tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66668766120864279232024-02-06T20:07:27.247-08:00Ravings of an Ivory Tower LunaticT. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-68685745301423006832013-02-15T12:35:00.003-08:002013-02-15T14:39:28.749-08:00Looking for love advice? Why not ask some Disney princes?<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Prince
Charming?”</span> I asked. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Traditional Arabic', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: 'Traditional Arabic', serif;">Several heads turned. “Right, there are
several Prince Charmings, aren't there?”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">One
dressed in blue stepped forward to resolve my confusion. He was
vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place him.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Well,
really, it's Prince<u>s</u> Charming, properly speaking. Charming is ...”
He fumbled for a moment, at a loss for the word he needed. “It's
like an extra part of the title. An adjective, not really a name.
We've had real proper names from time to time,” he said. Then he
paused again.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Sorry.
Had trouble remembering what my name is right now. I've been called
Florian, Frederick, David, and James. It's not like our names matter;
it's the what we are that matters, not the who. We're all pretty
interchangeable on the personal level – one prince is as good as
another.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;"><i>Interchangeable</i>.
Another word for <i>disposable</i>. I wondered if even their wives could tell them apart if they swapped clothes and traded places for the day. Neither Florian nor any of his other names sounded familiar, and I
honestly couldn't recognize him from his looks, so I had to ask: “Er.
Which one are you, again?”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">I'm
Snow White's,” he said.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">How
did you court her?” I asked. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Well,
first I started singing with her when she thought she was alone and
singing to herself,” he said. He looked at me hopefully. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Did
she like that?” I asked. I couldn't remember that part of the
movie.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">No,
actually, she found it terrifying and creepy, and she ran away from
me.” He sighed. “She didn't return my affections
until after I woke her up from that enchanted sleep. I was lucky the
witch did that, I don't think I would have gotten her to hold still
long enough otherwise.” </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">It
was the same for both of us,” chipped in a prince wearing red.
“Kissing her awake from an enchanted sleep. Plant one on her while
she's asleep and she knows she's yours when she wakes up.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Sleeping
Beauty's prince. In the old French fairy tale, the prince visited the sleeping
maiden, and she woke up nine months later. With twins. I wanted sound
advice, not a prescription for magical roofies. “Ah. Well, uh, nice
meeting you.” I turned to another prince, wearing what looked like
an old-fashioned military uniform, yellow with gold trim. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">How
about you, Prince?” </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">The
next prince paused. “I don't say I really did anything. The ladies
came to me, and I picked out the one with the smallest feet. Had the
devil of a time finding her, but that's what servants are for. You
just need to be yourself - rich, powerful, tall, and handsome, that
is - and the ladies will come to you. You'll have your pick of the
litter.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">A
fourth prince nodded in agreement. “I thought I'd go with a good
singer, but then I changed my mind to go with a mute girl who was
much cuter and really eager to do anything for me. And I mean, like,
<u>anything</u>,” he said with a smile. “Turns out she was also a
good singer, just had really bad laryngitis, so that was totally the
right choice. Just stand around, be rich, powerful, tall, and
handsome, and then pick one out, man. Nothing to it.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">I
looked around the room, and indeed, they almost all were tall and
handsome, and wore their rich clothes with the assurance of old
money. But there was one - a small and slightly darker-complexioned fellow - who was scratching at his sleeves with the discomfort of the newly rich.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Aladdin?”
I said. He'd gotten some real face time in his Disney feature, so it
was easy enough to tell who it was. “What if you aren't rich,
handsome, tall, and powerful?”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Then
cheat,” he said. “Lie, cheat, and steal your way to the top.”
He paused. “Hey, I may be shorter than the rest of those clowns,
but I looked tall to her in comparison to her dad. So I got the tall.
And I'm handsome.” </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">He
puffed himself up to his full height. “So. If you ain't rich and
powerful, claw your way up and you can make her yours. Show your
rivals no mercy, show her a good time, and all the lies won't
matter so long as you pull through.” </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Having
a genie at your disposal probably helped, too, but I didn't have any
magic lamps at my disposal. I'm not the sort of fellow inclined to
skirt moral, legal, and physical laws, either; this was going in the
same file with the prescription for magical roofies.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">The
next fellow looked totally unfamiliar. “Who are you?” I said.
Sorting through faceless vaguely princes was hard, but I really
couldn't remember this one. Not at all.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Well,
you might know me better wearing my old face. They called me Beast.”
His eyes gleamed. “I'm the smart one of this lot, here.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Beast
I could remember. He'd been nearly as prominent in his movie as
Aladdin had been in his. “Tall, but not handsome. Rich, but
outcast. You had a tough time of it, didn't you?” I said.“Tell
me, how on Earth did you hook Belle? How did you get her to fall in
love with you?”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Beast
paused, considering for a moment. “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome" target="_blank">Stockholm syndrome</a>,” he said.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Ah.” That made a certain amount of sense. I decided not to ask him about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lima_Syndrome#Lima_syndrome" target="_blank">his feelings for Belle</a>, reflecting instead on the lengthy prison sentences associated with kidnapping cases.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Half
a dozen princes, and what had I learned? </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">Well,
I should simply <i>be</i> a namelessly bland tall, handsome, wealthy, and
influential fellow, and pick one of the easily-impressed girls
flinging themselves at me. If the girls weren't flinging themselves
at me quickly enough, I should get someone to apply magical
roofies to one of them, and have my way with her in her sleep - then
she'd be mine when she woke up.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">If
I wasn't rich and famous enough for that, I should lie, cheat, and steal; kidnapping my chosen bride
by force if necessary. Then I should play head games with her until
she ended up loving me in spite of – or <i>because of </i>– the
way I'd abused and deceived her.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Traditional Arabic, serif;">What
princely advice that was.</span></div>
T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-20431089744297529042011-01-10T23:42:00.000-08:002011-01-11T01:54:34.157-08:00The Arizona shooting: A depressing lack of surpriseI know that Saturday, there was a politically motivated shooting that made the news. A congresswoman, a sitting district court judge, and many other people were shot. Part of the "news" running through the mainstream media outlets is that this is shocking. Which means unexpected.<br /><br />To me, it was not a surprise, and I don't think that reporters who make news their business have any right to claim surprise. Could I have predicted this specific time and target? No. Does it fit right in to the political environment? Yes.<br /><br />There has been lately, and particularly in the last two election cycles, with Obama taking center stage, a dramatic upswing in indicators of political violence and <a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/articles/entry/2815/">domestic terrorism from the political fringe</a>. The rhetoric of a number of talking heads has been a constant drumbeat of fear and terror.<br /><br />There have been a number of incidents of attempted or successful acts of political violence just during this past election season; probably the most publicized being the videotaped stomping of a young woman at a rally in Kentucky days before the election (a fortunately non-lethal happening; but one which I found alarming nonetheless).<br /><br />The only thing particularly special about this attack is how successful it appears to have been. I imagine there will be many public debates over the precise ideology of the gunman. There will be backlash against the way some media figures have been inciting violence. And if we're especially lucky, maybe we'll see lasting change in the infotainment arenas.<br /><br />The shooter himself has every reason to lie through his teeth about his ideology for maximum impact at this point, if he is even capable of presenting his views in a coherent and understandable fashion. I can't afford to trust what he says about his own purposes. He's on the political fringe and almost certainly mentally ill, and his views won't line up perfectly with any mainstream figure anyway, however much the pundits try to fit him neatly into the box of their favored ideological opponents.<br /><br />The problem is how neatly this fits in a pattern of rising violence, a tide whose leading edge can retroactively be seen starting in when he was still in high school and Giffords wasn't a US congresswoman, and a tide which reached full froth when Obama was elected president.<br /><br />That's a fact. We've been watching a rising tide of political violence targeted very specifically at the left and the Democratic party. So. That's a plain statement of fact. Could I add anything - anything at all - from my own personal experience?<br /><br />One thing, maybe.<br /><br />I see a steady movement of white nationalists into the mainstream right wing. I suppose this could be both a symptom and a cause of the rise of violence. I can't claim to be an expert on the sociology of violence.<br /><br />A long time ago, back in January of 2003 - almost exactly 8 years ago - I was a college freshman out to see the online world who joined <a href="http://www.nationstates.net/">NationStates</a>. I fell in love with the community immediately. Just the year before I had been an ideologically extreme high school student fond of describing myself as "left of Lenin;" and NationStates had a large and diverse community from all ends of the political spectrum.<br /><br />There were Democrats. There were Republicans. There were anarcho-capitalists. There were communists - authoritarian and anarchist varieties both. There were Islamic socialists. And perhaps most visibly of all, there were neo-Nazis - a host of white nationalists had come to NationStates from Stormfront.<br /><br />The political debates were fierce and multi-faceted. I came to be familiar with the types of rhetoric frequently employed by white nationalists. The dangerous ones could make themselves sound more or less <span style="font-style: italic;">reasonable</span>.<br /><br />In the past few years, it's been remarkable to me to see just how much more widely distributed, how much more mainstream that rhetoric is. One of the most famous of the Republican primary candidates of 2008, Ron Paul, was remarkably skilled at speaking in ways that sounded perfectly reasonable, and to white nationalists, sounded like he was agreeing with them.<br /><br />The things the more reasonable sounding white nationalists would say in 2003, I might hear today on talk radio or Fox News. And back on NationStates, I'm wondering where all the neo-Nazis went. I'm wondering why we mysteriously have so many more Republicans now, and why so many of them sound so familiar.<br /><br />I'd rather just blame Beck or Palin or Fox News in general. Domestic terrorism, though, isn't new. Timothy McVeigh didn't need Beck or Palin to make his decisions. People on the fringes of politics and society don't necessarily listen too closely to mainstream media figures (<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/15/tides-foundation-ceo-glenn-beck_n_764470.html">though sometimes they do</a>).<br /><br />And I wonder: Is the important thing that ties McVeigh and Loughner together the former's KKK connection and the latter's love of <span style="font-style: italic;">Mein Kampf?</span> Or is it media-fueled anti-government paranoia, running off the fires of a hostile Republican reaction to a Democratic president?<br /><br />The more connections I try to explore, the more know that I don't know about the cause and effect. But I am pretty sure that something's rotten in Denmark. There just isn't enough room in the world of statistics for me to be able to pretend to be surprised by Saturday's attack.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-9425257168140307672010-11-23T01:15:00.001-08:002015-05-10T00:13:02.752-07:00Economics and economists<span style="font-size: 180%; font-weight: bold;">For a very long time,</span> I've held a dim view of economics as a "science" and economists in general. It's funny, because I had never taken an economics course. Not in five years as an undergraduate; nor the two extra years I stayed at my <em>alma mater</em> picking up my MA in math. This, in spite of the fact that I had become quite interested in voting theory<sup>1</sup>.<br />
