June 2002 Archives

I found a link to a Nation bashing story on Electrolite. The bone of contention boils down to a single line from an editorial by William Grieder. "The smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy could be abruptly deflated by economic events--which probably would be a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn't run roughshod over others, but terrible for US prosperity."

Patrick comments:

Of course, meanwhile, actual people's lives will be ruined by the things-getting-much-worse part, but that'll be okay since it's all part of mankind's march to a triumphant future. And in fact reformist measures are to be sneered at and dismissed, since they merely delay the exposure of the contradictions inherent in the system. This is why, for a certain kind of so-called leftist, the real enemies aren't the powerful and the privileged. The real enemies, to be fought tooth and nail, are reforming liberals.

I agree with the criticism of leftist politics that Patrick makes but I'm not sure this is the real problem. Reading the rest of the editorial gives an entirely different sense to the story.

The systematic deceit and imaginative greed--the sheer chintziness of personal finagling for more loot--go well beyond the darkest hunches harbored by resident skeptics like myself. Indeed, the Wall Street system is now being flayed in the media almost daily by its own leading tribunes.

Blogging is good for analyzing issues but this seems to take a single line and blow it way out of proportion. To me the line may be mistaken but hardly worth condemning the whole article. My reading philosophy is to suck out the parts of the critique that matter and then continue on.

Arnold Kling has an item commenting on the so-called command line bigots who use Unix and other open-source software. Basically he takes Eric Raymond to task for suggesting that Linux can solve the version fatigue mentioned by Glenn Reynolds.

The gist of Kling's arugment is:

I wish that Raymond or Doc Searls or any of their command-line bigot friends could spend just one day as an attorney, a secretary, or any other office worker whose job is something other than composing rants or editing computer code. Try producing that inventory chart or sales brochure using emacs and shell scripts.

I agree that doing this kind of work with a simple text editor and a shell script is more complex than most users would be able to manage. But there is something powerful about Linux and Unix that is missing from Windows or the web and that is the ability to easily script or program operations. What we need is a programming system that is usable by end-users. I was reading a book on end-user programming last night A Small Matter of Programming. The author calls for task-specific programming languages that would allow users to have the power to program their own computers for what they need. Her two big examples of where this already occurs are in spreadsheets and CAD systems. On a more theoretical level she convinces me that the claims made by many computer scientists that we are moving toward conversational interactions with our computers are extremely questionable. Conversations are too context sensitive to be easily translated to computers and the domain descibed by natural language too wide to make the tasks descibable.

What I like about the un*x systems is the modularity and small tools that make scripting possible. I was recently trying to edit some web pages using Microsoft tools and couldn't find any easy way to make global changes, such as removing all the HTML tags. Sed, the stream editor, on un*x solved the problem in a single line. Getting this ease of use and configurability to the end-user is the real challenge and failure to do so the true command-line bigotry.

CNET has a good summary of current arguments about government regulation of adware, spyware and other surreptitious programs.

However, after years of chances and failures, anti-regulatory dogma regarding the Internet has worn thin. People are becoming increasingly fed up with companies that seek to entrench themselves deep within the viscera of their PCs, and each violation of their trust by short-lived start-ups makes it more difficult for legitimate businesses to win back their confidence.

I've been feeling the pain of this with my recent download of RealOne, which has sucked up more file associations than I want. So far I've been unable to find a permanent solution and I'm one of the consumers who actually knows where to find the folder options that control associations in Windows XP.

John Rennie has "15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense" at Scientific American. Mostly it demolishes the claims that some intelligent design adherents make regarding the unscientific nature of evolution.

I found this via the Sound and the Fury which mentions an upcoming appearence on the National Geographic channel, but the article at sciam doesn't mention any television connection.

Salon is running a story on the 'success' of electronic music, pointing out that it rules our advertising and movie soundtracks but has never shown up on the radio, despite the marketing hype of the mid-90s. So why was this?

Vontz discusses the common complaints: repetitive beats, lack of real artistry (after all using a computer to create music can't be as aesthetically privleged as the violionist). Then he criticizes the American consumer who expects:

performances featuring vocalists and instruments that are recognizable and produce the kinds of sounds that they've spent decades listening to. They expect these sounds to be accompanied by the visual spectacle of singers, rappers and dancers on stage doing their damnedest to entertain and otherwise get them fired up. To people who have only experienced music this way the concept of the electronic music DJ and the dance experience must be utterly perplexing.

