice shapes:



Today on my day off I was fiddling with my bike, and I swapped out my flat bars for some drops from a bike salvaged from the trash a couple months back. I did a quick ink drawing of it so I could trace it with the compass:



Here's the finished drawing. I started tracing at the rear wheel with the pencils very close together and then as I worked my way "forward" I moved the pencils farther apart. I'm not sure how well the 3D ended up working, but it still looks sort of cool:



Update: as soon as I posted this and was looking at the finished drawing again, I thought to check something. The blue pencil that came with the kit is totally the wrong color: if you hold the red lens of the glasses right against the paper then you only see the blue lines, but if you look through the blue side then both lines are clearly visible. I think actually the pencil is close to "true blue," whereas the glasses are cyan. I'll have to pick up a cyan pencil and see if I can get better results.

I'm a Terrible Roommate

I often let the cat box go for days, or even more than a week, without being scooped. With two cats, that's a lot of stank.

AstroTurking

Last week DU told me about Amazon's "mechanical Turk" program, which is basically a framework that allows the hiring of human labor to accomplish very small tasks that are difficult for computers.

The implications are pretty awesome (in the sense of inspiring awe) and extremely creepy, and as DU pointed out its primary application right now is probably using Indian labor to game search engines and other similar sketchiness. Which is nothing new, of course; Amazon is just democratizing something you'd previously have had to contract out for.

In any case, it made me think that a good use for this would be political astroturfing. At one point in 2005 I tried to turn myself into a sort of volunteer Democratic operative on one web community. I created a pseudonymous account, and every day I would look at the DNC's latest press release and then go post a diary echoing the DNC's claims in my own words.

The intent was to help counter the constant drum of GOP talking points propagated by the Right-Wing Noise Machine. This proved essentially impossible, simply because the whole way the Might Wurlitzer works is through repetition: by the time you hear someone repeat some anti-Kerry slur reported by Wolf Blitzer as what "some leading Democrats are saying," you've already heard it from half a dozen Rush listeners, Leno viewers, workplace know-nothings and your great uncle's email list. As Digby reminds me, it's the constant reinforcement of these memes that makes them "stick."

In contrast, when I loaded up democrats.org each day, my first reaction would be "they're talking about what?" Not that their lines of attack were bad, but they just weren't being repeated anywhere: I'd listen to Air America and read a bunch of liberal blogs, and nobody would be focusing on, e.g., deforestation, or whatever the DNC was on about that day. I felt like my efforts were for naught because nothing I said had any resonance.

Anyway, all of this is a long preamble to the idea that something like the mechanical Turk program could be used for this kind of thing really easily. Like, each day have a specific idea or key phrase (say, that John McCain has a history of financial corruption, or just the word "McSame") show up posted by ten different people on each of the ten most popular political blogs or forums. At a dollar per comment that's only $100 a day. And no single comment needs to be persuasive or even really coherent, because the point is to just get it out there and resonating.

Sync these messages up to what campaign surrogates are saying in the media and I think this approach could be really effective. But even when instigated by a single lone actor it would accomplish much more than my solitary shilling ever could.

Lewis Lapham on Steroids

On the topic of steroids, that is.

Harper's is my regular gym read, and I find that a month's worth of workouts usually provides just enough time on the elliptical machine to get through one issue, more or less, depending on how well I stick to my exercise schedule and how hard the cryptic is.

Anyway, because of a combination of my ski vacation and general laziness, I've fallen a whole two issues behind, so I just this weekend started reading the March issue, and Lewis Lapham's Notebook entry, entitled "Mudville," is an excellent satirical examination of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and the American Dream. More or less along the lines of this blog post from a couple months back, but less scattered, more incisive, and funnier.

The text isn't up on their website, but they do have images of the scanned pages, which I've shared below.

NASA Issues Intergalactical Nullus

I've got an ice geyser you can taste with your probe right here.

Earday!

After hours of study in the far reaches of internet photo sites, Sarah and I at some point determined that corgis' ears don't come out perked up...they're born with floppy ears, and at some point first one and then the other stands up. We already decided that when we get Bonkers (if he's young enough when we get him) then we'll celebrate both of his eardays.