<br />
Not only had I never taken any econ courses, I knew precious few economics majors and almost never talked to them about economics. Off the top of my head, I can remember only one - a fellow who shared a first name, a fencing hobby, and for the first half of his freshman year, an intended physics major with me. He was doing badly in physics and so dropped down into economics because it was easier.<br />
<br />
What I <span style="font-style: italic;">did</span> know is what I read about economics and economists. I was familiar that the justification for right-wing economic policies - including a number that seemed to fly in the face of countervailing empirical evidence, such as the old Reaganomic rattle about tax cuts stimulating growth<sup>2</sup>.<br />
<br />
I read biting critiques of economists by philosophers and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman">Richard Feynman</a>. I even read articles by economists trying to demand more respect for their field, but remained totally unimpressed. I did not study economics, and from what I saw, economics was not even a science.<br />
<br />
I also thought that economics education seemed to be all about <a href="http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/75/Economic_Indoctrination.html">learning how to agree with standard doctrines</a><sup>3</sup>. The handful of different approaches to economics, Wikipedia and other sources informed me, were hostile to each other as schools of thought and mainly differentiated by choosing the appropriate sorts of assumptions to back up a particular political faction<sup>4</sup>.<br />
<br />
I knew there was actually some pretty cool stuff in economics - some neat results here and there - but I dismissed economics. I've been frequently heard to declare that economists aren't scientists, but bad mathematicians attempting to do philosophy.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">And now?</span></span></div>
<br />
So instead of trying for a doctorate in physics or pure mathematics (I had funded offers for both), I decided to go California and get a doctorate in a cross-disciplinary institution. I'm still a math man at heart, but my funding comes through the school of social sciences, and in the last year and a half, I've had more interaction with economics, economists, and econ majors than in the rest of my life put together.<br />
<br />
I TAed an econ course my first quarter here. I'm <span style="font-style: italic;">taking</span> my first econ course this quarter. At least half the students in my research group come from an econ background.<br />
<br />
So here's what I know now. There are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_economics">economists who are scientists</a>, good ones who believe in the scientific method every bit as much as Feynman did. They seem not to be a majority of the field, but they're actually testing theories of economics. The good ones are studying and applying psychology to understand why people act as they do and then explaining the collective irrationalities we seem to engage in.<br />
<br />
Many economists are critical of economics and other economists. Econ graduate students and economists themselves are usually fairly bright. There are a lot of smart economists out there doing a lot of good work trying to figure things out.<br />
<br />
While some econ majors are surely the immediate predecessors of the bright, smart, and motivated grad students I meet with on a weekly basis, most of them aren't. If anything, econ majors seem to be wholly different creatures on an entirely different plane of competence. They're terrified of the math that is necessary to get anywhere interesting, and seem to have relatively little understanding of the scientific method.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure that my oft-repeated claim about bad mathematicians trying to do philosophy isn't true of the bulk of economists, or economics viewed as an academic field in practical terms. But now that I know some people with economics degrees sitting beside their names who <span style="font-style: italic;">don't</span> fit neatly in that pigeonhole, the fun's gone out of saying it. It just seems like a cheap shot now.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 78%;">1. It started when I as an undergraduate got to participate in a seminar field-testing <a href="http://www.maa.org/reviews/votingelections.html">this book</a>. It's a field that's been largely populated with economists for the last half-century.<br />2. That one is a very hard sell for someone who started following the news in the early 90s, watched economic growth follow the Clinton tax hikes, and then watched the economy flatline during the Bush years after being "stimulated" by tax cuts.</span><span style="font-size: 78%;"><br />3. I actually didn't get that notion from reading articles like that one. I got it from reading between the lines in articles written by economists trying to defend their field, and also from students who'd found economics courses disagreeable.<br />4. To this day, I believe this is how people who don't make a living in economics decide what school of economic thought is best - take the conclusions that they like and work backwards to justify the assumptions that school swears by. I suppose this may also be true of some economists.</span>T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-76819826081562729032010-07-31T16:56:00.001-07:002010-09-01T02:38:14.752-07:00Chess variations: The life of the partyFor those of you who know me personally, you know that I like chess.<br /><br />You also know I'm not actually that <span style="font-style: italic;">good</span> at chess (granted, I did go undefeated in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jetan">Martian chess</a> in high school, for the handful of matches that we played) - but I like to have some fun with it. And I also like to spice it up so that all those people who usually don't have much fun with chess will be having a blast.<br /><br />There are several major variations and hybridizations of chess. One that's good for all ages is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess">Bughouse</a> - partner the best player with the worst player and see how the middle team does. For the athletic crowd, there's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing">chess boxing</a>, which we could use as a template for any martial sport hybridized with chess, but I'm not a big fan of that one.<div><br />For the 18+ crowd, there's also strip chess, and for the 21+ crowd, shot glass chess. House rules on how to play these two games vary and are, on the whole, poorly documented, so I'll explain how to do them <span style="font-style: italic;">correctly</span>. And by <i>correctly</i>, I mean <i>this is going to be a fun game that can get played several times in a night without people complaining it's unfair.</i><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Shot Glass Chess</span></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span></div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_LjbqQ5gIB8So8qt-7ek-7MJyReGShSFlF-UYzAeFJCgC_ur58JfpmdSoPTFcQR1rb3A2xvefo3fP7GwhYsysXYuZDkYQC6jEwbSa9MRbHP0MsEpnIQ1RkPUdDIHlBNERXkpjrSbrBKk/s400/chess.jpg" style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 231px; height: 159px;" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5511837535865444226" /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">To the right, you can see a shot glass chess game in progress. The author (cream, right-hand side) has just finished capturing a rook (empty 2.5 oz tumbler on the side of the board) from his opponent (green, left-hand side) with his queen (miniature hurricane glass, 4.5 fl. oz). The result of this move is that the author was obliged to drain a 2.5 oz tumbler of Midori sour. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">That's the simple rule of shot glass chess: All the pieces are drinks, and when you take a piece, you take the drink. At the end of the match, the loser drinks his or her own king, as the penalty for losing. In the event of a draw, both players face the ignominious result of draining their own kings. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The only tricky part of shot glass chess is setting up the match. There are two types of shot glass chess sets. The type that's easy to find has glasses all of the same size with pictures of the pieces stamped on them. The other type has different sizes and types of glasses for the different pieces, like the one above. Although they're harder to find, you can put one together yourself. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />If you want to play great games of shot glass chess, and you don't have a good set, the important thing to know are the piece point values. If you're using the same size glasses, you can either fill the lesser pieces partway up (this works very well with tall, narrow glasses, but not so well with wider glasses), or use drinks of varying strength. Here are the recommended point values.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><ul><li>Pawns are 1 point each<br /><i>0.5 oz, 4.5% ABV, 1 part liquor to 8 parts mixer, or just a little splash in the bottom of the glass</i> </li><li>The "minors," knights and bishops, are worth 3 points<br /><i>1.5 oz, 13% ABV, 1 part liquor to 2 parts mixer, or fill to one third</i></li><li>The "majors," the rooks, are worth 5 points<br /><i>2.5 oz, 22% ABV, 1 part liquor to 1 part mixer, or fill to a half</i></li><li>The queen is worth 9 points<br /><i>4.5 oz, 40% ABV, straight liquor, or filled to full)</i></li><li>The king does not have a point value, but should match the queen in size and contents.</li></ul>If a player manages to graduate a pawn, don't add more liquor - just pour the pawn into the replacement piece. If you're using the listed volumes, the whole chess set is 48 ounces of liquid. 1 oz shot glasses with the mixtures listed above will give about 5 ounces of liquor on each side of the board. Fortunately, the entire board is rarely cleared in a chess game, but it often gets close. Consider using weaker mixtures for smaller opponents, or when playing repeated games.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-large;">Strip Chess</span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Strip chess, unlike shot glass chess, doesn't have a very good set of existing rules. To be fair, it has been marginalized in favor of strip poker, a more psychological and less intellectual game. There are numerous existing variations of strip chess, some of which have actually been played. They generally involve setting up a correspondence between capturing the pieces on the board and removing clothing. One such codification can be found <a href="http://boardgames.lovetoknow.com/Strip_Chess">here</a>. Oddly, few of them take the obvious step of simply setting a ratio of points per article of clothing (I would say 5 is about right).</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I think, however, this misses how we can add additional depth to the game. In shot glass chess, this depth is provided by automatic handicapping. I propose, instead of assigning point values to clothing, these three rules, which add to ordinary chess the dimension of embarrassment:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><ol><li>If a player loses the match, he or she must remove one article of clothing - chosen by his or her opponent.</li><li>At any time, a player may remove an article of clothing - of his or her own choice - in order to return the board to where it was before his or her previous move.</li><li>If a player is offered bad advice by one or more bystanders, which results in removal of clothing under rules #1 or #2, the bystanders must each also remove a corresponding article of clothing.</li></ol></div><div style="text-align: left;">I think it is subtle enough and simple enough to be played as a party game - and amenable to the addition of drinking and the atmosphere of poor decisions at parties. Play chess at a party and you'll be distracted, often wishing you could take back a move. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Rule #3 is optional, but allows for an intermediate level of group participation between team matches (where moves are resolved by committee) and individual matches (where spectators have little to do, but will probably be offering advice - some good, and some bad). One final footnote: You may want to treat "paired" items, such as shoes, as a single item - both in this, and in other strip games.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:x-large;">Strip Shot Glass Chess</span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's possible to combine the above games. Why not? Capturing pieces leads to inebriation. Inebriation leads to mistakes. Mistakes lead, in turn, to removing clothing. Chess then becomes your guide to the complete classic party experience. The game you play then has the following additional rules from ordinary chess:</div><div style="text-align: left;"><ol><li><b>Capturing pieces:</b> If you take a piece, you drink the piece.