If you're used to live music as entertainment -- in the sense of watching performers make spectacles of themselves as they create music while you passively consume the sonic byproduct of their efforts -- then enjoying electronic music requires a shift in aural expectations, synthesis, digestion and physical participation. While there are certain branches of electronic music, such as the intelligent dance music created by producers like Boards of Canada, that are made for listening rather than dancing, by and large electronic music is made to make people dance. And when you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is.

This all fits into the point I made a few days ago in relation to the New York magazine story which projects a future of music similar to the publishing business: few superstars, mostly mid-listers toiling away to sell a few thousand copies.

Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation, begun in 1984 to promote freedom in computing by releasing free software. The review succinctly summarizes Stallman's appeal and oddity:

Most broadly, Williams’s book is about a disappearing personality type, that of the individual who stands on principle alone, who does not bend to pressure, succumb to convenience, or compromise his beliefs. It’s an investigation of just how viable such an ethically unyielding character is in a morally relativist world of bargains, trades, and deals.

I confess to being the pragmatist who is willing to use whatever tool works best, whether it be proprietary or free software, but I find Stallman's dedication an admirable goal for all of us to emulate.

Forbes has two articles critical of the patent system. "The Smother of Invention"

But there is bad news on this bicentennial. After 200 years of lumbering down the tracks, the intellectual-property process in the United States is beginning to go off the rails. Branches of the government are intervening where they never have before. Opposing camps, many with money and influence, are forming. Small inventors are diverted from where they can make the greatest contributions. And a culture of litigation, circumvention, and secrecy has evolved from an area where openness and law had long ruled.

From an editorial "Patently Absurd"

After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.

An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

Over the weekend the NY Times ran this article "Budding Scientists, Let Loose in a World They Can Save" which contains a description of a project sponsored by Harvard and George Mason that lets students learn in a virtual world.

She and her classmates are part of a research project designed by scientists at George Mason University and the Harvard University Graduate School of Education that relies on what they call multiple-user virtual environment experiential simulators, or Muvees. Players log in, adopt an identity and join up with other players to gather information and solve problems in a three-dimensional virtual world brimming with people, places and things.

I just stumbled across David Brin's brilliant essay that takes the whole mythology of Star Wars to task for being elitist, pompous, and anti-democratic.

Above all, I never cared for the whole Nietzschian Übermensch thing: the notion -- pervading a great many myths and legends -- that a good yarn has to be about demigods who are bigger, badder and better than normal folk by several orders of magnitude. It's an ancient storytelling tradition based on abiding contempt for the masses -- one that I find odious in the works of A.E. Van Vogt, E.E. Smith, L. Ron Hubbard and wherever you witness slanlike super-beings deciding the fate of billions without ever pausing to consider their wishes.

Brin continues to distinguish two trends in science fiction and critique the Joseph Campbell worship that pervades Star Wars. Science fiction at its best is a fiction of liberation that rejects the Homeric-heroic literary tradition in favor of a future in which questions are asked. To Brin an example of the ideals of SF can be found in Star Trek

Above all, "Star Trek" generally depicts heroes who are only about 10 times as brilliant, noble and heroic as a normal person, prevailing through cooperation and wit, rather than because of some inherited godlike transcendent greatness. Characters who do achieve godlike powers are subjected to ruthless scrutiny. In other words, "Trek" is a prototypically American dream, entranced by notions of human improvement and a progress that lifts all. Gene Roddenberry's vision loves heroes, but it breaks away from the elitist tradition of princes and wizards who rule by divine or mystical right.

As I read this I was reminded of another essay by Michael Moorcock "Starship Stormtroopers"

Star Wars carries the paternalistic messages of almost all generic adventure fiction (may the Force never arrive on your doorstep at three o'clock in the morning) and has all the right characters. it raises 'instinct' above reason (a fundamental to Nazi doctrine) and promotes a kind of sentimental romanticism attractive to the young and idealistic while protective of existing institutions. It is the essence of a genre that it continues to promote certain implicit ideas even if the author is unconscious of them. In this case the audience also seems frequently unconscious of them.

The New York Times has an article on the absurdities of reading exams that are censored to remove any references that might be deemed offensive. Of course, what gets removed is often the content of the story.

The modifications to the passages ranged widely. In the Chekhov story "The Upheaval," the exam takes out the portion in which a wealthy woman looking for a missing brooch strip-searches all of the house's staff members. Students are then asked to use the story to write an essay on the meaning of human dignity.

A paragraph in John Holt's "Learning All the Time" is truncated to eliminate some of the reasons Suzuki violin instruction differs in Japan and the United States, apparently not to offend anyone who might find the particulars somehow insulting. Students are nonetheless then asked to answer questions about those differences

My reaction to all of this is to condemn the sophistry that makes politicians believe that a return to the basics or standardized testing will solve the problems of education. As Jon Scieszka says in the article I cited earlier: we need better teachers. Exams are always at the mercy of the politics of those who write them. What today seems too politically correct may tomorrow become overtly racist or conservative, depending on who gets elected to the school board. Education needs a new way to assess student progress. (Kudo's to Prof. Shupe)

When I worked for Barnes and Noble one of my favorite recommendations for children's picture books were the work of Jon Scieszka, who wrote The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. I enjoyed his titles and the illustrations.

Today I found an essay by him at the Washington Post about Why Johnny Won't Read. He contends, and I think sadly it is true, that boys don't see enough role models reading.

The 10-year-old boys in my neighborhood, the boys I talk to when I visit schools, the boys who write to me -- "I don't like books, but I kind of liked one of yours" -- these boys don't see reading as a "guy" activity. And this perception of reading is showing up in grim statistics, most notably those provided by U.S. Department of Education reading tests, which have shown boys scoring lower than girls every year, in every age group -- for the past 30 years.

I know I got my first taste for reading from my father who used to sit in his armchair with the latest copy of Analog, smoking a cigarette. I skipped the second addiction but went whole hog for the first. I used to carry three or four extra books to every one of my junior high and high school classes. I still remember how astonished Mrs. Nichols was in 6th grade when I told her that I was reading Watership Down. I loved reading and I still do. So visit Jon's web site www.guysread.com, download the poster, and read to your sons.

Two articles of note about the stock market came to mind today. The first is "Beyond Value Investing: How I Realized the Internet Bubble was a Pyramid Scheme" by Bob Hiler. Hiler's argument is that the internet bubble is a new form of the pyramid scheme - a distributed pyramid scheme in which no one person or group can be blamed, instead a bunch of individual actors, acting in their perceived best interest, created a pyramid which eventually came crashing down. Hiler suggest the following 4 characteristics of a pyramid and then demonstrates how each one of them worked in the internet bubble.

1. Pyramids Tout A Revolutionary High-Return Strategy.


2. Pyramids Have New Investors Transfer Money to Old Investors.


3. All "Levels" Of The Pyramid Sell The Same Stuff To Each Other.


4. Pyramids Make Competition a Good Thing.

Finally he concludes that we were all duped into thinking that the internet was selling opportunity instead of an actual product. Based on how many Time cover stories I remember reading from just a few years ago I have to agree that opportunity was in the air.

Could this have been avoided? We all like to believe that we are immune to the hype of commercialism, whether it be ignoring the latest ad for cola or deciding for ourselves what is a good investment. Unfortunately there is too much information for any of us to digest. Even the so-called experts aren't always right. For that I cite an excellent piece by Malcolm Gladwell from the New Yorker "Blowing Up: How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy"
Taleb is an investor in options. He buys stock options on both sides of the fence, betting that the market will go up or it will go down, and eventually it will go so far that his options will make a lot of money.

What Empirica has done is to invert the traditional psychology of investing. You and I, if we invest conventionally in the market, have a fairly large chance of making a small amount of money in a given day from dividends or interest or the general upward trend of the market. We have almost no chance of making a large amount of money in one day, and there is a very small, but real, possibility that if the market collapses we could blow up. We accept that distribution of risks because, for fundamental reasons, it feels right.

For Taleb there will be a day when everything moves dramatically or unthinkably and that will be the day he makes his money. On normal days nothing much happens or he loses money. But he knows that someday the unthinkable will happen and the other "rational" people who invest in the stock market will cause a bust or a boom that can't be justified and he will be waiting to cash in.

I'm thinking to myself that this is a strategy I need to use. Maybe I should have become a broker. But fundamentally it undermines our notion of rationality. Sometimes the unthinkable happens and it cannot be avoided.