Anyway, I happened to be looking at pics of Maddi today, and noticed that there's a good portrayal of the corgi ear progression.

Here she is at six weeks old:


At seven weeks, one ear stands up:


And after eight weeks, both ears are standing up:

Happy Kitty Birthday!

Today it's my cats's birthday's! They're two years old. Judging by Lucy's behavior this morning starting about an hour before my alarm went off, they are either entering their terrible twos or their rebellious teenage years.

I made them party hats using the outline from this template, scaled down to fit a cat-head instead of a person-head. I personalized them with photos of each of them:



And then I added some happy birthday messages and taped them up:



I experimented with chin straps, and it just was not happening. So I had to try to get a hat near one of their heads and then snap a picture before they batted it away. The perfect ensemble portrait I had pictured in my mind was clearly an impossibility.





Happy birthday, Lucy and the Colonel! I love you guys!

Zoning

Matt Yglesias discusses how zoning can work against a vibrant urban environment. I think this is one of those cases where a thinking person should be able to look at the rhetoric in support of certain policies, contrast that with the undeniable reality of their effects, and infer that the true motivations are something else. Zoning regulations have been recognized as a destructive force for decades, and the fact that they persist, and that well-connected developers continue to pocket piles of public money because of them, might suggest that the people who maintain them are perhaps not interested in urban vibrancy at all.

Not really related, but Harper's has publicly posted their article on "The next bubble." It's supposed to be a warning against buying into whatever mania takes the place of real estate, but my take-away is to invest in green technologies right now, then cash out in five years and buy a cheap-ass house. Can't fail.

Senator Clay Davis Ringtone

I couldn't find one of these anywhere: "Shyeeeeeeeeit."

Non-water liquids as beverage media.

I've had this idea before that one could make a cape codder with extra cranberry flavor by starting with pure cranberry juice and diluting it to drinking strength with vodka rather than water. The resulting drink would be as flavorful as a regular cranberry juice cocktail and as alcoholic as a normal bar cocktail. You might want to add some sugar as well.

Anyway, my lover and I were recently discussing coffee brewing. She was a big proponent of brewing methods that keep the coffee hot, so that it doesn't end up being too cold after you add a lot of milk. One solution is to steam or otherwise heat up the milk before you stir it in.

I was mulling this over, so to speak, and it struck me that you could do something similar to my cape codder variation, brewing the coffee directly in hot milk (or a milk/water mixture) rather than water.

You would probably want to use a manual drip brewer or French press so you don't have to worry about getting old milk all up in a machine that's not easy to clean. Then just heat some milk up on the stove and pour it in. You could even try milk in a Moka pot.

This approach is preferable to water brewing and adding cold milk in that it doesn't cool off the final beverage. It is preferable to heating up milk separately in that it only requires one heating step. And it is preferable to either in that it does not dilute the coffee.

I'm a Terrible Roommate

I frequently feel the urge to vent about some supposed impropriety perpetrated by one or the other of my roommates. But I'm aware that pretty much everyone does things that will get on someone's nerves if they live together, and it has a lot less to do with what the offenses actually are than it does with their being repeated over and over and how you can't really do anything to get away from them.

So I decided that any time one of my dear roomies moves my favorite oven mitt and I'm all full of righteous anger about it, that instead of venting I'll try to put myself in their shoes. I'll think of something I do all the time, obliviously, that might plausibly drive one of them up the wall.

The point isn't too identify personal shortcomings in myself for the sake of fixing them—because really, what are the chances that I accurately stumble across one of the many potentially annoying behaviors that actually bugs one of my roommates—but merely to remind myself that living with relative strangers is always difficult and takes patience.

So with that explanation out of the way, here's the first reason I'm a Terrible Roommate: I never ask my roommates' permission, or even offer a heads-up, before inviting people over, letting friends from out of town crash on the couch, dog-sitting, or any other act of hospitality on my part that could reasonably be understood as a huge imposition on my cohabitants.

Not sure if I screwed this up.

So I'm playing a scrabolous game with Nate. He had just played JOG hanging over the bottom triple word:



I was holding ROASTED, which I saw I could play along the left to make STAG. But if I could bingo by hooking my S onto JOG instead then it would be a 100+ point play. I couldn't find an anagram, though, so I did this:



I think it's the first time I've been holding a playable bingo and not played it. And I burned my E,R, and S. My reasoning was: it was worth almost as much as the bingo would have been (60 vs. 66, if I recall); leaving JOGS open would risk most of my bingo points anyway if Nate was holding an S; and I could land my D on the double letter and leave myself with A and T on my rack.



And Nate makes a play on a whole different triple as I draw...another bingo!



Not a very valuable or safe one, admittedly. But still pretty lucky. I think I may have not made the best choice with DOERS, but since I lucked out and didn't get punished for it at all, I'm afraid it might encourage bad habits.

Update: I ran the board past Quackle. DOATERS and TROADES are both valid. None of the AIs recommended DOERS.

Update: Also since Quackle counts tiles for you, I noted that at the time I was deciding whether to play DOERS, I was holding the fourth and final S. You'd think I would have thought to count those since blocking JOGS was a big part of my calculus. I'm an idiot.

3-2-1 Compact

I never fucked around with Compact Fluorescent light "bulbs" before. My thinking was that as a single non-homeowner, my lifestyle doesn't really justify buying anything that's going to last five years. But I have cats, so I guess that reasoning doesn't really hold up. And then a couple recent events caused me to take the plunge and pick up a couple.

First, Rob Cockerham posted quantifying the efficiency gains of CF over incandescent, which I found pretty persuasive. A couple days later he posted again with some negative feedback he'd received in response to his CFL essay. These responses set off my right-wing bullshit detector (my detector of right-wing bullshit, that is) right away. They all consisted of lists of the same "gotcha" objections (e.g., you can't use a CFL in your oven) without ever challenging the central assertion (that CFLs are far, far more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs).

It's exactly the style of argument used to dispute the veracity of global climate change, evolution, or the Holocaust: the point isn't to actually win the debate, but rather to make it appear to the casual observer that, first, there is a debate to be had; and second, since it seems to involve all these highly technical points regarding flagella or mercury disposal or whatnot, the layman had best just leave the whole thing alone and not pass judgment one way or the other. "Opinions Differ on Shape of Earth," as the joke goes.

Anyway, down towards the end of the response page someone gives the game away by linking to a WorldNetDaily article (duly sadlynotified later that day). So while I haven't talked to anyone who can figure out what's motivating right-wingers to go after CFLs aside from sheer misanthropic orneriness, it seems pretty clear that I'm now obligated to use CF on principle.

Oh and then when I was helping Andrew move he revealed that he had a couple in his apartment. I had been worried about the light quality of CFLs, but as an artist in the medium of light, his endorsement carries a lot of weight. So I picked up a couple and put them in both my bathrooms.

I'm pretty happy with them so far. They seemed dimmer than the 75W bulbs they replaced at first, but then when I gave them time to warm up they looked okay. Here's my downstairs bathroom, pictures taken just after flipping the lightswitch, and then every 10 seconds after:



So it's really yellow at first but pretty white by the time you're done brushing your teeth or peeing, and you can put on your makeup or artificial tan without concern.

Also the incandescents I had been using were those full spectrum or "daylight" ones, so that's part of the difference. They also have CFLs like that, but they were like twice as expensive, so I went with the regular ones.

Next up will be my bedroom, where I have three incandescents (plus two track lights that I think are halogens) right now. I have one 3-way lamp and one with a dimmer, but they have fancy CFLs on the market for both of those situations. And then my other floor lamp's socket is recessed so far that I couldn't get the ones I got to screw in, so I'll have to see if I can find one that's shaped differently.

The future is now, in any case.

Elite Opinion and Policy Versus Politics

Ezra Klein comments on the emerging elite consensus in favor of Obama, and describes how he perceives the Obama/Clinton choice:

My basic belief is that Obama is more progressive on foreign policy, [Clinton]'s more liberal on social policy, but he's more likely to lead towards a more progressive moment on social policy, almost in s[p]ite of his own policy shop.

Or as he puts it in his longer piece (nullus):

The promise of [Obama's] presidency is less its capacity to change our policies than its capacity to change our politics.