</li><li><b>Penalty for losing:</b> If a player loses the match, he or she must drain his or her king and then remove one article of clothing - chosen by his or her opponent.</li><li><b>Taking back moves:</b> At any time, a player may remove an article of clothing of his or her choice in order to return the board to where it was before his or her previous move.</li><li><b>Bad advice:</b> If a player is offered bad advice by one or more bystanders, which results in removal of clothing under rules #1 or #2, the bystanders must each also remove a corresponding article of clothing.</li></ol></div><div style="text-align: left;">There arises a natural question on rule #3: Should taken pieces be refilled with the same alcoholic beverage when the move of their capture is undone? I recommend refilling them with water or juice of the appropriate color to remind players of their mistakes without putting them over their originally intended alcohol consumption. However, if you are using a weak set, you might be able to get away with playing it the other way.</div></div></div></div>T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-29302997455393689502009-12-31T20:50:00.001-08:002009-12-31T22:01:28.122-08:002009: A good year for moviesI've seen several movies this year in first-run theaters. I know, unusual, right? I've even been positively impressed. I saw <span style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Up!</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Hurt Locker</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar.</span><br /><br />And I'm definitely thinking that <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span> are good science fiction movies, of the sort we haven't seen too many of lately. They were good, they were <span style="font-style: italic;">serious</span>, and they were original. It's not really a combination we see too often, but the similarity doesn't stop there. Both films were exploring alienation, race, and loyalty, edgy topics that simply were not fashionable when Bush was president.<br /><br />Both have a human plunged into the society of the aliens, experience the oppression humans place upon them first hand, turn against the human military apparatus, and become physically transformed into aliens themselves. Both films make exceptional use of aesthetics - the Prawn are revoltingly ugly, and the gritty documentary style makes the ugliness of the slum life very real. The Na'vi, on the other hand, are strikingly beautiful, and the film is visually gorgeous.<br /><br />Both make intense use of historical metaphor to talk about the times in which some humans - and yes, ladies and gentlemen, white Western European industrial English-speaking humans, if we're to be specific - have decided to treat other humans as <span style="font-style: italic;">sub</span>human. <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> uses apartheid. <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span> uses the american indian wars. I even noticed Colonel Quaritch, the military leader in <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span>, making what seemed like a deliberate reference to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance">Ghost Dance</a>.<br /><br />Now that Obama is in office, those who found it fashionable to be not only patriotic, but nationalistic and jingoistic are becoming rabidly anti-American, cheering when Chicago lost its bid for the Olympics, jeering when a sitting president is handed a Nobel prize. The Democrats haven't picked up the slack; nationalistic fervor has tapered. If <span style="font-style: italic;">The Hurt Locker</span> had the temerity to suggest that some soldiers get hooked on the rush of putting it all on the line in Iraq back in 2004, would it have been labelled anti-American and bad for soldiers' morale?<br /><br />And heaven forbid that a film show ex-US Marines as ruthless mercenaries engaging in massacring civilians. But that nationalistic fervor has faded, enough that it's no longer fashionable. Suddenly, it's fashionable to talk about race, to examine the question of social identity.<br /><br />I suppose the bombing of the Home Tree plays a little more like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre">My Lai</a> than any of the battles of the Indian Wars we're familiar with, complete with the soldier who says they didn't sign up for this and decides they've had enough, but I don't think the Vietnam War is a much more comfortable piece of history than the systematic destruction of the american indian nations.<br /><br />I've heard a few people complain that <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span> has no plot. I count several - a conflict between science and short-term ignorant greed, a romance, a unification story, a sequence of alienation, initiation, and adoption. It's not even badly written, and I didn't spot so many of the egregious hard-to-ignore physics errors so common in flashy big-budget SFX movies. <span style="font-style: italic;">Spiderman 2</span>, I'm looking right at you. That was painful. Anyway, back on topic:<br /><br />Good science fiction tries to push a little bit beyond our comfort zone. When I see some people reacting in a very visceral way to the "race traitors" of <span style="font-style: italic;">District 9</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Avatar</span>, I see it as a sign those movies are doing something <span style="font-style: italic;">right</span>. Aside from making half their critics look like white supremacist nutjobs, they're prodding hard enough to make some very meaningful statements and ask people questions they might not ask themselves enough.<br /><br />The moral I see in both films is this. It doesn't matter if they're ten foot tall blue beauties in a neolithic tribal structure or technologically advanced tentacled bugs who get high on cat food, <span style="font-style: italic;">everybody</span> deserves to be treated with a full measure of "human" dignity. If we don't, we are already traitors to our ideals. And that's a radical statement, because we have a devil of a time managing that with other humans.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-53076769840677466332009-11-26T16:56:00.001-08:002009-11-26T19:15:59.869-08:00The length of an elven lifespanOne thing that gets me in fantasy literature: Elves, and how long elves live. Usually, we see elves living incredibly long lifespans "off-screen." Since they don't age, we see elves living thousands and thousands of years. Naturally, in the course of events that happen on-stage, they die off in fairly large numbers due to unnatural causes.<br /><br />Elves aren't invincible. Some kinds of elves, such as Tolkien's elves, are immune to disease. These elves only die due to violence, lethal accidents, or suicide. Our first order estimate is therefore based on the most recent statistics for that - the <a href="http://www.who.int/research/en/">WHO 2002 report on mortality</a>. We see that 83 out of every 100,000 people die traumatically violent untimely deaths, and an additional 8 out of 100,000 starve to death.<br /><br />With humans, this varies with age, but since elves are unaging and unchanging beings, we'll assume the average rate holds for all elves of any age. Thus, each year, 0.091% of all elves die. This means that the elven time of death is drawn from a simple <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_distribution">exponential distribution</a> with parameter λ = 0.00091.<br /><br />The mean of an exponential distribution is simply 1/λ, so the average elven lifespan is 1100 years. The median elven lifespan is shorter - 760 years - and about 40% of elves live past their first millenium.<br /><br />But 2002 was not that violent of a year. War, genocide, and famines tend to happen in short sharp "spikes." Only 2.8 people per 100,000 died as a result of war in 2002; over the course of the 20th century, about 10 billion people drew breath. 6 billion of those lived to see the end of it, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million died in excessive spikes of "mass death" - famines and wars. That's 2,000 per 100,000 per 100 years; taking the appropriate 1/100th root, we get an average of 40 per 100,000.<br /><br />If we take out today's war deaths and famine deaths and substitute an averaged value of 40 for "mass death" events, we get about 120 per 100,000. At λ = 0.0012, the average elven lifespan is 830 years, and the typical elf lives a mere 580 years. Only 30% of elves live to see out the end of their first millenium. One out of every 160,000 would live to see their tenth millenium.<br /><br />Not all fantasy mythos leave elves immune to disease - and infectious disease represented 175 per 100,000 deaths in 2002. Historically, diseases have killed far more than violence and starvation, even among the healthy "young adult" population (smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, scarlet fever, malaria, outbreaks of various plagues - these can kill at any age) - so if elves aren't immune to disease, we would probably want to see λ to become substantially larger and the elven lifespan much shorter.<br /><br />In the limiting case, where we consider lethal accidents, violence, and disease terms more typical to the dark ages? Well, let's just say that two or three centuries doesn't seem like such a short time for an elf to live, after all.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-8162943588423705002009-11-12T08:01:00.000-08:002009-11-12T08:33:08.878-08:00Context and qualityThe other night, I was talking with a lovely poli sci student and wound up bringing up <span style="font-style: italic;">Jumper</span>, which would appear to be three related things:<br /><ol><li>A 1992 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumper_%28novel%29">book</a> I greatly enjoyed reading several times 10-15 years ago and classed as an exemplar of the writing craft (though not necessarily the writing art).</li><li>A 2008 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumper_%28film%29">movie</a> widely reputed to be bad.</li><li>A 2007 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumper:_Griffin%27s_Story_%28novel%29">book</a> written to tie into the screenplay.<br /></li></ol>I have yet to experience items number 2 and 3, but I wonder: Would, today, I still enjoy item number 1? Would I enjoy it if I encountered it for the first time <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span>? The terrorist-obsessed vigilante might seem much more heavily worn after living through 8 years of terrorism-obsessed politics; the damaged young man struggling to connect with a normal life and normal relationships might not be nearly as sympathetic a character.<br /><br />And perhaps my standards for the writing <span style="font-style: italic;">craft</span> have changed. I was impressed not with the plots or characterizations of <span style="font-style: italic;">Jumper</span>, but by what I saw as a remarkably smooth flow of words, a mechanically well-put-together piece of fiction. I read 1-2 other books by the same author not long after, and was unimpressed with them. But today, would I apply the same standard? Do I care more or less about the craftsmanship that went into a book - and do I consider the same things good?<br /><br />I suppose I should re-read it and see what I think of the book now, but re-reading a book is never the same as encountering it for the very first time.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-42118744758016279192009-09-03T04:23:00.000-07:002015-05-10T00:15:28.179-07:00The socialized medicine we already haveThe public dialog surrounding health care has become fairly frustrating to me. There's a generation gap, an information gap, a comprehension gap, and not only that, but plenty of hypocrisy and misinformation going around.<br />
<br />
First: No, the US health care system is not the best in the world. We may have the best experts on some diseases, and very good health care, but the overall quality of care, system-wide, is no better than tenth in the world. Even Forbes magazine - hardly a bastion of socialism - <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/07/health-world-countries-forbeslife-cx_avd_0408health_slide_6.html?thisSpeed=15000">puts the US at 11th healthiest</a>. In 2000, the WHO put the US health care system as <a href="http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_annex_en.pdf">15th best</a> - 37th accounting for how much we spend.<br />
<br />
No matter what anecdotes Fox News, the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages, or anybody else spout about the horrors of socialized medicine, the fact of the matter is that nearly every serious look at the <span style="font-style: italic;">data</span> tell us that Canada, the UK, Sweden, etc have far better health care systems.<br />
<br />
Second: The US already <span style="font-style: italic;">has</span> government-provided health care. For 2005, the WHO calculates total government spending on health care in the US at <a href="http://apps.who.int/whosis/database/core/core_select_process.cfm">$2,862 per capita</a> (out of a total of $6,350 - yes, both figures have risen substantially in the last 4 years). In other words, between Medicare, Medicaid, the Veteran's Administration, and other government provided insurance and health care systems, Uncle Sam pays directly for about 45% of all health care.<br />
<br />
I don't believe that counts the employer tax break, which as an indirect subsidy amounts to about $500 per person, and Medicare spending has grown sharply in the last four years. Government insurance programs cover directly more than a quarter of the population directly, and the subsidies affect half the population.<br />
<br />
The result of selectively covering the poor, elderly, and disabled is one of the most expensive (and least efficient) government health care systems in the developed world. The US government, in 2005, spent more money per capita on health care than the Canadian government, the German government, the UK government, the Swedish government, and most of the other European governments you hear about when people start talking about socialized medicine and universal health care.<br />
<br />
Iceland, Switzerland, and Denmark's governments all spent more than Uncle Sam in 2005 - in nominal terms, but in terms of purchasing power parity (everything is more expensive there), they spent less than our government. Austria pretty much matches us in PPP terms; so far as I can tell, the French and Norwegian governments alone spent more money on health care than our government did.<br />
<br />
In fact, US government spending on health care is about the same as <span style="font-style: italic;">total</span> health care expenditures - public and private - in the countries I usually use as examples, Japan and Sweden. (<a href="http://www.marx.org/archive/katayama/1908/11/21.htm">Anyone think that Japan has a recent history as a bastion of socialism?</a>)<br />
<br />
So if "government provided health care" is a form of socialism ... ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the United States: The world's third or fourth most socialized medicine on the planet - and the only one in the top 20 that can't manage to cover all its citizens.<br />
<br />
Third: The generation gap. What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that employer health benefits are on the downslide. And that matters a lot more for us young folk, who are part-timers, new hires whose contracts don't have grandfathered care, entrepreneurs, subcontractors, self-employed, and generally get the short end of the stick when it comes to government subsidies and government-provided coverage.<br />
<br />
I'm 25. Mortality and disease and high health care bills are pretty uncommon in our age bracket - but there aren't many of us who don't realize that skimping on preventative care now will cost use when we're older, or that one accident, one unusual disease will completely wipe out our pocketbooks and put us in the hole. Not only that, but we probably won't even be able to <span style="font-style: italic;">get</span> care until later in the course of a disease or long-term condition if we aren't covered, and that means it'll get a lot worse.<br />
<br />
And so most of us are strongly in favor of health care reform. It's not surprising; we're right there. We can see our self-interest, and we can see our taxes fueling a system that spends enormously and inefficiently on everybody else. And when I hear about all the older folks hollering and protesting at "town hall" meetings about "socialized medicine," I can't help but think: There is someone who probably benefitted from government-subsidized health care for several decades of their life, and is probably covered directly by Medicare now.<br />
<br />
And I think to myself that they are probably more than a little bit of a hypocrite. They <span style="font-style: italic;">have</span> socialized medicine. They're probably afraid it'll get cut if the government stretches out to pay for everybody - something I think about a lot when I look at how older folk respond to intimations of Medicare cuts. Those young people, they don't need insurance, most of them are really healthy - so many of the older generation seems to think.<br />
<br />
And who is going to be paying for this, paying for the growing national debt, paying for any health care reform? Most of today's retirees aren't going to be paying many taxes twenty or thirty years down the road. Most of today's young people <span style="font-style: italic;">will</span>. So when I see members of the older generation fighting health care reform tooth and nail, I look at the demographics and the statistics and I think to myself that it looks like most of the protesters are engaging in an exercise in hypocrisy.<br />
<br />
But back to the issure of young people <span style="font-style: italic;">needing</span> coverage. Here we come to the comprehension gap. Because when it comes to having health care, it's do or die. And so when it comes to insurance, you <span style="font-style: italic;">need</span> coverage that will handle a major emergency, which in a market where the government is paying for most of everybody else's ticket, in a market where you can't shop around between more than a handful of providers, in a market where bloated middlemen work hard to make their share larger, in a market with an enormous information gap, means that you're completely fucked if you're a little fish on your own shopping for coverage.<br />
<br />
I happen to have gotten lucky in that my graduate school actually provides health coverage as part of my funding package, and it <span style="font-style: italic;">might</span> even be adequate coverage in the event of a major medical emergency. I don't know yet. There's always a lot of fine print, and I haven't spent several weeks reviewing it - not that I could afford to buy adequate coverage on my graduate stipend. I don't exactly have a choice there.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
So. That turned out to be a longer rant than I expected, and there's so much more I could talk about, but I'll leave you with the summary and the recap. First, other countries do actually have better health care systems. Second, the US government is already spending enough to provide universal coverage <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> better coverage. Third, your experience and understanding of this country's health care is going to vary radically based on age and socioeconomic background.<br />
<br />
At the risk of sounding like a teenager, many of you making loud objections really just <span style="font-style: italic;">don't</span> understand. The holes in the system are a lot more visible to those of us living in them, and to those <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/opinion/11krugman.html">who trip over and fall in one</a>.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-14736364738356427762009-08-04T07:14:00.000-07:002009-08-04T08:50:34.960-07:00A secession scenario, part IIIThe past two installments of this series have been discussing a hypothetical Republican-led anti-Obama secession movement and what things would look like if about one third of the states seceded. Today, I'd like to spend just one moment turning the map inside-out.<br /><br />When I constructed the ASA, I started off by taking every state that has a Republican legislature, a Republican governor, and voted against Obama. I.e., we didn't include Florida, because Florida voted for Obama. I then added the two states Obama did worst in (Wyoming and Oklahoma) despite their Democratic governors, and threw in Montana because they have been surrounded. Now let's do the opposite, for fairness' sake - what's the Democrat-ruled Obama Nation look like?<br /><br />OK, so let's take the states that voted for Obama <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> have wholly Democratic state governments - so not including Arkansas and West Virginia, Democrat-run states which voted against Obama. Now add Hawaii and Vermont because Obama did best in those two states (in spite of their Republican governors). Connecticut and Rhode Island we now add for geographic reasons.<br /><br />Unlike the ASA, we can't connect all the Democratic states of America using only four states - but there is one state that Obama polled over 60% in that we haven't included, and it's a big enough state to make an entire "disputed region" all by itself: California. So here's our map, for completeness.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFNf2Mp8pKE9vl9ARV-d6uvgn1BCMn33aPyT5N1CT-JbdBsA8xYpb_QwyY2-NLKn8FYqXZqiaveikwN1NWWjz_GYLnVpHrGbZA6PGGlE9DNNPyTlef9s1RZRlBJgjLBlP5W076e-187o0/s1600-h/secess5.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFNf2Mp8pKE9vl9ARV-d6uvgn1BCMn33aPyT5N1CT-JbdBsA8xYpb_QwyY2-NLKn8FYqXZqiaveikwN1NWWjz_GYLnVpHrGbZA6PGGlE9DNNPyTlef9s1RZRlBJgjLBlP5W076e-187o0/s200/secess5.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5366129464135358306" border="0" /></a>The highlighted states (blue) have a population of 98 million and a GDP of $4.9 trillion ($50,200 per capita). You can see how much less geographically contiguous this group is - scattered across the country in five different pieces. And I think that highlights the point perfectly.<br /><br />Now, if the ASA's GDP per capita was barely below the US average, and these Democratic states average well above the US average, that tells us something really odd that I don't think I've heard before. The<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> most bipartisan </span></span>states in the union, as a group, number in their group most of the poorest states. Maybe it's a historical anomaly that the states whose local governments and presidential preferences are split are poorer than those who are entirely red or blue in 2008; maybe it actually means something.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-52408736187509492102009-07-29T23:59:00.000-07:002009-07-30T01:23:31.594-07:00Cuba: A look into the perils of communist health careWhenever I hear people discussing the perils of socialized medicine, I think of three countries immediately. Japan, Sweden, and Cuba. Japan and Sweden I immediately think of because these are two of the indisputably healthiest countries.<br /><br />Sweden has universal almost-free health coverage, where the state pays for about 98% of all costs; in Japan, health coverage is mandatory and either supplied through an employer, with the government providing coverage for students, elderly, farmers, and the self-employed. We could consider Japan the exemplar for the private model and Sweden the exemplar for the public model; in either case, the far less healthy United States is getting far less bang for its health care bucks than either.<br /><br />However, I think of Cuba because Cuba is actually identified as <span style="font-style: italic;">communist</span>. Nobody is going to dispute that Cuba is <span style="font-style: italic;">communist</span> - nor will anybody mistake Cuba for a rich country. The CIA World Factbook estimates that Cuba's GDP per capita, by purchasing power parity, is only $9500, barely more <span style="font-style: italic;">in total</span> than what we spend per capita on health care.<br /><br />Cuba spends even less - the WHO estimates 7.6% of its GDP - and due to Cuba's particular economic and trade relations situations, Cuba is short on many modern medical supplies, and this is reflected in the number of Cubans dying from causes we consider easily preventable.<br /><br />Here's where the Cuban system falls short. Maternal mortality - perhaps noncoincidentally, this ratio is matched by the rise in the number of c-sections performed. Tuberculosis - detection, treatment, and prevention. Child deaths due to diarhorreal disease or pneumonia - which would be especially easily solved with a little more money for drugs and sanitation infrastructure.<br /><br />Cuba also has noticably - albeit not as dramatically - higher deaths due to cardiovascular problems, something that may be linked to Cuba's substantially higher tobacco use rather than a specific deficiency in care, but that pretty much covers all of it.<br /><br />Life expectancy in Cuba is quite similar to the US. Infant, child, and adult mortality are overall lower. And what does it say about us that we spend twenty times as much on health care (<a href="http://apps.who.int/whosis/database/core/core_select_process.cfm">ref</a>) and yet get so little, as a population, out of our health care system? How much would it cost us to match Cuba's infant and child mortality rates?<br /><br />I am sure there are many specific procedures that are simply not available in a poor country like Cuba - but how can a rich country like the United States fail so badly with basic care that all the advanced procedures in the world barely let us catch up to our poorer neighbor on the demographic level?T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-17774024317870273992009-07-28T20:46:00.000-07:002015-05-10T00:16:01.166-07:00The oddity of the informed middlemanOn a certain level, salespeople tend to bother me a little. Not so much personally - although one of the people at my undergraduate <em>alma mater</em> I found the most reasons to personally dislike ended up working as a car salesman for a little while - as in terms of the general concept of the role. The line between salesperson and scam artist can be very slim, and it's difficult to see, sometimes, just what they add.<br />
<br />
There are two elements that combine to make salespeople hazardous. One is working on commission; the other is informational imbalance. If you work in sales, you probably are paid on commission, even if you work as a middleman between two parties (as, say, real estate agents do) rather than working directly for some manufacturer.<br />
<br />
I can think of several scams that involve trying to hook lots of amateur sales-interested folk by requiring them to buy expensive samples or the merchandise they will sell, and then doling out a narrow commission. I say "scam" because some of these operations make their real money selling sample kits to would-be salespersons rather than moving merchandise through those salespersons. The commission is a powerful motivating tool.<br />
<br />
Now, when combined with the information gap, a salesperson on the ground has every reason to outright lie to uninformed customers if it will get them to purchase something marginally more expensive, to incrementally stretch bit by bit their intended budget, and since little of it is written down, there's often little recourse for a consumer who has been deceived with a personal sales pitch.<br />
<br />
I've been lied to by sales folk more than once myself. And by and large, the consumer is in something of a bind: They need an expert on computers, cell phones, etc that they can talk to, who will explain all the features they don't quite understand - but while the salesperson is such an expert, and a remarkably easy to find one, there's every reason not to trust them.<br />
<br />
Oddly, my experience is that when there's no commission in play and a generous returns policy, employees working for a wage are perfectly willing to dish out honestly about which products do what and what you probably need for what you want to do. Remember all the jokes about used car dealers? The grain of truth in them is why I so tend to distrust salespeople. It's nothing personal, salesfolk; it's simply that I'm pretty sure your interests and my interests are as close to orthogonal as they could be given that we're talking about the same kind of product.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-38451861468527737682009-07-26T20:07:00.000-07:002009-07-26T23:21:56.621-07:00A secession scenario, part II<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj72k9cFFcwl62Ifh3JV5kvg9TzXJ-GDDjxOCjc5OW_0s-59ZYWzNeCs97LhQqtJNOiTuGF2ccShlk2ezqdC5XWApzSg00GjmeRvByby5D_oX4BeyCtoSiimWYinJRYATpCbRCsqsVNf4E/s1600-h/secess2.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj72k9cFFcwl62Ifh3JV5kvg9TzXJ-GDDjxOCjc5OW_0s-59ZYWzNeCs97LhQqtJNOiTuGF2ccShlk2ezqdC5XWApzSg00GjmeRvByby5D_oX4BeyCtoSiimWYinJRYATpCbRCsqsVNf4E/s200/secess2.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362974956930090050" border="0" /></a>Continuing from <a href="http://tjhairball.blogspot.com/2009/07/secession-scenario-part-i.html">where we left off last time</a>, we divided the USA up based on a hypothetical Republican-led, anti-Obama secession movement, and then looked at the composition of the ASA (the "anti-socialist" seceded states) and RSA (remaining states). Today, in the second part of the series, I'd like for us to explore what the major obstacles to a secession movement would be in a number of these states and regions.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Old South</span><br /><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzNrxrClYzI2hrH-00l1MUkBkux9WktwCUE3y5Rlc-6rSsYj6SG7CQOFBt9AO0cL1y1KEvBRzPjCKgYlrtuIm_sAusAAbLbVGXwecIN7p8wPFv4MkQkt5w6rYQEve24kfU6GNbPZf0TSg/s1600-h/south.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 129px; height: 76px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzNrxrClYzI2hrH-00l1MUkBkux9WktwCUE3y5Rlc-6rSsYj6SG7CQOFBt9AO0cL1y1KEvBRzPjCKgYlrtuIm_sAusAAbLbVGXwecIN7p8wPFv4MkQkt5w6rYQEve24kfU6GNbPZf0TSg/s200/south.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362977541652120466" border="0" /></a>There are a few common problems in this region that present an obstacle to secession attempts, one being that a Republican-led secession movement would probably struggle in Democratic state legislatures in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A powerful reason across the entire region is that 29% of the population of this region is black. Percentages range from 37% in Mississippi to 26% in Alabama, and while you can find a number of Southern whites who will say that states' rights and secession are things that have nothing to do with race, you would be hard-pressed to find Southern blacks willing to agree. And that's with secession in general; an anti-Obama secession movement would inflame racial tensions to heights not seen since the 1970s even if it <span style="font-style: italic;">failed</span>. In the event any of these states were to secede from the rest of the US, I would expect to see things get very ugly in a hurry for the reasons of race and history.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">Georgia<br /><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCeRT2how3_hk8AFQqT-xJXImewfWmnoHplGjsNAcOKWMoZIOc62dS9UlpQ7W6q-Y8QfJGZpJdChVNGpp5529jvo7Hec2qia8geYZ4IeN5blP1Jy1A8wEjtRt4-34vvm8gyiOuKvM5-Sg/s1600-h/GA.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 49px; height: 61px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCeRT2how3_hk8AFQqT-xJXImewfWmnoHplGjsNAcOKWMoZIOc62dS9UlpQ7W6q-Y8QfJGZpJdChVNGpp5529jvo7Hec2qia8geYZ4IeN5blP1Jy1A8wEjtRt4-34vvm8gyiOuKvM5-Sg/s200/GA.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362985427586790418" border="0" /></a>Georgia is the largest and most prosperous state in this region. However, while Georgia's state government is firmly in Republican hands<span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><span>Georgia is also the state in this region that gave Obama the highest percentage of the vote - a full 47%, his third-smallest percentage loss in the country behind Montana and Missouri. This would present a major obstacle to any secession movement in Georgia; Obama simply doesn't have the net negatives in Georgia that he does in the rest of the South. Georgia has also spent the most effort reinventing itself as part of a <span style="font-style: italic;">new</span> South; Atlanta, as the center of the "New South," would represent a powerful center of opposition to secession.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">South Carolina</span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8kwpNbbGfjuSXL-H9yEXjY1t1CWAQOlSJSoZBp0Vn7s1D2J18Y5CN41R-zG0eO0SUTBRou41D3YG_TV3EedYkglESghh0GTiTlsPKe8UeFF8D2H6sSDCG2YC3myMeR8Qugv3fyk_ATlY/s1600-h/SC.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 66px; height: 58px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8kwpNbbGfjuSXL-H9yEXjY1t1CWAQOlSJSoZBp0Vn7s1D2J18Y5CN41R-zG0eO0SUTBRou41D3YG_TV3EedYkglESghh0GTiTlsPKe8UeFF8D2H6sSDCG2YC3myMeR8Qugv3fyk_ATlY/s200/SC.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5362984449088772642" border="0" /></a>South Carolina is one of the two states in this region whose state governments are controlled by Republicans. South Carolina also is the state with the longest history of secession threats, and did so in December 1860, before any other state in the Confederacy. It was also the site of what is widely regarded as the first battle of the Civil War (Fort Sumter) and for these powerful historical reasons, a secession movement<span style="font-style: italic;"> starting</span> in South Carolina cannot avoid being compared to the Civil War. Also, two practical points to consider: If Georgia does not secede, South Carolina would be surrounded; and South Carolina's economy relies heavily on the tourism industry, something that is likely to take a sharp nosedive even in a peaceful secession.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Mormon Triad</span><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFHkIBY07PFQNIrn9HoEBlr0wqt2wgbwRcTgxWZOMWtJB9x5LLAoDYmuT8u9KaUzaSWseXZnG09Ps7gUJz4Yq5fLtxfz7FFG2IL-fjnBE7UzbUohigoEyX87a_UDWeFeByecbc5TpfKJM/s1600-h/mormontriad.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 67px; height: 90px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFHkIBY07PFQNIrn9HoEBlr0wqt2wgbwRcTgxWZOMWtJB9x5LLAoDYmuT8u9KaUzaSWseXZnG09Ps7gUJz4Yq5fLtxfz7FFG2IL-fjnBE7UzbUohigoEyX87a_UDWeFeByecbc5TpfKJM/s200/mormontriad.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363000347899479170" border="0" /></a>Three of the most heavily Republican states, with three of the four lowest Obama vote percentages, are also the three with the highest percentages of Mormons in their population, which helps me come up with a handy name that doesn't sound like it should include Colorado and Montana. Utah is much more Mormon than Idaho, which is much more Mormon than Wyoming; the three of them combined are close to half Mormon, with around 2.3 million LDC members out of a combined population of 4.8 million. However, the name is much more than that; it's a reminder of how influential the CLDS is within the Republican party, especially in Idaho and Utah. If there are any three states in which the opinion of Church elders will matter, it will be these three states.<br /><br />An interesting historical fact: During the civil war, an assembly of the Mormon church sent a petition to Congress to join the United States. I know very little about the inner workings of the current CLDS, but I expect secession to be controversial enough that it will <span style="font-style: italic;">matter</span> what is being said within the CLDS, and I do not expect these three states to secede on their own account - if and only if Republicans across the nation are clamoring for secession. However, in these states, and in the Plains states (the column running down from North Dakota to Oklahoma), we don't expect white-black racial tensions and the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Act to be as important.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Montana</span><br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVRnJX2EvK5pyNIm8qAxjzce7HCmYsSC23d9BJ7aCtfoX76_m8YiGFQgE7q-FsdA807MMbmg2SV6ROaAMV1TnhxS8o1LnCmZkLajJQmc0X06CBYa_GZ7wC6wypTZN2C1MR-FN-N357A34/s1600-h/montana.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 64px; height: 44px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVRnJX2EvK5pyNIm8qAxjzce7HCmYsSC23d9BJ7aCtfoX76_m8YiGFQgE7q-FsdA807MMbmg2SV6ROaAMV1TnhxS8o1LnCmZkLajJQmc0X06CBYa_GZ7wC6wypTZN2C1MR-FN-N357A34/s200/montana.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363013160446543586" border="0" /></a>Montana, I should note, is something of a special case that I tossed in on the secession side without a very detailed explanation. Montana is increasingly Democratic, and McCain edged out Obama in Montana by barely more than 2% of the vote. I included Montana for two reasons, and two reasons only. The first is that increasingly Democratic or not, Montana has a powerful libertarian tradition and a lot of very independent-minded folk, and the justification of this scenario was that the country would split over health care. The second is that if the Mormon Triad and the Northern Plains states (Nebraska and the Dakotas) all secede, then Montana will be completely surrounded by seceded states, at which point secession would start to sound a lot more reasonable.<br /><br />We can expect, however, that Montana would be likely to secede only in the event those six other states all seceding - and it is not guaranteed even then.<br /><div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;"><br />Texas<br /></div><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpbRLJlb0yuX7cPGqVH4GOAvypp0Ko6gln17v1zUkIbO5W2OLagjP9_FM4LUa07wASzCM7XPCTP-V8F-u3bcdkkEzzYyDaEkOtNfku8JxY9aBVPjfymYMiyZ4lUJNDXRzZ91UhHPmg6qM/s1600-h/TEXAS.PNG"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 78px; height: 77px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpbRLJlb0yuX7cPGqVH4GOAvypp0Ko6gln17v1zUkIbO5W2OLagjP9_FM4LUa07wASzCM7XPCTP-V8F-u3bcdkkEzzYyDaEkOtNfku8JxY9aBVPjfymYMiyZ4lUJNDXRzZ91UhHPmg6qM/s200/TEXAS.PNG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5363018061167836578" border="0" /></a>Texas is an interesting state, even more so within this collection, because we actually have seen polls run gauging the popularity of secession in Texas. We've seen polls run for two reasons: One, the governor was talking about. Two, Texas probably is the most likely state to secede. It's a large state with a significant population, a large economy, lots of natural resources, and an unusually strong identity. Texans identify as <span style="font-style: italic;">Texan</span>. The forum post inspiring this exploration assumed Texas would lead any secession movement - and even so, polls have suggested that secession struggles to reach majority support among Texas Republicans, and is unpopular within the general population.<br /><br />So when we talk about Texas... we cannot help but see how unlikely <span style="font-style: italic;">any </span>secession scenario is in the near future. It makes for some fun stories to talk about, and perhaps by closely watching the continuing saga of Governor Perry, we might see what it would take to have another period of secession from the Union.<br /></div>T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-34145721892112743732009-07-25T23:05:00.000-07:002009-07-25T23:40:08.837-07:00Nonlinear historyA long time ago, I got into writing online quizzes. My masterpiece was a monster on the topic of how history gets revised for popular consumption. It's been a long time since I updated it, or checked to see if it was still working, but one of the key themes I noted in putting it together is this:<br /><br />History is very nonlinear. It's not only nonlinear - different things change at different rates - but in every dimension it is non-monotone. Technology does not always move forward. New farming techniques are not always better. Sexuality has not steadily become more relaxed over time, but instead, has cycled through different eras of prudishness, puritanism, and permissiveness.<br /><br />The Victorian era is a prime example. It was probably the height of sexual repression (as we commonly consider the term) in England - but while the stiff standards of "proper" female behavior marched forward, that does not mean the pre-Victorian era was even more prudish. In fact, the 17th century was a very earthy century in England, as we know from Shakespeare.<br /><br />Another prime example that is especially worth noting is the Antikythera device - a mechanical computer dating back to around 150 BCE, which in sophistication, rivals the mechanical computing machines of the early 19th century. It would take almost 2000 years until western Europe recovered the sophistication of the Greek clockwork devices.<br /><br />And then the mind just boggles. On some level, when I was young, I absorbed the lesson that history was a kind of progress. You always moved forward. And then, slowly, I absorbed a different lesson: History is nonlinear. Dramatically so, not just in the eyes of wild-eyed fans of ancient alien visits, or apocalyptic doom-bringers, but in the cold eyes of rational respectable historians.<br /><br />Forces for progress exist, but as is normal in nonlinear dynamics, they are very difficult to model, and there are areas where they behave oddly, local anomalies, and oscillatory behavior.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-9134792975095184242009-07-24T23:10:00.000-07:002009-07-24T23:27:07.189-07:00Snap judgmentOne of the most difficult things in the world to do, for me, is withholding judgment. It's something I have to constantly work at, to train myself in, and for a scientist or a mathematician looking to discover the untested truth of propositions, one of the most important.<br /><br />The moment I look at a proposed theorem, or a math problem, or read the description of a court case, I want to be able to say "Well, obviously, it's <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span>." I want to know that man is definitely guilty, I want to know that the proposition holds for all x>3, I want to be able to tell immediately if a fuel is a thermodynamically viable carbon-neutral energy vessel. I'm impatient like that, and growing up with the ability to answer nearly any of the "math" problems posed to me within seconds probably didn't help.<br /><br />I mean, I sped my way through the SAT, taking less than half the time allotted on each section, just because I wanted to say I knew answers <span style="font-style: italic;">immediately</span>, to make snap judgments. It didn't matter that it was important for college admissions, and it probably didn't help that the one time I actually went back and made myself check my answers, telling myself the test score was important, I got a 1480 that was almost exactly the same 1480 I'd gotten the previous year (740/740 vs 760/720).<br /><br />But the thing is, I also hate being <span style="font-style: italic;">wrong</span> . I just <span style="font-style: italic;">have</span> to be right, and being wrong would be even worse than having to wait for the answer. So I learned - slowly and painfully - to withhold judgment. The study of philosophy has been very helpful for me in developing that patience, and I've withheld judgment about many things that few people hesitate to fix in their mind. I'm comfortable with being an agnostic; I push myself to try foods that I was sure I disliked; I understand how to take a hypothetical position and work up a whole tree of contingent conclusions while keeping my assumptions in clear sight.<br /><br />It's not what I really wanted - to know the answer <span style="font-style: italic;">now</span> - but if I can only either be sure I'm right, or have my answer now, I'd rather be sure.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-67062997993310654142009-07-23T17:47:00.000-07:002009-07-23T20:04:11.551-07:00A secession scenario, part IToday, a poster on NationStates posed the following <a href="http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=8781">hypothetical</a>: Suppose Texas and a majority of "red states" threaten to secede from the Union in response to Obama and the Democrats nationalizing health care. What would you do? Well, I thought it was an interesting question.<br /><br />My first thought, naturally, is to explore the scenario a little more carefully to<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLdS-WZkixHArW21seLNJGBToJLXu9bxcohy0hLBsRXRfihTl6E6qU41UseOulUjGAVdVMP5stKMx9tWlJJlvb8Zqmn2ae5wZF4wvC22SNWxM382ZW5guOkgNmrPNx4eS0M1OGAms8WU/s1600-h/secess1.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimLdS-WZkixHArW21seLNJGBToJLXu9bxcohy0hLBsRXRfihTl6E6qU41UseOulUjGAVdVMP5stKMx9tWlJJlvb8Zqmn2ae5wZF4wvC22SNWxM382ZW5guOkgNmrPNx4eS0M1OGAms8WU/s200/secess1.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361830155959987282" border="0" /></a> determine <span style="font-style: italic;">what</span> states are involved. An anti-Obama secession movement will be almost strictly Republican; thus, we should start with those states whose state governments are entirely Republican controlled. There are eleven of these. I'll subtract Florida - since Obama won Florida's electoral votes - and add the overwhelmingly Republican Oklahoma and Wyoming, which have Democratic governors but posted the lowest percentages for Obama. Finally, I'll throw Montana in, since they just got surrounded, to make 13.<br /><br />In red, we have the Anti-Socialist States of America (henceforth the ASA) and the Remaining States of America (henceforth RSA) are in blue.<br /><br />After looking at the map and thinking about it, I'll introduce a group of "border states." Kansas: It's been a long time since "bleeding Kansas," but it's in something of a strategic spot. Politically, it's similar<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIsDr-ShHKq-WV3D_egh_cY8VpOJZo0g6bD1-am25UXMjuRlF4ZnEkMu5aErtsbNvMM1ZsRIRkyp77krs9UEjmJXs5EJ7J0lVm_A3lPXkb7Dx1migzk8H7bWZV9R9Vn9WF4esAggYxwww/s1600-h/secess2.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIsDr-ShHKq-WV3D_egh_cY8VpOJZo0g6bD1-am25UXMjuRlF4ZnEkMu5aErtsbNvMM1ZsRIRkyp77krs9UEjmJXs5EJ7J0lVm_A3lPXkb7Dx1migzk8H7bWZV9R9Vn9WF4esAggYxwww/s200/secess2.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361831312866277570" border="0" /></a> to Wyoming and Oklahoma in having a strongly Republican state legislature and a Democratic governor; it's also a state in which Obama enjoys surprisingly high approval ratings, considering he lost it in the fall.<br /><br />Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi in the Deep South are also strategically positioned, and an area in which Obama polls low numbers. However, they are also states with significant black populations that their Democratic state legislatures rely on heavily. These four states are possible candidates for a second wave of harder-fought secessions in this scenario, but also states in which secession would be more politically difficult. These are battleground states in this sort of scenario, and are keys to either the RSA or ASA having a more contiguous territory.<br /><br />And that's the first thing we really notice about this map, as opposed <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOPG2Y4ASs3ToOxStJYuomttYsis_nW_5b46PbZ7jVJBp1lvOuCEPPaWt3Zx8mLCYANBWR-RYXU0n9_vLbuSydUlMCn6nMLqN0LSQKi0SsvwL4avjFkhJ3EvkA9MiY6NpvN0Twyyzh0jE/s1600-h/secess3.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 200px; height: 131px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOPG2Y4ASs3ToOxStJYuomttYsis_nW_5b46PbZ7jVJBp1lvOuCEPPaWt3Zx8mLCYANBWR-RYXU0n9_vLbuSydUlMCn6nMLqN0LSQKi0SsvwL4avjFkhJ3EvkA9MiY6NpvN0Twyyzh0jE/s200/secess3.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5361836644436924306" border="0" /></a>to a map of the Union-Confederate divide in the Civil War: The CSA (grey) and the Union (blue) were both contiguous territories, and the disputed states/territories whose membership is less clear are all on the border. Our hypothetical ASA and RSA divide the continental US into five separated chunks - three ASA chunks and two RSA chunks on my first map, or one contiguous continental ASA dividing the RSA into four pieces with the "second wave" states.<br /><br />I think that's a very important lesson to draw: Our political interests, as a nation, are not as sharply divided regionally as they used to be. We've seen some electoral maps that seem to show sharp regional divisions, but the interior of this country is not exactly politically uniform. The situations from state to state, right at this moment, defy an easy division of the country into a Republican region and a Democratic region.<br /><br />Let's look for a minute at the characteristics of the two freshly-divided nations. We're assuming that this is somehow an amicable parting of ways.<br /><br />First, the RSA is staggeringly Democratic, and the ASA staggeringly Republican. The Senate keeps at least 52 Democrats and loses at least 19 Republicans, for example. On the federal level, both have a clear supermajority in one party - which means that we should expect major political shifts, possibly the rise of new (or newly prominent) political parties.<br /><br />Second, the two hold about the same land area (between Australia and India. with one 6th and one 7th place in the world, depending on who gets the border states), but the RSA has most of the people:<br /><br />RSA: 235 million, 4.1M km^2 land<br />ASA: 58 million people, 4.5M km^2 land<br />Border states: 15 million people, 600K km^2 land<br /><br />Neither one is exceptionally richer than the other; the "border" states are a bit poorer than the rest of the country, on average. The RSA remains the world's largest economy, while the ASA goes somewhere in the area of 5th-7th place, depending on the details of how we measure things and whether or not it gets the border states:<br /><br />RSA: 2008 GDP $10.8 trillion, $45,000 per capita<br />ASA: 2008 GDP $2.6 trillion, $44,000 per capita<br />Border states: 2008 GDP $590 billion, $39,000 per capita<br /><br />So the ASA would be about the population and wealth of one of the major European countries - somewhere in the range between Italy and Germany. We wouldn't expect anything much larger than the ASA plus border states to secede even in a political atmosphere favorable to secession.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-15358474790577020312009-07-22T21:29:00.000-07:002009-07-22T22:38:34.802-07:00The wealth of nationsAs of 2008, three of the major GDP estimations agree on the list of the ten richest nations on Earth. First is the US, then, with close to the US GDP between the three of them, Japan, China, and Germany; the lists then all proceed with France, Italy, and the UK (in that order). The final three, which the different lists rank differently, are Brazil, Spain, and Russia.<br /><br />In a moment of curiosity, I decided to plot these with respect to population... land area... there's not really anything in common with the list. It gets worse when we go a few more places down, which pulls in India and Mexico.<br /><br />The only thing that's really clear on these lists is that the wealth of nations is still fairly concentrated. The 800 million people in the EU and US control half the world's economy; the 2.5 billion people in China and India control a tenth of it. Mostly that's China speaking, there, India is part of the 2.8 billion population unit that only accounts for <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost-half-planet-for.html">5% of global GDP</a>.<br /><br />India. The Tiger. The rapidly developing, technologically savvy country. Rapidly growing economy or not, a rising reputation for churning out talented engineers and programmers or not, they're still quite poor in terms of cash dollars.<br /><br />When I think of all the things I bought, there's very little in terms of durable goods that came from the US or EU; some fencing equipment, some odds and ends, some books - and when I read the 538 post near the end of June (see link above) talking about how to take out about 40% of the world's population for the small price of 5% of the world's GDP, I have to wonder if we aren't undervaluing the contribution these countries make to the global economy when we choose to rely on GDP as a measure of it.<br /><br />I also have to wonder if it's a question of the value of their labor being truly different, or if it's really more of a product of how money moves. Or doesn't move, as the case may be. Some evidence suggests that the supply and demand for money - and therefore, currency exchange rates - are a large piece of the picture, for when we look at GDP(PPP) figures - measuring local purchasing power - the EU misplaces about three trillion dollars and China picks up a similar amount, rocketing past Japan.<br /><br />India shoots up from 12th (1.2$T) to 4th (3.2$T). The local goods and services available in India would be worth about three times as much on the European market as Indians actually buy/sell them for. It's amazing, and more than a little bit disturbing, to think that the difference in the value of money is so terribly significant.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-68524578758165216532009-07-20T23:31:00.000-07:002009-07-21T00:13:09.296-07:00More than science; less than science; against the scienceOne of the phrases I've heard used in praise of Barack Obama is <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article6719707.ece">evidence based policy</a>. Nestled in that tiny phrase are so many different ideas that it's difficult to get a handle on what it means. I think the reason I hear it so much now is that Bush's policies were sometimes in outright denial of the evidence.<br /><br />The core idea is that science tells us many things about <span style="font-style: italic;">how</span> things work. Macroeconomics, as a field, seems to be a core attempt to measure the effect of policy. The lack of respect economists enjoy among other scientists should be a warning sign: The point of basing policy on evidence is to let scientists dictate to politicians about <span style="font-style: italic;">what</span> they should be trying to do, but of <span style="font-style: italic;">how</span> they should be trying to do it.<br /><br />My perception of economists is that they too often confuse the matter. More often than not, it seems to me (as in the case of the author of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Myth of the Rational Voter</span>, who seems a parody of everything irritating about economists) that economists focus on the accumulation of aggregate wealth, which leads them to endorse policies that are unpopular for reasons that have nothing to do with the wealth of nations.<br /><br />The role of climate science with respect to the issue of global warming isn't, therefore, to say "Stop! No! Bad!" as much as "If you don't cut carbon emissions sharply, the following things will happen." Having a rational evidence-based debate on policy means weighing the very clear alternatives: Short term higher economic growth against serious ecological impacts and major long-term economic problems, especially for coastal and tropical areas.<br /><br />When the alternatives are that dramatic, it suddenly behooves the opposition to deny the facts. Abstinence-only "education" leads to higher pregnancy rates; that's a fact. Is it one that supporters of abstinence-only education <span style="font-style: italic;">believe</span>? I doubt it. President Bush seemed to think that reducing teen pregnancy rates and STD infection rates was a desirable social goal, and I have little doubt that the vast majority of voters and politicians agree.<br /><br />And so, while it is not the job of the economist to say whether full employment is a more valuable goal than 8% annual GDP growth, or whether execution is more or less morally justifiable than the death penalty, neither is it the job of the politician to determine if execution is an effective deterrant, or if girls perform better in mathematics in gender-segregated environments.<br /><br />One of the things I terribly dislike about this nation is that there are certain <span style="font-style: italic;">facts </span>we are simply not supposed to speak of, certain<span style="font-style: italic;"> facts</span> that are too sensitive for politicians to speak aloud in public. There is no such thing as clean coal, not in the here and now, for every kilo of coal burned adds a kilo of carbon to the atmosphere, and the ability to bury that carbon dioxide is well beyond practical.<br /><br />It's even worse than burning oil, for every kilo of long-chain hydrocarbon burned adds only 0.86 kilos of carbon to the air, every kilo of methane a mere 0.75 kilos. For reference, methane puts out half again as much energy per kilogram, slightly more than doubling the ratio of energy output to carbon output.<br /><br />For the purpose of the carbon load on the atmosphere, or indeed for the purpose of limiting pollution output, coal is the worst possible fuel in the world to burn. Barack Obama wouldn't say it; Hillary Clinton wouldn't say it; John McCain wouldn't say it. But that's a fact; it's a fact that is as hard and cold as the fact that the polar ice cap will disappear if we keep burning all that coal.<br /><br />The next time I see a television playing or blog rolling or columnist writing that they don't want to reduce emissions, I want to see them say "because I don't give a **** about the polar bears or Micronesia or the oceans turning to acid, I want to have prosperity in the now while I'm still alive and consuming." I don't want to see them say "because global warming isn't proven," because by golly, that's something that climate scientists are pretty sure about. And they know a lot more than you do, op-ed guy...T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-35128061557643732762009-07-18T22:16:00.000-07:002009-07-18T22:52:30.927-07:00FascismIt might surprise some of you that I run into both supporters of fascism and people who terribly misunderstand fascism historically on a very regular basis. I see at least one or the other almost weekly; certainly almost every month for the past half decade.<br /><br />You might say that it's simply because of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law">Godwin's Law</a>: Any vociferous argument over the internet will inevitably wind up with comparing people to Nazis. I don't really believe in Godwin's Law, but for a common touchstone, fascism certainly <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> poorly understood, and since fascists are almost shorthand for evil, well, it's easy to see the motives for the poorly stretched analogis to Godwin's Law.<br /><br />And it's not limited to casual discussion on the internet. The political right has been working hard to cast Hitler as part and parcel of the political left, an exercise that reached new heights with Jonah Goldberg's book <a href="http://www.alternet.org/story/72960/">Liberal Fascism</a>, and something truly remarkable to historians who recall that the architects of fascism explicitly identified liberals as a problem. The conflation of "socialist" with "national socialist" is one I have seen all too many times.<br /><br />It's with good reason that historians put fascism on the right side of the political spectrum, but it would also be naive to confuse the modern political right with fascism. Modern fascists and - if you are one of those few who draws a distincition - neonazis almost always align themselves within the political right wing (e.g., David Duke), although the mainstream of the political right generally disowns their support. Historically, fascists drew their support from business elites, corporate interests, and traditionalists, core groups for conservative movements now.<br /><br />There are common elements, such as the invocation of nationalist sentiment, militarism, leaning heavily on traditional family values, and getting "outsider" ethnic groups to conform to an identified traditional norm or leave; there are also critical differences, such as theoretical economic policy.<br /><br />Right wing ideologues will at least claim to support the free market - fascism, however, was nearly as opposed to <span style="font-style: italic;">lassez faire</span> economics as it was to socialism. Proponents described it as a "third way," neither communist nor free-market. To understand fascism - and I only suspect that I do - it is necessary to understand that fascism is all about the<span style="font-style: italic;"> good</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">of the nation</span>. In the Nazi model, we insert <span style="font-style: italic;">the good of the race</span> as a template over <span style="font-style: italic;">the good of the nation</span>, but in both cases, it is about competition and strength. Social Darwinism is probably the most compelling ideological inspiration for fascism; and at its core, fascism is not particularly peaceful.<br /><br />When conflict can serve to strengthen a nation, weeding out weaker elements within the nation and weaker nations within the world, conflict becomes desirable.<br /><br />But everybody already knows what fascists are. Fascists are people who do and believe something different from you politically, who you think are forcing the wrong thing upon you... right? Leave alone this nonsense about "historical reality," you know what you want to believe!T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-79636404111100918982009-07-17T21:24:00.000-07:002009-07-17T21:43:43.248-07:00In a perfect world, there is no warWhen I picture a perfect world, I see a world at peace. I see a world in which there is no need for guns or tanks, in which the only rockets fired are toys, fireworks, or part of a space program. And my perfect world is one that many agree on.<br /><br />Perhaps a few disagree; Vikings that looked forward to Ragnarok at the end of Valhalla (and any other religious groups looking forward to some final battle)<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>, would-be Klingons, feudalistic or retroactive types looking to the glory of martial combat, and the occasional fascist. I'm not being hyperbolic in mentioning fascists, by the way; we do still have people who lean towards that ideology, and fascism drew inspiration from social Darwinism, concluding that the conflict between nations is a good thing. I suppose I'll want to talk about fascism in detail later.<br /><br />However, with those few exceptions - and I think they are small exceptions - I think most of us can agree that world peace would be a nice thing.<br /><br />There remains, however, no small amount of ideological division on <span style="font-style: italic;">why</span> a perfect world is a peaceful one. A Quaker might say that war itself is immoral; a more hawkish individual might say that there is no war because in a perfect world, nobody would do something that would provoke a war.<br /><br />It is extraordinarily difficult to see war as anything other than an act that creates and unleashes evil. It is also extraordinarily difficult to see an immediately effective alternative to greater evils, such as mass exterminations. Some speak of the usefulness of war, and I will complain about their moral corruption, but it is one of the tests I have seen applied: Would this war serve our interests?<br /><br />I am sympathetic to the view of genuine pacifists, but it is not a stand I am strong enough to embrace. The test I prefer is this: Is the wrong done by waging war greater or less than the wrong it would prevent? And from that point of view, many wars are difficult to justify. I feel that many wars are not necessary wars, the cost in blood too high for too little prevention; however, I would rather damn myself through action to benefit others and prevent them from being done much greater wrong.<br /><br />But oh, what a wonderful world it could be in which we could all get along.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-77119029914288976022009-07-16T19:02:00.000-07:002009-07-16T21:36:19.899-07:00Bows and gunsA little military history and a little lesson about technology.<br /><br />Guns and cannons replaced bows and catapults in Europe and Asia beginning in the 13th century, and ending in the 16th century; that is to say, by the time the 16th century ended, the bow as a military instrument was considered largely obsolete.<br /><br />Why? It's easy to see how artillery was replaced; it was much easier to throw massive objects with chemical, rather than mechanical, energy; cannon were far superior for reducing fortifications and smashing through human bodies, from the very start.<br /><br />The mission of a musket is different. It's to kill some particular person. Military guns of the 16th century are smoothbore weapons, muskets and arquebuses; they're terribly inaccurate compared to bows. With much lower rates of fire, and in this era much less reliability, the gun was a more dangerous weapon to use. Backfires and accidents with slowmatches were quite common. The Mongolian horse archer of the 13th century would probably have been able to handily trounce a pistolier from the 16th century - probably, individually, deadlier than any of the types of soldiers fielded across Europe in the 16th or 17th centuries.<br /><br />The typical Mongolian bow, with close to a 160 pound pull, fired an arrow with around 160 joules of kinetic energy (<a href="http://www.bio.vu.nl/thb/users/kooi/kooi91c.pdf">ref</a>); for reference, <a href="http://www.currentmiddleages.org/artsci/docs/Champ_Bane_Archery-Testing.pdf">tests</a> playing a ~80 joule arrow at point blank against 15th century armor show it to be capable of just barely piercing period armor. There exists a raging debate over how effective the less powerful (100 pound typical pull) English longbow was against the very best plate armor, developed after the famous Battle of Agincourt.<br /><br />Expert opinions range from "only at point-blank on a good direct hit" to "any shot within the effective range of the longbow that lands squarely," but the Mongolian bow is more powerful; accurate to about 80 meters in the field, the range at which large, round, and comparatively soft musket balls with a higher muzzle energy (but poorer ballistics and a larger surface area) could threaten plate, it can be expected to pierce plate armor with nearly every square hit at that range.<br /><br />The fact that it could deliver 3-6 hits in the time that it took a musketeer to reload just about makes up for the fact that only a square hit would pierce; the gross inaccuracy of the musketeer means the Mongolian bow is almost certainly deadlier than the musket even against targets with good armor.<br /><br />And good armor was not that common. I sometimes go as far as to suspect that a <span style="font-style: italic;">tumen</span> of Chinggis's finest could quite possibly defeat a like number of 17th century German mercenaries in the field. So why, if the archer was better at killing more people in a hurry than the musketeer and the best bow of the 13th century was in many ways better than the best guns of the 16th, did the musket replace the bow so quickly?<br /><br />The answer is complex. One factor is that when two armies face each other, accuracy is no longer as important; a poorly aimed musket ball or arrow is deadly no matter who it hits, and it will hit someone. Another factor is logistics: Musket balls and powder are easier to carry, and are easier to manufacture in large quantity. A third is training: A 16th century musketeer required no more than a few weeks to familiarize himself with his weapon to use it as accurately as anyone else could, while the deadly longbowmen of England's 15th century armies, and the deadlier horse archers of Mongolia's 13th century armies, required years of specialized athletic training.<br /><br />And because of that, the bow was prohibitively expensive to use in armies, compared to the gun. Some would still use it to great effect once in a while, but it never regained ground as a battlefield weapon. In time, the greater kinetic energy of the gun was coupled with better ballistics, armor-piercing ammunition, rates of fire, and great advances in accuracy, outclassing the bow on all fronts; but to replace the bow as a weapon of war, it needed only more convenient ammunition and greater ease of use. Even allowing that a 15th century English longbowman, firing ten arrows a minute, was deadlier than the musketeer replacing him against all but the most heavily armored men, he was many times more expensive, and harder to replace.<br /><br />And so the bow was replaced by the gun, in the far east and in the west. Here's where I generalize today's lesson on technology: The better technology is not always superior in all regards. It's even possible to go backwards in some respects - and yet still render the old technology "obsolete" quite authoritatively.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-32684526778023850742009-07-15T21:27:00.000-07:002009-07-15T22:18:01.383-07:00The striking partisanship of scientistsSomething that is sometimes difficult to grasp from outside the academic world is how strikingly political - and partisan - scientists have become in the last decade. The shift is, I think, something that was brewing for some time, and we can argue the causes endlessly, but the fact is, scientists are liberal and sharply Democratic rather than Republican. It is difficult to think of any identifiable professional, ethnic, or social group that is quite as <a href="http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1549">partisan</a>.<br /><br />Yes, that's a recent Pew survey that has scientists identifying as D over R by +49 points as oppose to the general public's mere D+12 lean. I personally think the most striking cause was the Bush administrations' "<a href="http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0705-04.htm">War on Science</a>," a phrase that has gained currency not only with Democratic activists but working scientists frustrated with what they see as one political party's attempt to bury inconvenient scientific facts and obstruct unwanted research.<br /><br />However, the religious tone of the Republican party from Reagan onward has probably been pushing scientists slowly away from the Republican party for longer. Scientists have in recent generations counted in their number a higher proportion of agnostics and atheists than the general population, and a smaller number of religious fundamentalists.<br /><br />Another key point to consider is what you consider <span style="font-style: italic;">valuable</span>. Getting a doctorate is generally not an economically sound proposition; the time it takes to finish and get into a tenure-track position has been steadily sliding upward. The increased cost in time and money spent getting the Ph. D. put you behind the curve on pay raises and deeper in debt. Fiscal conservatism has focused intently on the bottom line, lauding the businessman and executive; social conservatism has focused on family life, and the prospect of spending ten years in university is a daunting one if you want to start a family in a timely fashion.<br /><br />There's another very specific one. Perhaps the largest and most vivid scientific policy question is that of global warming, and for whatever reason, the Republican party managed to align itself wholly in the position of denying what rapidly became established scientific fact.<br /><br />And perhaps the D+49 (55 to 6) percent party ID gap in scientists has just a little to do with the fact that Obama himself can be described as an academic, but I think the persistent anti-intellectual rhetoric of the Republican party throughout the Bush administration had more to do with it.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-81690975007185419412009-07-14T19:14:00.000-07:002015-05-10T00:18:20.706-07:00What else did I learn about chemistry?Yesterday, I talked about all the various ways in which baking soda has endeared itself to me.<br />
<br />
Today, I'd like to ramble on a little more about a related topic, the things I've learned in chemistry class, which are not entirely the same thing. I didn't take any chemistry courses in college; I did, however, two years of chemistry in high school, and got a 5 on my AP Chem test, so perhaps I learned about basic chemistry in class.<br />
<br />
The AP chem test turned out to be the most valuable AP test I took (out of four), since it gave me a whole eight credit hours, a sequence that was actually on the checksheet for my physics major at some point. AP Physics wouldn't have done as much for me, ironically.<br />
<br />
The man who taught both of my high school chem classes, was just an incredible teacher - maybe not the most organized-seeming person, and he would ramble and get side-tracked once in a while, but his stories would drive home valuable lessons. Not only did his lessons send me through the AP test, but years later, I took the physics GRE and knocked out a 770.<br />
<br />
I hadn't taken any formal coursework in thermodynamics when I took the test, which made it tricky, as that was one of the topics it covered; however, I was surprised at how many thermodynamics questions I could answer based on things my chemistry teacher had taught me back in high school. I still remember many of the lessons I learned in class; one of the odder ones is to always taste test, and that a little bit of lime flavor goes a long way. He had us making ice cream for a lab once.<br />
<br />
Another lesson that was reinforced in my first chemistry class - perhaps not the best lesson to take to heart in high school - was that the less work you seem to do to get a given test grade, the more it impresses people with your intelligence when it's a high grade. I shared my 10th grade chemistry class with a much more studious girl named Jennie, and she expressed amazement that I kept acing quiz after quiz in that class. I sat in the back corner, where the distracted talkative kids were.<br />
<br />
The guy in front of me was facing a failing grade long before he got the crap kicked out of him by some rough characters in the parking lot across from the school one lunchtime and wound up in the hospital; I probably had three of the four lowest grades in that class sitting nearest to me. But even if I seemed terribly distracted, had a habit of not doing homework and turning lab reports in late if ever - things that Jennie had apparently noticed - I tended to pay attention to what my teacher was actually saying, because it was so <span style="font-style: italic;">interesting</span>.<br />
<br />
Later, I looked back on Jennie telling me that she was amazed that I could keep doing so well in the class without doing work, and I see one of the moments where I was closest to consciously realizing that more than anything else, I was making a conspicuous display out of laziness throughout high school in order to score some kind of points with my peers. Now that I've seen that sort of attitude from the other side of the classroom, I strongly suspect some of my teachers in high school felt frustrated with me.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-72915075116761681532009-07-13T21:27:00.000-07:002015-05-10T00:19:08.595-07:00Baking soda: The duct tape of household chemicalsI've been using that description for baking soda for longer than I should admit. Perhaps I'm being irrationally biased; clearly, I can live without baking soda, and often do. Gone at the days when I have a roll of duct tape always on hand, and equally gone are the days that I always had a box of baking soda on hand.<br />
<br />
But it is useful stuff. In chemistry class, my chemistry teacher taught us that if there was a spill of something, it probably wouldn't hurt to throw baking soda on it. Water to dilute, baking soda to neutralize - because baking soda is a natural buffer. Mix with an acid, and the bicarbonate ion fizzes, neutralizing mole for mole; mix with a base, and the bicarbonate will react to produce carbonate, which will tend to bind to positive ions and precipitate out of solution.<br />
<br />
So it's a nice "safe" chemical. Nontoxic and neutralizes a wide range of acids and bases. Its pH buffering effect is appreciated by pool operators the world over - and it also helps keep swimming pools crystal clear. See a container of "pool clarifier" on the shelf? Check the label. Odds are it's sodium bicarbonate - baking soda - even if it's priced much higher.<br />
<br />
But there's more! What with reacting to lots of things and dissolving well, it's actually the sort of chemical that you can use to scrub things clean, from bathroom floors to your teeth. Of course, there are better things to use for each of those, more specialized chemicals; when we're talking about keeping everything neat and clean, baking soda's deoderizing effect is where it really shines. Trash cans, refrigerators, teenagers - everything smells less when you apply baking soda to it.<br />
<br />
Speaking of applying baking soda to people, you can use it topically in a paste to alleviate itchy irritated spots. This is one use you may actually see on the side of a box sometime; working at camp, I would use it to help sooth away mosquito bites. And since I've gotten to the topic of biting and eating, there's something more pleasant than mosquitos eating people: People eating baked goods. Let us not forget why it's called baking soda; it's useful for that, too, making things that much more edible.<br />
<br />
Such a useful chemical; such a simple chemical, too, and like duct tape, you can just keep going on about all the uses.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-12461745254468542692009-07-12T21:31:00.000-07:002009-07-12T21:49:15.458-07:00Fanon and IranThe fact that protests are continuing in Iran leads me to several conclusions.<br /><br />One, my initial guess as to what would happen has proved fairly correct, and my hopes disappointed. Those in power have clamped down, rather than reaching out, conducting a runoff election, and settling the matter with Mousavi, who is no radical; instead, it looks just a little more like revolution. With Mousavi and other approved candidates trying to distance themselves from the protests, there's no clear outlet left within the system, and so pressure has built.<br /><br />And even though Iran is not by any means a colonized state, I always think of Franz Fanon when it comes to the question of revolution. Fanon very boldly asserted that it was better that the colonial powers were violently overthrown, rather than giving up power in a peaceful and bloodless transition; better to make a clean break with the past.<br /><br />I sometimes wonder if he was right in that judgment. Violent revolution is a terrifying thing - but as dearly as it is sold, one wishes that <span style="font-style: italic;">something</span> be gotten for the monstrous cost in blood. I suppose soon, when we start reaching forty day marks, we will see whether the pace of the 1979 Iranian revolution and this one are one and the same; I do not suppose that we will know soon, however, what to expect.<br /><br />I will go as far as to predict this, though: The longer and harder the fight, the more radicalized it will become, and the sharper the changes that Iran will face. Whether or not the existing establishment falls, whether or not Mousavi or any other moderate tries to ride the tiger to tameness.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6666876612086427923.post-82449343651293167422009-07-10T21:35:00.001-07:002009-07-10T21:51:55.668-07:00The economist's volcanoI went and read another bit of a book written by an economist, and after another chapter of him displaying what I wish were a bad parody of economist behavior, this illustrative scenario occurred to me.<br /><br />Suppose you have a magic volcano. Not just any volcano; a special magic volcano. When you throw someone into the magic volcano and make a gainful wish, it calls up two immortal beings: An actuary and an economist.<br /><br />The actuary tells the volcano how many years that person would probably have lived; the economist looks up the current estimated GDP per capita and current market prices of every commodity and manufactured good. Since this is a magic volcano, it can do multiplication, so it takes the GDP per capita and multiplies it by the years of remaining life that person was expected to have.<br /><br />The next morning, on the slope of the volcano, you'll find whatever you wished for, in whatever quantity, to the market value of that much money - a whole productive lifetime of money right up front, and maybe that particular person wasn't that productive. The volcano doesn't care if they're a hard worker or chronically unemployed.<br /><br />So, is throwing people into the volcano an act of public good sometimes, most of the time, always, or never? It's certainly a positive economic benefit more often than not, defined in terms of financial value or productivity. Would <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span> want to throw someone in the volcano? What do you expect should - or would - be done regarding this volcano if the news of its abilities spread far and wide?<br /><br />There's a point to prosperity. I just don't think it's especially important once you've figured out how to keep people alive and well.T. J. Hairballhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15266755532944306411noreply@blogger.com0