Letters and Papers

Excommunication was only the beginning

2012-02-13T00:04:00.000-08:00

I have been reading some Facebook discussion of a church discipline situation at Mars Hill, which is a large church in the Seattle area.

The basic story is that a prominent church member, Andrew, was engaged and acted immorally with a woman he used to date. He told his fiancee and other church members, and Mars Hill began a discipline process to, as they put it, bring Andrew to repentance and reconciliation with the church. You can read what appears to be Andrew's side of it here, in a couple of linked blog posts. I encourage you to read them, including the documents from the church.

http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/mark-driscolls-church-discipline-contract-looking-for-true-repentance-at-mars-hill-church-sign-on-the-dotted-line/

There are two details that make this case stand out. As a condition of discipline, the church asked him to sign a contract saying, among other things, the following, quote:

* Andrew will not pursue or date any woman inside or outside of MH
* Andrew will write out in detail his sexual and emotional attachment history with women and share it with XXX.

He refused to sign it, and essentially walked away.

Then, the church sent a memo to its internal social network telling them not to associate with Andrew, to the level of refusing to share meals or participate in activities with him. Conversations are to be held strictly to the topic of Andrew's church discipline.

This all feels totalitarian to me. And whatever else it is, it's turned the church into a barren desert for this guy. In my eyes, it is damaging their witness. Having heard this story, I would never join Mars Hill.

They have their reasons. Here is the church's response:

http://marshill.com/2012/01/27/church-discipline-in-the-bible

I know that we do not know all the circumstances that surround this church decision. I also agree that the church is within the boundaries of Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 to demand that he either part ways with them or submit to discipline.

Where I get off the train is the church telling its members not to eat with him or go out with him. As in, for example:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-mormon-church-in-need-of-reform/2012/01/27/gIQA3s44aQ_story_1.html

I don't think that is scripturally supportable. Matthew 18 says "treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector". Those were the people that Jesus partied with! So I don't agree with the Mars Hill interpretation, which I can find no support for, that "This means we no longer have normal, casual fellowship with the believer but instead use any encounters to bring the gospel of reconciliation to him and lovingly urge him to repent and turn back in obedience to God."

For me it seems that this is less about Andrew and God and more about Andrew and Mars Hill.

And this from the same section is off the deep end:

"If someone under discipline begins attending another church, we notify the leaders of that church that they are unrepentant and have been removed from fellowship in our church. We ask that they also deny that person fellowship in their church so that we can continue working to bring the sinning one to repentance in a holy fashion."

To me it sounds like they don't understand when someone is just not that into them.

Having read the contract the church wanted this guy to sign and the letter sent to its internal social network, the passage that comes to mind for me is not about church discipline, but about Pharisees. Matthew 23: "do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them."

Getting hacked was only the beginning

2011-10-17T23:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a great article about what happens when someone malicious takes control of your Gmail account. It's by the person that knows best: the person who got burned. Without spoiling it, they were in a world of hurt. Go read it.

One way that this whole thing could have been avoided was turning on two-factor authentication, "something you know plus something you have". The basic idea is that you don't just have a password, you also have some randomly rotating key that is attached to a physical device in your possession. For something like a corporate network, it's a little keychain that looks like the readout at the top of a solar calculator, with 6 numbers that change every 30 seconds. You type in your password with the 6 numbers at the end.

For Gmail, it requires that every time you log in to Gmail using a new device, and once per month after that, you have to type in the 6 digit code that they SMS to your cell phone. If you have to pay for texts this might not be the best. You can also print out backup one-time use numbers that will work as codes. Do this if you want to feel like a spy.

The great thing about two-factor authentication is that even if somebody knows your password, their ability to guess random numbers you have no control over is limited. For well designed systems like Gmail, they won't be allowed to try your password plus all million random numbers they need to enter to get into your account. Instead, after a small number of failures, they'll get locked out.

Another way most of this could have been avoided is using a program like Thunderbird to download all your mail to a local backup. You still might lose control of your account, but you won't lose years of your personal lifestream.

Without putting too fine a point on it, I'm proud of the way my company, Amazon, puts the customer first. Like good design, security, and scalability, you can't bolt on the customer service after the fact. Getting there might be painful for Google.

Lastly, I think this is not the last wake up call for personal data. Over the past several years, like all of you, I have outsourced some personal data to big corporations who may not be aligned with my interests. I've thought twice about how to own my own data and send it out to everyone. I think I'm settling on Blogger plus RSS to Google+ and Facebook. Eventually I'll host my own blog and email, as soon as I can think of a killer domain name (not surprisingly, most variations of danlewis.com are already taken). That's just the first step toward decentralizing the big sprawls these social networks have become.

Voyage begins

2011-10-10T23:20:00.001-07:00

So maybe I'll restart this blog with an ending.

Sarah and I finished watching Star Trek: Voyager a couple nights ago. It didn't catch my interest while it was on. I distinctly remember my college roommate Rob watching, I think it was the black-and-white pulp episode.

Like all the Star Treks it had highs and lows. There were truly sublime episodes, like the one where two people are fused into one joint body and personality by a transporter accident, or the one where the crew go to work on a factory planet, or the one with the perfect prison, or the one where the crew is observed by aliens through the eyes of the doctor. And there were truly stupid ones, like the one with the big ball of water, or the space race, or the one with the self-aware ship. I actually called the entire plot of that last one from the cold open, you have to admit it's completely predictable.

I just noticed a pattern here. I loved all the doctor episodes (and more) and hated all the Tom Paris episodes. Similarly, loved Seven and Janeway episodes, hated B'Elanna and Chakotay episodes. Tuvok, Neelix, and Kim were somewhat hit or miss.

It was Star Trek, so there were Borg episodes and Q episodes and special appearances by the crew of the Next Generation and lots and lots of time traveling. And the techno-jargon got to me this time. I can't remember how many times I guffawed at officers solving problems by "trying a recursive algorithm". (For non-computer-scientists, this is a very fundamental way to write extremely simple functions.) There was a lot of reversing of shield polarity, subspace and gravimetric distortions, tachyons, and warp signatures. I even found a website that generates the babble.

I would up or down episodes early, and almost always be right. This annoyed Sarah immensely.

I had so many problems with the technologies the crew did and didn't have that I made it a personal snowclone: "They don't have X in the 24th century?" And tried to work it into every episode. It wasn't hard: body armor, personal shields, independent power sources, file permissions (there's one episode where Tom Paris rewrites a holo-novel written by the doctor without authorization), backups, lifestreaming, surveillance systems. These simple technologies, presumably ubiquitous, would have broken entire episodes.

Sarah's (or my) personal favorite was an episode where the ship shut down the warp core and main power and wandered around with flashlights stuck to their hands. So I said, "They don't have glowing glow globes in the 24th century?" Everybody knows, of course, that a glowing glow globe is a ball that floats in the middle of a room and sheds light on all angles. It has an independent power source and can float and glow for a long time. But I think all Sarah really heard was that I had said three different consecutive words that all start with 'glo'.

Despite these disadvantages (or lovable hangups), every two or three episodes one would come along that blew your socks off. And that's what Star Trek's really always been about.

At its warm heart, the show was about adrift people trying to get home, and their personal voyages of self-discovery and growth. It worked on that deep level for me most of the time. Sarah and I miss it already.

Dan's 2010 mix

2011-03-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

Ok, so it's a little late, but...

I like putting together mix CDs. Who doesn't right? But there's a certain challenge in making it flow and giving it a kind of story and ending it all in 80 minutes. That's right, all my mix CDs are concept albums.

My brothers and sisters started a tradition of making these for each other for Christmas last year. I found myself putting together a bouncy album and a depressing album so in 2009 we had the Down album (featuring Radiohead) and the Up album (featuring Garrison Keillor). You get the idea. I had a mix for Groundhog Day, for traveling, one with all songs about death, one for Vancouver, you get the idea.

This Christmas, all the songs and albums were from 2010! It was a very good year. I can recommend all the individual albums, although The Lady Killer can get... dirty.

I keep coming back to this mix for listening pleasure, so I wanted to share it.

Yes, my CD contained Arcade Fire before they won the Album of the Year Grammy. :o) My album of the year was Sufjan Stevens' dizzying, outer space apocalypse symphonic dance rock album, The Age of Adz, but it's not for everyone. I was not surprised at all that Arcade Fire won. For me it was a no-brainer. It's got tons of musical variety, some big ideas, and real emotion behind it all.

01 Suburban War - Arcade Fire, from The Suburbs
02 Enchanting Ghost - Sufjan Stevens, from All Delighted People EP
03 Anyone’s Ghost - The National, from High Violet
04 This Is The Song [Good Luck] - Punch Brothers, from Antifogmatic
05 England - The National, from High Violet
06 I Can See Your Future - Belle and Sebastian, from Write About Love
07 We End Up Together - The New Pornographers, from Together
08 Next to the Trash - Punch Brothers, from Antifogmatic
09 Wasted Hours - Arcade Fire, from The Suburbs
10 Futile Devices - Sufjan Stevens, from The Age of Adz
11 Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk - The New Pornographers, from Together
12 You Were A Kindness - The National, from High Violet (Expanded Edition)
13 Up In The Dark - The New Pornographers, from Together
14 Read The Blessed Pages - Belle and Sebastian, from Write About Love
15 Old Fashioned - Cee Lo Green, from The Lady Killer
16 Get Real Get Right - Sufjan Stevens, from The Age of Adz

If you're looking for a mix CD, let me know and I'll send you an ISO.

Mac Willems memorial service: 7/31, 1:00, in Des Moines

2010-07-30T22:56:00.000-07:00

Hi people. I am posting to Twitter, Blogger, and Facebook for widest possible distribution. Please forgive me if this hits you more than once.

Mac Willems, one of my high school teachers, died this month. His memorial service is in the Seattle area on Saturday, July 31, at 1:00, at Midway Community Covenant Church in Des Moines.

Here is a map.

If you know anyone who would want to know, please pass it on by Saturday.

The end of Lost (with obscure spoiler alert)

2010-05-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

I was fooled. I really thought in the last episode we were going to learn the golden light held a nanobot cloud from the future, trapped on the island by The Incident, which became sentient when the nameless one floated into the cave. And the crash was intended to unwind the events folded in and out of time, so that one timeline didn't happen (explaining the parallel time streams). Et cetera.

The masterful head fake when they flashed back to Season 1 finding the stones in the cave led me to believe we were coming to a final clash of good and evil of King-ian proportions, one that had indeed been planned from the beginning. In other words, a genre story. But instead, they punted on all the major story elements in cussworthy fashion.

The comparison to The Prisoner is apt. Remember when Rover takes off in the rocket ship? I thought we were going to see the smoke monster do something very similar. And Sawyer says "I'll be seeing you" in the last episode too (apart from the credit sequence, probably the single most quotable and quoted line from The Prisoner). But the difference is that The Prisoner was episodic and every storyline resolved in the space of one hour. There is debate about which order to even watch the episodes in because there is so little continuity.

There can't be any such debate about the right order to watch Lost in. It was all so plotted and deliberate, or really (now) deliberate-looking. It was building. But in the end the climax fizzled out.

So on the one hand, I think people will be studying Lost the way they study great art. But I take it as kind of a failed experiment in making art without catharsis, and ultimately without the unities.

Neverwhere on Wii Netflix Streaming

2010-03-29T00:22:00.000-07:00

I watched the mid-90s BBC miniseries version of Neverwhere tonight. It's six episodes written by Neil Gaiman, one of our great writers. The story is about the under-world of London Below, and what happens when Richard Mayhew is dragged into it as a result of an act of kindness.

I had read the book first, so I knew how it went, but it was still good. Sure, you have to look past the cramped scenery, the dingy lighting, and the constantly panning camera so characteristic of the BBC, but you also have to give credit to the fine British tradition of surreal, fantastic (in both senses) television.

I got to watch this gem on my Nintendo! We received a disc for Wii that allows us to stream Netflix to our television. Alex is watching the complete run of Blue's Clues. As I might have mentioned, I caught up on Lost this way. There's 30 Days, Mythbusters, Monty Python...

The only bummer, and it is a major bummer, is the major missing feature: search. Onlline, Netflix streaming has search that will get you to any title available. On the Wii, it doesn't exist. The best workaround is to put stuff in your queue when online, then use the Wii to watch it. I suppose you could use Wii Internet (and this probably will basically work), but it feels pretty clunky.

Getting Getting Things Done Done

2010-03-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

If you are, like me, a disorganized schlub, the last time you received formal instruction in "study skills" was fourth or fifth grade. Life was simpler then. We had workbooks that had blanks to fill in, book reports to prove we actually read something (in 4th grade I put a Paul Gallico novel on my reading log. I'm sure now my teacher had me dead to rights), TOPS cards to let us practice math with story problems. Instead of looking at girls you could run around the track (capped at 6 laps). You could even accidentally jam a pencil in your hand and get the lead stuck in there until you're almost 30.

But I digress.

Outlining and time management didn't really stick in there, and so for the next fifteen years, in and out of school, I managed to avoid learning it. I would write 10-page research papers over a weekend, and stay up real late playing video games before finals.

Not knowing this skill killed me for years and years. I can say this with perfect hindsight. I was good at times, just never as good as I could have been (valedictorian good? we'll never know).

I just never knew how bad off I was until I got to Amazon. Here I finally started to see that I had to do something or I was going to drown in minutiae and errands.

Thus, Getting Things Done by David Allen. I finished it recently and it's been a huge eye-opener and relief. The basic point is that your brain has a limited ability to focus, and when you haven't solidly nailed down your commitments and the projects that are important to you, they consume your focus with worry.

Instead you need to feel comfortable that every loose end in your life has a concrete action tied to it. The loose ends could be as complex as buying a house or as simple as writing an email. The point is to think ahead a little bit and figure out how easy the single next step would be to move that loose end forward. Then you have lowered the barrier (activation energy? A little chemistry there) to actually doing that thing.

Best of all, when there are less loose ends in your life, you get peace. You feel like Augustine, who could say truthfully that if he discovered Armageddon was coming tomorrow, he would still go hoe his vegetable patch today.

There are many ways to run a system like this, with a bunch of lists of things to get done. For me, a program called Shuffle made my phone even more indispensable. It's simple, but it does all I want it to in terms of organizing tasks and integrating with my calendar.

Any system you use to get organized? Tell me now, before I turn 30.

Alex's prospects

2010-03-20T20:47:00.000-07:00

We had a meeting with Alex's teachers on Monday. On the bright side, his academic skills seem to be coming along nicely. Although he doesn't use language as much as we'd like, he appears to be cutting at a first grade level, and coloring, and writing words, and understanding sequences and stories. This is all very encouraging given his early speech delay. I have felt for a while like Alex is learning the same set of things that other kids would, but delayed a year or two.

In fact, the main barrier to his entering regular kindergarten now is behavior. He hits his teachers and headbutts, screams, and throws tantrums. His teachers are doing heroic work keeping everyone safe and putting him in time out. We are learning that Alex is set off when he doesn't have options.

He seems to respond well to structures like "X or Y" and "first X, then Y". So we are now saying things like, "Do you want to get out of the tub by yourself, or do you want Daddy to help you?" and "First put on your clothes, then we can have breakfast."

I've noticed lately that when we tell other parents about Alex's autism, they definitely look at us differently, like we're doing this heroic thing to raise a boy with this problem. I tell them that we're happy with how things have turned out so far. We got Alex into early intervention because Sarah was monitoring his development very closely.

But Alex is our only child so far. This is all we have ever known. I don't measure Alex against kids his age. I don't compare him to another kid who would be telling me stories and talking my ear off.

I wish he was. I can't wait until he does. I think he will someday.

Every parent is challenged. We have just had different challenges. We're not super-parents. We're just muddling through, picking our spots to place our effort, and praying for our child.

The secrets of your DNA

2010-01-22T09:11:00.000-08:00

I've been reading an interesting book called The Language of Life. It is by Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome project, which provided a complete sequence of human DNA.

As a geneticist, Collins has a lot to say about an emerging revolution in the way we treat disease. His prediction is that within the next five years, you will be able to obtain your own complete sequence of DNA, in the billions of base pairs long, for about one thousand dollars. The applications are virtually endless, from genealogical study to disease risk prediction.

At this point, commodity DNA testing does not sequence the entire DNA strand. Rather, it checks certain small portions with a well-established cause-and-effect relationship with important diseases like cancer or diabetes. Collins found that he had an increased risk of contracting adult-onset diabetes. He made some lifestyle changes to lower his risk.

To me, this is the key point about getting your DNA sequence. You can learn your predilection for horrible disease, and then do something about it. For instance, Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, learned that he was marked for Parkinson's disease and has a chance now to do something about it. As time goes on, and more important tests and markers are revealed, there will only be more reason to have your DNA on file to check against these new discoveries.

This immediately hit my computer scientist brain though. I hate typing my password into the third-party Blogger interface. Who can I trust with the secrets of my DNA? How will it be kept encrypted and secure? How will I provide access to it for medical testing or genetic studies without my insurance company crapping on me? How can anyone anonymize information that distinguishes me from everyone else on the planet?

Some bright people are going to solve these problems. It's an intriguing area, and at least some of it can be studied before the first consumer DNA sequencer opens for business.

The Oracle of Stupid

2009-11-13T12:19:00.000-08:00

Someone at work pointed this out. You can ask the magic box any question, and this is the best we can come up with.

Reproduce: go to Google and start typing a question. Google will start giving you suggestions that are relevant and popular. Best, try to imagine who would have searched for that and why. Sometimes it is tragically obvious, sometimes it is not.

Here are a few more to try:

is there
are there
who was
why
why is

One word of warning: "can" and "could" questions seem to be dominated by questions about pregnancy...

Software installs for a fresh Mac

2009-10-27T22:32:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of software I had to install to get closer to normal in the Mac:

Firefox (with NoScript, AdBlockPlus, Greasemonkey, Ubiquity, Firebug, and Vacuum Places)
Carbon Emacs
Xcode with developer tools
Quicksilver
X-Edit 2.0 (for my guitar pedal)
Nethack
Crossover Games (running Steam and thus, Team Fortress 2)
GarageBand extras
GrandPerspective (hard drive dissector)

The terminal situation on the Mac seems pretty hopeless. I could use a good recommendation. I'm looking for Command-means-meta and high color, tabs would be nice. At this point I'm just running M-x shell in Emacs, but Emacs has problems in the remote shell (in particular, I can't get remote completions to work because Emacs consumes the Tab).

Adventures in Media I

2009-10-26T22:14:00.000-07:00

I'll try to put my adventures in media all in one place, so you can skip them if you like.

The Prisoner
Where have you been all my life? Seriously, I am glad I ran across this last weekend. I haven't finished them all, but this is my kind of show. It's creepy, surreal, inventive, epic.

It's strange because I recognize a fair portion of the motifs from a Simpsons episode where Homer is taken to a sinister island because, as Mr X, he publishes an internet rumor that shows that he knows too much. The constant drugging, the replacement of number 2, even a cameo by the star.

You can see it on demand if you have Comcast. They provided all the episodes as a teaser for the AMC remake miniseries (looks like 6 episodes, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen).

If you have been waiting for an excuse to buy a Blu-Ray player, it looks like they've remastered the entire series in surround sound, and since it was originally filmed in 35mm, in high-def as well. It's coming out tomorrow at my fair employer.

Anna Karenina
In the words of Apu, "Mmmm... that's some good adultery!"

I have been rereading the epic novels of my youth lately. Dune held up, no surprise there. The Belgariad actually suffered a bit on my reread, somewhat to my surprise. The Eye of the World, also surprisingly, remains pretty cracking good.

And then there's Anna. My copy is twelve years old now and it's a bit the worse for wear. I have to retape the preface again because the pages have ripped off and are falling away from the binding. The page edge is covered in transferred ink from fingers and hands that rested too long on the words. It's got six colors of ink on the pages. By any standards, I've defaced it beyond recognition.

What keeps me coming back? As I've grown, I've found this novel growing with me. Now that I'm a family man with a young son, the pressures and paradises of married life stand out more starkly to me in Anna. I continue to see myself in her and Levin.

Anna escapes from her bourgeois life into a more dangerous one. For that much, she has to be admired. The part of us that cries out for more than the world around us must be listened to. But what we escape into must be carefully decided. Anna's passion and lack of wisdom leads her down a dark road, but it could could have been otherwise.

Thom Yorke at the Orpheum
Thom Yorke, the lead singer/songwriter of Radiohead, has been touring with a rock band, including longtime producer Nigel Godrich on keyboards and Flea, the bassist from the Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. They are performing Yorke's solo material, including The Eraser album in its entirety, Radiohead B-sides and some new songs.

The new stuff will require some more listening (read: it's difficult, live)... but what they are doing to The Eraser is really fascinating. A somewhat methodical, bleeping and blooping "apocalyptic dance" album is transformed into wild rock.

I picked up the mp3s for one of the shows, so if you have trouble finding them, let me know and I'll post them.

Meanwhile, here is a study in contrasts. This is "The Eraser", the first song on the solo album, from the album, from a solo performance, and from this latest one with the band.

Album version

Live at Latitude Festival, solo

Live at the Orpheum, with the new band

Back in Mac

2009-10-26T20:13:00.000-07:00

I know it's time to buy Windows again or whatever, but... I got a Macbook. The year of Linux on the desktop is coming, maybe soon, but... I got a Macbook.

So that's that. I've joined the ranks of the smug, latte-drinking weenies. I'll spend my life looking down my nose at well-meaning gents and shatter their illusions of love.

One of the many consequences is that I now have a platform to establish my online identity from. Before, sharing my wife's iMac, it was hard to just take over. I'd want to blog something and be on it all night. Now that I have the laptop, the resource contention is over. So I friended 40+ people on Facebook, I'm blogging tonight, I have a place to get back into reading the internet one RSS feed at a time, I even got a Google Wave invite. Look out world, here I come.

Also, I have a mobile recording station. Along with a helpful tip from the makers of my multi-effects pedal and a shiny new vintage white solid-body electric SG, I've been making recordings in Garage Band. And they sound like real music! It's hard to try to fake that sound with a plugged-in acoustic guitar. Now it sounds pure and sharp.

I'm gaming with the details turned up. It turns out that Team Fortress 2 has a ton of shiny lighting effects that I never saw before. It has actually been hard to play because it's so cool looking...

The only feature I am really missing compared to my Amazon laptop is a number pad accessible under the uiojkl keys. As it is, I either have to accept the dangerous yubnhjkl (You have much trouble lifting a large box. Continue? [ynq] (q)) or the hard to reach 123456789 for moving around in Nethack.

This may not sound like much of a missing feature to you, but you don't play nearly as much Nethack as I do.

Inventions to improve car network behavior and communication

2009-10-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

proximity warning and online driving safety tips delivered by The Computer (you're tailgating too closely for a construction zone, Dave)
a GPS with bird's eye display of nearby cars that broadcast their location
text nastygrams to bad drivers' license plate number
new codes for head and taillights ("preparing to change lanes" is only the tip of the iceberg)
gun to write messages on sticky notes or with dissolvable paint balls and shoot at doors of other cars

Please steal these ideas. Their time has come.

Studio Unleashed II

2009-06-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

Once again, a song from the studio redone live in a fresh and interesting way.

This is by Sufjan Stevens. It's called The Transfiguration. You can read an "official" version here for context.

Studio:

Live:

Everything in its right place

2009-05-31T01:48:00.000-07:00

That is the title of a seminal song on Radiohead's Kid A album. It was the first album to follow what is, for my money, the greatest album of the 90s, OK Computer. Instead of staying with the same sound that won them deserved fame, fortune, and critical acclaim, Radiohead experimented and remixed their way to a strange new sound. The song is not about everything being in its right place, when everything is jumbled and patched together.

That is a bit how I feel about this last several months. It has felt like a transition to a brave new world full of experiments and risk. Gone is the stability of a home and routine. Even though we are staying in the home I grew up in, I have never felt so rootless. Maybe it has something to do with having all our stuff in storage.

Along with feeling my way around at work (Greasemonkey is my new pal), we've been searching for a house. It hasn't gone great, with our most promising candidate running into issues at the inspection stage. We want to cut the cord and be done with it.

Trying to work around this sense of disorientation has not been easy. I have taken up incessant media consumption in response. It's been Sufjan Stevens and the Decemberists on the radio, Team Fortress 2 and Zelda and Nethack and Dwarf Fortress for video games, Gordon Ramsay, soccer, and Top Gear on the TV, the internet on every screen in the house and in the phone in my pocket, on which I am typing right now... It's a good thing I have a family or I'd be a mole person right now.

It's not all bad but it is starting to feel like a dangerous new normal. For me it seems to be about forming relationships with machines rather than people. I start to resemble what I spend all my time with. You take a little break from being yourself and before you know it, you can't get back. I already feel disconnected and foggy. This has to stop.

Time to retreat like a turtle back into my shell... but at least I am awake again. Hope you and yours are well.

REGISTER?

2009-04-05T23:43:00.000-07:00

I just figured out what went up on my blog a couple weeks ago. I sent a command to a mail daemon that allowed me to blog from my phone. And I thought I'd written something in between now and then...

Anyway, I'm alive, no worries. I'm in Seattle, working for Amazon, living with my parents while we save for a house. Life is strange, but ok.

I need to start catching everyone up soon.

REGISTER

2009-03-29T10:06:00.000-07:00

And the thing I meant to say earlier

2009-02-18T23:51:00.001-08:00

I was cleaning out my desk and happened upon a great fortune-cookie fortune. It reads:

Your future is whatever you make of it, so make it a good one.

It was great to see this on the eve of a fascinating new future, of course.

This is not really a fortune at all. It is an anti-fortune.

Fortunes tell you what is going to happen, in such a way that you feel powerless to prevent it. "A guest will arrive unexpectedly." "You will meet with success." "Lucky numbers: 2 4 13 25 36 39". "Someone close to you will die soon."

This one tells you that you can shape your own destiny. Paradoxically, it critiques other fortunes but it is a fortune. It is a universal truth that is uniquely personal, yet it was one of thousands of copies distributed randomly to Chinese-food lovers.

Without warning

2009-02-18T19:50:00.000-08:00

The end of my time at Lockheed has snuck up on me. My last day is tomorrow, and it's basically a half day.

On Monday, my coworkers treated me to a farewell lunch. They had all signed a poster and we had a good time.

