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: