Mind Poison

Profiles in Courage

2007-05-18T20:03:00.000-04:00

Hi, I just wanted to point out two recent examples of courage I came across.

The first is from Diane Feinstein, calling for a [meaningless] vote of no confidence in Gonzales.

FEINSTEIN: I join with Sen. Schumer in saying I think the time has come for the Senate to express its will. And that will is simply to say that we lack confidence in Attorney General Gonzales. I don’t like saying this. I very much regret saying it. I want to say exactly the opposite. But in view of what I know, I can’t.

Hm, yes, the will of the senate is to say that they lack confidence in Gonzales. Wow. Clearly they are still riding strong on the mandate of the 2006 elections.

The second is from the Washington Post's editorial today.

The president would like to make this unpleasant controversy disappear behind the national security curtain. That cannot be allowed to happen.

I totally agree. Fortunately, you are one of the nation's premier newspapers. So I assume this means that you are going to assign reporters to stay on this case to the bitter end, and continue to publish their stories on the front page? Because if there was anyone who could prevent this controversy from disappearing, it would be you.

Notes on Lord of War

2005-09-17T23:53:00.000-04:00

Here's the IMDB "what the critics" said on Lord of War

Critics are warring over the Nicolas Cage satire Lord of War about the international gun market. Manohla Dargis in the New York Times calls it "a misfire" even though Cage's performance, she remarks, is "watchable." The problem, she writes, is that writer-director Andrew Niccol "never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel)." Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune remarks: "The film is morally unsettling on its surface, and then you realize the surface is all you're going to get." Bob Longino in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes it as an "often heavy-handed and terminally dull depiction of the violent world of unscrupulous international arms deals." On the other hand, Phillip Wuntch in the Dallas Morning News finds the film compelling. "Lord of War definitely aims to be something more profound than brain candy. It gives moviegoers something to think about," he writes. "If that recommendation sounds too dutiful, let it be known that it's exciting as well as thought-provoking."

They also noted that Just Like Heaven got better reviews.

So when we were watching it today, and I was immediately captivated, I kept waiting for the movie to take its big turn and start sucking. That never happened, it was great to the very last moment. Walking out of the movie, Claire and I were shocked at the reviews. Did we see the same movie? What the hell are they talking about it being only surface-level and dull? This could be the best movie so far this year.

The critics have entered another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A wonderous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. They've just crossed over into the twilight zone.

Really Bad Software

2005-08-23T12:43:00.000-04:00

I'm having a really hard time figuring out what Google was thinking with their Sidebar in Google Desktop Search.

As Microsoft's Windows UI has gotten older and older (Windows XP was available in 2001) without any change, I've found it hasn't really kept up with what I'd like my OS to be doing. Its battery and WiFi status applets are pretty much useless, despite how important they are to the way I use my computer. There are many repetitive tasks I need to do on the web that I'd love to have automated. Advanced computer users I have talked to recently have dismissed desktop search products as useless, but I like the idea and find it useful (and both MacOS and Linux have very good implementations now).

Yahoo's Konfabulator has actually been a welcome addition to my desktop. Its battery status and WiFi monitors are much better than the ones Windows provides, and have a permanent place on my desktop, where they look entirely like they fit in. As someone who lives on the east coast, I also frequently have to check the weather, and so the Weather widget is quite welcome on "Konspose," where I can access it by simply pressing F8, along with a few other applets. (I know most of my readership is west coast, and this weather-checking seems like strangely fussy behavior to you, but if you live in a climate-controlled high-rise on the weather-enabled east coast, checking the weather first-hand can be more of a hassle, and besides, it's quite likely to change throughout the day).

I've had a few complaints with Konfabulator. Each widget is its own process, which annoys me when I look through my process list, the only widgets worth using are those that come with Konfabulator, as the user-designed widgets are always ugly and poorly designed, and I dislike the fact that I can only choose to put something on my desktop or in Konspose. So I've been waiting and hoping that Google would come out with something similar and, in the long tradition of Google Maps and Gmail, much better.

Well, they did, and it totally sucks. Well, not totally. I like that it is a part of Google Desktop, and provides Spotlight-like real-time search capabilities. Using this feature seems to be faster than navigating through the Start menu or folder heirarchy for most things I am looking for. Love it, it's great. Everything else is all wrong, though.

With Google Desktop, you have two options: keep the sidebar on the side of your screen, taking up the entire vertical length, or have it auto-hide. Well, clearly I am not going to cut off a significant fraction of my screen for a weather applet, so mine is on auto-hide. But there is no short-cut key to reveal it, as far as I can tell, so I potentially have to wheel my mouse all the way across my screen to get to it.

What's worse is how they chose to build this thing: It's built out of COM components. I can see why this would seem appealing to a programmer: write the plugins in any language you want! But it makes writing plugins a total pain in the ass: "We recommend using Microsoft Visual Studio for developing the plug-in." I consider myself an able developer, comfortable in C++ and Visual Studio and all that, and this just strikes me as too much effort for the payoff of a little widget for this thing (try looking at the SDK examples, and while you're at it, check out the simplistic-looking stuff that all this effort buys you).

In contrast, Konfabulator widgets are written in XML and Javascript, and Dashboard widgets are written in HTML with Javascript. This is a piece of cake, and any web developer can do it. Since Javascript can access COM, these widgets seem just as capable of interacting with system functions as well. Furthermore, these bundles of XML and Javascript come in their own package format, which Konfabulator or Dashboard registers itself as a handler for. The user simply clicks the download button and the widget can pop right up on their screen. What I am about to say next is so stunning that I'm going to give it it's own paragraph.

Google's Sidebar widgets use installers. That's right, the usual Installshield-style things, with entries in your Add/Remove Programs and Start Menu and everything.

Why is an OS company like Apple, with no significant web properties, doing this The Web Way, and a web company, whose products make it to the user's eyes entirely through the cooperation of the OS companies doing this the difficult, painful, non-cross-platform Windows-only way? What the heck was Google thinking?

High-Def DVD

2005-08-23T12:25:00.000-04:00

There's a lot of fretting right now about a next-generation format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and a lot of warm remembrance about the way the movie studios all banded together and agreed to a standard for DVD, and there was no format war and everything was wonderful.

This is not how it happened. If you try to do a search for "DivX" these days, all you'll pull up is the video codec, but before that codec existed, DIVX was something entirely different. There was tremendous fear in the early days of DVD that DIVX was going to gain traction, and split the market, or eventually win, due to the appeal it would have to the greedy movie studios. Especially because several studios (like Disney) signed on to release DIVX discs and not DVDs.

HD-DVD poses about as much threat to Blu-Ray as DIVX did to DVD. The number of device manufacturers and movie studios signed on to Blu-Ray far outnumber the number attached to HD-DVD. But this hardly matters, as in the next few years, there's a very good chance that these discs could be drastically reduced in importance, as online movie distribution eventually gets sorted out.

On Movie Ratings

2005-07-22T00:09:00.000-04:00

The other night, we watched Back to the Future again, which I had not seen in many years. Holy crap, I said to myself, he said said "Shit!" I heard "shit" at least 5 times, and there was an "asshole."

Now, I remember being shown this movie when I was 6 at the YMCA. So I was like, "Wow, I never knew this movie was PG-13." Cuz, you know, you can bust out a few "shits" and still slide in as PG-13, you know, when it's funny and Will Smith is saying it. So imagine my surprise when I checked, and Back to the Future was actually PG. How times change.

Speaking of movies rated R, Wedding Crashers is fantastic. It's rated R, it's hilarious, it's charming, and it's much better than you expect.

Notes on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

2005-07-22T00:01:00.000-04:00

I'm trying to think of other examples of memorable musicals being remade, and I can't. The oompa loompa song? Everyone knows that song, right?

Anyways, this movie is a remake, so I believe I've already written about that. The only reason for this post, really, is to point out that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a sort of really obvious allegory about proper child-raising technique. I mean, I shouldn't have to point this out; it's like a kiddy version of Se7en.

So the irony dial was at 11 when this little kid behind us talked throughout the movie. Not that he was carrying on a conversation, but he would blurt out his little observations really loud, like "He got small!" or "He's got braces on!" I don't know how old this kid was, so maybe he's a genius for his age, but I distinctly recall from as long as I can remember, it was made very, very clear to me that you do not talk during a movie. Can't recall ever going to the movies and feeling free to just shout out something like "It's a river of chocolate!" while the movie is showing a river of chocolate. The parents seemed to think this was cute or something, because they made no effort at all to hush this kid.

On Remakes

2005-07-21T23:02:00.000-04:00

Have you ever seen a movie that intrigued you with some original notion, but for whatever reason just failed to come together and you couldn't truthfully call it a "good movie" in the end? David Fincher said that the reason we get bad movies is that every one is the prototype; you're figuring out how to make it work as you make it, but by then it's too late. Occasionally a good concept just fails to come together for whatever reason, and it's not necessarily anyone's fault.

You might think that this sort of movie would be the perfect candidate for a remake. Occasionally, this sort of movie has been remade with spectacular results; a movie that you thought "Why would anyone remake that?!" only to be pleasantly surprised by the potential that some creative person saw in some piece of crap. The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, Father of the Bride, The Ring, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and True Lies all spring to mind; even if they didn't turn out amazing, they managed to add something fresh to the originals.

If you think this way, you'll never make it in Hollywood. At least, not these days; Defamer summarized last weekend's box office as "remake, new idea, superhero movie, remake, superhero movie." What Hollywood instead prefers to do is take their most successful movies ever and squeeze out a little more money: why not just make it again?

This is obviously a really bad idea. A movie that was fortunate enough to turn out really well is unlikely to go as well if you try it a second time. Yet, these movies seem to have an audience, and often do make money. After all, if you want to find the True Lies out there, you might have to sit through some Psychos. Still, there's nothing really illogical about this behavior from the studios so far. If you have a good property, and you understand why it worked, why not do it again? You might be able to open a movie up to an entirely new audience who might not have been able to relate to its original, due to age or language or a woefully small budget or what not. Or, you might just have some original spin on a good idea (like The Magnificent Seven vs. The Seven Samurai).

What I don't understand is why Hollywood can't just stick to the formula that made the original so great. Perhaps it is some unconscious guilt at how little they're doing for the movie, but invariably, when they're remaking a great movie, they must always make the same remake mistakes. The most common one of which is attempting to expand on the original material.

An interesting case study for me is Abre Los Ojos versus Vanilla Sky, because they were made just a few years apart, and had the same actress playing the same role. Abre Los Ojos is a damn fine film, by my estimation, and very original. All that is good about Vanilla Sky, down to some of the very striking shots, are from the original. However, when they remade it, the remake wound up 20 minutes longer (and it felt like it was 40 extra minutes). Every little offhanded remark that a character makes in Abre Los Ojos, little things that add flavor and depth to a character, is expanded into a ridiculous subplot in the remake. An offhanded remark about his business partners being out to get him is blown into a running subplot, and a nervous statement on the edge of a cliff about fear of heights is turned into an almost debilitating neurosis from the very beginning of the movie. It's silly.

In general, flashbacks and prologues are added to expand on the background of some character or place. In general, doing this sort of thing doesn't add anything important, and horribly screws with the pacing. Imagine, for example, a fantastical, whirlwind tour through the world's most amazing chocolate factory punctuated with boring flashbacks to Willy Wonka's childhood!

Or, another way to feel like you're earning your keep is to change the ending (also a typical book-to-movie change). You could turn a beloved character into the villain (Mission Impossible), or add another sequence after the original end. Obviously, this rarely improves on a good movie, but for some reason, studios just can't help themselves.

Notes on War of the Worlds

2005-06-30T15:22:00.000-04:00

Steven Spielberg has actually provided us with an interesting case-study in comparative directing, in this case by remaking Signs. It turns out he's a lot better than M. Night Shyamalan (who was heralded as the next Spielberg, before he made any other movies), but it also painfully reminds us how awful Signs was. Spielberg's remake is much better, don't misunderstand me. But it is the same movie.

When I heard complaints about the ending, I assumed that meant they changed it from the original ending, as they seem to like to do in remakes these days, but no, indeed it is the familiar ending. I guess people don't really know how the original ends. Of course, in this day and age, it might be much harder to buy such an ending; the alien technology certainly requires an understanding of the atom, and it seems unlikely that they'd miss microbes on their way to investigating the atom, and similarly unlikely that their species evolved without stopping off at the single-cell stage, so that they might be fully unaware of such a thing. Also, Spielberg's need for happy endings is a disease. When an annoying character does his billionth unbelievably stupid thing and dies, you know he didn't really die. I would have liked an explanation for how he managed to save his unbelievably stupid ass from the totally unsurvivable fate that befalls the entire regiment he's right next to, though. At least the stepdad didn't die, resparking the romance between Cruise and his ex-wife. Ugh.

Anyway, other stupid things: An EMP knocks out every electronic device near the lightning storm in the beginning. Including his wind-up watch. OK, that's stupid. But then just two minutes later we see a shot of someone using a camcorder to film the tripod. How did that happen to survive? The plane wreckage was totally unrealistic, and there's no way a house would survive the flaming jetfuel of a 747 falling on it. Nor would the engine still be spinning the next day, not to mention that the plane shouldn't have even been flying that night, given what we know about US emergency flight policy after 9/11. So yeah, there's not a lot of following the rules in this movie.

So it's pretty similar to Signs. Why is it somewhat better? Well, it has some more action (although from the ads I wasn't expecting half the movie to be spent in a basement). Spielberg has a genius for intense scenes in thrillers like this, and several are quite well done. There's nothing like the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park, but the honk sound that the tripods emit is fantastic, and sounds like alien death.

And then that ending, though.

Apple and Intel

2005-06-12T03:11:00.000-04:00

You might already think that Apple's decision to use Intel chips is a good idea, but I think it's a great idea.

Markets, as they grow and mature, tend to get more specialized. It used to be, you could get a Model T in any color, as long as it was black. Today's car market caters to such specialized tastes as "small-cab pickups" and "luxury sports sedan." So it is becoming for computing. The days of the do-it-all machine are disappearing, and we're moving towards more devices and more specialized devices. There's no way that a single chip can provide the outstanding floating point performance that games want, as well as the dynamic reordering and so forth that a mainstream PC needs to run older code efficiently. Not at a decent price/heat-level/whatever. Choices have to be made, and it makes sense for floating point monsters to be made for game machines at the expense of other factors. The PC is being dismantled into smaller pieces and moved towards a greater variety of more specialized configurations; there'll be cheap game consoles, expensive workstations for content creation, cheap media recording/receiving/playback machines, cheap machines for internet connectivity, and so forth. It's a natural process, and we'll probably end up with much better products for it.

Well, pity poor Apple. They were one of the first to see this trend and a few years ago, Jobs told us his strategy: make the Mac the "digital hub" of the home, connecting and distributing media and so forth to TVs and stereos. They've made some great progress on this end, with their digital music and AirPort lines, and so forth. I expect some more good stuff to come from them for video and movies.

However, a few weeks ago I wrote about the competitive threat that the new video game consoles were going to present to Apple. They too want to be digital hubs of the home, and they have the content that's going to drive people to buy them up and connect them to TVs and stereos. iTunes and AirPort Express is great, but those PS3s and Xbox2s are going to present real problems for Apple, because they don't have any games to get people to connect up with their stack. Some people might go for hybrid solutions, but it's obvious that people will only favor one solution. I've also suggested that Apple team up with one of the obvious winners (Sony or Microsoft), or find someone else who is being left out in the cold and combine forces with them, like Nintendo.

But Apple found someone even better: Intel. With the next wave of home entertainment devices, Microsoft, Sony, and IBM are all winning, and even Apple is better positioned than Intel to profit from this trend. Now, with Apple, Intel has a vector into the home, and Jobs did hint that they had other consumer electronics devices planned with Intel. Major PC manufacturers, like Dell and Gateway have attempted to move into this space by selling flat-panel TVs, and other devices, but that's clearly not going to be where the value is. If Intel is smart, they'll treat Apple very well, and not just as another relatively low-volume PC-maker.

So, in concrete terms, I don't know what can go on here. I suspect that by moving to Intel chips, Apple has greatly improved the chances of people buying their machines. Windows will probably run on the new Macs, though Apple has said it won't work out of the box, and game developers seem to see moving to another platform with the same chips as easier than moving to a different platform with different chips. Perhaps Apple will even be able to use some VMWare or Wine-like technology to get decent game emulation performance for specific games. I'm sure they've explored that, but I don't think that's a likely scenario.

They've got a big hungry giant they can work with, and if they're both smart, they'll find ways to get in on the big living room opportunity that Microsoft and Sony are fighting over. I think this is a likely happening, because Intel can also see what's going on, they see that they are being left out of the party, and they know that the average PC manufacturer's idea of an innovative consumer product is putting their logo on a flat-panel TV. Apple is a company that can make this happen for them. Even without the games, Apple knows users and knows user interfaces. It's not impossible that Apple's offerings will be so far superior to Sony's and Microsoft's that most users will use Apple's offerings for everything that isn't games, very much like the fact that the PS2 is a crappy DVD player has resulted in most people having a separate DVD player in addition to their PS2.

Why not AMD: Great chips, great performance, great prices, absolutely doesn't address either of the main reasons for Apple's switch [very well]: notebook chips and supply reliability. That's about all there is to say about AMD. Maybe their notebook line will shape up, but they've got a long way to go on being a reliable chip supplier. If you're gonna switch, might as well solve that headache for good, and the deal will be sweeter if you go straight there.

Profiles in Horrible Leadership Skills, with Miguel de Icaza

2005-06-02T14:59:00.000-04:00

Shawn pointed out to me last night that I really have it in for Miguel de Icaza. I just can't help it. He's just such a horrible leader, and I figured I'd write about it, since, you know, it's not like any Gnome people are gonna write about it and let the people who couldn't watch the speeches know what was being said and decided about the future of Gnome.

I watched his keynote GUADEC speech last night, and it was unbelievable. His speaking style is best described as "unrehearsed." Most of the speech seemed like a long ramble based on a few slides, which he made up as he went along. There was no vision for the future of Gnome presented, aside from some vague statements about the need for better usability testing.

Other great moments in leadership:

He asked the audience how many people were using MacOS X, and after some people raised their hands, spat out "What are you doing here? You're at the wrong conference!" He was kidding, I think, but if you watch the speech, he wasn't being sufficiently cheerful for that to come across. In any case, really bad idea to imply, even jokingly, the non-Gnome developers who went to Stuttgart to see him speak are not welcome in the community.
He openly stated that he was hoping that Gnome would adopt his company's Mono technology, and screw his competitors (Red Hat, Sun), who otherwise provide just as much funding and manpower (I would guess) to the Gnome project.
Someone mentioned Java, and although both sides of the exchange aren't audible, he replied that (in effect) we don't have to think about Java in Gnome because no one is using it. When asked how many people used Java versus .Net, de Icaza said that one study said there were more .Net programmers than Java programmers, and another study said that there were twice as many Java programmers as .Net programmers. Of course, he preferred the former study. Clearly he prefers Gnome to have a large tent.

For contrast, look at Jeff Waugh's "10x10" talk, which at least judging by Planet Gnome, has gotten developers excited. Waugh was the person at the conference who articulated a vision for Gnome. His vision was to have Gnome achieve 10% global desktop marketshare by 2010. He probably knows as well as everyone else that that won't happen.

Still, his talk was a creative, well-spoken list of suggestions for how to get there: why aren't we taking full advantage of our "friends in high places," like Google, Novell, Red Hat, HP, Sun, and the trade press? Why aren't we engaging hardware vendors to see what it would take for them to ship Gnome pre-installed on their computers (in certain configuratios), so that we can work towards that? Why aren't we engaging independent software vendors to make them feel more like their applications are a part of Gnome even if they don't ship in the Gnome distribution? Why aren't we usability-testing our APIs instead of just our user interfaces? Why do we discourage software from Gnome being ported and distributed on Windows, which helps users move to our platform incrementally, and gets them excited about it? Why do we insist on shipping software that we think is abstractly elegant, but our end-users overwhelmingly tell us they hate? Why don't we see keeping our language bindings up to date as part of our job?

All of those suggestions would greatly improve the Gnome project, whether or not they meet their 10x10 goals. As Thoreau said, "In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high." That is the role of a leader, telling them what to aim at, and how to hit it.

A Day Without an Indonesian

2005-05-27T14:53:00.000-04:00

Only rarely do we get to witness experimental macroeconomics, but here's a little experiment Malaysia tried.

In other Indonesia news, an Australian woman was sentenced to 20 years in an Indonesian prison today for smuggling a few pounds of marijuana. What I find so remarkable about this story is that this sentence is entirely in line with US sentencing guidelines for similar crimes in the United States, and yet it is being reported as shocking news. It is shocking, and I would consider it cruel and unusual punishment, but I'm still surprised to see anyone in this country care about it.

Wow, a Sucky Google Product

2005-05-20T10:35:00.000-04:00

I thought the idea of Google Personal was pretty neat. While Yahoo and other portal sites create these cluttered monstrosities filled with ads, the idea of being able to put a bunch of useful stuff on my homepage is appealing. Google did launch this so that it is simple and free of ads, which I do appreciate very much. Similarly, the easy, dynamic configuration is simply awesome, and does things I didn't know web pages could do. Finally, the fact that they are leaving their regular www.google.com homepage as simple as it was before (instead of trying to sell everyone on it and cluttering it up), is the absolute right thing to do.

However, most of their content offerings are kinda lame. I do like the weather and maps (though it only lets you do driving directions), but Slashdot? Come on. In fact, most of the things you can add on there are kinda sorry: Wired News, Quote of the Day, and only 12 items over all. If you go on over to My Yahoo the number of options they offer for your personal homepage makes Google look pathetic: sports scores, TV listings, comics, many more news items, and so forth. Making Google look as cluttered as Yahoo is against the whole purpose, but if you're gonna make this thing, you need more options than what they're offering.

The whole thing is even lamer at another level, though. In order to use Google Personal, you need to be logged into your Gmail account, even if you don't want it to show you your email inbox when you go to your homepage. Since there's no difference between being logged into Google Personal and Gmail, it means that in order for it to even function, you've got to leave your Gmail account logged in at all times! This is a terrible idea, and it's totally unnecessary. We have proof by existence (Amazon, for example), that a web site can remember who you are and your personal settings without you actually having to be logged into your account. Having to log into your homepage is stupid, and leaving your Google account logged in is a horrible thing to encourage from a security perspective, so I simply cannot believe Google Personal functions this way.

I know it's beta, and I'm sure it'll get better with time, since Google is very good about revising this stuff. But being beta at Google is pretty much meaningless, and everyone knows it. This is the most underwhelming major release in ages.

Tactics

2005-05-18T18:43:00.000-04:00

Today I discovered a book online that I absolutely love. It's called (I think) Ward Farnsworth's Predator at the Chessboard (linked to from Volokh).

There's two things I take from this. The first is that this is probably the best book on Chess that I've ever read for beginners (I am obviously not qualified to comment on more advanced books, being a beginner). I've long known all the rules of the game, but I've never had any idea what I was doing at all. I made a few attempts to figure things out when I was in middle school, but the literature I could find flew over my head and was practically useless (much talk of openings and so forth). So it was a good sign that when I read the beginning of the book, explaining its rationale, I found this paragraph:

What was said about strategy can be said as well about openings. You can spend enormous time mastering the details of an opening―say, the Italian Game or the French Defense. The yield of those efforts, in victories and in fun, probably will be small. You frequently will find that your opponent’s play drags you away from the opening you studied; and even if not, the payoff of a successful opening usually is a minor advantage in position. By itself the advantage will not win you anything or bring you much pleasure. What will bring you immense pleasure, whether or not you know much about openings, is taking your opponent’s pieces. And to do that you need to learn how to use tactics―the weaponry of the chessboard.

This book talks about chess like a human being, explaining the elements of tactics, and how you should be looking at the board, then provides many examples of the same ideas over and over. I'll obviously still get my ass kicked the next time I try to play, and Chess doesn't really fascinate me enough to warrant my investing much time improving my game, but for the first time I felt like I was able to read the board positions provided and figure out a decent picture of what was going on. Well-written, and highly recommended.

The other thing I'll say about this book is that "My God, this is a fantastic way to present a book." If you dig in, you'll find that the book is done in small chunks, with a frame on the left for the board illustration. This is such a fantastic way to present the materials in a book, because when you need to scroll down, you can keep the relevant illustration in sight. I often read math books or economics papers, and find myself having to stick most of the fingers on one hand between different pages to keep an easy reference to the equations or diagrams referenced throughout the text. Imagine if people adopted this sort of organization for math books, easily presenting everything that each chunk of the text refers to while you read. Brilliant.

Microsoft Just Can't Do Consumer Devices

2005-05-17T12:21:00.000-04:00

I feel kind of embarassed for Microsoft after Sony's Playstation 3 announcement last night. I can just imagine the smiles on the faces of Sony executives when they tuned into the MTV special last thursday night. Let me put it this way. When I first started playing the first video clip of the PS3, I thought for a second...just a second, mind you, but there was definitely that instant of confusion...that they were starting off with video footage of a race car being fueled up so that they could compare it to the console's rendering. Of course, it was just the console's rendering the whole time, but that's the point. Here's what the Gamespot editors wrote about Killzone 2:

The models and animations here are so smooth, in fact, that it's tempting to assume that the Killzone 2 footage is prerendered or somehow doctored, but if it is all in-engine, and we have no reason to believe that it's not, then it's going to be hard to imagine a game coming along during E3 that's more visually impressive than this.

I find that caution about what they actually saw telling. Unless Sony is being very misleading by showing pre-rendered footage from a first-person perspective with the "gun-in-hands" view and not showing any actual footage of the game itself, that's pretty much all you need to know about how the next round of the console war will shake out.

Before we knew what the PS3 was going to look like, I was assuming (like many others, I imagine), that Microsoft knew its place in the gaming console world. If you're not the gigantic Sony, then to get a foothold on the market you've got to have some draw that makes people want your console. For Nintendo, that draw is obviously Shigeru Miyamoto and the goldmine of intellectual property they own that allows them to make games for ridiculously underpowered hardware and still sell almost as much as the Xbox. For Microsoft, that draw was having ridiculously overpowered hardware and an architecture that was similar enough to a PC to lure PC developers onto the console.

I think Microsoft was pretty successful in the last round. They entered the market last against two very established console brands, and now stand having sold about 3 million more Xboxes than Nintendo has sold Gamecubes (the statistics I've seen put Sony at about 30 million PS2s, Xbox at around 13 million, and Nintendo at around 11 million). The console had to do entirely without such huge PS2 hits as the Final Fantasy series, the Grand Theft Auto series, and the Metal Gear Solid series, and obviously they never had Mario or Metroid or Zelda like Nintendo did.

Still, starting out with almost no developers, they managed to attract a sizable market. I think without a doubt, Halo was instrumental in drawing gamers to Xbox. You just had to look at the game and it was obvious that no other system was going to offer the graphics or the game experience that Halo could. I think other developers came along to Xbox for two reasons: either they were PC developers for whom moving to the Xbox was a relatively easy step, or they were developers who were hoping to exploit the far superior hardware. Just look at the difference between Splinter Cell on the Xbox (2) and the same game on the PS2 (2). The gamers came along for two different reasons: Xbox Live and the far superior hardware.

Still, Microsoft was obviously frustrated. Not only did Sony's little thing, with its smaller RAM, crappy graphics, and no online functionality, continue to beat them in sales, but Sony made a profit on each one while Microsoft could never turn a profit on the Xbox. Apparently the lesson Microsoft took from this was: release your console first, and make sure you can make money on it.

Neither is a bad thing to do, but Microsoft has probably gone too far in the other direction. With the Xbox they couldn't lower their processor costs very easily because Intel had control of the processor. For the Xbox2, Microsoft has designed their own chip and presumably they'll be able to take advantage of competitive bidding by fabs to lower the costs on the chips, and they've also rushed to get it out to market about a half year before the PS3 comes out. I think both of these moves were mistakes.

The processor issue goes both ways. Using the x86 made it easier for them to get the Xbox to market and it made it easier for game developers to support the console. However, it made it so that the only way they could have backwards compatibility was to continue using the x86 chip, which is really hard to emulate. That has forced them into a difficult position: either they choose backwards compatibility, or face the real possibility that they can never make money on the Xbox. Phrased like that, it's not hard to see why they chose to rip off the bandaid sooner instead of later.

Before the PS3 was announced, I was impressed with Microsoft's PR campaign which kept the Xbox in the news for weeks leading up to the announcement. I also looked at the next Xbox as something that would essentially try to be what the Xbox was in the console market, and so I assumed that Microsoft was using the best components they could get to make sure that the Xbox was going to keep a least a slight RAM, processor, and graphics chip advantage over the PS3, even if it came out sooner.

Now that the PS3 has been announced, it's pretty clear that this is not even close to being the case. The PS3 has as much total RAM as the Xbox2, and its CPU runs the same architecture (PowerPC) and clockspeed as the Xbox2's. But that RAM is connected to an overwhelmingly superior graphics chip from NVidia, and that CPU seems to have much more parallelism than the Xbox2's. The PS3 supports more media types and its games come on much higher-capacity discs. It supports the same high resolution as the Xbox2, but it supports two simultaneous monitors as well. It has built-in WiFi connectivity, and on top of that, it can communicate wirelessly with a PSP to coordinate games like the Dreamcast's little controller screen did. Sony appears to have finally formulated a cohesive online experience as well to rival Xbox Live.

Sony is obviously carefully managing what we know about the PS3 at this point, but it's hard to ignore those screenshots. If Microsoft had something that looked that good, they'd show it. The worst part of it for Microsoft is, all of the interesting games that they announced for the Xbox2 turn out to also be coming out for PS3 as well: Alan Wake, 2 Days to Vegas, Dark Sector, Darkness, Demonik, Splinter Cell 4, Ghost Recon 3. Some of these are going to suck, but it's hard to see the Xbox's gems showing up the PS3, where they will without a doubt look better. It's going to be really hard for Halo 3 and Perfect Dark Zero to overcome this software lineup.

There are some situations that are so stacked against you that not losing completely is a sort of success. By that measure, the Xbox was very successful. It's hard to see any route to similar success for Microsoft here. Microsoft said they would announce whether or not the Xbox2 would be backwards compatible after the PS3 announcement (well, they didn't phrase it like that, but it's clear that's what they were thinking), and after the PS3 was announced, they did say that the Xbox2 would be backwards compatible, but only for certain games. That's not going to do it.

Looking longer-term, I think Microsoft has taken the first losing step in what was a bigger battle: the battle for the consumer living room. Microsoft has said before that they want to be in the living room very, very badly, but they've clearly been outplayed here. The PS3, aside from being a rocking games console, and looking a lot more like sleek appliance to match a sexy LCD TV (slot-loading drive!), is like a universal media adapter attached to your TV set.

Other thoughts: This announcement explains a lot of Sony's previous behavior. They've committed to BluRay for the PS3, and it's hard to imagine them making some compromise with Toshiba over HD-DVD that doesn't keep the BluRay disc structure.

I think this also hurts Apple, the other company that has had a great shot at owning the living room. Apple and Sony have very different strategies for this; so far Apple has been reluctant to sell an appliance for this sort of thing (I don't think that's how they see the Mac Mini), preferring instead to mesh seamlessly into the home through WiFi and devices that work with PCs and stereos and other existing devices. However, Sony has a big presence there assured, and you can bet that Sony CONNECT (their online music store) is going to make an appearance on the PS3. Sony also said that you would be able to buy movies on the PS3, though I haven't seen any more details on that. With all the media ports on the back of the PS3, it could well become the new sync point for portable music players.

This all makes me wonder how much Steve Jobs has known about this. I am thinking back to Macworld in January, where Jobs brought the CEO of Sony onto the stage so they could show off their new HD camera. They laughed and said nice things about each other, and talked about how 2005 was going to be "the year of HD" (high-def). Apple can't make a killer game console, so it'll be interesting to see how this will affect their media business. As much as I'd love to see Apple and Sony partner or merge (and I think it could make sense), I don't see that happening.

And yes, I call it the Xbox2 instead of Xbox360. Xbox360 is just such a horribly bad name I can't stand to use it. It strikes me as the sort of thing Microsoft would think was important: getting a 3 in the name so that the PS3 wouldn't have a bigger number. It just winds up making the thing seem kind of boring and generic instead. It's almost as bad as...well, "Xbox."

Oh great! Right as I'm finished, Microsoft announces that Xbox2 will support Media Center and let you stream content to your TV screen through the Xbox2. Spur of the moment, I don't think that's quite going to do the trick...the PS3 IS (or can be) the media center PC. But I am going to hit Publish Post now before more announcements come out to render what I've written obsolete.

Update: Just saw on Gizmodo that BluRay/HD-DVD unification talks have failed. Interesting timing, of course. For an insight into what Microsoft was thinking for the Xbox2, check out this article on Kotaku. The summary is: "We believe that despite the evidence (TurboGrafix 16, Atari Jaguar, and Dreamcast), getting to market first wins."

Was Miguel de Icaza Always This Creepy?

2005-05-11T11:33:00.000-04:00

The Gnome language wars have started up again after a good 9 months of nothing happening. Havoc Pennington posted yesterday saying that Red Hat simply cannot ever ship Mono, due to pre-existing legal reasons that they can't talk about, and are having a hard time working around. That is the sort of thing that is hard to verify, but it's quite possibly true (Red Hat has made lots of deals with software and hardware vendors, and you can easily see some agreement being made or some code being shared that has tainted Red Hat somehow in this issue).

So Miguel de Icaza, helpful guy that he is, responds saying "Hey, too bad for them. They can just not ship the Mono stuff when they ship Gnome!" Wow, you'd love that wouldn't you? Red Hat is your biggest and really only competitor for [essentially] control of desktop Linux, and if they can't ship a good deal of the Gnome platform, you're more than happy to hear that, aren't you? You love the full-time programmers they've had hack on Gnome for years and years on GTK, Pango, Cairo, Mozilla, and so forth, and you're more than happy to just screw them over and be The One. Your concern for the community and your commitment to the spirit of freedom and sharing of open source has truly touched me.

The iPod is Not a Fad

2005-05-07T00:39:00.000-04:00

Since many companies are releasing their quarterly results about now, I happened to notice a few days ago that some analysts have been predicting an iPod "backlash," or "white earbud fatigue," because with it's insane market dominance, the iPod will stop being cool. I disagree with this theory for a number of reasons.

First of all, the iPod is not a pair of Ugg boots. It's a functional device, and how fashionable it is is only one consideration people have when deciding what to buy. That is probably why luxury brands for things like cars, watches, and hotels have much more staying power compared to things like clothes and hair styles. Given the portability of a small music player, something aesthetically pleasing is very desirable, but in a device people want to have with them at all times, the elegance and simplicity of its interface is part of the luxury. I think a large part of the gap between Apple's market share and that of other major players can be explained not so much by Apple's hipness, but by how well-designed their offerings are.

First of all, the scrollwheel is an excellent interface for such a device. The latest incarnation is very advanced, and works wonderfully. By being circular, you can easily scroll through a list without having to stop. The problem for competitors is that there's one company that owns all the patents on these touch-screen devices (Synaptics), and they have an exclusivity deal with Apple on a circular scrollwheel. Zen has equipped its players with a straight up and down region that accelerates like Apple's scrollwheel, and other players use directional buttons and other similar interfaces, but you don't even have to try them out to know that they just don't cut it in comparison. Eventually Synaptics's patents will expire, but until then, I think Apple will be able to write a check large enough to keep their exclusivity with Synaptics. So this is a pretty hard mountain for a competitor to climb.

On top of that, no one else seems to have their act together with respect to the software. Part of what makes the iPod so wonderful to use is the excellent integration with iTunes, which enforces a model of your iPod's library that is easy for users to understand: when you connect your iPod, it will be synchronized to match your iTunes library. Other devices require various other software packages to manage and synchronize your music library, and these other pieces of software are not as mature or well-designed as iTunes. Yes, there is some increase in choice in that certain pieces of software work with devices by different manufacturers, but not all of them. The major pieces of software (Sony Connect, Napster) seem to be more interested in selling you their subscription music than helping you rip, manage, or play your music on your computer, which would result in my not using it (but that's just me).

It seems inevitable that the software/hardware integration problem will get better on the non-Apple platform, but I'm not seeing any movement on that at all so far. The hardware manufacturers themselves probably don't have the resources to invest in creating amazingly great software themselves. It's hard to see Napster shifting their interfaces to be "music management with a music store" instead of "a music store with library management," since that is the only thing they make money on, but Sony might do it. Any day now, they might start getting their act together on the software. Soon.

But the scrollwheel issue is much harder to solve. And as time goes on, all those people who have been buying those third of a billion songs on iTunes Music Store seem less and less likely to walk away from their investment in those files, and buy them again somewhere else so that they can use a (possibly excellent) non-iPod device.

More Thoughts on Operating Systems

2005-05-02T12:08:00.000-04:00

One thing that struck me as I read the ArsTechnica article I previously mentioned was how backwards MacOS X's kernel has been. Until Tiger, it has essentially had a "big kernel lock," though some footnotes apply to that statement. Furthermore, until Tiger, they had not frozen the low-level kernel interfaces in MacOS X, making kernel extensions, file systems, and certain drivers a pain in the ass to develop. Tiger also improves the limited support for 64-bit processors as well.

"What a shame," I thought, "that they didn't choose Linux as their kernel." Linux got rid of their big kernel lock with 2.4, which came out in 2001. The most recent release of the Linux kernel (2.6, which came out in 2003) goes a step farther and is preemptive, a huge win for system responsiveness in interactive applications (read: desktops!). Linux has also had full support for 64-bit PowerPC chips since 2001, with full backwards compatibility with 32-bit applications. As for the stable kernel interfaces, two out of three ain't bad.

So you look at this situation and go, hm, Apple has been making multiprocessor 64-bit desktop machines for a couple of years now. It's like Apple is totally unable to ship an operating system that takes advantage of their current hardware at all, if you look back at how long it took them to ship an operating system that was actually PowerPC native. And, you know, had all the things Windows 95 had.

Gnome and Apple share a very important trait, and that is that they're willing to break with tradition that is stupid. Apple looked at unix and said, "Hey, we can make a great system using this, and fixing what is bad about it." So they ported all the unix utilities to use a standardized XML configuration file format. When I first heard about that with the first release of MacOS X, I thought, "Aha, this is a great idea. This means we only need one parser, knowledge of one syntax, the files are easily displayed through a user-friendly editing interface, and they can be machine-verified for correctness. Surely this will be moved over to Linux in short order." In a word, that has not happened. The Linux types hate it.

Similarly, with Tiger, Apple has fixed the mess that is /etc/rc.d with their faster, more elegant launchd solution. Aaaand, they hate it.

Now, look at Gnome. They've based their configuration file format on GConf, which in practice is always mapped to XML files. Similarly, look at Seth Nickell's proposal for an init replacement that he called SystemServices. It's remarkably similar to launchd, but it never got written.

I would say that if anything, Gnome hasn't been thinking big enough. They've made changes against the kicking and screaming of the unix core, and in so doing dragged them into the, well, a few years past where they were. There isn't anyone performing this sort of modernization on other parts of Linux, however. In my fantasies, a company comes along and decides to build a desktop/workstation system, using Linux as its foundation. Only instead of designing backwards from what software is out there, they design the system and then adapt the software to do what it needs to do, breaking with existing projects if necessary (be that forking or replacing them entirely). Such an entity providing a more stable, centralized location for a software developer to aim at would probably be a very good influence in the Linux market. In my fantasies, they would write kernel driver modules that export a stable, binary-only interface for drivers and are updated to talk to the kernel on the other side whenever the kernel developers try to break those interfaces (Linux has held the line on binary-only drivers long enough; it's clear that the hardware makers would rather just not bother enabling their hardware to work in Linux than providing documentation or source code).

I could keep on elaborating about how great it would be if they would design some vaguely stylish looking x86 hardware to tightly integrate with, and so forth, but the reality is that it could never happen. Although building such a system is probably not as daunting as it might at first seem (Linux is closer than it would seem from outward appearances), no company would want to surrender so much control to a large lineup of widely varied personalities and interests.

And that is probably why Apple decided against choosing Linux.

Thoughts on Operating Systems

2005-05-01T01:01:00.000-04:00

If there's been a theme so far in MacOS X development, I would say it is that every new release contains two types of features: those they hype, and those they don't. As awesome as I think Spotlight looks, I have been looking forward to Tiger more for the second sort of feature. Of course, I didn't have any proof that Tiger would contain any of this sort of feature, but make sure you don't miss this article on ArsTechnica that details exactly what those under-the-hood features are. I suggest you skip his pages and pages of ranting about metadata, but the rest of the article is fascinating, not only because it explains what is new in Tiger, but also because it describes what was wrong in previous releases of MacOS X (stuff you wouldn't believe). On page 14, you learn that there is a potentially tremendous speed increase in Tiger that is turned off by default, apparently because it's not quite ready for prime-time.

I also wanted to point out this blog post by Edd Dumbill, a Gnome developer. He touches on something I've talked about before, namely the problem Gnome has created by not making a decision on what to do about high level languages. As Charles Simonyi (Microsoft programmer extraordinaire) said, "It is often more important to make timely decisions than it is to make correct ones."

This year's handwringing in the Gnome camp appears to be related to whether or not Gnome can develop the "next-generation" of user interface with its current development methodology. I think a lot of the thinking here is pretty misguided. There seems to be this fantasy among many of the hackers that 3.0 will be where Gnome finally becomes the user interface designer's utopia, and radically departs from most of the interfaces that computer users are used to across platforms. I think that that won't happen, and it really probably shouldn't happen. First of all, Gnome developers might or might not remember that they were at this point before, when they were trying to make 2.0 happen. It festered, undone, for many years, before some sanity was brought to the project and much smaller, more reasonable changes were%2

That's all I'm going to post now, because although this represents only about a third of what I'd actually written, Blogger ate the rest of it (I didn't even do anything that would have required me to submit the page, or so I thought, so I hadn't yet copied the text to save it from the Blogger post-eater). And you ask why I don't blog as much anymore.

OK, fine, I'll rewrite the gist of what I wrote. I am so unbelievably angry, though.

made so that 2.0 was finally completed. The final version of Gnome 2.0 didn't look all that fundamentally different from 1.0, but it has certainly enabled a long and stable stream of releases that have built the platform up to where in many respects, it is the equal of other systems.

The changes suggested by the Gnome 3.0 wiki don't seem to be driven by any actual user needs, but more by what might be called "architecture astronauts" if we were talking about APIs instead of user interfaces. The basic idea is correct, sure: user-centric objects are much more important these days. But we are getting to the advanced stages of a shift in focus that has happened before. Just as interface-centric concerns eclipsed kernel features in importance, the actual desktop shell is being pushed down the operating system stack as mostly finished. In its place, domain specific applications are becoming the new focus of user attention.

Applications like iTunes and Picasa are practically file-specific operating system features. The idea of using a file manager to work with music or photographs is rendered ridiculous by these applications. I interact with thousands of times more music or picture files through these applications than I do through the file manager. Similarly, integrated and comprehensive desktop search capabilities are about to render the use of the file manager as outdated as managing your browser bookmarks. (I'm not saying the file manager will disappear or anything like that; I still make bookmarks for certain things in my browser. I just think it's going to become much more exceptional for a user to have to jump into it).

The Gnome hackers are onboard with this much, but they seem to want these functionalities to be a part of Gnome, with Gnome as a sort of mega-application that intelligently displays all your data in its own specific way, much like you would use iTunes. I think this is misguided, because these applications are complex and Gnome doesn't have the resources to develop them to the level they need to be at. Third-party developers certainly aren't going to want to step out of the way and let their software become anonymously integrated with Gnome, and with all of the internal data being free for the desktop shell (or competitors) to use. Gnome hackers might respond that they're trying to build a free and open desktop, but they should also remember that most of the interesting software currently available for Gnome, even if free, is created by external projects that might have very different goals (for example, Firefox, OpenOffice, Gimp, and so forth all desire some amount of portability).

I realize I am putting words in their mouths, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how else their vision should be interpretted. I would say instead that the desktop shell is basically done, with all the major operating systems having converged on basically the same design. Gnome should focus on maintaining excellence and enabling even better applications to run on their platform (especially, for example, recent work on the graphics capabilities of the Linux desktop). But I think they should also realize that any attempts to move the Linux desktop forward through what is basically the desktop shell are probably doomed to failure. The next step forward is going to have to come from the development of those data-centric and task-centric applications. Until Gnome has some polished alternative to iTunes and Picasa, I really can't use it. And the reality is, most of those applications can be developed perfectly well on Gnome as it currently stands. Perhaps Gnome should even consider making itself smaller and tighter, the mere meeting point for the applications that are, when taken together, truly going to provide the next generation of user interface.

Update: Fortunately, a lot of the bigwigs in Gnome seem to...well, I won't make the potentially libelous claim that they agree with me, but they do seem to have the same thoughts. For instance, here's Havoc Pennington.

Reality in Exile

2005-04-18T10:47:00.000-04:00

After all of the posthumous hagiographical obituaries of Andrea Dworkin last week, this is exactly the dose of reality I was hoping I would see someone write.

Same goes for this piece pointing out [the obvious fact] that Pope John Paul II did not actually stop communism.

More on Linux (I was right)

2005-02-20T12:54:00.000-05:00

So, when I wrote the previous post, I was too lazy to find the old article I wrote about whether Gnome should adopt Mono. But I got bored today, so I dug it out. Sure enough, I predicted that if the Mono-proponents were allowed to continue implementing software with it (without clarity about the fate of Mono in Gnome), Gnome would be unable to resist adopting it eventually:

However, this isn't a debate Mono fans want to have right now (and Nat Friedman pretty much said as much). Whatever the reason for this oddly SCO-like delaying instinct, it does have another effect. By delaying the decision, Mono benefits from this uncertainty with respect to the Gnome project's decision; people will continue to write more and more software with Mono that is meant for the Gnome eco-system. When it does come time to make a decision, there will be so much Mono-based software that it will be hard for Gnome to turn it all down.

Nicely played, Mono guys.

Some Thoughts on Linux

2005-02-18T16:31:00.000-05:00

It's often said that Linux, due to its open source nature, can't really be innovative. I think Sabayon, a recently announced project, demonstrates that that's not necessarily true (the conventional wisdom that Linux project names suck still cannot be rejected, however).

It is a sysadmin tool for Gnome desktops, and it has a really clever idea about how to do this. Instead of a gigantic tool for setting all sorts of settings, which need to be specially programmed and documented, Sabayon simply opens a new X session in a window, pays attention to what preferences you change in that session, and then saves that as a configuration that you can then push out to users. Check out the blog post for a walk-through of how this works. This is a really clever solution to the problem, and I think it will ultimately prove to be very useful and attractive to administrators (especially amateur administrators).

I think it's also interesting that this is a solution that you pretty much just could not do on Windows without a huge amount of deep magic and/or expensive software. Perhaps there is something to the protocol-based nature of X-Windows afterall.

While I'm here, I'd also like to point out some promising Linux projects aimed at end-users. Some of this software looks so great, that it actually moves me towards wanting to run Linux to use it. For example, Tomboy is really cool, and I often find myself wishing I had it handy. I've also wanted a search tool like Google's search service recently, but I've found all of the offerings to be unattractive for one reason or another. Apple's Spotlight looks really good, but Beagle looks almost as good (I especially hope they implement the searching for control panel preferences that Spotlight does). Related to Beagle is Dashboard, which is a sidebar that constantly brings up information related to what you're doing. Some hackers are working on coding up an X server (Xgl) that runs on top of OpenGL, which would really speed up X and make a MacOS X-like interface possible. The recently announced Hula Project probably won't be of direct interest to most users, since it is just an email and calendaring server, but it looks promising and should make corporate users happy, if Linux ever gets rolled out there. iFolder makes it so that I can stop emailing myself files by setting up a centralized file server and service so that you can have a directory synchronize with other machines in the background. Currently, emailing files to yourself is just about the only good way to have your files in multiple locations, and it's a really archaic way of doing it. If Linux continues to accumulate desirable software like this...

One thing I should point out is that most of the software I mentioned above is written in Mono (not Hula or Xgl). I've written previously about Mono and whether or not the Gnome community should be embracing it (specifically, I thought they shouldn't). Looking back on it now, it's a different picture. By really embracing it, they have managed to push out some rapid and impressive software projects. Having that software available is doing a lot of good for Linux, and although I can't say for sure whether that is worth the potential legal problems with Mono (depends on whether or not the threats ever manifest themselves), it certainly puts more weight on the "yes" side of the scale.

Finally, I think it's interesting that several pieces of software I just mentioned are actually very near the "web services" space, despite being open source. Hula is really only a web service, and iFolder requires a server you can connect to. No one is going to run those servers for free, and few people will have the hardware, bandwidth, and expertise necessary to set them up for their own usage, but I'd pay a reasonable fee for a "Novell Web Services Suite" that will let me move my files around and calendar with my friends (or tolerate ads to use it). I don't know what this means in the big picture, but I do find the development of open source web service software interesting. Perhaps it points to a reason to pay for Linux distributions: pay for the support, get the web services along with it.

Afterthought: I started off talking about how open source can be innovative. I should also point out that both Beagle and Dashboard were projects that were started before Apple announced Spotlight and before Microsoft announced Implicit Query. Which doesn't mean the open source software started first, or will hit 1.0 first, but it does mean that they thought of these projects on their own.

Notes on Star Wars: Republic Commando

2005-02-05T01:02:00.000-05:00

Tycho seemed to like this game, but I have no idea why. It sounded like a very interesting concept; a strategic shooter, where you order a small team of commandos around while fighting alongside them. Abstractly, that idea rocks. This game sucks, though.

The first thing I have to say about this game is that it looks worse than Half-Life 2 and runs much slower. There's really no excuse for that. Perhaps Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source have spoiled me, but it just doesn't feel like an action game when you throw a grenade next to a bunch of barrels and it doesn't throw them around when it explodes.

The game has conceptual problems also. While the squad-based strategy stuff sounds interesting, in reality all of the possible orders you can give are predetermined. If you come across an area and notice that it will let you assign a sniper to a stack of barrels, well, you should do it. I guess. Usually there are less of these spots than there are guys on your team, which makes it all kind of moot, in my opinion. There was one spot in the game where I got stuck in a deadend. I hadn't realized that there was actually a wall that could be demolished. It looked like any other wall...no other random walls could be knocked down before that point. It just sucked until I noticed the demolition spot. Sometimes you need your hacker guy to hack a door to open it. You might find yourself in a room, getting shot at by a billion guys, and the guy doesn't just go open it. It's frustrating. You just want to go, look, there's one thing that can be done in this room, why don't you just go do it?

That's another thing, actually. The game seems to have an unlimited supply of bad guys to throw at you until you make progress past a given door or wall. This kind of takes the strategy out of it, since you'll just have to sit there getting whittled down until you figure out what wall or door needs to be opened. I'd much rather you could clear an area of bad guys, but have the bad guys all be tougher. Another thing; the characters are really hard to read because of this. When there's guys pouring into the room without end, it's really hard to figure out where your guys are. It's partially an artwork issue, since the bad guys and your teammates don't really read that well on a dark screen. But it's also just an insanity issue.

I'd rather just zoom in on Warhammer 40k.

Notes on A Fire Upon the Deep

2005-01-24T16:54:00.000-05:00

If you haven't read it, then you probably don't know that A Fire Upon the Deep is as good as your favorite science fiction books or better. It's the type of science fiction book so good that no matter how hard you search, and how patient you are, you only find one of its caliber every few years.

The less I say about it, the better it will be for you, and that extends even to the first line of the prologue. The story is epic and hard to describe. It's so epic that despite how exciting it is, and how unbelievable the visuals would be, and how exciting the last third of the book is, it could never be made into a movie. Best to leave this one quietly in the book, sitting there unnoticed and undisturbed.

Notes on In Good Company

2005-01-24T16:44:00.000-05:00

There will be no notes on In Good Company, because I just composed the post, and Blogger ate the post entirely when I tried to publish it, for the third or fourth time. Hitting back did not preserve the text, so we are just screwed. (Can Blogger please cook up some Javascript to automatically copy your post to your clipboard when you hit "Publish"? Thanks.)

To give you a few of the highlights:

Claire and I were walking around NYU just hours before we saw the movie, which takes place partially on the campus. We didn't know this ahead of time, of course, so it was kind of amusing to see the characters standing and talking right across the street from where we'd just been that same day.

The movie, as Claire says, is very retro. It is bewildered by the modern work environment, with people switching jobs willy nilly, and people getting fired for underperforming instead of the previous comfortable welfare system that a company used to be. "Cross-promoting our magazine with other companies in the conglomerate that owns us?! The perversion!" it says. The magazine the characters work for has no internet presence at all, as far as we can tell, and seems to see it as "the competition" which its crazy customers are momentarily confused about and embracing. The whole movie, from its characters' male-female relations to its bewilderment at this modern world of cellphones and corporate mergers, is very old-fashioned.

Topher Grace and his character are just about the only interesting things in this movie.

What I'm Reading

2005-01-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

Competition of Rules
This article argues against doing something about tort reform at the Federal level, and I absolutely agree.

Hayek for the 21st Century
Great interview with one of Friedrich Hayek's biographers.

Update:

Malpractice vs. "Malresult"
Keeping this entry entirely devoted to Reason articles, they just published another article dealing with the tort reform issue. I'll have to think for a while about what exactly I think about this, but I like his recognition of the difference between malpractice due to doctor negligence and bad outcomes that are out of any doctor's control.

Notes on The Aviator

2005-01-07T13:47:00.000-05:00

For me, you'd have to work really, really hard to mess up a movie about Howard Hughes, and Martin Scorcese and Leonardo DiCaprio are not up to the task. Hughes is such a fascinating character, for his accomplishments as well as his personality, and the movie doesn't even get through the second half of his life. Granted, there's very little known about that period, and I'm not sure how they could have made the movie that long (it's already 3+ hours), but I encourage you to at least read the Wikipedia entry on Howard Hughes to get some of the information about his bizarre later years.

So, again, hard to go wrong, I really liked it. But there were some problems. Others have pointed out that the fact that Howard Hughes was comfortable flying experimental planes of his own design, but unable to touch a doorknob presents certain problems for a filmmaker (as accurate as that may be). Scorcese's solution to this seems to have been to show his mother teaching him to spell "quarantine" at the beginning and leaving it at that. It didn't work that well. The movie also ran a bit long, and certain segments could have been cut out entirely as they didn't really add enough to justify their added runtime.

Cate Blanchett is excellent as Katharine Hepburn. I never thought I could see Leonardo DiCaprio pulling off Howard Hughes, but by the end of the movie, I wasn't thinking about it much. I'm not saying he was as good as Blanchett, but he was surprisingly good. The cinematography wasn't particularly notable, though, which seemed a bit unusual for a Scorcese film. A lot of the scenes involving planes were computer graphics, and he really didn't seem to know how to put together a CG shot very well, either. Still, there is a memorable (and very disturbing) sequence involving a plane crash.

Some Thoughts on Healthcare in 2005

2005-01-06T15:51:00.000-05:00

So, I went to see my doctor yesterday, and some things struck me. This is my first doctor apart from my previous life-long doctor back home, or going to student health. Some things surprised me.

For example, there was a constant stream of vendors or salesmen or something, men with large bags emblazoned with some drug-sounding name. They'd come in, say hi to the receptionist, and help themselves to go right on back. I don't know what they did back there, I just thought it was interesting. It seemed like every simple object you could think of was covered in a drug-sounding logo. Here, wipe your nose with these Zanaflex tissues. Fill out this form with your choice of pen: Imitrex, Zyprexa, or Cerumenex. Find useful women's health information in this pamphlet, presented by Ortho TricyclenLo.

The thing that most disturbed me was what I saw behind the receptionist. It was a row of gigantic shelves, stuffed with folders, little letters hanging out. The entire office was entirely paper-based! My god, this is 2005. How many of these receptionists are really needed if we were using a computer-based database? How much more office space would there be? How many medical mistakes might be prevented because someone didn't misread someone else's handwriting? Could we see more patients in a given doctor's day? When I had to go upstairs to get a blood test, the doctor filled out this 1950's-era carbon copy sheet and gave it to me to take up to them, and they had to separately confirm my insurance information upstairs. With computers and networking, looking me up in a database would have been instantaneous. How much are we wasting here, across this entire system?

There were some computers around, but they were all DOS-era dinosaurs running in text-mode. I knew that the health industry is notorious for being slow to adopt IT, but this was a shocking sight to me. Except for the cell phones, the entire experience would have looked much the same as in the 80s. I have no idea what they were being used for, but it could only have been a fraction of what is possible. The shame of it is, despite the lousy decor and all that, I thought this was a decent doctor, and the nurses were all attentive and professional.

I think the problem is that doctors traditionally run their own companies, making them into managers as well. I suspect most doctors don't have much interest in the management problems of their organizations, and would rather spend the time seeing patients. That would certainly explain why they seem to do such a lousy job on the management side.

Hey, every problem is an opportunity. Why doesn't some young entrepreneur go out and figure out how to take these management problems off the doctors' hands? Perhaps they can take advantage of the idea that most of the suites in a given medicine-oriented building are taken up with doctors or dentists, and can rent space for a small, shared IT division in one of the suites that runs around and keeps all their systems upgraded and running smoothly. Or they could rent some space in a building that has many other doctors nearby, if the area is more urban. Doctors could pay a monthly IT services fee to get that whole hassle taken care of; doctors can then concentrate on what they'd rather be doing, specialists would keep their IT operations running smoothly, and they would probably wind up lowering costs or increasing their quality of care (hopefully both).

Collapse

2005-01-04T10:22:00.000-05:00

Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, is now out and Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has read it now. He points to some of the same problems I mentioned before (comparing modern societies to agricultural societies as if it is an apples-to-apples comparison), and finds the book problematic. He also points to some other reviews of the book at the bottom of his post.

Cuts

2004-12-30T11:07:00.000-05:00

I just saw this article in the New York Times and am unbelievably happy. It's not that I think the Pentagon's budget is too big, and that we should be working to reduce it...not at all. In fact, I'm perfectly happy for the Pentagon to get as much money as it thinks it needs to make sure that we have the most unfair military advantage on the planet.

I'm also not happy because I think this is going to make a difference in the budget deficit. Federal outlays this year are at $2.312 trillion dollars. These cuts would take $10 billion dollars off a year for the next six years, a mere rounding error. In fact, I've pointed out before that looking to defense and discretionary spending as the source of the budget deficit is nonsense given what a small percentage of that $2.3 trillion dollars they are.

Still, just because I think high levels of defense spending are worthwhile doesn't mean I think we should be throwing away that money. I was very happy when the Comanche was cancelled earlier this year, and now I am very happy that they are "sharply reducing" the F-22 program. While these two weapons might be fun toys, I'm not sure how useful stealth helicopters and stealth fighter jets are going to be against most of the enemies we are likely to face for the next generation or two.

What I'm Reading

2004-12-30T01:14:00.000-05:00

We All Know That TV Is Bad For Us: Or do we?
God, I just love articles like this, which point out the obvious things that people don't seem to know they already know.

Cory responds to Wired Editor on DRM
Another short piece by Cory Doctorow on DRM. He touches on what I brought up before, about having to buy media multiple times.

Notes on various movies

2004-12-28T13:51:00.000-05:00

For a variety of reasons, I've been watching many more movies than I've been able to write about. Rather than let this backlog become an excuse to not write any more, I'm going to just do away with all of the ones that come to mind with quick little blurbs so I catch up before my memory fades entirely.

Sideways
One of Claire's friends pointed out that this movie is basically "Swingers for aging blue-staters." I think that's right on. It was funny, and it had a lot of good things to recommend it. I especially liked Paul Giamatti's performance. The downside is that it was a bit too long, and wasn't always entertaining me. Overall, good but not a must-see.

Ocean's 12
Another casual movie from an artist. It's good fun, and has a very different pacing than the first movie, with a twistier plot. The main heist is about as nonsensical as the first movie's was, and that makes it another cop-out in my book. This movie is so light that immediately afterwards, while leaving the theater, I attempted to explain a segment of the plot that Claire slept through, and found I just couldn't remember it.

Spanglish
This movie is uneven. That's the best word to describe it, I think. You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both, and there you have...Spanglish.

A Very Long Engagement
The brilliant Jean-Pierre Jeunet rounds up the usual gang and makes great film-making look easy once again. I didn't realize that the plot is basically structured as a mystery, and it's very interesting. I had a bit of a hard time keeping up with all the characters, probably due to the fact that it's subtitled (and all those dirty French World War I soldiers look basically the same in the trenches). Probably needs more viewings for me to fully pick up all of the character connections.

Meet the Fockers
Surprise: It's nowhere near as good as the original. The jokes are all telegraphed way ahead of time and involve contrived situations. It manages to squeeze out a few laughs, with some effort, but they're not great laughs. Ben Stiller's character no longer seems to smoke, and there's some convoluted reason that Robert DeNiro's character is basically raising his other daughter's baby son so that the movie can have some baby humor. He feeds the baby with a synthetic breast with working nipple that he has fashioned, if that gives you any idea how coherent the movie is.

Closer
Powerful, well-written, and well-acted. I thought Mike Nichols did a good job, but not a movie I'm eager to see again soon. Obviously, it's depressing.

Before Sunset
This movie is similar to Closer, it has just two characters, and the entire movie is talking about feelings and stuff. I liked this one a lot better, though (and I thought I'd hate it going in). I hadn't seen the predecessor, Before Sunrise, but I don't feel that that hurt the experience much, if at all. Ethan Hawke looks like a dork.

My Fear

2004-12-28T11:34:00.000-05:00

I saw mentioned today on Marginal Revolution that Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) has a new book coming out soon called Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed. The most interesting thing to me was Malcolm Gladwell's article on the book in the New Yorker, since Gladwell provides a preview of some of Diamond's arguments.

I read Guns, Germs, and Steel about a year and a half ago, and I thought it was really great, and I think Diamond made a very strong argument that I largely was convinced by. In fact, Collapse sounds like it has an argument that would convince me too. But there's something about the Gladwell article that is bothering me. I am afraid that the lesson people will take from this book is that societies fail or succeed based on how well they take care of the environment. In fact, the examples Gladwell passes on from Diamond are great examples of exactly that: the Norse on Greenland, the Easter Islanders, and the Rwandan genocide.

Here's what bothers me: These are all non-industrial societies. The fact that Rwanda is cited as a "modern example" is particularly troubling. According to the CIA World Factbook entry on Rwanda, "Rwanda is a poor rural country with about 90% of the population engaged in (mainly subsistence) agriculture." Of course the environment matters greatly to a nation like that, and to the other examples. That is a very different set of resource needs from a modern industrial society, however. No such countries have such a scarcity of food or water or other natural resources that they sit on the edge of a catastrophic environmental imbalance in the same way as these examples. In fact, one of the key points of Guns, Germs, and Steel was the way societies have evolved to have complex mechanisms like trade and markets that make the relative importance of such things for survival much smaller. Still, this is all related second hand, and since I believe the ridiculous example of Oregon was entirely Gladwell's, I am hoping that this is just getting filtered through a particular viewpoint on its way from Diamond to me. I do believe in the phenomenon Diamond describes, where societies can collectively commit suicide.

I am often, when I think about such things, terrified for the United States in this regard. I am not scared about our resource usage or the environment at all. Nor am I concerned about competition from foreign nations, who collectively don't seem to have as great an idea of how to run things as we do. What concerns me is that over time, we will, as we have been, lose touch with our understanding of what puts our own ecosystem in balance. This ecosystem includes our natural resources, but those are overshadowed by our man-made resources: our collective human capital, our personal freedoms and our drive to explore, be entrepreneurial, and risk failure.

Now, I hate to be a doomsday prophet, and liken the US to Rome at its height or anything like that. I don't think that's what's going to happen. Still, we do seem to be turning away from the path that brought us here. We don't have a great education system, and we don't seem likely to get one soon; not due to any necessary state of affairs, but apparently because we just can't bring ourselves to deal with the current problems. We seem more than ever to be uninterested in civil liberties, and willing to chip away at them or trade them in for increased government powers (totally neglecting the safety that we get from freedom from interference by the government). And standing before what could be the dawn of many promising, and yes, risky, fields, like aerospace engineering, biological engineering and nanotechnology, we are finding that we no longer have the taste for exploration and the risks that go along with it, and would rather fight such things.

This is our ecosystem, this is how we feed ourselves. I want to believe I'm wrong here. That I don't have to worry, because entrepreneurialism and the human urge to be free will always find a way. I'm just not sure that's true, given how successfully it has been beaten down in most of the world for most of time. What I actually believe is that the United States was a very difficult, lucky thing for the world to have, and it does not at all represent the natural state of affairs for societies. Like I said, I don't think our society is on the verge of collapse, or anything like that. I think the danger is that we'll gradually surrender freedoms, and underinvest in the long-term fundamentals of our economy, and turn away the best and brightest foreigners who want to work here because we are afraid of the competition/terrorism, and give in to vested interests that represent the past and not the future, and continue to work with a gigantic regulatory monstrosity until we look just like any other mediocre, mismanaged European country.

That's my fear, anyways.

What I'm Reading

2004-12-10T18:04:00.000-05:00

I totally loved this article on Tim Hunkin's webpage, which I found via Bruce Schneier's blog. Not only is it filled with a lot of cool information on how safe's are made and how they work, it also mentions how cool Richard Feynman was, and provides many other interesting bits of trivia.

The main point of the article was this: safes are pretty much impossible to break into these days. What jumped out at me, however, was why this is so. It's because for hundreds of years, people built safes, and the makers of safes would try to break into their competitors' safes to show how insecure they were. After a few hundred years of this, we wind up with safes that are filled with all sorts of unbelievable countermeasures, and can apparently protect their contents from an atomic blast.

So imagine that instead of allowing this to happen, governments had outlawed safecracking early on in the process. Robbers would continue to crack safes, since they were already doing something illegal. But now manufacturers would be unable to crack each other's safes, and presumably they are interested in obeying the law.

Now imagine that instead of safes we're talking about computer security products. I don't think I even need to finish this, or link to EFF.

Unclear on the Concept

2004-12-03T13:53:00.000-05:00

Gabe and Tycho at Penny Arcade are talking about Prince of Persia 2: Warrior Within, and it sounds like it's suffering from the most heart-breaking sort of sequel problem. Here's Gabe:

I guess people complained about the combat in the first game not being deep enough. They even said the final boss was too easy. These people didn't understand the game. Your enemy in the first game was the environment. You were battling against puzzles not monsters. The actual combat was there as a breather to give you a rest between puzzles. The final boss wasn't even the vizier it was navigating the last level without your sword. The level was the boss, not the guy at the end. So now they've beefed up the combat and they make you fight all the time. So they listened to the people who didn't like their game and totally fucked those of us who loved it. Thanks Ubi, you know a lot of people really hate all the sneaking around in Splinter Cell. Why don't you give Sam a dual Uzis and a rocket launcher?

I always hate it when this happens, in games or in movies. One of my favorite games ever, Marathon, suffered a horrible sequel. Instead of the empty, echoing rusted walls and cathedral-like chambers of the Marathon, Bungie set the sequel on some bright, gaudy, pastel alien planet. Someone I knew who met Jason Jones at a trade show told me that he was boasting that "now that they had better art, they didn't have to set the game in the dark to prevent you from seeing the awful textures anymore." I've always told myself that Jason Jones, if he really said that, was just being a good salesman for Marathon 2 at the time.

Also gone from Marathon 2 were all of the puzzles. Like a rat in a maze, sometimes a level's main difficulty was figuring out how the level was supposed to work while you were still stuck in it. Levels that required a little more thought than people were used to in a first-person shooter, like Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken, Cool Fusion, G4 Sunbathing, Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap!, and Habe Quiddam, were missing (most of those maps, by the way, were designed by Jason Jones himself). The game added a shotgun and became what Marathoners used to hate: Doom. I'm complaining, but this was practically Bungie's sales pitch at the time.

Fortunately, the third Marathon, Marathon: Infinity was a bit better. Marathon 2's plotline was so horribly muddled, that they really didn't have anywhere to go. Marathon: Infinity's plot is really impossible to comprehend (which doesn't stop the alarming but harmless fans from trying to insert meaning into it). The game jumps around in time and space, and even makes liberal use of "dream sequence" levels. Still, by outsourcing the production of the game entirely to Double Aught software (which had some former Bungie employees and other Marathon fans on staff), the feel of the game was restored. The levels that take place on the alien planet had their textures toned down quite a bit; in a marvelous feat of artistry, Randy Reddig repainted all of the textures in the game at the last second in a way that left them completely compatible with the previous textures (ie, all of the switches and patterns on the textures remained perfectly aligned). The game also moved itself back into a cavernous, abandoned spaceship, and some of those levels were truly superb.

This isn't the only time this has happened in Bungie's past either. They followed up on the somber, majestic Myth by redesigning all of the sprites so that they looked more like some bargain bin generic medieval strategy game in Myth 2. The game lost its look and its mood entirely, as they added gimmickry like indoor levels, zombies, wolves, and a level with a pirate ship. A freaking pirate ship. They went ahead and lowered the resolution on all sprites as well, "so that they could put more frames of animation in," making Myth 2 one of the few sequels to look worse than its predecessor. Myth 2 was a complete disaster, and I'm probably going easy on it, since I couldn't even stand to finish the first level (I did play a few other levels as a beta tester, but I dropped out of the test because I just couldn't stand it).

Apparently Halo 2 is something of a disappointment as well, being way too short and ending abruptly with a cliffhanger ending, though I have not played it yet myself. I'm one of Bungie's biggest and oldest fans, and I think the reason is that they will tackle a tired game setup and bring some creativity to it, or they'll do something completely new. They show that any type of game can be fun if you have a good grasp of what fun is. I hated real-time strategy games until I saw Myth, the first game to be presented in 3D, and with an emphasis on battle tactics instead of resource harvesting. Hell, I even though Oni was fun, the first attempt at combining a fighting game with an adventure game, and using professional architects to design the settings. It was fatally flawed, yes, but it was still a very creative product that someone should revisit or rip off. As far as I can tell, the game was limited by its poorly designed engine.

Unfortunately, their sequels frequently drop the ball entirely, by failing to understand why their original game was so amazing in the first place. It also happens, as I have pointed out in the past, that there is a very high correlation between the amount of work Jason Jones does on a game and that game's quality (Jason Jones was deeply involved in Marathon, Myth, and Halo, but not Marathon 2 or Marathon: Infinity, Myth 2 or Myth 3, or Oni; I'm not sure how much of a role he had in Halo 2).

So, I'm very sorry to see this happen to Prince of Persia, since that game was truly fantastic. Ubisoft has probably been the best thing to happen to the Xbox, as they have faithfully provided their own version of any game that made me want a PS2, only they've made it better than the PS2 version. That is, I wanted ICO for PS2, but Prince of Persia was better; I wanted Metal Gear Solid 2, but Splinter Cell took the same idea and did it way better. It makes me wonder if Splinter Cell 2 was as messed up as Prince of Persia 2.

In any case, one game where that has not happened at all is Half-Life 2. It's hard to write a review of Half-Life 2, because by talking about the good stuff in it you're depriving the reader of the experience. Unbelievable things happen around you, and you truly feel like an action hero sorting it out.

Unfortunately, I've been very disappointed by Half-Life 2's deathmatch mode. It's not far from being fun, but it's definitely not as good as in the original Half-Life. Deathmatch mode was obviously done at the last second and as an afterthought. There are no deathmatch maps, just adapted singleplayer maps, and only two of those at that. Throwing things around in a deathmatch game isn't as fun as you might think it is. Often, something really fun does happen with the zero-point energy gun. A guy threw a barrel at me once at close range, and I caught it in mid-air and threw it back at him. It was immensely satisfying. More often, though, it's a frenzied free-for-all, with lethal objects flying about. There is very little strategy available in this setup, it just encourages you to fling stuff everywhere because you will hit someone easily. But you can't aim or move very well, since the large objects you are holding will block your view. The bookshelves and desks and barrels also tend to accumulate in doorways where someone couldn't get through with them, and it makes movement about the levels very annoying as you struggle to push things out of the way. The zero-point energy gun should unquestionably be a component of Half-Life 2 deathmatch, but the levels don't have to be so filled to the brim with debris to throw around.

Seeing how good recent games are looking, and the incredible growth of the game industry, I wonder if maybe this will eventually lead to an increase in the demand for architects. Certainly, architects have way more freedom in a purely virtual environment, and a good-looking game tends to sell better than a sloppy one. It might even be appealing to an artistic architect, as many architectural designs I've seen in an architecture school were simply not realistic structures to build. Plus, it might "bring architecture to the people," instead of requiring the people to go to the architecture. Surely letting people experience more art in their daily lives is a good thing. Unfortunately, I think that this would be seen as "cheap" compared to architects who build actual buildings, though I cannot understand why. In either case, the architect designs a computer model as his main task; it's in the hands of contractors or programmers after that.

Economics

2004-11-29T20:04:00.000-05:00

Here's a little snippet of non-official transcript from today's arguments in Ashcroft v. Raich.

Stevens: If you reduce demand, then you will reduce prices? Wouldn’t it increase prices?

Barnett: No, if you reduce demand, you reduce price.

Stevens: Are you sure?

Barnett: Yes.

What I'm Reading

2004-11-13T15:02:00.000-05:00

The Final Hours of Half-Life 2
Finally, so many questions answered. This is a long article, but it's a fascinating look at a process you never see. When the media frenzy started about the delay and the source theft and all that, I figured we'd someday have this article to fill in all the weird stuff that happened for us.

Beautiful But Wrong: The Floating Hourglass Puzzle
I first found this full book on Rich Burridge's blog. Specifically, pages 130 to 138 are really fun to read. I'm sure I'll find some other good stuff in here too when I get a chance to look around.

Monopolies of the mind
I suppose it's nice to note that no less a publication than The Economist has now bashed US patent policy. I'm sure it's all going to start changing now.

Ballpark Figures
If you're not in the DC area, you probably don't know or care that the mayor of DC is about to spend half a billion taxpayer dollars to get the fabulous Montreal Expos to move to DC and build a stadium. The idea is that this stadium will revitalize Southeast DC with all the economic benefits it will bring. Jacob Sullum points out what is obvious to any moron: that this is a really stupid idea.

What I'm Reading

2004-11-12T11:24:00.000-05:00

The Secret Sins of Economics
This is a really fun piece, although much longer than your average article on the web. Although it's against the grain that characterizes this article, I have to quote my favorite bit:

I have not, I realize, painted a very attractive picture of economics. But these sins are widespread, I repeat, among non-economists, too—even that odd one, candid selfishness, which you can find Nature’s Economists articulating even when they aren’t trained in it. But I earnestly invite you to learn by further reading in the literature the offsetting merits of economists:
Economists are for one thing serious about the public interest, and are often the only people defending it with any sort of lucidity and persuasiveness against the special interests. The model of worldly philosophy was originated in crude form by the early pamphleteers and political arithmeticians (among them Daniel Defoe). Adam Smith a half century and more later brought it to perfection.

And if you like engineers you will like many economists. Engineers are attractive people, hard working (you have to be hard working to absorb all that engineering math), earnest and practical, bent always on Solving the Problem. True, they are often simpleminded. But simplicity gets the job done. Lots of economists are engineering types.
Or lawyer types. Like lawyers the economists are good arguers, which is good when you need a good argument ("How do you want it to come out?"). Economists can debate each other and yet not lose their tempers and not make irrelevant appeals to rank. Economists like lawyers are clear-minded, professionally. They are used to
getting to the point and staying there. The humor of economists, unhappily, is often cynical, as it is also among lawyers, seldom generous, but that’s true in many fields of the intellect.

But, above all, economics is about important matters. It would be remarkable if the economics-since-Marx that most non-economists would rather not read had nothing worthwhile in it. After all, thousands of apparently intelligent (they certainly think so) economists have labored away at it now for a century and a half.

I beseech you, dear reader, think it possible that economists, even Chicago-School economists, even Samuelsonian economists, have some important things to say about the economy.

As always, I don't fully agree with the criticisms (by her construction, it's because I'm too "in the system," but whatever), but it's amusing. Did she really just call engineers "attractive?"

Why Does the Government Patronize Us?
Recently crowned Nobel laureate Ed Prescott argues persuasively for mandatory private individual accounts for social security, with a minimal "free money" system for those who for one reason or another weren't able to save enough for their old age. My favorite bits:

It would be one thing if the government's Social Security system paid a decent return, but as the President's Commission reported, for a single male worker born in 2000 with average earnings, the real annual return on his currently-scheduled contributions to Social Security will be just 0.86%. And for a worker who earns the maximum amount taxed (then $80,400), the real annual return is a negative 0.72%. A bank would have to offer a pretty fancy toaster to get depositors at those rates of return.
...
Further, about two dozen countries have reformed their state-run retirement programs, including Chile, Sweden, Australia, Peru, the U.K., Kazakhstan, China, Croatia and Poland. If citizens in these countries can handle individual savings accounts, especially citizens in countries without a history of financial freedom, then U.S. citizens should be equally adept. At a time when the rest of the world is dropping the vestiges of state control, the United States should be leading the way and not lagging behind.
...
Under a reformed system there will always be some individuals who, owing to disabilities or other reasons that prevent them from working, will not have sufficient savings in their old age. The solution is to include a means-tested supplement to ensure that those citizens receive a required payment -- just like they receive today. Nobody gets left behind under this new system, and most will move ahead. U.S. citizens deserve more than a minimum payment, and the U.S. economy deserves more than to have its savings, capital and labor weighed down by an increasingly costly tax-and-transfer system.

Jeers and Cheers for Sears
A creative approach to making money from troubled retail companies.

Droppers

2004-11-12T02:32:00.000-05:00

Speaking of droppers, I'm surprised that this still happens in online gaming. This strikes me as a totally solvable problem. People drop because the benefits outweigh the costs: the benefit is that they don't get a loss counted on their record for the rankings, and the cost is that everyone gets pissed at them. Given that they're playing with strangers, they probably don't care very much about that cost, so they go ahead and do it.

I don't understand why game developers don't build in ways to counteract this. You need to balance the small number of times when someone drops because their connection actually broke or they crashed (the former happened to me the other night), and the much more frequent "I'm losing" drop. One thing you could do is count every drop after, say, 5 minutes as a loss. You could even allow one or two unpenalized drops per month. Alternatively, you could set a "drop to game ratio" and if someone has dropped more than X% of their games, they are stigmatized with a "dropper" icon. I'm much more in favor of the former than the latter; the latter makes it hard for someone to get back into the game's good graces, because they won't be able to play games to work away the ratio.

Another thing that would help, I suspect, is having a way to "resign" a game, so that the other players can get a win on their record, without having to wait for their units to pound all your buildings into dust. I think some people drop when they're losing because it's boring to sit there helpless while your base is destroyed (it takes a couple of minutes), and they don't realize that by dropping they're depriving the other team of a win.

Warhammer 40k Blogging

2004-11-12T01:41:00.000-05:00

Forgive me for geeking out here. I just had two of the most wonderful Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War online games ever. I know no one will understand any of this, because you just won't give the game a chance. If you want to try to make this somewhat coherent (bless you) check out this unit guide.

The first game I played was a 2 on 2 game. Our opponents got together and rushed me early. Since one of the players was playing as Orks, I got my hands on a heavy bolter the only way I could without an armory: by upgrading the nearest listening post (usually this is seen as a waste of requisition). That started beating back the orcs, but it was so early in the game that I still had almost no units to fight back with. All of a sudden, a pink eldar army mosies over from nowhere and starts beating them back.

"Thanks," I said to my teammate. "Hey, we're a team right?" he replied. Incredible. I've never had a teammate come to my rescue, even when I'm asking for help. He came by unasked. I told him that he was the first non-bozo teammate I'd ever been paired with.

After the great mass of their forces were broken, we established clear control of the center. Since my teammate and I controlled the center of the map, and had most of the strategic points, we were going to win by a control-area victory, so we just sat there and waited (not by coordination, we both just knew that we could sit and wait). That was going to be a boring 6 minutes, though, so I built a tactical squad consisting entirely of rocket launchers, and used some undercover scouts to look around the nearest guy's territory. He had some listening posts, so I decided to attack his economy and had my rocket squad destroy those in no time. However many units this guy had, he wasn't going to be building very many more, so me and my teammate just went in for total annihilation (he dropped, of course, but it was still fun).

The other game was a bit later. I came into a 1 on 1 game with some guy playing as orks on a map I was unfamiliar with. This map has basically two valleys going to a river that divides the territories, so I divided my troops and had them stand at each of the two guarding my territory. Since I knew I was playing against orks, I got heavy bolters into as many hands as possible as soon as possible.

Soon enough, he brought some masses over to one of the valleys I was guarding. He must have been surprised when half my army totally destroyed his first wave (a pathetic number of marines compared to his ork masses...it was the heavy bolters). Unfortunately, his next wave was much harder. He started building wartraks, and they started pounding my troops. Since they all had heavy bolters, I couldn't get any rocket launchers over to destroy the wartraks soon enough, and had to fight them off by moving the rest of my army from the other valley. Obviously, this was costly.

While this was all going on, I had an undercover scout squad spying in his territory: one of his valleys was totally empty, and led right to his base. When I saw this, I remembered a game I had played the other night. It was a 3 on 3 game, and one of my teammates put out a call for help, but I was far away. I told him I was on my way to help, but he said, "No, just attack his base. It'll pull him back." It worked.

So when this guy attacked me again, and I didn't have the firepower to beat him off, instead of moving some marine squads from the other side of the map, I rushed them to his base and attacked. They got chewed up pretty badly, but it did pull him back from my other troops.

As fast as I could, I started building marine squads and then a machine cult, so I could bring some dreadnoughts over. Cleaning up the intrusion onto my territory took some time, but I finally cleaned him out and started building up forces. I got all the tech I could as fast as I could, because I had the requisition to spare and knew that his next wave was going to be killer, and his base was very near the point of contention, so he could get his troops to battle quickly. As part of this, I built several predators and terminator squads.

His next wave was huge and filled with vehicles, while most of my army was still stuck with heavy bolters (which don't do much to vehicles). However, his other valley was still empty. I ran two predators, fully decked out with four lascannons each to the edge of his base. I also brought my force commander over and ran straight into his base, and he called in orbital bombardment on his base. The few buildings that survived were being destroyed by the predators' lascannons, and he congratulated me on my victory.

What I'm Reading

2004-11-08T15:40:00.000-05:00

The Dismal Quackery of Eco-Economics
I saw this essay on Spiked-Online linked to from Marginal Revolution. Every word is a joy to read.

Getting Over It
Interesting article by Malcolm Gladwell about human resilience.

People are bad at forecasting their emotions—at appreciating how well, under most circumstances, they will recover. Not long ago, for instance, Gilbert, Wilson, and two other researchers—Carey Morewedge and Jane Risen—asked passengers at a subway station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, how much regret they thought they would feel if they arrived on the platform just as a train was pulling away. Then they approached passengers who really had arrived just as their train was leaving, and asked them how they felt. They found that the predictions of how bad it would feel to have just barely missed a train were on average greater than reports of how it actually felt to watch the train pull away. We suffer from what Wilson and Gilbert call an impact bias: we always assume that our emotional states will last much longer than they do. We forget that other experiences will compete for our attention and emotions. We forget that our psychological immune system will kick in and take away the sting of adversity. “When I talk about our research, I say to people, ‘I’m not telling you that bad things don’t hurt,’” Gilbert says. “Of course they do. It would be perverse to say that having a child or a spouse die is not a big deal. All I’m
saying is that the reality doesn’t meet the expectation.”

Medicare Covers New Treatments With a Catch
Medicare is going to start covering new and expensive treatments in exchange for getting companies to pay for studies on which methods actually work. Hopefully this will provide hard data about the effectiveness of new treatments, which can eventually be used to stop paying for the ones that don't work.

The new initiatives began this year when Dr. McClellan, who is both an internist and an economist, decided that evaluating treatments for elderly Americans falls under Medicare's purview to pay for whatever is medically necessary. If the treatment does not work, he argues, then it really is not medically necessary, and Medicare should not be paying.
Over the past six months, he has been fundamentally transforming Medicare's scope by offering to pay for a number of new and expensive treatments and diagnostic tests - ranging from $30,000-a-dose cancer drugs to brain scans to diagnose Alzheimer's - but with a catch. Patients can only have them if they enter into studies that evaluate how well they work. And someone other than Medicare will have to pay for those studies.
In the past Medicare just paid the bills or said no to treatments. Now, with a flood of promising but astronomically expensive treatments and little data on how they work in the real world, Medicare has decided to use its 41 million beneficiaries to get some answers. And it is using the threat of refusing to pay unless patients are in a study as a cudgel to get companies or foundations or professional groups to pay for the research. The goal, Dr. McClellan said, is better and more cost-effective medicine.

High Prices
And here we tie together the two previous articles: An article about drug prices by Malcolm Gladwell.

Notes on The Incredibles

2004-11-08T14:00:00.000-05:00

This is easily the best movie I've seen since the last time I said that (The Bourne Supremacy, probably). If you don't like this movie, there's probably something wrong with you. It actually surpasses A Bug's Life as the best movie Pixar has ever made (I wasn't sure at first, but having seen it twice, I'm quite sure now).

First of all, the short that opens this movie, Boundin', is unquestionably the best short Pixar has ever made. It's fun, has cute music, is told in rhyme, and is just plain adorable. Everyone's heart melted. I almost want the DVD just for Boundin'.

Now, the rest of the movie is so great, it's hardly worth talking about all the different aspects that combine to make it fantastic. Let me just describe what it was like, seeing the movie on opening night, and I think you'll get an idea of how great this movie is: I haven't seen an audience in such rapture since I saw The Matrix on opening night (in fact, the movie actually has some of the most dynamic, exciting action sequences I've seen since The Matrix). The laughing was so loud and continuous that I lost track of how many times I couldn't hear the next line. All around me people were leaning forward, propping their elbows on their knees and their heads in their hands, smiling at the screen.

One of the things I've always loved about Pixar movies is how clever their characters are. Instead of having an answer for every situation, they are pressed to be clever and resourceful. This holds true even of the superheroes in this movie. Instead of feeling boring and overpowered, they always seem pressed to the limits, and in danger of failing. They need their intelligence to win. Truly geek superheroes.

The movie also has a kind of retro-future feel that I really enjoyed. Pixar has for the first time moved humans into the leading roles, but they've done it their way. Instead of going the Polar Express route, which attempts extreme realism, only to wind up with jerky, highly disturbing copies of real people, The Incredibles uses highly stylized, cartoony-looking humans. Plus, the art direction is fantastic, filling the movie with some great visuals. It manages to spoof James Bond, Star Wars, and other superhero films while at the same time outdoing them. One of my favorite shots is Mr. Incredible standing in silhouette in front of a gigantic wall of pouring lava in the supervillain's lair.

Finally, we can officially say that Brad Bird is one of the best directors working in Hollywood today. He's only made two movies, The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, but they're both spectacularly good films that can do the unthinkable: hit every note, and appeal to every audience while not feeling forced or over-stuffed at all.

Notes on Birth

2004-11-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

I have to say, I'm a bit confused. Birth only has a 6.1 on IMDB. Surely this is a better movie than Femme Fatale...right, internet?! Why does it have a lower rating?

I went into this movie not having seen a trailer or even a still. In fact, I didn't really know much about it except for the one sentence plot summary. Frustratingly enough, the movie didn't have opening credits, so I couldn't tell who the director was, and thus whether I was supposed to like the movie or not. Fortunately, the closing credits told me that the director was Jonathan Glazer, of Sexy Beast, and I felt relieved that I hadn't just fallen in love with a Joel Schumacher film.

I was enchanted almost as soon as the movie started. The opening scene, long slow shots moving along a snowy Central Park, combine perfectly with the music to give the movie a sense of magic that lasted throughout the movie for me. I came out of the movie just assuming that everyone thought it was a great film, and feeling warm from the rare experience of a wonderfully executed film.

Ten years after her husband Sean's death, Nicole Kidman is finally remarrying. But a ten year old boy named Sean shows up, and tells her that he's her dead husband, reincarnated, and he doesn't want her to remarry. Obviously, the fact that this possibility is not easily dismissed throws her into an emotional turmoil, and that is the core of the movie.

As I said, the movie is perfectly scored, and matches well with Glazer's visual style. It really feels enchanted, and at times creepy, and it is powerful. Nicole Kidman puts in a good performance, and is supported well by the intense Cameron Bright (from Godsend), who plays the reincarnated boy. The boy is serious beyond his years, and makes the whole ridiculous premise work.

There's a much discussed bath scene, which is often summarized as "Nicole Kidman taking a bath with a 10 year old boy," suggesting a scene of pedophilic sensuality. It's pretty ridiculous, that's not what happens at all. Nicole Kidman is curled up in a bath, he lets himself in, takes off his clothes, and gets in the tub, curled up in a ball at the other end. They don't touch, and after a moment she tells him that she wants him to leave her alone. Which of course isn't appropriate behavior on Nicole Kidman's part ("Uh, get out of the bathroom you little perv..."), but it's certainly not smut either. Maybe she figured the kid had seen it all before.

The other thing that might strike you is that...Nicole Kidman looks kinda weird. Combined with her ultra-short dark brown haircut, and pulled-up eyebrows, she looks like a pixie from Peter Pan or something.

Finally, you might like or dislike the ending, but I thought it was perfect. Spoilers ahead, so select the text to read it. I always hate it when people claim that they "saw the ending coming a mile away," but I really had already started to theorize along very similar lines. That isn't a complaint, I just want to say that I think the ending turned out to be exactly what the movie needed to tie things up correctly, and I was hoping for my theory to be correct. It's crushing, but it feels right; seeing what Nicole Kidman goes through, you don't really want it to be her reincarnated husband, and have them stuck in an impossible love. Kids can do horrible things to people, especially without intending to. The boy doesn't seem malicious, he seems genuinely confused, and that makes it even more painful.

Democrats: Are We Federalists Yet?

2004-11-05T10:45:00.000-05:00

Like many, I've been looking at the maps of the US election breakdown, and fearing for those islands of sophisticated, athiest city-dwellers on the coasts. Might this finally move Democrats to support federalism? You do your thing, Mississippi, and we'll do our thing. Traditionally this has been a Republican position, but now that they've got a long-term hold on power with their margins in Congress and the Presidency (and thus eventually the courts), let's be realistic...they're not gonna be for that anymore.

The Median Voter Theorem

2004-11-04T15:30:00.000-05:00

Virginia Postrel summarizes a research paper by a Harvard economist in today's New York Times. The paper (which I have not read through yet) concerns voting behavior and extreme views, and might help to provide an alternative explanation for how George Bush assembled his win on tuesday. In the paper, politicians take extreme views because they can get their core to turn out voters more than they will energize the opposition turnout (note that this is still a vote-maximizing strategy, but turnout is no longer exogenous). This is because a politician might be able to target his messages so that his base hears his more extreme views without the broader public getting the message. In fact, this very much squares with what we know about Bush and his use of code words, and the paper provides another example:

In this paper, we present an information-based theory of strategic extremism. The key assumption in this theory is that awareness of a politician’s policies is higher among the politician’s supporters than among his opponent’s supporters. This asymmetry means that when a politician’s policies deviate from the median, he energizes his own supporters (who are more likely to be aware of this deviation)more than he energizes his opponent’s supporters (who are less likely to be aware of this deviation). That politicians have an edge in communicating with their own supporters is reflected in recent efforts by the Bush and Kerry campaigns. For example, during the Republican National Convention there was a "closed, invitation-only Bush campaign rally for Christian conservatives" at which "Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas called for a broad social conservative agenda notably different from the televised presentations at the Republican convention" (Kirkpatrick, 2004b). The Kerry campaign also appears to be targeting public appearances to reach loyal Democrats (Borsuk, 2004).

The paper also mentions another interesting result, which is that you should be able to tell whether certain political views are strategic or heartfelt. If an extreme viewpoint is strategic, then policy will be less extreme than the message, while the opposite is true for a heartfelt viewpoint:

A key difference between a model of strategic extremism and a model in which extremism reflects politicians’ preferences is that, when extremism is strategic, politicians’ policies will be more moderate than their messages. When extremism reflects leaders’ preferences, policies will be more extreme than political messages. We examine policies and platforms on tax policy and abortion over the last 25 years to examine these implications. The economic messages in platforms are extremely moderate, but there are big differences in mean tax rates between Democratic and Republican regimes. Conversely, political messages about abortion tend to extremes, but abortion rates are independent of the party in power. These results suggest that differences in economic policies between the parties reflect preferences of party leaders but that differences in abortion and other religion-related policies reflect political strategy.

Their paper also provides some numbers for the rise of religiousness as a political issue, and the decline of labor unions:

We end the paper by examining a key prediction of the model: religious determinants of political orientation will be maximized when about 50 percent of the population attends church regularly and that economic determinants of political orientation will be maximized when about 50 percent of the population is in labor unions.
...
Finally, we use our parameter estimates to see whether declining church attendance and declining union membership can explain the rising importance of religion in American politics. Unions have declined from being close to 35 percent of non-agricultural employment in the 1950s to being less than 15 percent of the labor force today (Freeman, 1998; Hirsch, MacPherson and Vroman, 2001). Church attendance has declined from 1968 when 57 percent of the population went church once per month or more to 2000 the point when 47 percent of the population went to church this often. Both of these declines should have caused politics to focus less on economics and more on religion.

I find the model of this paper very clever and useful (keep in mind I still haven't read very far in), and it captures the intuition in the median voter theorem in more detail. It still seems to suggest that a change in focus towards religion and morality is needed for the Democrats; either that, or a new group to target that maximizes the probability that members of that group will vote Democratic. If we knew what that group was, though, we'd have probably found it by now.

Give Us Another Southern Governor, Please

2004-11-04T11:59:00.000-05:00

Earlier, I was going to write about why senators do so badly in Presidential races. I just saw that Brad Delong posted about this topic yesterday. He has a problem with the fact that long-time senators don't do well in presidential races, and that might be a valid complaint. However, I think that governors actually aren't that poorly qualified.

First of all, their job basically echos the job of the president but on a smaller scale. People might have valid reasons to be turned off from someone who has had a long history of political sausage-making in the senate. Governors, like the President, can simply accept or reject the bills that come out of their legisatures, letting them keep their hands clean and still take credit for the good things that happen under their watch. While governors and senators might both pander to their constituents, that behavior might be looked down upon more in a senator, who does such things with federal issues. Voters might be more forgiving of such vigorous representation at a state level, and see it as a desirable attribute.

Lastly, I think comparing the resumes of presidential candidates is really dumb. No one ever has enough experience to be the president, unless he already was president. I don't see why a governor of a given state's experience should be any less relevant than a senator from that same state, since they require the approval of the same set of voters. But I don't think people really care about their leaders' resumes anyways, they care about what their vision is.

However, if current trends continue, the Democrats might have slim pickings for capable presidential candidates. There was no net change in Democratic or Republican governorships this election, but if the Republicans pick up some more, the chances of finding someone in that group with national appeal get worse and worse.

Exit Polls

2004-11-04T11:37:00.000-05:00

Just wanted to post a story on Slate that backs up what I was saying about the exit polls.

I absolutely agree with Slate's rationale for posting exit poll numbers. However, once you get to that point, you don't have statisticians interpreting the numbers, but lay people.

As it happens, Kerry did carry Pennsylvania. In Florida he lost by two points instead of winning by two points. Far from being wildly off the mark, that variance is about par for the course, or even under par, for a mid-afternoon reading of an exit poll. Indeed, Tuesday's exit-poll numbers were no more off the mark than were those of four, eight, or 12 years ago.

That's why the people who bought and paid for this intelligence kept it to themselves. Bill Wheatley, an NBC executive who understands these things, told the New York Times Wednesday that early afternoon numbers from an exit poll are "junk." Slate and the other Web sites on which these numbers appeared yesterday afternoon have every right in the world to get them however they can and publish them. But it's hard to pin the blame for the dissemination of these numbers on those who tried so hard to keep them secret.

Mind Poison, your Slate digest.

What Now

2004-11-03T23:50:00.000-05:00

Earlier today, I posted a story talking about bad ideas leading to more bad ideas as desperation sets in. With the results of the 2004 election behind us, there's obviously a lot of thought about what comes next for the Democrats. They've gotten their asses kicked in the past three major elections. If you widen the window of time that you are looking at, it starts to look more like the Republicans are achieving a long-term dominance the way the Democrats did in the middle of the 20th century (Bill Clinton being the 8 year respite that corresponds to Eisenhower's 8 years). Eventually, the Democrats will come back. But how long is it going to take for them to figure out what it's going to take (and perhaps, for enough of the old die-hards to die off)?

Two articles I really liked on this topic are this one, by William Saletan, and this other one, by Timothy Noah. Chris Suellentrop also has worthwhile thoughts.

Timothy Noah points out that the democrats have problems on all sides. He says that they can't move rightward, can't move leftward, and can't sit still (but you'll have to read his article to get the reasons). Sitting still is not a good idea, and it's motivated only by wishful thinking. I get the feeling that there was some of that this time around: Al Gore really won 2000, they think, so we just have to get our rightful result this time. It didn't work out that way. The world has changed.

Similarly, moving leftward won't work. Despite the great hopes for the youth voter turnout this year, I always held private doubts about whether that would materialize. If youth voters can't get up the self-interest and discipline to stop their grandparents from screwing them with debt, I can't imagine what would. Having lived on or very near a college campus for most of the past 6 years, I've seen the attempts of the highly motivated student organizations to do something, anything. Even with local politics that seriously affected Isla Vistans' ability to party, nothing happened. Riots in Seattle, Eminem videos, war that many think threatens a new draft (an exceedingly unlikely development, but nonetheless one which many young voters honestly believe is possible)...nothing seems to turn these voters out.

No, despite turnout attempts, treating turnout as exogenous in this situation seems to always be a more reasonable assumption to work with. For most of our lives, there have been those that vote as a bloc, and those that don't, and realistically, you have to work within that. This leads me to my criticism of Noah's piece.

Noah says that moving to the right is not an option, because moving to the right has no endpoint, and only pushes the Republicans further rightward beyond reason. I believe this is wrong. The median voter theorem states that politicians will more or less move to the position of the median voter. Any voter to the left of the most left politician still votes for him, and any voter to the right of the most right politician still votes for the rightmost polician. Thus, there is no gain to moving away from the center, because it allows the other guy to hug your position but stay just a little to the other end of you, grabbing more of the votes. Obviously, this is a major simplification, but I think this construction captures the basic observed features of politics remarkably well (ie, third parties never win because they're too far to the sides and only catch that tail of the distribution that is at least as extreme as they are, while major parties both resemble each other in the center and tend to win only by luck in close elections, and so forth).

If the Republicans are winning elections by moving to the right, it is because the distribution of voters is changing so that the median voter falls farther to the right. In this case, the best response actually is to move farther to the right, but not quite as far as the other party. This is where Saletan's article comes in. Saletan makes some good suggestions that I agree with, and I think his proposal for a grand vision makes sense, and I think the reason has to do with what's causing the shift away from Democrats.

The political spectrum is not a single line across which people fall, it has a more complex structure than that, especially with the electoral college. The parties sustain themselves by drawing together strong, disciplined voter blocs (this leads to such strange alliances as highly religious social conservatives and socially liberal libertarians voting for Republicans, and rich, highly educated coastal whites voting with middle class labor in the midwest for Democrats). For Democrats, their base groups are being rearranged, as Republicans learn to appeal to minorities better (it was only a matter of time before Republicans figured out that minorities, which are often very religious and entrepreneurial, would make great Republicans), and the long-term US decline in manufacturing weakens the labor unions. Painful as it may be for the party faithful, in order to get back in the game, Democrats have to move on from their current positioning, and find some new alliances, either by finding new voting interest groups, or taking some from Republicans. Saletan's proposal is about as plausible an idea as I've seen for that so far, but it's gonna take more than that.

In immediate, practical terms, Saletan suggests Edwards for 2008. Though I harshed on him earlier, I don't think that's implausible. What he's going to have to do is spend the next four years learning a lot about policy so that he doesn't have to dodge easy questions that he should know the answers to. And he needs to get better at debating, so he doesn't freak out so easily. It can be done.

Superficially, he's good: young, good-looking, doesn't have a long, embarassing senate voting record, is Southern and comes from the middle class. However, we'll have to see if he can overcome the stigma of failure and if he can overcome the intellectual, leftist urges of the party faithful in the primaries in 2008 (not to mention another potential candidate with more red state appeal). The game in 2008 is entirely about turning one or more red states blue. I haven't seen enough of Obama in action to form an opinion of him, but I'll have to be convinced that he could turn a southern or midwest state to the Democrats. Similarly, I have my doubts that Hillary Clinton could do it either. This is that talking with sincerity about moral values thing that Saletan talks about; I agree that it's essential, but she doesn't have it.

In fact, let's just stay away from senators in blue states altogether next time.

Update: Just wanted to add this link to another interesting article, A Functional Party No More, by Reason's Tim Cavanaugh.

Robert Wright also has some thoughts on Slate, Why Americans Hate Democrats.

Musil breaks down some of the minority voting numbers.

Moments in Your Life

2004-11-03T17:39:00.000-05:00

I walked home late last night, and the streets of DC were basically empty. As I stood across the street from my building waiting for the light to change, I looked up and noticed that the tree on the corner looked gigantic and majestic in the silence and electric light. The leaves were all yellow like a sports car, and dangling like a willow tree, so they shuffled lightly in the unseasonably warm breeze. I stood there and enjoyed it, for I knew that that sort of thing wouldn't last more than a day or two.

I walked home from work just now and noticed that they'd cut the tree down today.

Dick Morris is an Idiot

2004-11-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

Dick Morris has just announced to the world that he's a major idiot. His argument goes something like this: "Exit polls are never wrong, and they were wrong last night, so clearly the lying liberal media tampered with the exit polls." Mm hm.

I mentioned this before, but anyone who understands statistics a little bit should understand why this is nonsense (you'd think a political advisor would understand that much about statistics). I linked yesterday to MysteryPollster's explanation of exit polling, but if you didn't read it, you should. They try to sample 100 people at about 1500 precincts across the country throughout the day. In a tight race, with sample sizes that small, it would not be unlikely that you see results that suggest the opposite of what the actual distribution is.

If you've got say 5 million people voting, and their underlying distribution is that 51 percent support Bush, when you sample 100 of them, there's no reason you shouldn't expect to see that 51 percent of your sample support Kerry. Taking this sample, your maximum likelihood estimator would lead you to believe that 51 percent of the 5 million people support Kerry.

Now, they don't forecast a state with 100 voters. If the precincts are distributed across the states equally (probably not), then say there's 30 per state, or 3000 people. That's a much better-looking sample size. But keep in mind that these are not ideal sampling conditions; MysteryPollster brought up several problems that make exit polls not statistically ideal. Furthermore, that 3000 people isn't 3000 randomly selected, it's 3000 from 30 randomly selected precincts. Some of the precincts will be heavily democratic and some heavily republican, and some neither. By the luck of the draw, your 30 random precinct draws in that state will probably sample one or the other too much (keep in mind that their "corrective" weighting is based on elections in years past, and voter attitudes and demographics, could have changed greatly in that time, to say nothing of redistricting). Voting patterns might also be different throughout the day, and also, reading Drudge and seeing a close race that your guy is losing might get your ass out to the polls at the last second.

In the end, just about every early exit poll number I can find was within the margin of error (supposedly 4%), and well within it at that. Kerry supposedly had 51% in Ohio and he had 49%, supposedly 52% in Michigan and he had 51%, 53% in Pennsylvania when he only had 51%, 50% in Iowa when he only had 49%, 51% in Wisconsin (which was correct), 52% in Minnesota when he had 51%, and so forth. The farthest from the exit polls were New Hampshire and Florida, and I imagine if you go back through the polling data in previous elections, there are plenty of exit polls in very close states that were not correct within the margin of error. Only it wasn't a big deal because they were in states that didn't matter, or they predicted the same as the actual result anyways.

So the mid-day exit poll numbers showed a small lead in the wrong direction in the closest races. Calm down, Dick.

What I'm Reading

2004-11-03T15:57:00.000-05:00

The Gimli Glider Incident
Most of you probably know that I really hate flying. It's a totally irrational fear, since I am quite well-informed about how safe it is. For some reason, I found this article strangely reassuring.

New York City Picks New Streetlight Design
I saw this on Fark. New York City just had a competition to design a new streetlamp for the city's inventory, with the eventual goal of replacing most of the city's lights. I actually really like the winning design. It looks cool, and I like the way they put the grooves up the stem of the lamp so that signs and signals can be attached without having to wrap those ugly metal bands around the whole post. Most interesting to me was the fact that they're designed to be powered by LEDs. Given the power usage of conventional streetlamps, and the fact that they need to be on at all times during the night, the power and cost-savings of converting those to LEDs could be substantial. UCSB's Materials department probably has at least one more Nobel prize headed its way some day for this invention.

The Idea Trap
This article by Bryan Caplan argues that there are two equilibria for policy: good and bad. Good policies reinforce themselves by creating growth and thus lead to reasoned debate and more good policies, while bad policies reinforce themselves by creating misery and desperation, which leads people to open themselves to nonsensical policies. There's no rigor here, and I don't think I buy his arguments, but there does seem to be at least a kernel of truth in what he's saying from a psychological standpoint...I'm sure we can all think of similar examples from history or life.

I think this paper is ultimately too simplistic, though; there are many countries that have bettered their lot by simply realizing that their policies were bad and copying those of countries with better outcomes. He says that that's due to luck, and in a sense it is (so are all good things), but it doesn't give credit to people who make changes through rational thought. Or to put it in his framework, if things get bad enough, people who dogmatically believe in certain bad policies might open themselves up to "crazy" policies like those that seem to be working elsewhere, which undermines his point. Also, I reject his simplistic notion of good and bad policies. Different people in different places would consider different things to be "good" policy.

In general, attempts to categorically summarize the situation of diverse sick and developing economies always fails. There are too many variables to boil it down to a simple framework like this, and even Jeffrey Sachs, for all his successes, has had his failures. So always be suspicious of such simplicity.

Claire Rocks

2004-11-03T09:42:00.000-05:00

Claire is a lean, mean acceptance machine. She got into Georgetown Law yesterday. The dean of admissions wrote a hand-written note on her letter saying how much she rocks and how they hope she'll attend.

Liberal Cocooning

2004-11-03T09:12:00.000-05:00

Matt Drudge may have been white-washing the exit poll results, but he turned out to be right. What the democrats are doing, convincing themselves that there is a chance Kerry will somehow pull over 100,000 votes out of Ohio, is much worse. This is not the 500 votes in Florida. Bush has won it, and if you were looking at the county-by-county vote last night at about 10pm, this was obvious.

Of course, I don't blame the Kerry camp for not doing anything rash. You never know, and this is very, very close. It's perfectly valid to want to be sure before making an announcement.

But let's not kid ourselves, folks. Even assuming that somehow, those 250,000 uncounted Ohio votes actually broke 2:1 for Kerry (which is what it would take), any road to Kerry victory leads through the courts, and we know where that road ends.

Conservative Cocooning

2004-11-02T17:32:00.000-05:00

Kaus is always talking about liberal cocooning, which is when liberals find ways to misread the news so that they don't have to deal with it as bad news.

Here's Drudge's update on the early exit polls:

17:12:21 ET // UPDATE: Exit poll mania spread through media and campaign circles Tuesday evening after exit data from big media sources claimed Kerry competitive in key states.... FL Kerry +1 PA Kerry+2-4 OH Kerry+1 WI Kerry+4 MI Kerry+2 NH Kerry +4

"Competitive?" He's winning.

Of course, don't take that to mean that I think the exit polls mean Kerry is winning. If you've got a narrowly divided election (say, fractions of a percent), then your (very sparse) exit polls are quite likely to show a lead for one candidate or the other just due to sampling error. But if there's something that those polls he cites show, it's that Kerry is winning. Certainly it is better for your guy to be up 1% in these polls than down.

The Democratic Candidate

2004-11-02T13:25:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to say something before the polls close, and we know who won. I previously thought that Edwards was the best shot for a Democratic win in 2004, but I've come to believe that I was totally wrong. John Kerry actually was the best choice for the Democrats.

Why did I think Edwards was the best? Well, I think if you've seen him give a stump speech, you'd know why. He's eloquent, and speaks powerfully. He looks young and energetic up there. It's exactly what you liked about Bill Clinton.

However, I never watched any of the Democratic primary debates. I'm sure what I would have seen if I had was that John Edwards is an awful debater. He's terrible at it, he falls apart completely. He looks nervous, and behaves strangely. Watching him debate Cheney wasn't a pretty sight. If John Kerry wins tonight, it will almost certainly have been due in large part to his strong and steady debate performances against Bush. Edwards debating Bush would have been a whole different game than a faceoff with Cheney, but I still can't imagine Edwards coming out on top of that one.

In fact, given his poor performance, I am led to agree that picking Edwards hasn't done much for Kerry. The Democratic governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, made the short list of potential VP choices, and probably could have delivered Iowa for Kerry. Edwards doesn't have a hope of delivering a single Southern state, so now Kerry-Edwards has had to fight for a state that might have simply been theirs.

The only other realistic Democratic nominee was Howard Dean, and while I was sympathetic to many of his positions (especially his straight-shooting position that we need to raise the retirement age for social security), he struck me as a bit too unpredictable and politically tone deaf (ie, he was laughable when talking about religion) to be a good choice to face Bush. Plus, the Deaniacs alienated the hell out of me with their whole cult thing, and I'm supposed to be on their side.

So in the end, I think John Kerry was the best choice the Democrats had to choose from. And what a sorry statement that is.

Holy Moly

2004-11-01T09:51:00.000-05:00

Wow, The Votemaster is Andrew Tanenbaum.

That is so...weird.

Actually, Not the Bluetooth Killer App

2004-10-28T16:03:00.000-04:00

Alex calls me out on some sloppy google research. I shot myself in the foot with the old Kb vs. KB thing and granted Bluetooth 8 times the bandwidth it actually has.

How embarassing.

(And in front of so many people).

That does pretty much sink the wireless idea. However, I'd just like to say, I wouldn't have thought the camera would transfer the full, uncompressed image, but rather the JPEG. Given that most of my camera's photos come out at around 600K, I guess you can see why I thought Bluetooth would be feasible, given my misunderstanding its performance.

Also, a while ago, I heard some rumor of some new WiFi standard being worked on to provide a high-speed personal wireless network, like Bluetooth, but better suited to something like this. It was like 802.something, as I recall, but I might well be hallucinating it. I can't seem to find anything about this anymore, since I have no idea what it would have been called. Ah, those vague, convenient rumors.

Finally, I'd like to point out that the wirelessness was not the main point of the post. If they could figure out a way to jam a more universal port onto the iPod (USB2 or Firewire), so that people could connect up the camera, it would still work about the same; you'd still have your iPod in your pocket. The main idea was about what the iPod could become, and how it could better integrate with all sorts of other electronic devices to provide storage for them.

And, I want it to be a cell phone, damnit.

The Bluetooth Killer App

2004-10-26T14:45:00.000-04:00

Apple just announced their newest iPods, the iPod U2 Special Edition and the iPod Photo. Personally, neither of these is particularly appealing to me. The U2 iPod looks alright, but I think the back looks funny still being silver, it doesn't quite work with the front as well as the white does. They probably didn't want to mess with it too much, though.

The iPod Photo similarly doesn't do anything for me. It was probably inevitable that they'd stick a color screen in there; it was going to happen sooner or later, whether it was them or their competitors leading the way. However, the idea of being able to view my photo collection on a little 2 inch diagonal screen doesn't really excite me that much (neither does its increased size and weight).

Still, I think this could be a good first step towards what the iPod can become: a personal portable hard drive. Obviously, the real usage scenario for iPod Photo is plugging it into your TV or computer to show the photos in a way that someone might actually want to see them. That's fine, but what I really want to be able to do is have an iPod in my pocket and have my digital camera automatically send my photos to it, like it's an outside-the-camera 40GB roll of film. Since I don't want to have to carry around a cable for every given type of device I might want to connect to, I'd also like it if the iPod would work wirelessly. Given its bandwidth and the proximity the user will usually have to the device being used, Bluetooth is probably a great match for the iPod.

Of course, then that begs the question of what else you can do if everyone is carrying around a wireless hard drive in their pocket. For one thing, it strikes me that my cellphone (a small Nokia) would fit entirely inside my iPod, if you took the case off. Most of that smaller piece is a battery and the screen. In a few generations, could the chips used in the iPod be small enough to include mobile phone chips and an antenna, so I don't have to haul around both my cell phone and iPod (obviously, the battery and screen would be shared)? Let us hope. A small redesign to the iPod headphones could include one of those dangling microphones on the wire. Or, Apple could use a Bluetooth headset, similar to what is currently available for Bluetooth phones. I'm sure Apple could work out a nice interface for dialing with the scrollwheel (although I find that I'm usually dialing out of my contacts list on my cellphone, which is what I'd prefer if I could). Plus, it could stop me from missing cell phone calls while I'm walking around listening to music, which must be amusing to bystanders every time I walk by oblivious to the ringing cell phone in my pocket.

I hate speculation pieces like this, because the writer always assumes that R&D and production are free. Of course I want a cheaper, faster iPod with more storage and a higher-res screen that does the work of any electronic appliance you could think of! That's not what I'm trying to say, because I understand that's not helpful. However, I think there's a very real opening here for Apple to create and own a potentially huge new market in the, well, personal hard drive/universal connector mark...the "digital pod" market. As a matter of fact, I think it's either very forward-thinking or fortunate that Apple gave the iPod such a vague name, when it could have called it something more music-centered.

Lead the way, Apple! Earn that $600!

The Latest Great Thing About Firefox

2004-10-25T21:17:00.000-04:00

As I've said before, I don't have Flash installed on Firefox, because nothing good ever comes of Flash. It only leads to obnoxious movie previews and commercials making noise in your browser window while you're trying to read, or gigantic ads that obscure the page until you dismiss them. Well, almost nothing good comes of Flash. Occasionally, you want to check out Strongbad Email, or something like that. Then, it's too much trouble to bother, since you have to open IE, and deal with that whole unpleasant experience.

Well, the answer is Flash Click to View. This extension prevents every Flash object from loading, and instead replaces it with a play button. If you want to see a particular Flash movie, you just click the button. Otherwise, your browsing experience remains just as quiet and pleasant as if you didn't have Flash installed.

This was actually the first time I'd ever installed a Firefox extension, and I was pleasantly surprised. Firefox itself takes you to their extension repository, and a simple click on "Install Now" does all the work. It just tells you that you need to restart Firefox before it can take effect.

Similarly, installing Flash was easier than on IE. I really like the Firefox tells you that you don't have a viewer for a certain page object (with the yellow bar across the top of the page and the button that lets you get the viewer), but today I got to tell Firefox to load the Flash plugin. You never have to deal with Macromedia's site or an installer, or anything. Firefox hides the whole thing from you. All you need to do is agree to the license, watch the progress bar, and restart Firefox.

Incredible.

What I'm Reading

2004-10-20T13:52:00.000-04:00

I had to let her know that the reason she'd never heard of me was because I was famous
I'd hate for you to think that I read Slashdot interviews (I don't), but I do read what Neal Stephenson writes. This put me in a kind of difficult situation when I saw a Slashdot interview with Neal Stephenson, but ties go to Neal.

Good Bad Attitude
OK, don't think that I read Slashdot... This is really sort of a self-serving essay: us hackers, we're so amazing, and the world just doesn't get us because they're squares. That would turn me off, if it weren't for the fact that I think he's absolutely right about the subversive attitude he's talking about.

In other news, I got an email from Jamie Zawinski today, as part of an email he'd sent out to a bunch of the major Gnome and GTK bigwigs. He was linking to an article he'd just put up on his website, discussing why XScreensaver doesn't use a widely used toolkit. I can't imagine how I got on this list along with Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, Jeff Waugh, Davyd Madeley, and others, but it was definitely a manually-entered list and not some mailing list forward. I know I've never emailed Jamie before, so I thought that was pretty funny.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We Have a Winner!

2004-10-19T23:12:00.000-04:00

Surprisingly, I have found a library that works almost exactly as I would like. It's called ding, after the author. Despite some style differences, his library is almost perfect. The matrix class is parameterized on type, but not on dimension, which is what I was looking for. It doesn't seem to do any heavy-weight sparse-matrix stuff either. It has nicely defined operators, and some nice output facilities.

Looking around at his site, I see why it probably matches my needs so closely. Yongling Ding is a Finance PhD, and he bills his library as a quantitative finance library. It doesn't seem very complete for that specific task, but even on the basics it's obvious that the main thrust of what we want to do with it is similar.

I wish I'd found it sooner, so I didn't have to implement my own versions of all those functions. So, in an attempt to prevent this horrible fate from befalling another, I am mobilizing my 4 regular readers, and attempting to give him some googlejuice.

Everything Sucks in Large Amounts

2004-10-19T21:37:00.000-04:00

What I want to be doing right now, instead of writing this post, is writing some C++ code. Well, let me rephrase that. I want to be writing some high-speed numerical code. I honestly gave Java and C# a really honest chance last night, but it quickly became apparent that there just aren't any decent matrix math libraries for them. That's how much I wanted to avoid C++, I was willing to deal with the performance of Java for this problem. If you're about to snicker at the fact that I would consider those solutions to be "high performance," shut up until you read the rest of this. Besides, even Java would still be a major improvement over Matlab.

There's some Matlab code we have to do a Geweke-Hajivassiliou-Keane (GHK) simulation to find the probability that an event that is distributed multivariate normally is within a given set of bounds. This is actually a pretty neat thing to do. Because the pdf of a normal distribution cannot be integrated analytically, calculating the cdf requires numerical integration. Normally, this is fine, but when you get a multivariate normal distribution (that is, a vector random variable that is jointly normally distributed, as opposed to a vector of independently normal random variables), after three dimensions it becomes impractical to do this integration. It is illegal, in economics or statistics literature, to mention this problem without also mentioning that it is called "the curse of dimensionality."

The solution, in practical terms, is to generate random variables that are distributed according to the distribution you are interested in, and then see how many of those fall in the rectangle you are interested in. As you perform this iterative process, you will converge on the probability you are interested in. The GHK algorithm is an improvement on the "crude" version I just described that uses some clever weighting to get a better estimate with fewer random draws.

So, since the Matlab code was taking 31 hours to run on the dataset of interest, and despite the fact that my optimization efforts cut that down by two thirds in Matlab, I thought I'd try to see if I could improve on that with a lower-level language.

I searched long and hard for some Java or C# matrix math libraries. I found some, of course, but nothing I felt comfortable with investing time in, because they looked too half-baked or bit-rotten, or whatever. So, I finally came to terms with the fact that I was going to have to use C++, because I knew there were many math libraries freely available for it.

The first thing I realized is that while there are some good libraries for this stuff, they're not really for the uses I was thinking of. Many of them are for creating gigantic sparse matrices, and that was just too heavy-weight. I'd never see a speed improvement for a much smaller matrix like I was working with. Eventually I invested some time in a highly lauded library called Blitz++. It promised good speed and some very complete matrix classes.

However, after I'd familiarized myself with the library and its very flexible matrix implementations, I found that it had no matrix multiply routine. This struck me as a rather strange omission, and I blew over an hour poking around because I just couldn't believe it wouldn't have it. Of course, it really didn't. They offered some very clever hack involving their tensor notation and the associated operators which in practice executes in O(n^4) time, no thank you. So, I wrote my own matrix multiply routine, no big deal, I've done it a million times.

However, what quickly became a problem was all the C++ template hackery that the Blitz++ fellows think is so clever. It isn't. It's painful. Compiling my little 150 line program takes more than half a minute, due to all that template crap. If there's a simple bug, it could very well generate 40 pages of meaningless error messages because every phase of the compiler is totally confused. Using Blitz++ drove me slowly insane, and now I don't really know what to use. There are some other math libraries I found, but none of them have the specific operations that I was hoping to get pre-written, as far as I can tell. The more complete ones seem to promise more template nonsense as well.

It makes you want to use Java or C#, is really what it does. I'm sure the performance would still have been a major improvement over the entirely interpreted (and notoriously slow) Matlab, and I might well have been done by now because I could have just written the damn code, instead of screwing around with libraries all day.

Notes on Team America: World Police

2004-10-18T11:17:00.000-04:00

I'm somewhat at a loss for how to describe this movie. Most of the things I normally key in on in movies just don't apply this movie (like cinematography, directing, acting, and writing). Still, much like its (spiritual) predecessor, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, it's a brilliant film.

Some people, of course, won't be able to decide if they want to see this movie until they know whose side it's on. Given that it's really hard to pin the movie down on anything, that might, along with its R rating, explain why it opened third in the box office. I've seen some complain that the left is given a harder time by this movie, but I disagree. It's true that Bush and his advisors are entirely absent from the movie, but I can easily see it being the case that whoever greenlighted this movie didn't want to risk the box office consequences of cutting themselves off entirely from Bush supporters (after already cutting themselves off from people who don't think they want to watch marionettes, and people under 17). The criticism of the war on terror couldn't have been clearer or more piercing to me. The members of Team America talk like police on COPS might, showing up in helicopters with sirens on them, and blowing up much of major foreign cities in their bumbling pursuit of terrorists. Then after finally killing the terrorists (and razing much of, say, Paris), they stand around, waiting to be fawned over by the locals, who are about to do no such thing. You can't fail to pick up the idea that fighting terrorists through bombing cities largely effects third parties who have nothing to do with the two parties in actual conflict.

In any case, it's ridiculous to argue about who has it easier in this movie. No one who agrees with either extreme is going to declare the movie's verdict fair. Although I very much respect Parker and Stone's intelligence, and I respect the freedom comedy has to tell the truth, the much more important feature of this movie is that it's hilarious. It's the funniest movie I've seen in ages, and everyone in the audience obviously thought so too. The main character's final speech about the war on terror must be seen.

Update: I hate to admit I read cnn.com, but this article is related to some of the things I talked about above.

The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

2004-10-15T16:59:00.000-04:00

I've always wondered how the east coast can have such a strong concentration of the first-rate schools. On the east coast, you'll find tons of top schools that people just have to go to: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, UPenn, Chicago, Michigan, Brown, NYU, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Duke, UVA, and plenty of others. The west coast has Stanford, CalTech, Berkeley, UCLA, and maybe UCSD. That's what you've got if you're, say, west of North Dakota (And I'm counting universities here, there's plenty of well-respected liberal arts colleges on the west coast, though I suspect those are also outweighed by the east coast). Only five of the top 30 schools are west of Texas, according to US News.

This isn't really surprising, given that the east coast has been settled for much longer, but it is a bit strange that most of the top students on the west half of the country get shipped to the other side. You wouldn't expect it to last over time. Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD are big schools, but that can't possibly make up for it. The workhorses of the west, the "midrange" mentioned above, are the other 7 UC schools. No other state school system is well respected on this half of the country, and the California State system isn't very good.

Given this lopsided distribution, it's only natural that over time, more schools in the west would slowly evolve and move up the ranks, right? Having gone to one of those workhorse schools, I'm glad to see it. In fact, you might have expected this to happen at USCB: How many other schools can give professors offices with an ocean view? It probably has a better faculty than you might otherwise think it could afford.

I don't know if UCSB can ever get past its reputation, but it's pretty clear that it is improving dramatically (in reputation, at least; clearly if it's being considered a better school, it's been a better school for some time). Indeed, for the small difference in the quality of education, there's a large difference in tuition between the UCs and the Ivy Leagues. That cost-effectiveness is in itself something to be proud of, I think, but it clearly doesn't translate into respect or earnings. Just try telling it to an Ivy Leaguer; they'll nod and smile but wouldn't be caught dead there. Perhaps some day the "other" UCs will be as well-regarded as the "other" east coast schools, and provide a stronger representation for the western half of the country on the lists of the top schools.

What a wonderful thing that would be. Another coast filled with excellent schools, but without the aristocratic names and self-importance. Instead of old neo-classical buildings and snow, simple, laid-back architecture in paradise, and with respect.

Notes on Friday Night Lights

2004-10-13T16:52:00.000-04:00

This is a powerful movie, and it might be one of my favorite sports movies. However, that's probably not for the reason that most people like sports movies. Typically, sports movies are about struggle, overcoming adversity, persistence, and eventually victory, or something like that. A sports movie where the main characters don't win is almost unheard of.

If you aren't paying attention, you might think that Friday Night Lights is just that sort of movie. However, what it's really about is having an unhealthy attitude towards sports. The movie is quite clear about where it stands on this, as announcers complain that not enough money has been spent on the high school's football stadium, and superstar kids can barely read their college recruitment letters. The kids in the movie are told that they don't have any opportunities aside from football, and they believe it. Because they believe it, it's true, and it's heartbreaking.

Aside from that, it's a pretty typical sports movie. Billy Bob Thornton is great as the football coach (but then, saying that is like saying that Courtney Love is an amazing actress when she plays a crackwhore), and all the other Texans put in very natural performances. The movie depends on that authenticity, because it's very much not in the traditional Hollywood style of, say, Jerry Maguire. The camera is frequently handheld, and it cut very quickly, like a music video. Some parts of it just seem like a highlight reel, fast-forwarding through time. Of course, all sports movies do that, but this one makes doesn't try as hard to hide it. That's not a criticism, either, it works well.

What I'm Reading

2004-10-13T14:35:00.000-04:00

Here's just a list of several interesting articles and blog posts I've read recently around the web.

Thank You, William H. Meckling
I found this article about the economist(s) who killed the draft on Marginal Revolution. It's a great read. Here's the heroic Milton Friedman shaming a general:

Of course, Meckling wasn't the only hero. Milton Friedman was very persuasive. One of Meckling's favorite stories, which his widow, Becky, recalled in a recent interview, was of an exchange between Mr. Friedman and General William Westmoreland, then commander of all U.S. troops in Vietnam. In his testimony before the commission, Mr. Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Mr. Friedman interrupted, "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?" Mr. Westmoreland replied, "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." Mr. Friedman then retorted, "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher."

Linux Kernel 2.6: It's Worth More!
In this paper, David Wheeler uses some of Barry Boehm's constructive cost models (COCOMO) to estimate the cost of privately redeveloping the Linux kernel from scratch. He arrives at an answer in the neighborhood of $612 million dollars, though he says (and I completely agree) that this is probably only a lower bound. It's almost certainly much higher than that. Previously, David Wheeler wrote a similar paper called More Than a Gigabuck, which attempts to estimate the same statistic for an entire RedHat distribution (as the title suggests, it comes out to more than $1 billion dollars, though I would again be surprised if it was actually that low). The much more interesting question is how much Linux is worth, but that's much harder to estimate (Slashdot, of course, can't tell the difference).

How to Watch Tonight's Debate
I largely agree with Timothy Noah's sentiment, but I think he's wrong in practice. When talking about the added expenses of Bush's social security privatization plan, he's being simplistic. It's true that privatizing social security will require a lot of borrowing (I believe those figures). But the longer you wait to do it, the more expensive it gets! Since John Kerry doesn't want to privatize it, he gets to count the transition costs as zero, but that masks what is really going to happen. In fact, the Concord Coalition document that Noah links to says about as much:

However, the key issue in evaluating the fiscal implications of a Social Security reform plan is not its immediate 10-year cost but whether it achieves long-term sustainability. Both the costs and benefits of reform should be assessed over a time frame that goes well beyond the next decade. Incurring a modest near-term budget cost as part of the transition to a genuinely funded and sustainable system may not be fiscally irresponsible.

The Concord Coalition then goes on to say that they don't think Bush's plan will achieve long-term sustainiability. However, I still take issue with the way people account for the costs of inaction. Arnold Kling explains much better here and here. Note that Kling assumes there is no cost to increased government borrowing, and that this simply shifts who pays when; this ignores the effects of crowding out, which can have contractionary effects. Still, it's better than doing nothing, but nothing is probably what we'll get:

The more dire the long term problem grows, the greater the cost, and the political resistance, of doing something to fix it now. So, for instance, debate over private account reforms for Social Security stalls on the size of "transition costs," which are much less than the cost of not reforming, but must be borne in the present. The question now is whether we've passed the point of no return: Whether the near-term pain required to fix things will continue to multiply with the long-term cost of inaction at a rate that keeps us locked on course. Perhaps, sometime soon, citizens will be struck with the spirit of civic and intergenerational responsibility, bite the bullet and clean up the mess their predecessors made. Or perhaps, if we're lucky, the scam will last long enough for us to pass the bill on to our kids.

Justice Dept. wants new antipiracy powers
Last friday, just after the debate, we watched Real Time with Bill Maher. Fox News's Tony Snow and the asshat Lieutenant Governor of The Worst State in the Union lost their shit when Bill Maher pointed to the recent corporate tax cut and said that nothing has changed since September 11th. I don't fully agree with Bill, but I think he definitely has a point. If our priorities have changed so much, then do we really need to increase funding for the FBI so they can hire more agents to crack down on illegal song downloading?

"The department is prepared to build the strongest, most aggressive legal assault against intellectual-property crime in our nation's history," Attorney General John Ashcroft, who created the task force in March, said at a press conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon.
In an example of the Justice Department's hunger for new copyright-related police powers, the report asks Congress to introduce legislation that would permit wiretaps to be used in investigating serious intellectual-property offenses and that would create a new crime of the "importation" of pirated products. It also suggests stationing FBI agents and prosecutors in Hong Kong and Budapest, Hungary, to aid local officials and "develop training programs on intellectual-property enforcement."

It basically speaks for itself. If September 11th had really changed our priorities, we might stop this nonsense (and plenty of other nonsense) because we have other things we urgently need to spend money on that will give us a higher return to our safety and happiness.

A Solution for Gerrymandering?

2004-10-08T11:52:00.000-04:00

Mickey Kaus made a post today that gave me an idea. Gerrymandering is an old problem, and it continues to be a huge problem. Redistricting is necessary from time to time for ensuring that district boundaries are drawn fairly with respect to the changing concentration of the population, but the problem is that the people who do the redistricting are the politicians affected by it. It's been said that gerrymandering lets politicians choose their voters, instead of letting voters choose their politicians.

What if we could come up with an algorithm that creates district boundaries, and all states were required by law to use that algorithm for creating districts? That is, what if we could create an algorithm that takes as input the geographic shape of the state and information on current voter densities and outputs a set of district boundaries? That would take the control entirely out of the hands of any partisan force and place it instead in the hands of mathematics and the voters (by virtue of where they choose to live). Notice that it doesn't take in any information on what party the voters are registered with. To borrow from John Rawls, it would be a set of district boundaries that everyone could agree to if they didn't know what party they were in, only it works by not knowing the party registration of the voters. In essence, a tangible, real-life veil of ignorance.

Of course, there are difficulties. When I took data structures and algorithms, one of the projects involved implementing several different algorithms for taking a group of points distributed on the x,y plane, and clustering them into n groups. Constructing the optimal clustering is not computationally feasible (with all the footnotes that go with that), so these algorithms were mostly based on heuristics and didn't always generate good results (and they could still take a long time to run).

I imagine with some research, it should be possible to construct an algorithm that has desirable properties. For example, it should create districts of roughly equal size in terms of population, connected, non-overlapping, not too concave, and it should try to make district boundaries go through sparsely populated areas. It is essential that it not require any "tuning parameters" or human input (except in the case that it needs firmly set parameters to be tuned once and then used everywhere). That's too many goals, and they can be contrary to each other, I know. Still, the clustering doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to be unbiased and better than what currently happens. Ideally, the key properties and performance boundaries of the algorithm should be proven mathematically, so everyone can be comfortable with it. With some work, I think something promising could be done.

However, I think even if it is possible, it won't be done for the obvious reasons: it requires the people who are affected by it to agree to it, which is the original problem. It's too bad, it would be an interesting combination of law and technology.

Update: Macneil writes in to point out that this is actually an old idea. For example, see here. I did some google searches last night, but nothing came up. Now I'm finding all sorts of stuff, so I must have been using the wrong search terms.

Endgame

2004-10-08T09:16:00.000-04:00

Today marks the beginning of the endgame for the 2004 presidential election. This morning, at 8:30am, the BLS released the last employment situation report before the election. Bush supporters had placed high hopes on this report finally showing strong job growth, especially because the BLS was due to issue a revision to the data for the year leading up to March 2004. The Bush administration had been expecting an upward revision of about 300,000 to 400,000 jobs. This jobs report didn't get close to fulfilling their hopes, as the upward revision is smaller than forecasted (and smaller than the average upward revision in past years), this month's job growth was weak (96,000), and last month's was revised downward. A good news strikeout.

The candidates are going to have to react quickly, because their second debate is tonight. I don't know how people weigh the different debates, but I imagine the earlier ones are probably more important to people. By the third, they've probably seen what they were watching to see, so unless someone makes a major mistake, it's probably the least important. We'll see if Bush can reverse last thursday's performance, and if Kerry can turn in a similarly strong one. By tonight, we should have a better picture of where the election is going.

By the way, this story is hard to believe, exactly the sort of nonsense that Salon mass produces. The photo is hard to argue with, but who knows? They cite Bush's "let me finish!" statement as evidence, but I don't see why he couldn't have been responding to Jim Lehrer looking like he was about to turn it over to Kerry, which is what I assumed at the time. I don't see the mainstream media picking up on this story anytime soon. Still, I'll be watching the space between Bush's shoulder blades with interest tonight. (By the way, I got that link from electoral-vote.com, so please don't think I actually read Salon)

Last Word

2004-10-07T11:05:00.000-04:00

Now that it has been a couple of days since the debate, some better polls have been conducted about who won the Vice Presidential debate. The results firmly suggest that Cheney won (link from electoral-vote.com). However, those states and cities also agree in similar numbers that Kerry won the first presidential debate.

Damnit, shoulda stuck to my guns!

The More You Tighten Your Grip, the More Users Will Slip Through Your Fingers

2004-10-06T01:21:00.000-04:00

The other day, J. Bradford Delong, an economist a Berkeley articulated a really good reason to privatize social security. Actually, he wrote about several good reasons, but since this is actually an iPod post, I'm only interested in one:

At present, your Social Security benefits are yours only by grace of Congress: Congress could cut them if it wished. But if your privatized Social Security account were *yours*, then it would be yours not by grace of Congress but by right of property: courts would stand ready to defend it against any casual attempt to cut or confiscate it.

(Arnold Kling discusses the issue in more detail here, if you're interested).

The other day, I was thinking what a strange thing it is that I still have yet to buy any music from Apple's iTunes Music Store. I'm a big fan of Apple's, I am in favor of intellectual property rights for digital music files, and I think self-protection mechanisms are probably the best solution. I'm all about their pricing. So if I'm such an ideal customer for them, why can't I bring myself to do it?

One big reason is very similar to what Brad Delong brings up. When you download a song from iTunes Music Store, you don't really have a very firm guarantee about what you're buying. They do spell out what the software allows you to do, but they can change that retroactively. In fact, they have done that. If you purchased a song with the first version of the store, you were able to burn a given file to CD ten times. Subsequent versions have brought that number down to seven. That's hardly a dealbreaker, since I don't even plan to do it once.

Still, it makes me uneasy. If I pay for an album, what exactly am I buying? Purchasing a song from iTunes Music Store (and let me make clear that I realize that this is not entirely up to Apple; most of these criticisms should be read as being directed against the RIAA where appropriate) is actually the purchase of a usage license. You don't have any rights except what they give you, and you certainly can't consider your file a piece of your own property. In the license agreement they reserve the right to change your rights retroactively at any time, so I don't really feel comfortable with the purchase.

Does commercial song licensing happen this way? If you're a movie producer, and you want to license the latest hit song for your blockbuster, do they give you the rights, take your money, and then warn you that if they want, they can instantaneously change the terms of your usage agreement? You would feel comfortable with that? I doubt it. Yet that's exactly what they expect you to do when you download music from them, only one dollar at a time.

Then on top of that, they tell you that you are not in fact buying a license to use the music, you're buying a license to use that one particular file they send you. If your hard drive crashes, well, you're just gonna have to buy a new license so you can download it again! In other words, they're not about giving you the increased convenience that digital files give everyone else, they want you to inconvenience yourself by manually backing up your gigantic music collection to dozens of CDs, or pay to download everything again (having people buy things over and over again is a big theme with the record industry). I can understand that they have bandwidth costs, but losing a hard disk is not the uncommon event that a house fire that destroys your CD collection is. It happens all the time, and I'm not sure most people really understand how to back up their files.

I know the record industry is barely comfortable with the fact that everyone in the world can run around willy-nilly without a 1984 big-brother screen in their living room, automatically charging people when they hear a song. It's a tough life. But I think that if they would make some changes to their policies, they could get a lot more people onboard.

The way iTunes organizes your music is fantastic, and for me, CDs have basically become a distribution system for my mp3 files. When a CD comes out, I'm faced with a choice between paying $9.99 for the it at iTunes Music Store, and going to the record store a few blocks away and getting it for around $12.99 or $13.99. I'm still choosing the record store, and the reason why is directly related to their licensing terms.

With the CD, I do pay more. But I also get a lot more for my money. If I drop my laptop and the disk breaks, I can just rerip the CD without spending any more money (than the replacement laptop is already going to cost me). I can play the CD on as many computers or devices as I like, including my car, without the hassle of burning CDs or other contortions. And, I can lend the CD to my friends, if I think they might like it; who wants to be unable to lend their friends a CD? (It's stating the obvious to say that the 30-second song clips on iTunes are practically useless compared to getting a couple of good listens to the full CD). In short, the CD is worth more because it conveys usage rights that are a strict superset of the rights given to me by the license agreement. And they cannot revoke those rights after the purchase of the CD. Is it any wonder that people pay the few extra dollars to buy a CD and not have to worry about the inconvenience and uncertainty?

Of course, there is a difference in price, and it is significant. But apparently it's not a big enough difference to make up for all the problems, because I'm still getting the CDs. I suspect there's also an effect where people pool their purchases, buying CDs and letting their friends rip mp3s of them, so that in effect they are experiencing a lower price for the CDs that they don't absolutely need to have. This makes the price difference with the digital file seem less appealing if you have a group of friends with similar music tastes.

Still, I do want digital distribution, especially given how unused my CDs become once I've ripped them, and I think it would be more attractive if they made some changes. First of all, they should respect the terms of the license in effect when you buy the song, and waive their right to change the terms of the purchase after the fact. This will prevent the bait-and-switch problem that arises from the fact that the files are not your property.

Then they should let users listen to the entire CD at a very low quality level, instead of giving them 30-second song clips. The Flaming Lips have a very crappy version of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on their website. It lets you listen to the entire album streamed in Flash, and it sounds like garbage. Still, I listened to the entire album several times all the way through, and then had to get the CD to stop the stutters and hissing and the fact that I had to be on the web and playing my music through Flash. I'm pretty sure I would have bought the album anyways, but I don't think someone unfamiliar with their music would have heard what is good about the album from a group of 30 second clips.

Amazon does something very similar to this, letting users search inside the entire book and get specific pages out. However, they put tight limits on how much of the book you can see, so that you don't just read the book online. This might lose them a few sales due to people who were just looking for a specific piece of data, but those weren't exactly likely buyers anyways. They probably get additional buyers who satisfy themselves that the book contains a lot of what they're interested in (which they can't ascertain from just the first few pages), and feel comfortable buying it.

The mechanism could work similarly on iTunes Music Store. Interested, registered users logged into their accounts could stream the entire album (counted as 50% or more) in very low quality, say, 5 to 10 times in a 2-year period. After that, sorry, you've gotten a good idea of what's in there. Streaming the album in this way isn't a good substitute for having bought the album because it sounds crappy, it limits the number of times you can hear it, and it doesn't let you send the album to your iPod or through AirTunes to your stereo.

Loosening up on the usage restrictions like this also makes it possible for users to share CDs they think their friends might like. Instead of lending the CD, a user can simply say "Go to iTunes and stream this CD, I think you'll like it." Since people probably have a better idea of what their friends like, I would be surprised if this didn't result in a net positive for sales.

Finally, iTunes Music Store should give users some recourse if their hard disk crashes, other than buying the whole shebang over again. It doesn't necessarily have to be free, but they do have your purchase history, and they should offer you a steep discount to download the files you've bought again in case you need to. It could be a sliding scale, like 50% off for a collection of less than 100 songs, and 70% off for a collection of 100 to 500, and 90% off of bigger collections. That should deter people from casually downloading songs over and over again ("Hmmm, why do you want to do that?"), without leaving them totally screwed if they lose their music collection or have to switch to a new computer.

Cheney Finally Produces the WMD

2004-10-05T23:25:00.000-04:00

The best proof that the vice presidential debate was an embarassing failure for the Democrats is the universal consensus amongst Kerry/Edwards supporters that the debate was a draw. This is an nonsensical as the same response to the first presidential debate from Republicans.

Not that Edwards was without his good moments. Almost immediately after the debate shifted to domestic policy, he started to not suck. Some of his answers were actually good, especially his obviously-rehearsed defense of the fact that he's a trial lawyer, and very convincing, substantive discussion of malpractice suits (even if I disagree with his solution to the problem). His closing statement had the potential to be powerful, but given the preceding 90 minutes, it felt too fake and rehearsed. I can understand why he reminds people of Clinton, when he's giving a speech. But Clinton can talk like that when he's speaking unrehearsed, and Edwards can't.

Cheney is a fantastic debater, and his performance tonight was easily the best of any presidential or vice presidential debater in the past 4 years. If you didn't understand anything they were talking about, you'd conclude that Cheney had a better grasp of policy. His answers were coherent and substantive, convincing. Edwards debated like Bush, falling back on pre-packaged attacks to the point of repetition. All through this, as Cheney wiped the floor with Edwards, he did it with a calm, pleasant manner that said Edwards was getting what he deserved.

Cheney took it a step further: he has an instinct for when he can cross the line and go in for the kill. Several times Cheney declined to respond to a question instead of filling up his alloted time, exactly those times when Edwards was sounding weak and repetitive. When he cited Edwards's attendance in the senate, it made Edwards look pathetic, and Edwards had no good response. He just got Bush-like and cried about "distortions" before changing the subject. I think that even people who don't understand the policies being discussed very well can sniff out that sort of weakness.

I think Edwards erred when the moderator asked him about flip-flopping and spoon-fed him some Bush flip-flops. He claimed they'd been consistent the entire time, a claim that strains credibility. I don't know why it's such political death to say "We extended you our good faith when you claimed that Saddam Hussein was on the verge of having these weapons and immediate action was necessary, and now we've seen that you were making those claims irresponsibly," or something to that effect. Instead, by doubling down on the "total consistency" angle, they've cut themselves off from that direction for good. Kerry was closer in the first debate when he pointed out the kindergarten insight that you can be certain and wrong. Sometimes it can help your case to admit your faults, it takes an attack a way from your opponent (8 Mile had a great example of this, but you probably don't want to deploy that attack unmodified in this context). Edwards did something like this late in the debate, when he admitted that he didn't have the experience record that Cheney did, but that didn't mean he was wrong (or something to that effect). Unfortunately, I think people had mostly figured out what they needed to from the first half of the debate, and turned their TVs off by the time things were going well for Edwards. Fortunately, I think most people aren't going to be too swayed by the VP debate anyways.

Watching this debate, I couldn't help but wonder whether maybe Bush hasn't pioneered a long-term innovation in the role of the vice president. Obviously, the vice president hasn't had an important role in previous administrations. Lyndon Johnson said the most miserable time of his life was being Kennedy's VP. He was used to having incredible power as the Senate Majority Leader, and took the VP slot thinking that "power is where power goes." He drafted an order for Kennedy to sign that would have made him something like "co-president," but obviously Kennedy declined.

However, Bush has gotten a lot of mileage out of Cheney. Cheney is obviously a heavy-weight policy wonk, and does a lot of heavy lifting. The amount of hatred that is evident for Cheney probably does draw some of the heat away from Bush himself. And Cheney's position probably helps him get things done. Watching this debate, you couldn't help but wonder if things might have gone differently if Edwards had been the presidential candidate, and someone like Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Colin Powell, or some other well-spoken, highly intelligent, long-time policy expert who is too old and obviously disinclined from politics to be any sort of threat to the president.

Update: I woke up this morning to find that the consensus appears to be that Edwards won the debate. Apparently the second half of the debate resonated with watchers more than I thought it would. When Cheney started destroying Edwards early in the debate, and Edwards sat there fidgeting with his pen and burying his face in the coffee mug, before failing to counter any charges and instead repeating his vague allegations, I thought it was all over. Cheney went on to make unbelievable statements that he should have known better than to try to get away with, but my fears were that Edwards was so damaged at this point that it was all moot.

This morning, there's several developments on what Cheney said. Obviously, his claim that he never said there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida is so ridiculous I doubt anyone has bothered to point it out. But Cheney incorrectly gave the URL for Annenberg's Political FactCheck (factcheck.org) as "factcheck.com." George Soros snapped up that domain and put a message up on it. Also, the Kerry campaign has produced a picture of Edwards and Cheney on the stage next to each other at some event (which of course doesn't prove that they actually met, but if it gets enough circulation, it's as good as proof).

Andrew Sullivan, William Saletan, and Chris Suellentrop and others whose opinion is probably better than mine all disagree with me. More importantly, the first instant polls are coming back in favor of Edwards, especially CBS's poll of undecided voters, which shows that they favored Edwards. Given that more people are probably reading about the debate than actually watched it, if it continues at this rate it might add up to a functional win for Kerry/Edwards, even though I'm still not sure what they saw last night.

Another update: Apparently Fred Kaplan and RealClearPolitics got the same read as I did. Kaplan says:

Cheney came into this debate with a weak hand. The war in Iraq is going poorly. Casualties are mounting. Meaningful victory is increasingly elusive. The rhetorical foundations of the war—weapons of mass destruction, Saddam's connection to al-Qaida—are thinner than ever and acknowledged as such by more insiders every day.

Edwards referred to these trends and to the administration's misjudgments and misrepresentations. But he only referred to them. He didn't pound them home time and again.

The Bush-Cheney campaign has tried to deal with the administration's problems by switching the perspective—warning that Kerry will only make things worse. And Cheney did push this button over and over: "You're not credible. … You have a record that isn't so distinguished. … Your rhetoric would be a lot more credible if there was a record to back it up. … I don't believe [Kerry] has the qualities we need as a commander in chief"—all uttered with a tone of parental disappointment.

Kerry defused this tactic very effectively last Thursday. Edwards didn't tonight. It may be that reading a transcript of tonight's debate on foreign and defense policy—or, better still, a point-by-point outline of the transcript—might make Edwards come out the winner. Cheney, after all, spouted a fair bit of nonsense. And Edwards pointed out that some of it was nonsense. But my guess is a stronger impression was made by Cheney's withering assault on his challengers' qualifications for office. Edwards shot down some of the specific attacks, but he didn't mow down the barrage.

Another update: Andrew Sullivan elaborates here. He's convincing me.

Keep Hope Alive

2004-10-01T01:21:00.000-04:00

Here are my thoughts on the debate.

I watched the entire debate, and half an hour of the post-debate coverage. When Kerry started off in the very beginning, I winced at his Floridapander, but Bush managed to screw up by not having a much better, more involved counter-Floridapander prepared, and lamely echoed Kerry's remarks.

However, that was the last time Kerry made me wince. After ten minutes, I told Claire I thought Kerry was winning. For the rest of the debate, Kerry was - dare I say - excellent. Every single question, he started with a very strong short answer, and then elaborated. Every statement ended right as time ran out with a closer that left an impression that the answer was firm, consistent, and complete. Kerry spoke calmly and fluidly, with a very strong prosecutorial manner. It was strong, polite, and commanding; he left nothing frivolous for anyone to complain about like in the 2000 debates.

Bush was the opposite, almost immediately he started coming apart. He would start his responses with a pause of several seconds while he fumbled for words. His replies felt like rehearsed pleasantries devoid of specifics, and he seemed surprised by Kerry's performance, holding to a debate strategy that was outdated from the very first question. Kerry wasn't very specific about anything, but he certainly gave you the impression he was being concrete and substantive to the extent that a 2 minute response allows. Bush shifted around, seeming to hold onto the podium like he was on some scary rollercoaster ride at times. Bush kept trying to stick irrelevant barbs in there, to the point that it felt like a non-sequiter; "...oh yeah, and flip-flopper! But anyways..." (Not a real quote). At one point, he started off a reply by highlighting a vague term that Kerry used, and then found himself with nowhere to go with that line of criticism. It looked weak.

And when Bush actually was talking substantively, I got the impression that someone who wasn't keeping up to date with current events wouldn't know what he was talking about. Kerry actually managed the unbelievable feat of talking about policy, and then explaining what it meant quickly, simply, and without any condescension at all. It was shocking.

I thought one key moment that was both good and a missed opportunity for Kerry was when they were talking about building a coalition. Kerry said the obvious, which is that our coalition was a joke. In his rebuttal, Bush talked up our allies, and made a big deal about Kerry's having forgotten Poland in his list (that military powerhouse). Then in his counter-rebuttal, Kerry detailed the countries who are in the coalition and then detailed their troop levels, making obvious what a joke it is. The missed opportunity was his not giving the comparison to the coalition that Bush's father assembled for the first Gulf War.

Kerry made a few minor errors in judgement, I thought. On a few minor points, he leaned on a touchy issue, like Kyoto, which hadn't been mentioned by anyone. He also told an anecdote about JFK trying to convince France about the Cuban missile crisis, which I fear was ill-advised, even if I agree with his point. It came around and ended well, with him pointing out that no one in the world would say to us today "We don't need to see the pictures, your word is good enough." Still, I wonder if perhaps someone could come away thinking he was trying to talk up France the same way he was trying to mention every single swing state as many times as he could.

This was compounded by his "passing the global test" line. I didn't have a problem with the line in itself; the question was about how the United States should deal with pre-emption, and Kerry was highlighting how important that issue was to get right, given how dangerous pre-emptive war can be. Bush wasn't able to do anything with it; as I said above he just drew attention to the line and hit a brick wall. I'm not sure some uninformed voter would get what Bush was trying to point out, but who knows what the magic of campaign ad editing can do.

The losses due to all this were hopefully swamped by what Kerry did for himself on the flip-flopper charge. His demeanor was so firm that he countered it with just his body language and speech pattern throughout the debate. Bush's canned lines bounced off him as if he didn't hear them, and it worked. Then Kerry explained the simple fact that you can be certain and wrong and did it masterfully. A clear, memorable moment in the flip-flopper issue.

However, I don't think any of that is the real issue. Just as the talk of the 2000 debate was Al Gore's sighing, the most important thing to happen in this debate was everything except what was being said. Kerry looked strong and confident, Bush looked defensive and nervous. When Bush was attacking Kerry at one point, Kerry nodded calmly and wordlessly said "I agree," neutralizing the attack while Bush was still in it. In contrast, Bush would often stand there leaning, doing his pursed lips thing, and looking pissed off. ABC's post-debate coverage said that their instant poll had 45% saying Kerry won, and 36% saying Bush won. CBS got similar results, and CNN got an even wider margin for Kerry. I try to be sensitive to those demeanor issues, since they seem to be so incredibly important to people. Still, they're not very important to me, so I don't really trust my own opinion here.

I'm not sure at this point that it's going to add up to a Kerry victory. I have managed to follow this election so far with almost no hope, and I hesitate to get my hopes up now. Everyone knows Kerry won, and the conservative pundits are pushing to make the limited case that "it was a draw." Nonsense, even that limited claim looks ridiculous. For the first time, I felt like I wanted Kerry to be president, and not just that I wanted someone other than Bush. Given the median voter theorem, that's not good enough. Still, I follow politics ridiculously closely and had managed to not see Kerry speak since January. It isn't hard for me to imagine that many swing voters tuned in and saw Kerry for the first time tonight. And it isn't hard for me to imagine them liking him.

Mickey Kaus has some more thoughts here.

Give and Ye Shall Receive

2004-09-28T14:56:00.000-04:00

I just saw this on IMDB's Studio Briefing:

MPAA Chafes at Bit(Torrent)
A new technology called BitTorrent, which can download a pirated feature film in DVD quality in less time than it takes to watch, is posing a new threat to movie studios. According to Mercury News, the technology, which requires several "owners" of a particular film to "share" individual parts of it with others, is particularly tough for the studios to battle since the sharing network shuts down after the film is downloaded. The BitTorrent software was created by Bram Cohen of Seattle, who receives no money from sales of pirated films but does welcome "donations" from visitors to his website. However, that may not insulate him from a lawsuit by the MPAA. John G. Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy for the Motion Picture Association of America, told Mercury News: "BitTorrent and others who are complicit in copyright theft should take little comfort from their temporary celebrity status."

The level of asshattery is unbelievable. I have no idea what the MPAA thinks they're doing, but shame on the IMDB and Mercury News for letting themselves be spoon fed propaganda like that. This article frames BitTorrent as a movie-stealing tool and insinuates that Bram Cohen is asking for donations from movie pirates.

In reality, what Bram Cohen has done is come up with a way to make file distribution much cheaper and more efficient by making better use of bandwidth. In conventional downloading, a server sits on the internet, and each person who asks for a file is sent an entire copy from the server. As more people ask for files, the server has to blindly send more and more complete copies of the file, making it slower and slower (and in the extreme, bringing down the server).

Cohen's observation is that as users download the file, they have more and more of the file, and yet their upstream bandwidth is sitting there idle. Why not use some of that upstream bandwidth to send the parts of the file that users have to other users? Then the central server doesn't have to send out so many copies of the file in order to serve everyone. The main site has some great charts to illustrate this idea. This winds up drastically reducing the central server's bandwidth usage, yet everyone still gets their file. And since everyone is getting the file from many sources simultaneously, they get the file faster. In fact, as more people download the file, everyone's download gets faster and not slower. All they have to do is contribute a small amount to the distribution. What Bram Cohen has done is create a miracle--faster, more available downloads for the users, using less bandwidth for the distributor--simply by reorganizing poorly utilized resources.

Of course this sort of thing is probably going to piss someone off. I'm just surprised it's the MPAA. There is no doubt that BitTorrent is used to pirate movies, but it's not well-suited to illegal activity. For one thing, you might have noticed in the sentence above that it relies on a central server to coordinate the network. That is the key blunder that brought Napster down. What is distributed by the central server is entirely up to the person who runs the server, so if there are illegal files being downloaded from your BitTorrent server, it's a piece of cake to find you, and it's a piece of cake to prove that you put them there. People who set up piracy torrents are probably relying on the relative obscurity of BitTorrent. The MPAA might be aiming this PR push at those people, but threatening Bram Cohen is unconscionable.

This is not some guy setting up an offshore shell corporation or operating out of contested territory like other P2P software providers. Nor is it some anonymous author trying to cause mischief. The program isn't designed to make it hard to track down its users. If he wants a donation, it's because using BitTorrent can save a company thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs when they release a big file. For example, it has become commonplace for game companies to release the hotly demanded (and gigantic) demos for their games as torrents. In fact, I got the recent Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War demo in this way, sustaining a download rate near my connection's top transfer speed, and without having to wait a single second for the download to start. The MPAA should be thanking this guy for inventing something that can make their future movie download services cheap and convenient to their customers (and then only asking for voluntary donations), not threatening to sue him.

Arnold Kling on Health Insurance

2004-09-28T14:33:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to pass along this article by Arnold Kling on the problem with health insurance as it is currently implemented.

One of the most serious impediments to rational debate on health care is the misuse of the term "health insurance." What we call health "insurance" in this country was never designed to insure the consumer. Instead, its purpose is to insure steady, reliable incomes for health care providers. True health insurance is the economist's equivalent of a unicorn -- we can describe it, but none of us has actually seen it.

What Blue Cross and Blue Shield pioneered was a "split-the-check" approach to health care. An equivalent plan for restaurant meals would be that instead of paying for your meal, you would pay an annual premium to "Blue Eats," which would in turn reimburse restaurants for their costs, plus a profit margin. Every individual member of "Blue Eats" would have an incentive to eat out a lot and order the most expensive items on the menu, because the cost is shared among all of the members of "Blue
Eats."
"Blue Eats" would be a great marketing ploy by restaurants, because it would get people to eat out more and spend more at restaurants. Similarly, John C. Goodman argues that what we call "health insurance" originated as a marketing ploy by physicians and hospitals. It worked really well, too.

Here's the article he references by John C. Goodman, too. Some interesting detail there.

Substitution

2004-09-27T15:49:00.000-04:00

Here's a brief economics lesson.

Two goods are substitutes if one can be used more or less in place of the other, at least for some uses. Some common textbook examples of this are margarine and butter, chicken and steak, movies and video rentals, and CDs and cassettes. In some cases, consumers might strictly prefer one or the other, but more commonly, people prefer to consume some combination of substitute goods. Stated differently, it would take a lot of just one good in order to make you as happy as when you're consuming some combination of the goods. This makes sense; most people split their entertainment budget between videos and movies, and if they couldn't watch movies, you'd have to give them a lot more video rentals to make them as happy as they would have been before.

If you want to define a consumer's utility function on the two goods, you could write it as a function of the amount of two goods consumed, say U(x,y). In this case, there are two goods, X and Y, and U is some function of those two. Now, U can take many functional forms, and the forms it takes says a lot about the two goods X and Y. For example, it might be that the two goods are not substitutes, but are in fact compliments. Complimentary goods are goods that we only care to consume together; the textbook example of this is left shoes and right shoes. Consuming a thousand left shoes and four right shoes makes you exactly as happy as four left shoes and four right shoes (assuming you have two feet).

The greater U(x,y) is, the greater utility the consumer is experiencing from X and Y. For most goods, the greater x and y are, the greater U will be (but again, this is not necessarily the case; it's not hard to think of "bads," which make you less happy the more you consume). The problem for a consumer is that they have a constraint: a limited amount of money. So the problem is to maximize utility within the budget constraint. Consumers are probably pretty good at this, since they know what their preferences are, even if they don't think about the problem in this way.

So what happens if one of the two goods becomes more expensive? If the goods are close substitutes, then the consumer can substitute the other good for the one that is increasing in price. If the price of steak goes up, you might eat chicken more often; if movies get more expensive, you might rent more often and wait for marginal movies to come out on DVD.

So here's what I really wanted to talk about: oil. The financial markets are once again very concerned about rising oil prices, and with good reason. I have yet to be convinced that we're at "peak oil" or anything like that, but there are other factors. The rest of the world is rapidly industrializing. China's economy has been growing at a breakneck pace, and so has their demand for oil. This year, China replaced Japan as the world's #2 oil consumer, and there doesn't seem to be much that's going to stop this over the long term, as their year-on-year increase in oil usage drawfs that of the United States. And it's a good thing, really, that the standard of living of people in China is increasing.

However, there's almost no scenario in which this doesn't result in higher oil prices for the rest of the world. We're not talking about an oil shock like in the 70s, when OPEC decided to produce drastically less oil. We're talking about a longer-term change in the market for oil, where more countries are trying to buy more oil. OPEC might increase output, but probably not by enough to offset this effect (of course).

So Americans' gas prices are going to increase over the long term. In the past, this meant we were basically screwed, as there's no close substitute for gasoline for our cars. However, now there is an increasingly viable substitute for oil: the accumulated technological knowledge that goes into the production of gasoline-electric hybrid engines. Right now we consume very, very little of that, but as oil becomes more expensive, consumers will increasingly lean on the capital that goes into high-efficiency engines in order to stay as close to neutral in utility as they can.

So if you're looking for a potential future growth industry, look at companies and technologies that will benefit from this, and invest in them. Or if you think you can do better, invest yourself in research that might improve the state of the art so you can make millions of dollars.

The Price of Freedom

2004-09-27T14:13:00.000-04:00

The first (and only) other person to ever link to me, Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac has had several posts recently about how much Macs cost in comparison to PCs. For example, here, here and here. Basically, Leander is pointing out that the usual PC comparison is done by looking at Apple's one model for a particular market segment (ie, casual consumer -> iMac), and comparing it to the cheapest offering for that same segment from a PC vendor. This creates some damning price differences, where the Mac is hundreds or thousands of dollars more expensive.

Obviously, this is a ridiculous way to look at it when the Mac is a much better machine. When you compare a Mac with a similarly equipped PC, you might well find that the Mac is cheaper than the PC. To be economically rigorous, we could run a hedonic regression to find a quality-adjusted price index. That is, we could run a regression that attempts to explain the price by the quantities of the characteristics of those goods (ie, amount of RAM, hard disk, processor speed, etc). Then you could estimate the effect of each of those components on price; the residuals (ie, the variation in price that isn't explained by the quality variables) would tell you what is happening to the quality-adjusted price level, which is what we're interested in.

I think that'd be a fun thing to do if I didn't have to find and enter the data, but I'm sure such geekiness isn't really necessary, and don't see any reason to doubt what they're saying. Apple has been making a conscious effort for many years now to make their models more affordable, though they still want to keep a higher average quality level. If it has borne fruit, it's unsurprising.

In any case, I think there's something that they're leaving out of their calculations, which is the value in the software available for PCs that isn't available for Macs. I'm not talking about the price of the software itself, I'm talking about the value of having the increased choice in software available. The PC has a much bigger software ecosystem available for you to play with, and probably has more suppliers for any given piece of software. This gives consumers more variety, because they can choose from more pieces of software, and thus they are more likely to find one that works exactly like they want. It gives consumers more flexibility, in case one supplier goes out of business or something happens that inconveniences them. It also gives consumers more market power in the software market, since they might find increased competition in the particular piece of software they want, and that will translate into lower prices. All of these things have value for consumers, and it makes sense that they would pay for them.

Of course, consumers are all different, and all of these factors might well be unimportant for a large number of users. This is almost certainly the case, and I imagine you do find a lot of these consumers on Macs. For example, a given consumer might be uninterested in purchasing third-party software, and want a computer primarily for the software it comes with. Apple probably has an advantage to this consumer. Or, a given customer might well want software where the market leader happens to write their software for Macs, which is undoubtedly the case for many media applications. Since it's so hard to nourish a software ecosystem, especially when you're not a market leader, Apple has wisely been investing in cultivating such applications.

Whether you realize it or not, you probably are comfortable paying for flexibility like this. For example, few people accept a mortgages that they can't prepay, even though they're at a lower interest rate. It only makes sense that PC manufacturers would be able to extract some of this benefit from you. They probably don't extract all of it, though, which means that Macs are only cheaper if you're not adjusting for this.

Long-term, there might be good news for Apple here. I actually used to use a computer, and be highly entertained by it long before I had any sort of access to the internet. Today, I consider a computer without internet access largely useless. The most interesting things to do with a computer have shifted to activities that are based on standard protocols that don't require you to be on any one platform, like email and web-based applications. If the trend continues, then Apple (and others) should have an easier and easier time getting customers. (Of course, Microsoft doesn't want that to happen, and they have a strategy for attempting to slow that down. It makes you wonder, what is Apple's strategy for .Net?)

Still Glad I Use Firefox

2004-09-27T11:16:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot of news for Mozilla Firefox lately. A couple weeks ago, with the preview release of Firefox 1.0, they put up SpreadFirefox.com, a site to try to coordinate a community effort to market Firefox. This is like the old "Get Netscape" buttons redone with some modernity. They've put an affiliate system in place, so that bloggers who drive downloads to them can get some rewards in the form of recognition and Gmail accounts.

I think this is all a great idea. Microsoft has the biggest ad budget in the world, but publicity is much more valuable and much harder to get. And they've managed to get plenty of publicity in the past few weeks, even in print media. Several big sites have reported a growing number of Mozilla Firefox users in recent months; W3Schools.com has reported that nearly a sixth of their users are using Mozilla browser, and the more mainstream News.com reports that in September, nearly 20% of their visitors were using Mozilla browsers, up from 8% at the beginning of the year.

Of course, Charles Manski would point out that this is only meaningful if you believe that the people who browse those sites have the same distribution of browser usage as people in general. I don't believe that, but there are two possible responses to this. The first is that even though the average user won't go to W3Schools.com or News.com, IT professionals and web developers probably do, and so it is a good sign the readership of those sites is increasingly using Firefox. They probably are sympathetic to making the websites they develop or the corporate intranets they administer friendly to Firefox (My employer plans to role it out shortly). The second response is that a web research firm has reported that Mozilla's usage share has been increasing while IE has been suffering its first declines ever:

Mainstream users have not shown the same gung-ho enthusiasm for the non-Microsoft browser but have increasingly adopted Firefox, according to Web analytics firm WebSideStory. The percentage of visitors to e-commerce and corporate sites that used Firefox or another Mozilla browser grew to 5.2 percent in September, from 3.5 percent in June 2004. Meanwhile, Microsoft's share of the users shrank from 95.5 percent in June to 93.7 percent in September, according to the company.

It sounds pathetic, but it is major news for a volunteer-led project like Firefox to make such a big dent in market share so quickly, against the incredible market and distribution power of Microsoft. Furthermore, it's not clear that Microsoft has any credible response to the factors that seem to be driving people towards Mozilla. We can't really be sure what those are, but I would say the main factors are probably security fears and an increasingly inconvenient browsing experience when using IE.

When Microsoft announced their major security initiative over a year ago, I actually thought they would make some progress. Most people understand that this is a strength of open source software, and taking that away would definitely benefit Microsoft. They even closed the company down for a month so that all their programmers could go through and harden their code. However, nearly two years later, it's hard to see any improvement in the situation. Microsoft recently released Service Pack 2 for Windows XP, which contained many fixes, but it's not clear that enough people are downloading it, given the hassle that it is, and it was already outdated before it was released. Their credibility on security is even thinner now that they've made such a big deal about getting tough.

More important might be the browsing experience. The version of IE in Service Pack 2 does contain popup blocking, but I imagine most users probably won't get a version of IE that does this until they move to Windows Longhorn in a year or two. Microsoft has declined to continue development on IE as a standalone program, requiring users to buy new versions of Windows to get any updates to it. That's just not a realistic strategy in this game, given how incredibly quickly their competitors can move. Firefox is a small, free download and makes popup ads go away right now. In the past few weeks, a growing numbers of sites, including the New York Times and Slate, are popping up ads that take up the entire screen. As that annoyance factor increases, the one-time investment in effort required to get Firefox probably looks more and more like a good deal to people. Again, until Microsoft shows that they can move quickly and add the innovative features that make people love Firefox once they try it, this is going to remain a problem for them.

I've often said that in order for Microsoft to lose their power here, they don't need to stop being the dominant web browser. What percentage of customers do you think eBay or Amazon is comfortable with turning away, or providing a substandard experience for? One in 20? One in 10? With the increasing amount of strange software that installs itself silently through IE, or hijacks people's home pages, it becomes increasingly hard for sites to tell their users to just use IE. If sites are finding it important to work with other browsers, Microsoft can't tell the web what to do as easily.

In fact, one of the SpreadFirefox guys recently put up a site, Defending the Fox. The idea is to collect a list of sites that don't work on Firefox; I looked at the entire list and it was notable to me for the absence of any sites I visit (OK, I could see myself needing to use verizonwireless.net, but I happen to use T-Mobile). The site is fine, but really, I wouldn't bother. As I've said before, I've used Firefox for several years now without any major inconveniences (I do take advantage of its privacy settings to deny third-party cookies (not the default setting), which makes Hotmail not work, but that's their own damn fault: Gmail and every other web mail or login-based service I use seems to get by without them). The list is basically an advertisement for how compatible Firefox is with the web as it exists today. It seems almost everyone has taken the miniscule amount of effort required to make sure their site is largely standards-compliant and works with all the major browsers.

Coming back to the incredible publicity push by SpreadFirefox.com, they've had a great couple of weeks. Their campaign to get 1 million downloads of their preview release in ten days wound up with their getting 2 million downloads in the same period. I think this was a bit of a conservative goal; they said several months ago that their daily download rate had risen to 150,000 to 200,000 a day in response to the increased worm attacks of the past year. Still, carefully managing that campaign gave them another publicity punch after the campaign ended. Notably, their top 100 bloggers were specifically responsible for 100,000 referrals in that period.

It is hard to know what the long-term trend will be. It's not clear whether they'll be able to sustain this rate of interest or not. Nonetheless, the underlying factors that seem to be sparking such interest in Firefox, aside from their PR push, seem likely to stick around for another year or two.

It Turns Out This is Not a Job for EconoPundit

2004-09-23T09:54:00.000-04:00

There's this paper that's kind of making its way through the blogosphere, which challenges the idea that prediction markets have futures contracts representing subjective probabilities. The paper is by Charles Manski, a very respected econometrician. I started reading his book, Identification Problems in the Social Sciences a month or two ago.

In this context, "identified" means "you can know what it is." Manski's book is all about what you can reasonably know in statistical analysis without any assumptions, and what power you get out of imposing assumptions. For example, if you send out a survey to 100 randomly selected people, and 65 fill it out and give you a response, then the underlying distribution of the entire sample is not identified, since you only have information on the subset of the sample that replied. Manski points out that even in this situation, you can put bounds on the underlying distribution with the censored sample, but that only narrows the range of possible values. If you are willing to impose the assumption that whether someone responds to the survey is independent of what they reply, then the full sample's distribution is identified. That might or might not be a reasonable assumption, though (it probably isn't).

In any case, I was surprised to learn that there's very little research about what the prices of futures contracts actually mean, given how ingrained the conventional wisdom is. Manski has come along and with this paper pointed out that with minimal assumptions, the price of a prediction market contract doesn't actually correspond to the market's mean subjective belief (ie, the average of what everyone in the market believes the probability of the event to be). In fact, he derives the bounds on what the mean subjective belief can be for a given price, and finds that except in certain cases (for example, absolute unanimity), these bounds are wide enough to be practically useless. Furthermore, the true value can be anywhere within these bounds, without the prices giving you any clue about where. This post at Dead Parrots does a great job explaining it in detail without math.

Since I don't think I can improve on the explanation at Dead Parrots, I'm really just making this post to point out that EconoPundit is a fool. Yesterday, he posted this, promising to update with an explanation of the article. I predicted to Claire yesterday that he would in fact not understand the article well enough to explain it, and pull his post, as he has sometimes done in the past. Sure enough, this morning, he has updated with some really, really lame explanation about how some people who read his site every day are friends of Ronald Coase, and he doesn't want to get it wrong. Please.

I've pointed out in the past that EconoPundit doesn't seem to understand simple econometrics very well, and that he likes to massage data to make it show what he wants it to. The paper is not that hard to understand if you've got some experience in statistics, and it should be a piece of cake for someone who works as an economics professor. The way Manski does things, working with minimal assumptions and trying to put bounds on things, is way easier than the statistics typical of econometrics. EconoPundit likes to point to the TradeSports presidential prediction contracts, so we'll see if he stops doing that now.

Why I Don't Like Paul Krugman

2004-09-22T11:42:00.000-04:00

Ever since I've been aware of him, I've had a dislike for Paul Krugman. I know he's a very accomplished scholar, and has done some respected research (none of which I am familiar with), but most people's exposure to him, myself included, comes from his New York Times column. I'm a regular reader, although I don't read every one. Some are fine, some are uninteresting to me, and many are painful to read, for reasons I have never quite been able to articulate. They simply cause me to roll my eyes and give up. Given that I often don't disagree in principle with Krugman, it's been quite baffling.

Without looking for it, this morning I found my way to this article by Arnold Kling (written some time ago) that has put a name to my dislike for Krugman's articles. For me, he's absolutely nailed it.

For example, suppose I were to say, "We should abolish the minimum wage. That would increase employment and enable more people to climb out of poverty."

There are two types of arguments you might make in response. I call these Type C and Type M. A hypothetical example of a Type C argument would be, "Well, Arnold, studies actually show that the minimum wage does not cost jobs. If you read the work of Krueger and Card, you would see that the minimum wage probably reduces poverty."

A hypothetical example of a Type M argument would be, "People who want to get rid of the minimum wage are just trying to help the corporate plutocrats."

Paul, my question for you is this:

Do you see any differences between those two types of arguments?

I see differences, and to me they are important. Type C arguments are about the consequences of policies. Type M arguments are about the alleged motives of individuals who advocate policies.

In this example, the type C argument says that the consequences of eliminating the minimum wage would not be those that I expect and desire. We can have a constructive discussion of the Type C argument -- I can cite theory and evidence that contradicts Krueger and Card -- and eventually one of us could change his mind, based on the facts.

Type M arguments deny the legitimacy of one's opponents to even state their case. Type M arguments do not give rise to constructive discussion. They are almost impossible to test empirically.

For many years, Milton Friedman wrote columns in which he tried to explain economic reasoning to a mainstream audience. In order to educate and maybe change minds. Hal Varian still does that today, and in the same newspaper as Paul Krugman. I love economics because the insights it provides can be incredibly beneficial to society. Part of the obligation that goes with having that much power to do good is to "spread the word." In fact, you can often see the pained look in economists' faces when they see people doing things that they know will make them worse off, simply because they're confused. This morning, Arnold Kling wrote:

...in economics there are issues on which experts have imperfect knowledge and disagree with one another. Our arrogance should be tempered. In my book, I quote Herbert Stein, who has written that "economists do not know very much about economic policy...non-economists know even less."

I believe that economists have a right to feel that we have superior knowledge on issues of public policy. However, the implication of this is not that we should be given deference and power. Instead, I believe that economists have an obligation to explain our thinking to novices, and novices have an obligation to attempt to understand economics.

I see that willingness to explain in Varian's articles, and in Steven Landsburg's articles on Slate. Take their views for what you will, I have yet to feel like I've learned something from Krugman's columns.

You Must Be At Least THIS Stupid to Be the Libertarian Party Presidential Candidate

2004-09-21T10:34:00.000-04:00

Slashdot interviewed Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party presidential candidate, the other day. I started reading it, and after reading the second question, I just couldn't take it anymore and had to stop reading.

I fully support the Libertarian platform and ideals and I have every intention of voting for you in November. My only beef with the libertarian approach is timing. You've stated that in your first couple months of holding office you'll eliminate the federal reserve, kick the U.N. out of the country, and bring as many of our troops home as possible, among other radical (but good) changes. My question is this: how do you plan to handle the societal impact of these changes? Eliminating the federal reserve is not something I'd expect to go over lightly in the financial markets, for example. Much of the Libertarian platform is a severe departure from the current state of the nation -- I feel that society would need time to adapt to these changes.

I guess my first response to that has to be that for a Libertarian to be elected to the White House right now would indicate massive social upheaval already. Yes, my ideas are radical -- but my election would prove that America is ready for radical solutions.

You're right, though. It isn't as simple as that. Stating my goals and what I'd attempt to do is not the same as stating what would happen. The presidency is an office of limited power, and I'd actually spend a good deal of time struggling with Congress and the courts to get my solutions implemented, giving Americans time to prepare for the changes.

Of course, with some of the changes I'm proposing, I've set a longer timeline on anyway. With American troops in more than 135 countries around the globe, I don't plan to just buy them all airline tickets and tell them to catch the next plane home. My plan for Iraq is a 90-day phased withdrawal concentrating on the physical security of the troops. For drawing down the US military presence in Germany, Korea, Japan and elsewhere, I've proposed a two-year timeline, with the first actual troop pullouts beginning at the end of the first year. That's quicker than George W. Bush's 10-year timeline, but it isn't unduly hasty.

My expectation is that if we eliminate the Fed's monopoly on currency provision, the Fed will continue exist -- it will just have to compete with other currency options on a truly level playing field without the government demanding that its currency be accepted instead of others. People can decide whether they want to hold their wealth in green pieces of paper backed only by seven trillion dollars in debt, or in currency coined of, or backed by, some scarce commodity. I'm not planning to haul Alan Greenspan and the Board of Governors off to Indiana for death by lethal injection or anything like that.

My job as a candidate is to articulate a vision of the changes I propose and to argue forcefully for their implementation. The checks and balances which our nation's founders wrote into the Constitution provide a framework in which those changes can be implemented with the minimum possible chaos.

I feel like I really shouldn't have to comment on this, it mostly speaks for itself. However, it's that penultimate paragraph that got my attention. How the hell does the Fed have a monopoly on currency provision? You can already hold your wealth however you want. United States currency is legal tender, for all debts public and private, but nothing is forcing you to use it. You and I can hold whatever kinds of currency we want. Right here, right now, on US soil, you and I can buy things from each other in Euros or GBP or gold or little pellets of lapis lazuli.

Allow me to quote snopes.com here, they explain it really well:

Title 31 (Money and Finance), Subtitle IV (Money), Chapter 51 (Coins and Currency), Subchapter I (Monetary System), Section 5103 (Legal Tender) of the United States Code states:
United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues. Foreign gold or silver coins are not legal tender for debts.

What this statute means, in the words of the United States Treasury, is that "[A]ll United States money . . . is a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal law mandating that a person or organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services."

That's it. All this means is that the Federal Reserve System must honor U.S. currency and coins, not necessarily anyone else. U.S. currency and coins can be used for making payments, but a debtor does not have to pay in legal tender, nor does a creditor have to accept legal tender. If a shoemaker wants to sell his products for 8000 jelly beans per pair, he's entitled to do so; the buyer cannot demand that he accept the equivalent value in legal tender instead. However, legal tender is the default method of payment assumed in contractual agreements involving payments for goods or services unless otherwise specified.

Furthermore, the fact that he doesn't realize the gains from having a common unit of measurement for value is a serious strike against him. Should we also do away with the government's Constitutional "monopoly" on setting the system of weights and measures? We should really be free to measure things with whatever system we want, shouldn't we?

Oh wait, I think we already are.

I Hate DVDs

2004-09-20T01:24:00.000-04:00

It turns out that DVDs have a terrible design flaw: They leave the surface of the disc exposed to every asshat on the planet, so that they can wipe their ass with them, or tape them to the bottom of their feet and slide around their apartment with them, or whatever the hell it is they do. In the past few months, we've only managed to rent a handful of DVDs that didn't have horrible scratches on them that made certain parts of the movie unplayable. It's especially fun when they occur multiple times during the movie.

It's enough to make me wish for some sort of pay-per-view system, digital rights management and all.

Energy Conservation

2004-09-19T22:57:00.000-04:00

Every time someone suggests covering the planet in solar cells or windmills or something, my eyes always roll involuntarily. I'm just not interested in such fanciful things. So when I saw Saving Energy Without Derision mentioned on Slashdot, I was pretty interested. I hadn't heard of Alan Zelicoff, but when I saw the subtitle of the book ("One household's real (and reasonably painless) experience in energy conservation"), I was very interested to hear what he would say.

Just because I think the Kyoto Protocol was idiotic and most "renewable" energy sources are unrealistic doesn't mean I'm hostile to increasing our energy efficiency. On the contrary, we're basically throwing away money for laziness if we do that. When I read his realistic appraisal of renewable energy sources, I suddenly became interested in the rest of what he had to say:

There are only two possible answers: either we decrease our use of electricity (conservation) or increase production from other sources. Many “environmentalists” believe that renewables can do the latter. The problem is that even the increase in US demand (let alone the existing demand load) is so huge as to swamp even the most optimistic assumptions about how many windfarms or solar panels we can build and install.

Let’s take an example: in New Mexico, the local power company (Public Service Company of New Mexico) in collaboration with Florida Power and Light has just finished the installation of a 200 Mega-watt (peak production capacity) windfarm in the high plains, about 200 miles east of Albuquerque and it is just about the largest windfarm in the US. How much electricity does this windfarm make in a year? The calculation is easy: from data published by the National Weather Service, we know that the wind blows about 35% of time, on average, in and
around Tucumcari, NM where the windfarm is located. And, since there are about 9,000 hours in a year we find that:

200 * 1 million watts * 9,000 hours * 35% = 600 million kw-hrs per year

Looked at another way, the US’ largest windfarm installation in 2003 makes just under 1% of the increase in demand for electricity during that same year. Overall, there were about 15 similarly sized wind-farms installed in 2003 in North America. Thus, only 15% of new demand was met by renewable resources (photovoltaic was, unfortunately, several orders of magnitude less contributory due to costs). So even if you think that windfarms and other renewable energy resources are a good way to make electricity (and I happen to believe this), they aren’t going to make much of a dent in fossil fuel burning as the primary source for our electricity.

The alert reader will have also noticed that hydroelectric power is completely tapped out in the US, and due to drought – particularly in the northwest US and some of Canada) – its contribution has actually dwindled somewhat in the past few years. There is no more hydroelectric energy to exploit in the US, and its advertised attractiveness as a “clean” source of energy maybe a bit overstated (considering the impact on fish, the fishing industry and even methane gas production due to rotting plants that are drowned in rising reservoirs every year).

Or:

Nuclear power produces about 20% of all of the electricity in the US. It generates no CO2 because there are no chemical reactions involved in the reactor. Rather, atoms are literally split at their core (the “nucleus”), releasing heat. Of course, there is a lot of radioactive waste created, but at least it is all in one spot. As you’ll see in a minute, when we burn coal, we release many tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere every year - out of sight and out of mind (and we may be out of our minds to be doing this. I’ll give you the facts below and you
can decide).

It’s interesting to note that even though there hasn’t been a single new nuclear plant built in the US for over 20 years, and even though our total electricity production is increasing, nuclear power is holding its own in terms of percentage of electricity generated. This has been made possible by much more efficient running of the existing nuclear plants including the reduction of the time that plants have to be shut down for refueling. In addition, the existing nuclear plants that were originally planned for dismantlement after 30 years have been granted licensing extensions for, on average, an additional 10 years or so. New nuclear energy should be considered in the mix of future electricity resources, in my view. The opposition to it is mostly based on politics and very little on science; I’ll comment more on this later.

When someone can talk realistically about this stuff, I actually want to listen.

I've long held that the key to our energy problems will be using technology to improve what we have, rather than some bold, far-reaching initiative requiring massive coordination and investment. The potential in LED lights and more efficient gas engines for cars is staggering. Already you may have noticed that your city has switched traffic lights from incandescent lights to LED arrays. As Shawn said, when you show a city planner the bottom-line number on how many millions of dollars they will save due to a slower rate of bulb replacement and the higher efficiency of the LEDs, it's a no-brainer for them to run around replacing them all.

I've only read the first half so far (and don't agree with everything he says), but fortunately, Dr. Zelicoff has some very practical advice that people could implement without noticing any major difference in their lives, while still saving a significant amount of energy and money. Zelicoff points to many other things you could do that are in the same vein. For example, he notes that if you were to turn down your water heater so that you didn't have to dilute the water in your shower with cold water, you probably would shower and do dishes just as comfortably after you learn the new settings on the water dials, but you would save tons of electricity, since your water heater will keep the water at that temperature at all times. Furthermore, you could get some extremely inexpensive insulation for your water heater and the piping in your house (not to mention your walls and attic). He reports that simply by replacing their decade-old refrigerator with a new, more energy-efficient one that wasn't available previously, they immediately started seeing savings. These are things that could save you so much money, you would probably recover the costs almost immediately, and you probably wouldn't notice any difference in how your house worked, or need to think about them anymore.

And the savings are significant. In his case, they pay $200 a year in total energy costs, while the average house pays $900 a year. If you could show people that bottom line, that would probably motivate them to start implementing some of these things. Just think of the economic stimulus, as well!

As for the rest of Dr. Zelicoff's suggestions, I think there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that many of his suggestions involve behavior modifications, like unplugging clocks and appliances you're not using, line-drying your clothes, turning off the furnace pilot light during the summer, turning down the thermostat and night, and so forth. For whatever reason, people just don't seem to be into these sorts of inconveniences when aggregated.

However, I think the good news is that most of these can be addressed. Line-drying clothes is just not an option for many people, but I don't see why some intelligent design couldn't address many other issues. For instance, in places I have worked, they installed motion sensors that turn off the lights when it appeared that no one was around. Occasionally, if you are being very still, they make a mistake and turn off your lights while you are still around. A simple hand-wave fixes the problem instantly. Why can't a similar reasoning be applied to other appliances. If the lights aren't on in your kitchen, why should your kitchen appliances (refrigerator-aside) be drawing power?

In fact, it isn't that difficult to imagine the house of the future having a small server in a closet somewhere. In addition to providing the functionality Mike talks about here, it could control your power usage. For example, it could take care of making sure that when the kitchen isn't in use, your blender, microwave, and toaster aren't drawing any power. It could also take care of your furnace and thermostat at certain times of the year or day, or if it thinks you're not around (if you do the light sensor thing). Or heck, it could be programmed to not heat up your water all night, instead starting at 5am and ending at noon, and so forth. Of course, this would use energy itself, but it would probably be profitable overall.

Of course, this begs the question of why this sort of thing isn't more common. I imagine the problem is that people want the cheapest house they can get, and homebuilders want the fattest margins they can get and they don't get any cut of your energy savings. Adding together all these energy savers is obviously a net savings in the long run, but homebuilders don't have any incentive to participate there, and people probably don't know about most of the options that are available (I know I certainly didn't know about many of the things he talks about) or just how much money they can save. However, this sort of inefficiency always screams "opportunity" to me. It seems to me that someone could provide a service that coordinates and does all the work in one go; really making the process painless could take a share of the consumer's surplus that goes along with implementing these changes. You call them up, they come over, look things over, and essentially show you that bottom-line per-year savings number.

In the end, making this stuff happen is about making it make sense for people's wallets, and if you look at the problem from that perspective, you're likely to make more progress.

Pflueger's Law

2004-09-16T13:28:00.000-04:00

All The Parking Lot is Full comic strips eventually come true. Warning: Brilliant lawyering inside.

Notes on Garden State

2004-09-13T01:57:00.000-04:00

If you know anything about this movie, it's probably that "it has a good soundtrack." I can't really disagree, since I already had 8 of the 13 songs on the soundtrack (well, one of them was a remix of a song I already have). Still, as brilliant a soundtrack as it is, it does have a movie to go along with it, and surprisingly enough, it's not bad either.

I wouldn't quite call it a grand slam, it had a few missteps. There's a scene in the beginning where the movie is trying to establish how lame and miserable his life in LA is, as he's a waiter at a Vietnamese restaurant, and a particular table is giving him trouble. The scene is just really dumb and poorly written, and squanders an opportunity for some real laughs. Another thing is that the visuals you might have seen in the trailer are in the movie, but some of them are dead-ends that seem to be in the movie just because they look cool. I liked them, but can't help but feel that a couple extra lines of dialog, or maybe just some slicker editing might have made them fit into the flow better. Lastly, the ending has a scene that might have been played as comedy, but I suspect it was actually an attempt to put some last-second romantic suspense into the movie. It ends up with the right conclusion, but again, I think this could have been tweaked.

This is all very minor, Seinfeld-ish whining, obviously. This is easily the best writer/director newcomer movie I've seen since Good Will Hunting.

Notes on Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War

2004-09-13T01:20:00.000-04:00

I've long admired the cool-looking Warhammer 40,000 setting. I've never had the patience to actually sit and play a role-playing game for more than a few turns, as Todd and Adam can surely attest. Still, it hasn't escaped my notice that previous video game renditions of Warhammer 40,000 have been uniformly god-awful. They've finally gotten it right.

I haven't actually played through very much; I've barely made it through the lengthy walk-through. I've played enough to know that it's not exactly my type of game. That is, it's more in the *craft school of strategy games, meaning it features resource management and unit creation/research and so forth. I much prefer the Myth style, which does away with all that and focuses on pure battle tactics.

Still, as far as this school of games goes, it's the most appealing I've seen so far. The settings look truly fantastic, and the units all look spectacularly wicked, with bloody, animated, epic battles. Stuff is dropped onto the battlefield from orbit. It's really cool to watch. I want to like this game very much, I'm just afraid that it doesn't have enough of what I like. However, if you like any of the *craft games, you'll probably like this one a lot.

My Trip to Boston (Click to Enlarge!)

2004-09-09T00:20:00.000-04:00

Employees of Cabot Corporation, you are immortal in this lamppost! (Boston Common)

Aw yeah! (Boston Common)

The buildings of Christian Science. Take that you disreputable Scientology wackos!

A picture of a bunch of people getting their picture taken in front of the bar that the TV show Cheers was based on. We figured this out when a big tour bus drove by, and overheard the driver pointing this out. "In there, everyone knows your name. Especially if you're wearing a nametag." Hilarious.

Some pictures of the first LISP machine at the MIT Museum. And I thought the breadboards I had to make in ECE152A were bad.

The key to successful web marketing is making it easy for people to remember your URL (Taken near MIT).

Some views of the Stata Center at MIT.

World's End. On the way back, we had to be escorted out of Weymouth by the police.

Chilling out at the Boston Aquarium.

The best thing I saw at Boston happened today at the airport. I don't have pictures of it, because I didn't realize at the onset just how entertaining the spectacle would eventually be.

As we were sitting at Logan waiting for our plane, we were right in front of another jet being loaded up for a trip to Laguardia. A guy drove up with a big baggage cart, and started pulling out cardboard containers of the sort the US Mail uses. He would grab three at a time, and hurl them into the cargo door. Not a gentle, lofting toss from overhead, but a full, start-at-the-hip out of control swing. Well, one eventually hit the side of the door, and split open, tossing letters and catalogs on the ground everywhere.

He stopped for a moment, thinking. Upon consideration, he decided it was fine for the mail to sit there on the wet ground in the rain, and started throwing more boxes into the plane. Then, all the boxes hurled, he half-heartedly picked up a few limp, dissolving items, and shoved them through the door, leaving the cardboard box and many other letters still fully submerged in the puddles they were in. His job done, he went on to other tasks. Another guy came along and pointed out that this wasn't the way to handle this, and picked up a few more letters. He tossed them in and closed the cargo door. Finally, a third guy came and bravely, as the jet was starting its engines, collected the bin and the remaining letters and bills, opened the cargo door, and loaded them on. Not rain, nor sleet, nor dark of night.

The Presidential Aorta

2004-09-03T16:12:00.000-04:00

I was a bit surprised by this whole Bill Clinton quadruple bypass thing. I mean, he's not known for being incredibly fit, but he's never struck me as incredibly unfit either, and he's fairly young. Then in reading an article about it, I see this:

Clinton, 58, has been in good health with no known history of heart problems. A medical report in January of 2001 showed he had an above-normal cholesterol level and borderline high blood pressure.
...
Since leaving office, Clinton has lost weight and he told talk show host Oprah Winfrey that he had gone on the South Beach diet.

So he was previously in good health, but had borderline cholesterol and blood pressure, and then went on a low-carb diet. How interesting.

It's a scary thing, and I hope he's OK. So far, 2004 has just not been the year to be a former president.

A Simple Tablet PC

2004-09-03T11:57:00.000-04:00

Tablet PCs are so expensive, they aren't worth it. They seem clumsy, especially for anything that isn't note-taking related. Previously, I suggested that throwing Windows XP onto a tablet was the wrong idea, due to the bad match between interface and input device. I've come to think that the entire tablet is superfluous.

The tablet is useful because it can let you put what you write in electronic form and then search it, copy it, or move it around easily. Having to carry around a warm, battery-powered device with a screen that probably gets scratched up as you use it isn't convenient. There's a medium out there right now that is portable, durable, and has incredible display fidelity: paper. It's really hard for a tablet-like PC to get near paper in all those regards (Just look at how much praise is lavished on Windows for Tablets for the great lengths it goes through to make your writing look like actual penstrokes).

What really needs to happen is the pen-based PC. That is, the entire computer is in the pen. Siemens kind of got this one wrong for phones a while back, but I think that idea has promise for tablet-based computing. If you could cram a processor and memory into a comfortable, working pen, it could then simply record your pen strokes as you write on regular paper. Later on, you plug it into your computer and dump off what you wrote. Since it kept all the information on acceleration and stroke strength, the software on your computer can later display, analyze, search, and convert the text you wrote.

Of course, this does require some slight changes to the interface for pens. Instead of the usual "just write" interface, you would need a button to indicate that you are writing on a new page. While that might be strange, people seem to have gotten used to periodically clicking their mechanical pencils for more lead, so it strikes me as something that people could adapt to, given the potential benefits of a logging pen. The software that runs on the PC could let the user do a lot of the work to clean up any mistakes they might have made.

Microsoft will never do this, though. Obviously: they're only interested in devices that let them sell more copies of Windows (just look at their strategy, they're trying to get you to buy more copies of it: Windows for your computer! Windows for your servers! Windows for your game systems! Windows for your VCR! Windows for your portable music player! Windows for your cell phone! ...) However, the upside is that when you take the complexity of the tablet PC out of the equation, it becomes a much cheaper product to design and manufacture. Someone could actually give Microsoft's tablet PCs a run for their money on this (and I believe win, of course).

Too bad I'm not going into entrepreneurship. I'd buy that pen.

Notes on Hero

2004-08-30T21:17:00.000-04:00

I was prepared for another monstrous failure of a movie, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I was very pleasantly surprised.

This movie has an interesting story that goes with it. Nameless has killed the three assassins that have been trying to kill the king, and the king has summoned him to hear what happened, see the proof, and provide the bounties for their heads. Instead of being so straight forward, though, the story tellers are lying, and hypothesizing. So you see the same scenes played out in different ways, Rashomon-like, depending on who is talking/lying/theorizing. It's a wonderful narrative device, and really pulls you in, making you more and more curious to find out what's happened. (Perhaps it is this aspect, the fact that most of the movie plays out as storytelling, that made me find the ridiculous martial arts totally tolerable this time).

In any case, I don't need to tell you much else about the movie, other than that I think it all works well together. You've seen the trailers, so you know that the cinematography and directing is great, and the acting is, well, as good as it gets in this sort of movie. It's a great time.

Notes on Blow Out

2004-08-30T20:56:00.000-04:00

This movie is the exact opposite of The Quiet American: It starts out really good, and winds up being awful by the end.

It's kind of a weird concept: John Travolta accidentally records the sounds of a presidential candidate's car going off a bridge. Strange as it may seem, this sound recording is the evidence that the tire was shot, and not simply a freak blowout. When the car goes over, John Travolta dives in and pulls a girl from the sinking vehicle, saving her life. Obviously, their situation puts them both in danger. Surprisingly, this much works.

So, Brian De Palma directed this movie, and he's a really talented director who seems to enjoy making crappy films. The movie has an interesting visual style that is fun to watch; I'm thinking specifically of the opening sequence from the point of view of the serial killer, and the montage sequence of John Travolta getting sounds for the movie he's working on (There are a couple of other scenes that were well-handled, but you probably wouldn't want me to tell you). De Palma treated this movie like a serious assignment, and even though it wasn't, the movie is better for it.

The problems start coming in, though. Nancy Allen's character, the girl who was having an affair with the politician, is unbelievably ditzy. It just wouldn't be acceptable to make a female character this ditzy today. I didn't know it was still acceptable in 1981, but it happened. It gets annoying.

Despite the interesting initial setup, the movie doesn't end up deliving on any conspiracies or anything like that. There's a mysterious character with entirely unexplained motivations who performed the assassination, and he continues to be the bad guy for the rest of the movie, as he attempts to clean up loose ends. Seriously, you never find out who wanted to kill that politician or why! As unsatisfying as that is already, it gets worse.

See, the bad guy, in trying to kill Nancy Allen, accidentally kills some other girl. So his solution is to go on a killing spree, so that when he actually kills Allen, it will look like she was just another one of the serial killer's victims. In fact, he shows surprising devotion to this coverup idea (in the process, you get to witness a very touching love scene in a phone booth).

The ending is when this movie is slam-dunked into the dumpster. It's totally inappropriate, unsatisfying, and so incredibly misguided, it's almost funny. It's a shaggy sdog tory ending.

Notes on The Quiet American

2004-08-30T20:36:00.000-04:00

As this movie started out, I didn't like it much. It felt slow, and I had a hard time swallowing some of the things that happened in it. For example, proposing marriage to someone you hardly know in front of their boyfriend. I just couldn't really buy that whole situation.

It gets better as it continues, however. Set in the pre-war days in Vietnam, Michael Caine is a newspaper reporter, and Brendan Frasier is a doctor from the United States on a foreign aid mission. Despite the movie's initial awkwardness, Caine finds himself on the trail of a political conspiracy. Somehow, that American doctor always seems to be in the middle of things. The movie is sad in several ways, but the writing and acting is great (the directing is low key).

Tablets

2004-08-25T23:48:00.000-04:00

Mac mentioned tablets in a comment to my last post, and I know there's also been some rumor about this from Apple recently. I think tablet computers would be a great achievement, but they're not there yet. I think there's big problem they need to solve thoroughly before they become useful.

There are some places a computer just can't help you. I can't take notes on a laptop very easily, unless I'm just going to be writing things down. Some classes or meetings probably could lend themselves to that. For example, since I type very fast, a laptop would probably be useful for me if I were to take a history class. In fact, I often wanted a laptop when I was in history, as I was madly scribbling down everything that was being said. That's kind of a special case; I could never take notes for just about any other class on a laptop.

The value of having information in a computer is in the ability to search and manipulate it easily. Microsoft's tablet PCs are ridiculous because they miss this point entirely, they just let you draw pictures. There is no understanding of what you wrote, just a picture of it. This is a kind of shocking failure to understand why computers are useful.

Obviously, converting handwriting to text would be amazing. But if I could have a tablet that would just let me search my notes, written in my own handwriting, even in a simplistic way, it would be extremely useful. I don't know much about handwriting recognition, but I know enough to know that it is an extremely difficult problem. Still, perhaps a tablet computer has some advantages that can be exploited. Instead of facing the problem of recognizing a given image as a character or word, a tablet computer potentially has information on the order of the strokes, the velocity and acceleration used in making the strokes, and adjacent markings. Perhaps if you kept whatever the user drew as a picture, but kept this additional information around, then a query could be performed that would use knowledge of English words to try to guess what you wrote (like cell phones do with the letters on the number pad) and match your search word. Who knows? I sure don't, but I have to think that this technology has a lot of potential for improvement.

In any case, I think this is the big question in any tablet product. Of course, I'm only saying an answer to this question is necessary for tablets to take off, it's not clearly sufficient.

Update: Hm, it appears that I had some misconceptions about how Tablet PCs work. They DO have handwriting recognition, apparently, and it seems pretty decent. You CAN search your handwritten notes, too. That's great. I probably won't consider one until I could take notes for an econometrics class and then search for a Greek letter. But still, good stuff. It's gonna get there. I'm particularly impressed with software like OneNote and Grafigo, which will help recognize the shapes you draw. This sort of thing is vital. As good as the text recognition of Microsoft Journal seems, it doesn't appear to understand numbered lists or indentation of paragraphs.

Also, apparently handwriting recognition is way better than what you can get in current products. Check out this online demo, I was very impressed with how well it recognized my mouse-renderings of my already strange cursive. Hopefully Apple has something really great here.

Another Update: The more I look into this, the less I like Tablet PC. It is actually a full-on Windows XP system, just with some tablet-related additions. This might work, but I think it's probably too cumbersome an interface for that sort of general purpose use. I wouldn't want to have to use a pen to navigate around on my PC, that doesn't strike me as a very comfortable interface. What I would hope for is something a little more special-purpose. Something thin and light, and with software more like a simple notebook. Aside from writing, drawing, and querying it, I'd probably prefer to connect to my main computer to do anything more advanced with it. Perhaps this explains why those Tablet PCs are so unreasonably priced.

Who wants to sit there browsing the web with a pen? Chatting on AIM by writing instead of typing? Navigating heirarchical menus? Doesn't strike me as a particularly great user experience.

What's Next

2004-08-25T15:36:00.000-04:00

About a year before Apple announced iTunes for Windows, The Register spotted a job posting on Apple's site. It called for a Windows programmer for the iTunes team. Wasn't hard to figure out what that meant.

This one is a little bit harder, but it sounds good, whatever it is.

An Apple Customer

2004-08-23T11:26:00.000-04:00

Finding myself in need of a WiFi router, I went out and got myself an Airport Express this weekend. It's more expensive than a product that would simply fulfill my needs here, but given my incredibly great experience with the iPod, there was never any question in my mind that I would go to Apple for this.

The device is wonderful, of course. It comes in a stylish package similar to that of the iPod; a sky blue fold-open box contains the device nestled inside and the disks and manuals are in a little paper folder on the other side. I simply can't bring myself to throw away the box for Apple products. It's not the usual piece of crap that is filled with partitions, empty space, and useless slips of paper (manuals, rebate offers, and ads) sliding about, which you must dig through and half-destroy to get your stuff.

In fact, that pretty much describes the box my ugly, clunky DSL modem came in. Apple, can you possibly design your next version of Airport Express to have a DSL and/or cable modem built right in, so I can get rid of that awful piece of junk and its associated wires? My modem is big, but it's feather-light and obviously full of empty space. I would gladly buy the Airport Express again in a year if you would do this for me.

This burning desire I have to give Apple more money makes me reflect on their current direction. In the past six months, I have bought nearly $500 worth of goods from Apple for myself (more if you count presents). I have managed to avoid purchasing any services from them, but walking to the record store 6 blocks away is starting to feel more and more like a chore these days and I don't know if I'll hold off forever. A year ago, I hadn't been responsible for a dime of their revenue since before 1996. I had no reason to give Apple any money at all. Now, not only am I buying whatever electronics I can from them, but I find myself standing in their stores as I do so, thinking, "I mostly just use the web, iTunes, and AIM...this Mac would make all those much nicer."

The fact that Apple now has several ways to make money off of someone like me, who is firmly in the PC camp and almost certain to stay there for the foreseeable future, is a good thing for them. The market seems to agree, just check out their stock: it's doubled in price in the past year or so. Note that Apple announced the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, an event that is clearly reflected in the stock. This looks even better when you compare it to the stock market's performance for the same period: Apple has outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq Composite. In fact, compare it to just about anyone: Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Intel. Obviously, we shouldn't read too much into this, and it would be idiotic to suggest that this is the beginning of some road to domination for Apple. Nonetheless, the fact that the market seems to think Apple is twice as valuable as it was a year ago is significant and impressive, and I think it largely reflects Apple's success in finding ways to sell things to more people than it was a year ago.

Notes on Maria Full of Grace

2004-08-23T01:16:00.000-04:00

This is also a pretty good movie. Acting, writing, direction all get good grades. It's really depressing and stressful, though. Definitely not the Feel-Good movie of the year. You shouldn't watch it right after Jacob's Ladder or Kids or Thirteen or anything like that.

Notes on Jacob's Ladder

2004-08-23T00:38:00.000-04:00

If you asked me to name an Adrian Lyne movie, I would have only been able to name his version of Lolita (which I actually liked a lot). I didn't find out he did Jacob's Ladder until the opening credits rolled. Now that I look into it, Adrian Lyne turns out to be responsible for a lot of horrible movies, like Flashdance, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal. But I was impressed by Jacob's Ladder.

The movie reminded me a bit of The Cell; it's kind of an excuse to show some really disturbing, confusing imagery. But that makes it sound like it's no better, and really it is very good. Instead of some contrived trek through a disturbed mind, it's a strange "What's going on here?" movie, kind of like The Sixth Sense, or Abre Los Ojos. It certainly kept me interested to the end, and the solution in the end didn't wind up being as dumb as I expected (However, it did have some unnecessary aspects...the movie would have worked without some of what is revealed).

In any case, I found it thrilling and creepy, and pretty worthwhile if you're into that sort of thing.

Fisk You

2004-08-20T15:09:00.000-04:00

I normally think fisking is a bit too aggressive and nitpicky to generate anything worth reading, so I hope Macneil will take this in the good-natured way I mean it. He simply said a lot of things I disagree with, and commenting piece by piece feels like the most natural way to rebut such a long piece.

(for a low-quality article, check out this reasoning
free article from the editor-in-chief; I've seen less
annoying writing styles in articles about sports bras in women's magazines).
I've found that (giving the benefit of the doubt and other concessions for the
sake of argument) the high-quality articles are well-reasoned but that they
reflect poor values. A good example is an article by
Jacob Sullum on the same topic of the poorly-written one
(and in the same issue! why did they bother publishing the other
one?).

I don't think Nick Gillespie's article is an example of bad reasoning. It is an example of an Editor-in-Chief writing a small article introducing a themed issue (the physical magazine, which often contains things not on the website, might well have more articles). It's a common thing, especially in magazines that don't come out very often (Reason is published 6 times a year).

At heart, here's what I think libertarians value:
Economic growth
Innovation
Consumer choice

Well, you always get into trouble when you tell people what they value. That's why I'm not going to say anything about what I think you value. That said, it's probably true that libertarians value those things, but that isn't what defines them, in that it's not the framework that they use when reasoning about what they believe in.

I think both sides recognize that either extreme is bad: corporations without
anti-trust laws become oligarchies; while governments that control what is good
for us and bad for us become, well, oligarchies. What the conservatives need to
realize is that capitalism only works when it has regulations. What the liberals
need to realize is that many kinds of regulations can create devastatingly
negative effects: markets have an amazing ability to balance out (provided
collusion isn't part of the equation), and the wrong regulations can lead to
economic "inefficiency," which is a technical way to say that resources have
been wasted without much benefit.

You keep saying this thing about capitalism only working when it's regulated. I have no idea what that means, or what your evidence for it is. I'm not aware of any economic theories that state that, and when you examine markets that are unregulated, there doesn't seem to be a general breakdown in the capitalist system. Perhaps what you mean is that you don't like what capitalism looks like when it's not regulated in the way you want.

Why do I value economic growth, innovation, and consumer choice? Do
I value these for the principles that they are? No. I am closer to a pragmatist,
not to an ideologue. I value these things because they increase the quality of
life. Freedom is a fine corollary to concerns for quality of life: it's hard to
imagine "the good life" if it doesn't have choice. However, no one is an island.
If we give someone the "freedom" to pollute a river, he is affecting the quality
of life of everyone down the stream. Pollution is a good example, because it
shows clear effects of one person affecting others, and how it's immoral to
allow one person to do something that would kill hundreds.

Again, I think you're putting words in people's mouths. Anything can sound offensive if you replace the word "ability" with the word "freedom." Libertarians do care about freedom, but that doesn't mean they would agree with the construction "you should have the freedom to kick people's teeth out." You don't seem to understand what the word means, or where it applies. Obviously, anyone's freedom to any action is firmly bounded by other people's freedoms, which might act in opposition. Freedom is the ability to make decisions about the things that affect your life, not anyone else's. The freedoms, or lack of freedoms, that people get upset about are things which aren't anyone's business but yours: what you read, say, buy, think, and do with the things that belong to you, who you love and associate with, and how you manage your own body.

In any case, you might validly think freedom can easily and safely be traded for comfort and happiness. My impression, however, is not that libertarians are weirdos who value an abstract notion like freedom entirely apart from what it brings. On the contrary, I think they are concerned largely with slippery slopes. The question is, how does one articulate a principle of government that you can use to guide you for the long term? You can't do it with short term pragmatism.

This is largely the problem the framers of the Constitution were attempting to deal with, and is why the document is so short and vague. I think the framers did a pretty good job, but over time our attitudes towards what it says have changed. We rediscovered some of the freedom it grants us over time, but we also invented roles for the government that it wasn't originally intended to fill. The commerce clause of the Constitution is used as a backdoor by congress to legislate pretty much whatever they want at the federal level, for example. For what it's worth, many libertarians consider themselves to be simply restating what Thomas Jefferson and many of the framers thought and wrote about the role of government.

If you accept vast expansions of government like that, you can find yourself somewhere that you didn't want to be. Here's a simplistic example. If you're accepting of the notion that the government (taxpayers) should pay for everyone's healthcare costs, then it makes perfect sense for the government to have a say in whether or not you smoke, and how much you weigh, and perhaps other things too. Or, if you're accepting of the idea that the government (taxpayers) should pay for everyone's retirement, then is it any surprise when decades later your country has a very low savings rate and huge long-term debt obligations which will require significant tax increases?

You might think that either of these are no big deal to you, and that's a fine opinion. Libertarians tend to have a different opinion, and think that if people bear the costs of their own actions, and are given the benefits of their labors, they will be properly incentivized and most able to make decisions for themselves without affecting others (ie, that that situation will maximize personal freedoms). In the above example, if you bore the cost of your own healthcare, you could smoke if you wanted. And if you bore the costs of your own retirement, you would save money to retire in an account, and then withdraw it when you retire (Social security is often said to work "kind of" like this from any individual's perspective, which might lead you to wonder why it doesn't just work exactly like that). In any case, if you feel that the idea of the goverment having a say about how much you weigh, or whether or not you smoke is disturbing, you would rationally and validly be against the principles that led to such an expansion of the role of the government.

I think it's similar to the minimum wage: Some libertarians cry
that the minimum wage is unfair and hurts more people than it helps. So, suppose
we eliminate the minimum wage. In the libertarian's wildest fantasies, the
economy surges to never before seen highs, and quality of life explodes. Now
imagine in this libertopia that a new minimum wage of two cents is instituted.
Suddenly, the economy crashes, there is a great depression and millions suffer.
Does that sound far fetched? It should. Because the point I'm making here is
that some rates of minimum wage will have no practical effect, whatsoever, in
the real world. And, indeed, leading economists believe our current minimum wage
has a very negligible effect, and the same goes for John Kerry's proposal for a
$7 minimum wage (which Bush is starting to echo as something he finds
acceptable; funny how the Great Divider moves toward the center in an election
year).

I would agree that many libertarians think that, and it's probably true that the minimum wage doesn't have that big an effect when it is kept low. But you could just oppose it on the leave-me-alone principle. If a given job I want done is worth less than the minimum wage to me, and someone is willing to do it for less than the minimum wage, who are you or anyone to interfere in a transaction that is agreeable to the two of us? Yes, it might not have that big an effect, but that's not a good enough reason. In reality, people do have a reservation wage, the threshold at which they will choose to work. Few people would value their time such that they would work for $0.02 an hour, or any wage below their reservation wage. This is like a free market minimum wage: if you want to hire someone to do something, you must pay more than their reservation wage.

I don't enjoy taxes out of some Robin Hood aesthetic of justice. I
value them because they can be used to help protect and promote what we value;
particularly when the market itself does not have the right incentives in place
to do so on its own.

Well, you can't get any sort of agreement on "what we value," for the most part. You seem to mean "what I value." There are plenty of things that benefit everyone equally, like national defense, crime prevention, roadway and telecommunications spectrum coordination, and so forth. No one would argue that these are very valuable, only doable by a central authority, and that we should use taxes to fund them. However, most of our taxes don't go toward that sort of thing, they go towards transfer payments from one group of people to another. Someone could very validly agree with the value of using the power of government to transfer wealth around.

Again, this is about protecting against the abuse of power. Government is an apparatus that is difficult to fight against or dismantle. The more powerful it is, the harder it is to fight against when it is behaving badly. You might appreciate a benevolent use of government power, but the power of government provides powerful incentives to those who wield it. The Constitution was designed to fight against that and, for example, Washington, DC was put in a god-awful location so that a permanent group of rulers wouldn't spring up. For government to do the things that you value requires government to have incredible power that is open to gross misuse.

By the way, you really should read that paper on slippery slopes that I linked to.

Getting Your Ass Kicked

2004-08-18T11:06:00.000-04:00

Last night we went out to Baltimore with a bunch of coworkers to watch the Orioles have their asses handed to them 11-0 by the Oakland A's. Of course, just about everyone else was rooting for the Orioles. I was with the A's, not only because they're from California, but also because of what I read about them in Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Once one of the poorest teams in baseball, the A's manager Billy Beane started using statistics and thinking strategically to pick up players that no other teams wanted, but which nonetheless had solid ability to get on base. By grinding out runs with singles instead of homers, the A's started winning spectacularly.

That strategy was apparent last night. When the A's were at bat, they would usually get on base, or get the bases loaded, in a process that would last for ages before they finally got three outs. When the Orioles were at bat, it was usually three quick outs. It took several innings for anyone to make a run, but it was pretty obvious from the very beginning that the Orioles were facing inevitability. (Of course, they also sucked: they brought in a relief pitcher who almost immediately walked a guy while the bases were loaded. Apparently this was inadvertent, because he then threw the next guy a really easy pitch out of desperation, and that guy hit a homerun. That guy was immediately switched out, and replaced with a guy who hit a player with a wild pitch).

Now I wake up and find that apparently Google has gotten their ass handed to them by the market. Apparently people weren't up to paying top dollar for an asset whose only worth to them is the possibility of its increasing in value. It's fitting and ironic, coming from the "Don't Be Evil" guys, since the whole point of their auction process was to guarantee that most of the value of the IPO would flow to them. Of course, this isn't really that big a deal for them, since it's just their huge IPO being downgraded to a slightly less huge IPO. It is embarassing, though.

Lastly, I somehow missed the news on monday that SHA-0 and MD5 have been broken! Apparently SHA-1 is on the way to being broken as well. I found this on Volokh.com today, strangely enough. This is huge news! (The CRYPTO conference, held in lovely Santa Barbara every year, has a history of major cryptanalytical announcements; it's where Adi Shamir announced his differential cryptanalysis technique).

Notes on Collateral

2004-08-16T16:20:00.000-04:00

When Michael Mann makes a movie set in LA, it's always a treat for me. He seems to frame the city I am so familiar with better than anyone. Collateral was good, but it wasn't his best. It feels like the sort of movie that a very talented director can toss off because he's bored and doesn't feel like working too hard.

Almost everything is great. The directing is fantastic, as is the cinematography. The acting is excellent. The dialogue is pretty good, the action is very exciting, and the whole thing is suspenseful. It's a pretty good movie. (Like I've said, you can tell I liked a movie when I don't say much about it). What has nagged me about the movie is a bunch of little flaws.

Early in the movie, he turns on the radio while driving around with a woman, and it's a nice montage of LA at night. What made it great was that the song he plays is "Hands of Time" by Groove Armada. But apparently this was not the song they originally intended to play, because the woman remarks, "You like the classics, I see?" The song came out in their CD Love Box, which came out in 2002. OK, that one is really minor, but it took me out of the movie. Even if you weren't familiar with the song, it's obviously not anything commonly considered "classic" in this day and age.

The main problem I had is part of a larger problem with Michael Mann's villains: they're really cool. In Heat, Robert DeNiro was way more bad ass than Al Pacino, and you're sorry to see him lose. Similarly, Tom Cruise's Vincent is a totally terrifying guy. Tom Cruise runs and kills with a calm, ruthless efficiency of movement that looks very powerful on the screen. He seems unstoppable, and indeed, survives hoards of professional goons. Yet in the end (and this a spoiler warning for you people out there), he is killed by Jaime Foxx standing dead in front of him, emptying a gun at him. Jaime Foxx is untouched by the similar barrage from Vincent. I'm OK with the bad guy losing, you don't really want him to win, because he's so terrible. But such a cool character deserves a better defeat than that. It's so especially disappointing in this movie because it's so damn implausible.

Bad Interviewing

2004-08-15T14:05:00.000-04:00

Now here's something interesting from Econopundit, for a change. Check out this interview with Ray Fair in the New York Times, by some asshat with the slimmest fraction of his intelligence. Claire and I read this maddening interview at the same time, incredibly frustrated at the interviewer. She doesn't seem to understand that you can want someone to win, and believe that they won't, or that he might actually be motivated by a desire for a deeper understanding of what drives elections than what he wants to have happen.

Bad Economics

2004-08-12T11:26:00.000-04:00

Econopundit strikes again. When I read this, I immediately thought "What are you talking about?" His claim that there hasn't been a monthly decline in job growth since April is simply not true. Here's the payrolls data from January 2003 on:

Date	Payrolls (Thousands)	Change from Preceding Month
Jan-03	130190	94
Feb-03	130031	-159
Mar-03	129921	-110
Apr-03	129901	-20
May-03	129873	-28
Jun-03	129859	-14
Jul-03	129814	-45
Aug-03	129789	-25
Sep-03	129856	67
Oct-03	129944	88
Nov-03	130027	83
Dec-03	130035	8
Jan-04	130194	159
Feb-04	130277	83
Mar-04	130630	353
Apr-04	130954	324
May-04	131162	208
Jun-04	131240	78
Jul-04	131272	32

So clearly there was a decline in payrolls until September 2003. What he's done in his chart is pick the exact way the data seems like it says what he says it says. So instead of showing the absolute change from period to period (what most people look at), he shows the percent change from period to period. Here's what the percent change from period to period looks like:

Date	Percent Change from Preceding Month
Jan-03	0.07%
Feb-03	-0.12%
Mar-03	-0.08%
Apr-03	-0.02%
May-03	-0.02%
Jun-03	-0.01%
Jul-03	-0.03%
Aug-03	-0.02%
Sep-03	0.05%
Oct-03	0.07%
Nov-03	0.06%
Dec-03	0.01%
Jan-04	0.12%
Feb-04	0.06%
Mar-04	0.27%
Apr-04	0.25%
May-04	0.16%
Jun-04	0.06%
Jul-04	0.02%

Right here, you can see why people don't look at the percentage changes. If gangbusters payroll growth is March 2004, and that's only 0.25% percent growth, what is the point? The payrolls seem to only grow by certain amounts each month over time (around 200 to 300 thousand a month in times of expansion), but since jobs accumulate, a "good" payroll increase is a decreasing percentage change over time. In other words, a 250,000 payroll increase 30 years ago is a larger percentage change than the same increase today, but it's still just as good of an increase in employment. It's kind of surprising, actually. This makes the percent changes uninformative.

But ignore that. It still doesn't look like his claim is correct, does it? So he applies a little more fudge, by rounding the growth rates to one digit. Well, then you get his chart.

Date	Percent Change from Preceding Month	Percent Change Rounded to 1 Digit
Jan-03	0.07%	0%
Feb-03	-0.12%	0%
Mar-03	-0.08%	0%
Apr-03	-0.02%	0%
May-03	-0.02%	0%
Jun-03	-0.01%	0%
Jul-03	-0.03%	0%
Aug-03	-0.02%	0%
Sep-03	0.05%	0.1%
Oct-03	0.07%	0.1%
Nov-03	0.06%	0.1%
Dec-03	0.01%	0%
Jan-04	0.12%	0.1%
Feb-04	0.06%	0.1%
Mar-04	0.27%	0.3%
Apr-04	0.25%	0.2%
May-04	0.16%	0.2%
Jun-04	0.06%	0.1%
Jul-04	0.02%	0%

As you can see, not only does this now make it look like there wasn't actually a decline in jobs in those first five months after April 2003, but it also exaggerates the growth for September through December, by almost doubling the growth rate in those months. He's hidden a decline of over 130,000 jobs and called it "zero" because it's broken up into enough periods that the percent changes were rounded away by the arbitrary precision he chose.

But even still, all this isn't really the point. The working population is growing all the time, and so people enter the labor force. That means that simply having zero jobs growth is actually a decline in employment in percentage terms. In fact, economists estimate that you need about 150,000 new jobs a month just to keep up with population growth. So a smaller monthly increase isn't actually anything that people get excited about. From this perspective, only March, April, and May (and November, barely) are consistent with an increase in real employment.