My heart is getting a little full with it all. I started getting misty as I piled up a year and a half of notes and file folders, ready for the memory hole. I've been finding things in my desk that remind me of people. There are about twenty people on the team, so I have already started wondering if I've seen some of them for the last time. I hope they'll email, but I don't know.

I had this guitar in my garage for several months and I told our janitor lady that she could have it. I finally brought it in today, but I didn't see her. We talk whenever she comes around on her rounds. I'll leave it with someone if I don't see her.

The transition has been incredibly fast. It is an off season for the relocation company, so the movers are coming tomorrow. They take our car on Friday and we fly out to Seattle on Saturday. And I start with Amazon on Monday. Our house is in disarray. Alex seems to be worn out and irritable because of all of it. Sarah is working hard as usual.

In a way, I feel like it's better than the alternative, so I won't be pining away after my colleagues while I take vacation on a beach somewhere.

I'm a little nervous about the job, but I am eager to dive in too. My new manager sent me some reading material on software metrics, so I've been dusting off my data mining skills and learning about what makes a useful metric.

I'll be working downtown in the Columbia Center, whose parking rates are highway robbery, so I'm considering taking the bus instead. From my parents' house, the 132 is pretty direct all the way into downtown. That would make home less accessible in an emergency, unfortunately. Maybe I can find a cheaper garage. Amazon would subsidize my parking to some degree, but I don't know what the rates are like.

Give me a mail if you want to see me after we're settled in.

I'm also thinking about starting a technical blog now that I'm outside the Lockheed Martin firewall.

Fate, it seems, has a strange sense of irony

2009-02-09T19:14:00.001-08:00

I'm moving back to Seattle! Believe me, I am as shocked as you are. I haven't lived in my hometown for seven years.

As you may know, I've been working on defense software for Lockheed Martin in Littleton for the past year and a half. I'm proud of my work at Lockheed and I don't regret the last several months by a long shot.

Over that time, Sarah and I came to realize two things: we are not mountain people, and we're not really outdoor people. We've made some great friends and had some fun times, but we're ready to be close to family again, in the wet and woolly and green Pacific Northwest.

I'm starting work for Amazon shortly (yes, that Amazon) as a software developer. As an AI guy interested in getting out on the cutting edge, this was a chance I couldn't afford to pass up. To be honest, I racked my brains after my on-site interviews, replaying them for several sleepless nights afterwards, finding ways I could've answered technical questions better. I read somewhere that rat brains do this after the rat runs a maze. Their neurons actually fire in the same pattern that they did while running the maze, dozens of times.

My C++ and SQL questions were fun and interesting. I was thinking about "find the longest palindrome in a string" for several days afterward, still looking for performance hacks.

I was pretty sure I blew my last interview after venturing into some chancy territory about internet technology, with which I have a nodding familiarity, but no great expertise. You can imagine my surprise and my relief when, after my last sleepless night, I looked up the difference between a GET and a POST and found out that I had basically remembered correctly, in a somewhat stressful situation. That was when I began to believe it all might happen.

Last Friday, the hiring manager talked to me again about the position, proposing an interesting project for my first several months, then all was go. The recruiter made me an offer I couldn't refuse, and we were off.

I'm suppose to be there two weeks from today, but I have trouble believing the relocation can happen so quickly. On the other hand, I've been surprised already.

Back

2009-01-27T18:50:00.000-08:00

I have been lost in contemplation for the last month or so.

Christmas break was good, just very full.

How sweet that inauguration was. I watched it on Fox News at work (the channel of the TV cannot be changed) with forty other people. I only laughed once. President Obama was talking about restoring the rule of law, and Fox cut to former President Bush. The latter had this look on his face. Otherwise I was kind of on pins and needles. The last week has been pretty riveting for me.

It's not because the president is a liberal president. I feel a profound sense of relief that we might have truth, justice, science, and the American way back on our side again. Changes in tone like that come from the top. It has been good so far.

Sarah and I finished watching Six Feet Under. Every six months or so, we happen across a TV show and we decide to watch it together, cover to cover on DVD.

It's a hard show to watch in many ways. I would rate this show adults only for all the regular adult reasons, it's a hard R at the minimum (D L N S V and so on). But that's not what was hard for me. It challenges your sense of balance, your emotions, your personal meaning of life. It reaches from the vulgar to the sublime, the hilarious to the heartbreaking.

I think I mentioned before it's about a man who returns to his boyhood home when his father, a funeral director dies. Little by little, he decides to become a funeral director alongside his brother, and to rejoin his family. The show juggles all their stories deftly, and has many surprises in store along the way. It is just about note-perfect television.

I have never dealt well with death. Whenever I've encountered it, it has always been an occasion for soul-searching and pain. I didn't become a Christian because I was frightened of dying, but the deaths of friends and family in high school set me on the path of thinking and living that led to my Christianity.

While I talked to Sarah about it, I noticed suddenly that I had, for a long time, been using my Christian belief as a way to ignore my fear of dying. I found things like the following comforting:

I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: "Death has been swallowed up in victory."

"Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?"

-- First Letter to the Corinthians

And I do still find such beliefs comforting. It's just that I don't want to use them to avoid the grieving and the pain that also come with death. As the show's creator said in a retrospective on Six Feet Under, yes, the title of the show is about burial, but it's also about the emotions that we shove below the surface of our behavior and our consciousness. As the funeral directors say repeatedly in the show, sometimes people like to view the body of their loved one to feel a sense of closure. Similarly, our emotions and our pain need a viewing before we lay them to rest.

If you can bear it (and you'll figure out pretty fast if you can), I recommend this show as highly as possible. It's basically perfect.

I'm heading back to Seattle for two nights only on Thursday, for Dad's 50th birthday. It sounds like we are blowing the doors off on Friday night, not sure what's happening yet.

Oh, and my personal data was involved in two major breaches in a week, on a website and compromising my debit card. So far I do not appear to be the victim of fraud. However, this goes a long way toward explaining how quiet I have been on Facebook. If I can get over it, I'll start updating my statuses (statii?) along with the rest of you.

Hope you had a nice hiatus over your break as well.

Tunes Questionnaire

2008-12-15T19:55:00.001-08:00

I saw this out on the internet. Here goes:

1. Put your iTunes on shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS!
4. Pass it on.

IF SOMEONE SAYS "IS THIS OKAY" YOU SAY?
"Kamera" - Wilco

WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
"The Setting Sun" - Switchfoot

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL?
"McFearless" - Kings of Leon

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
"The Bends" - Radiohead

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE?
"Across the Land" - Sondre Lerche

WHAT IS YOUR MOTTO?
"Narrative: Cinco de Mayo" - Brian Wilson

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU?
"Strong Hand" - Emmylou Harris

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN?
"Peace of Me" - Natasha Bedingfield

WHAT IS 2+2?
"Old Backstage" - Garrison Keillor

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND?
"Say the Word" - The Beatles

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
"Under the Floor" - Switchfoot

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY?
"You Don't Know Me" - Emmylou Harris

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP?
"Symphony # 3 - Mvt 2" - Philip Glass

WHAT DO YOU THINK WHEN YOU SEE THE PERSON YOU LIKE?
"How to Disappear Completely" - Radiohead

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU?
"Moonlight in Samosa" - Robert Plant

WHAT WILL YOU DANCE TO AT YOUR WEDDING?
"Only For You" - Garrison Keillor

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL?
"Angel in the Snow" - Elliott Smith

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST?
"Ten Years Gone" - Led Zeppelin

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET?
"Big Weekend" - Tom Petty

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS?
"Unknown Legend" - Neil Young

WHAT'S THE WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN?
"There Once Was a Shy Young Man" - Garrison Keillor

HOW WILL YOU DIE?
"Cymbal Rush" - Thom Yorke

WHAT IS THE ONE THING YOU REGRET?
"I Know There's An Answer" - The Beachboys

WHAT MAKES YOU LAUGH?
"Icky Thump" - The White Stripes

WHAT MAKES YOU CRY?
"Paranoid Android" - Radiohead

WILL YOU EVER GET MARRIED?
"I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)" - Louis Armstrong

WHAT SCARES YOU THE MOST?
"Lion's Jaws" - Neko Case

DOES ANYONE LIKE YOU?
"Setting Sail / Muineira de Frexido" - The Chieftains

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME, WHAT WOULD YOU CHANGE?
"Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" - The Beatles

WHAT HURTS RIGHT NOW?
"Weird Fishes / Arpeggi" - Radiohead

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS?
"Hymn for a New Age" - Ray Davies

Some observations:

Radiohead and the Beatles are probably actually underrepresented on that list.
I only have one Garrison Keillor album, and iTunes' shuffle feature apparently sucks.
I really need to get that Robert Plant album out of there.
Notably missing (with multiple albums and no hits): Pink Floyd, Nickel Creek (and any of their side projects and solo albums), Arcade Fire, Beck, Bob Dylan, Glenn Gould, The Rolling Stones, The Who.

The end of all things

2008-12-01T20:31:00.000-08:00

I have been reading and watching a lot of media about the end of the world and death lately.

A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. Rated PG-13 for violence. As promised, this was a story about the preservation of human knowledge by monks in the wake of a nuclear war. The war was blamed on intellectuals, politicians, and scientists, so a kind of pogrom was carried out against them, ushering in a new dark age. The story picks up centuries later, as humanity begins waking up from the nightmare. The book is bittersweet, as is any story of history repeating as tragedy and farce. A Hugo winner, a thinking person's book, a true classic. Highly recommended.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard. Rated PG for adult themes. This is the play that focuses on two minor characters from Hamlet, staying with them when the action moves elsewhere. Hamlet is larger than life; this play is kind of the same size. I still remember the first time I saw this live, in 1997. I've read it and seen it many times since. I think it was just time again. It's about being lost, and about living without a sense of meaning. It's about what you lose by wandering around and doing as you're told. There are many possible interpretations, of course. It's witty and brilliant. Read it yesterday.

Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Rated R for nudity, language, violence, disturbing images, adult themes. This is the only comic ever to win a Hugo award, the only graphic novel on Time's list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century. It was trailblazing in many ways, and it's as epic a tale as you will ever read.

It's set in an alternative America where superheroism was briefly in vogue, but has since fallen out of fashion. The world's only real uber-man, Doctor Manhattan, was created in a nuclear accident. He has control over matter, time, and space, and allows himself to be pressed into service as America's Doomsday Device, Missile Shield, and Blitzkrieg all in one. He ends the Vietnam War victoriously, but the tensions of the Cold War, the specter of nuclear annihilation and the end of the world still hang over the story.

For all that, it's an unforgettably human story, with complex characters. And a metafictional extravaganza that embeds an entire pirate horror story in parallel with the action. And the best ending ever. It's heartwrenching, and so rereadable, even the writer said he had to read it several times to catch all the details the artist put in.

And then there's Six Feet Under, and I haven't really brought all this together yet... but I'll get there.

How The West Was Won: Led Zeppelin Live

2008-11-16T20:01:00.000-08:00

In another instance of Studio vs. Live, let me recommend How The West Was Won, a three-CD set of two Led Zeppelin shows from 1972 merged into one long concert.

I wouldn't dream of taking anything away from the Led Zeppelin studio material, which is about as solid and meaty as rock has ever been.

But being pummeled by the Led Zeppelin live show, I kept saying to myself, "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

There's a continuum of great guitar music, between the delicate, beautiful folk of, say, James Taylor and then the insanely awesome power playing. This incarnation of Led Zeppelin is way over on the other end. That's a recommendation and a warning in one.

Here's the first track, Immigrant Song:

Studio Unleashed I

2008-11-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

I'll borrow a trope from Andrew Sullivan and start naming posts that are actually about the same thing the same way. I think I want there to be more than one of these.

I am a big fan of live music, as you may know by now. One of the things I like best about it is when a band that does really great things in the studio is forced to do something different live. It can get rawer and more personal, although sometimes you have to sit back in awe at how much of the original album can be reproduced without overdubs.

So, Studio Unleashed: great songs from the studio that stayed great live.

Here is a gem by Arcade Fire. I don't know why I think it's so beautiful. It's on their first album, the Arcade Fire EP. The song is called "Vampire/Forest Fire". I suggest you listen to the studio version first. There are lyrics at the bottom of the post for your inspection.

Studio:

Live:

You wanna be set apart?
Burn all of your art repair the wasteful part
I'm a vampire in a forest fire
Hey! we all gotta keep warm
driving towards the storm

Your father was a pervert
Face down in the dirt
He taught you how to hurt
My father was a miner who lived in the suburbs
Let's live in the suburbs
If I let where I'm from burn I can never return!

My brother reads you and me his new poetry
How embarrassing
Your sister pours the gasoline
I'll fix your meals
while your burns heal!

Find a house you don't have to rebuild
Stone by stone, brick by brick, nail by nail my father never meant to leave me this
Let this love last
I drive too fast
Said I'd return if I'd ever cared
But there's no Interstate I'd find to take me there.
to take me there.

I wanted to surface a comment really fast

2008-11-12T17:28:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the election, I've been talking a little about how progressive priorities might be just. I want to get deeper into this in response to a comment my friend Aaron left on a previous post (also Tina's comment on third parties a month ago; I think they actually make a lot of sense together). I don't have enough time this second, but let me show you that comment thread in case you missed it:

tori said...

Robin Hood has one fatal error. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor sounds great... but in the end, it is still stealing. Clear as that. Whenever you choose to vote to take something away from someone and not yourself, once again...it is stealing. I'm trying out this new idea...I've only thought about it for two days. But I think an equal percentage tax on all Americans would be most just.
Glad that you won't get mad at me for saying this, Dan. We can just debate and not let it get personal.
:)

Dan Lewis said...

I won't get mad, Tori. Be welcome!

I don't know how far we want to take the Robin Hood analogy. By this reasoning, if I don't like the tax structure I call it stealing.

For instance, in the status quo, I say the Bush tax cuts are stealing from poor people and giving to rich people. Someone might argue to the contrary that rolling back the tax cuts would be stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Both sides can make an equal-and-opposite argument, and they basically cancel each other out. Maybe it's not the best label.

We will have a tax structure one way or another. The question is whether it should favor the poor at the expense of the rich, favor the rich at the expense of the poor, or somewhere in between.

When I quoted Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world, he said he pays less total taxes as a percentage of his total income than his janitor. That is, we have a deeply regressive tax structure in this country, even though on paper rich people may be paying more.

There are lots of reasons why this is so. One obvious one is that if you become rich enough, it becomes cheaper as a percentage of your income to pay a lawyer to lawfully evade taxes than it is to just pay them straight down the line. That leads into another reason, which is that it's cheaper to lobby Congress to pass laws to create tax loopholes than it is to just pay them straight down the line. It is big business for rich people to game the system to keep more of their money. The working stiffs do not have the time or the money to play in this game.

The point of all this is that our tax structure is unfair, but it is unfairly skewed to benefit the rich. If you want a fair system, it probably needs to swing back the other way even harder.

We have a lot of policies that aid the disadvantaged in society. For instance, we have homeless shelters. The homeless do not pay for them, but we do it anyway. We all pay for health insurance for poor families (Medicaid) and the elderly (Medicare). It goes on. We do unemployment for people between jobs, welfare for people who are poor, food stamps for people who would go hungry. And so on.

These are "unfair" taxes on people who have food, shelter, enough money, jobs, their health. "Why should I have to pay for that? I don't get anything back for it. I'm doing just fine on my own." People who have money are giving to those who don't have it. It is not equal or even fair.

There is a secular argument to be made that these policies really do pay for themselves. When we invest in crime prevention or preventive health care, these pay large dividends down the road. And there are similar arguments to be made for the societal costs of not caring for the elderly, the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and so on.

But I think there's a more telling argument for people who follow the way of grace. I think it is natural that we who are rich should give out of our abundance to those who are poor without expecting anything in return.

As Christians, the principle that the greatest among us will be the servant of all, that we will lift up the humble and cast down the proud, that the poor will always be with us, is even more strongly pronounced. We have special duties to care for the poor and defenseless, the widows and orphans, the outsiders.

One way we can do this is by voting for the engines of government to reflect our values. That's not stealing, it's empowering our representatives to work toward the balance we think is just.

Aaron said...

Hey Dan,
Thanks for your response...and for taking the time to explain so much on your blog. I can see where you are coming from...and even why you are for the pendulum swinging in favor for the poor rather than the rich.
It sure would be nice if taxes could be and would remain just. And it would be nice if the church would do the job of the church and care for the "orphans and widows in their distress." I'm just not sure that the main way the church should do this is through the government. Did the church fail in this? Is this why the government has to take over this role?
Unfortunately, because of the fall, the poor are no more righteous than the rich. You are in the minority... in voting on economical issues not for your own gain, but out of concern for those who are barely making ends meet. Many are openly voting for whatever will help their own bank accounts. Many of the "poor" think that they have the right to have their needs met by the government. This takes away the whole idea of grace and generosity. Instead it becomes something that is forced.
The whole point, I guess...is that people are totally depraved and will all look out for their own best interests as far as they understand them. The rich, in not paying even an equal percentage to the poor who have so much less- are (if we are to compare sin here) the worse sinners. They should not be able to get out of their equal percent for any amount of money. This is turning into a great conversational illustration of the doctrine of total depravity! So long as we are sinful and living in a Genesis 3 world... our economic policy will never be just. And then the question comes... are we as fervent in our giving to the poor outside of our own taxes (what we are obligated to pay the government) as we are to see legislation pass that may or may not help the poor?
Guess this leaves me at this point wondering what the real solution is? Do we implement unjust means to achieve justice? Perhaps the ends do justify the means in such murky waters? I'm not sure that the real heart issues will ever be discussed in politics....
and perhaps it is the church's job to call the government into account for "stealing widow's houses" as the Leaders did in the day of Jesus. But I'm not sure what that looks like. I'm not convinced that it takes place through a vote. The government will answer to God on the day of judgment. God has ordained the leaders and those in power... in His sovereignty (whether the person has what we consider to be "Christian values" or not) and on the day of judgment they will answer to Him (as the rest of us).
Oh... and what are your thoughts about proposition 8 in CA? If it gets overturned again... just what does our vote mean anyway? Government for the people by the courts?
OK... please explain where I obviously don't understand. :)

The Next Day

2008-11-05T06:37:00.000-08:00

And now a fun post on books

2008-11-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

I've read a lot of books since I last wrote here. I only have time for ratings, capsule summaries, and recommendations:

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. Rated NC-17. After the extinction of humanity, an obsolete courtesan-bot takes up with a clandestine group of butler bots to prevent the reintroduction of humanity to robot society, which threatens its collapse. Read more for Charles Stross completeness than other motives.

The Sharing Knife vols 1 & 2 by Lois McMaster Bujold. Rated R. A pregnant farm-girl takes up with a grizzled ranger over twice her age. They fight zombies and meet each other's families. Good, but not as amazing and complex as her earlier work.

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Or How We Found The Bishop's Bird Stump At Last by Connie Willis. Rated PG. Historians from the late 21st century upset the space-time continuum and go through hilarious hijinks in Victorian England to set it to rights. One of the funniest books I have ever read. Hugo and Nebula winner. One hundred percent recommended.

Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King. Rated R. A werewolf enters a New England town with predictable results. Gorily told and illustrated. Read for Stephen King completeness. Pass it by.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. Rated PG-13. A sea captain, Jack Aubrey, and his surgeon, Stephen Maturin, sail the high seas in search of adventure and the glory of the British crown. Amazing authenticity of detail and language, funny, at times thought-provoking, complicated vocabulary, plot with long continuity, and of course sails, cannons, pirates, Napoleon, and Lord Nelson. Incredibly addictive. The first part of an eighteen-part series.

I probably missed a few there, but I have lost the records of my reading.

Up next, Bad Money by Kevin Phillips, which called the market collapse early, Pet Sematary by Stephen King, more Aubrey-Maturin novels, and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller and Anathem by Neal Stephenson, both of which appear to be about monks preserving the remnants of Western civilization in the post-apocalyptic wake of a nuclear war.

The end of Bush-onomics and a new beginning

2008-11-02T18:31:00.000-08:00

[The following is an argument I made in email with a friend. It's about whether it is just to "redistribute the wealth"; whether capitalism eventually shakes out good outcomes through the invisible hand of the market; and whether we think that spending money on the poor will actually achieve anything.]

I'll try to explain where I think Bush's economics went wrong, and why we shouldn't trust our current political and economic system to correctly determine winners and losers in the economy.

Trickle-down economics really doesn't work. Bush blew the doors off upper class tax rates and said many times that those tax cuts would pay for themselves. I think it is by now universally acknowledged that after eight years of such policies, the middle class did not see the benefit of economic stimulus at the top. The tax cuts did not live up to the hype.

There are a lot of reasons this is true. One that I think explains a lot is the marginal value of income. When people are poor, their money goes to necessities. Losing a hundred dollars can have serious effects on their weekly budget. Their quality of life diminishes a lot if a bill has to be late, or they can't pay for medical care when they need it or a hundred other things. Being poor or even middle class in America is a constant balancing act. Gaining a hundred dollars can have a real positive impact on their budget for the same reasons.

On the other hand, when people are rich, like a two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year rich, for example, they're taking home on the extreme end of conservatively, ten thousand dollars a month in net income after taxes. Losing a hundred dollars is not a blip on the radar of these people. Their standard of living does not change in any meaningful way. Gaining a hundred dollars is the same.

What's going on here is that the millionaire's last dollar is worth much less to the millionaire than the poor person's last dollar. It is discounted by the fact that around dollar $500000, or earlier, money became no object. So when we say that rich people pay the vast majority of taxes in a dollar amount, we should realize that even though they are paying much more as a percentage of their income than poor people are, they are paying out of the cheap end of their cash. The widow's mite story in the Gospels is still true today. [Ed. see here]

In the United States, the situation is even further off the deep end than that. Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, has a smaller tax footprint than his janitor, because of the way we tax income, payroll, and capital gains. He said in an interview two months ago:

"In my office, I have 18 or so people there, and I ask them to compute line 63, which is their tax, and then add payroll taxes, and compare it to line 43, which is their taxable income. And these people who make anywhere from $50,000 to $750,000 a year ... and the lowest person in the office pays a higher rate than I do. I paid 17.7 percent last year, counting payroll taxes. ... The (employees) average was twice mine. ... Those fellows say they fix up companies and they get paid for doing that. On balance, they're paying a 15 percent tax rate on that and no payroll taxes, and somebody that fixes up the restroom is paying 15.3 percent in payroll taxes, just to start with. ... [The janitor] pays a higher tax rate than people who fix up companies (being paid) hundreds of millions of dollars annually in income."

This is totally upside down and unjust, and it's a direct result of our political/economic system being flawed.

Our system is set up so that rich, powerful special interests are overrepresented in legislation and tax policy. They pass their policies, like the bankruptcy bill a couple of years ago, that increase the tail end of their profits and incomes at the expense of poor and middle class consumers who can't pay their debts any more. They pass their upper-class tax cuts, they pass Medicare Part D with massive giveaways to drug companies, they pass their Wall Street bailouts and buy nonvoting shares of failing companies, they give no-bid defense contracts to wasteful companies.

And then they call people socialists for daring to suggest that their casino gambling on derivatives of derivatives of insurance on unsafe mortgages should be regulated, and that after the world economy collapses.

If our politics and capitalism were a just system, we could lie back and let the system work itself out. We could trust that the just rise and the unjust sink. But by almost any statistic you care to name, be it income gaps, wages, consumer buying power, bankruptcy and foreclosure rates, overall taxes as a percentage of income, or health care costs, and the list is pretty endless, our politics are lifting the rich on the backs of the poor.

So yes, measures that take from the discounted end of the wealth of rich people and pay it to the valuable end of the wealth of poor people, I see as corrective action pushing back against an unfortunately corrupt machine. I don't see the harm in taking an extra $5000 a year from someone who makes $250000 a year.

If you believe that we're supposed to sink or swim on our own, I can see why you would disagree. But I think the machine is out of control, the pendulum has swung way too far, and people who profit from imperfect systems should give back to those who don't.

As far as putting more cash into the hands of poor people (or spending it on services, like health care and education for the poor), I would rather give a few of the wrong people more money than deny it to all of them. It is the same kind of optimism that lies behind innocent until proven guilty: letting several guilty people go free lest one innocent should be punished. We should apply the same rigor to making sure that not one poor person should be disadvantaged by our systems, even if it means getting taken advantage of a little.

Getting your vote to count

2008-11-02T17:35:00.000-08:00

So the election is almost over. Sarah and I voted last Thursday, so I have been kind of chilling on the whole thing. One very interesting thing happened when we went in. We had our voter registration cards, which clearly showed us registering with our current address on May 2 of this year. But we got in to the early voting place and we were not listed on the voter rolls.

At this point, a poll worker told us we could vote provisionally. She insisted it was just a paper ballot and there was no big difference. I told her that it made my vote less likely to be counted. See, for example, a recent article about Ohio's provisional voting situation, with my emphasis:

But the most likely source of litigation is the state’s heavy use of provisional ballots, which are issued when a voter’s identity or registration cannot immediately be verified or when polls stay open late. Ohio has a history of requiring large numbers of voters to use these ballots, which are easy to disqualify and are not counted until after the election.

“Provisional ballots are really the Achilles’ heel of our electoral process, because in a close race that is the pressure point lawyers use to try to undo the results,” said Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who is one of the nation’s foremost experts on voting litigation. “The larger the number of provisional ballots cast in a state, the more vulnerable the Achilles’ heel, and Ohio has for a couple of elections used more of these ballots than most any other state.”

Provisional ballots are second-class citizens in our electoral system. You are strongly advised to avoid casting one or treating it as a substitute for a real ballot.

Fortunately, I had taken two hours off of work and there were no lines. So I stuck to my guns and the poll workers called the central office (Secretary of State? I don't know). It turned out that Colorado switched its registration database or some such this year, and oopsie, my wife and I got lost in the shuffle. That's my fodder for conspiracy theories about election dirty tricks.

Frankly, after a couple of election cycles of this mess, I think we should treat elections as if we're conspiracy theorists. It is appalling that elections are not above reproach and a rational person like me can put on the tin-foil hat when it comes to voter registration snafus, provisional ballots, vote machine under-distribution in urban (minority, which is to say Democrat-dominated) neighborhoods, and the exhaustively documented security apocalypse that is the electronic voting machine and vote counting system. When you read What Went Wrong In Ohio and realize that not much, not enough has really changed in the last four years, you'll put on your tin-foil hat too.

Don't forget that David Iglesias, one of the US Attorneys fired by the Department of Justice for not being ideological and partisan enough, was fired specifically because he refused to bring suit against Democratic organizations prior to the 2006 elections for "voter registration fraud". Here he is on October 18:

David Iglesias says he's shocked by the news, leaked today to the Associated Press, that the FBI is pursuing a voter-fraud investigation into ACORN just weeks before the election.

"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic." In 2006, Iglesias was fired as U.S. attorney thanks partly to his reluctance to pursue voter-fraud cases as aggressively as DOJ wanted -- one of several U.S. attorneys fired for inappropriate political reasons, according to a recently released report by DOJ's Office of the Inspector General.

Iglesias, who has been the most outspoken of the fired U.S. attorneys, went on to say that the FBI's investigation seemed designed to inappropriately create a "boogeyman" out of voter fraud.

We waited for several minutes while our registration was transferred manually from the old system to the new one. If this happens to a bunch of people on Tuesday, the polling place will be swamped. They finally printed our election labels. I expressed my thanks to the ladies who had worked to get us straightened out, and the one who had downplayed the significance of voting on paper said she was glad that we were getting to vote the way we wanted.

Completely missing the point.

I hope she watches the news when those provisional ballots go to the courts, as they well could in Colorado. It's possible that there will be enough provisional ballots cast to put the state's electoral votes in Limbo. The only way it wouldn't is if an Obama landslide puts the battleground states out of reach.

Again, be frank, be polite, but remember: Provisional ballots are second-class citizens in our electoral system. You are strongly advised to avoid casting one or treating it as a substitute for a real ballot.

I figured out a secret of this blogging thing. I have a few more things to say tonight, but I will put them in one post per topic...

Obama becomes first African-American President of the United States

2008-10-23T18:45:00.000-07:00

And so you know, I feel like I need to start foamulating my comment for November 5 when you post something about Obama winning the election. Do you think you could give me a sneak peek as to what that post might look like so I can start working on it now?

So Travis, that's how it's going to start... unless a completely unlikely catastrophe happens in the next 12 days, we'll have a historic end to this year's presidential election. In the immortal words of James Brown,

Hey, country
Didn't say what you meant
Just changed
Brand new funky President

I wait with bated breath to see what he will come up with large majorities in the Senate and House. We can expect a pragmatic liberal agenda.

One thing I think is getting lost in the foofaraw about the economic crisis is that the next president's challenge will not be to tighten the budget during a deep recession. Like was asked in all three debates, I think, "Dontcha wish your economy was hot like ME? Dontcha wish you didn't have to cutcha domestic agenda like ME? DONTCHA? DONTCHA?" That's not the function of government, as Hoover demonstrated with disastrous consequences during the Great Depression.

The next president will have to find creative ways to stimulate the economy. We do that by spending in lean times and saving in fat times. I read the other day that there's fairly strong evidence that we've been in a recession for a year now. FDR did it by creating massive public works projects, employing people and strengthening the fabric of the nation. I look at Obama's clean energy agenda as a similar win-win, a de-facto stimulus in an area that our country and the world as a whole desperately needs. The next president should have long-term goals to cut the deficit and start paying down the debt, just not right away. (This is a "fundamental difference" between the candidates: hint, one of them proposed "a spending freeze".)

There is little chance that McCain will be president. He has to run the table in a number of states where he is behind by double digits. A lot of people have already voted in early voting, in historic numbers, so he can't flip them. I keep saying it's over, but it's OVER. You can follow the electoral projections in mind-numbing statistical detail at fivethirtyeight.com and pollster.com. But it's over.

On the lighter side of the news... I did see Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. I heard from several people who only watched the cold open, where, in a Hamlet-like recursion of scenes, we watched Sarah Palin watching Sarah Palin give a press conference. Instead of feeling the ironic distance between Fey and Palin, like Hamlet's murderous uncle, we are meant to feel the essential identity between Fey's portrayal and Palin. Alec Baldwin's bit where he mistakes Palin for Fey pushes them even closer together.

But what you really just gotta, gotta see, is the second Palin segment. She's on Weekend Update with Seth Meyers, and she demurs, again, from doing her planned segment (in the script; she said something similar about not wanting to do the SNL press conference). So Amy Poehler busts out the Palin Gangsta Rap, which is like a greatest hits compilation:

She had a very passive role in everything that was being done to her. I agree that she was a good sport about being pilloried yet again, but wasn't the point to show a different side of Sarah Palin? And yet we didn't see much of one...

I don't think you balance a ticket by starting with a qualified candidate and balancing with an unqualified one. And McCain's flat-out lie on Don Imus does not make me confident about his judgment of her: "I think she is the most qualified of any that has run recently for vice president." This is totally off the wall.

More qualified than Biden? He's been a Senator for over three decades and chairs the Foreign Relations Committee.

More qualified than Al Gore, a Congressman and Senator for sixteen years before he became VP? (He went on to win the popular vote in 2000 and the Nobel Peace Prize, but it would be unfair to compare that record to Palin's while she still has a chance to go on to accomplish those things.)

More qualified than Jack Kemp of Dole/Kemp, who was a Congressman for the better part of twenty years, then Housing Secretary under the first president Bush?

More qualified than DICK CHENEY (Evil as he is)?

Stanford professor Larry Lessig did a video about a month ago comparing Palin's experience to every serving vice president in history. It makes this question of experience eminently obvious.

So why did McCain lie?

I'm being called away to The Office, more on your more substantive points later...

Rights

2008-10-15T17:39:00.000-07:00

Let me get this in right before the debate. There was a question in the last presidential debate about whether health care should be a privilege, a responsibility, or a right. That is, should it be up to each person to do what they have to do to get health care or not, or should everyone be entitled to health care? (There's not actually much difference between calling it a privilege and calling it a responsibility. A privileged person explains that you don't have a privilege because you were irresponsible.)

This boils down again to the partisan divide on systems. A staunch Republican will say that we have set up a health care system that basically functions like a market. Over time, the system will derive appropriate health care costs. If you can't pay your health care costs under the system, the Republican finds fault with you, not with the system.

John McCain's health care plan revolves around you making even more decisions in the market, essentially driving a wedge between you and your employer-provided health care, cutting you loose with five grand to pay for an individual health plan. And if you can't do it because he didn't give you enough money, don't come crying to John McCain.

A Democrat like me would point out that the health care system we have has gotten stuck in a local maximum.

A free market functions well when consumer choices are real and varied. The choice of a consumer for one provider or another puts pressure on the other providers to improve value. But a free market breaks down in the face of an oligopoly, a market where there are few choices. An oligopoly, or monopoly, has strong incentives to lower value and raise prices because there is no competitive pressure. History abounds with examples.

Ask yourself whether we have a competitive health care market.

That's just one among many reasons that people can't pay the costs of health care. Democrats see that as a failure of the system, not a failure of the people. So first, we have to fix the system. An interesting way to do that might be to open the government health plan, the one that John McCain is on right now, to anyone who wants to join.

Making health care a right is a way of saying a few things: "We guarantee that the system will not chew you up and spit you out. We guarantee that you won't have to go bankrupt because of necessary medical care. We guarantee that you won't have to choose between food and prescriptions." And we're also saying that an America where any of those things can happen to you is not an America we can countenance.

My dad used to tell us about evangelizing in the inner city. He said they would hand out tracts wrapped around sandwiches. The idea was that there are needs more urgent than religion. Maybe sandwiches are not as important in the long run, but they certainly are in the short run.

Health care is like the sandwich. There's little point in talk about high-minded ideals like freedom of speech, religion, and press for people who do not have basic access to doctors and health services.

Troopergate explodes

2008-10-09T21:56:00.001-07:00

I have been chewing over Tina's latest comment and I promise I actually have something constructive. But first:

On July 11, Ms. Palin fired Mr. Monegan, setting off a politically charged scandal that has become vastly more so since Ms. Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

By now, the outlines of the matter have been widely reported. Mr. Monegan believes he was ousted because he would not bow to pressure to dismiss Trooper Wooten. The Alaska Legislature is investigating the firing and whether the governor abused the powers of her office to pursue a personal vendetta. Its report is due Friday.

Ms. Palin has denied that anyone told Mr. Monegan to dismiss Trooper Wooten, or that the commissioner’s ouster had anything to do with him. But an examination of the case, based on interviews with Mr. Monegan and several top aides, indicates that, to a far greater degree than was previously known, the governor, her husband and her administration pressed the commissioner and his staff to get Trooper Wooten off the force, though without directly ordering it.

In all, the commissioner and his aides were contacted about Trooper Wooten three dozen times over 19 months by the governor, her husband and seven administration officials, interviews and documents show.

“To all of us, it was a campaign to get rid of him as a trooper and, at the very least, to smear the guy and give him a desk job somewhere,” said Kim Peterson, Mr. Monegan’s special assistant, who like several other aides spoke publicly about the matter for the first time.

Ms. Peterson, a 31-year veteran of state government who retired 10 days before Mr. Monegan’s firing, said she received about a dozen calls herself. “It was very clear that someone from the governor’s office wanted him watched,” she said.

Nor did that interest end with Mr. Monegan, the examination shows. His successor, Chuck Kopp, recalled that in an exploratory phone call and then a job interview, Ms. Palin’s aides mentioned the governor’s concerns about Trooper Wooten. None of the 280 other troopers were discussed, Mr. Kopp said.

NY Times, in the first of many many articles to come. This issue will dominate the headlines for the rest of the election.

Palin has more executive experience than McCain. Unfortunately, it was experience in abuse of power and politically motivating firing, then shifting stories and lies in the media, then a massive stonewall from Palin, then several attempts to quash by the McCain campaign.

I don't see how anyone could, in the cold light of reason, vote for this ticket.

Slice of life

2008-10-06T21:30:00.000-07:00

One thing I actually retained from a class in French cinema about ten years ago was this: when film exploded, the early cameras, cinematographs, only had a short amount of film (46 seconds), so you could only do so much with your reel. A lot of those films were actualités, short slices of life, like a lot of blogs.

Here's what happened. I was out at the mall with Sarah, Alex, and a couple of grandparents. We had finished our swing through the department stores and were on our way out. Sarah's dad decided to duck into Eddie Bauer, which is right in front of a wishing well. I stayed with the stroller and helped Alex check it out without falling in. It's pretty, especially when the koi are in there. I didn't see them tonight.

While I was holding Alex, I noticed a couple of teens dressed in what I assume is the à la mode slacker/stoner fashion. I did not witness them doing drugs, but they might have earlier. It would explain a lot.

The one with long messy hair was fishing around in the fountain stealing coins, and picking them off the rocks. What happens to a wish deferred? I remember throwing coins into the same fountain (the part without the koi) when I visited for interviews, and later with Sarah on our house-hunting trip. The bleached blond dude might have been a lookout, but he wasn't doing much of a job.

I almost said something to the guys. Instead I stood there and thought about the example they were setting for my son. I didn't feel like they injured my sense of community... more like offended my sense of propriety. The nerve! I don't think Alex really understood though. No harm done.

Near the end, the guy stealing coins rolled up his sleeve at one point to put his arm way down in the muck. He looked through them for a second, then shook out the water and rolled the sleeve back down. Shortly thereafter, him and his friend headed towards Eddie Bauer.

From behind my left, two police officers appeared, following them, and motioned to three others coming from the right. They caught up with the kids right at the entrance. I didn't see or hear much of the conversation after that, but I did see them cuffing the blond kid as we left. I was surprised that it escalated to that level over what is basically pocket change. Maybe they were repeat offenders.

The part of the story that doesn't make sense to me is why in heaven's name they thought they would get away with it. If you can rely on people like me not to make an issue of it, that's one thing. But the fountain sits in the nerve center of the mall. It has 360 degrees of visibility on the floor and you can see it 360 degrees from the banistered walkways on the next floor up. It is next to the elevator to the food court. There is a lot of foot traffic.

Were they high? Maybe the blond kid got cuffed for possession?

VP Debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin

2008-10-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

For those who didn't get a chance, here is the debate on Google Video, and here is the transcript.

Joe Biden, debate word cloud:

Sarah Palin, debate word cloud:

I had some minor trouble watching the VP debate, as I suspected. Also, Palin's mannerisms and wordsmithing drove me up the wall. Also, probably the first use of "shout-out" in presidential election debate history. Also, those were little things. Well, at least they were to me. Also. As for conservative columnist Rich Lowry:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

Palin does not seem to be as effective as some other treatments for this little problem, which promise to let you choose the moment that is right for you. But her presence in the McCain campaign now seems to be explained. Even justified. Demanded!

Ok, ok, enough jokes about the still-feisty, surely virile McCain, who despite his 72 years is as rambunctious and impulsive as ever. The real problems I had with Palin were never that she seemed incapable of stringing English sentences together, or wasn't winking enough.

The real problem with Palin on the issues is that when she was taken off her talking points into the details, or asked to give a nuanced judgment of an issue, she crashed and burned. And she didn't crash and burn because she was providing too much information. She crashed and burned because she had no context for the things she was talking about.

As Mr Willems was so fond of saying, meaning is contextual. When an idea, incident or word appears, it plays in the foreground against the contextual background. It locates itself among the nodes of a web of concepts. It means something because everything else means something.

That's why it was so brazen for Palin to say, early in the debate,

I'm still on the tax thing because I want to correct you on that again. And I want to let you know what I did as a mayor and as a governor. And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also.

What she said was that she wasn't interested in maintaining a conversation. She would be responsive if she chose. And when necessary, she would disregard the context and launch into stream-of-consciousness mini-essays on American life. Okay, she didn't say that in so many words, but...

Here is one of the most bald-faced examples. Gwen Ifill began with the question to Biden, what would your administration look like if you were forced into the Presidency? Biden explained that he would carry Obama's torch, essentially, by focusing on the middle class, doing health care and clean energy, restoring a foreign policy focused on diplomacy and cooperation.

But this question is perhaps the key question about Palin, the one that matters more than any other. If we had a President Palin, what could we expect? Could she cut it? Rather than answer this question, Palin avoided it almost entirely, and none too smoothly veered off into the economy. I'll italicize the point when she really went off the rails. We begin a little into Palin's answer, without omitting much of the point:

PALIN: ... What I would do also, if that were to ever happen, though, is to continue the good work he is so committed to of putting government back on the side of the people and get rid of the greed and corruption on Wall Street and in Washington.

I think we need a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street there, brought to Washington, D.C.

PALIN: So that people there can understand how the average working class family is viewing bureaucracy in the federal government and Congress and inaction of Congress.

Just everyday working class Americans saying, you know, government, just get out of my way. If you're going to do any harm and mandate more things on me and take more of my money and income tax and business taxes, you're going to have a choice in just a few weeks here on either supporting a ticket that wants to create jobs and bolster our economy and win the war or you're going to be supporting a ticket that wants to increase taxes, which ultimately kills jobs, and is going to hurt our economy.

BIDEN: Can I respond? Look, all you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie's Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me where I spend a lot of time and you ask anybody in there whether or not the economic and foreign policy of this administration has made them better off in the last eight years. And then ask them whether there's a single major initiative that John McCain differs with the president on. On taxes, on Iraq, on Afghanistan, on the whole question of how to help education, on the dealing with health care.

Look, the people in my neighborhood, they get it. They get it. They know they've been getting the short end of the stick. So walk with me in my neighborhood, go back to my old neighborhood in Claymont, an old steel town or go up to Scranton with me. These people know the middle class has gotten the short end. The wealthy have done very well. Corporate America has been rewarded. It's time we change it. Barack Obama will change it.

IFILL: Governor?

PALIN: Say it ain't so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let's look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he's a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here's a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It's not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it's near and dear to my heart. I'm very, very concerned about where we're going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena.

Yes, there was a moment later where Biden got emotional that was really raw and human, a great moment, and Palin kind of just talked over it. But for me, this was one of the bigger moments in the debate.

I don't know how much of it to unpack, so let me just summarize this way. A Palin presidency would, according to Palin, be a small-government presidency, engaged in eliminating greed and corruption from Wall Street with a little Main Street elbow grease. Biden points out that the Bush presidency wasn't good for Main Street, and John McCain didn't disagree with him much over the course of that presidency. Palin clearly struggles to respond, first saying that the past doesn't matter about as clumsily as possible, then seizing on one word in Biden's point to launch into another issue wholly removed from the preceding context, again about as clumsily as possible.

Why did she have so much trouble? Maybe because Biden was telling the truth in a way that is pretty hard to argue, at least without seeming completely out of touch. (McCain's agreement with Bush was positive for the country! Main Street is doing just fine! Main Street doesn't understand how great things are!) But also, I think, because Palin can't articulate the difference between the McCain vision and the Bush vision, and what McCain will do for the middle class that George Bush wouldn't, and how she might disagree with the policies of the last eight years, as a dyed-in-the-wool Washington outsider.

She couldn't hook into the last eight years, because she hasn't been plugged in for the last eight years. Her populist rhetoric ran dry pretty fast in the debate. Imagine how fast it would run dry in a four-year presidency.

I'm not saying Biden or Obama were perfect in their debates. But if you watch them fairly, you can definitely see their concerns playing out against their ideologies of support for the middle class, clean energy, and a responsible foreign policy. And for all that I disagree with McCain's trickle-down, belligerent alternative viewpoint, at least he has a viewpoint to speak of. And then there's Palin.

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?

Arcade Fire

2008-10-01T09:00:00.001-07:00

I tape Austin City Limits on PBS and go through them when I have a chance. I've seen some really great ones. Recently, The Decemberists, Ray Davies, Van Morrison, The Raconteurs. Watch them yourself whenever you get a chance. Sometimes it's the best of new music, sometimes it's legendary acts like Bob Dylan.

I saw another band, new to me, about a week ago and it just blew me away: Arcade Fire. They're a seven-piece-plus band out of Montreal that plays all kinds of instruments and sings songs about those fundamental things: life and death, love, religion, culture. Their show was epic, and not just because they had a horn section, violins, and a gigantic pipe organ.

They sing and play with fiery passion. There were about ten people on stage playing their hearts out, then switching instruments between songs. They would sing even when they weren't next to a microphone.

I found all their albums at the library, so they've been getting a lot of listens lately. The Arcade Fire EP, Funeral, and Neon Bible. Highly recommended.

First presidential debate, Obama vs. McCain

2008-09-26T23:17:00.000-07:00

He he. I saw Wolf Blitzer say on CNN post-debate (paraphrase), "We've been getting emails about why we interviewed Vice Presidential candidate Biden but not Sarah Palin. We tried to get Sarah Palin, we'd love to talk to Sarah Palin sometime... down the road... we did talk to Nicole Wallace, senior advisor to John McCain." Apparently Palin declined the invitation. Here's what she did instead.

Sarah and I watched the debate together. She was paying more attention when Jim Lehrer asked the candidates at the beginning of the debate not to talk to him, but address each other, so she noticed first when McCain didn't look at Obama. We're still not sure why McCain did that.

After that, I watched reasonably carefully, and I don't think McCain really looked at him until they shook hands after the debate was over. On a related note, Obama addressed McCain directly, calling him John and talking to him in the second person; McCain was all third person all the time.

Without belaboring the point, I got the feeling that McCain was not engaging. If you covered up Obama's side of the screen and edited McCain's segments together, it would look a bit like a speech. It would not look like give and take. Haven't we had enough of a President who does not listen?

I got another idea just now. McCain says "my friend/my friends" all the time when he is addressing people in public. Maybe if he'd said "my friend" to Obama it would've looked insincere and condescending, so they had to go as far away from the second person as possible.

Another thing I was kind of surprised to see was McCain being the angry old man. Was I the only one to think Grandpa Simpson when McCain started telling yet another story about how he'd visited a country, which makes him some kind of foreign policy genius? I failed to see the huge point of "I've been to Waziristan", beyond grandstanding. If it's really that important... would you pick a vice president who's never really traveled or been interested in these issues?

Famously, he also visited Iraq a year ago and said there "are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today". He spoke from experience. He had just walked through a neighborhood in Baghdad. Of course, he had a bulletproof vest, and he was escorted... by 100 soldiers, 3 Blackhawk helicopters, and 2 Apache gunships. Anyone can just go to countries... but actually learning something with open eyes takes a little more effort.

Back to the main line, "I don't think John McCain understands" how he dated himself when he started bringing up Kissinger and how long he'd been around, and telling stories from the Reagan era... like bringing up SDI (!) on the missile defense issue. I caught it, but I doubt most of the country did. And I still missed the point, ie why he actually brought it up.

McCain came off as a get-off-my-lawn condescending old guy to me... I think that will not help his chances.

As for Obama, I thought he respected the format better than McCain. He wasn't always as firm as I would like in responding to McCain. He didn't quite bring up McCain's long record of financial services deregulation. Nor did he ask what victory and defeat mean in what is now, after all, not a war but an occupation of Iraq. But overall, a pretty solid performance, and that's probably all he needed.

Maybe I'll have some more deep thoughts later.

Your tax dollars at work

2008-09-25T22:53:00.000-07:00

If you've been having trouble following the soap opera that is the market bailout (there is no Wall Street anymore, there are no extant investment banks, so I feel funny calling it the Wall Street Bailout), Krugman has a good catch-up post bringing us up to Wednesday. Here are some highlights. If you're interested, read the whole thing.

Before I explain the apparent logic here, let’s talk about how governments normally respond to financial crisis: namely, they rescue the failing financial institutions, taking temporary ownership while keeping them running. If they don’t want to keep the institutions public, they eventually dispose of bad assets and pay off enough debt to make the institutions viable again, then sell them back to the private sector. But the first step is rescue with ownership.

That’s what we did in the S&L crisis; that’s what Sweden did in the early 90s; that’s what was just done with Fannie and Freddie; it’s even what was done just last week with AIG. It’s more or less what would happen with the Dodd plan, which would buy bad debt but get equity warrants that depend on the later losses on that debt.

But now Paulson and Bernanke are proposing, very nearly, to do the opposite: they want to buy bad paper from everyone, not just institutions in trouble, while taking no ownership. In fact, they’ve said that they don’t want equity warrants precisely because they would lead financial institutions that aren’t in trouble to stay away. So we’re talking about a bailout specifically designed to funnel money to those who don’t need it.

...

So, three points:

1. They’re still offering something for nothing. ...
2. They’re asserting that Treasury and the Fed know true values better than the market. ...
3. Even if it works, the system will remain badly undercapitalized. ...

Palin's interviews keep getting worser and worserer. I'm having to invent parts of speech just to keep up with them. Seriously, no VP candidate should make you cringe when they talk about the issues. Listen when Palin talks about McCain's record on deregulation (near the end, I think).

I view McCain's "campaign suspension" (TV ads, stump speech at Clinton Global Initiative, and surrogates all over the news media notwithstanding) and flight to Washington as a jump-the-shark moment. I thought the election was over when I found out who Sarah Palin was... I keep thinking the election is over. Expect more shark-jumping as the polls get worse for him. I said earlier that Bush has governed by jumping from crisis to crisis and I believe McCain is campaigning from crisis to crisis.

She's real fine, my 419

2008-09-22T19:03:00.000-07:00

I got this email in my inbox. Not sure where it started, but it's an important message for all Americans.

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

The sky is always falling

2008-09-21T18:56:00.000-07:00

The story of this presidency, repeating as tragedy and farce: Crisis X is mounting and will cause the end of Western Civilization. Emergency Plan Y must be put into effect this week or we are all DOOMED. Anyone who looks askance at Y is dangerously naive and will be the first up against the wall when X hits the fan.

Y has been, variously, putting domestic communications in the hands of the NSA, the PATRIOT Act, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of 9/11, invading a country without a casus belli, torturing the innocent and the guilty in our public and secret prisons, putting enemy combatants outside of the purview of the justice system, sending untracked cash to the money pit that was the Iraq Reconstruction...

This week, Y equals a 700 billion dollar bailout for Wall Street, run by the Secretary of the Treasury, with actions not reviewable, period. Here's the draft:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

I read The Big Picture and Infectious Greed to stay informed on the markets and the economy, and so should you. There are many many problems with this corporate welfare, but here's the obvious one: this is a replay of the Iraq Reconstruction, only instead of sending pallets of cash to God-Knows-Who, we taxpayers are sending pallets of cash to honest-to-God Wall Street fat cats, no strings attached.

Like the other Xs, the crisis is overblown, but we are being asked not to take time to think things through. Like the other Ys, the solution is half-baked and likely to be counter-productive in the long run, and hands over power to an unaccountable elite.

Chicken Little is our President. The sky is always falling: it is in stable geosynchronous orbit. We don't govern anymore. Instead, we continuously manage our way from crisis to crisis. There is no normal. Heart rates are always up, blood is always pounding through our brain, fight or flight. We have no long-term vision for policy, just tunnel vision.

This is one of my criticisms of the Democrats. On issues like this one, they aren't liberal and wonky enough. They don't get their dander up and stand firm against the excesses of the latter-day conservative movement, and, more importantly, they don't deconstruct the fear-mongering that spins us from emergency to crisis to apocalypse.

A few quick things

2008-09-11T22:26:00.000-07:00

The content browser for Spore is very exciting. You can spend hours on it... Here are two takes on WALL-E.

The first one was done in the creature editor. The second one was in one of the vehicle editors. The thing to blow your mind is, somebody did that vehicle one since Sunday... and it probably took a couple of hours at most. It's introducing a whole generation to 3-D modeling and design...

Clueless governor department. See if you can spot my issues with her first big interview...

I'm almost done with Suskind's book. A review is imminent.

A must-see post-convention McCain interview

2008-09-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

Watch McCain twist and dodge real, tough questions from a smart, respectful, hard-hitting reporter. Also, McCain flat out lies: "She [Palin] knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America." This one is a must-see. I would embed it, but it plays automatically when the page loads.

And incidentally, contra McCain in the interview, Obama did famously break with his party and most everybody else in what you'd have to say is one of the better calls of the last several years.

Now let me be clear — I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity.

He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

From an anti-Iraq War speech, October 2, 2002

Good Morning America covering Troopergate

2008-09-11T06:34:00.001-07:00

Trouble a-brewing. Sarah put on the TV this morning. Good Morning America aired an ABC News investigation that covered Palin, Monegan's testimony, his witness and emails that he was sent about the trooper. In other words, hard evidence...

You know what they say. If you've lost Good Morning America, it's over.

Spore

2008-09-10T22:02:00.000-07:00

I got Spore on Sunday, like many other people in North America.

As you may know, there are several stages of life as we know it. Spore splits them into Cell (really bacteria, I suppose), Creature, Tribe (the beginning of sentience), Civilization (politics), and finally Space. At each stage, you customize your body, tribe (probably the weakest), buildings, and vehicles with almost endless variety in 3D editors that are years ahead of the state-of-the-art (they kind of invented their own state-of-the-art). There are various goals that you pursue in the first levels to proceed up the evolutionary ladder, such as subduing or befriending tribes, or eating things.

The reviews have been mixed so far. Everyone thinks that the content creation tools are great. Everyone who is playing is automatically uploading their content to central servers, which then spread them back out to all the players' individual games. There were 4 million shared objects in that database last weekend, the creature creator having been released a couple of months ago. Today, less than a week after the release, there are 12 million creatures, buildings, and vehicles in there (and no, that figure is not going to stand up if you read this post a week from now). And there is some stuff that is totally unreal coming out of it, like animals that look like cars, as well as more humdrum creatures with two arms, two legs, two ears, two eyes, etc (of course, a lot of people are trying to make Homer Simpson and all their favorite characters, so it's not as humdrum as all that). Here's my page of stuff.

But the goal-based gameplay in the first few levels is kind of dumb. I started on Easy, and it was pretty impossible to screw up (I still managed to die three times on Tribal phase). You'll pick it up pretty fast and get on your merry way shortly. But a lot of hardcore gamers didn't like this. They wanted a challenge from the get-go, and the gameplay lacked the kind of depth they are used to in the various genres that Spore pays homage to: Diablo-type third-person action games, Starcraft-type real-time strategy, and Civilization-type world-conquest games.

It is becoming more obvious to me now that the gameplay was made deliberately easy in those first four stages for two reasons: one, for the creative people who love to make stuff but could care less about being challenged, the gameplay was made simple enough not to get in their way; two, the first four stages are not much more than a glorified tutorial for the awe-inspiring Space stage, and the game designers wanted everyone to get there.

The Space Stage is one of those gaming experiences that hearkens back to the best of the grand strategy games, the Star Controls and the Civs, the buy-low, sell-high of Drug Wars, the space exploration of VGA planets... it brings some new things into the mix too, in modeling planets with food webs, atmospheres, and temperature. For some reason, I am really enjoying terraforming worlds and filling them with flourishing species.

Each world that supports life can have any combination of those animals, vehicles, and buildings, and can be at any of those stages of evolution that you passed through. There are (hundreds of?) thousands of stars in the galaxy, and several worlds per star... you could never see everything. It beggars the imagination.

I recommend starting on Easy. It will help you learn the ropes. I had many aha moments as I went through that will help me a lot on the second time through. I don't know if I'm going to finish the story part of the game, first time through. I am tempted to take what I know and start over, ready for a bit easier time of it.

I recommend it highly for anyone ready to get creative, have their mind expanded, and invest a lot of time. I spent about six hours just getting to Space the first time (it would be a lot faster second time around), and Space, the galaxy, is basically an endless playground.

PS There is a kind of protest going on about the digital rights management (DRM) the game distributor, EA, put on Spore. If I understand it, it only allows you to install the software on three computers, then you have to call in and prove you purchased the software somehow to keep installing it. It also phones home with your license key every time you connect to EA's servers for content.

A lot of people saw this as pointless, because you could download the software from various Bittorrent establishments on the day it came out. That is, the DRM only harms legitimate customers who went out and bought the game, while doing nothing to stem piracy.

Thus, for starters, people started giving Spore one-star reviews on Amazon. It has 2133 reviews, 1961 of which are one-stars. If you didn't read around, you wouldn't know about the critical acclaim it has received (with the caveats I mentioned above). It's a five-star game in my book.

Has the DRM hurt sales of this great game? I think so... I hope the end result is that the DRM is removed, that's a win-win. I am not a fan of DRM in any of its forms, I just couldn't help myself on this purchase.

Palin and the Presidency

2008-09-04T21:14:00.000-07:00

I don't know a better way to respond to the comments substantively than promoting them to the front page. I hope my commenters don't mind...

OK Dan. Obviously last week I agreed whole-heartedly with you. Now, I'm in the McCain camp, and you can thank Sarah Palin for that.
I've also been putting a lot of thought into what the Biblical role of government should be. Is it really to be a provider? Shouldn't the church be doing that? Shouldn't we be afraid of a government that becomes so large that it could take everything away from us? Shouldn't we care about our national security enough to elect somebody that has a proven record of defending our freedom?

Maybe I'm one of those people that is easliy tossed about by the waves of politial hype...but I always kind of knew in the back of my head that I was being rebellious by supporting Obama...I'm not convinced he has my best interests in mind anymore...plus, I now have a hard time with the idea that by voting for him, I'm aligning myself with the downright nasty far-left liberal press, like the writers for the Huffington Post that smeared Sarah Palin's daughter for being pregnant - as if it's any of their business what happens in her family.

McCain's choice of Palin, in my opinion, shows that he is one that is not afraid to buck the establishment of Washington. The guy really is a Maverick and an American Hero. I want him represrenting me and fighting for my freedom. Can't wait for his speech tonight. I'll be praying for your mind to change! :) (Just kidding. I respect your opinion. Keep up the discussion!)

Travis, first, thanks for writing and for what you said a few posts ago. Sarah and I appreciate your support and interest. There are a lot of interesting points here. I will answer a few, in a spirit of frankness and friendship. Nothing I say next is meant to offend, I just call it like I see it.

Palin

I think it would be good to judge McCain's vice-presidential pick in the fullness of time. There are substantial reasons that I disapprove of Palin as a presidential pick. They go far beyond her private life.

The most obvious reason for me is a scandal called "Troopergate", where it is fairly obvious and well-reported that:

Palin abused her office as governor to try to get an enemy of her family fired
then fired the Public Safety Commissioner when he wouldn't fire said enemy (a state trooper)
when the fired guy came forward, Palin denied everything, then was forced to change her story when hard evidence came out (one of the conversations was recorded)
then (arguably) interfered with the congressional investigation of her abuse of power, and
has now lawyered up and refused to testify to the same investigation.

If you can get past the left-leaning polemic, you can read a pretty concise description of all this in more detail, as part of a post here. The investigation is currently scheduled to release its findings just before the election. I'm sure we'll be hearing more about it in the coming weeks.

On a more general level, I think Palin is not, realistically, ready to be President. That's what we ask of the Vice President. A couple of months ago, she said she didn't really want the VP job

"until somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day. I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here. ..."

If she didn't know what the VP does, how can we possibly think she's ready to be President?

A few months ago, she had no real position on the Iraq troop surge, preferring to talk in platitudes:

Alaska Business Monthly: We've lost a lot of Alaska's military members to the war in Iraq. How do you feel about sending more troops into battle, as President Bush is suggesting?

Palin: I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq. I heard on the news about the new deployments, and while I support our president, Condoleezza Rice and the administration, I want to know that we have an exit plan in place; I want assurances that we are doing all we can to keep our troops safe. Every life lost is such a tragedy. I am very, very proud of the troops we have in Alaska, those fighting overseas for our freedoms, and the families here who are making so many sacrifices.

I had a position on the troop surge (it was all hat and no cattle; no political gains in Iraq have been seen; American soldiers dying for short-term gains in physical security), and I was just making software. The real point for me is that this lady does not have awareness of the world around her. She is not curious about a subject that marched up and down the front pages for months. Yes, she will get coached to agree with John McCain's policy positions, but... I'll make a prediction, she makes a foreign policy gaffe, a real howler, in the near future (I'd say the next two, three weeks but I don't know when the McCain campaign is going to let reporters start talking to her). And she'll do it because she has never really been interested in this stuff.

We have already had an incurious, ignorant, inexperienced, showy, jes folks governor in a Presidential election, and it has been a pure nightmare for our foreign policy. We have lost our standing in the world and the moral high ground, not to mention blood and treasure. Sarah Palin is fool me twice; we should not do this again. (Watch the video where Campbell Brown lays into Tucker Bounds of the McCain campaign, asking what foreign policy experience or qualifications to be Commander in Chief Sarah Palin has. Spoiler: none, which makes the four-minute video quite entertaining in a painful sort of way.)

That's why I don't like the Palin pick, for starters... but no one really knows how deep the rabbit hole goes on Palin, because she was not vetted deeply by the McCain campaign before she was picked. There have been an explosion of stories in the last week on Palin because she was a complete unknown. Everyone wants to know about her, so everything is news.

(Special bonus video: Republicans on MSNBC caught talking off-mike about the Palin pick. Includes a swear.)

Journalism

I too prefer to focus on substantive issues, not who's having whose baby. Focusing on the bad behavior of the fringes, though, Travis, is no way to decide what "side" you prefer to be on. I don't tar pro-life people with the same brush that I do the terrorists who bomb abortion clinics; you shouldn't tar Democrats, liberals, progressives with the same brush that you do the scandal-mongers at Huffington Post (especially when Obama said specifically that no one should be doing these kinds of stories).

And let me point out that "by voting for him, I'm aligning myself with the downright nasty far-left liberal press" has an equal and opposite argument; if you vote for McCain, you're on the side of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Karl Rove... you can read all the nasty quotes from them you want on mediamatters.org. Here's a famous one from Coulter:

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.
New York Observer article; August 26, 2002

Of course I regret it. I should have added 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and the reporters.'
rightwingnews.com; June 26, 2003
On her (above) statement concerning Timothy McVeigh

Don't let irresponsible journalists on either side of the political divide cloud the real issues.

Government

The role of government is a real issue. Here's an example that comes to mind often in this context. There are plenty of statistics that bear out my position that the health insurance industry shows signs of too little government involvement (and that's an understatement). If you have a catastrophic health event without health insurance, you'll lose your home and all your money. It's the leading cause of bankruptcy in America. It's a system that lets unfortunate people drown when they fall off the boat. The profit motive is screwing with health outcomes that would have been otherwise if care had been granted. There is no profit for the insurance industry in waking up and caring for more people, so the system is hardly likely to change now because of market pressure.

In general, churches don't provide you with insurance if you have none. Churches don't pay those bankruptcy-level medical bills for each of its members. There are some issues that are too big for one community to solve, that demand collective action.

The government's role, I think, is not to create so-called fair systems (like laissez-faire markets) and watch people sink or swim within them (and when they sink, say, "the system chewed you up and spat you out, you must not have been good enough, all's fair"). The federal government can improve systems and should step in when any system goes haywire, be it the regulation of energy traders (see Enron), accountants (Arthur Andersen), oil companies (profiteering), military contractors (Halliburton), pollutants (Clean Air Act), subprimes... deregulation or lax regulation in all these arenas has damaged the public good to the profit of a few. When we all say no to that, we want the government to lay down those laws.

Am I in favor of a strong central government? I am not in favor of wholesale surveillance and the erosion of privacy; I am not in favor of unaccountable strong police powers; I am not in favor of the unaccountable unitary executive being able to ignore the legislature on national security. To my mind, there is a big difference between having effective, nationwide (even nationalized?) social programs and having effective, nationwide social control. Somehow the Republicans became in favor of the latter and opposed to the former. I think that's upside down and we need to change it.

As for McCain on national security... that will have to wait for next time. Another can of worms.

Obama at the Democratic National Convention

2008-09-02T22:24:00.001-07:00

The thing I liked best about Obama's acceptance speech at the convention was its emphasis on the progressive vision of the government: essentially, the pendulum has swung too far from "united we stand" to "divided we fall". You can find the speech on mp3 here. It's not much different than watching the video, I think, which is here. It was really decent and inspiring, a real way out of the world of the Bush Administration.
The Bush government has faith in the impersonal fairness of systems like world markets, corporate America, the insurance industry, the No Child Left Behind accountability algorithms, realpolitik, no fly lists, data mining of your phone and internet traffic. If you somehow get ground between the gears of the systems, obviously you're doing something wrong. And the people on top deserve to be there. All is right with the world...
Meanwhile, in the machine, us ground-up people can decide whether we want to be cooked in someone else's hamburger and served for lunch, or whether this is not in fact the way things should be.
There is nothing shameful about leaving behind 99 sheep to save the one that's falling through the cracks. There is nothing shameful about selling your property and giving the proceeds to the poor. There is nothing shameful about providing safety from the catastrophes of our modern era, guarantees that there is a way out.
If you're in jail, you should get a habeas corpus writ. If you're sick, you should be insured in such a way that you won't go bankrupt. If you're poor, you should get the help you need to stand on your own two feet. If you're on the no-fly list, you should be able to challenge your presence on the list. If you've profited from the machine, you should pay for those who haven't. If you're well, you should care for the sick. If you're free, you should visit those in prison.
As Obama said:

It's not because John McCain doesn't care. It's because John McCain doesn't get it.

For over two decades, he's subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is that you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. You're on your own. No health care? The market will fix it. You're on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don't have boots. You are on your own.

Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America. And that's why I'm running for president of the United States.

Mark responds

2008-08-28T23:45:00.000-07:00

First of all, how I even found this blog: Your basic followed links from a friend, followed those links and etc, somehow ended up here a while back and again recently.

Didn't mean to hit quite that hard of a nerve, still not sure why you have reacted so strongly. I didn't make the point I was hoping to make very well, here is what I really meant...

Based upon what I'd read in your blog, it seemed clear, to me at least, that you would never vote for McCain, quite the contrary, I'd expected you to be a rather enthusiastic Obama supporter. So, to read that something caused McCain to lose your vote seemed out of place, given that I never believed he had your vote in the first place. What you wrote seemed more like an excuse to not vote for him versus a reason. In some sense it seemed like you weren't being honest with yourself, when it seems so clear to me that you'd never really vote for McCain anyway.

The point had nothing, in substance, to do with comparing abortion to torture (but not possible to tell from my short comment) and the paradox that seems obvious; given that you embrace abortion, at least to some extent, but have zero tolerance for torture.

If I am mistaken and McCain truly did lose your vote, let me recommend looking to a third party candidate. I haven't voted for a major party Presidential candidate in many elections. There is a profound psychological barrier that causes us to want to vote for a winner, that if more people could overcome, the tight grip of the major two parties could be freed, I can only dream that could ever happen!

First, thank you, Mark, for giving me a second try. I do have strong feelings on these subjects, but you bit the bullet and wrote some more. Between watching Obama speak tonight and your comments, I've had a few more thoughts.

It is true that I have been a Democrat for a while now. A perusal of the posts tagged "politics" on this blog makes that clear. And it's true that I probably would have voted against another Republican administration even before having any specific beefs with their Presidential candidate. If the Democrats had put out a real dog, maybe I would have reconsidered. (Was Edwards a dog for cheating on his wife and lying about it to the press? I don't know.)

I have been listening to the Denver convention speeches off and on. One thing that really surprised me was hearing the critiques of the Bush Administration. They started to really move me, even bring tears to my eyes. It wasn't because I am enthralled by fully funding Headstart (which is nevertheless a good idea). It's because I started to realize that the Bush Administration will really be over. I feel profoundly tired of Bush, not just because he had terrorists in prisons tortured (and whoops, some of those terrorists turned out to be innocent nobodies caught up in random sweeps). My brain gets fried just thinking about the endless list... * Okay, that's totally derailing my train of thought.

I've been positive about Obama since I read this blog post. I preferred him to Clinton in the primaries, certainly. So it's true John McCain would have had an uphill struggle for my vote from the start.

But there's a difference between failing to win my vote and flushing it down the toilet, and that's what John McCain did with his position on torture.

A few months ago I went over McCain's cynical flip-flop on torture. The comparison of his position today (google [mccain torture] for an endless series of articles) and his editorial of 2005, neatly interwoven with lessons from his POW experience, should convince any disinterested observer that he has abandoned his principles on torture.

Why did I care so much? Here's one answer, an old editorial from 2005 that sums it up well, I think. Not torturing people should be a no-brainer for all of us. It's cruel and unusual. It victimizes both the torturer and the tortured. It turns human dignity inside out. And in the case of our prisoners, it's done to people who are completely helpless to harm us.

Not institutionalizing the torture of people should be even more obvious. Not normalizing torture in the public discourse as one option among many for dealing with foreign POWs... how did we even get to this point? It's like waking up one morning to find that the city government has reinstituted human sacrifices to Moloch, or that they're serving human brains at the diner. Every time I write about this, I feel crazy that we are even discussing it.

All that said, why react so strongly when Mark called partial-birth abortion torture and said I would probably find it in my heart to forgive Obama for holding pro-choice positions, even though I couldn't for John McCain? I think it's because I read an accusation that I was being inconsistent into Mark's comment. That is, I care about torture issues when it suits me and ignore them when it doesn't. It's OK If You're A Democrat. I take that personally because I have integrity and I want to be consistent, especially on the thoughts and issues that actually mean something to me.

I will say that I think the issues are different in kind. Torture is a black-and-white moral issue that cuts across political party, moral upbringing, geography. Before George W Bush practically everyone held very strong feelings against it. It is basically a crime against our common humanity. Now something like half hold the same feelings and the other half concoct excuses, but the same moral revulsion is hanging around.

Abortion, on the other hand, pits the life and dignity of the mother against the life and dignity of the fetus. There is a grey area here that is not going to go away (until we can switch on and off our fertility at will, or bring babies to term in artificial womb machines; see Lois McMaster Bujold's sf for more of this bewildering future). People disagree honestly and in good faith about what should be legal and illegal when it comes to it.

Here's Obama's position on partial-birth abortion, close to my own. It's a legitimate compromise in circumstances where people disagree.

On an issue like partial birth abortion, I strongly believe that the state can properly restrict late-term abortions. I have said so repeatedly. All I've said is we should have a provision to protect the health of the mother, and many of the bills that came before me didn't have that.

Part of the reason they didn't have it was purposeful, because those who are opposed to abortion have a moral calling to try to oppose what they think is immoral. Oftentimes what they were trying to do was to polarize the debate and make it more difficult for people, so that they could try to bring an end to abortions overall.

As president, my goal is to bring people together, to listen to them, and I don't think that's any Republican out there who I've worked with who would say that I don't listen to them, I don't respect their ideas, I don't understand their perspective. And my goal is to get us out of this polarizing debate where we're always trying to score cheap political points and actually get things done.
Source: Fox News Sunday: 2008 presidential race interview Apr 27, 2008 (link)

When I read something like that, I understand that it's a messy compromise that has to be struck in our pluralist society. Partial-birth abortion restrictions without exceptions for the life of the mother amount to demanding that other people immolate themselves on the altar of our principles. I don't think it's clear that we can or should make that demand, much less enshrine it in law. I would hardly call this an embrace of abortion, but I'll let it stand. I am not a fan of abortion, but I am a fan of leaving abortions legal.

When I compare issues like the normalization of torture and the legalization of abortion, I see a large difference of kind. If you don't, maybe we'll agree to disagree. Anyhow, that's my take on whether or not Obama would lose my vote for his partial-birth abortion stance, owing to my strong objections to torture: No. But no hard feelings, I was glad to articulate that and think about it.

There's also a question here about whether I am a one-issue voter. Have I lost my objectivity? Am I being narrow-minded? Well, if it comes to that, I feel happy with an Obama vote for many reasons, and unhappy with a McCain vote for other reasons. Mark is right, though, that I might be rationalizing here... maybe I think McCain's age is the real issue, which prejudice might reflect badly on me, but this torture thing provides a good cover for my real motives. Maybe that is less plausible now that you've got an idea of what I think about this.

Instead, I think the torture flipflop provides a window onto his character. It is located in a constellation of similar panders and locksteps by McCain, which make me all the more sure that he has abandoned his principles here. It is simply a catastrophe of misjudgment, magnified by his own experience at the hands of his torturers.

The way I see it, if you need more examples, they exist... but that one is enough for me.

As for voting for a third-party candidate...

From the sky comes a scream, as Homer is crashing right into the Capitol. A few footsteps later, he comes running down the stairs.

Homer: America, take a good look at your beloved candidates. They're nothing but hideous space reptiles. [unmasks them]
[audience gasps in terror]
Kodos: It's true, we are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
[murmurs]
Man1: He's right, this is a two-party system.
Man2: Well, I believe I'll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead, throw your vote away.
[Kang and Kodos laugh out loud]
[Ross Perot smashes his "Perot 96" hat]

The next day, Kodos announces the result: "All hail, President Kang."

The field in front of the Capitol has now become a working ground where humans are whipped by aliens and used to carry materials.

The Simpsons family is working too, with Homer and the kids carrying wood, and Marge pushing a wheelbarrow of cinderblocks -- with Maggie on top.

Marge: I don't understand why we have to build a ray gun to aim at a planet I never even heard of.
Homer: Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

I think the best way to fix this is to fix the system so third parties have an easier time getting a foothold, for instance by lowering the vote threshold (5%, as this article on Nader mentions in passing) for parties to qualify for federal public funding of their campaigns. But being in the swing state of Colorado, I just can't afford to risk my vote on electing the Republican by default, not this time around... and besides, I think Obama will do a good job.

Hopefully that is not too much bloviating... we now return you to your regularly scheduled blog. And thanks again to Mark for raising the level of the discourse.

* US attorneys getting fired for political reasons (even during active investigations of the people they were getting fired by!?), refusing clearances to OPM lawyers investigating the executive branch, burning a CIA agent working on nuclear nonproliferation issues, and that to get revenge against someone who called BS on their case for going to war, aides stonewalling in contempt of Congress, the unitary theory of executive power, signing statements defying the rule of law, not to mention the shifting and ultimately groundless arguments for invading and occupying a country preemptively, the Katrina debacle, committing multiple felonies by illegally wiretapping internet and phone traffic in contravention of FISA... and those are just the lowlights that come immediately to mind. Wasn't there some stuff about illegal propaganda from the Pentagon? Illegal hiring practices at DOE? Missing emails not turned over? Abramoff? Using off-the-reservation email accounts... it just doesn't stop...

Keeping it quick

2008-08-24T21:55:00.000-07:00

I've been continuing with Okami. It's very entertaining.
I biked out to the library on Saturday. I got a few more CDs and those books, then read Stephen King in an easy chair. I headed out just as a thunderstorm was moving in. I had a good time, a little peaceful spot.
I finished Christine. I won't spoil the ending. King got back to form, it is way better than Cujo. But I have a feeling I'm about to see a ton of books (along my chronology, I've got from 1983 till 1989, Misery) that are King working out metaphors for the damage his drug abuse was doing to his family. I don't think it's exactly transparent, but it definitely colors my reading...
I put up the books I'm reading on my whiteboard at work. I'm kind of relieved to be able to erase Christine when I get in tomorrow, because I have a coworker named Christine and it must have looked a little strange.
Up next, still doing The Way of the World by Ron Suskind. I also have a Stross book that eluded me, The Jennifer Morgue, which is more "James Bond meets HP Lovecraft". And I picked up the start of a newish series by Lois McMaster Bujold that I just hadn't gotten around to. The series is called The Sharing Knife, and the first book is called Beguilement.
I watched the Star Wars CG film The Clone Wars tonight. It ends a little abruptly, and for all the exposition, it is actually a little tough for me to locate it in context in the storyline. The graphics were great, the dialog was ok if a little obvious at times. It was mostly fun as a chance to get out with Chuck, who is a guy I know via Sarah's friend Laura (his wife). We should do stuff like that more often.
I loaned Chuck a few Bujold books: Cordelia's Honor, The Warrior's Apprentice, and The Curse of Chalion. Here's to another addict! I had no clue until recently that he reads fantasy.
A dude named Mark (no forwarding address) commented on the last post. I do not know if I consider his comment particularly edifying or not. And my comment back is not so great.
My basic argument is this: we want a president who will respect the rule of law. The last eight years have taught us how valuable that would be. Whether you agree or disagree on this issue or that issue with the president, you can rest assured that the president will preserve the laws that we have by proxy all agreed upon. The president will not attempt to shirk his responsibilities under the law or rewrite them by illegal action or inaction. The president will not play cowboy politics with people's lives.
And the president will not torture people, even our enemies. The president will not attempt to move prisoners to so-called law-free zones like Camp X-Ray or give them law-free status like "enemy combatant". I think it's plain that what our soldiers are not allowed to do by the Geneva Conventions, even in situations of extreme duress like "under enemy attack in combat zones", our spies and politicians should not be allowed to do in well-appointed offices in cold blood, before they go out for cocktails and cigars with their lobbyist buddies and friends in the press.
Like I told Mark, the United States needs a moral compass. We need a sense of mission untainted by what the devilish have done in the name of America. For me, torture represents a clear line to draw, and it is just as obvious that John McCain is not willing to draw it.

Short

2008-08-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

Series 2 of The Office UK: seriously vulgar, but the episode with the motivational speech was totally off the hook.
Andrew Sullivan pointed out something very provocative about John McCain's experience as a POW in Vietnam: he was never tortured. Read the link, it's pretty short, if you believe there is any controversy there.
McCain's flip-flop on the Military Commissions Act, condoning the torture status quo, lost him my vote. There is no place in a sane, civilized world for legalized torture. Period.

Media redux

2008-08-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

I think I need to start properly italicizing my book/movie posts. Not following the convention has finally gotten to me again.
Nobody told me Bridge to Terabithia was like it was. I wonder what parents took their kids on opening weekend, only to find out what it really was. For the record, I think it was pretty good, but I'm not sure yet if it was cheating. And the book is probably better...
We watched Dan in Real Life once again. It slays me every time. There is an amazing economy of motion. It's hilarious. It's true. Steve Carell is the man.
I finally finished The Pearl. I wish people would make their critical Prefaces into Postfaces so there are NO SPOILERS BEFORE THE STORY BEGINS. When you are flipping through trying to find page one, these are the worst possible things to stand in your way. They are like the soundtrack preview just before the DVD main menu. In the immortal words of Frank Costanza:

"HeyHeyHey ComeOn ComeOn! I haven't seen it yet!"

"It doesn't have anything to do with the plot."

"Still, still. I like to go in Fresh."

So I will not ruin the story. It was exquisitely written. I don't think I've read or heard any Steinbeck since Ms Backen read us Of Mice and Men in the 8th grade. I've never read The Grapes of Wrath, is that unbelievable? Like Stephen King, I am now looking forward to reading the rest of his oeuvre, starting again with Of Mice and Men, which I bought at the library sale.
Speaking of Mr King, the last we left him, he was writing himself into a book ostensibly about a rabid dog killing people indiscriminately, which I read as a book about his drug addiction destroying his family, and he had republished his long stories in Different Seasons, which contains not one but three stories made into movies. Now he's back on his ground in my opinion, writing in 1983 about a loser teenager named Arnie Cunningham, and his beat-up Plymouth, Christine. I had seen the trailer, so I knew this was about a car gone horribly wrong. I was expecting Cujo with a chrome bumper, I have been pleasantly surprised. And as always, when King is at his best, he isn't doing allegory. He is doing a story that is somehow weightier than its logline. Sure, it's about a demonic car (50 pages in, all signs point that way). But it is about a lot more than that.
I snuck into the hold line and scored a copy of The Way of the World, by Ron Suskind. Ron Suskind, if you'll recall, wrote two extremely important books about the Bush Administration. I wrote about The One Percent Doctrine earlier, which was an examination of something like the inner workings of the war on terror, and The Price of Loyalty, which was about Bush's domestic policy as seen through the eyes of Paul O'Neill. The only reason I haven't read very far is that I always seem to be about to eat something when I think of reading it. It's brand new and I don't want to get soup, condiments, or salty snack remains on it. From the news reports, this is the book that contains a fairly detailed account of Tahir_Jalil_Habbush_al-Tikriti, an Iraqi intelligence official, forging a document alleging false links between al-Qaeda and Iraq at the request of the Bush Administration. Let me say that twice: in order to prop up support for the then-underway invasion of Iraq, fantasists at the White House planted a document in order to retcon the justifications for the war. And he has the transcripts to prove it. But it also seems to be about the post-9/11, post-Bush future that we will collectively create. I am looking forward to both that future and this book's treatment of it.
Sarah and I just freed a bunny. It fell down a window well by our basement. It was scared, and would not climb up a piece of lattice we stuck down there. So, I climbed into the window well with a cardboard box, cornered the bunny and got it to go into the box, then lifted it out to safety.
I had a total score at the library and checked out Okami, a Nintendo Wii game. (I also found a klezmer band interpreting unpublished lyrics of Woody Guthrie: Wonder Wheel, by The Klezmatics, but if I talked about every great CD I found at the library, this would turn into a great CDs from the library blog. An improvement over the current content...) It is tiding me over until Spore comes out on September 7 (at which point, all bets are off).
But what a game. In Okami, you are Amaterasu Okami, the Shinto goddess of nature. (Shinto being a nature religion, this puts you at the top of the world.) You have been incarnated as a white wolf who, one hundred years ago, beat back the eight-headed dragon Orochi and sealed it in the Moon Cave, saving the world. Now, Orochi's prison has been unsealed, and the evil miasma of its presence wreaks devastation across the land of Nippon. Your mission is to use the power of calligraphy to restore the natural beauty of the environment.
This is an older game, having previously come out for Playstation at least, but it really shines on the Wii. The game cries out constantly for you to manipulate it with the power of your brush. Trees bloom, lily pads sprout, boulders slice in half as a result of your drawing. You feed the animals so they love you and restore the land (and also, on a somewhat heart-tugging level, because you are Mother Nature and that's just what you do). The mythology was foreign to me, but it's note-perfect, completely consistent. The dialogue is well-translated and human.
And the graphics are unreal. Every screen seems like a work of art. It's cel-shaded and fulsome, filled with falling cherry blossoms and stylized splashes. It takes up Japanese iconography, where a few lines represent a mountain, or the blazing sun is the familiar circle surrounded by stripes. The ink, due to the Wii remote's sensitivity to distance, feels like it's dripping on the screen. There are countless little details in the characterization, the landscape... even the menus are full of little touches.
If anybody asks you if video games are art, tell them to try Okami. It's not just great fun (if a little linear, but like you care, what a story; be prepared for it to be extremely Japanese though), it's over-the-top beautiful. The most interesting thing about its beauty, though, is that so much of it is derived from the interactivity. This wouldn't be nearly as good as a story about Okami, or a movie. The whole point of the thing is that you are the one reshaping and renewing the world, everything responds to you.
Work has been going pretty well. We are finally coming to the end of our cycle. We're actually in pretty good shape on my portion of the project (I was in charge of a decent-sized piece that I and approximately one and a half people have been working on), so I'm starting to look past what we've got and think about what's next. The delivery ate up a lot of my summer break, so I'm hoping the fall will be relaxing and rewarding for the family.
My son is back in preschool, so Sarah has more time on her own. I think it is making her think useful, deep thoughts about the future. Whenever she is free to be herself, even for a few hours a day, these ideas bubble up. I am excited for what the future holds as well...
PS, the bullet points seem to work, so I might stick to them for a while. They help me pretend I am just jotting things down, not inserting 500-word video game reviews into the middle of What I Did Last Week.
PPS The coolest Olympic thing I have seen so far is the badminton final. That guy was totally amazing.

Every Word We Say Is True

2008-08-03T22:13:00.000-07:00

It's a little unfair for me to inflict this on you, but I've got to get it out and move on. I wrote the first words for this song in May 2007 and I just can't make anything new without finishing it.

So there is a second draft sitting in the music player at left. I didn't have time to get in fancy instruments or anything. That's life.

Every Word We Say Is True

I've been talking with your ghost. She is friendly, as you know.
On the day you had to go, she started speaking almost clearly.
No, she doesn't have your eyes. I'm beginning to forget that and more.
But if time will not restore, I'll tell myself the lies sincerely.

She's still saying that you loved me.
I'm still saying that I knew.
Every word we say is true.

You've been living in my dreams, black and white and shades of gray,
And our scene is here to stay. Let words redeem, former times pass away.
For illusion though you are, every line I still will trace
When I meet you in that place. I'll see your star. I'll know the way.

Where you're saying that you love me,
And I say I love you too.
Every word we say is true.

We've walked far in foreign lands, talking strange to strangers' ears.
Faces blank, we shroud in years the dead demands of memory.
Our hands approach but never meet. Mirrors touch, but never touch.
I want to hear your voice so much, unbearable, sweet, and free.

If I whisper that I love you
With a love we never knew,
Would you want it to be true?

By the way, I have mixed feelings about punctuating lyrics and poetry. I feel like it eliminates some of the double meanings and possible interpretations, and thus some fun for the reader/listener.

Braindead

2008-07-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

Some things I did in the last month:

Saw my parents on a week-long vacation
Watched the entire run of The Office, US
Saw a herd of giraffes at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo
Ran Alex through a fountain and a pool at the public park
Bought a bag full of books and CDs with my dad for a grand total of $8. Most of the list:

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
The Green Mile by Stephen King
A Tolkien Treasury (various)
The Spy Who Came in From The Cold by John le Carre
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by John Steinbeck
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
In Search of Schrodinger's Cat (by somebody)
America: The Book by the Daily Show crew
Building Big by David Macaulay
Among Schoolchildren by Tracy Kidder
Five Major Plays by Anton Chekhov
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
Asterix el Legionario
and albums by G Love, Counting Crows, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Live, and The Jayhawks.

Bought a bottle of Leninade
Finished main development on my first professional software project
Read most of the extant novels of Charles Stross (still left: Accelerando, Glasshouse, Saturn's Children)
Watched the mountain stages of the Tour de France, including the magical Alpe d'Huez
Rode bikes with Mom and Dad before breakfast, causing much wheezing
Sold our 2000 Corolla to a truly desperate college graduate sister, who is moving to San Antonio for a year
Bought a shiny Ruby Red mid-size sedan: a 2007 Kia Optima
Found an oil leak in the shiny new Optima
Took the Optima to the Kia dealer, who services our 5 year/60000 mile factory warranty
Paid the Kia dealer for service anyway, because our car salesmen neglected to replace the oil drain plug when they changed the oil as a standard practice before resale, causing the leak and requiring a new oil change, which is not covered under the warranty
Called the car salesmen, who offered to change our oil next time around
Played Zombie Fluxx, a card game with constantly changing rules and zombies
Ate several kinds of exotic cheese
Ate my dad's delicious cooking for a decadent week
Sampled several Wii games new to me, like the awesome new Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, the lame and difficult Winter Sports, the neato Marvel Ultimate Alliance, the hilarious Excite Truck, and the exciting and difficult Guitar Hero: Aerosmith edition
Played a few games online with my brother
Called 1-800-GOOG-411 at every possible opportunity, to get phone numbers, store hours, and addresses
Visited the Tattered Cover and got a bunch of titles to check out
Started programming the internet in HTML, Perl/CGI, Javascript, CSS, etc etc etc at http://msg.nfshost.com (still under construction)

My best to you and yours. More to come soon.

Spore arrives

2008-06-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

So, I've been on about this for a while. Spore is a game coming out in September that will unleash unparalleled creativity on an unsuspecting gaming populace. It's the game of life, where you pass through successive generations designing yourself, from bacteria to creature, from sentient being to civilization. You model animals, cities, buildings, vehicles, flora in amazing detail, and then, through the magic of Will Wright and his team, your creations come to life. Then, through the magic of Will Wright, they will populate the galaxies of other players, a galaxy with millions of worlds that you can visit, eventually, in your species' spaceship. It is an unfinishable game.

Today a demo of just the creature creator went online. It is completely free to try, and you can construct the crazy animals that will fill the game. Get it here. Repeat, GET IT. Your jaw will hit the floor. Your kids will love it. You will love it. Your dog will love it.

It is a little nerfed; there is a $10 version with all parts and options enabled, which I am certainly buying as soon as they make it to stores (Thursday, I think). You need a halfway decent computer to run the software, but if you've bought in the last couple of years you should be fine (the specs for Vista are pretty fricking ugly though).

If you'd like to see some of my ridiculous creations, they will start filling in here. So far, only ballicus curius has made it to the internet. But I've done a couple more that should be on the way. And let me say, before you even start playing, you can spend hours just making animals.

This is one of the more amazing pieces of software I have ever seen. The technical challenges involved in turning J. Random Player, with help from the computer, into a successful 3D modeler were apparently astounding. I've been getting chills.

Sorry I've been out of the picture. It has not been for the best, but it's that kind of season in life. My software should be done with main development this week, though, so I may be able to take my foot off the gas pedal by next week.

Sarah is in Utah visiting friends and family, with Alex, so I have been all alone in the house. It is very strange. But I have been studying computers and doing whatnot.

My high school's ten year reunion is in a couple of weeks. In some ways, I am sorry not to be able to go. I haven't seen some friends in ages. I don't know why, but lately I keep thinking I will meet some friends to read books with. There is a guy at work who has been interested in my dive into Charles Stross lately, but it's not the same.

So, for the record, Charles Stross is an amazing speculative fiction writer. I read Singularity Sky, which is about as good an introduction as you could get to the Singularity (disparagingly, "the nerd rapture", when we create an AI that can bootstrap itself into godlike intelligence, or alternatively when we create nanomachines that can convert base materials into the stuff of our wildest dreams). Whether you believe all the theories or not (and I am inclined not to), it makes for a great story.

He also wrote a great near future story called Halting State, essentially about a world where the internet is very closely intertwined with real life, as in virtual reality layers that are based on the place on earth you are standing right now. So you could put on your VR goggles and be in a whole new world, essentially. So the story goes, what amounts to a bank in World of Warcraft 3.0 is robbed by a band of orcs. Then a group of hackers and forensic investigators is brought in to figure out what happened, on behalf of the country running the bank. It's hilarious, and I can't give away the terrific story. You should read it right away.

I had another book by Stross about a tech journalist who falls into a brave new world, like a curious shadow of Earth, called The Hidden Family, first in a series. It is great so far, as is Iron Sunrise, the sequel to Singularity Sky.

Sometimes I get like this with an author and I want to read all their stuff, as much as I can find. So far I've done it with William Gibson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Neal Stephenson, and Shusaku Endo. Stross is another one of those.

I'm also trying to get further in Godel, Escher, Bach. Every time I check it out, though, someone reserves it right behind me. I am going to break down and just buy it soon.

Hard at work

2008-05-23T17:58:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been working hard lately. It is close to delivery time at my work. On the bright side, that means I'm just about the end of my first shipping product. In other words, I was working on this software when it was barely a twinkle in our customer's eye, and my water just broke.

It's been a great experience. I've been getting better with Emacs and the shell, and with a lot of C++ over the last five months. Working with the team and a larger existing code base has also been enlightening. I've found it just takes a while to get up to speed with how things are organized, and the project's standard ways of doing things. I wish I'd had my TAGS file in Emacs months ago though. (It basically finds the proverbial needle in the haystack of code files for you.) Learning to give and take with my teammates and come up with mutually beneficial designs has been great too.

Now, we're working overtime. I am glad that we don't do 50 to 70 hour weeks for most of the year. This is really wearing, it's reminding me of grad school. I get about one day off per week at the moment. We're fortunate enough to get paid, so Sarah and I are probably taking down another credit card or two this month.

Hemingway slipped to the back burner as I read some Isaac Asimov this week. He's a giant in the sf field, writing many well-loved novels. Foundation, which is about the a society whose future has been mapped out by a psychohistorian, is a real classic. There's Nightfall, which is about a planet where night only falls once every couple of millennia.

And there are robots. Asimov coined the word "robotics" and wrote some great stories about them. I finished rereading I, Robot again, which is a collection of short stories about the first robots, and the three laws of robotics. They made it into a movie, I hear, but it was more "inspired by" than "based on" the stories in this book. It's charming and rereadable, and it even has a female lead. Pick it up, 100%.

I also read the first in a trilogy (Robots of Dawn, maybe?), which was a robot murder mystery called The Caves of Steel. It posits a human race, thousands of years in the future, on an overpopulated Earth, that has crowded into massive biodomes, made yeast products the main nutrition, regulated everyone's employment, and started to replace human workers with robots. Although humanity has space flight and has colonized other planets, the agoraphobia and xenophobia of the remaining earthlings is keeping a lid on the society, living out their lives in caves of steel. And that's just the setup. This is a fine, fine book. Its point-of-view feels alien to us air-breathing, outside-enjoying humans, just as it should. The main character's outlook on robots prefigures some of our current obsession with illegal immigrants stealing American jobs, and our mistrust of foreigners. There are some great moral themes as well. This is highly recommended. It might make more sense, though, if you read I, Robot first.

I've been working my way through C++ Coding Standards, which is a list of 100 pithy dos and don'ts by Herb Sutter and Andrei Alexandrescu. Sutter is the chair of the ISO C++ standard committee, and Alexandrescu is an expert on using C++ to do template metaprogramming (for libraries). Now, in some ways, C++ is a pig, and this book is like the lipstick on the pig. It's testimony on the complexity of the language that a book like this, which is almost completely language-specific tricks, had to exist. But there's another way that C++ is like a pig, and that is that it is liable to eat your foot if you try to ride it, and poke you with its bristles. And this book is like a saddle for the pig, for those of us forced to get on and put that pig through its paces. And, for what it aims at, it's a terrific book.

Ok, I just ran across this video, and it's too cool. This is just one more thing I love about computer science:

Change of subject. We bought a scuba diving game called Endless Ocean. It is very low impact as far as difficulty goes, but it is beautiful and mellow, like interacting with a screen saver.

Last, we preordered Wii Fit from Amazon while they were still taking orders. It arrived yesterday, and boy are my arms tired. Yes, they were weak, but still. The thing, for those of you who don't know, is an exercise game packaged with a balance board, which can sense your weight, center of gravity, balance, pressure, however you want to think of it. It is about one third game and two thirds exercise tool, with yoga and strength training as well as balance games and aerobics. It tracks your weight and activity, and tells you how weak you are. Sarah and I both got a good workout from it. In fact, I'm going to spend the next few minutes working at it again. It offers few advantages over the gym, but it does have one killer feature: the privacy of your own home. And, it does all the tracking for you, and it's fun.

I've got a bike you can ride it if you like

2008-05-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

Feeling introspective today. We used a bit of tax rebate money (the Bush legacy) to buy bikes, and today I rode a great many-speed bike (the first bike I've ever bought) for the first time in several years. I think the last time was summer of 2002. I had agreed to look after someone's house and they loaned me a bike to ride across Logan in.

I was a little deceptive there. The first bike I bought was yesterday. We bought a Magna piece of crap from Target. The brakes honked when I used them, so I spent a few hours on Mother's Day trying to tweak them. I finally got them acceptable, then when I rode around the block, the seat tilted forwards and backwards uncontrollably. When I finally wrestled it into submission and started pedaling, the chain broke in half, so I coasted a block with brakes, then walked back to our driveway.

I got very nostalgic about bikes. I rode all over the place in them: from my house to Paul vB's by Sylvester, to Mr. Norris's high school, Thomas Jefferson, out on S 288th St, up and down Normandy Park, to Des Moines, to Mt. Rainier... and then of course, my parents got into biking and we went all over the place: Lopez Island and the rest of the San Juans, the Canadian islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, UW to Woodinville (to a brewery; is Pyramid up there? no, Google tells me it was probably Redhook), the Green River trail, Burke Gilman, the STP... I still remember great biking moments, like heading out to Shark Reef with Tyler and Ian, and pitching over the handlebars after an ill-considered attempt to steer with one hand and drink a Slurpee with the other. There was a brief moment in undergrad at UW where I really missed having a bike, but I didn't act on it (or much else) until it was all over.

It meant something to me to be able to travel around town, to go where I pleased. Maybe part of it was wanting to be alone, too. I don't know how deeply to think about this now.

My parents definitely did us a service by giving us all the opportunity to get into it. I knew all the equipment to buy, for one thing. So we have our pump with built-in gauge, our mirrors, our helmets, our water bottles, our tire patch kit, our trunk-mounted rack for two, our bungee cords. Sarah also wants to take Alex out on the town with this bike, so we got a nice trailer that will double as a jogging stroller.

The new one is a silver Diamondback Wildwood Citi. It's for people who want to go around on the road, the trail, and possibly the path, not really the mountain (and don't want to spend much money). I like the gear shifts in the handles (they're rotaties, which I always liked better than paddles, or especially the analog pull-handle. Best of all, it's got a seat with its own suspension, so it's springy.

I couldn't get very far today, on my first ride in six years or so. So I just went on the trails by our house, got frightened all over again of going downhill through the gravel on my half-road, half-trail treads, and did a little loop until my thighs burned. Then I got home and wobbled upstairs on my weak legs.

I'm excited.

You may not know I'm a Pink Floyd fan (at least until Roger Waters left). Here's the early Pink Floyd (The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, 1967) on the subject of bikes:

We had a Mother's Day for the ages. We started out at The Village Inn for breakfast, but they were announcing tables with a handheld microphone at the servers podium and a loudspeaker. There was a tarp outside with water, and the pre-service church crowd, I don't know how else to explain it. We tried one more place, then ended up at the Farmer's Market that happens every Sunday in Highlands Ranch. We got a delicious cherry strudel and some Jamba juices, then a bag of hickory smoked almonds (speaking of which, they're in the car right now. excuse me...), and some cleverly carved wooden flowers that will always stay lovely, until the paint fades I suppose. Then we did the saga of the bikes. It was touch and go there, but we got it all sorted out. We rounded out the day with Sarah's new favorite, ice cream cake.

I found Book Lust and a cooking book at the Borders outlet this weekend. I am enjoying both, so far. The omission of Lois McMaster Bujold from Book Lust is a bit of a let down, though. Stephen King also doesn't get much play (although he's written tons of terrific stuff).

Folding proteins for fun

2008-05-09T21:21:00.000-07:00

There's been a project called Folding@Home around for a while. Basically, a project at Stanford borrows your computer to do heavy computations related to biochemistry: protein folding and misfolding, solving problems.

Well, a somewhat related project called Foldit allows you, the user, to fold protein chains interactively. I've tried it and it's a hoot. Essentially, you are trying to find the most stable state for the protein (highest energy maybe? lowest energy? I don't know the chemistry).

It's a fascinating way to play around with chemicals. It might even be possible for the scientists behind the game to teach protein folding to computers by using human play.

Download it if you like puzzles. The control isn't terrific, but it's plenty good enough for fun.

Catch-22 and Different Seasons

2008-05-06T13:38:00.001-07:00

I finished Catch-22 this week (and today I went and picked up the sequel, Closing Time). It's a great, great book. The later chapters are poignant and funny (the thing with Doc Daneeka is probably the saddest), and the ending is great. I don't know if I would've been prepared for it in high school. Or rather, I don't know if I would have been unprepared. It is the kind of book that catches you with your pants down and knocks you on your butt.

It is an over-the-top satire of the vagaries of war (unfortunately, probably not very over-the-top) and the illogic of bureaucracy and war in general. It is also a really good example of how the language of the story can become the story on some level. It wouldn't have been nearly as forceful without stuff like this:

Yossarian looked at him soberly and tried another approach. "Is Orr crazy?"

"He sure is," Doc Daneeka said.

"Can you ground him?"

"I sure can but first he has to ask me to. That's part of the rule."

"Then why doesn't he ask you to?"

"Because he's crazy," Doc Daneeka said. "He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to."

"That's all he has to do to be grounded?"

"That's all. Let him ask me."

"And then you can ground him?" Yossarian asked.

"No, then I can't ground him."

"You mean there's a catch?"

"Sure there is a catch," Doc Daneeka replied. "Catch-22. Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn't really crazy."

I would've gotten jokes like this, sure, but I don't think I would've groaned as much. The narrator of Catch-22 accepts all they see and say, something like Huck Finn. As I've said before, I wasn't good at standing outside the narrator's head. It's not that I had to be hit over the head with things, but I felt like I had to see things like the narrator did in order to understand the point of the story. This put me at a disadvantage with the unreliable narrators of modern fiction.

Anyhow, reread this if you haven't seen it for a while. It was great. I don't remember a single boring page. Sex, violence, language, and philosophy warnings.

I resumed my Stephen King program. I think I'm up to 1982 or so. I checked out Christine (which I think is about an evil car), and Different Seasons. Different Seasons is about as long as a paperback, and contains four short stories/novellas/novelettes/whatever. Three of them have been made into movies (and I'm not sure about the fourth). They all seem to have minor links between their characters.

The first one was "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption", which was the basis for The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman took the main roles). It was a great story, just as touching as the movie. It surprised me how much of the language from the story had survived into the movie. Most of the important incidents made it too. Looking back at the movie, I see why they added and changed what they did: somebody had some real brainstorms for the movie. But there are no substantial differences in the feeling of the thing. Make haste to read the story and see the movie.

The second one was "Apt Pupil". Once, I read that good vs. evil is a hoary old conflict for a plot to do. Instead, you should do something closer to good vs. good; that is, oppose characters who want conflicting things for their own good reasons. There are a lot of reasons to do it: the characters will be more realistic, the conflict will be more meaningful, the story will be less predictable.

"Apt Pupil", on the other hand, is pure evil vs. pure evil. It's about a kid who becomes fascinated with the Holocaust and the concentration camps, then recognizes an old Nazi living in his town. Instead of turning the Nazi into the cops, the kid coerces the Nazi into telling him every gory detail. And that's just the beginning of the story. Everything spirals down from there. In a way, I couldn't wait for both of them to get their comeuppance. But it gets pretty horrible along the way.

It was made into a movie with Ian McKellen and Brad Renfro, but I don't think I really want to see it.

Next up in that one is "The Body", which got made into Stand By Me, a movie I might have seen snatches of, but now can't remember.

I also got The Old Man and the Sea. It was on the shelf near Joseph Heller's books. I don't think I have ever read a whole story by Hemingway, much less a novel, so this is another big classic for me.

So many classics, so little time.

In the year 2108

2008-04-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

The recent flap over the DNC's new ad which quotes John McCain talking about the length of the American commitment in Iraq, revolves around this exchange:

TIFFANY (questioner): President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.

MCCAIN: Maybe a hundred. ... That'd be fine with me

If this were the whole of his comments, it would be tantamount to saying we will never leave Iraq in my lifetime or my son's lifetime. Or anyone else's son's lifetime.

Certain people have been saying that this rips the quote out of context. And it's true that the paragraph is a bit different than the ad makes it seem:

Maybe a hundred. How long—We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.

More moderate, right? Here, McCain seems to hedge a bit and say that if the violence doesn't end (perhaps, return to prewar levels; if you believe the epidemiologists, it seems like we're still way above the prewar level. Here's the article about those studies) then he would support getting out. Here, one might wonder how much American and Iraqi death is too much. A cynic might ask if the violence would become too heavy a burden before or after November 2008.

Fortunately, we don't have to wonder, because again there is more context for McCain's remarks (on January 3, 2008, mind you). Here is the full exchange. It's from a New Yorker blog by Hendrik Hertzberg. The only words I changed from the original rough transcript are "Make it a hundred"; the tape clearly has McCain saying "Maybe a hundred."

Bear in mind that the questioner is an antiwar activist (I didn't know at the time). Whether he's an agitator looking to score points is... beside the point. McCain's opinion, it turns out, is pretty forthright.

Dave Tiffany... [a “full-time antiwar activist”] asked McCain “what you hope to accomplish in Iraq and how long it’s going to take.”

Here’s my rough transcript of what followed:

MCCAIN: The fact is, it’s a classic counterinsurgency. And you have to get areas under a secure environment, and that secure environment then allows the economic, political, and social process to move forward. In case you missed it, New Year’s Eve, people were out in the streets in Baghdad by the thousands for the first time in years. That’s because we provided them with a safe and secure environment. Is it totally safe? No. I talked earlier about the suicide bombs and the continued threats. But then what happens is American troops withdraw to bases. And we reach an arrangement like they have with South Korea and Japan. We still have troops in Bosnia. The fact is, it’s American casualties that the American people care about. Those casualties are on the way down, rather dramatically. You’ve got to consider the option. If we had withdrawn six months ago, I can look you in the eye and tell you that Al Qaeda would have said, We beat the United States of America. If we’d gone along with Harry Reid and said the war is lost to Al Qaeda, then we would be fighting that battle all over the Middle East. I’m convinced of that and so is General Petraeus.... I can tell you that it’s going to be long and hard and tough. I can tell you that the option of defeat is incredible and horrendous. And I can look you in the eye and tell you that this strategy is succeeding. And what we care about is not American presence. We care about American casualties. And those casualties will be dramatically and continue to be reduced.

TIFFANY: I do not believe that one more soldier being killed every day is success. There were three U.S. soldiers killed today. I want to know, How long are we going to be there?

MCCAIN: How long do you want us to be in South Korea? How long do you want us to be in Bosnia?

TIFFANY: There's no fighting going on in South Korea. There's no fighting in Bosnia. Let's come back to Iraq.

MCCAIN: I can look you in the eye and tell you that those casualties tragically continue… But they are much less, and they are dramatically reduced and we will eventually eliminate them. And again, the option of setting a date for withdrawal is a date for surrender. And we will then have many more casualties and many more American sacrifices if we withdraw with setting a date for surrender. Now you and I have an open and honest disagreement. But I can tell you that six months ago people like you, who believe like you do, said the surge would never succeed. It is succeeding. And I've been there and I've seen it with my very own eyes. Do you want to follow up?

TIFFANY: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.

MCCAIN: Maybe a hundred. How long—We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we've been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me. I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training and recruiting and equipping and motivating people every single day.

TIFFANY: By the way, I hope you kick Romney’s butt. That man cannot lie straight in bed.

MCCAIN: I knew there was a reason I called on you.

TIFFANY: What if U.S. soldiers are being killed at the same rate, one per day, four years from now?

MCCAIN: I can't tell you what the ratio is. But I can tell you, I understand American public opinion, sir. I understand American public opinion will not sustain a conflict where Americans continue to be sacrificed without showing them that we can succeed.

TIFFANY: I hear an open-ended commitment, then.

MCCAIN: I have an open-ended commitment in Asia. I have an open-ended commitment in South Korea. I have an open-ended commitment in Bosnia. I have an open-ended commitment in in Europe…

The rest was drowned out by applause. McCain said, “This kind of dialogue has to take place in America today, and I thank you.”

To me, it's fairly clear that McCain doesn't have an exit strategy for Iraq. He has a permanent presence strategy for Iraq. He can contemplate being there in the year 2108, long after he's dead (and long after the next American casualty will be dead). What he can't contemplate is a future where American military force continues to fail in the face of a completely untenable political situation in Iraq.

Don't you get it? We have already had eight long, long years of a President who refuses to contemplate the consequences of failure, who is not living and dying in the reality that the rest of us recognize. The idea that we will have to go through another four years of this exhausts me, it makes my heart heavy.

Finally, here's Josh Marshall, with a very watchable dissection of the flap, with further McCain statements reaffirming his long-term commitment to the occupation of Iraq.

Book action

2008-04-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

I read Smoke and Mirrors, another short story collection by Neil Gaiman. There are a few stories that will definitely stick with me, and more that are pretty forgettable. The Cthulhu ones were pretty good, and there's a great murder mystery set in Heaven, prior to Satan's rebellion.

I started Catch-22 on a blustery day at Denver's City Park Lake. I've never read it before. I was in the shade most of the afternoon, working on the first hundred pages or so. It finally got so cold between the tree and the wind that I moved a couple of benches over to the warmth of the sun. I felt much better while I was there, and I developed a nasty sunburn.

Catch-22 is a funny funny book.

Code folding in emacs

2008-04-15T22:27:00.000-07:00

I wrote a regular expression today that got my C++ major mode in Emacs to play nice with outline mode. For the first go round, I am just collapsing down to comments. We are using Doxygen so the structure is predictable.

It helped me double-check that I'd done the comments up to our standard, which was useful and productive.

Customizing Emacs has been a bit of a ride, but there is enough material on the internet to do quick fixes. My job isn't really paying me to learn an editor, but I'll spend a little time to get things like this in order.

One thing that's caught me a little off-guard is how little I depend on an IDE to get stuff done at work. I definitely recommend that the programmers out there wean off Visual Studio and Eclipse, and just put a good editor in their toolbox.

I saw The Simpsons' "Worst. Episode. Ever." again tonight. It's a meta-episode about how the Simpsons' writers are running out of ideas, so they have to recycle old plots, make ridiculous running jokes, crappy dialogue, and default to implausible coincidences to resolve the story. It's one of the funniest things they've ever done.

For those who don't know The Lewises, we have about 15 hours worth of Simpsons episodes on the DVR right now. It's the 800 pound gorilla, the monster show, undefeated champion of the world. It's twice as long as Seinfeld and still going. The quality is still running surprisingly strong.

Best. Sitcom. Ever?

The Baroque Cycle finally finishes

2008-04-13T08:58:00.000-07:00

Well, it was quite a ride. Quite a ride, indeed. But I finished the Baroque Cycle, the 3000-page (in hardback! It's something like 8 paperbacks) historical novel set in the days of Newton, science and calculus, currency, and the beginning of the modern world.

If you haven't been following along, the story revolves around three larger-than-life characters: Daniel Waterhouse, Newton's schooltime chum and doer of deeds; Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, a kind of bloody-minded adventurer, beggar, and explorer; and Eliza, the woman Jack loves, a master of markets and influence. Behind the scenes, they create the atmosphere in which the greats of the era get things done.

What surprised me most was the lengths to which modernity depended on Newton's project to create a money system that could be trusted. He spent half his life on a project I hadn't even known was important. I used to think that Newton's best years were behind him when he went to work at the Mint. This book certainly put it in perspective for me.

I don't know how to describe it exactly. At the beginning of the book, the world is very chaotic and new. By the end of the last volume (titled The System of the World), Newton and his generation have created systems, and even in a way, systematic knowledge. Newton and Leibniz divide the world between them, all else is technology, that sort of thing.

I watched the modern world come into being, while caring about the poignant and hilarious adventures of this motley crew (and there's a cast of hundreds to care about, if you can). It's hard to believe that so much could get packed into one story, but somehow it did. And it definitely played hard and well as a counterpoint to and illumination of our modern times.

Plus, Monty Python jokes, including an absolute howler in Volume III.

I will definitely need longer to digest it, but it's been an amazing trip. I've been reading these for months, and I haven't appreciated all the subtleties, I'm sure. If you have several weeks to devote to one work of fiction, this would take you to great places. I feel like I can finally get back to reading three books at once, which is more like normal mode for me.

My only quibble is this: I know that the story takes artistic license with the events of the period. So I now have more fictional knowledge about the Baroque era than real knowledge. It's like Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell, which gave me fictional knowledge about Jack the Ripper. So, now that I'm interested in this stuff, I'll have to read a great deal of history. No doubt some fictional knowledge will always be mixed in from now on.

Also like Alan Moore's graphic novel about Jack the Ripper, this series is for adults only. I don't actually worry too much about kids reading for the sex, violence, disturbing images, language and adult situations. They're never going to make it past the superb language, the hunks of world knowledge inserted by the author, and the thinking they'd have to do to put it together.

Five Stars.

Google takes over the Internet

2008-04-09T21:48:00.001-07:00

Let me bring you up to speed.

Ok, that's not exactly hyperbole. While Google has been essentially the most popular first click on the Internet, it has done so as an honest broker. It has said that pages sink or swim in its search results on the basis of algorithms, not favors for favors. It is a road sign on the (sigh) information superhighway, rarely an offramp or destination.

There are some exceptions. Google has steadily built a stable of productivity applications: Gmail, Gcal (the calendar), Google Maps, Google Docs and Spreadsheets (think Word and Excel, less powerful, but collaborative). They also own some content, like Youtube (and Google Video), and of course Blogger.

You can find the bleeding edge stuff at labs.google.com. Google 411 is a fascinating example. You can call a toll-free number from anywhere, 1800 GOOG 411, talk to a robot, search for a business by type, then get connected to the business without putting down the phone. The whole service is always free.

Why is Google doing Google 411? No, no, it's not just to put regular 411 out of business, which it totally would if anyone knew about it. There's a much awesomer reason to do it. While you talk to the robot, your voice data is being collected to train speech recognition algorithms. They're trading information so their robot can listen to you. It's not much of an invasion of privacy, really (if you called real 411, you'd be telling a person what you were looking for anyway). You can even block your caller ID before calling in, if you're paranoid.

Last week, Google stuck a program out there that allows you to use their office products even when you're offline, and seamlessly resyncs your data when you regain your internet connection. Google Docs and Spreadsheets are now competing directly with Microsoft Office...

Trust me, they are doing stuff there you could not imagine.

Until now. Google's system scales better than anything else out there; the amount of data they use and process is mindboggling, and they've created several unique tools to analyze it all efficiently. This week Google opened up its internet infrastructure (in beta), allowing people access to their application servers, Google FS filesystem and BigTable databases. It's called Google App Engine.

They're allowing 500 MB of space free, and a generous amount of bandwidth per month. The level of use they are allowing is free into the future, three applications per person. If you want more space or page views, you'll pay Google some amount of money.

Chances are good that the next great internet application, the next Facebook, will be written on these servers. And best of all, it takes 90% of the thinking out of hosting internet applications. It is Internet programming for the masses, in Python. It costs nothing just to go make a cool project that anyone in the world can see. A lot of budding young programmers will do just that. And Google will buy that awesome application that already runs on their infrastructure, along with the programmers who wrote it.

I decided to be a budding young programmer. To go with my Emacs and Unix obsession, I'm getting back into Python by fooling around with it to do processing for my Netflix prize data. And of course, I'm on the waiting list for the Engine... internet programming is a somewhat hairy world. I am taking my baby steps through Unix first, then onward.

I am on the home stretch of The Baroque Cycle. It's been just about perfect. I'm on the last 200 pages (out of 2500 or so). I'll be sorry to see it go. But, there's a new Neal Stephenson novel coming out in the fall, so I'm right on time. I've also never read Catch-22, so I got that from the library.

Linus and religion

2008-04-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

No, not the philosophical kid with the blanket. Incidentally, the complete Peanuts is coming out in permanent book form now. Here's one. It will take over a decade to release them all to the buying public. A full set will cost in the neighborhood of $400.

I grew up with Peanuts. When I have frivolous spending money, I might get a set for my kids. And if anyone out there in publishing land is listening, a DVD ROM set would go straight onto my wish list.

I finished Just For Fun, the autobiography of Linus Torvalds, this week. Linus is the originator and still dictator for life of Linux, the Unix-clone operating system kernel that is free to inspect, copy, and obtain. Linus is an interesting character with an obvious gift for low-level software and the interface between it and hardware that he has planted himself in. That part of the book is quite interesting. In fact, I recommend it overall, although the story is bookended by a philosophy I am about to disagree with.

His exposition of the meaning of life is not so cogent. Essentially, he believes that human behavior comes down to essentially, a hierarchy of needs. The most basic need is survival. The next is social. The last is entertainment. They are not just like needs, they are also something like the stages of human endeavor and motivation.

Aside from leaving off the tops of Maslow's pyramid, which is itself an incomplete story at best, Linus' theory of behavior omits some other important motivators/stages.

There's no good and evil in Linus' world. I leave it to you whether the Carthaginian human sacrifice of children was an example of survival, social, or entertainment. On the good side of religion, there's the Kierkegaardian knight of faith, who follows the moral that is in some way beyond the mores of society. It would take reductionism in the extreme to call, say, Abraham's sacrifice of his son Isaac to God a product of the survival instinct or the social order, when a major point of the story is to turn exactly those things upside down. Here's the incomparable beginning:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!"

"Here I am," he replied.

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about."

Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey.

More stages: the ultimate end of entertainment is corruption and decay. See the Romans, Fox News, any decadent society (pre-bloodbath France). And religious/civil awakening seems to be a spontaneously generating toothbrush for that decay. You can often see the pendulum swing again to a state sponsorship of religion. I'm not sure where power fits into survival, social, or entertainment either.

I suppose it's possible that Linus is carefully couching these stages in terms of progress, so a lot of what I am talking about are the forces opposed to survival, social, and entertainment, but I think he's really aiming at a broader target than that.

Another Dan Lewis original

2008-03-29T00:15:00.001-07:00

And another song changes from relentlessly dreary to somewhat bouncy.

I've had most of the words for this song for a couple of years. I played it once for friends and it didn't have a real chorus. The word "stranger" was used repeatedly, which was pointed out to me.

So I realized through the process of this recording that if you want to repeat a word a lot, it has to be in the chorus. Of interest, every verse still has a rhyme or near rhyme for "stranger". So you can kind of guess how it went.

In music as in writing, if your audience says something is wrong, they're right. However, the audience does not always know how to fix it. I don't remember where I picked up that little proverb, but it is so true.

I discovered the guitar solo sound by poking around on the pedal. It reminds me a little of Mark Knopfler's signature sound (of course, he has real guitars and real guitar pedals; if I had to guess, I'd say he was playing on a hollowbody, for one thing). You narrowly missed hearing a guitar sound that was like a car going past you: neeeerrrowm. Repeatedly. I thought it sounded violinish.

The song's not autobiographical. It's the story of one complete relationship, like the seven ages of man (but there are only four verses, I spared you). I enjoy writing songs where you say the same thing over and over again, but its meaning keeps changing. I find a similar delight in The Simpsons' postmodern humor. And here is the Jargon File on hacker humor, which really explains it all:

hacker humor

A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics:

1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor having to do with confusion of metalevels (see meta). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold a red index card in front of him/her with “GREEN” written on it, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is funny only the first time).

2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as specifications (see write-only memory), standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL), and even entire scientific theories (see quantum bogodynamics, computron).

3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre, ludicrous, or just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.

5. A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive currents of intelligence in it — for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humor that combines this trait with elements of high camp and slapstick is especially favored.

6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X nature, Discordianism, zen, ha ha only serious, koan.

See also filk, retrocomputing, and the Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that all six of these traits are really aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are (a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are also recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout science-fiction fandom.

Oh, and it's called "Stranger For Your Love", obviously.

I just realized that the original hook, the reason for the song's existence, a cool sounding bass line, has vanished from the version I've got now... maybe if I had more friends to play music with? I wouldn't create these problems?

More editors

2008-03-27T20:32:00.000-07:00

So Emacs 22 got installed at work. I had a heady sense of power, during which I actually got real work done.

As it turned out, there are several chapters in Learning Gnu Emacs that are not important to me at this time, like the major mode for HTML, or Lisp programming (which I already know how to do). So I'm almost done with it. What I really have left to learn are the programming modes and the Emacs object model.

Dean tried to start a rainstorm on my parade. Hi Dean! I still remember getting up early for your C++ class. Good times. I think he's right. The best programmers don't care that much whether they work in vi or emacs. They probably spend the vast majority of their time thinking.

I heard a quote once that SQL was one of the only languages where you do more thinking than typing. I think it's true for me, but in every language I work in, not just SQL. I figure things out for a long time, then type as fast as possible (unless it's the night before something is due; then I just type). Sometimes I worry that I am not getting done all that I could be, if I were frenetic and focused enough to bang out enormous applications overnight.

I don't know if my emacs phase is just a novelty. I have enjoyed not leaving the environment to get all my work done. I don't really feel like I'm context switching to just go to the shell buffer. I feel a little like this was the way it's meant to be.

Lisp as an extension language is good in my book too. I still think Scheme and Common Lisp are probably the most amazing languages I have ever tried to understand, so I guess I am doing all this learning for a variety of mutually self-supporting reasons.

I know enough vi to get around in a pinch, so I don't feel qualified to boo and hiss at vi users. We have some great programmers using vi at my job, too.

But let's also say I am doing an experiment with this tool. I have a crush, we're on our first date. But do we really have a future together? Stay tuned.

New topic, I've been listening to Chris Thile's new band's new album. They are called the Punch Brothers and it is called Punch. (They did another excellent album called How To Grow a Woman From The Ground while Thile was still in Nickel Creek.) It is a chamber-classical-bluegrass album about love, Thile's divorce, and religion. The main music is a forty-minute bluegrass piece called The Blind Leaving The Blind. In four movements. They're all, individually and together, virtuoso players. I can barely wrap my head around it. If you are remotely interested from this description, plunk your dollars on the table (or the computer). They have a Myspace site if you want to hear something awesome first. Or Google videos.

Emacs, Unix, geeking out all over the place

2008-03-26T19:05:00.000-07:00

This isn't very exciting to almost anyone, but after months of vacillating, I've finally taken the plunge into using GNU Emacs at work and at home.

My PC has been relegated to the dustbin of history, only turning on for music recording now (and that's only because I can't get the guitar pedal control program working). For me lately, Unix has been it at work and it at home.

What is GNU Emacs, you ask? Well, for you non-programmers out there, you might think of it, at first blush, as a very very very sophisticated version of Notepad. It is first a text editor. On the other hand, there is a joke about GNU Emacs: it's a nice operating system, not such a great text editor. This refers to the fact that Emacs is extensively programmable, and as such has become, over the years, a command shell (windows users, open cmd.exe), a software development tool, a program interpreter, a games platform, and pretty much anything you can think of and program. It even edits text.

Why is it so cool? Well, in the Unix world, there are basically two text editors: vi and emacs. They are fruitful, and multiply, and so there are vim and gvim and xemacs and so on. There are other options, like Nirvana Edit and Nano/Pico and such, but vi and emacs dominate the text editor landscape.

A lot of programmers I really respect use Emacs. One in particular, Steve Yegge, got me thinking when I read stuff like the following. Incidentally, if you're a computer programmer, you could do worse than read his two blogs. He has a somewhat unique perspective as an employee of first Amazon, then Google, not to mention the creator and maintainer of Wyvern, which can be described as a cross between Nethack and MUDs. In other words, whether you agree with all he says or not, he's brilliant. So listen:

Emacs is the world's best text editor. It's not just the best for editing program source; it's the best for any kind of text-editing. Mastering Emacs will make you more effective at writing and editing email, documentation drafts, blogs, HTML pages, XML files, and virtually everything else that requires any typing.

and

The original brilliant guys and gals here only allowed two languages in Amazon's hallowed source repository: C and Lisp.

Go figure.

They all used Emacs, of course. Hell, Eric Benson was one of the authors of XEmacs. All of the greatest engineers in the world use Emacs. The world-changer types. Not the great gal in the cube next to you. Not Fred, the amazing guy down the hall. I'm talking about the greatest software developers of our profession, the ones who changed the face of the industry. The James Goslings, the Donald Knuths, the Paul Grahams, the Jamie Zawinskis, the Eric Bensons. Real engineers use Emacs. You have to be way smart to use it well, and it makes you incredibly powerful if you can master it.

and

In the meantime, Emacs isn't going anywhere, and Emacs-Lisp isn't going anywhere, not for several decades at least, so it will benefit you to learn them deeply. It will never be obsolete knowledge. You might as well start learning it now, and reap the benefits now.

and finally, the quote that always gets me:

Old algorithms don't suck, unless perhaps you count Bubble Sort. Generally, the more tried-and-true an algorithm or data structure is (DFS, BFS, quicksort, binary search, hashing, etc.), the more confidence you have in it. Ideas are fundamental and timeless, but technologies are always replaced.

Lisp straddles the line between a fundamental idea and a technology — which is another reason it took me so long to settle on it. And in many ways I'm still unhappy with it. But I believe it's the best thing out there, and will continue to be so for (at least) my lifetime. (My bet on Emacs fifteen years ago is still paying off.)

I realized that I was standing at the cusp of a unique opportunity in my career: I could make a great bet, hardly risky at this point given three decades of history on this one. The bet would improve my productivity and understanding for years to come. So why not?

Something just got to me in the last couple of days. I decided to get out Learning Gnu Emacs, read the first few chapters, then just decided that it was time. I knew enough to be dangerous, and I'd look up things in the book when I found I wanted to do them. I got myself running at work, my shell in one window and my text in the split screen, and I really didn't look back.

I was practically getting shivers. It was exciting, to see things just working, to get my fingers used to messing around. There is a reason why you just start up Emacs and don't leave the environment for the rest of the day.

I asked our sysadmin to get Emacs 22, which came out more recently than what we had (Emacs 19 from 1997!), and then tried to build it from source myself. That was a little ambitious for Day One, it turned out. But Day Two should get it going smoothly.

This is one of those programmer rites of passage, like customizing your prompt and terminal. I'm sort of getting it at the same time that I really want to get Unix. On those lines, I also got Classic Shell Scripting so I can pursue another decades-old programming tradition.

I even got Linus Torvalds' biography from the library.

The only regret I have is that I'm putting learning operating systems and compilers on the shelf for a little while to get all this done. But I figure that learning the Unix Way first will be worth it. (For the Unix Way, see also Eric S Raymond's stuff: The Art of Unix Programming, How To Become A Hacker, The Unix and Internet Fundamentals HOWTO, and of course, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.)

Poor man's guitar setup

2008-03-19T22:48:00.000-07:00

So I didn't have much to do tonight, and I decided to take out the strings I bought a few weeks ago, change them out, and (gulp) raise the bridge without professional help.

I changed the strings and took more than hour to shim up my bridge, which it turns out has been too low, causing all kinds of fret buzz and unplayable notes.

The bridge is the piece of the guitar next to the start of the strings, near the bottom. It is a little wall the strings climb over on their trip up the neck. The point of the bridge is to keep the strings from being at the surface of the guitar, where they have no room to vibrate and jangle against the wood surface as they are played.

On the other hand, unless you are doing slide/dobro kinds of things, you don't want the action (the height of the strings above the neck) to be too high. A high action makes it difficult to press down a string on to the neck at a given fret, to produce the note you want, because you have to push harder. It makes it especially difficult to bend strings, which involves pressing down to play a note, then pulling the string sideways to slightly and smoothly increase the pitch. It is fun to do and turns your guitar from a discrete instrument into a continuous instrument, opening up some interesting possibilities.

They, where they equals the leading internet resources on setting up your guitar, want you to put in thin pieces of wood veneers, about 1/32 of an inch each, to adjust the bridge up just right, to get a nice low action without getting all that fret buzz.

I don't have wood veneers, but I was hoping to get some from underneath as I was casting around for an appropriate material, I lit upon the perfect poor man's wood veneer.

I want to say one word to you. Just one word.

Are you listening?

Plastics.

I have a bunch of crappy club cards in my wallet, for toy stores and Autozone and a bunch more. By carefully scissoring the long edge of the toy store card, then cutting to fit in the precise length of my bridge (insert an hour of experimenting and annoyance here), I've got it just about perfect.

The only problem was, my worst offending string, the high E, still had an annoying dead region starting about the 11th fret and extending for five steps or so. This is what we in the music business call a major buzzkill. So I turned to the trusty internet again, where I found a suggestion to stick a little material in between the bridge and the offending string, shimming it up still further.

And of course you know what happened next; I just happen
ed to have a debit card from Utah to cut up, and two pieces of it stacked end to end, jammed in between wire and plastic bridge now mar the appearance of my beloved guitar.

But they raised the string up so it plays perfectly (and so it's a little higher than the others, making me feel like I have an intelligent, custom setup), so it's worth looking a little silly.

Poking around

2008-03-18T22:23:00.000-07:00

I've been poking around with the Mac, installing MySQL (a database management system) so I can get the Netflix data into the database. I also spent a good half hour figuring out you can use nice/renice to reprioritize processes, and use prepare/execute to speed up MySQL insertions, which is making the Perl script go a bit more smoothly on the 10 million insert statements I need to do to get the data into a table.

I also plugged my pedal into the Mac. I was a bit surprised to find that it was plug-and-play, zero configuration in Garage Band. I have been doing stuff in Audacity, but it's apparently the week to experiment.

If the "Music By Dan" player in the left column is not showing five songs by me, you can also go look at a static Google page with them here. An earlier commenter gave me the impression she couldn't see them.

On Vince's encouragement, I picked up some more Glenn Gould CDs from the library, along with Simon and Garfunkel's albums. Incidentally, their entire concert in Central Park is here. I also got Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You).

On the way home, I was listening to Kathy's Song and it got me thinking, here:

And so you see I have come to doubt
All that I once held as true
I stand alone without beliefs
The only truth I know is you

I don't think that I have beliefs exactly. Instead I have one big belief, or one big world of belief that I inhabit. The individual things that make up my world, it turns out, are all connected. They are supposed to hang together, and for the most part they do. They are not gas particles randomly colliding in Brownian fashion. Really they are more like a crystal, albeit with impurities.

I will try to get around to explaining this when I have a few more minutes. But what I want to say about it for now is that pursuing destructive proofs by contradiction (gotchas) of a crystalline belief is like pointing out impurities in a crystal. My wife's engagement ring has a diamond with such an impurity, but that doesn't make the diamond worthless, or make it structurally unsound. As a believing person I am not personally attached to x, y, or z flawed example belief. If you want to destroy a diamond, you have to use another diamond.

Adventures in media

2008-03-13T20:39:00.000-07:00

I got my hands on a recording of Glenn Gould doing The Goldberg Variations. I love Bach's music, but I have not (yet) been trained to appreciate the theoretical delights of baroque music. I may get around to it. About the middle of the CD (track 16), there was one that was fast and surprising and crazy. It blew my mind. Normally I listen to albums all the way through, but that one earned a previous track.

I don't normally listen to rap, but I make a few exceptions, and now one of them is the Jurassic 5. I listened to the album FeedBack today. It was very entertaining. If I've interpreted the music and the liner notes correctly, it's a mostly Muslim hip-hop group that spends a good deal of time being upbeat and simultaneously deconstructing gangsta. They keep the swearing to a minimum for the most part, and they have an amazing sound and mind-expanding lyrics.

Unfortunately, they are breaking up (or already have). I first heard of them when another one of those crazy rap-salsa-activist bands that I love (Ozomatli) had Chali2na and Cut Chemist as guests on their self-titled album, way back in my undergraduate days. Once again, I am the last person to the party.

I cackled and howled at a movie tonight for the first time in a while. It was Mr. Bean's Holiday. Go see (rent) this movie immediately. Unlike the voyage to America ten years ago, which was a heart-warming family comedy, this was classic Mr. Bean in France, and it was dazzling. The plot makes as much sense as a Seinfeld episode. Mr. Bean wins a vacation in Cannes, and takes the long way around. I don't think I had a single dull moment. And if you know anything about France, it's that much more perfect. And I should mention that Willem Dafoe has a perfect, hilarious part as a self-important emo director with a film premiering at Cannes.

Out of sorts

2008-03-12T22:22:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind words and love. Sarah and I have appreciated you all.

I have been hard at work learning Bayesian networks and inference, in pursuit of the Netflix Prize. Tonight, I'm getting all the rating data in that database. I think I am writing my stuff in Perl. I am also considering getting it onto the PC so I can use Matlab, but that would take a new hard drive.

But other than that, I've been Daylight Savings Out Of Sorts. I slept pretty crappily last night.

I hope to get a little deeper into the saga of Alex as time goes on. Sarah and I have found a lot of misconceptions about autism out there. The most obvious is that Alex doesn't seem to be neurotic like Rainman or other celebrated cases. Instead, his diagnosis of autism comes down to a checklist in the DSM, and a few boxes like "not enough language for communication", "not enough pretend play", "does not attend to unfamiliar adult". There is a broad spectrum of disorder, from truly incommunicable sensibilities back up to where Alex is. I figure that telling Alex's story and our story can break a few stereotypes.

My son has autism

2008-03-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

Now that I have your attention, let me bring you up to speed.

Around Alex's second birthday, October 2006, Sarah and I decided to explore preschool for Alex. He had a number of symptoms, like speech delay, flapping hands, spinning stuff, repetitive behavior, low social interaction and communication. We got into an early childhood class where Alex got speech therapy and occupational therapy a couple of times per month, and preschool with other kids with similar issues two times per week.

I was finishing up my CS degree at the time and working on my thesis. If I thought about it at all, I basically believed that Alex was just behind, and time the great healer would catch him up.

Alex has always been smart, if a bit uncommunicative at times. He also clearly loves people and has the most fun interacting with us. These boded well to me, so I put the issues on the back burner.

As time went on, we saw Alex respond to his classroom and enjoy school. Sarah read more about autism, including some books. She read the fascinating Born On A Blue Day, the autobiography of an autistic savant. You can watch an hour-long video about this particular guy here. She also read Jenny McCarthy's book about her autistic son, got hooked up with an autistic parents' group, read another book... you get the idea.

We moved last July, and priority 1 was to get Alex into services. We found a nice team in our town who helped get him into preschool. His class is about 80% "norms" and 20% "others": the autistic and fragile-X and antisocial and non-talking children. For Alex, this is really valuable, to be with lots of kids, many of whom are active and talking on schedule. Also, there are a raft of specialized teachers doing speech therapy and special ed and occupational therapy along with the regular ones. Thank God, the school was right around the corner from our house so Sarah could walk him in the mornings while I was at work.

We also put him in an enormous queue for evaluation and diagnosis at a children's hospital. Depending on the results, we could get greater access to services, or perhaps find out that Alex was catching up quickly enough that no extra intervention was required. It took several months to get him in.

This morning, we finally took Alex in to meet with several doctors. They tested his abilities in various ways, exhausting the entire family with questionnaires and performances, and finally gave us the bad news. Alex is officially diagnosed with autism. Among other things, he now qualifies for specialized care, more subsidized therapies from the state, a Medicaid disability waiver, insurance claims, and so on. Sarah and I can have the opportunity to be trained to help Alex at home.

They also gave us the good news, which is that Alex seems to have normal cognitive abilities. He can speak phrases and understand a lot of things. He can do some things quickly, and, the doctors suspect, would have passed more tests if some fundamental issues with paying attention and following directions had been resolved before today.

What this means to me is that there is a well-developed child who wants to connect to the world around him. I almost said "trapped in a X's body", "struggling to get out", but these don't quite catch my meaning.

What I mean is, it is worth fighting to save my son, to give him a high-functioning, healthy life. It is crucial to do it now, it is worth my blood, sweat, and tears.

Normally, I like to be philosophical about things. It implies that you can take a step back, and that if you have a strong opinion, it's because you've considered a thing from many angles, seen it from the inside and the outside, understood the person or idea you disagree with at its strongest. I also think it means your attitude is intellectual, controlled, and cold. This is a strong attitude if you are looking for the truth.

I find it hard to be philosophical in this situation. The doctors failed to talk around the fact that they thought this was crushing bad news. Like that Simpsons episode where Homer runs into the statue and has his jaw wired shut. They give Marge a brochure on Homer's behalf: "So Your Life Is Ruined".

To me, this fatalism is so... fatal. Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't feel like I can responsibly wish reality away, or curl up into a little ball. I am resigned to the name they gave my son. But in the fight for your son's future, there's just no room for detachment.

Your support, your friendship, your prayers, your love. Any or all of the above will be precious to us, going forward.

P.S. I held this one for a little while so we could tell our families first. All this happened on Wednesday.

new mac, old mac

2008-03-03T22:26:00.000-08:00

When Sarah got her dad's Mac, I was bequeathed with her old Mac, a G4 iMac. I have enjoyed putting it to good use. One thing I've had to do is start backing up her files off the computer so I can use the hard drive space for the Netflix prize contest.

This got me thinking about backups. I am using the poor man's backup, the DVD, but I would like to be able to easily back up my PC and Mac, preventing the destruction of about ten years' worth of personal data. A lot of it is crap like shareware I installed, but a good chunk of it is stuff that is creative, or personal history, or both.

I think I need to look into off-site backups for this data. If anyone has a reliable option, please let me know.

Meanwhile, I am rereading my machine learning texts, trying to get back to where I was a year or so ago, in the thick of graduate school, just coming off a data mining course.

Lawrence of Arabia

2008-03-02T18:16:00.000-08:00

I was a little under the weather today, so I devoted four hours or so to David Lean's epic, Lawrence of Arabia. It was on TCM, so thankfully proceeded without commercials.

I hadn't seen it for about ten years, since Mr. Lien put it on in history class in high school. I was curious about which parts I remembered and which I didn't.

One thing that really stuck out to me this time was Lawrence's tightrope walk between a sense of purpose and mission for the Arab people and messianic delusions of grandeur. He had the same lessons over and over again about power and mercy, and continued to swing the pendulum back and forth. He resigns his commission, then is flattered into returning to war. He is depressed and shaken by killing, then slaughtering the infidel with fervor. For all his hardness and sense of destiny, he ends the movie a very broken person.

I think that a thing I tend to do when I'm watching movies is to appropriate the identity of the main character. I like good guys and bad guys like anyone else, but it goes deeper than that. I tend to see the action from their point of view. Thus, my high school view of the movie saw Lawrence as a somewhat one-dimensional hero figure, doing what it takes to carry the banner of civilization. This time around, I felt the irony and had much more mixed feelings about Lawrence.

Does Lawrence go native, or is he a colonialist in tribal clothing? I definitely think he lost the plot along the way. His final great act was the slaughter of defenseless people. His friend, Sherif Ali, throws the words Lawrence said the first time they met, about the barbarity of the Arab people, back in his face.

So has Lawrence finally been mastered by the desert he loved, assimilating, or is he finally showing his true foreignness? Certainly Lawrence's psychotic response can't be separated from his torture at the hands of the Turks. The epilogue with Prince Faisal and General Allenby suggests that he was being manipulated into his crusade, along with the sidewise remarks about what happened to Lawrence when he met the English general.

The score is epic and the theme is classic, but one thing I noticed was that the levels went from soft to loud pretty quickly. A modern movie might take more care to balance things toward the middle. Also, that theme is used over and over again, inevitably.

The cast is incredible. I was not aware that Obi-Wan Kenobi was in this movie, or Mr. "Round up the usual suspects" Claude Rains. Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, and on and on. And of course, Peter O'Toole was awesome. One striking absence is any significant female role.

Finally, during the intermission, the word "entr'acte", which is French for "intermission", was spelled "entre'e acte". This is probably the stupidest misspelling of French I have ever seen.

When you have a good solid block of time, hie thee to the video store and check it out. Incidentally, our nearby video store is closing. I advise that you go see a real live video store before they all become Blockbuster, and then they all disappear.

A tale of two cities

2008-03-02T08:02:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the family went to the city park, a large area with the Denver Nature & Science Museum, a planetarium, the Denver Zoo, and a couple of tiny lakes. It was balmy and breezy, mid-70s. We took pictures and enjoyed the geese after wandering through some incredibly busy parking lots looking for a spot.

Today, we have a couple of inches of snow and more on the way.

Sarah will put up pictures sooner or later.

Same Mistakes

2008-03-01T22:13:00.000-08:00

Another song is up, in the Music by Dan sidebar to the left. If someone cannot access these songs, please let me know. I have been hosting them on a pages.google.com account, which I would not expect to cause any problems.

I seem to be able to do about one recording per night, but of course my nights are not always free.

This song is by Jon Brion, an amazing musician. He does a lot of film scores nowadays, including I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is how I first heard his name. He also produced Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" album, along with Kanye West's "No Registration". On top of that, he has a standing gig at Largo, acoustic club par excellence.

It's my third crack at the song (and there were about fifteen takes on the bridge vocal). Be glad the first ones are not on the internet. I don't know why I love this song so much. I think I like how it sneaks up on you. I like how the chorus is always the same but is constantly changing interpretation. I like the power of memory, the remorse, the chance to start again, the conflicting emotions.

The main guitar effect is distortion, but pretty clean unless I play just loud enough to break into fuzzy. I saved the settings for further study. The clean sound is just a little chorus. Not much to it really. I was a little surprised that I could play it high as a little lead and low as a little bass. This guitar effects pedal is so cool.

Overall, I think this song sounds a little fuller and better than the other ones. Also, it's louder. I need to consider going back to balance volume levels for all the songs in the player. Or just make enough songs that the old ones kind of fall off the bottom ("retire").

I am getting up to speed on the Netflix prize. The idea is to improve on the Netflix movie recommendation engine. You're basically given ratings for 17000+ movies by about half a million Netflix users, then told to predict their ratings for other movies. First prize is ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Yearly prizes of $50000 for the current leader.

There are many other people kicking around ideas. I think I will do it as a hobby at first, then slowly become obsessed with it. It is machine learning and data mining, and I have been trained to hack my way through such jungles.

I am two-thirds of the way up Mt. Baroque Cycle. The Confusion was, once again, well worth all 800 hardback pages. It is made for people like me (hackers who like history, science, romance, and tales of derring-do). Not for kids, but it is for you. The last volume is The System of the World. I'm starting it tonight.

Into That Good Night

2008-02-20T21:37:00.001-08:00

Another song is now in the sidebar. Your first Dan Lewis original with lyrics. It is called "Into That Good Night", perhaps. It was all made up today, although the idea has been kicking around for a while. You missed all the fun, like my recording software crashing, and a change of key from C to D.

It is a kind of inversion of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas. You have probably already read this, but here are the words:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My first thought about this was going to be to just sing the lyrics, slightly rearranged and edited. It even has verses and a chorus:

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

And you, my lover, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I had an appropriately mournful tune available.

But at some point, I got a kind of bouncy tune stuck in my head, so I had to turn the lyrics inside out. Here is the new version, which you can hear:

Quiet the lightning, break the curse
Let the storm within disperse

Let meteors fall through other skies
The light is dying in your eyes

And I will go
I will go
Gentle into that good night

Like a madman calmed by familiar hands
The rage will wash away with the sands

For one brief word, I would wait for you still
Send me away, whatever you will

And I will go
I will go
Gentle into that good night

I sing to you, here at our end
Blows the breeze, fades the wind

Dry your tears, leave that sad height
I will bless you into the night

And you will go
You will go
Gentle into that good
And you will go
You will go
Gentle into that good night

Is this a sad song or a happy song? It makes me feel serene, but also a bit like pinin for the fjords. I think the best goodbyes are a mixture of both.

I might go back later on this one for more instruments and voices. It could also probably use some editing. For now, I hope you can enjoy it as it is.

Anywhere.fm

2008-02-16T07:10:00.000-08:00

Maybe I am, as usual, the last person to this party. But there is a website called (and located at) anywhere.fm. It is basically an iTunes-style music player that is online. Not only that, but you upload your music (mp3s only), and you can listen to them anywhere you have an internet connection.

Not only that, but you can listen to other people's music collections on a streaming basis (at least, you can fire up their playlists). There are over 10,000,000 songs uploaded and counting.

Is this legal? They seem to think so. They chose to be basically a web radio station and pay the ASCAP and BMI fees for public performance. They don't allow you to download anyone's songs. Depending on how you use the site, you might not have to.

How do they make money? When you hear a song on somebody else's playlist, you see a little shopping cart "buy this song" link. Apparently they get finders' fees when someone does that.

A downer is that there appears to be no search engine, so you can't just get a big list of Beatles songs and just listen to those. Instead, you depend on the other users to organize things for you, as if they were the DJ of their own little radio station. You also don't appear to be able to skip... yes, I just tried it. If you start on a playlist you don't own, you can't randomly skip to the ones you like... you can only skip so many per hour. Of course, you could put every song you own in a separate playlist, exposing them all, but that's no fun.

The last caveat is that the uploading process goes at about 30 K per second at best (I left it on all night, and I've got about 60 songs out of 800-some).

My music is going up at anywhere.fm/mineshaftgap. I'll warn you that there are some isolated swears, and you should probably skip the Green Day and Ozomatli albums if you care about such things. But there's a lot of Radiohead and Beck and Beatles, and all the Switchfoot studio albums and all the Nickel Creek, plus their side projects (except the 1997 Here To There rarity and a lot of Chris Thile's solo stuff). I'll try and get things organized.

Go check it out.

Caption of the day; irony of ironies and all is irony

2008-02-14T17:58:00.000-08:00

The White House said that President Bush will veto a bill that would ban the use of waterboarding by the CIA. The president claims such a prohibition will inhibit the collection of information.

Under the headline of the day:

Bush Will Veto Ban On Torture
McCain, Once Tortured Himself, Joins White House To Oppose Bill Prohibiting Waterboarding

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/national/main3830691.shtml

This is one of the most editorial articles I have ever read from the AP. An excerpt:

Although President Bush has stated that the United States has not and will not torture people, it has been learned that Mr. Bush himself has authorized the use of waterboarding on detainees (a practice previously prosecuted by the United States as a war crime), and has claimed the authority to do so again in certain circumstances.

Despite military interrogators' assertions that waterboarding and other brands of torture do not produce reliable intelligence, the Bush administration continues to argue that it needs the option of waterboarding when seeking information from recalcitrant prisoners.

Attorney General Mike Mukasey has declined to declare that waterboarding is torture, despite congressional demands during and after his Senate confirmation process, fueling the administration critics' assumption that admitting such would expose administration figures who authorized the practice to criminal prosecution.

The AP newswire called Bush a liar, a torturer, and a criminal, implying that the fact that he's not in jail for a war crime hangs on a technicality (and an Attorney General in his pocket). And that's in a straight news article.

The other day Scalia said that we have to have the debate over torture vs. intelligence, because the terrorists could have a ticking time bomb, etc. It's a huge grey area to him.

This is total crap. I explored it earlier and elsewhere. So I'll turn the mike over to a prominent critic of our torture policies.

Those who argue the necessity of some abuses raise an important dilemma as their most compelling rationale: the ticking-time-bomb scenario. What do we do if we capture a terrorist who we have sound reasons to believe possesses specific knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack?

In such an urgent and rare instance, an interrogator might well try extreme measures to extract information that could save lives. Should he do so, and thereby save an American city or prevent another 9/11, authorities and the public would surely take this into account when judging his actions and recognize the extremely dire situation which he confronted. But I don't believe this scenario requires us to write into law an exception to our treaty and moral obligations that would permit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. To carve out legal exemptions to this basic principle of human rights risks opening the door to abuse as a matter of course, rather than a standard violated truly in extremis. It is far better to embrace a standard that might be violated in extraordinary circumstances than to lower our standards to accommodate a remote contingency, confusing personnel in the field and sending precisely the wrong message abroad about America's purposes and practices.

That sounds pretty convincing, critic of torture. Say, what's your position on waterboarding, while we're at it?

Now, in this war, our liberal notions are put to the test. Americans of good will, all patriots, argue about what is appropriate and necessary to combat this unconventional enemy. Those of us who feel that in this war, as in past wars, Americans should not compromise our values must answer those Americans who believe that a less rigorous application of those values is regrettably necessary to prevail over a uniquely abhorrent and dangerous enemy. Part of our disagreement is definitional. Some view more coercive interrogation tactics as something short of torture but worry that they might be subject to challenge under the "no cruel, inhumane or degrading" standard. Others, including me, believe that both the prohibition on torture and the cruel, inhumane and degrading standard must remain intact. When we relax that standard, it is nearly unavoidable that some objectionable practices will be allowed as something less than torture because they do not risk life and limb or do not cause very serious physical pain.

For instance, there has been considerable press attention to a tactic called "waterboarding," where a prisoner is restrained and blindfolded while an interrogator pours water on his face and into his mouth-causing the prisoner to believe he is being drowned. He isn't, of course; there is no intention to injure him physically. But if you gave people who have suffered abuse as prisoners a choice between a beating and a mock execution, many, including me, would choose a beating. The effects of most beatings heal. The memory of an execution will haunt someone for a very long time and damage his or her psyche in ways that may never heal. In my view, to make someone believe that you are killing him by drowning is no different than holding a pistol to his head and firing a blank. I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture.

Any last thoughts?

The enemies we fight today hold our liberal values in contempt, as they hold in contempt the international conventions that enshrine them. I know that. But we are better than them, and we are stronger for our faith. And we will prevail. It is indispensable to our success in this war that those we ask to fight it know that in the discharge of their dangerous responsibilities to their country they are never expected to forget that they are Americans, and the valiant defenders of a sacred idea of how nations should govern their own affairs and their relations with others--even our enemies.

Those who return to us and those who give their lives for us are entitled to that honor. And those of us who have given them this onerous duty are obliged by our history, and the many terrible sacrifices that have been made in our defense, to make clear to them that they need not risk their or their country's honor to prevail; that they are always--through the violence, chaos and heartache of war, through deprivation and cruelty and loss--they are always, always, Americans, and different, better and stronger than those who would destroy us.

And now, the punchline:

Torture's Terrible Toll
By Senator John McCain
Newsweek
25 November 2005 issue

Godel, Escher, Bach (major geek alert)

2008-02-11T22:22:00.000-08:00

This reminds me of that classic Johnny Carson bit, Carnac the Magnificent. The swami, bejeweled and enturbaned, holds up the envelope to his forehead and closes his eyes: "Godel, Escher, Bach". "Girdle Esher Bock" echoes Ed McMahon. He reads the card: "Instructions for a German wedding."

(I tried desperately to come up with a better one than that. It's the Escher that kept getting in the way.)

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter. This is actually a book about self-reference, about logic and metalogic, about patterns and fugues, about artificial intelligence, about symbols and interpretations. I haven't read very far yet, but it is already pretty mindblowing. It won a Pulitzer and it hasn't changed since 1979.

Plus this guy told me to read it. About halfway through the blog post, he veers off into stuff about being a programmer and making software that may or may not interest you.

In the preface to the 20th anniversary edition, Hofstadter explains the main idea: things that refer to themselves in some sense examine their own state and are conscious. This self reference, he calls a "strange loop", and suggests that there may be a scale of consciousness based on the amount of introspection that a thing or system does. It's basically a goofy, insightful, jarring 800 page book. With bonus dialogues between Lewis Carroll's Tortoise and Achilles. With digressions on Bach canons. With pictures. Only 100 pages in; I'll tell you how it goes.

I've also been reading lately that the Internet is like a brain. See, for instance, Dimensions of the One Machine. I've read many similar such arguments that seem to conflate hardware density and speed with intelligence, then claim that in the year 2040, due to the consistent doubling of computer power due to Moore's law, we'll have computers with brains that surpass the human mind.

I think these arguments ignore the complex structural differences between the network of neurons and synapses that we have, which are stuporously interconnected, and the logic gates on a computer, which are not. While we're stuck on the x86 architecture (like most home computers nowadays), we will not stumble onto artificial brains.

One thing the Internet does not seem to do much is introspect. The closest thing we have at the moment is probably search. Google is not really the Internet. It is really about the Internet. However, introspection seems to imply a greater sense of feedback and control than Google really does... Google holds up the mirror to the Internet, but then what happens? Really, Google just builds a better mirror.

The feedback at the moment is all coming from the human users.

If the Internet were a giant brain, how could we even interpret its thoughts?

In vaguely related news, Will Wright's intelligent design simulator, Spore, is coming out in September. From cell to civilization to spaceship, the player evolves their creations, then sets out to explore a vast universe. Here is a cool interview with the latest. For earlier posts, see here and here. I've been waiting for this one for a long time.

Caedmon's Call concert last night

2008-02-10T09:02:00.000-08:00

Most contemporary Christian music (CCM, a genre with its own magazine) is sour, at least to my uneducated tastebuds. The exceptions are few: Jars of Clay, still rockin it; Switchfoot, world famous, but it's obviously still a Christian band; Jennifer Knapp, before she stopped making music; Ginny Owens, the blind pop pianist; Leigh Nash from Sixpence None The Richer... I'm just about petered out there.

And then there's Caedmon's Call, a group of singer-songwriters with world-music percussion. They've been around for over a decade, and they have a lot of strong music.

The show started with founding member Derek Webb, who went solo a few years ago, but came back recently for the latest Caedmon's Call album and tour, Overdressed. He makes great music about religion, love, politics... His latest album, The Ringing Bell, is not to be missed. He did an hour of music, then a few minutes later the whole band was on stage.

There are eight people in Caedmon's Call now: lead singers Cliff and Danielle Young, singer/songwriters Derek Webb (twelve string) and Andrew Osenga (guitars), drums and percussion by Todd Bragg and Garett Buell, Jeff Miller on bass, and Josh Moore on keyboards etc. They had garbage cans, riffs, organs, big thumpy drums, three and four part harmonies... they've really got it all, this band.

By the end of the three-hour concert, my ears were stuffed, but it was a great time. For some reason, I have a need to write down the setlist... they did something like 34 songs.

One thing Sarah noticed was that nobody would stand up. For the vast majority of the concert, we were sitting down. Once in a while, they'd bang the drums really loud and people would stand and clap and sing along, but not that often. Maybe that's what you get when you do a concert in a church.

Finished Quicksilver; McCain

2008-02-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

So, I've been way off the map, stuck in the 17th century with Neal Stephenson. But I finally finished Quicksilver after weeks of reading (maybe more than a month, an eon in my reading life). The phrase "tour de force" gets thrown around a lot these days... "Entertaining"... "Thought provoking..." "Hilarious..." "Absorbing..." "Tales of the ruling class intersect with the exploits of Vagabonds. Lofty science turns into slapstick on a dime. Depressing realism gives way to explosive alchemical experiments." I don't know how to blurb this book. It would probably be rated R or worse as a movie, with sometimes graphic violence and sex. It's everything from beautiful to vulgar. But it's amazing.

Here's McCain vs. McCain, an editorial in a flagship conservative newspaper that came out a few weeks ago. It was a somewhat transparent attempt to prevent McCain from gaining the Republican nomination, in the runup to Super Tuesday. It didn't work, because the Republican field was not strong this time around.

Vince gave a pretty backhanded description of McCain on those lines:

McCain walks a line somewhere between pandering and probity. I actually find this a welcome difference from the complete groveling of the other Republican candidates toward the pop conservative issue of the day.

McCain also contrasts well with President Bush, who shamelessly colors all history and lies profusely without any apparent guilt.

Of the Republicans, McCain is definitely the statesman of the bunch.

This is a dictionary-worthy example of damning with faint praise.

To understand how I feel about McCain, you'll have to take a trip back in time to the 2000 campaign. Ron Suskind, profiling Rove in 2003, puts it about as succinctly as anyone could:

As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched.

McCain, having endured these attacks on his family and his reputation, turned around and made common cause with these people, going so far as to say he'd accept campaign advice from Rove this time around... hugging President Bush while hating his guts...

It is only the most personal example of many sellouts by McCain. He is a media darling and is portrayed as a moderate, and he's the Republican nominee. I wonder, though, since we essentially have 3 moderates left in the race, whether people will not vote for the real liberals and moderates instead of the somewhat clouded record of McCain.

New song in the bar to the left

2008-01-31T22:39:00.000-08:00

This is a depressing song by Radiohead called "No Surprises". It is about sleepily, sheepily letting the man walk all over you until you die. The lyrics can be found here.

I figured it would be fun to put my vocal microphone through the effects pedal and see what I could do. Mostly I am playing with vibrato and fiddling with the delay with one hand while holding the mike with the other. I recorded two vocal tracks.

I am also messing with a pitch shifter, which is a cheap way to turn a six-string guitar into something that plays two octaves at once, a poor man's twelve-string.

By the way, it's on OK Computer, a no-brainer way to buy one of the best albums of the 1990s.

I would be failing you if I didn't post the real version as well. The video features the lead singer of Radiohead, who is, or was, claustrophobic and afraid of drowning.

Record 1, McCain 0

2008-01-30T22:08:00.001-08:00

I have been hearing about John McCain, so a quick reminder. Far from being a maverick, he has pandered relentlessly in his quest for the presidency. However, the popular press has a short attention span. I direct you to Exhibit A and Exhibit B.

Exhibit C:

And just for fun:

I used to like John McCain
But now he gives me a pain.
He was a Bush critic
But it seems to this cynic
He’s switched his positions for gain.

His opposition to torture
Is open to forfeiture
For embracing Gitmo George.

He’ll reform campaign finance
Unless if by some chance
There’s a banquet at which he can gorge.

And suddenly the religious right
Is dandy in his new light
Of forgetting when they were his scourge.

Nobody should misconstrue
His new affection for W.
John’s running for president,
Meaning values once resident
Have all been flushed down the loo.

--Lee Wochner

http://socalgrassroots.blogspot.com/2006/03/poem-for-john-mcgain.html

Life 1, Dan 0.

2008-01-30T21:10:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while again.

My mother-in-law came to visit. Alex had really been missing his Mimi. It made all of us miss Sarah's family in Utah. Everyone wanted to be back together again. We took a nice trip downtown to The Tattered Cover (one of the better bookstores in the state, so I'm told).

Alex is enjoying a lot of Sesame Street characters now, especially Elmo. We've been getting him books and watching the show more. He's learning to count from them. In one particular show, The Count is out, so Ernie fills in for him. However, after Ernie finishes counting, there's no melodramatic thunder or lightning flash, so Ernie has to do his own effects. "Eight... Nine... Ten! Ah ah ah! ... Uh... THUNDER! LIGHTNING!" Now when Alex counts, he says it and we say it. It really cracks him up.

He can also do most of his alphabet, and he's up to subject-verb-object syntax. Of course, it's stuff like "I love Elmo" and "I play soap", but it's been a marked improvement.

Sarah and I have been pleased to find a church. Check it out at www.missionhills.org. Personally, they had me at Caedmon's Call concert (a Christian band, that plays acoustic and world music). One of Alex's classmates goes there with his family, and after the mom found out from Sarah that we were still church-hunting, we figured we'd give it a try. For the past couple of weeks, we've enjoyed their service. There is a young married people-type sunday school class during the second service, so we'll try that next time.

It has been a bit exhausting trying to live without that kind of community, without meeting people regularly. The best I have done is bonding with the guys at work. Our families and faraway friends have been valuable in this respect.

My dad turned 49 yesterday, and we spent a very pleasant conversation on DDR, memory and the neural networks of the brain, his new classroom, and such. I gave my DDR setup to my mom. It turned out I couldn't play it after Alex went to bed because it was too noisy, so there was no good time to work out. Mom is going to town on it, getting Bs on songs. My cousins Riley and Shay come to stay with my parents, and it turns out that the best babysitter is DDR. They're about... I want to say 10 and 8, but that might be wrong. Anyhow, Dad reports that tiring them out has become very easy because they play the dance game 3 hours a day during their visits... this boggles my mind.

Dad always wants us to come back to Seattle. He hasn't had a crack at his grandson yet, but they miss us too. I suppose if I got the right offer, I could see it... Sarah wants to get settled here so Alex can go to school and life stays a little predictable, though, so it would have to be a pretty big improvement on the status quo.

I finished another Discworld book by Terry Pratchett. This was #2, The Light Fantastic. It is almost pointless to tell you the plot. However, it's just great for what it is, which is humorous fantasy satire with a playful philosophical nugget at the core.

I also ripped through V for Vendetta the comic, once again. I basically read it all in one sitting. It is hard to read the glib protestations of V now that he was 'liberating' Evey without a bit of a chill. The point of the story in general is that the proper answer to tyranny is violence, that violence can be a tool of the liberator who the government calls the terrorist, and that destruction, not conciliation, is the proper response to this. Along the way, V kills instruments of the state, but also causes, directly or indirectly, the deaths of many more people. His motives are also very murky, in that he is not just carrying out a program of asymmetric insurgency, but also prosecuting a vendetta. He is a serial killer, but he is the hero of the story. The story in the comic books is violent, but not very gory. Aside from the somewhat goofy storyline where the AI computer controls the country, it is very powerful. So, once again, I strongly recommend you read it.

Quicksilver, a historickal tale of science and piracy set at the dawn of the Age of Newton, has been going really well. It is insightful, and big somehow, and rollicking hilarious. It shines a light from a very interesting angle on our contemporary situation. It came from an unexpected quarter, written by a science-fiction author of high distinction. It's bawdy and violent and ludicrous, but also amazing.

I finally got started learning GNU Emacs. World beware.

Also, Arc, a new programming language has hit the web. I am following this development with great interest. This is the goal: http://paulgraham.com/hundred.html

Music thingy

2008-01-19T00:14:00.000-08:00

As you may not be aware if you don't actually visit the front page of the blog (seriously, people, RSS; feed readers; look it up), I stuck an mp3 player on the top, to the left. I figured out that as a dude with a Google email address, I have 100 MB of free space available for me to upload files or make web pages at pages.google.com. I don't know if there's a bandwidth cap, but the way these things work is, if enough people start hammering your website to download your music, the website can become profitable through text ads. So I'm not worried for the time being.

Don't Need Anything is the first song in there right now. It's the finale of an anarchist musical, or so I hear, by the lead singer from Toad the Wet Sprocket, but it has also made a great lullaby for Alex that I've sung many a time. Please forgive my nonexistent mixing ability, as well as the stray bad note here and there.

The second song is what you get when you stick a drum machine with a looping chord progression on one track, and then a guitarist comes back from the dead and plays the guitar like a zombie and clicks through the presets on the pedal while recording on the other track. It's also what you get when you hand a crappy lead guitar player a multi-effects pedal. If we shadows have offended, etc., etc.

I often record random noodling onto the computer, just like writers will warm up by writing random stuff. Most writers, however, have the good sense not to publish theirs. I am also listening for sweet music in the middle of noise, and once in a while a riff will be useful to me later.

All the sounds on both songs come out of the one pedal, which may be of some interest to you if you've never thought about how guitar effects work. What the pedal does is simulate more complicated setups where each step performs a different transformation on the audio signal coming through. You can get almost anything out of your guitar if you can come up with the recipe. I haven't even experimented with creating my own effects yet, so stay tuned.

I finished a few books. It's pretty hard to talk about Spook Country, the latest novel by William Gibson. His previous novel was one of the best books I've read in a long time, so that bar was set pretty high. Gibson's book was a very interesting take on what kind of world we are living in. The various characters move in and out of worlds that are invisible to common perception. The idea is that these things are in their infancy, though, and might become just as real, if not more real, than our quotidian existence. So there are spies and surveillance as well as virtual reality and real world articles tagged with metadata (spimes). The funny thing about this kind of book is that it's not exactly extrapolative science fiction any more. To get the sf thrills and sensawunda, you have to think about where all this is going. In a more traditional sf book, the author would just show you. I thought it was thought-provoking and entertaining, but I don't think I would call it moving, like I would some of his other work.

I also read Dies the Fire by SM Stirling. Dad bought it for me while he was here. This is a story of America (really, Oregon) after an apocalypse: in a flash, causes TBD, electricity and gunpowder stop working for good. Then, tons of people die because they don't know how to survive (and they're stuck in urban areas). The book tells the story of the survivors, who get medieval and communal in a hurry. It was a very interesting idea, and was pretty well thought out. One thing I always wondered about The Stand was what would happen when the food ran out (years after the end of the story). Which it would. This book goes there. It revolves around food in a way that really surprised me. Change of subject, one of the main characters is a Wiccan. I didn't know much about their religion (except the really basic stuff you pick up here and there), so I was interested in the window on that culture. It's not a classic book, but it's fun (if at times a bit gory and sweary).

And I finished another one by the master, Philip K. Dick. What's he the master of? Well, writing like Philip K. Dick, for one, that's why they named an award after him. I guess he's the master of mind-bending, of reality confusion, of paranoia, of the low and untidy corners of society. This one was called Lies, Inc. (originally, The Unteleported Man). Dick wrote this in a fertile period, when he wrote ten novels in two years.

In the story, a dystopian Earth is overpopulated, and attempts at colonizing the solar system have essentially failed. Light-speed ships exist, but only one habitable planet has been found. Then comes the invention of instant teleportation. A channel from Earth to the colony planet opens, and people start going to the colony planet. The only catch is that it's a one way trip. There's no way back to Earth.

A neurotic man who owns a light-speed ship starts to suspect that something is rotten in the colony, that a powerful conspiracy is controlling the colony for its own purposes, and decides to spend 18 years traveling to the colony in his ship, so he can return and report on its true nature. Even before he leaves, he is essentially hallucinating. And when he gets there... well, you'd just have to read it. I haven't taken acid but I feel confident that the experience was set down in print in this book. And it only gets weirder from there.

The setting, the characters, the language were top-notch, and I found the resolution very well done, very fair. It cleared up the book a lot, but I have a lot more to reconstruct as far as what was actually going on while I was reading the craziness. I even started rereading it from the beginning. I don't know if I'll go all the way again, but it certainly commanded my attention. Nothing very graphic, except for the drug trips, call it adult themes and disturbing images. Definitely worth your time, if you turn pro when the going gets weird.

Up next, an sf parody by Terry Pratchett (Discworld #2, The Light Fantastic), Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe, and Mt. Baroque Cycle. Oh, and Lord of the Rings. I'll be busy.

Last Christmas gift

2008-01-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

Between a couple of parents and parents in law, I got my hands on a multi-effects guitar pedal. For poor people like me without enough $ for an amplifier, distortion pedal, flanger, chorus, etc. etc., this is the best imitator I could find. I can record it into the computer, so now my recordings can get a little more interesting. So far, I've found something that sounds kind of like a twelve-string, something that adds a couple of octaves and another thing that takes me down a couple of octaves (it is hard to hear the low note on that one), stuff that sounds like alien noises and blips and U2, and all kinds of fuzzy stuff to rock out to. Needless to say, when I start actually editing the presets, there are going to be fireworks.

I will try to add something soon. I am looking at hosting mp3s on our Comcast account, then putting a little player in the blog so you can hear them.

And now, because I just can't go another day without unleashing more Radiohead on you, here's the amazing video for "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". They recently played this in their studio with helmet cams that were pointed directly at their faces. This looks pretty normal until they start moving their heads.

For a more low-key two-person version, a study in contrast, check out this one with lead singer Thom Yorke, and lead wizard Jonny Greenwood on the Ondes Martenot.

It's been a busy couple of weeks

2008-01-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! My family has been visiting in Denver: Mom, Dad, and Rachel. We have been busy not being busy: going to the bookstore, playing Nintendo together, going to movies, eating my dad's cooking, and generally having a great holiday.

I read The Hobbit, which you should also read, and I got some great book recommendations for my dad. I'm ready to scale Mt. Baroque Cycle soon, and some more Gene Wolfe, Lord of the Rings, and more!

The most interesting part of the week has been family devotional time. Mom came up with it. All of us will have taken a night, through tomorrow. We've talked about whether God is fair, how we should worship a child-God, about the difficulty of prayer and church discipline. I will try to get to these in blog posts.

Dad wants me to create a book-group-creating/management web site. My cursory investigations have not yielded a similar service on the internet.

Cheers to all of you!

A Christmas Story

2007-12-23T10:10:00.000-08:00

We live in a strange world. I was looking for Christmas music to play while we clean and cook... I found the entire A Christmas Story (you'll shoot your eye out!).

And here's Good King Kong, by PDQ Bach, Peter Schickele.

Events

2007-12-17T19:31:00.001-08:00

I hope your celebration of Beethoven's birthday was as awesome as mine: shopping madness for Christmas. It is hard to find time to get away. I stole a parking spot from a big truck (not altogether intentionally) and, in one line, sang four Radiohead songs to myself.

Sarah and I went out in the cold to see the lights in downtown Denver. It was kind of fun, kind of chilly. I miss the shopping district in Seattle for that kind of expedition. And the steel drum band. There was a dude on a recorder, though.

Where we were, there's just an outdoor mall. We had thought they lit the state capitol, but we didn't see anything when we went by. The US Mint was just red in the top tower. They were showing Miracle on 34th Street, the original, on a big screen in a park.

I've been enjoying a set of computer programming problems called Project Euler. Basically, they are math problems that would not be easy to solve without a computer. We the people can solve problems that were beyond the world's mathematicians for centuries. They are not that easy to solve with a computer either, as the design of the program is the key, but every solution program should end in under one minute.

I've been taking the opportunity to learn a programming language new to me, Python. I learned Common Lisp in grad school, so a lot of the concepts are familiar to me. Still, it's been fun to make functional little programs that can run on basically any computer. I haven't been doing math problems just for fun since high school, basically, so it's been neat to get back to those roots. I could reflect on the circle of life, the more things change, nothing new under the sun...

Start of book reviews

2007-12-06T20:40:00.000-08:00

I was going over my reading record in the blog, and I think I must've either missed tagging some things with "books" or not talked about all that I did read. For instance, The Stand isn't on there. There are only 34 books! On the positive side, only four were rereads, so I tried to spread my wings a little this year. If you want to go back and check them, just click on the "books" tag at the bottom of this post.

There's a lot of science fiction and fantasy, some classics, some religious stuff, some Stephen King, and other miscellany from databases to math to poker.

It should go without saying that I'm soliciting reading suggestions. And I really should get a reading group.

This probably interests about two people in the entire world, but here's the list I found for 2007 blog-posted books, earliest to latest:

Left Hand of Darkness
Bujold: Brothers in Arms, Memory, Mirror Dance
The Shining
How Much for Just the Planet?
The Knight, The Wizard
V for Vendetta
The Biggest Game in Town
Understanding Comics
From Hell
Database in Depth
Freakonomics
How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
Aspects of the Novel
Walking On Water
Girl Meets God
A Sort of Life
What's So Amazing About Grace
Audible Neil Gaiman
Cujo
Charmed Life
The Power and the Glory
Night Shift
The Gunslinger
Till We Have Faces
The Color of Magic
Starship Troopers
The Language of the Night
The Man in the High Castle
Lord of the Flies
Journey Through Genius
Fragile Things

Allergy

2007-12-04T22:34:00.000-08:00

I forgot to put in the last post that I've noticed myself doing something funny lately. Sarah and I go out shopping, and around the second store I start to get really exhausted by the crowds, the lights, the aggressive product placements and advertising. I hate the experience of being bought and sold in those environments. For some reason, I just cannot handle it anymore.

So I take out the iPod that is always in my coat now, and start listening to Radiohead. I've even started putting on the tunes in the grocery store.

It is like a histamine blocker.

Checking in

2007-12-02T16:13:00.000-08:00

My reading of Lord of the Flies was somewhat tainted by knowing how it ends. It's the model UN episode of The Simpsons, so I knew the plot from start to finish. It was still a very impressive book. I had to take several breaks from reading it because it was just too depressing, but it was very good.

One thing I wondered as I read it was whether this thing was written deliberately to provide fodder for critics of various schools. It is almost impossible to avoid reading it as an allegory; I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I used to think that true understanding of a work of fiction involved teasing out the allegory. Now, not so much.

In between Lord of the Flies sessions, I finally found Neil Gaiman's short story collection Fragile Things under a car seat and finished it off. The end of the book is a kind of post-quel to American Gods, another book I recommend highly. A story about The Matrix that was written when the movie came out. One about a society of gourmands that has eaten absolutely everything under the sun. A touching one called "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" about a shy kid who meets some very strange girls. A very funny one about a writer who lives in a gothic Halloween world who tries to overcome the stigma of writing contemporary literary fiction. All of them start out normal enough, then go a little bit crazy, magical-realism style.

I also finished Charmed Life, which was very entertaining. Today, I dove into the next one in the series, The Nine Lives of Christopher Chant.

Somehow I worked in time to "finish" Super Mario Galaxy. This is a charming game, a flagship for Nintendo. They hit every note just right. Mario is running around in the stars, visiting all kinds of planets. Some have normal gravity, some are very very strange. They have themes, like "" The plot is the Mario plot (Bowser kidnaps the princess, you go save her), but everything else was fresh and exciting. There was some great camera trickery involved, with Mario walking around on the ceiling a lot. The music was brilliant. Bee Mario is probably the cutest thing they have ever done. And beating the Robot Bowser level in Toyland felt like a real accomplishment. The first half of the game was easy enough, but the second half, which I am just starting, looks to be pretty hardcore. I say "finish" because even over the course of my rental, which was most of three evenings, I only got through half of the levels.

I got a wireless keyboard and mouse at Target this weekend. I hope to use it in conjunction with the Wii to surf the web from my couch. Stay tuned.

I've got that William Gibson book to read, and I have that end-of-year book sum-up to get to. I hope the early December days are treating you well. Sarah should have some exciting pictures up of the house decorated for Christmas soon...

Happy Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T20:29:00.001-08:00

I hadn't looked at my Amazon recommendations in a while, so I was a little unprepared to find that many of the book recommendations it found for me were things I had recently checked out from the library or read using the reference libraries available through work. The tool basically predicted the future based on my past reading events. The one that was the weirdest was that it recommended The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, and that was the first Dick novel I've ever read. A little spooky.

My first turkey: Alton Brown's roast turkey recipe was idiot-proof and amazing. You brine the turkey overnight and then roast with apples, onions, and herbs stuck in the cavity. It was moist and delicious, mission accomplished. The only thing that went wrong was that I bought too small a turkey. I won't make that mistake again.

I finally finished Charmed Life, (Diana Wynne Jones) which was quite good. The eerie similarities to Harry Potter continued to the end of the novel, which cements my opinion that it is basically source material for the series. I mean, two thirds of the way through, someone starts insisting that they not call the enchanter Chrestomanci by his name, to avoid summoning him, but instead call him... wait for it... You Know Who. Capital letters and all.

We had a nice Thanksgiving cooking together. Sarah's sweet potatoes were just divine, and even though the turkey was small, our little family of 3 barely got through a quarter of it. We have lots of leftovers. We did the wishbone, said what we were thankful for, and watched football while peeling potatoes. These were practically my only requirements for a successful day. Then we all fell asleep at 4:00. It was our first Thanksgiving away from everyone's relatives, but Sarah and Alex did videoconferencing with the Utah fam (with iChat; we are also set up to do it over Skype, but other programs are possible) so they got their fix.

There are some great poems about being thankful, so I will just let one take over. But first, I am thankful for life and love, for wife and son, for food and song, for walks and books, for every short, eternal day.

Welcome Morning

Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

If you're like me

2007-11-20T18:24:00.000-08:00

You got temporarily distracted from Lord of the Flies by Journey Through Genius: The Great Theorems of Mathematics. Along the way, you learned about transfinite numbers and how they used to have math-offs in the Italian Renaissance. You also picked up a new book by one of your favorite authors: Spook Country, by William Gibson. As the jacket says,

Spook: Specter, ghost, revenant. Slang for "intelligence agent."

Country: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind.

Spook Country: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place where we are learning to live.

Last, but certainly not least, a desire to deepen your professional awareness led you to begin a thousand page journey through a computer science textbook: Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools.

You have over twenty things checked out of the library. Five of them are the first season of Stargate SG-1, which you were surprised to learn is a true sequel to the movie. You have about fifteen CDs checked out, and today you heard Born To Run for the first time. You also listened to more Talking Heads songs than ever, a new Ozomatli album, and the latest Decemberists.

You took your first turkey out of the freezer on Sunday night and stuck it in a mixing bowl to thaw. Tomorrow, you will be dunking it in a five-gallon bucket filled with saltwater. Thursday, you will have your first Thanksgiving away from your parents and your in-laws.

Friday, you plan to laugh at insane shopping from the comfort of your living room, enjoying hot cider.

You've been playing the drums with your son lately. He likes rocking out on the xylophone. You have been listening to the drummer from Radiohead a lot. You also have been trying out guitar effects on the computer. You even played for half an hour straight at the guitar store, on your knees, with headphones with a short cord, just messing with one low-end effects pedal.

You brought homemade banana bread with chocolate chips inside to a Thanksgiving potluck at work, and every single person who tried it essentially asked you, "Chocolate in banana bread? Can you do that?" in between bites.

Yes. Yes, you can do that.

If you're like me.

Lazy

2007-11-13T21:55:00.001-08:00

I've been posting less. I'm not sure if this is because I've run out of long thoughts for now (which is certainly true, except for an ongoing conversation I've been having with my mom about the erosion of privacy and the demonizing of dissent in the post-9/11 America. I've written about this before, but we're all adults here and this is not the year PNE 6. For better or worse it's 2007 and we deserve a post-post-9/11 America.). It could be that my mind is more or less exhausted by work and home life, which is another half truth. Work is exhilarating, and for the most part I don't bring it home, which is good.

I never got around to Lord of the Flies in high school. I mentioned to my mom that we skipped a lot of the British white guys in IB. Sure, we had to have our Shakespeare and Dickens, but it was very international overall. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Sound of Waves, Things Fall Apart, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (what's the name of that one? I can't remember... oh, it's Chronicle of a Death Foretold), and so on. So I somehow missed this book about the savagery of school kids, about the apocalypse, about the heart of darkness, about everything under the sun, according to the jacket cover.

I read an essay recently that said that nerds were doomed to be cynical about high school because it is your whole world for a while, but it doesn't mean anything in the long run. He had read Lord of the Flies, and he said that he wished someone had made the connection between the book and the environment it was being taught in.

iPod madness

2007-11-03T21:10:00.000-07:00

I finally figured out how to get my music collection onto my brand old iPod. It was a gift from my father in law quite a while ago. It had all his old music, and I didn't have cords to get my music from the PC onto the iPod, and I didn't have the wherewithal to laboriously burn several gigabytes of music onto several more 800 MB CDs, so it became this amazing jukebox that I took, especially on flights and mowing the lawn.

It turns out all we had to do was set up a network between the Mac and the PC, start a new Mac account for my music, share a few folders, then copy several gigabytes over the air. It still takes a while, but you don't have to keep switching out physical media, so you can get up and go to Home Depot to buy your first rake while Beck, Radiohead, the Beatles, Nickel Creek, and a motley crew of others worm their electronic ways into your heart.

I am quite excited. For the first time, I will have better music on the iPod than I can find on the internet, and thus, a reason to take the iPod in to work.

I also watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior. I was going to, well, not pan it, but at least compare it to its superior predecessors, Drunken Master 2 and Fist of Legend until I read on the internet, just now, that there were no wires, CGI or camera tricks in this movie. Wow. It's just the brutal ballet, if the ballerinas all ganged up on the one little ballerina... and then the crunching started. And I thought all the elbow and knee strikes were getting a little repetitive. I actually might have to watch this thing again. Its plot is virtually nonexistent, but this is one of those movies where it would just get in the way.

Still more entertainment

2007-11-02T22:15:00.000-07:00

I read The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick this week. He's the (departed) guy maybe most broadly known for writing the stories that got made into Blade Runner, Total Recall, Paycheck, and Minority Report, and more recently, you probably didn't see A Scanner Darkly and Next.

This book came out in 1962. It's the alternate present of America in 1962, 15 years after the Allies lost World War II (owing to, among other things, the assassination of FDR). The west coast is run by the Japanese, the east coast is run by the Germans, and the middle of the country has become a shadow of its former self. It's well-depicted and eerie. More than that, it's a novel about the Tao and about living inside and outside the flow of the world. It's also a novel about art, where the characters all seem to be reading an alternate history bestseller, banned in the Nazi countries, called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts the Allied victory in World War II. It's also a stylistic tour-de-force, with each focus character narrated and talking in their own dialect and from their own peculiar points of view.

This truly appears to be my year of the novel. I also picked up a novel omnibus by Ursula K. LeGuin. If anybody has some more recommendations, I am all ears.

Vince brought up recently that our reading lists do not intersect much because I read a lot of fiction and he reads a lot of non-fiction. I love stories. I don't necessarily learn facts from them, but consider this: facts are true, but often irrelevant; theories are relevant, but often untrue. That is my philosophy of science, cribbed from a linguistics professor in undergrad. One day he was trying to explain a fundamental problem with Chomsky's linguistics and he put it this way: they keep trying to extend the theory to cover more and more cases, but by doing that, they lose the power of their original generalizations.

This appears to be a fundamental problem of the pursuit of knowledge: knowing how important the details are. This is so important that researchers routinely eliminate as many details as possible, by controlling the environment. To find important implications, you have to match valuable behavior with significant control.

Living as a human being, perhaps fortunately, does not provide us with similar control of our environment, with similar eliminations of variables, except perhaps to the insane, the Wall Street executive, the alienated... but I repeat myself. Instead of tearing our lives into constituent parts, I am convinced we try to tell ourselves a story with some integrity, some unity of action. And reading fiction, or even non-fiction stories, I think, gives us a chance to respond to our world, to another human being, not with a little part of ourselves, but with our hearts in our teeth, our minds engaged, our blood pumping through the pages. I have rarely been shaken or moved by non-fiction, or rather, by arguments. But I want to be moved when I read. I want to be someone else when I'm done.

Madeleine L'Engle said recently about Harry Potter that there's no underneath to the stories, and I think there is something to this. The Harry Potter books are interesting depictions of flawed heroes, and they are epic and fun, grand and entertaining, but ultimately, they are not meant to shake you up the way I'm talking about. They do not point to deeper meanings, do not exploit the power of ambiguity. They are safe. Impotent. Sterile. I hope for JK Rowling's sake that instead of writing the Harry Potter encyclopedia (she is currently suing a website that plans to make a similar product with her characters) and getting stuck in the safe world, she sits down with her pen and her knife, and creates a new story with a few more razorblades sticking out of it.

If you watch TV, point yourself toward the other best show on television. Yes, yes, there's Heroes, which you should still be watching (first season on DVD, quite poignant and epic, dangerous and potent), but the antics of the cheerleader have gotten boring, and the dead hand of the painter that depicts the future is choking the plot. All in all, things are a bit tedious at the moment. So why not watch a show about a dude who brings people back from the dead.

It's Pushing Daisies. In Pushing Daisies, Ned, a pie-maker in his mid-twenties, has been living with a strange power for more than a decade: touch a dead thing (animal, person) once, and it comes back to life. But touch it again and it's dead forever. Also, the catch, if the reanimated thing is not returned to death within a minute, something else dies in its place.

The backstory: when the guy was ten, he discovered his power when his mom died by accident, he brought her back to life. His girl-next-door's father died when, 60 seconds later, he hadn't returned his mom to death. Then his mom touched him anyway, and she died again, this time permanently. Afterwards, Ned's dad sent him to boarding school, but he never forgot Charlotte Charles, nicknamed Chuck, the childhood sweetheart whose father he had inadvertently killed.

The front story: Ned, now a full-time pie maker, falls in with a private investigator. The PI solves mysteries by talking to the dead for 60 seconds, using Ned's ability. Charlotte (Chuck) gets killed on a cruise and Ned goes in, ostensibly to touch her and solve the mystery of her death. But when she comes back to life, he is unwilling to see her dead again. So, 60 seconds go by and a grave-robbing funeral director nearby dies in her place.

Charlotte (Chuck) and Ned fall for each other instantly, but they cannot touch, or Charlotte will die. Nevertheless, they make the most of their second chance together, and therein lies the story. It is completely spell-binding. It's an urban fairy tale, still more evidence that the geeks have won. It is by turns surreal and kooky in the extreme, darling, hilarious, philosophical and heavy, and heartbreakingly romantic and beautiful. And, I just saw the episode where they do a They Might Be Giants song, which, unexpectedly, is germane to the content.

You can watch the show online if you like. ABC's player contains all the episodes to date; just click on the link that says "Watch Online Now."

Last off, here's a Radiohead concert in two acts. If you want to hear what they're all about, get it while it's hot. It's from Berkeley in 2006, so they play stuff from most of their catalog, including their newest album, excluding their first album. One thing that might impress you is how different the songs sound, even though it's always and only been the same five guys. They are a bit paranoid about contemporary Western society, but I for one am glad that someone is. It's dense, poetic, symphonic music.

Kefi's wedding video

2007-10-28T23:19:00.001-07:00