I think I basically agree. I'd elaborate that, first, policies matter, especially to non-elites; and second, politics don't seem to ever much change, despite many smart people's best efforts at various significant points throughout history (not least the election in 1992 of William Jefferson Clinton, whose triangulized policies progressives are still trying to get out from under).

What it do, Travis!

Since I've been playing Scrabulous on Facebook, I've always noticed, and been mildly annoyed by, the little foreign-language greetings they use to welcome you to the main screen:



For some reason it never really occurred to me that Flickr has always done the same thing:



Is this some sort of Web 2.0 standard or something? Does Ruby have a library function that returns a random international salutation?

Thinking about this also rememberized me to the fact that the school computer system in college named its individual servers this same way, each one a different word for "hello" in some other language. So when you'd telnet to cunix.cc.columbia.edu, it would actually connect you to, say, aloha.cc.columbia.edu if that had the fewest users at the time.

Anyway, so I guess it's just some geek thing thought up by dorks.

Democratic Primareez Nutz

It seems like everyone is supporting Borat Obama now. I think he's great, and I'll gladly vote for him in the general election, but despite all the adoration people have for Obama, I'm still pretty sure I'll be pulling my lever for Hillary on Tuesday.

But I'll also be voting for her. Amanda and Ezra both linked to an essay in the Nation, that makes the argument that (roughly) the president has more leeway in setting foreign than domestic policy, so you should support the candidate with the preferable foreign policy, Obama.

I'm sympathetic to that sort of argument, since it's along the lines of my original support for Chris Dodd, but I'm ultimately unconvinced. Obama's early opposition to the Iraq war is admirable, but it came in a context (as a representative of Chicago in the Illinois State Senate) where it carried little political risk. While he has made much of that stance as public opinion on the war has soured, he has not shown the willingness to counteract the broad Democratic Party foreign policy views that let so many Democrats sign off on the war in the US Senate.

And so I would expect him to more or less follow the establishment Democratic opinion. It would be perhaps marginally more humane than Clinton's, but not the radically saner alternative that a Dodd or Kucinich could really get me excited about. Nullus.

On domestic policy, in contrast, I think Clinton is far more credible. She cut her legislative teeth tackling health care before she was even in office. She knows better than to even hint at fucking with Social Security. She will not be an echo of her husband: Bill Clinton came to the presidency with a background as a pro-business Democratic governor, while Hillary will come to it as a solid Democratic legislator with a history of support for traditional Democratic constituencies.

Recent Obama converts make a big deal about how presidents don't get carte blanche in implementing domestic policy. But they do set priorities and wield the bully pulpit. Whether they ended up succeeding (the Assault Weapons Ban, No Child Left Behind) or failing (health care reform, Social Security privatization), nobody can honestly look at the Clinton and Bush presidencies and say that the president's impact on legislation wasn't enormous.

So that's it: whoever is president will doubtlessly continue to fuck up the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, and Africa. This is what American presidents do. Domestically, Clinton wins on both policy and politics.

Some people also argue that Obama has vision, or is a symbol of a better tomorrow, or will usher in a new era of progressivism or what have you. Whatever. JFK had all that too and he gave us Vietnam. Johnson was an unlikeable asshole who passed the Civil Rights Act and did more for social democracy than anyone since FDR. I'll take tangible results over symbolism any day.

Hillary Clenis for Nominee!

Biking Loses an Advantage

I hate owning a car. There are any number of annoying aspects of urban car ownership, but one of them is flyering.

Just about every week when I go to move the car for street cleaning (most weeks this is the only time I even look at my car) there is at least one advertisement tucked under the windshield wiper. Postcards and letter-sized sheets are the most popular formats, though business cards show up on occasion, and they're often filthy from enduring several nights in the open.

Yet another reason to prefer a bike, right? Well so I thought. Yesterday evening I was running errands in the city and I came back to my bike only to find that I'd been flyered:



It was an ad for some retail promotion where you get a free dinner or something. Ridiculous.

So there you go. One less advantage of cycling over driving.

And while I'm posting pictures from my cell phone, here's one of Nate with a dead salmon: