Mano Singham's Web Journal

THIS BLOG HAS MOVED AND HAS A NEW HOME PAGE.

Entries in "Other"

January 10, 2012

This blog has moved to Freethought Blogs

I have decided to take up the offer to move to Freethought Blogs. The change will take effect immediately and my new site is already up here. I reposted yesterday's Santorum post over there to get a feel of how to use the new platform. I will continue to maintain this site with all its archives and will monitor it to clear up the spam and respond to any questions and comments that warrant them but new posts will only appear over at the new site.

Thanks to all who responded to my request for comments on the move. It was gratifying to hear the messages of support and that most of you felt that you would go to the new site. I was surprised at the number of people who said that the present site had a sense of intimacy and coziness that they feared might get lost at FTB. One does not immediately think of the internet as an intimate place but I understand what they are saying. Over time, a community of people gets created and I feel that I 'know' many people who comment here though I have never met them and all that I know about them is the name and URL they choose to provide.

People have warned me about possible trolls at the new location. I think of internet trolls as commenters who deliberately try to deflect a discussion to irrelevant issues or start a flame war or otherwise disrupt a discussion. I have not had to deal with that problem here, mainly because the readers here seem to be able to keep things on track and ignore irrelevancies. It will be interesting to see what the new site will bring.

What I have had to spend a lot of time on is spam. Every day I get hundreds of spam comments, a few of which get past the system's filters and appear on the site. Several times I day I go in and clean them out, so that the real comments don't get lost in the clutter. More time consuming is going into the spam folder and rescuing and publishing real comments that the filter has mistakenly identified as spam. In the new system, you can freely post comments as here except that I have chosen the option that the first time someone posts a comment, I will need to authorize it but after that there is no restriction and your comments should appear immediately. Sorry about that inconvenience but that should reduce the spam problem.

I would like to express my special thanks to Norm Nason, editor of the excellent web magazine Machines Like Us, and a person of many artistic talents whose wide variety of work can be seen here, for designing the nifty new banner that graces my new site.

I must also give a lot of thanks to Jeremy Smith, the system administrator here, who has been immensely supportive in keeping the system going and helping me out when necessary when I have done something stupid, such as banning myself from my own site, if you can believe it. (I have never banned anyone but the system has filters that identify most spam and can ban the more egregious offenders and on occasion I have accidentally triggered it.) I must thank Jeremy, Heidi Cool, and Vincenzo who commented on my first few posts and encouraged me to keep going. But they should not be blamed for the quality of the roughly two million words that have subsequently emerged!

I also have to thank Case Western Reserve University for creating this blogging platform without which I might never have had the nerve to start blogging. This platform made it so easy that I took the plunge on January 26th, 2005 and I will mark the seventh anniversary of blogging this month. The university has never once interfered with anything that I have posted, although I have taken some pretty controversial positions on occasion. Colleagues have on occasion asked me if I received any push back from the university administration for things I said and have been surprised when I reply that no one has given even the remotest suggestion that I tone things down. Universities should be the most dedicated defenders of free speech but we know that in these days, with so much pressure from external sources such as alumni and funders, many are wary of stepping on toes. Hence it reflects great credit to CWRU that they have left me completely alone to write what I wish. It is not that they don't know this blog exists because I know that I am read quite widely on campus.

So onward and upward to the new frontier!

January 04, 2012

This is not your grandfather's model railroad

There is something quite fascinating to me about miniature railroads. I had a toy train set as a boy but this is something I could never have imagined.

(Via Machines Like Us.)

January 02, 2012

Moving to Freethought Blogs?

I have been invited to join the stable of bloggers over at Freethought Blogs. There are some well-known ones already posting there, such as Greta Christina, Ophelia Benson, P. Z. Myers, John Loftus, and Ed Brayton.

There will be no restrictions whatsoever on what I post and so the content will remain the same. I am leaning towards joining but before I make the decision, I wanted to throw the idea out to the loyal readers of this blog as to how it might affect their reading enjoyment.

The present site is on a platform run by my university and has been terrific in providing support whenever I needed it and not placing any restrictions on my writing, so any move will not be due to any dissatisfaction with the current situation but purely as a means of creating greater visibility by being part of a broader network of bloggers with similar interests.

So, what do you think?

December 30, 2011

Spaghetti night

What is better than friends sharing food?

(Thanks to Norm.)

December 19, 2011

Matt Damon goes undercover to promote reusable water bottles to children

Happy Anniversary to Baxter, the Wonder Dog!

He became part of our family six years ago today and is resting up before the partying in his honor begins.

Some thoughts on Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens undoubtedly died well, by which I mean that he faced his terminal illness with dignity, not falling into either one of the common twin traps that snare people who are told they have a serious terminal illness, that of maudlin sentimentality of the 'why me?' variety or fake bravado that he would defeat the cancer somehow when all before him had failed. He was above all, a writer, for whom the compulsion to pour words out was unstoppable. Not for him the idea that his last days should be spent in doing those things he had had no time for before. He was apparently working on an essay until the end, even when he was so weak that he could barely drag his IV drip with to the chair and would nod off periodically and could barely hit the keys. One has to admire that.

The only book I read of his was God is Not Great and my review was decidedly mixed. But there was no doubt that his debating skills in favor of the atheist cause were definitely something I welcomed. He had a quick wit, an easy facility with words, was widely read, and seemed to have a prodigious memory, all of which come in handy when engaged in the kinds of polemical battles he seemed to relish.

It must be said, however, that his other politics in the latter part of his life were atrocious. He seemed to have bought the entire neoconservative package, demonstrating an enthusiasm for wars against Muslim countries that was appalling. Critics claimed that he was a social climber, eager to move in elite American political and social circles and that his entry ticket to that world was to join in the jingoistic hysteria that followed the events of September 11, 2001. Recall that in those days, to decry the reaction to lash out at perceived enemies was seen as irrelevant and not serious at best and borderline treasonous at worst.

Since I am not of that world, I am in no position to judge if that charge is accurate, but I thought that this remembrance of him by Alexander Cockburn was worth linking to.

December 18, 2011

Grandparents

Strange as it may seem to some people, gay couples react to the news of becoming grandparents pretty much the same way as heterosexual couples do.

Explain to me again why we should not let gay people adopt children?

December 16, 2011

Animals and me

I am not a fan of violence, even of the fake kind in films and TV. I do not seek violence out and an advisory on a film that it contains a lot of it is enough to make me want to give it a miss. I never watch any films in the slasher/horror genre. But I can stomach film violence if I have to. I have seen my share of cinematic deaths and injury and bloodshed and survived, and usually forget about them soon afterwards. In more mainstream films, if there is a violent scene or two and I can anticipate one coming, I can turn away. I recently saw the trilogy of films that began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and although they had some pretty rough stuff from time to time, I enjoyed the films enough that I could get through those scenes.

Sometimes it is too much, though. The film Pulp Fiction sickened me because the violence seemed just gratuitous and turned me off Quentin Tarantino films forever. I also went to see the film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, and her Lover which had some pretty gross scenes early on which I sat through but towards the end it was so clear that it was heading towards a ghastly denouement and I simply got up and left, the only time that I have actually left a movie theater before the end.

But there is something that I cannot stand and that is violence towards animals. Any hint that animals are going to be shown treated cruelly is enough to ruin the film for me. Even the portrayal of the natural death of an animal upsets me. If animals have to die, I definitely want them to die peacefully and off-screen. This is true even in books. I read a novel some years ago that had one scene in which a dog is treated cruelly. That scene remains in my mind long after the rest of the novel has been forgotten.

In nature films, the only animal video clips I will watch or link to are those with happy outcomes but even then there are limits. Sometime ago, a blog reader sent me a link to a video clip of a baby wildebeest in the wild that was being dragged underwater by crocodiles until it was saved by the collective action of the herd. It was a happy ending but watching the baby struggling for survival was too much for me to watch again and I never linked to it.

The funny thing is that I am not an animal lover, as the term is popularly understood. I did not even have a pet as a child nor do I recall ever asking for one. The first dog in my life arrived when I was over forty years of age and I consented only because my children's pleas for one finally overcame my strenuous objections. I definitely do not gush over animals. When I encounter them, I treat them as I would when I meet children for the first time, friendly but keeping a slight distance. I do not rescue strays, visit and help out at animal shelters, join organizations dedicated to protecting them, or do any of the countless other things that true animal lovers would do. I even eat meat, despite knowing of the widespread use of horrendous factory farming practices in the US. And yet, news items about people treating animals badly fill me with rage against the perpetrators.

Quite a few of my loved ones have died and I know that many others in my life that I am fond of may die before me. While the prospect makes me sad, I can still think of it without becoming too upset. But I cannot bear to even contemplate the death of my dog. The thought fills me with such dread that I resolutely push it out of my mind. Even writing these words cause me discomfort.

I have tried and failed to explain this seemingly contradictory behavior on my part. The best I can come up with is that because animals are so dependent on us, and we have such power over them, treating them badly is a gross violation of our duties and obligations to them. It is like mistreating children or people who are powerless, something that also makes me really angry. There is something overwhelmingly wrong in abusing those over whom you have power.

December 07, 2011

Glenn Greenwald annual fundraiser

Once a year, Greenwald has a fundraiser and it is going on now. He is undoubtedly one of the most valuable resources on the web and I would strongly urge you to contribute whatever you can so that he can continue his work.

November 24, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope all of you have a quiet and enjoyable day with family and friends, which is what I will be doing.

What I will not be doing this weekend is going anyway near any store. Recession, depression, or good times, the madness of shopping that accompanies this weekend is what I hate most about this otherwise wonderful holiday.

November 13, 2011

"Grinding the Crack"

Amazing.

(Via Norm)

November 11, 2011

How far did the Penn State rot spread?

John Cole makes a good point. Penn State assistant coach Jerry Sandusky who is the target of the sexual assault allegations against young boys for the period 1994 to 2009 was considered a top defensive coach and heir to Joe Paterno when he suddenly 'retired' in 1999 in his prime. Why was he not recruited by other colleges or pro football teams? Was it because his behavior was an open secret within the football fraternity? If so, this could be the beginning of a much wider scandal. Former University of Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys coach Barry Switzer says that from his knowledge of the coaching world, every senior person on the coaching staff at Penn State had to have known what was going on. "Having been in this profession a long time and knowing how close coaching staffs are, I knew that this was a secret that was kept secret," Switzer said. "Everyone on that staff had to have known, the ones that had been around a long time."

There are now articles suggesting that many people don't know what they should do when they suspect child sexual abuse and so perhaps the actions (or more precisely the non-actions) of the people at Penn State should not be judged too harshly. I think this is a wrong argument. It is one thing to not know what to do when you just suspect that something is wrong. But in this case, someone actually saw a grown man having sex with a child. The person who saw it was a football player in his twenties and the perpetrator of the abuse was an older man of about 60 so it should have been possible to physically intervene and stop the abuse. But he did not try to stop it nor did he report it to the police, nor did the people he told it to report it to the police. This is not really a grey area.

Jon Stewart sums it up well.

November 10, 2011

Joe Paterno deserved to be sacked

The rioting by Penn State students on hearing the news that football coach Joe Paterno was summarily sacked (along with the university president) by the university's Board of Trustees is inexcusable.

According to news reports, graduate assistant Mike McCreary (sometimes spelled as McQueary) observed assistant coach Jerry Sandusky raping a 10-year old boy in the showers in the locker room all the way back in 2002. Why he did not immediately try to stop it is bad enough. He apparently reported it to Paterno the next day but Paterno says he was not told the details and simply reported to his superiors that there was some kind of problem and left it at that.

I find that unbelievable. Paterno exercises tight control over his operations. To think that he would not have asked for details of what McCreary had observed is preposterous. The fact that he and McCreary did nothing even when no action was taken against Sandusky for nine years is shameful. We are talking about the rape of a child. Paterno and McCreary and anyone else who knew of Sandusky's serial predatory behavior and did nothing deserve a far greater punishment than firing.

The code of silence and cover-up in the Penn State football program reminds me of the Catholic church's child abuse scandal and raises the question: Is there something about an all-male culture that makes people tolerate horrible abuses such as these?

November 09, 2011

Corruption in sports

That corruption exists in professional sports is obvious, often caused by gambling. Usually when players get caught fixing results they face punishments of fines or suspension and exclusion form the game. Last week though, three Pakistani cricketers were sentenced to jail for periods ranging from six to thirty months for agreeing to fix games in return for money, in addition to fines and suspensions.

The deals between the gamblers and the players were arranged by an intermediary but the way that the players signaled to the bettors that they were in on the deal was by bowling a 'no ball' at a pre-determined point in the game. For those not familiar with cricket, the closest analogous situation in baseball is where a pitcher balks. This is a fairly rare event but one that is totally within the control of the pitcher and can be done at will.

Though I used to be a fan, I am now frankly sick of professional sports, and this includes the big college sports programs that seem to provide a steady stream of scandals, the most recent one being the disgusting one emerging from Penn State. I still pay casual attention to it but it increasingly seems like big business, not sport anymore, with all the venality that accompanies it.

November 04, 2011

Jeff Sharlett talks at CWRU

Jeff Sharlett, author, investigative journalist, and TV political commentator, is a prolific writer on the intersection of religion and politics. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (2008) is one of his works. His bio is here.

He will be talking on The Noise of Democracy Occupying Our Minds on Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 5:30 PM in the Ford Auditorium in Allen Memorial Library Building, which is on the CWRU campus at the corner of the Euclid and Adelbert, just across the street from Severance Hall.

The talk is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

[Updated to include the time.]

November 02, 2011

The role of religion at a secular university

There will be a panel discussion followed by a free and open forum on the above topic to discuss the role of religion, involving questions such as: Should we support it, promote it, accommodate it, respect it, or just ignore it?

The panelists are: William Deal (moderator, Professor of Religion), Peter Haas (Chair of Department of Religious Studies), Colleen Barker-Williamson (Director of Student Activities and Leadership), and Mano Singham (Director, UCITE)

Location: Nord 310 on the Case quad of CWRU
Time: Friday, November 4, 2011, 12:30-1:45 pm

Pizza and drinks will be available.

October 21, 2011

Tragic death of exotic animals

The big story in Ohio has been the tragic one of a private owner of a large menagerie of exotic animals in a rural area of central Ohio who reportedly released all of them before killing himself. The authorities, confronted with dangerous animals roaming wild in populated areas, shot and killed almost all the animals.

I was stunned to learn of the scale of the carnage. 48 animals were killed, including 18 Bengal tigers, 17 lions, and eight bears. The photo of the corpses of these magnificent animals was heartbreaking.

I was also furious that it is even possible for private individuals to obtain and keep these animals in poor conditions but apparently the laws allow it. According to the news report:

Since 2004, Thompson had been charged by local authorities with cruelty to animals, allowing his animals to run free and improperly disposing of dead animals.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also received two complaints about the farm in 2008 and 2009, involving such things as pens that may have been unsafe, animals that were too skinny and dead animals on the property, said Dave Sacks, a USDA spokesman. But the agency decided it had no authority to act.

Federal officials said the government had no jurisdiction over the farm under either the Animal Welfare Act or the Endangered Species Act, since the animals were held as private property and were not exhibited or being used for other commercial purposes.

There are estimated to be less than 2,500 Bengal tigers in the world. Ohio apparently has the dubious distinction of having the most lax, some would say even non-existent, state regulations in the country. How is it possible that we allow a single individual to acquire and keep 18 of them legally? Because of that, laxity about 1% of the world's population of Bengal tigers have been killed in a single day.

I am not a fan of publicly owned zoos because they keep animals confined away from their normal habitat. The big animals especially never look happy. But at least a case can be made that zoos raise awareness of the need to protect and preserve species and perhaps even help in conservation efforts. But I cannot see any reason why private individuals should be allowed to keep rare, exotic, dangerous, and endangered animals as pets. The practice should be banned.

October 18, 2011

Throwable panoramic ball camera

A ball containing 36 cameras is programmed to take simultaneous photos when it reaches the highest point in its trajectory, providing an instantaneous panoramic view. This not only looks like it would be fun to use, it could have many practical uses, such as seeing over high barriers.

(Via Boing Boing.)

October 15, 2011

How to choose passwords

All of us who are heavy users of computers and the internet know that we get drowned in the number of passwords we need and that it is hard to keep track of them.

James Fallows describes what he learned after his wife's Gmail account was hacked and gives a list of suggestions for passwords.

The science, psychology, and sociology of creating strong passwords is a surprisingly well-chronicled and fascinating field. On The Atlantic's Web site, we will describe some of the main strategies and the reasoning behind them. Even security professionals recognize the contradiction: the stronger the password, the less likely you are to remember it. Thus the Post-it notes with passwords, on monitor screens or in desk drawers.

But there is a middle ground, of passwords strong enough to create problems for hackers and still simple enough to be manageable. There are more details on our site, but strategies include:

• Choose a long, familiar-to-you sequence of ordinary words, with spaces between them as in an ordinary sentence, which more and more sites now allow. "Lake Winnebago is deep and chilly," for instance. Or "my favorite packer is not brett favre." You could remember a phrase like that, but a hacker's computer, which couldn't tell spaces from characters, would see only one forbiddingly long password sequence.
  
• Choose a shorter sequence of words that are not "real" English words. I once lived in a Ghanaian village called Assin Fosu. I can remember its name easily, but it would be hard to guess. Even harder if I added numbers or characters.
  
• Choose a truly obscure, gibberish password—"V*!amYEg5M5!3R" is one I generated just now with the LastPass system, and you're welcome to it—and then find a way to store it. Having it written down in your wallet is one, though the paper it's on shouldn't say "Passwords" at the top. The approach I prefer, and use for some passwords, is to entrust them to online managers like LastPass or RoboForm. Even if their corporate sites were hacked, that wouldn't reveal all your passwords, since the programs work by storing part of the encoding information in the cloud and part on your own machine.

At a minimum, any step up from "password," "123456," or your own birthday is worthwhile.

Finally, use different passwords. Not hundreds of different ones, for the hundreds of different places that require logins of some kind. The guide should be: any site that matters needs its own password—one you don't currently use for any other site, and that you have never used anywhere else.

"Using an important password anywhere else is just like mailing your house key to anyone who might be making a delivery," Michael Jones of Google said. "If you use your password in two places, it is not a valid password."

I asked my experts how many passwords they personally used. The highest I heard was "about a dozen." The lowest was four, and the norm was five or six. They all stressed that they managed their passwords and sites in different categories. In my own case, there are five sites whose security really matters to me: my main e‑mail account, two credit-card sites, a banking account, and an investment firm. Each has its own, good password, never used anywhere else. Next are the sites I'd just as soon not have compromised: airline-mileage accounts, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, various message boards and memberships. I have two or three semi-strong passwords I use among all of them. If you hacked one of them you might hack the others, but I don't really care. Then there is everything else, the thicket of annoying little logins we all deal with. I have one or two passwords for them too. By making it easy to deal with unimportant accounts, I can concentrate on protecting the ones that matter.

Seems like good advice.

Dogs Decoded

The PBS series Nova has a wonderful program about dogs with the above title that looks at the amazing things we are learning about them. It was broadcast on October 12 and will be available for free viewing online for only a week after that. Don't miss it, especially if you are fond of dogs.

I particularly enjoyed it because there were lots of scenes in which they showed dogs that were exactly like Baxter, the Wonder Dog.

October 11, 2011

Phasing out small shampoo bottles

Those tiny bottles of shampoo and conditioner that hotels provide would last me about two weeks but I usually stay just one or two days and I suspect that the rest will be thrown away, which seems awfully wasteful of both shampoo and plastic. Do hotels expect you to leave the remnants behind or are you doing them a favor by taking the partially used bottles with you, saving them the trouble of throwing them away? It seems vaguely wrong to take them home with me without being given explicit permission and I have personally vacillated between taking them and leaving them. It would be nice if hotels left a little note telling guests like me who worry about such trivialities what to do.

But now apparently some hotels are going to be providing full-size bottles that are refillable, so that the ambiguity is removed.

That's a welcome development. Now if they could do something about the waste of the remnants of those little bars of soap …

October 09, 2011

Penn and Teller on the Indian rope trick

October 03, 2011

Amazing goal

A soccer player scores a goal with a header from inside his own half.

What is surprising is why the goalkeeper was so far out of position. You can see him in lime green right at the beginning near the opponent's goal and could not get back in time to guard his own goal.

September 22, 2011

Discussion on the scientific basis for justice and altruism

On Friday, September 23, I will be leading a discussion on these ideas, especially the work of Frans de Waal, Paul Bloom, and Peter Singer on the implications of the theory of evolution.

It will take place from 12:30- 2:00 pm in Nord 310B on the CWRU campus.

The event is free and open to all. Drinks will be provided and you are encouraged to bring your own brown bag lunch.

September 21, 2011

We're #25!

At least as far as internet speeds go, just behind Romania.

If it seems extraordinary to you that the country that pioneered the internet should lag so far behind now, Tim Karr explains that the prime cause is the lack of competition here, thanks to the ability of the telecommunications giants to pressure regulators.

In the years that followed the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, lobbyists working for powerful providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon pressured a compliant FCC to tear down all of the important safeguards established by Congress.
…
While the U.S. blindly followed a path of "deregulation," other nations in Europe and Asia beefed up their pro-competitive policies. The results are evident in our free fall from the top of almost every global measure of Internet services, availability and speed.
…
The lack of competition has turned America into a broadband backwater. In the aftermath of the FCC’s decisions, powerful phone and cable companies legislated and lobbied their way to controlling 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market — leaving the vast majority of consumers with two or fewer choices of land-based providers in any given market.
The absence of true consumer choice has driven prices up and services down.

September 20, 2011

Bathroom mania

For reasons that are not clear to me, the Plain Dealer wasted a huge amount of the limited space in its front section to a story about a fancy lakefront property that was on sale for nearly $20 million. The item read like a huge, free, real estate advertisement and fell into the category of what is known as 'real estate porn', that showcases the absurdly extravagant homes of the wealthy.

But what struck me was that the 38,000 square foot house built on 160 acres consisted of five bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and seven half bathrooms.

Why would you need sixteen bathrooms for a private home that has just five bedrooms? Do rich people need to go to the bathroom a lot and so must have one handy at any moment?

September 19, 2011

The inexplicable popularity of awards shows

I see from the news today that yesterday was the Emmy awards show. I do not understand the appeal of such shows for viewers and am curious as to why people watch them at all. Surely it can't be to see the stars since we see them all the time in their performances themselves. The shows apparently have some moments of comedy and some music and dance but most of the time seems to be spent announcing the nominees, showing clips from their performances, and the acceptance remarks of category winners. Surely this must get stale about fifteen minutes into the proceedings?

It is true that I do not watch TV or go to many plays much, which may explain my lack of interest in the Emmys and the Tonys. But I do watch films a lot and my disinterest extends to the Oscar awards show as well.

Do viewers of these shows see it as a quasi-sporting event and root for particular people to win, thus enjoying the suspense of seeing if their 'team' won?

I am genuinely curious.

September 14, 2011

Happy Birthday to Baxter, the Wonder Dog!

September 12, 2011

P. Z. Myers to speak at event honoring Page Stephens

The Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry is having its 2011 Humanism Award banquet on Friday, September 30th 2011 at 7:00 pm at the Crowne Plaza Independence, 5300 Rockside Road, Independence, OH 44131.

The award is being given to Page Stephens, PhD, "who, as cofounder and seventeen year president of the now-disbanded South Shore Skeptics, was instrumental in cultivating a burgeoning skeptics community on the southern banks of Lake Erie and proved himself a staunch defender of science over pseudoscience."

The featured speaker is the well-known biologist blogger P. Z. Myers.

More details can be found here.

September 08, 2011

The importance of balancing one's life

One of the odd features of life in the US is the boasting (either overt or subtle) by professional people about how much they work. They seem to seek bragging rights about who puts in the most hours, as if the more hours you work the more important you must be. My daughter worked for a couple of years in the financial sector and sent me this article that illustrates the mindset of many of the people she encountered in that world. The author highlights a trap that young professionals especially can fall into.

Because fulfilling and engrossing work - the sort that is thought to provide the most intense learning experience - often requires long hours or captivates the imagination for long periods of time, it is easy to slip into the idea that the converse is also true: that just by working long hours, one is also engaging in fulfilling and engrossing work. This leads to the popular fallacy that you can measure the value of your job (and, therefore, the amount you are learning from it) by the amount of time you spend on it. And, incidentally, when a premium is placed on learning rather than earning, people are particularly susceptible to this form of self-deceit.

Thus, whereas in the past, when people in their 20s or 30s spoke disparagingly about nine-to-five jobs it was invariably because they were seen as too routine, too unimaginative, or too bourgeois. Now, it is simply because they don't contain enough hours.

Young professionals have not suddenly developed a distaste for leisure, but they have solidly bought into the belief that a 45-hour week necessarily signifies an unfulfilling job. Jane, a 29-year-old corporate lawyer who works in the City of London, tells a story about working on a deal with another lawyer, a young man in his early 30s. At about 3am, he leant over the boardroom desk and said: "Isn't this great? This is when I really love my job." What most struck her about the remark was that the work was irrelevant (she says it was actually rather boring); her colleague simply liked the idea of working late. "It's as though he was validated, or making his life important by this," she says.

Unfortunately, when people can convince themselves that all they need do in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives is to work long hours, they can quickly start to lose reasons for their existence. As they start to think of their employment as a lifestyle, fulfilling and rewarding of itself - and in which the reward is proportional to hours worked - people rapidly begin to substitute work for other aspects of their lives.
…
Jane, Michael, Robert and Kathryn grew up as part of a generation with fewer social constraints determining their futures than has been true for probably any other generation in history. They were taught at school that when they grew up they could "do anything", "be anything". It was an idea that was reinforced by popular culture, in films, books and television.

The notion that one can do anything is clearly liberating. But life without constraints has also proved a recipe for endless searching, endless questioning of aspirations. It has made this generation obsessed with self-development and determined, for as long as possible, to minimise personal commitments in order to maximise the options open to them. One might see this as a sign of extended adolescence.

Eventually, they will be forced to realise that living is as much about closing possibilities as it is about creating them.

I grew up at a time and in a country where this mindset was not present, so I did not fall prey to this kind of thinking. Also academia is an area where people do work long hours but because the research involves largely self-motivated learning, it does not seem like work, and since there is already a consensus that the work is worthwhile, academics tend not to brag to each other about the hours they put in.

Now of course, I am in the twilight of my work life, approaching the age when retirement becomes a factor to consider. Getting old is no picnic, mainly because your body starts to fall apart. But one of the benefits, if one is able to recognize it as such, is that you realize that because time is running out, many of the options that you once considered are no longer open to you, and so you begin to think of how best to maximize the benefits of the life you have rather than constantly seeking new fields to conquer.

It is not that one has become resigned to one's lot in life. It is that one sees more clearly what options are realistically available and can then focus on making the most of them.

September 07, 2011

The 'student athlete' fraud

A recent news report says that football players in Division 1A colleges average about 44.8 hours on that sport and less than 40 on academics.

This is crazy. A full time student is expected to spend a minimum of about 50 hours per week on academics (attending classes and doing out of class work). Assuming they sleep 8 hours per day, that means that they have 17 hours per week, or 2.5 hours per day, for everything else in life. It is ridiculous to think that these athletes are sacrificing all the other things and living the ascetic life of a hermit in order to completely meet their athletic and academic demands.

The NCAA, the governing body, is pretending that this shows the commitment of these students to living up to the 'student-athlete' ideal. An NCAA spokesperson Myles brand says, "These young people are very competitive. It's in their fiber… and they will do everything they can to succeed… Frankly, I'd rather have that student go to sleep early, wake up in the morning and do an extra run than I would (him or her) staying up late and going to the bars… The fact that they choose to balance athletics and academics as a primary activity, I think that's fine."

Yeah, right. What is obviously happening is that these student athletes are cutting back on their studies at these big sports schools, which are notorious for finding ways to circumvent academic requirements.

What these students really are are professional athletes masquerading as students, providing income for the schools in return for the small chance of making it in professional sports after they graduate with a worthless degree. Some undoubtedly feel that they are being exploited, hence the periodic scandals involving 'secret' benefits and payments to players, with coaches and school administrators pretending not to notice. Ohio State University is the latest school to be found guilty of such infractions and its football coach resigned but he will merely move on to another position and the cycle goes on.

September 01, 2011

Short break from blogging

I realized that I have not had a break from blogging for almost two years. Since my daughter will be having a wedding reception this weekend and there will be many friends and family that I will be meeting, I will be taking some time off to enjoy their company.

Regular blogging will return after the Labor Day weekend but I will likely check in from time to time with some short posts and to clean up the spam in the comments.

But until then, here is a photo of Baxter, the Wonder Dog, taking a well-earned rest.

August 31, 2011

Competitive lock picking

I am constantly amazed at the kinds of things that get made into serious competitions.

In this video, Schuyler Towne explains what this particular sport is and how it is done (via Boing Boing).

August 24, 2011

Malcolm Marshall

There is perhaps no more graceful sight in cricket than to see a great fast bowler in action. The long flowing run up, the planting of the feet and the swiveling of the body before the arms wheel and delivers the ball at high speed, is really something to see.

Perhaps the greatest of such bowlers in modern times was Malcolm Marshall of the West Indies, who stood out even during the 1970 and 1980s when that country was churning out great fast bowlers that were demolishing their opponents. He was not a big man by fast bowler standards but his sheer skill and athletic ability made him successful. His untimely death in 1999 at the age of 41 a few years after he retired from international cricket was a great loss to the sporting world.

Here he is in action in one international match against England.

August 23, 2011

Rubik's cube contests

The son of a friend of is very good at solving the Rubik's cube and takes part in the annual national contest to see who is the best in the US. In successive years he has come in 3rd, 2nd, 4th and 5th, but frustratingly has never won.

Here is a video of someone solving it in competition in 6.77 seconds.

What I learned recently is that the contest also has a category where people are required to solve the puzzle with their feet! Here is someone solving it in 31.56 seconds.

Being somewhat of a klutz myself with quite poor small motor skills, I find this amazing.

You have to be a bit cautious about YouTube videos of people claiming to be able to solve the puzzle quickly with their feet or hands. Some of them are hoaxes where they start out with an ordered cube, make it disordered while filming it, and then run the video in reverse. Make sure there is a lot of background stuff going on which unambiguously indicate forward time, and that there are no cuts.

August 22, 2011

"Don't call my bluff"

Recently Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, speaking about the Tea Party, said: "They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank."

Similarly President Obama said to Eric Cantor during the debt ceiling discussions: "Eric, don't call my bluff. I'm going to the American people on this."

In both these cases, the speakers implied that they possessed the stronger hand so it does not make sense to say "Don't call my bluff". In such situations, you either call your opponents' bluff or you want your opponent to think you are bluffing and call you on it. To say that you are bluffing and then warn them not to call you on it does not make any sense.

It seems like in both cases the speakers meant to say "Don't think I am bluffing because I am not." In other words, the people who are saying "Don't call my bluff" should really be saying "I am calling your bluff."

August 21, 2011

The need to have a plan B

NPR had a story about people who get lost, stranded, and even die in Death Valley because their GPS devices led them astray. After repeated instances like this, a Death Valley Ranger investigated and discovered that the devices were using old maps with roads that had long since disappeared. People following the GPS devices ended up on dirt roads that led nowhere.

I have written before at how surprised I am that people put their faith implicitly in technology. I find it incredible that anyone would even go to a place like Death Valley without at least some backup plan in case the GPS failed. Apart from errors, what would they do if the device started obviously malfunctioning or stopped working?

Just recently I had to go to someone's home. Their address was on Shaker Boulevard, which is a very long street with a wide grassy median with few crossover points, so I put their street number into Google Maps to get a rough idea of where the house was. I was surprised to find that the location given was two towns away from mine, since I was pretty sure that they lived in my own suburb. So I tried MapQuest and sure enough, it was very near my home. Google Maps had made an error. My habit of being skeptical and checking saved me from wasting time.

I also recently drove to a distant town for a wedding party and as is my practice before I left got directions from Google Maps or MapQuest and compared it with a physical map. But when I got to that town, construction had closed off many of the streets that I was supposed to go on. This did not bother me because I had a map and quickly found an alternate route to my hotel.

I don't have GPS but was wondering what it would do in situations where its directions cannot be followed due to various reasons. For example, for people traveling in Death Valley, if they sense that the dirt road they are asked to go on is a mistake, what options do they have? Does anyone know?

August 18, 2011

Stanford prison experiment

This week marked the 40th anniversary of the infamous experiment that showed how quickly people can turn into brutes when given unchecked power over someone else.

The video in the link is worth watching for its interviews with some of the original participants.

August 11, 2011

Such people are scum

One of the most sickening cases of recent times was that of a Pennsylvania judge getting bribes from a builder of juvenile prisons, in exchange for which the judge sent thousands of children, many of them first-time offenders convicted of minor crimes and some as young as 10, to the private jails.

About 4,000 of those convictions have now been tossed aside because he violated the constitutional rights of the accused, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea. The judge was portrayed as not only corrupt but as "vicious and mean-spirited" who "verbally abused and cruelly mocked" the children whom he sent to jail.

His trial has ended with the judge being sentenced to 28 years in prison.

Another judge accused of a similar crime has pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

The 'Internet Explorer users are stupid' hoax

Some of you may have read about a study that supposedly showed that people who used Internet Explore had lower IQs than those who use other web browsers. The hoax fooled many major news outlets like the BBC, which picked up and reported on it.

The hoax's perpetrators explain why they did it and their surprise that so many people did not seem to question the results, as if it were fairly common knowledge that IE users were stupid. They listed eight things that should have quickly indicated to people, especially reporters, that the story was fake.

Christopher Budd explores what the widespread and uncritical acceptance of this hoax story might tell us about ourselves and the media.

August 07, 2011

Happy birthday, World Wide Web!

Yesterday, August 6th was the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which was built on the foundation of the much older internet. The internet was the name given to the network of linked computers around the globe that was used in the early days primarily by research institutions to transfer data and send email.

The World Wide Web was a radical advance created by Tim Berners-Lee when he standardized the three protocols that now enable users to easily put up information on servers in a manner (using HTML) that other users can use their web browsers to find because of its unique address (the familiar URL), and then transfer that information from the remote servers to their own computers (using HTTP).

The internet and the World Wide Web certainly are the biggest revolutions in my lifetime, the one thing that I simply cannot imagine life without.

August 05, 2011

The oddest things are considered offensive

It is odd how society decides that some things are offensive. For example, raising your index finger is fine. Athletes often point to the heavens after a good play to thank their god for taking time out from his busy schedule to help them out. But the third finger pointing to the heavens is considered such a dire insult that it can result in murderous fury.

We know that certain words are not allowed on broadcast television. But when I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, they bleep out these words too, even though those shows are on cable and I watch them online.

But what surprised me is that when the people on these shows raise the third finger, it is pixelated. Despite the fact that many of the comedic segments on the show involve gestures that have obvious similarities to sexual acts and are not pixelated, 'giving the finger' is seen as so toxic that it gets special treatment.

Construction worker karaoke

I love it when regular people do this kind of unexpected stuff, bringing some fun into the daily routine.

July 31, 2011

The Wrongulator

I never unquestioningly accept the results produced by machines and as much as possible try to find independent ways to check if they make sense. The following story may explain why.

When I was in graduate school, my doctoral thesis involved a lot of detailed calculations that required using a computer. This was in the days prior to the personal computer and we used massive mainframes, entering the programs and data using punch cards and later advancing to remote terminals. Because the computer programs I had written were so complicated and there were so many opportunities for making errors, as much as possible I would check its output in special, simplified cases where I could also do the calculations using just a pocket calculator.

There was one occasion where I simply could not get the two results to agree. After days and days of work trying to find the source of disagreement, going to the extent of doing elaborate calculations without even the calculator, I found the source of the problem. It turned out that my hand calculator had this bug that if you had a number in the display that had the digit 8 in the fourth decimal place, and stored this number in the memory, when you recalled this number, the 8 would have been replaced with a zero. It was a very specialized error, occurring only with the digit 8 and only in the fourth decimal place. Everything else was fine. When I told my thesis advisor what had caused the problem he was shocked and said, "If you can't trust your own calculator, what can you trust?"

It was the kind of bug that could escape detection for a long time because the chances of it making a noticeable difference in a calculation was extremely small but it shook me up so much that after more than three decades I still remember the details of that story.

I was reminded of this when I came across this item about a 'Wrongulator', a gag calculator that always gives you the wrong answer.

I am not sure how it works. I would think that a calculator that is invariably wrong would be easy to detect unless you are totally innumerate. It also depends on how wrong it is. To fool someone, the error would have to be subtle, like my own experience. If the wrongulator said that 4x6=543, that would be easily detectable, whereas one that returned the answer of 26 may fool some.

I actually don't like gag gifts like this. They could have very serious negative consequences in the hands of innumerate people who accept unquestioningly whatever machines tell them.

July 21, 2011

Dramatic horse rescue

In October 2006, more than one hundred horses got trapped in a small patch of dry land as a result of a sudden flood in the Netherlands in which 18 horses drowned. All rescue attempts failed and the horses seemed to be getting desperate until four women decided to try a different approach.

The episode has been set to music. Watch.

July 17, 2011

How do you evaluate 'expert' opinion?

None of us are in a position to figure out everything for ourselves. We are all dependent on experts in specific fields for knowledge. While an expert's reputation and record of reliability and honesty can and should be factored in, we don't want to unquestioningly accept the assertions of authorities since it is possible that they may be mistaken or not as expert or knowledgeable as they claim to be or may even be lying

So to what extent is it reasonable to depend on experts? Bertrand Russell in his 1941 book Let the People Think suggested that rather than depend on this or that expert, one should look at the views of the aggregate of experts and draw the following reasonable inferences:

1. "that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;
   
2. that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and
   
3. that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment."

That seems like a good rule of thumb.

But of course, you will rarely get unanimity among experts. There will almost always be dissenters. But at least when it comes to scientific matters, there often tends to be an overwhelming consensus and what I do is see what the dominant views are. So for example, in the case of global warming, since an overwhelming majority of climate scientists say that it is occurring and is man-made, Russell would say (according to rule (1)) that it would be foolish to insist that they are wrong. Similarly, since an overwhelming majority of biologists accept the theory of evolution as the means by which speciation occurred, Russell would say that it would be silly to confidently deny it. At most one should voice tentative dissent.

When it comes to economic or political questions where there is often not only no unanimity but not even a dominant consensus, rule (2) comes into play and it is wise to not place one's faith too strongly on one particular view.

July 14, 2011

Something that puzzles me

I saw a news item that said that the plane that managed an emergency landing in the Hudson river without any casualties is being shipped to a museum in Charlotte, NC for display.

My question is: Why? I am as pleased as the next person that no lives were lost in that accident but why would anyone care to see that particular plane, which is just like any other plane? Do they think it has some special significance?

I feel the same way about the things in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum is Cleveland that I have not as yet visited. Why would I want to see (say) the clothes worn by Elvis or a guitar played by Jimi Hendrix? It would be different if there were something unique about the item itself that was distinguishable from the person it is associated with that made it interesting. If, for example, Jimi Hendrix had a special guitar made that enabled him to play in ways that other guitars would not allow, then I can see its value in a museum.

I can also understand wanting to preserve and see (say) the marked up copies of drafts of music or book manuscripts to see how the creator's ideas evolved. But the mere fact that something was owned by someone famous or is a relic of a famous event does not (for me at least) count for much.

July 04, 2011

On the pursuit of happiness

On this independence day holiday, I am repeating a post on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the insertion of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" as an inalienable right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a revolutionary political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who drafted it.

While happiness is a laudable goal, the suggestion that we should actively seek it may be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other worthwhile goals. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better sense about what it would take to achieve it, saying "Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so." [My italics]

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is not that we are rarely happy but that we don't realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them. He wrote:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any "Good Old Days," there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, "Don't look at me, I just got here."

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity -- the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, "Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end."

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can't be a man unless he'd gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Good advice.

July 02, 2011

Why must we buy shoes in equal-size pairs?

Apparently 60% of the population have left and right feet that are of different sizes, and of those 80% have larger left feet, which apparently has something to do with right hand dominance. (I got this information after a quick search from this website but cannot vouch for its reliability.) So that means that 40% of the general population have feet of equal size, 48% have larger left feet, and 12% have larger right feet.

I belong to the larger left foot group. When I buy a new pair of shoes, if I forget to try it in the store with my left foot, I end up with a pair in which the left foot starts to feel pinched and uncomfortable later in the day when people's feet start to swell. For some, the inequality is so great that they buy two pairs of shoes in two different sizes and use only one of each, which seems like a colossal waste. As a partial and somewhat clumsy solution, this website offers people a way of exchanging unused mismatched shoes.

But why must shoes be sold in equal size pairs at all when this does not suit the needs of more than half the population? Why not allow people to pick the correct size for each foot? Doing so should lead to little or no waste, even if 100% of the population had the same side foot being larger. For example, if I needed a size 11 left shoe and a size 10 for the right, someone else with a larger left foot would need a size 10 left and a size 9 right, and so on. So all the mid-range sizes would be paired off and sold, except to different customers.

There may be a few left over of the largest right shoe sizes and the smallest left sizes but assuming the above distribution is right, a quarter of those would be bought by people with larger right feet, leaving only a few unsold. And over time, manufacturers would be able to estimate production more accurately and eliminate even this waste.

So shoe manufacturers and retailers, what about it?

June 17, 2011

US life expectancy map, county by county

This interactive map shows surprisingly large variations across the US. The darker the region, the higher the life expectancy. The article states that the US is 37th amongst all countries in overall life expectancy at birth in 2007 (although the CIA Factbook estimates it at 50th for 2011) and is now stagnant or even declining, hardly something to be proud of for the world's largest economy.

The range within the US is huge, varying from highs of 86 years for women in some counties in Florida to a low of 65.9 years for men in Holmes county in Mississippi.

June 14, 2011

The gays amongst us

I had never heard of Tracy Morgan until he appeared on The Daily Show a few weeks ago and I took an instinctive dislike to him. He seemed kind of obnoxious. I did not know if he was really like that or was playing a part and I did not really care.

The next thing I heard was that he had let loose a nasty homophobic rant during his stand up comedy routine.

Tina Fey, who plays his boss on a TV show, criticized his comments and in the process said something important that I hope all people will take to heart: "I hope for his sake that Tracy's apology will be accepted as sincere by his gay and lesbian coworkers at 30 Rock, without whom Tracy would not have lines to say, clothes to wear, sets to stand on, scene partners to act with, or a printed-out paycheck from accounting to put in his pocket."

Even if you don't like gay people, you would be wise to keep your anti-gay bile to yourself, not because they will threaten you, but because they are all around us and we depend on them whether we are aware of it or not.

June 09, 2011

The propensity for violent over-reaction

From China comes this terrible story about a 21-year old man, the child of wealthy parents, whose car hit a 26-year old peasant woman riding a bicycle. Although the woman supposedly suffered only minor injuries, the man then proceeded to stab her eight times, killing her, before fleeing the scene. He apparently thought that she might report him to the police and also seek compensation from him. He was executed for the murder.

When I read such stories, I wonder what makes some people, when confronted with a relatively small problem, lose all sense of perspective and escalate things into a major tragedy. What made this young man think that committing a murder would be better than dealing with the complications arising from a traffic accident?

One sees this all too often in the US where someone suffers some personal setback, such as losing a job or spouse, and then goes on a rampage killing multiple people, often members of their own family and even their children.

These stories make me wonder whether only some people have the propensity for extreme and irrational violence or whether everyone's brains contain these impulses and that they are only held in check by the more rational parts of their brains. Is what distinguishes one from another merely the amount of self-control we are able to exercise?

June 06, 2011

Politics for the lazy

Kevin Drum touches on a peeve that I share, which is how politicians toss out slogans that sound strong and tough when the actual ideas contained in those slogans are obvious, vague, impractical, implausible, or even meaningless.

He gives four examples:

• Zero tolerance
  
• Everything is on the table
  
• Across the board cuts
  
• Doing nothing is not an option.

He calls for further examples. Here are some of my pet peeves:

• Eliminate waste
  
• Reduce bureaucracy
  
• Hold people accountable

Any other ideas?

Hotel housekeepers

The recent events surrounding Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund accused of sexually assaulting the person assigned to clean his hotel room shows, irrespective of the truth of the matter that eventually emerges, how vulnerable hotel housekeeping staff is to predatory guests.

Jacob Tomsky, who has worked in various capacities in the luxury hospitality business, says that events like those alleged in the Strauss-Kahn story are sadly all too frequent, and that guests not only often try to take advantage of the staff sexually, they also frequently falsely accuse them of doing things such as stealing, making international calls from the room, going through their belongings, etc..

I encounter the housekeeping staff in hotels quite a lot. When I go to conferences, the meetings take place in the hotel itself and so I frequently go back to my room during the day between sessions, sometimes for extended periods when there are no talks I want to listen to. Since I cannot read or work very well in public places with a lot of background noise and movement (a symptom of my need for lack of distractions when I am working), I prefer to work in the quiet of my room. As a result, I frequently encounter the housekeeping staff, sometimes in the hallways, and sometimes when they knock when I am in the room. It never happens that they come in unexpectedly because I always have the deadbolt in place when I am in the room.

The host-guest relationship becomes ambiguous when you stay in a hotel. Since you are renting the room, it 'belongs' to you in some sense and so, if you wish, you can think of yourself as the host and anyone who enters as a guest or, in the case of the housekeepers, your personal employees. On the other hand, you are the transient while the housekeeping staff is there permanently, which can make you feel like you are the guest and they are the host. I tend to think of myself in the latter category and so I try to accommodate the hosts and not upset the work schedule of the housekeeping staff. As a result, if they arrive and knock while I am the room, I tell them to go ahead and clean the room while I continue to work, and they usually do so.

My interactions with the housekeeping staff are friendly but minimal, limited to exchanging smiles and a few pleasantries, since we both have work to do. It had not occurred to me until the Strauss-Kahn story broke that the staff might have to make quick judgments in such situations as to whether I could be trusted to be in the same room with them.

As Dean Baker points out, one of the important facts about this case is that the reason that the employee was able to complain was that she belonged to a union.

This matters because under the law in the United States, an employer can fire a worker at any time for almost any reason. It is illegal for an employer to fire a worker for reporting a sexual assault. If any worker can prove that this is reason they were fired, they would get their job back and probably back pay. (The penalties tend to be trivial, so the back pay is unfortunately not a joke.)

However, it is completely legal for an employer to fire a worker who reports a sexual assault for having been late to work last Tuesday or any other transgression. Since employers know the law, they don't ever say that they are firing a worker for reporting a sexual assault. They might fire workers who report sexual assaults for other on-the-job failings, real or invented.

In this way the United States stands out from most other wealthy countries. For example, all the countries of Western Europe afford workers some measure of employment protection, where employers must give a reason for firing workers. Workers can contest their dismissal if they think the reason is not valid, unlike the United States where there is no recourse.

Unions matter for many things other than the ones we most focus on, such as obtaining decent pay and benefits. They also provide minimal protections against abuses by the rich and powerful. Without them, management of luxury hotels would be strongly tempted to sacrifice their employees in order to placate the wealthy clientele who abuse them.

April 30, 2011

Christopher Hitchens on the British monarchy

He gives it the drubbing it deserves but has some friendly advice for the new bride: persuade your new husband to abdicate before it is too late, and that corrupt and soul-killing institution gets you too.

Myself, I wish her well and also wish I could whisper to her: If you really love him, honey, get him out of there, and yourself, too. Many of us don't want or need another sacrificial lamb to water the dried bones and veins of a dessicated system. Do yourself a favor and save what you can: Leave the throne to the awful next incumbent that the hereditary principle has mandated for it.

April 20, 2011

Royal wedding refuseniks

Apparently a lot of Britons share my distaste for all the hoopla over the wedding celebrations of the British royal family and are planning alternative events or even leaving the country for that day.

April 18, 2011

Friends

(Via Balloon Juice)

April 13, 2011

'Invite' as a noun

I have seen an increasing use of the word 'invite' to replace 'invitation'. The distinction between the two words seemed pretty clear to me. One invites someone by sending them an invitation. And yet the latter word seems to be disappearing, with the former taking its place, with people saying things like "Hope you got my invite" and "The invites have gone out".

I find this use jarring. I thought that it was simply wrong but on checking the Oxford English Dictionary it appears that the word invite can be used as a noun this way and has been thus used since the 17th century.

Was this usage common and I just did not notice it until recently or did it fall out of favor and is now coming back?

April 12, 2011

A little puzzle

Some organizations that request money or information often include return self-addressed envelopes. This is convenient. What I don't understand is why a few of them also include their own address again in the top left corner, where, as the sender, you would normally insert your own name and address. What is the point in the organization's address being in both sender's and recipient's locations on the envelope?

The only reason that I can come up with is that if you forget to put postage on a letter, it is sent back to the presumed sender at the address on the top left. Is this a ploy to fool the postal service so that the letter reaches them whether there is postage or not? Surely they must be wise to that trick?

What does the postal service do with letters that do not have adequate postage but where the sender's and recipient's names and addresses are the same?

The menace of surprise parties

It's been awhile since I let loose one of my rants about something trivial that yet bugs me, so here's one.

I hate surprise parties.

I must admit that the appeal of surprise parties completely eludes me and I am getting to dislike them even more as I get older. Maybe it is because they are an acquired taste and since they were unheard of in Sri Lanka when I was growing up (at least I don't recall ever hearing about one, let alone attending any), I just didn't learn to like them. And yet in the US people seem to really like them.

The whole thing about sneaking in early and then hiding and waiting until the guest of honor arrives and then jumping out and shouting in unison "surprise!" strikes me as childish.

What happens after the surprise is sprung is equally bad. Much of the rest of the time consists of the honorees going around to each guest telling them how surprised they were and how they were puzzled by some vaguely unusual things that happened that were related to the surprise but which they did not suspect were due to a party being planned for them. One often suspects that they knew that a surprise was in the works all along but went along with the charade in order to not disappoint the organizers. Meanwhile the organizers of the surprise go around telling people in excruciating detail how they planned the surprise and how they lulled the honoree into not suspecting, the various glitches that might have unraveled their plans, and how they managed to overcome them.

I have attended a few surprise parties and find them dreary in the extreme, so much so that my heart sinks when I receive invitations for one, as happened just a few days ago. When I do go to them, I dutifully stay out of sight so as not to be a party-pooper and emerge once the ritual is over but I studiously avoid the post-mortems of how it was carried out, preferring to converse with a congenial fellow guest on other topics.

It is not clear that the pleasure of being surprised with a party thrown in one's honor (if it is a pleasure at all) overcomes all the negatives associated with it. People who don't like to have parties thrown for them of course hate it. Those who would have liked their loved ones to remember the special event are often deliberately misled before the event that no one seems to care or remember the day and thus may carry around with them feelings of sadness and disappointment for days and even weeks. Is that worth it for the momentary rush that the surprise brings with it?

This is particularly true for children, who may be truly sad that no one seems to care about their birthday. Isn't it better for them to be aware that a party is being planned for them so that they can share in the fun of planning for it and the build up of excitement until the day arrives? Furthermore, because surprise parties seem to be so ubiquitous, some people might mistakenly think that the lack of any talk of a party means that a surprise party is being planned for them and the realization that there really was no party at all may be even more disappointing.

For the guests, a surprise party is a real nuisance because one has to go really early, long before the party proper begins, and just hang around until the time the honorees arrive, which often gets delayed because of the convoluted planning.

The last straw for me was when I was invited to a surprise party for a friend's birthday that was organized by his wife and children. This family is notorious for having 'surprise' parties for each other for almost every occasion and one would think that they would have to be really dim bulbs to still be surprised. The friend is Sri Lankan-born and lives about an hour's drive away from us. We were given a time of arrival and then asked to park at a nearby parking area and wait for a phone call that would tell us that it was all clear, that the honoree had been sent out of the house on an errand and that we could then sneak into the house and hide. Of course we had to park far away so that there would be no telltale collection of recognizable cars when the honoree returned and entered the house.

I grudgingly went along with the plan. What I did not know was that I had been asked to come much earlier than necessary. Their circle of family and friends includes people of Sri Lankan and US origin. Sri Lankans have the reputation of not being punctual for parties (the friend who was being honored with the party being one of the worst culprits) so the organizers had told just them to come an hour earlier than they told the US-born people. Since I like to be punctual, I had come at the requested time (early in fact to avoid messing up the surprise) and was annoyed to discover that I had been tricked and had to wait in the parking lot for well over an hour.

It strikes me that the only people who really enjoy these surprise parties are the organizers themselves because they have the anticipation of being congratulated by everyone for pulling off a successful surprise and receiving the gratitude of the honorees for going to all the trouble. For everyone else, it seems like a pain. The only exception might be guests who are very small children for whom keeping a secret and hiding and jumping out and surprising someone can be a giggly delight.

End of rant.

April 07, 2011

Censoring language in comments

An odd situation has occurred. A comment has been posted containing explicitly sexual words. I personally am not bothered by language that some find offensive but I do warn people when some of the things I link to contain such language so that those who do can avoid it.

The commenter clearly disliked what I wrote in the post The rise of racism and religion in Israel.

While I delete suspected spam without any qualms, I allow all genuine comments. This particular comment does not look like spam (it includes my name and does not contain any links to sites) but does not make any substantive point and consists of a purely personal attack on me. I did not want to delete it because people have a right to dislike me or disagree with me and say so.

I have decided that if necessary, I will censor particular words in comments using the common practice of replacing selected letters with hyphens. Those of you who are angered by a post and do want to use such language in comments can spare me some trouble by putting in your own hyphens.

April 02, 2011

India wins World Cup

India defeated Sri Lanka in a closely fought final game.

Sri Lanka batted first and scored 274 runs off their allotted fifty overs, losing six wickets in the process. India batted well in response, scoring 277 with 10 deliveries to spare, losing only four wickets along the way. Throughout their run chase India maintained the required scoring rate and always looked steady and confident.

It was a well-played game by both teams and India were the deserved winners.

So now it is on to the next World Cup to be played in 2015 in Australia and New Zealand.

April 01, 2011

Cricket World Cup final: Sri Lanka v India

The World Cup final will be played in India on Saturday between Sri Lanka and India. The teams are fairly evenly matched. Although I am rooting for Sri Lanka, I think India is the slightly better team and given that they have the home field advantage, they have to be considered the favorites. You can see a live video stream of the game here, with the game starting at 5:00 am Eastern and ending around 1:00 pm. That pretty much takes care of my Saturday morning.

If you do watch, one thing to bear in mind is that in the one-day format in which the World Cup is played (unlike the five-day Test matches), each team bats for just one inning lasting for 50 'overs', with each over consisting of six balls (pitches). So the batting team faces a total of 300 deliveries or until they lose ten 'wickets' (i.e., ten batters get out), whichever comes first. On the fielding side, any given bowler is limited to a maximum of ten overs (60 deliveries). The team batting first has to score at least 250 runs to be competitive and over 300 to put real pressure on the team batting second. (For those who want to know more about how the game is played, see my post from 2006 here and you can also see a short video explaining the game here.)

In the first semi-final game, Sri Lanka defeated New Zealand as expected. New Zealand batted first and scored 217 runs from 293 deliveries before losing their tenth out terminated their innings. Sri Lanka surpassed that score in 287 deliveries while losing only five wickets. Although on paper it looks like a comfortable win, they received a scare at one point when New Zealand seemed to be about to repeat their upset win over South Africa in the quarter finals by causing a dramatic collapse in the Sri Lankan batting just as they seemed to be cruising to an easy victory. But unlike the South Africans, the Sri Lankans did not completely fold but recovered to win.

In the other game, watched by an more than one billion people worldwide, India beat Pakistan in a fairly close game. India batted first and scored 260 runs off 300 deliveries while losing 9 wickets in the process. Pakistan started off well and looked to have a chance to beat the more favored Indian team but could not maintain the pace and managed to score only 231 runs when they lost their tenth wicket on the 299th delivery.

This game had some political overtones. India and Pakistan have had conflicts over Kashmir and other issues that have lasted for more than a half-century so any contest between the two nations takes on a significance well beyond the game itself, like the athletic competitions between the USA and USSR during the cold war. Relations between the two nations reached a nadir with the attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai in 2008 by elements from Pakistan. In a gesture towards rapprochement, the Indian Prime Minister invited his Pakistani counterpart to watch the cricket game with him and the offer was accepted. Whether this will go beyond being a merely symbolic gesture and leads to a real thaw in relations remains to be seen.

The championship game will be the final international outing for 38-year old Muttiah Muralitharan, who has for nearly two decades been Sri Lanka's ace bowler and is recognized as one of the greatest bowlers in the history of the game, whose career record of 800 test match 'wickets' (i.e., the number of batsmen he has got out) is far ahead of the next highest total of 708. In addition, his ebullient personality and obvious love of the game have endeared him to fans worldwide. He is not fully fit but you can expect him to put forth maximum effort and to be given a grand farewell, whatever the result, though he would obviously like to retire with a second World Cup championship, having been part of the Sri Lankan side that won the trophy in 1996.

In cricket, the bowler pitches the ball is such a way that it bounces once on its way to the batsman. This allows the bowler to spin the ball so that it can turn to the left or the right after bouncing, or even keep low or rise higher than expected. The condition of the ground can thus also play a crucial role. Muralitharan's skill lay in his ability, on good days and with suitable ground conditions, to produce not only prodigious amounts of turn but also disguise its direction, which resulted in batsmen flailing away at the air while the ball went elsewhere.

Watch a few of the highlights of Muralitharan's career to see what I mean.

On India's side is Sachin Tendulkar, one of the greatest batsmen to ever play the game who, at almost 38, is also in the twilight of his career and whose career record of 14,692 runs is also far ahead of the next highest career total of 12,263. Tendulkar is actually quite small in stature (5 ft 5 ins in height) but in cricket this is not so important and he more than makes up for this by superb technique, good eye, quick reflexes, and exquisite timing. In cricket, aesthetics are much appreciated by the fans (even the fans of their opponents) and Tendulkar's style is so good that he has been bestowed the title of 'The Little Master'. Tendulkar will undoubtedly want to win the championship too since this is likely his last World Cup. India's only other win in the tournament was in 1983. You can watch him and judge for yourself.

The records set by Tendulkar and Muralitharan are so far ahead of their nearest competitors that they are like the one set by Bob Beamon in his spectacular long jump in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico that broke the previous world and Olympic records by nearly two feet.

That leap was so far ahead of everyone else that I for one was certain that it was a freak event, the result of an unlikely convergence of circumstances that would never be repeated and that the record would last forever. But human beings keep achieving the seemingly impossible and just as Beamon's world record was eventually surpassed in 1991 (although his Olympic record is still unbroken), so will those of Tendulkar and Muralitharan, though they too will likely last many decades.

Whatever the outcome, competing against each other in World Cup championship game is a fitting reward for all that these two great players have contributed to the game.

March 29, 2011

Interactive census map

The New York Times has created an interactive map based on the census data released last week. It is a good example of using technology to bring dry data to life.

You can spend a lot of time on it seeing how patterns are changing in the US.

March 28, 2011

The game of cricket

Since I am giving updates on the cricket World Cup, you may want to read my 2006 post explaining the game, along with watching this short video.

March 27, 2011

Cricket World Cup update

It turned out that only three of my four quarter-final predictions were correct. Pakistan and Sri Lanka trounced West Indies and England respectively. India beat Australia (who had won the three previous world Cups) in a more evenly balanced game. The one upset was New Zealand who won in dramatic come-from-behind fashion over South Africa, the country that I thought would become the eventual champions.

South Africa is an enigma. They consistently field strong teams and have often been thought the best in the tournament. And yet they suddenly collapse and lose at key moments, giving rise to the reputation of being chokers. They have not won the quadrennial World Cup since they first took part in 1992 when they were first allowed back into international sports competition following the end of apartheid. England and New Zealand have not won since the series started in 1975.

The semi-final games consist of Sri Lanka v New Zealand on Tuesday (in Sri Lanka) and Pakistan v India on Wednesday (in India). The teams are quite evenly matched and my picks are Sri Lanka and India, because I think they are slightly better teams and each has the home field advantage.

March 25, 2011

Talk: The Christian Delusion by John W. Loftus

A former preacher turned atheist, Loftus has published two books Why I Became an Atheist and The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (winner of the 2011 About.com Reader's Choice Award). His blog is ranked in the top 5 atheist/theist blogs on the internet today. He has three master's degrees in the Philosophy of Religion and is a graduate of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

His talk is on Saturday, March 26, 2011 in Wickenden Hall, room 322 on the CWRU campus. The talk is sponsored by the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry.

All are welcome and refreshments will be available.

Wickenden Hall is on the Case quad. It is likely that the parking lot 1A right behind Wickenden (entering from northbound MLK Drive) will be open. If you park there, go up the outdoor steps and Wickenden Hall is the building on your immediate right.. The visitors parking lot between Crawford Hall and Amasa Stone chapel (which you enter from Euclid Avenue) will be open.

March 22, 2011

Talk: The Christian Delusion by John W. Loftus

A former preacher turned atheist, Loftus has published two books Why I Became an Atheist and The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (winner of the 2011 About.com Reader's Choice Award). His blog is ranked in the top 5 atheist/theist blogs on the internet today. He has three master's degrees in the Philosophy of Religion and is a graduate of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

His talk is at 6:00 pm on Saturday, March 26, 2011 in Wickenden Hall, room 322 on the CWRU campus. The talk is sponsored by the CWRU chapter of the Center for Inquiry.

All are welcome and refreshments will be available.

Wickenden Hall is on the Case quad. It is likely that the parking lot 1A right behind Wickenden (entering from northbound MLK Drive) will be open. If you park there, go up the steps and Wickenden Hall is the building on your immediate right.

(Note; Loftus will also be speaking on Thursday, March 24 at 7:00 p to the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry. More details can be found here.)

March 21, 2011

The iPad and me

Although I use a Mac computer and much prefer its operating system to the Windows alternative, I am not really a fan in that I do not run out and buy the latest Mac gadget unless it has really useful functionality. I do not, for example, have an iPhone. I do have an iPod touch because it is functional. It fits in my pocket and enables to carry around my calendar and address book and sync the former with others in my office. If I am in a Wi-Fi hotspot I can check the internet, though I find the small screen wearying to look at for any length of time.

So when the iPad came out, it was not clear to me what additional functionality it provided. It seemed like a big iPod touch and why would I need that when I had a laptop? It is true that it is smaller than a laptop and so would be easier to carry around to meetings, but it was not clear to me that that was a sufficient advantage to invest in one. As far as I was concerned, it seemed like a solution to a non-existent problem.

But my university's technology department had a few iPads that they were passing around for people to check out to see if they had any ideas about how to use it at work and in teaching so I had one to play with for a few weeks.

My experience with the iPad has been interesting. Initially it was frustrating because I expected it to do everything a laptop did. In particular, I use my computer to write a lot even while reading. For example, I frequently want to jot down notes and ideas that occur to me while reading and the laptop enables me to go back and forth between reading and writing easily. The iPad? Not so much. You had to close one application to open the other and although it was quick, it was still awkward. The touch screen keyboard is big and easy to use but the keyboard being at the same angle of view as the screen made it awkward for me.

I realized that I was asking the iPad to do what it was not primarily intended to do. The iPad is great for receiving information but not so good for input. Once I let go of that expectation and worked with its strengths, it was better. I began to use it primarily as a reading device, to surf the web and read documents and that improved my experience.

One of the things that I was curious about was whether I would enjoy reading books on an e-reader. I had tried it with one of the earlier versions of the Kindle and had not liked it. I decided to give it another shot with iPad. There were five books that came with the iPad that was loaned to me. I had read four before but the fifth (The Count of Monte Cristo) was one that I had wanted to read for a long time, so clearly the anonymous person who had loaded these books onto the iPad was a kindred soul. This book is very long, over a 1,000 pages, and I figured it would be a good test of my ability to enjoy using an e-reader.

It is in reading this book that I have come to like the features of the iPad. The book features are easy on the eye and intuitive. The ability to search the book for events and characters that occurred before (important in long epic novels with lots of characters and complicated plot twists) and the built in dictionary and search features that link to Google or Wikipedia (again useful for a book set in another time and place and originally in another language so that there are many unusual words) are all nice to have. The Count of Monte Cristo has a complicated plot with many characters who take on different names and identities over time and whose stories intertwine. Characters whom one had encountered early on suddenly pop up much later. The ability to search the book made it much easier to keep track of things. I wish I had had it when I read other epic novels like War and Peace or Anna Karenina.

The deficiencies in the iPad as a book reader are the same as I had with the Kindle. One is that while you can change the font size, the size of the illustrations cannot be changed, which makes that feature irrelevant for technical books with lots of intricate figures. The other is that to give citations to things in books, you need to have the page number of a specific print edition. The books on the iPad have page counters but they are internal and vary with the chosen font size. Maybe there are ways to overcome these features that I am not aware of.

One big advantage is that with the iPad, you have immediate and free access to a vast array of classical literature that is now out of copyright. So with the purchase of this device, you had immediate access to all the old books you ever wanted to read without having to track them down. For someone like me who, when it comes to fiction, prefers to read the classics more than contemporary authors, this is a huge benefit.

I also played with some of the games that were on the iPad, including Angry Birds which I had heard so much about. They were ok but I am not a big fan of games and so soon got bored.

I found that I ended up using the iPad most in the last couple of hours at night in bed, reading the book and surfing the web before sleeping. It is much easier to use in bed than a laptop and the big backlit screen makes it easy on the eyes.

So my verdict is that the iPad is primarily an entertainment device and secondarily a work device because of the limited input capability, while the laptop is primarily a work device and secondarily an entertainment device.

Will I get an iPad, especially now that the new iPad2 is out? I've not decided but am thinking about it. Have any readers of this blog used an iPad? I'd be curious to hear your reactions.

March 20, 2011

March madness

No, not basketball. For all the cricket fans of this blog (yes, both of you), this of course refers to the 2011 World Cup currently taking place in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The group round-robin qualifying matches have just been completed with no upsets, leaving the eight top-seeded teams to advance to the quarterfinals. From now on, it is sudden death format.

The quarterfinal matchups are:

March 23: Pakistan v West Indies (played in Bangladesh)
March 24: Australia v India (played in India)
March 25: New Zealand v South Africa (played in Bangladesh)
March 26: Sri Lanka v England (played in Sri Lanka)

My picks are Pakistan, South Africa, and Sri Lanka to advance. The India v Australia game is tough to call but I will have to give the home field edge to India.

The semifinal games will be played on March 29 and 30 in Sri Lanka and India, and the final will be on April 2 in India.

March 19, 2011

Rescue in Japan

Here is some video footage of people who barely escaped the waters of the tsunami and, incredibly, kept their video camera running while they clambered to safety and then observed a rescue.

March 18, 2011

Aftermath of tragedy in Japan

Usually after a catastrophe like what occurred in Japan there are a lot of human interest stories of people mourning lost loved ones, frantically search for the missing, selfless heroism and generosity, with the occasional good news of someone surviving in the wreckage and being rescued after being given up for lost.

In this case, although we had a double catastrophe of an earthquake followed by a tsunami, the focus on the fate of the nuclear reactors has eclipsed almost everything else. While this is understandable, there are some stories that I feel should have received wider coverage. One is the absence of widespread looting, or any looting at all, in the wake of the disaster. The other is the absence of price gouging by merchants. In fact, many merchants are reducing prices in order to help out the survivors. The third is the orderly and neighborly way that people are behaving to ensure that resources are shared amongst everyone.

All these things reflect well on the capacity of human beings to think of others and the greater good even in times of dire stress and on the Japanese people and culture in particular, and are deserving of greater recognition.

March 14, 2011

Frightening power of the tsunami

The BBC has posted new video of the moment when the water struck land.

March 13, 2011

Heartbreaking

These before-and-after satellite photographs show the massive devastation wreaked by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The Overton window

The new atheists are considered 'bad' atheists because of their clearly stated belief that all beliefs about god are without any foundation. They have been criticized by 'good' atheists (i.e., atheist accommodationists) for being too extreme.

I have said before that the accommodationists should actually thank the new atheists because few people like to be on the extremes of a public debate and the new atheists have greatly broadened the range of the views and made accommodationism part of the center and thus acceptable the religious community. In fact, religious moderates seem to just love accommodationists.

Randy Pelton, president of the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry, tells me that this phenomenon of the range of acceptable views being limited and the ways to expand it actually has been studied by the political science community and has the name of the Overton window. The Wikipedia article gives a passage from Anthony Trollope's novel Phineas Finn which captures the idea:

"Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made."

"It is no loss of time," said Phineas, "to have taken the first great step in making it."

"The first great step was taken long ago," said Mr. Monk,–"taken by men who were looked upon as revolutionary demagogues, almost as traitors, because they took it. But it is a great thing to take any step that leads us onwards."

Oddly enough, it appears that Glenn Beck has written a novel with that title. I have no idea what it is about.

March 11, 2011

Tsunami hits Japan

The BBC plays video of the awesome power of the tsunami that hit Japan today, inflicting heavy casualties.

March 03, 2011

Cleveland Freethinkers March Roundtable

I will be talking to this group on Why atheism is winning (followed by a Q&A) on Saturday, March 5th at 7:30 pm.

More details can be found here.

February 16, 2011

The no-more-secret formula for Coca-Cola

One of the things I learned early in life is that the recipe for Coca-Cola was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world, almost on a level of the nuclear launch codes. But apparently Ira Glass of This American Life has stumbled upon it and released it.

So if you want to make your own Coke, go right ahead.

(via Why Evolution is True.)

February 14, 2011

Antiwar.com fund drive

The website Antiwar.com is holding its quarterly fund drive. This is an invaluable site for world news so if you can, please donate something.

February 13, 2011

Gangland cricket

The cricket World Cup matches start on the 19th and will be played in venues in Sri Lanka, India and Bangla Desh. While I like the game of cricket, I could never have imagined that this game that originated with the idle rich of England would catch on with gangsters, ex-cons, street kids, and the homeless of Compton, Los Angeles.

But it has and the Compton Cricket Club has toured England and Australia. What is even more interesting is that the homeless activist behind it says that the game teaches people how to be competitive while being civil and those lessons have enabled some of the players to move on to productive lives.

It struck me that this story could make a good film, a US version of Lagaan. Keanu Reeves is apparently a cricket fan and could star in it. His skills at the game surely must be better than his acting.

January 25, 2011

Chaser's vocabulary

Chaser is a border collie that not only can identify over a thousand objects by name, she even knows basic grammar and the three verbs paw, nose, and fetch, thus being able to distinguish what she was expected to do with each object. That is not all. She could also recognize categories, in other words common nouns. "She correctly follows the command “Fetch a Frisbee” or “Fetch a ball.” She can also learn by exclusion, as children do. If she is asked to fetch a new toy with a word she does not know, she will pick it out from ones that are familiar."

Chaser will appear in the PBS show Nova on February 9.

Chaser learned one or two new words each day, requiring four or five hours of daily practice. That is some dedication. My own dog Baxter, while an eager learner, tends to call it a day after about fifteen minutes and go off and take a nap. "Everything in moderation" seems to be his motto.

I was intrigued to read that in order for her trainer to remember what he had called the thousand objects, he wrote the name of each on the object with indelible ink. It is, of course, possible that Chaser is so smart that she had learned to read, thus saving herself the trouble of learning the names of all the objects.

January 01, 2011

Best wishes for 2011 to all this blog's readers

Let 2011 be the year in which justice and law begin to replace oligarchic rule.

December 31, 2010

Color changing card trick

(via Machine Like Us.)

December 30, 2010

The letter i

As someone who grew up with English English and then came to the US, I have got used to the different spellings, especially the missing u in words like color and favor and honor. In general, American spellings make more sense, so switching to it was easy.

When it comes to the letter i, Americans also sometimes drop it, to say (for example) 'aluminum' instead of the English 'aluminium'. But recently I have heard people drop the i in the word 'verbiage' to coin a new word 'verbage' which does not currently exist even in America, at least according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

Also, unlike the u, which seems to be always dropped, the policy on i is not so consistent. I have heard people add i to the word mischievous to say 'mischievious', a word which also does not currently exist.

I am not one of those people who think that language should be unchanging. English is a rich language precisely because it grows by adding new words. But these are not new words but spelling variations on old ones and I was curious as to whether what I have heard is merely a regional idiosyncrasy or whether others have heard similar usages.

December 29, 2010

Why the other line moves faster

(Via Progressive Review.)

December 28, 2010

It's snow story

Here are some simple facts.

Weather is unpredictable. In the northeast we get snow during the winter months. Most of the time the falling snow is spread out over time. But as with any stochastic process, on occasion a lot of snow will fall in a short time, more than one can be reasonably prepared for. During such times, there will be disruptions, such as flights being cancelled, roads being treacherous, and delays. This will happen a couple of times each winter and is completely normal and to be expected.

So why is it that when it inevitably happens, the news media get so worked up over it? Why is it treated as being of major national and even international significance instead of just a local story? Why are cities berated for not being prepared to deal with it? A snowstorm is not like a flood or an earthquake that can cause widespread and lasting damage. It makes no sense for cities to spend a lot of money to be ready for a problem that will disappear by itself in a day or two.

It's just snow, people. It's just pure, clean water and it will go away.

December 20, 2010

Happy anniversary to Baxter the Wonder Dog!

Yesterday (the 19th) was the fifth anniversary of Baxter the Wonder Dog joining the family as a three-month old puppy. On the right is a photo of him five years ago. Below is a recent photo of him.

And if you drop in at home you will often see this scene.

December 11, 2010

I will be on the radio

On Tuesday, December 14 from 9:00am to 10:00 am, I will be on our local NPR affiliate WCPN 90.3 on their Sound of Ideas program to discuss the results of the latest Pew survey on the state of religious knowledge, in which atheists/agnostics came out as the best informed.

This was the show that was re-scheduled from two months ago.

You can listen live or to a podcast after the show.

December 06, 2010

Random acts of culture

Here's another flash mob of singers from Florida Grand Opera surprising shoppers at a Macy's department store in the Dadeland Mall in Florida.

Random Act of Culture at Dadeland Mall from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

November 25, 2010

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I hope everyone who celebrates this really nice holiday has the opportunity to spend the day with family and friends.

This article provides some of the facts and debunks some myths about the origins and traditions of this holiday.

I have been disturbed by the creeping commercialism that is threatening to overtake this holiday. In order to lure customers to come to their stores first, they are scheduling sales that begin at midnight. What this means is that their employees are forced to work on Thanksgiving day, getting ready for the hordes of people camped out in front eager to get their hands on the few loss leaders that the stores put out. I hope we do not have a repetition of 2008:

A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an "out-of-control" mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said.

The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.

On a passing note, this week my bank sent me a 'Happy Thanksgiving' card from its vice president. Do these big corporations think that people are pleased to receive formal greetings churned out by a computer? This not only seems like an absurd waste of money, I fear it might be the start of a new marketing trend to inflict the same cards-and-gifts consumer binge that afflicts Christmas.

November 02, 2010

We're #1!

Once again, an American team has won the World Series, which means that, apart from 1992 and 1993, a US team has been world champions every single year, a truly impressive achievement.

October 27, 2010

The "One laptop per child" project

Nicholas Negroponte is a real visionary whose project could revolutionize the world.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Nicholas Negroponte
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election March to Keep Fear Alive

October 24, 2010

At last, a competition I think I can win

It is to see who can take the longest nap at a busy location.

Perhaps my greatest skill is the ability to take naps anywhere at any time.

October 13, 2010

The Chile mine rescue

The rescue of the trapped miners in Chile is a truly wonderful story. The careful plan put together by international teams seems to be working smoothly in bringing the stoic miners back to the surface and 21 of the 33 all have been rescued so far, after spending over two months trapped half-a-mile below the surface. See here for how the rescue was carried out. It is a triumph of perseverance, endurance, cooperation, patience, technology, and science.

But apparently three different Christian denominations are claiming it was their prayers that resulted in god intervening that resulted in the successful rescue and are vying to claim credit for the successful rescue. They did not explain why if god wanted the miners rescued he didn't simply lift them out of the mine himself or why their gods were silent when the 29 miners died in the West Virginia in April. It is pathetic to see people so desperate for a sign from god that they clutch at these straws.

In another footnote to this story, NPR depended upon an al-Jazeera reporter to get an on-the-spot report from the mine site earlier this week. NPR frequently uses reporters from other news services like the BBC but al-Jazeera is used only for stories in which either al-Jazeera itself is the story or because there are some situations (like the Gaza aid flotilla) where only they venture to send in reporters. This was the first time I had heard NPR using them for a 'neutral' story. It signals the long-overdue recognition that al-Jazeera, which provides excellent news coverage, is being seen by US news outlets as a legitimate source.

October 04, 2010

Radio program re-scheduled

The show on the Pew religion survey has been re-scheduled and will not occur at 9:00 am on Tuesday, October 5 as I said before.

I'll post the new date when I hear it.

September 27, 2010

Baxter, the Wonder Dog

He just turned five.

September 14, 2010

Jazzing up the national anthem

I wrote sometime ago about the veneration that Americans had for their flag that bordered on fetishism. This contrasts with the liberties taken with the national anthem. While Americans jump to their feet, remove their hats, place their hands over their hearts, and do all manner of things to show respect, the singers of the anthem are allowed to take all manner of liberties with it.

At any public event, for example, you are never sure if you are going to get a jazz or blues or classic version. The variations that I have not heard so far consist of rock and disco, though maybe even that was done in the 70s. Has anyone ever heard a rap version? Are their some music modes that are considered inherently disrespectful and so are not even attempted for fear of causing outrage?

I can't imagine that this freedom to interpret the anthem broadly always existed and I wonder when people in the US began allowing the anthem to be varied this way.

By contrast, whenever I hear the national anthem of other countries, they always seem to do it straight.

Update: In the comments Scott reminded me of Jimi Hendrix's version at Woodstock in 1969. That counts as a rock version and was pretty wild.

Blog comments policy

Here is the final comments policy. I will repost it periodically for the benefit of new arrivals to this blog.

1. In the comment box that says 'Name', you must insert a person's name only. The name can be a pseudonym but inserting the name of a product or company or service is grounds for deletion. So 'Ann Jones' or 'Joe' or 'Genghis Khan' is allowable, but 'Acme Roofing Company' or 'Diet Coke' or 'essay writing services' or 'Joe the plumber' is not.
2. If a comment seems genuine but violates the above rule, I reserve the right to delete it entirely or simply replace the name with a made-up name of my own choosing.
3. You can continue to insert a link to a company or product or commercial service site in the URL box and this will make the name in the name box into a hyperlink to that site. This will be the only means by which to advertise or drive traffic to a site or product.
4. Any link inserted in the body of a comment is also grounds for deletion of the entire comment unless the link is pointing to information relevant to the post.
5. Even if a comment meets all these criteria, I still reserve the right to delete it if I think its chief purpose is to advertise and not advance the discussion. So comments like 'Great post!' and 'I would like to read more on this topic' will get the boot.
6. The comments will continue to be unmoderated, so almost all genuine comments on recent posts should continue to appear almost immediately, just as before. If your comment does not appear immediately or even after a few minutes, it means it has been flagged as potential spam because of the appearance of some words that trigger the filter (words which in isolation can be quite harmless but in combination with other words can cause the filter to sit up and take notice) and it will appear only after I have got around to checking in on the filtered comments board.
7. If a comment contains language that might offend, I reserve the right to censor specific words using the common practice of replacing selected letters with hyphens.

September 10, 2010

Light blogging until Tuesday

Because of some personal commitments, the long posts will continue on their regular schedule, but I will not be able to respond to comments until Tuesday.

September 07, 2010

The last word (I hope!) on comments and spam

Thanks to everyone who made suggestions in response to my earlier post about how to manage the spam comments menace. There were some very useful ones from people on all sides of the issue.

The problem that I faced was that people sometimes use the comments feature of blogs seemingly purely to insert hyperlinks to their commercial interests in order to gain visibility for some product or service and to drive up their website rankings, and these pointless comments were cluttering up the boards and wasting the time of people who were trying to follow a discussion.

As the always highly knowledgeable Heidi Cool said, this blog server software already has a filter that flags some comments (using some algorithm) as suspected spam and sends them to me for approval, which may explain to some puzzled readers why their comments sometimes take a long time to appear whereas other people's seem to appear immediately. My problem was that it was getting harder and harder for me to decide which published comments to delete and which unpublished ones that were flagged as possible spam to approve, and I was spending far too much time agonizing over it.

One solution would be to make the comments board entirely moderated so that I would have to personally approve each comment before it appeared. This would take a lot of time (at least initially) because it would still require me to read all the comments but over time the volume should decrease as it should discourage spammers from posting in the first place as they would realize that the chance of it being approved would be small. I don't like that solution because that would cause delays in genuine comments appearing.

Another brutally simple solution that was suggested would be to get rid of the box where people can insert a URL. That would definitely solve the problem but I hesitate to do that because I see no real harm with people who are genuinely interested in the blog's content and want to add something to the discussion also giving a little boost to their own site along the way, even if it is a commercial site. I am sympathetic to the needs of such entrepreneurs and small businesspeople. I have on occasion discovered some genuinely interesting websites because of those links. It is the professional spammers that I want to get rid of.

I think that I have arrived at a policy that manages to achieve a balance and makes it easier for me to police the site. Here are the new comment rules that I am thinking of imposing that will not cause genuine commenters any inconvenience or require them to change anything. I will defer implementing them for a week to allow for knowledgeable people to point out any potential flaws.

1. The comments will continue to be unmoderated, so almost all genuine comments on recent posts should continue to appear almost immediately, just as before. If your comment does not appear immediately or even after a few minutes, it means it has been flagged as potential spam because of the appearance of some words that trigger the filter (words which in isolation can be quite harmless but in combination with other words can cause the filter to sit up and take notice) and it will appear only after I have got around to checking in on the filtered comments board.
   
2. In the comment box that says 'Name', you must insert a person's name only. The name can be a pseudonym but inserting the name of a product or company or service is grounds for deletion. So 'Ann Jones' or 'Joe' or 'Genghis Khan' is allowable, but 'Acme Roofing Company' or 'Diet Coke' or 'essay writing services' or 'Joe the plumber' is not. Heidi says that putting a commercial name does not add to your site's search engine rankings anyway.
   
3. You can continue to insert a link to a company or product or commercial service site in the URL box and this will make the name in the name box into a hyperlink to that site, which does contribute to your rankings. This will be the only means by which to advertise or drive traffic to a site or product.
   
4. Any link inserted in the body of a comment is also grounds for deletion of the entire comment unless the link is pointing to information relevant to the post.
   
5. Even if a comment meets all these criteria, I still reserve the right to delete it if I think its chief purpose is to advertise and not advance the discussion. So comments like 'Great post!' and 'I would like to read more on this topic' will also get the boot.

I hope this new policy will make the site better and my life easier!

As suggested by commenter HP Bryce, here (I hope) is the last word on spam from what triggered the idea of adopting the name of a meat product for this ubiquitous feature of electronic communication.

September 06, 2010

Labor Day musings and some changes in the blog

On this Labor Day I want to wish everyone a great holiday, at least to my American and Canadian readers who are the only ones who celebrate workers on this day, while most of the world does it on May Day (May 1st).

Ironically enough, May Day has its origins in the US as the day that commemorates the Haymarket Riot in 1886 in which police in Chicago fired on workers who were striking for an eight-hour workday. The international worker's movement adopted a resolution in 1891 to use the anniversary of the Haymarket event to celebrate workers rights. Following another bloody suppression of workers in 1894, again in Chicago, in which federal troops were sent in to break up the Pullman strike and in which over a dozen strikers were killed, the US government sought to try and make peace with US workers by granting a holiday to celebrate workers. But since they did not want to remind people of its history of brutal opposition to worker rights that a May Day holiday might trigger, the US government and Congress in 1894 made the September Labor Day a federal holiday.

So I am taking the day off somewhat but want to flag some minor changes in the blog that will take place immediately.

Long time readers of this blog know that there is a routine here in which I post a single essay of around 1000 words on some topic each weekday at around 9:00 am Eastern time in the US. My goal of writing a daily long form essay serves largely a selfish purpose. Writing about things in some depth sharpens my thinking about them and forces me to look up sources and evidence for my views and not toss off glib, gut-level reactions. It is remarkable how much I learn by doing this and how often that process makes me realize that what I remembered as having happened or said is not correct and forces me to revise my views, as well as serving as a useful reminder of the fallibility of even strong memories. The essay form also keeps me writing regularly and thus improves my writing skills.

But I am finding that my self-imposed rule is too constraining. In the course of keeping up with the news and researching topics there are many interesting, funny, and quirky things that I come across (or are sent to me) or updates to earlier postings that I want to share with readers. I usually collect them and keep them until I can make them part of a later essay, either in the body of the text or, if it does not quite fit, as a post script. The catch is that there are many such interesting items that do not merit a long essay and which do not relate to anything that I am likely to write about at length. I still include some of those things as post scripts but they keep accumulating faster than I can use them and sometimes even go out of date, which seems a waste.

Since I want to preserve the weekday essay feature of the blog, I have decided to supplement it with occasional short postings that will appear randomly as needed.

From the point of view of the readers, the upside is that there will be more content than before (at least I hope that is viewed as an upside). The downside is that it is only the weekday essays that will appear on a regular schedule and the appearance of other items will be unpredictable. I assume that many people have RSS subscriptions that alert them whenever new content appears.

August 30, 2010

No blog posts until further notice

Due to technical problems with my computer, I will not be able to post anything until it is fixed, which I hope will be later today.

August 27, 2010

To CAPTCHA or not to CAPTCHA?

One of the interesting things about a blog is the comments section that enables readers and author to interact. The problem, as I have written before, is spam comments that just clog up the boards and waste people's time. I have an open and unmoderated comment system which means that anyone can comment without registering or getting my prior approval but the catch is that it can be exploited by spam. The people who run the servers have filters for detecting and eliminating or quarantining spam but it is not foolproof and sometimes genuine comments may be excluded while spam comments may be allowed.

Spam is not generated by people who are merely being pests but because there is an underlying economic reason. Some email spammers seek to gain access to mail accounts from which to send their advertisements, while blog comment spammers are seeking to place links to businesses and hence drive up their search engine rankings. As a result, businesses have a financial motivation for creating spam and have generated software for doing so. The more popular your website is, the more you get targeted since the payoff is greater.

I get hit with quite a lot of spam that seems to come in waves. So a couple of times a day, I go into the comments file and clean house. I do this because it would be irritating for readers to encounter spam there or to have their genuine comments rejected. This housekeeping is quite tedious because I have to read all the suspect spam. Often it is easy to spot them because they contain gibberish. On other occasions they are generic comments or comments that are repeated over and over with slight variations and signatures. If it seems clear to me that a comment has no relevance to the post, I delete it.

But I have noticed recently that detecting spam is getting harder. Some spam comments try to deceive by using a sentence from the actual post as the comment. This makes the comment seem relevant though lacking a point. I can usually detect this dodge, even if my post in question is several years old, because I have a good sense of my own writing style. More difficult is when the spam consists of a sentence taken from the posting of a genuine commenter. If the comment does not quite fit, I look at all the comments to that post to see if this is the case.

Even more hard to judge are those short comments that are not copies of other people's words but seem vaguely relevant to the topic. They often use some of the key words in the post, but are not really adding any value to the discussion and are written ungrammatically. These do not look like machine generated spam and are also not the mistakes of a careless or poorly educated native English speaker but more characteristic of someone for whom English is a second language.

Up until quite recently, my only criterion for accepting and rejecting comments was whether the comment was being generated a human or a machine. In making these judgments I am, in effect, running my own personal Turing test. To help me, I suggested to our webmaster that perhaps we should install one of those little tests that some sites have to detect whether a human or machine is trying to access it. These screening devices have to be simple enough that any human can easily solve them but difficult enough to fool a machine. The most familiar are the so-called CAPTCHAs, those curved letters and numerals on a cluttered background that you have to identify and type in before you are allowed in. Some sites like Machine Like Us require you to do a simple arithmetic sum.

I had thought I was fighting only machines because it would not be worthwhile to have real humans wandering the web and inserting spam. But it turns out that I was wrong. My increasing difficulty in telling whether some comments were being created by humans or machines was because, as a recent study of spam by a team of researchers at the University of San Diego showed, a lot of spam nowadays is being generated by actual humans and not machines, which would make adoption of a CAPTCHA system not as useful as I had thought. (Thanks to Kevin Drum for the link.)

The article discusses the economic basis for this development. The authors argue that in the arms race between software that generates spam and software designed to defend against these spam attacks, the defenders have pretty much won because the attackers are always playing catch up and really sophisticated automated CAPTCHA solvers are quite expensive and have to be updated so often that it discourages most spam operators from using them as not being economically viable. So CAPTCHA solving software is only used for sites that have low-level and static defenses, which are also usually not desired high-value sites.

But one consequence of this defeat is that the spam operators have turned to actual human beings to overcome the defenses. The study finds that businesses now hire people to prowl the web and insert spam. Like many things on the internet, while the market for CAPTCHA solving services has expanded, the wages of workers solving CAPTCHAs have been declining. The paper's authors report that companies now commonly charge their customers as low as $2, or even $1, to have 1,000 successful hits. As a result, those companies now pay their workers even lower amounts, $0.75 or even $0.50 per 1,000, down from highs of $10 in 2007 As you can imagine, these jobs are being outsourced to those countries that have cheap labor (such as in Eastern Europe, Bangladesh, China, India and Vietnam) which probably explains the unusual grammatical errors of the spam I now detect. I am guessing that these workers are told to take some words from the blog post and insert into a generic comment to make it seem relevant.

All this leaves me with a minor moral dilemma. My obligation to the blog's readers to maintain a clutter-free comment section means that I should ruthlessly weed out every comment that looks like it could be spam (human or otherwise) even if some genuine comments get thrown out in the process. On the other hand, I feel sorry for those poor bastards who are so desperate for work that they have to take dead-end jobs like this and spend their days posting pointless comments on site after site.

I decided to give my bleeding heart a vacation on this one issue and be ruthless. I figure that there are enough websites that do not care so much about preventing spam so as to provide income for these workers. Also, once the spammers get a 'hit' by successfully posting a bogus comment, they presumably get paid even if I come along a few hours later and delete them.

So if you find that I have deleted your genuine comment, please let me know and accept my apologies for thinking you were a spammer. And if you are puzzled by why some comments appear and then later disappear, you now know the reason.

POST SCRIPT: The Daily Show on objectionable words

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Hurt Talker
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

August 23, 2010

From consumer to citizen

(Text of a talk given at Case Western Reserve University's Share the Vision program in Severance Hall on Friday, August 20, 2010 1:00 pm. This program is to welcome all incoming first year students. My comments centered on the common reading book selection Bottlemania by Elizabeth Royte.)

As those of you near the front rows can see from my grey hair, I am roughly the same age as your parents, which means that I am a member of the infamous group that, like locusts, exploded upon the world and consumed everything in sight. I am speaking of course of the baby boomer generation.

As you would thus know and are probably sick of already, baby boomers love to talk about themselves and the wonderful things that their generation achieved. And a lot of good things really did happen during the time that we grew up and started running things. We had great advances in science and medicine, sent people to the moon, advanced civil rights, obtained greater equality for women, and fought for equal rights for gays and lesbians. We also invented the personal computer, the internet, and the ubiquitous cell phone, things we cannot imagine being without today.

But while we did many good things, we also are responsible for one major bad thing and that is that we well and truly trashed the planet. We baby boomers have been like children who have inherited a fortune in the Earth's resources and have busted it on one long big party. And that is something so bad that not even our greatest contribution to humanity (the invention of rock and roll) will excuse.

The people of my generation have not been good custodians of the resources of the planet. We have been so wasteful that we risk leaving future generations resource poor. And we are leaving it to you, the next generation, to clean up our mess. If you are not angry about that, you should be. But at the same time I am hopeful that you will channel that anger into finding real solutions to the major problems of energy use, water, and food sufficiency for everyone, and to the careful use of resources in the future.

How did the present state of self-absorption come about? I think the crucial change occurred when at some point along the way, we were persuaded to think of ourselves not as citizens but as consumers. Everywhere in the media today people are referred to as consumers. The word citizen is now used only in a narrow sense, when people are talking about immigration and the like. But the word citizen is much more meaningful than that. When we think of ourselves as citizens, it carries with it a sense of community, a sense of social responsibility, a concern for people other than ourselves.

Consumers, on the other hand, are people who merely consume, who think only of themselves. As a result of this change in self-perception, we started to think that we were entitled to have all our wants gratified, and we started consuming the Earth's riches at a rapid pace, at the same time creating enormous amounts of waste products. It bred what the book calls 'hyperindividualism', that "lets those can afford to opt out - whether from public schools, mass transit, or tap water - to further isolate themselves, in style." (p. 45)

While this perception of ourselves as consumers has resulted in high standards of living for the elites in the world, it has also resulted in wasteful excess. I am referring now to the kind of lifestyle that drives people to buy things that are not based on any actual need but instead from the impulse to flaunt wealth and consumption, to let others know how 'successful' we are. We have a culture that sees consumption for its own sake as something desirable, where people feel the need to buy new stuff they don't need even before the old stuff they also didn't need is completely used up, and where waste is endemic.

This is a disease that afflicts not only the affluent. Since the media celebrates those living lavish lifestyles, the middle classes also seek to emulate the very rich by living like them. The global reach of the media creates similar desires in the affluent classes of the second and third worlds, who also live high consumption lifestyles, which creates similar pressures on their middle classes, and so on. The resulting mindless consumption is like a virus that has spread all over the world. The bottled water craze is a symptom of this collective madness, giving everyone the chance to emulate the wastefulness of the rich. Bottled water first became a status symbol and now is seen as a necessity, when it should be neither.

The absolute low point in this consumer mentality occurred right after 9/11 when the president said that the best thing that people could do was to go out and shop. Imagine that. Nearly three thousand people killed in an act of mass murder, and the president's concern was that it might deter us from shopping and consumption.

Right now, as a result of the recession that has thrown many people out of work or fearful of becoming unemployed, people are being more frugal, living simpler, less consuming lives out of necessity. Amazingly, I hear commentators in the media actually worrying about this, fearing that during this period, people might discover that a simple life is actually enjoyable and that they might not start consuming wildly again when things get better. Oh, the horror!

How did it happen that being an addicted consumer, wasting money and resources on things we don't need, is the new standard of good behavior? How have we let ourselves be duped into thinking that being a consumer is better than being a citizen?

Not all consumption is bad, of course. Some increase in global consumption is inevitable and even desirable because it means that more people are able to live better lives. No one would doubt the benefits of increased availability of drinking water and food, more widespread availability of indoor plumbing and electricity, and the construction of homes that are better able to withstand the elements. All these things enable those people who are currently living in poverty and squalor and susceptible to disease to live better and healthier lives. Increases in consumption to achieve these ends are clearly desirable.

But we have to come to terms with the consequences of the fact that the Earth's resources are finite. Once we use them, they are degraded and we have no means of getting them back to the original state however conscientiously we recycle. Hence higher levels of basic consumption by the poor of the world have to be balanced by less wasteful and unnecessary consumption by the affluent. But that kind of thinking will occur only to people who think of themselves as citizens, not as consumers, who see themselves as responsible for others, not just for themselves.

The one hopeful sign that I see is that the next generation, people like you, is far more conscious of the need to conserve resources than ours was, and more likely to be good stewards of the planet. But to be really effective at changing course, you will need the most sophisticated tools at your disposal and that is where your next four years are crucial. During this period of your education you will have access to the finest teachers and scholars, incredible knowledge resources in the library, and most importantly, like-minded, smart, and concerned fellow students. You should take maximum advantage of this opportunity to equip yourself to overcome the challenges you will undoubtedly face in your lifetime.

Whatever subjects you choose to study, remember that your ultimate goal is to learn how to be a good citizen and not a mere consumer. In fact, the future of the planet depends upon it.

POST SCRIPT: The Hollies

Talking about rock and roll, I love this song Stop, Stop, Stop, especially the banjo playing.

And one great Hollies song deserves another, this time it's Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress.

August 13, 2010

Be nice to hospitality workers

By now everyone in the US must have heard about the JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater who got so fed up by the way he was treated by a passenger that he used the intercom to curse her out and left the plane. Grabbing a beer and using the emergency chute to make his dramatic exit was an inspired touch. Slater has become something of a folk hero for his take-this-job-and-shove-it action and I would not be surprised to see a made-for-TV movie about disgruntled flights attendants soon. Slater even became Stephen Colbert's Alpha Dog of the Week.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Alpha Dog of the Week - Steven Slater
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

Slater was arrested and is now out on bail, facing charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief that could put him in prison for up to seven years, which seems excessive to me. His lawyer has provided more details of what happened.

Flight attendants in general have expressed great sympathy for him, saying that he did what many of them have only fantasized about. My niece worked as a flight attendant for a few years and has her own share of stories about rude and obnoxious people on planes. The following apocryphal story describes the kind of pettiness and self-indulgence that airline workers have to routinely deal with:

In my youth, I was friends with a TWA flight attendant who used to tell this tale: A fellow attendant had just finished serving dinner (so you know how long ago this was), and a woman rang her call button. “This potato,” she said to the attendant, pointing to a small baker on the tray, “is bad.”

He calmly picked up the potato, placed it in the palm of his left hand and shook his right index finger at it, saying in a scolding tone, “Bad potato. Bad, bad potato.” His attempt at humor won him a suspension, my friend said.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether Slater should have done what he did and deserves the adulation he has received from some quarters, the whole episode illustrates the inequality and tension that exists between workers in the hospitality industry and the customers.

A couple of years ago my flight was cancelled due to bad weather and there was chaos at the check-in counter as a large number of people tried to find alternative flights. There was only one person to serve all the coach passengers and naturally there were long lines and delays and tempers became frayed, and some people started berating this poor woman although she was not responsible for the mess. Things got so bad that a policeman had to come in to keep some order. I was there for over six hours because I was trying to make an international connection and so was able to observe the fact that this woman did not leave her position even to get food or go to the bathroom but kept a pleasant and smiling face throughout the ordeal, never raising her voice, and standing all the time. It was only late in the evening, after everyone had left and I was the only person remaining that she confided in me that a co-worker had called in sick that day, which was why she was alone, and that she was totally exhausted. I asked her if tough days happened to her often and she ruefully said yes.

One reporter worked as a flight attendant for two days to see what it was like and wrote about her experiences. Her co-workers told her that working first class was harder than coach and that did not surprise me. Airlines themselves are partly responsible for this. In order to get people to fork out extra money for these more profitable upgrades, they have pandered to them that they are so special, giving them all manner of little perks, including laughably ridiculous ones like the little carpet near the boarding gate that ordinary coach passengers are not supposed to step on. It always cracks me up when the person at the gate announces that the proletariat is forbidden to step on that rug. Should we be surprised that some of the pampered people treat flight attendants as their personal servants?

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat those who they perceive as subordinate to them. As Dave Barry once wrote, "A person who is nice to you but not nice to the waiter is not a nice person." The notorious John Bolton, hysterical warmonger and George W. Bush's choice to be US ambassador to the United Nations, was known to berate his staff while being ingratiating to those he felt were his superiors. He was described by an observer as the "quintessential kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy", adding, "I've never seen anyone quite like Secretary Bolton in terms of the way he abuses his power and authority with little people… The fact is that he stands out, that he's got a bigger kick and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he's kicking."

It is true that modern airline travel is frustrating for passengers. But that does not excuse being nasty to the people who are the public face of that industry because they are not responsible for this state of affairs. In fact, they are as much victims as we are because airlines have cut back on personnel to the minimum, requiring those remaining to work much harder and longer. I have a great deal of sympathy for people who work in the hospitality industry like waiters, flight attendants, hotel employees, and the like. These people are on their feet almost all the time, for pay that is not that great, and are required by their employers to be smiling and friendly and obsequious to everyone. And while most people are polite and considerate, because these workers deal with so many people every day, the odds are that they encounter a fair number of jerks in the course of their work day, people seeking an outlet for their own personal frustrations and demons, who take advantage of them by being abusive and rude, knowing that they have to take it and still keep smiling.

Ideally, we should treat everyone equally and well but that is hard to do in practice. But a good rule-of-thumb is that the less power that people have, the greater effort we should put in to swallow our own irritation and annoyance and be nice to them and show consideration and respect, because they have likely had a much harder day than we did.

POST SCRIPT: Anthem for Steven Slater

I remember when this song was released in 1978 that it struck the same chord with fed up workers that Slater's actions did.

August 06, 2010

Greedy old people

I recently turned 60. I don't pay much attention to my birthdays but this one is a little special because it signifies that by almost any measure I am now officially an old person, a member of a group a subset of whom has been annoying the hell out of me for a long time: greedy old people.

Let me make it quite clear whom this rant is targeting. It is not aimed at old people who after many decades of hard work are even now struggling to make ends meet on their meager savings and social security checks, some of whom have to continue working well past normal retirement age at dead-end and physically demanding jobs which take a toll on their bodies, in order to obtain the basic necessities of life, such as food and shelter. Those people can leave the room because my words are not aimed at them.

This rant is targeted at those well-off people, who have done well financially and can live comfortably in their old age and yet are constantly on their guard to protect their own standard of living and fight off any changes that might affect them negatively in the slightest, even if those changes might benefit others in great need.

Recently I seem to see an explosion of these people and it is an ugly sight. These people seem to feel that they are entitled to a life of luxury in their old age. They seem to have this sense that such a life is due to them because they have 'worked hard' and 'played by the rules', though their hard work does not come close to the difficulty of the work done by most poor people.

This increasingly vociferous and obnoxious group of elderly people seem to feel that they deserve to retire to a life of endless golf and travel and restaurant meals and cruises and card games and all the other symbols of the good life. Very few things annoy me more than the spectacle of such well-to-do retirees in their resort complexes complaining about their taxes going towards improving the conditions of those much less fortunate than themselves. They recoil with horror at the words 'socialism' and the 'welfare state' without realizing how much they themselves benefited from such policies in the past, and do so even now in the form of Medicare and Social Security.

The health care debate brought out some of the worst in this crowd of greedy old people. Some of these people were adamantly against the idea of expanding Medicare for all and other forms of expanding health care access to everyone because they feared that this increased pool of people able to seek treatment might mean longer waits for them to see a doctor. So in order to hoard the benefits of Medicare just for themselves, they were willing to sacrifice the chance for others to get any treatment at all. I am fed up with hearing them complain about the 'doughnut hole' in covering prescription drug costs, especially since a single-payer health care system (that they opposed because it was 'socialized medicine') would have eliminated that problem. Such people make me sick.

Sam Smith highlights this hypocrisy:

People who complain about the welfare state remind me of the man from Virginia who went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal deposit insurance laws. Now he's retired and on social security and Medicare. The other day he got into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station, took Amtrak to Washington and went to Capitol Hill to ask his congressman to get the government off his back.

One of the reasons I detest the so-called 'tea party' movement is that its ranks, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll, seem to be full of just such people, those who are older, richer, and mean-spirited, who want to hold on to their own benefits while cutting those that they no longer need but serve others. They do not seem to care if public education and public services deteriorate, as long as the grass in their retirement communities is well manicured.

[D]espite their anti-spending rhetoric, Tea Party supporters told pollsters that two of the federal government's most money-consuming programs, Social Security and Medicare, are worth the cost to taxpayers (maybe not a surprise, given the Tea Partiers' average age).
…
While the Tea Partiers take pains to avoid appearing racist, they're still operating at the nexus of class and race. This seems to have reached a head with healthcare reform. The UW survey's director, Christopher Parker, summed it up this way: "While it's clear that the Tea Party in one sense is about limited government, it's also clear from the data that people who want limited government don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care." (my italics)

These people are hypocrites of the worst sort. They take for granted all the benefits that society has provided them, and that they enjoyed when they were starting out in life and needed them, and now think that they made it on their own and are quite comfortable demanding that they be no longer available to future generations. They preach the virtues of the simple life and hardship, but it is only for others. And because this group is wealthy, noisy, and votes disproportionately, they get endlessly pandered to by politicians and covered by the media, breeding in them an even greater sense of entitlement. These people are a menace to the well being of society, disproportionately sucking up resources that should be distributed more equitably to the elderly poor, the sick, children, and young people starting out in life.

Such old people should count themselves lucky that they were able to work all their lives in jobs that enabled them to have a comfortable retirement, unlike many poor people who worked as hard or even harder than them but lived a life of constant worry and stress from paycheck to paycheck, trying to make enough money to feed and shelter their families and give their children a decent education. It is the latter people who really deserve a worry-free retirement to at least partially compensate for the hardships they endured all their lives.

So listen up, you greedy well-off old people! You do not seem to realize that you are the ones who should complain the least. We are all lucky just to be alive at all. To have lived long lives in fairly good health and without serious deprivation is to have been extremely lucky. To want to hold on to your privileges without sharing those benefits with people who have never enjoyed them is to be piggishly greedy. You should be ashamed of yourselves. So stop whining and shut up.

Thank you.

End of rant.

POST SCRIPT: Those were the days?

And spare me the justifications for the self-centered attitude of greedy old people based on the hardships they allegedly experienced when they were young. Even if people did have a hard life earlier and had to struggle to get to where they are now (though that too is often exaggerated), that still does not justify greed and selfishness.

This classic sketch comedy called The Four Yorkshiremen captures this mentality perfectly.

July 28, 2010

Crime and punishment

Studies "indicate that across a wide spectrum of the population and independent of local crime rates, viewing local television news is related to increased fear of and concern about crime." That is consistent with my personal experience. I hardly ever watch TV and definitely not the local TV news. As a result, I tend to be less fearful of crime than those who watch the steady diet of fear-mongering that local news channels depend upon in order to get ratings.

I also live in a quiet tree-lined neighborhood in a middle class community with people walking their dogs and children playing on the sidewalks, and all these feed into the impression that one is living in a crime-free area.

But I recently started subscribing to the local weekly paper that reports the news in about four or five small suburbs including the one I live in. The items mostly consist of local community events and people, city council and school board meetings, and the inevitable zoning controversies of which at least one involves the proposed construction of a McDonalds to which the neighbors object. There is something about a proposed McDonalds that galvanizes opposition in middle-class neighborhoods.

But there is also one curiously fascinating feature that consists of the police blotter that lists all the crimes reported and I must say that reading it changes one's perception of the neighborhood, reminding one that there is petty crime all around. And when I say petty, I do mean petty. Most of them deal with stolen bicycles left unattended, people entering unlocked garages and homes and stealing small items, minor altercations, and domestic violence.

There was one item that jumped out at me and that was the arrest of a man for stealing a toothbrush. I can't get that terse one-sentence story out of my mind because it raises so many questions. What would lead someone to steal such a cheap item as a toothbrush? Was it someone who had recently fallen down on his luck but still valued personal hygiene? There seemed to be something poignant about someone who would risk arrest just to get a toothbrush. Or was the 'thief' (the word sounds jarringly strong for someone committing such a petty action) a kleptomaniac? Or was it an adolescent who could easily afford to buy it but wanted to steal it as a lark or a dare?

If the theft was out of genuine need, why would the drugstore (which is where presumably the attempted theft occurred) be so hard-hearted as to report such a person to the police? Surely you would give a person so desperate to maintain personal hygiene a chance and perhaps even a toothbrush free of charge? If it was a stupid childish prank, surely a strong warning would have been sufficient?

Another blotter item spoke of the arrest of a person for stealing a 12-oz can of beer. Again, the pettiness of the crime causes one to raise one's eyebrows and wonder about the story behind the story.

There is often a class element involved in determining whether a petty crime gets reported to the police or not. I recall that when I was in high school in Sri Lanka a couple of boys from my school were caught stealing books from a store down the street. These boys were from well-to-do families who clearly did not need to steal and were presumably doing it for kicks or on a dare or for one of the many other reasons that make young boys act stupidly. Because their families were influential, the matter was hushed up and the boys quietly allowed to transfer to another school. But a little later two classmates and friends of mine who were not members of elite families got caught stealing books from the same store, confirming that young boys are incorrigibly stupid. But in their case, they were immediately expelled with all the shame that accompanies such an outcome, and their case was publicized and made into a stern lesson for us all on the evil of stealing.

There is no doubt that I benefit from the class bias of society in that my honesty is taken for granted for reasons that have nothing to do with knowledge of my personal character. Once at the grocery store I forgot to take the items on the bottom rack of the shopping cart out and place it on the counter for checking out and so they were not rung up. I discovered this only later after paying my bill and heading out the store. When I discovered my error I of course told the cashier and we all laughed at my forgetfulness. I suspect that if I had actually wheeled the cart out of the store without noticing my error, I still would not have been arrested for theft because my age and my ethnicity and my 'respectable' demeanor (at least I think I look respectable) would have protected me. It would have been treated as the honest mistake it was. But others who have the 'wrong' profile will not be so fortunate and will not be given the benefit of the doubt.

I recall once a conference presentation in a hotel meeting room that I made together with my African-American female colleague. After our session, we cleared up and took our stuff out to make room for the next presenters. I picked up what I thought was my colleague's expensive-looking coat (she is always well dressed) but it was only later after relaxing in the lobby and getting ready to go home that she said that the coat did not belong to her and I realized that it must belong to the people who had been setting up after us. Her boyfriend was also present and he started to take the coat back to the room to return it, but then stopped and asked if I could do it because he said that it would be awkward for him to do so as people 'might not understand'. The problem was as clear as it was unspoken. It did not matter that he is a very distinguished-looking and impeccably dressed man who could easily be mistaken for an ambassador or college president, while I was my usual nondescript self. The basic fact was that he is black and I am not, and that made all the difference in whether we would be presumed guilty or innocent of theft.

Most of us are unaware of the class and race privileges we enjoy and assume that it has been eradicated until we are directly confronted with it.

POST SCRIPT: Girl raised from birth by Wolf Blitzer

From The Onion News Network.

Girl Raised From Birth By Wolf Blitzer Taken Into Protective Custody

July 16, 2010

World Cup musings

Although I am not a soccer fan, I watched the World Cup soccer final between the Netherlands and Spain. I had nothing better to do last Sunday afternoon and thought that I should at least see the culminating event of something that had been engrossing the entire world for a month.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, although the game itself was not that great and the amount of roughness was excessive (especially by the Netherlands), even allowing for the absurd histrionics of players who collapse on the ground (referred to as 'flopping') and writhe in agony when tacked for the ball, as if they received a fatal injury, only to jump up and continue playing normally once the referee has penalized the tackler. Surely veteran referees must be aware of all this gamesmanship and discount it when awarding penalties, so for whose benefit is all this acting?

Some of the tackles were genuinely vicious and it surprises me that more players do not get actually hurt. The one time where the Spanish player was kicked directly in the chest with what seemed like a martial arts kick was such a flagrant foul that I was amazed that the kicker was not immediately red-carded and ejected from the game but apparently the referee's view was obscured and so could not see how bad it was. I started the game with no team to root for except a mild preference for the Netherlands but the nasty style of play by the Dutch players made me switch my allegiance to the Spanish.

I really like the fact that the game moves so fast, with no breaks in the action, so that a 45-minute half actually lasts for only 45 minutes, with no time outs, stopping the clock, endless replays, challenges to referee calls, etc., the kind of things that drag American football out so that an allegedly 60-minute game actually can go on for well over three hours. Even though I am not a connoisseur of soccer and there was no scoring until almost two hours of play at very end of extra time, I was not bored at all, and was surprised at how quickly the time went by. Of course, this means no time for commercials except for the ones that are in the stadium and form part of the background to be captured by the cameras.

Another thing I like about soccer is that it is so simple. The players wear no special padding or helmets or other equipment. There is just one referee whose call is binding with no second-guessing involving replays or consulting with other officials, other than depending on the two line judges for offside calls. Although players do argue with the referee, the chats are quite short and the threat of the dreaded yellow card is enough to deter them from making too big a deal.

I am not sure why Americans do not prefer soccer to football. Soccer players look like regular people who happen to be athletic. They are normal-sized, quick and skilful, and fit enough to run around on the field non-stop for 45 minutes at a stretch. Anyone can aspire to being a good soccer player and still look a normal person. Who would want to be like the behemoths in football who pant heavily after a single run and have to go and rest on the bench after a few plays, or the absurdly tall basketball players?

I suspect that the very cheapness of the game and the lack of advertising opportunities during play works against it, since it prevents businesses from making huge amounts of money from it. Basketball is even simpler than soccer, requiring fewer people and less space but the way it is played in the US allows for a lot of stoppages for commercials, which may explain its appeal to sponsors. But given that soccer has managed to attract strong commercial support in the rest of the world, it is perhaps only a matter of time before it becomes a major sport here too.

The paranormal played an unexpectedly large role in the tournament. I found hilarious the soap opera surrounding the French team's collapse and ignominious early exit, along with their coach's dependence on astrology in selecting his line up. He will apparently not play people who are Scorpios and is dubious about Leos on defense. His faith in the stars did not do him or his team much good but I am sure that he will continue to be a firm believer.

Meanwhile, what about the Paul the Prophet? The octopus in the German aquarium correctly predicted all three of Germany's group matches (2 wins, one loss), plus their next three games (victories against England in the round of 16 and Argentina in the quarter finals followed by the loss to Spain in the semis), and then wrapped it up by predicting Germany to beat Uruguay for third place and Spain to beat Netherlands in the final. That's 8-for-8 with odds of only 1 in 256 of getting it by chance. That's pretty impressive and has, I am sure, impressed at least some superstitious people that Paul has real powers.

But as with most paranormal claims, on closer examination things are not so impressive. There is some selection bias at work. Given the intense interest in soccer in the world, Paul was just one of many candidates that people were seeking signs from and it is only those that were successful in the early rounds (say the first four) that attention was focused on as prognosticators, and all the others were ignored. (See my earlier post on these kinds of selection effects. You can read about some of the failed animal oracles here.) Paul started getting real attention only later in the tournament, after Germany beat England. That means only the last four picks should be considered as real predictions, and that works out to 1 in 16 chance of success, which is good but not spectacular.

Paul has a track record even before the World Cup, though. He made predictions in the 2008 Euro Cup, picking Germany to win in all six games they played but getting only four right, which is not that much better than chance. Also he seems to have a preference for selecting the container with the German flag, selecting them to win 11 out of the 13 games they played. Since Germany has a strong team (winning 9 out of the 13 games), this increases his odds of success. So I will have to conclude that the evidence is just not convincing that Paul can see into the future and stick with my theory that he is simply an astute soccer fan.

Paul has, however, retired from the oracle racket, which is a wise move since it means that he can go out a winner and preserve his reputation. What ruins it for most claimants to paranormal powers is that they go to the same well too often and eventually the odds catch up with them. And when prophets fail their followers, they often suffer nasty fates. I am glad for Paul's sake that he quit while he was ahead.

POST SCRIPT: The football sniper

July 14, 2010

Overdoing public grief

On the radio yesterday morning I heard a report on camps designed specifically for children who have recently had a bereavement in the family to attend with other similarly situated children. The camps will be staffed by people trained in grief counseling and the children will be encouraged to express their feelings through artwork and conversations and even cry.

Although I am not a psychologist, I must say that the story made me uncomfortable. Is it really a good idea to take a child who has just lost a parent, grandparent, or sibling and put them together with other grieving children so that they are surrounded by grief all the time? My impulse would be to keep the child at home, play games with them, send them out to the movies, or to encourage them to play with other children. Their sense of loss must be palpable and surely what they need is relief and distraction from it, not reinforcement.

For example, I think it is great that most people use the Memorial Day holiday to have picnics and barbecues, and strongly disagree with those pious scolds who every year complain that people are not treating the day with appropriate solemnity. What d they want people to do? Visit graveyards? Fast? Pray? Listen to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings on an endless loop?

It seems to me that nowadays rather than encouraging people to be stoic in the face of tragedy, they are now being encouraged to wallow in public grief. We seem to be telling people that what needs to be done is to drag out the grieving process and make their emotions public. Is this a good thing?

Take for example tragedies where many people die, such as the events of 9/11 or the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City or the Virginia Tech shooting. Immediately calls go out to build a memorial for the dead, which is usually followed by squabbles as to the appropriate design. And on every anniversary the events are commemorated with all kinds of symbolic events, such as the beating of drums or the pealing of bells once for each death, accompanied by the reading of the names of the victims. Even now, fifteen years after the event, the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing is publicly commemorated this way.

It has now got to the stage where following the (unfortunately frequent) senseless killing of several people by a deranged shooter, there are calls for a memorial to be set up to commemorate the victims. When I drive on the highways I often see small private memorials by the roadside, presumably to commemorate a highway fatality. If we are not careful, we will become a nation of memorials.

I don't understand this need to memorialize. They say that time heals all wounds. I believe that to be true but how can time do its work if every year people pick at the scab by reliving once again in a big ceremony the events surrounding the tragedy?

Maybe I am weird but to me grief is something that one deals with privately. If I had had someone close to me die in a tragic and untimely way, the last thing I would want is to have other people, total strangers, make a big fuss on the anniversary, reminding me of it over and over again, and obliging me to act grief-stricken on schedule on that day. As anyone knows, feelings of sadness at the loss of a loved one hit randomly, triggered by inconsequential things. For all other people know, I might be feeling pretty good on the anniversary and now have to put on a show of sadness for the public which would make me feel hypocritical, which is worse than feeling genuine grief.

What has happened is that the grief counseling industry has taken over and decided that we need to show our emotions with a great outpouring of feelings. The media is a major culprit as can be seen in the way that they treat deaths of public figures as events of great sadness and public importance, when they are not. The recent coverage of the deaths and funerals of Michael Jackson, President Ford, Tim Russert, etc. was way over the top. As a result, it seems that we should all feel sadness on demand.

Even people who have the most tenuous of connections to the events now seem to feel that they need grief counseling too. Rosa Brooks commented on this phenomenon in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings:

Did you feel sad when you heard the news? Did you ponder, however fleetingly, the mystery of mortality? If so, don't just go on with your ordinary life as if nothing has happened to disrupt it (even though nothing has happened to disrupt it). Honor your grief! Attend a candlelight vigil, post a poignant message on one of MySpace's Virginia Tech memorial pages and please, seek trauma counseling as soon as possible.

Convincing ourselves that we've been vicariously traumatized by the pain of strangers has become a cherished national pastime. Thus, the Washington Post this week accompanied online stories about the shooting with a clickable sidebar, "Where to Find Support" — apparently on the assumption that the mere experience of glancing at articles about the tragedy would be so emotionally devastating that readers would require trained therapists.

The death of Michael Jackson produced vast hordes of people who did not know him in the slightest but acted (at least in front of TV and news reporters) as if they had been devastated by the loss of an immediate family member or close friend. When John Lennon was murdered (the equivalent of Michael Jackson's death for my generation) I recall being shocked at the murder and sad at his untimely end but I did not feel grief, did not mourn, and definitely did not need counseling despite my close identification with Beatles music.

Everyone now seems to have even internalized the jargon of grief counselors, with ordinary people now glibly talking about the need to 'allow for the healing process to take place' in order to 'bring about closure', as if one can end one's sense of loss tidily at a scheduled time by going through some prescribed set of rituals.

Each person comes to terms with grief and loss in their own way. In my case, I tend to busy myself with mindless activities, such as cleaning out the garage and closets, sorting papers, watching TV, and so on. I let the minutiae of daily life consume my thoughts, except for brief moments when I let sad memories enter in small doses that I can deal with privately and alone. I don't want to talk about my loss, and I definitely do not want other people encouraging me to 'let my emotions show'. I just want to be left alone.

I would hate to have memorial activities on each anniversary that force me to confront, once again, the fact that they have died. I do not even visit my parents' graves and do not do anything special on the days of their birth or death. Why force myself to think about them? I think about them often at random moments and that for me is enough.

I am sure that other people react differently to tragedies in their lives. That is my point. We all react differently. Each of us deals with grief in our own way and should be allowed to go it alone and not feel obliged to conform to other people's expectations of how we should feel and behave. The rest of us should simply make room for bereaved people to respond in any way that works for them. Public memorializing tends to impose one set of expectations on everyone and serve no purpose that I can see, except to allow public and elected figures to grandstand.

POST SCRIPT: Get religion! Waste time!

July 12, 2010

The end of an affair

Well, the great drama of where LeBron James would play in future years has mercifully come to an end. There must not be a single person in America, however remotely located or disinterested in sports, who escaped from the endless speculation that culminated with an actual TV show where he revealed his decision. Surely the last was an act of egotism that has not been exceeded by any sports figure?

Living as I do in Cleveland, which was at the center of this spectacle, I could only marvel at how emotionally swept up people got about this whole thing. Even though I resolutely tried to ignore the coverage, not reading the endless newspaper articles, I still could not avoid being nauseated by the headlines alone, and the sight of an entire city and region, including civic leaders, begging and pleading with him to stay. This was over and above the usual and also highly excessive day-to-day adulation that we have lived with over the last decade ever since it became clear, even while he was in a local high school, that he had exceptionally good basketball skills. This devotion to him manifested itself in huge murals with him in messianic poses and his every movement adoringly reported in the papers, with front-page photos of him appearing regularly.

Just think about this for a moment. All this was because he was able to play with a ball better than others. Of course some would try to rationalize their childish involvement with something so trivial by trotting out economic arguments, such as that his playing here brought a boost to the economy by having people come to the city to go to the games, patronize the restaurants, and so forth. I have no doubt that there was some economic impact but it was clear that what was going on was based on far more than economics. This city is desperate to win a national championship in a major sport and winning the spelling bee simply does not cut it.

This desperation manifested in the city and its sports fans acting like a needy lover who is willing to do anything in order to keep the object of devotion around. And as often happens, when the lover is spurned and the object of adoration finds someone new, love turns to hate in a second. Instead of the spurned lover throwing all the stuff out the window, in this case fans are destroying or defacing the ubiquitous James memorabilia. The murals are coming down. Angry, vicious letters appear in the newspapers. The city has called James selfish, ungrateful, and a traitor. They seem shocked that he would leave them after all the love they have given him

What did they expect? Shifting metaphors, the city is like overly indulgent parents who give in to their adored child's every whim, praise him incessantly, overlook or excuse every misstep, and then are surprised to find that he has grown up to be thoroughly spoiled, only cares about himself, and spurns his parents when he no longer needs them. In his TV special he said quite explicitly that he wanted to do what's best for himself with no other consideration in mind.

I can understand that, actually, but that is because I know that major sports is a business in which sentimentality plays little or no part. Players are businessmen, going where they can make the most money. So are the team owners. The Cleveland Cavaliers owner called James ungrateful, which he is, but is that news? I am certain that he, like other sports team owners, would in turn dump the city in a heartbeat and move somewhere else if they did not cater to his whims. The owners and players can be like this because they exploit the fans' sentimental attachment to their teams, which makes them willing to shell out huge amounts of money for taxes to pay for new stadiums with luxury accommodations for wealthy patrons, highly inflated ticket prices, buy team merchandise, and watch their teams on TV.

I used to be a sports fan once, long ago. My emotions would rise and fall with the success of my team and I would eagerly discuss with other fanatics the possibilities of the next game or do a post-mortem on the one just passed. But then I grew up and realized that there were other things in life that were more important. I got further disenchanted when I became aware how cynically owners and players viewed the fans, as people with pockets to be picked. Now sports is something I follow casually by flipping through the sports section of the daily paper in a few minutes, but refuse to take seriously.

Since I live in Cleveland, I would like the city to win a football or basketball championship only because it is painful to watch actual adults agonize over not doing so for so long, and winning would put an end to that misery, at least for the next few decades I hope. (As for the local baseball team and its fans, I have no sympathy whatsoever for them because of their determination to hold on to the offensive Chief Wahoo logo.) It is pathetic that the city feels so invested in achieving something so trivial and I am embarrassed for them. In Bertholt Brecht's play Galileo, Andrea tells his teacher "Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero" to which Galileo replies, "No, Andrea, unhappy is the land that needs a hero." How much more unhappy (and pathetic) is a city that needs as a hero someone whose main skill is the ability to throw a ball through a hoop?

LeBron James can go wherever he likes and apart from feeling sympathy for how badly the people here feel because they suspect that their one chance of success has slipped through their hands, I simply couldn't care less. I am grateful, though, that the hoopla surrounding him will now take place far, far away.

POST SCRIPT: Paul Robeson

If people feel they must have heroes, then instead of venerating athletes with just one talent who simply look out for themselves, people should emulate figures like the multi-talented Paul Robeson, athlete, singer, actor, and activist, who was willing to sacrifice his career to fight for justice for the poor and against racism. Because of his outspokenness, he was hounded by the US government and his passport seized for many years. My parents had the great privilege of attending a concert given in London by Robeson after he got it back, and said that it was electrifying.

Here is Robeson singing the song that became identified with him, Old Man River from the musical Show Boat. It is a performance that never fails to move me, especially its memorable lines, "I get weary and sick of trying. I'm tired of living and scared of dying."

Later in life, Robeson would change the lyrics to make them less despairing and more inspiring.

The commentary you hear is by Harry Belafonte, a worthy successor to Robeson as someone who uses his celebrity to advance the cause of justice.

June 30, 2010

Is cheerleading a sport?

In the seminar that I teach that deals with scientific revolutions, one of the difficult questions that we grapple with is how to distinguish science from non-science. In other words, if we have two boxes, one labeled 'science' and the other 'non-science', can we establish some criteria that will enable us to take any given theory and determine which of the two boxes it should be put into? To be able to do so requires us to establish the existence of both necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be considered science.

If we have only necessary conditions, then any theory that does NOT meet those criteria is definitely not science so it goes into the non-science box. But if it does meet just necessary criteria, all we can say about it is that it may or may not be science. i.e., we do not know which box to put it into. So for example, the commonly accepted idea that scientific theories are materialistic and generate predictions that can be tested are necessary conditions. This is why any theories involving supernatural entities or that are untestable tend to be immediately classified as non-science. But all theories that are materialistic and testable may not be science. For example, the idea that soccer fans are intrinsically rowdier than football fans is not a scientific theory (in the usual sense we use the words) although the methods of scientific investigations (such as statistical analysis and correlations) may be used in seeing if it is in fact a true statement.

Similarly, if we have criteria for sufficiency and a theory meets those criteria, then it goes into the box marked science. But if it does not meet the criteria, it may or may not be science, so again we do not know which box to put it into. As an example, if we say that a theory is science if it has been cited as the reason why its inventors were awarded a Nobel prize, then quantum theory would be scientific without a doubt. But what about the theory of relativity? It has not been cited in Nobel awards so by our rules we cannot definitely say if it is or is not science.

This is why we need BOTH necessary and sufficient conditions to be able to make unambiguous statements that theory A is science while theory B is not science..

One would think that it might be easy to simply make a list of necessary conditions and say that if a theory meets ALL of those necessary conditions, then that is sufficient. But it is not that simple. What complicates things is that any demarcation criterion that tries to distinguish science from non-science would have to be such that all theories that are commonly accepted as science (such as Newton's laws of motion) would meet the criteria and be included while those that are commonly thought to not be science (say astrology) are excluded. Trying to ensure that existing theories go into the correct boxes is where the difficulty arises because there are always difficult marginal cases.

Finding necessary and sufficient conditions for science has been so difficult that some have declared this problem to be either insoluble or not worth the effort to solve it.

In teaching these somewhat abstract concepts of necessary and scientific conditions, I try to give my students a more down-to-earth parallel by posing to them the question: Is cheerleading a sport? This usually generates a lively discussion and they soon realize that in order to answer this question, they need to arrive at necessary and sufficient conditions for what makes something a sport or non-sport and they quickly discover that it is hard, if not impossible, to do so. And the difficulty is exactly the same as that confronting demarcation criteria for science. While it is possible to make prescriptive lists of conditions for what constitutes a sport, what complicates things is that whatever conditions we arrive at should also be such that things that are commonly accepted as sports (say tennis and soccer) and those that are not (drinking a beer or taking a nap on the couch) fall, using those criteria, into the correct boxes. And there are some tough marginal cases, not just cheerleading. Is chess a sport? Is the card game bridge a sport? (Both have applied to be part of the Olympic games.) How about video games?

It turns out that my classroom discussion question of whether cheerleading is a sport is not a purely academic exercise. It is actually being argued before a federal judge in Connecticut. The reason is that Quinnipiac University has been accused of subverting the requirements of Title IX, the federal legislation that requires colleges to provide some level of equity in support of women's athletics. The university cut costs by classifying the high-numbers, low-cost, women-dominated cheerleading as a sport, enabling them to eliminate other women's sports (such a volleyball) that cost more per student. The women's volleyball team has challenged the university's classification of cheerleading as a sport and this is what has led to the lawsuit.

In arguing the case, we see the same necessary and sufficient arguments surfacing.

While physical effort and ability are a given for many of the high-level gymnasts who cheer, Title IX has specific criteria for what counts as a sport when it comes to equity in athletics: a program must have a defined season, a governing organization, and feature competition as its primary goal. Competitive cheer is not recognized by the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) as a sport. Nor does it have a governing body: two versions of organizations that have filled the role have been associated with Varsity Brands, Inc., a for-profit company that sells cheerleading gear and hosts up to 60 "national championships" a year. To amplify its case that competitive cheer can indeed count as a varsity sport, Quinnipiac has joined with seven other schools to form the National Competitive Stunts and Tumbling Association, which is intended to be a new governing body for the sport. Four more schools need to sign on for it to be recognized as a legitimate governing body, and the sport itself to be seen as "emerging."

It looks like what Title IX has tried to specify are just necessary conditions which, as we have seen, can only definitely say if cheerleading is not a sport. It is not clear if it says that if an activity meets ALL the necessary conditions, then that is sufficient to make it a sport.

Whatever the outcome, Quinnipiac University should be ashamed of itself for trying to subvert the spirit of Title IX and eliminating women's volleyball.

But what I am really curious about is how the judge is going to arrive at a verdict. Will he be able to specify necessary and sufficient conditions and thus arrive at demarcation criteria, something that has so far eluded my students and me? If so, I will gladly say that you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

POST SCRIPT: Who is an atheist?

June 22, 2010

Fashion and foot binding

The novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (2005) is the story of the lifelong friendship, starting from childhood, of two women in early 19th century China as each undergoes major life changes, one moving up the socioeconomic ladder, the other down. Told through the eyes of one child who begins life as the daughter of a poor farmer and rises, through marriage, to become a noblewoman, it gives insight into the curious and sometimes brutal life of the various classes of women in the patriarchal Confucian system.

The book describes the hidden and secret world of women in that gender-segregated society, its superstitions and rituals, and the rigid hierarchy and roles that people, especially women, were assigned to. Women were meant to stay in the home and drilled with the rules known (p. 24) as the Three Obediences ("When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son") and the Four Virtues ("Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude; be quiet and agreeable in words; be restrained and exquisite in movement; be perfect in handiwork and embroidery") so that they will grow into the ideal of a virtuous woman. Women are told repeatedly from birth that they are worthless and any woman who does not bear sons is treated even worse than normal.

But what I found truly horrifying were the descriptions dealing with the binding of feet. I had been aware of course of this terrible practice but to have the process described in detail in the novel was chilling and makes one wonder how such a barbaric standard of beauty could have even been conceived and implemented except as a means of dominating women and breaking them both physically and in spirit.

The ideal of the perfect foot sought by the binding process seems grotesque now:

Of these requirements, length is the most important. Seven centimeters – about the length of a thumb – is the ideal. Shape comes next. A perfect foot should be shaped like the bud of a lotus. It should be full and round at the heel, come to a point at the front, with all the weight borne by the big toe alone. This means that the toes and the arch of the foot must be broken and bent under to meet the heel. (p. 26)

This result was obtained by brutally binding the feet of very young children with tightly wound bandages. Children started undergoing this process around the age of six or so, and it is, as you can imagine, not only excruciatingly painful but dangerous, with death from gangrene and permanent crippling not being uncommon. Even when "successful" the result was women whose mobility was impaired. To be quite frank, I found those sections too difficult to read and skimmed them. The descriptions of little children screaming in pain as their mothers put them through this process was just too much for me to take. This is another example of adults callously violating the bodily integrity of children by imposing their own beliefs on them.

How could such a terrible practice ever become seen as the norm or even desirable? From the point of view of men, having women who were restricted in their movements may have been seen as good thing as it enabled them to dominate them more easily. (The efforts by the Taliban and other Muslim fundamentalists to deprive women of education and keep them virtually prisoners in their homes seem to serve a similar purpose.)

But how did it happen that women also internalized this as a desirable standard of beauty? It is suggested that the practice began with wealthy women and that the very negatives associated with it, such as impaired mobility, were seen as signs of wealth and privilege since it implied that one was a woman of leisure who had servants to do all the work on one's behalf.

But as is often the case with fashion, what begins as an extravagance to be flaunted by the wealthy is then adopted by everyone as the standard and that may be why foot binding took hold among almost everyone in China except the servant classes, who were needed to do work. Thankfully the abolition of the Chinese monarchy and the creation of a republic in 1912 resulted in the banning of the practice, and after the Communist Revolution of 1949 the ban was even more strictly enforced so I believe (and hope) that the practice has disappeared altogether.

While reading the novel, it struck me that this kind of practice took place in the west too, though in less extreme forms. The kinds of clothes women wore in Victorian times, with highly restricting corsets, suffocating layers of petticoats, and ornate wigs and makeup were also a means of flaunting the fact that one had nothing better to do than spend vast amounts of time and money paying attention to one's appearance.

Nowadays, fashions are not so physically constraining but there are still things that are the result of rich people's lifestyles being adopted by others. For example, take the idea that one's wardrobe must be changed frequently. To be seen in the same outfit more than once, let along many times, is to commit a fashion faux pas. This strikes me as absurd. It seems logical to me that if someone looks good in an outfit, they should wear it many times. Just because rich people can afford to purchase vast numbers of outfits and discard them after one or two wearings does not mean that this is not a silly and wasteful practice. But it becomes positively ruinous for people who internalize this as good fashion sense but cannot afford it.

The spending of vast sums of money on accessories and makeup and hairstyles and other 'beauty' treatments are other examples of rich people's extravagances being adopted by people who cannot afford them.

As anyone who has seen me and the way I am dressed and groomed will immediately realize, I am not really an expert on fashion so there may be other contemporary examples of women going to extremes (either physically through plastic surgery or cosmetically or sartorially) that I am unaware of, purely because they have internalized a concept of beauty that has as its source nothing more than the flaunting of wealth and privilege.

I am not saying that one should not take care of one's appearance or try to look nice. But what we talking about here goes well beyond minimal requirements or common sense.

POST SCRIPT: The metrosexual danger

David Mitchell points out easy it is for men to look well-dressed and warns that those few men who pay too much attention to their clothes and grooming risk ruining it for the rest of us.

June 11, 2010

The strange appeal of the Spelling Bee

My adopted hometown Cleveland has a serious self-esteem problem despite the fact that I have found it to be a nice place to live and raise a family and have been very happy here. Of course, it has many real problems that it shares with other mid-sized cities in the northeast, such as the poor economy, the effects of the housing crisis, schools in trouble, and declining population coupled with rising unemployment.

But what really seems to stick in the craw of this sports-obsessed town is that it has not won a major national sporting championship since 1964, when it won the NFL trophy before it became the Super Bowl. The near misses since then have only added to the feeling that there is some curse on the town, perhaps as a result of their baseball team insisting on retaining the ghastly Chief Wahoo logo despite regular protests that it is a highly offensive caricature of Native Americans. It amazes me that some fans are so attached to that awful logo that any suggestion of removing it brings them out of the woodwork with angry letters to the newspapers..

Cleveland's best shot at a major national title seemed to be an NBA championship with LeBron James, but their second serious try at it fell short again this year even before they reached the finals, and with James now a free agent and heavily recruited by other teams, the city is glum.

So it was with some pleasure that our local newspaper The Plain Dealer reported last Saturday that one of our own, 14-year old Anamika Veeramani, had won the 83rd the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee Championship, after coming fifth the previous year. Her path to victory lay in her ability to by correctly spell "such tongue-twisters as nahcolite, a white mineral consisting of sodium bicarbonate; epiphysis, an end part of a long bone in higher vertebrates; and juvia, a Brazil nut." Her final winning word was Stromuhr, which is apparently a tool that measures the speed of blood through an artery.

The paper has been covering her victory tour the whole week. While I am pleased for her and her family for her success, I must admit that the appeal of this contest completely eludes me. Spelling words, like naming state capitols, could be an amusing parlor game to while away a few minutes but how could such a contest ever have gripped the imagination of so many people that the event actually gets national TV coverage?

Over at Mother Jones Kevin Drum is equally puzzled at the popularity of this contest and in his investigation finds that the kinds of words that are thrown at the contestants these days are a far cry from those of the past. In 1930, for example, words that contestants stumbled over were blackguard, conflagration, concede, litigation, breach, saxophone, license, and primarily. As he says, these are words that nowadays "probably wouldn't show up in the first round of a district competition, let alone in the final round of the nationals." In fact, all the words that knocked out the students in the final round in 1930 were ones that any reasonably literate adult would be able to spell today. The list of winning words since 1925 provides a fascinating window into the evolution of difficulty. Even though I read quite a lot, since 1986 I had heard of only two or three of the winning words and never encountered the words that Anamika Veeramani spelled this year and would not get correct even a single one of them, except by sheer luck and guesswork.

Has the vocabulary of our teenagers actually got so good that now we need to test them with esoteric words that one is unlikely to ever use? One of Drum's commenters, however, gave out the secret for this evolution.

Don't be too impressed with modern young spelling champs. Back in the late 80's when I was in junior high, I participated in the regional spelling bees from which winners went to the national bee (now televised on ESPN). I had the good fortune to qualify 3 years in a row for the regional contest for the greater Philadelphia area and learned the "game."

The game was that you can officially be asked any word from some version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. So, it's it's impressive when a 12 year old kid spells a crazy word. However… they give all contestants a thin pamphlet of study words for practice. During my first year, my parents overheard that all words in the competition came from the pamphlet (I can confirm this from subsequent competitions). The pamphlet is thin enough that a studious competitor can study and memorize it within a few months. This is how the modern spelling feats are explained in the televised competitions.

So in order to draw viewers, the sponsors of the contest seem to have rigged it to create amazement at the ability of young people to spell words that even adults have never heard of.

I recall seeing the documentary Spellbound a few years ago, that tracks a group of children as they work their way through the competition. I was impressed at the deep dedication of the children and their families as they spent hours and hours and hours each day over weeks and months drilling on the words. I was also depressed that they were devoting so much of their time to such a useless activity.

I can understand the need for contests of intellectual skills to at least partially balance the emphasis on athletic competitions in schools. But there must be other intellectual contests that have more intrinsic value. Surely among intellectual skills, the ability to spell obscure words must rank near the bottom in usefulness? I can understand, for example, a Scrabble contest. That is a game where you need to be able to draw upon a vocabulary of both ordinary and obscure words but also use strategy and ingenuity in placing them. A spelling competition involving a given list of esoteric words seems so incredibly pointless.

The format of the spelling bee also seems unfair, since all contestants do not spell the same words and an unlucky contestant may get knocked out by chancing to get a tough word early. A game in which all the contestants write down the words they are asked to spell would be fairer but would not provide the visual drama that TV requires. Perhaps people like to see children sweat under pressure, the agony of getting it wrong and being bumped, and the relief of getting it right, all of which you can see in Spellbound. I felt really sorry for them.

The fact that the whole thing is aimed at TV ratings also explains the controversy that erupted at this year's event when the organizers, in order to maintain the proper pacing of eliminations to fill their allotted TV time slot, invoked an obscure rule that seemed grossly unfair to the participants. Frankly, I do not understand the details of what the complicated controversy was all about and did not feel like spending a lot of time on it, but Shaquille O'Neal was involved, if you can imagine it.

There is one other thing that is puzzling. It strikes me, as a casual observer, that a lot of the students who reach the nationals are of Indian origin. In fact, 40 percent of the winners since 1985 seem to have ethnic Indian names. In addition, they seem by their names to be of South Indian ethnicity, in particular the Tamil community, which has a worldwide diaspora. What is that all about? Why is this particular group so attracted to this contest? Even though I am an ethnic Tamil, I have no idea as to the reason. Was there some memo that I did not get?

The whole thing strikes me as weird.

POST SCRIPT: Ricky Gervais on how and why he became an atheist

At the age of eight, it took him only an hour to figure out that there was no god.

(Thanks to Machine Like Us.)

March 11, 2010

Overdependence on technology

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

I like a lot of the conveniences that modern technology provides. At the same time, there is so much new stuff that is coming out that I feel reluctant to waste my time learning things that will prove to be transient. I am also somewhat cheap and tend to wait until the dust has settled and only the truly useful is left standing before spending money on it. So an early adopter I am not. I tend to keep an eye on trends but not adopt anything new unless I think I really need it or it solves a problem that I have or it looks like something that will really improve my life.

Personal GPS navigation systems have so far not passed that threshold. Yes, I can see that it might be fun to have but so far I am not persuaded that it is a must-have.

Last Friday, someone knocked on my office door. He said that he was looking for a conference that the university was hosting. I knew that there was nothing going on in my building and asked him why he had come there. He said that this was the place that his GPS has sent him to. I asked him if he could give me the name of the building where it was to be held or the people organizing it so I might be able to help him more easily. He said no. He had simply plugged some information into his GPS device and followed its directions to the end, which happened to be my building.

It so happened that I was able, from the topic of the conference, to track down the exact location and send him on his way. But I marveled at his total dependence on technology.

He is not alone. Recently my cousin was driving to New York City from Toronto for a wedding that I also attended and depended totally on his GPS system to get him there. For some reason, the street address of the hotel was not the address that you are supposed to insert into the GPS to get accurate directions, but he overlooked that and as a result he got lost and spent several wasted hours wandering around NYC (at the end of a long drive from Toronto when everyone in the car was already tired and irritable) until he found the hotel. It had not occurred to him to carry a map with the location of the hotel on it or to use MapQuest or similar sources to gets directions as backup.

While these two cases were benign, overdependence on GPS can be potentially deadly as one Oregon couple found when they blindly followed their GPS directions into a remote forest road and became stuck in the snow for three days before they were rescued.

I myself do not use GPS because I find that I am perfectly able to get to places with just street maps or with help from MapQuest. I also dislike the idea of voices breaking into my consciousness when I am driving and telling me what to do, when most of the time I don't need directions. Before I leave to go anywhere unfamiliar, I make sure that I have located my destination on a map and created a visual map in my head, and I take actual maps with me as a backup.

There s nothing wrong with using GPS. What surprises me is that some people are totally dependent on it and have no plan B, no backup, if the GPS goes awry.

POST SCRIPT: Wedding speeches

Over my lifetime I have attended many weddings and listened to quite a few speeches and I must say that That Mitchell and Webb Look captures their over-the-top praise nature well.

January 26, 2010

An unnatural blog

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

Today marks the fifth anniversary of this blog, so I thought I would pre-empt my series on the end of politics where I excoriate Obama and the Democrats and indulge in some self-indulgent musing about the whole blogging exercise and my contribution to it.

After some initial hesitant steps when I was not sure what I would do with this new medium, I soon settled into a routine of one op-ed length essay of about 1,000 words on a single topic each weekday. Apart from repeating some postings when I am on travel or for holidays, I have not taken a break. As a result, I have now written about 1250 essays and well over a million words. But I realize that this type of blogging is not natural for the form.

The big advantage of a blog is that it can be a way of providing immediate and informed commentary on news, whereas newspapers and magazines have lag times that can be quite considerable.

The second advantage is that a blog post can be of any length. Magazine and newspaper and journal article are of the 'long form' type and there are often constraints of length that one must conform to, about 800 words for op-eds, or 1,500 or 5,000 or 10,000 word lengths for magazines and journals. But a blog can be any length at all, from just a few words to thousands. So you can say exactly what you want to say, no more, no less, as the need arises, which can be enormously liberating and prevent needless verbiage.

What I have done is seemingly take the negative aspects of the long form essay (fixed word length and more analytical pieces) and used it as a basis for my blog. I am not entirely alone in this. Glenn Greenwald's excellent blog (which should be a must read for anyone) also has usually one long (often very long) analytical piece each day, but his deals with breaking news on the legal and political fronts. I often learn about breaking news from his blog. I cannot do the kind of quick analysis that Greenwald can (he is a constitutional lawyer and has a lot of expertise at his fingertips) except on rare occasions, so I rarely publish things in such a timely way.

So why I am blogging in this unnatural way? Partly out of necessity. It takes me a while to digest information and make sense of it. I jot down ideas that I think are interesting and may have some insight into, and sometimes think about them for weeks or even months before I write them up. Also I have other work to do so that I cannot spend a lot of time keeping up with breaking news or cruising the web picking up interesting tidbits to comment on.

I know that every one is busy so it has been my goal to not waste the reader's time. I arrived at the approximately 1,000-word length because it can be read in a few minutes. Since what I write about usually deals with old news, to add value, the blog post should contain things that are at least useful or new or interesting. One way of adding value is to provide at least some original analysis. As someone for whom teaching is in the blood, I also try to explain science or other difficult topics in ways that I hope will be clear and helpful to those who do not have the time to invest in learning these things on their own. The combination of trying to explain something in depth while restricting myself to the daily word limit has resulted in the many multi-part series of posts.

I also try to write the post as well as I can, given the limited time that I can devote to it, because I know how annoying it is to read something that has typos, factual errors, poor grammar, and generally looks sloppily done. I feel that such writing is an insult to the reader. So each post is rewritten and edited several times before it is posted, which is another reason that I rarely comment quickly on breaking news stories. I also try to be as accurate as I can about the information presented and give the sources so readers can follow up for themselves. All that takes time.

The benefits of blogging for me personally have been tremendous. In researching the information for the posts and in trying to explain things to others, I have learned a lot myself. I think I have also become a much more proficient writer as a result of the practice I have gained. The blog posts have often formed the first drafts of articles that I have subsequently published in more formal venues. Even my recent book God vs. Darwin began as a series of blog posts.

In the process, I have learned a lot from the readers and made many new contacts and renewed others thanks to people finding the blog.

At each anniversary I wonder how long I can keep up the pace. My main worry is that I will run out of things to say and start repeating myself. So far, I think I have avoided that danger. It has been fine and fun so I plan to keep going.

So thanks, everyone, for reading and commenting and sending me information. Here's to another year!

POST SCRIPT: Book signing and talk

I will be giving a talk and having a book signing on God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom at the Joseph-Beth book store in Legacy Village in Beachwood, Ohio at 7:00 pm tomorrow (Wednesday, January 27, 2010).

I would enjoy meeting any readers of this blog who can make it.

December 25, 2009

Reason's Greetings!

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.

Because of the holidays and travel overseas where internet access will be sporadic, I am taking some time off from writing new posts and instead reposting some of my favorites (often edited and updated) for the benefit of those who missed them the first time around or have forgotten them. New posts will start again on Monday, January 18, 2009.)

Baxter and I would like to wish all the readers of this blog our best wishes for the season. May all of you find peace and happiness.

We live in a world divided by conflicts based on religion, ethnicity, and nationality. But all these divisions are of human creation that merely serve to set groups of people up against each other by encouraging appeals to tribal loyalties. They have at best merely superficial meaning, and all came into being within the last four thousand years or so, a mere instant in the vastness of time that life and the universe have existed.

Contrast the divisiveness of religion, ethnicity, and nationality with the unifying effects of science in general and evolution in particular. If everyone were to accept the truth of evolution, that each one of is connected to every other living organism that lives now and has ever lived by the Darwinian tree of life, perhaps we can overcome tribal feelings and move towards a truly just and peaceful world.

We are fortunate that we are alive to experience life in its gloriousness. We should strive to enable everyone to experience that life to its fullest, free from want, and with the basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, education, and medical needs met. We can do that it we do not waste so much time and energy and resources on parochial interests at the expense of the general good.

So let's spread that message.

November 26, 2009

Thanksgiving musings

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

(I am taking the day off for the holiday and reposting an item from Thanksgiving of last year. I would like to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving holiday.)

For an immigrant like me, the Thanksgiving holiday took a long time to warm up to. It seems to be like baseball or cricket or peanut butter, belonging to that class of things that one has to get adjusted to at an early age in order to really enjoy. For people who were born and grew up here, Thanksgiving is one of those holidays whose special significance one gets to appreciate as part of learning the traditions and history and culture of this country. As someone who came to the US as an adult and did not have all the fond memories associated with the childhood experience of visiting my grandparents' homes for this occasion for a big family reunion, this holiday initially left me unmoved.

But over time, I have warmed to the holiday and it now seems to me to be the best holiday of all, for reasons that have little to do with its historical roots.

The first thanksgiving was supposedly held in 1621, sometime between September 21 and November 11, as a secular feast by the newly arrived pilgrims and was based on British harvest festivals. But this feast wasn't repeated and so cannot be considered the basis of the tradition. The modern thanksgiving tradition began with Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in an effort to unite a nation divided by the Civil War, declaring the last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day.

Commercial considerations have also been a part of the holidays with merchants being influential in setting the date. They want it close enough to Christmas so that people associate the holiday as a kick off for the shopping orgy, but not too close or people won't have a lot of time to shop. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to change Thanksgiving Day to the third Thursday in November so as to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, but that was rejected by Congress and the compromise date of the fourth Thursday in November was approved in 1941 and that has been the date since.

I personally would like to see Thanksgiving shifted a month earlier to the last Thursday or so in October (like it is in Canada), not to lengthen the shopping season, but because there is a long drought of holidays between Labor Day and Christmas, and this would fall nicely in the middle. The weather would also be better for traveling, and it would coincide nicely with a mid-term break for college students.

I mainly like the fact that the holiday has (still) managed to avoid being commercialized and merchandized to death. There are no gifts and cards associated with it. There are no ritualized ceremonies, religious or otherwise, that one has to attend. There are no decorations or dressing up. Although the holiday's roots lie in giving thanks to god at the end of the harvest season for bounties received, that thin veneer of religiosity can be easily discarded and it is now essentially a secular holiday so no one need feel excluded. The thanks that are offered are just for the good fortune of being with family and friends, and not overtly religious. Our family has traditionally celebrated it with friends, all of whom have different religious heritages but are now secular. No prayers are said. We are just thankful for the opportunity to be together.

Thanksgiving is just a time to get together with family and friends around that universal gesture of friendship, sharing food. And even the traditional menu of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, yams, cranberry sauce, and pies, is such that it is not too expensive, so most people can afford to have the standard meal for a large number of people without going into debt. And although there is much talk of anticipated gluttony, in practice this also seems like just a ritualized and familiar joke, and most people seem to eat well but not in excess. There is also no tradition of drinking too much and rowdiness.

Thanksgiving seems to symbolize a kind of quiet socializing that is a throwback to a simpler, less crass and commercial time. It remains mostly an opportunity to spend a day with those whom one is close to, sharing food, playing games, and basking in the warmth of good fellowship. How can one not like such a holiday?

The only catch with Thanksgiving is that it is immediately followed by the horror show known as the "Christmas shopping season" which involves a disgusting orgy of consumption and waste, with merchandisers and the government urging people to buy things they do not need for people who may not want them.

I sincerely hope that Thanksgiving does not also become corrupted by merchandizing the way that Christmas has. But in our the present spend-spend-spend, buy-buy-buy culture you can be sure that retailers are eyeing that holiday too and it will require great vigilance to prevent it from sliding down that particular slope.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

POST SCRIPT: When evil supervillains meet building safety codes

From That Mitchell and Webb Look.

July 03, 2009

On the pursuit of happiness

On this day before independence day, I am posting again a reflection from two years ago on what to me is one of the most intriguing phrases in the US Declaration of Independence. It is contained in the famous sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I have always found the insertion of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" as a fundamental right to be appealing. One does not expect to see such a quaint sentiment in a political document, and its inclusion sheds an interesting and positive light on the minds and aspirations of the people who created that document.

But the problem has always been with how happiness is attained. And in one serious respect, the suggestion that we should actively seek happiness, while laudable, may also be misguided. Happiness is not something to be pursued. People who pursue happiness as a goal are unlikely to find it. Happiness is what happens when you are pursuing other worthwhile goals. The philosopher Robert Ingersoll also valued happiness but had a better sense about what it would take to achieve it, saying "Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so."

Kurt Vonnegut in his last book A Man Without a Country suggests that the real problem is not that we are rarely happy but that we don't realize when we are happy, and that we should get in the habit of noticing those moments and stop and savor them. He wrote:

I apologize to all of you who are the same age as my grandchildren. And many of you reading this are probably the same age as my grandchildren. They, like you, are being royally shafted and lied to by our Baby Boomer corporations and government.

Yes, this planet is in a terrible mess. But it has always been a mess. There have never been any "Good Old Days," there have just been days. And as I say to my grandchildren, "Don't look at me, I just got here."

There are old poops who will say that you do not become a grown-up until you have somehow survived, as they have, some famous calamity -- the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, whatever. Storytellers are responsible for this destructive, not to say suicidal, myth. Again and again in stories, after some terrible mess, the character is able to say at last, "Today I am a woman. Today I am a man. The end."

When I got home from the Second World War, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, "You're a man now." So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.

Dan, that was my bad uncle, who said a man can't be a man unless he'd gone to war.

But I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Good advice.

POST SCRIPT: Mark Sanford: The Movie

Here's the trailer.

June 23, 2009

Reflections on Hong Kong

Last month I had the privilege of visiting Hong Kong for the first time to do some consulting work. The universities there are shifting from the British model of a narrowly focused three-year degree to the American model of a four-year degree, with broader educational goals and more general education courses, and they had invited me because of my familiarity with implementing such changes.

Arriving there, it was clear that they were taking the swine flu very seriously. All of us on the plane were given flu kits consisting of a mask and a thermometer, and most employees at the airport and in restaurants wore masks, though only a few ordinary people did. A week before my arrival an entire hotel had been quarantined for a week when one of their guests had tested positive for swine flu, and so I was nervous even to sneeze at the airport in case I was whisked off to isolation.

One thing that impressed me was the public transport. It seemed like everyone used it. There was a constant stream of double-decker buses on the street and the seats in them were like those in long-distance trains, high-backed, cushioned, comfortable, and in groups of four arranged to face each other. People waiting for the buses would spontaneously queue up and enter in an orderly fashion. There were also plenty of taxis. Everyone I spoke to at the university (with one exception) said they used public transport to get to work, and did not own a car. In fact, over 90% of daily trips are done on public transport, the highest rate in the world. Hong Kong is perfect for this, of course. The population of over 7 million occupies just about 400 square miles, making it one of the densest populations in the world. Also, there is very little street parking, and residents told me that the cost of parking is very high, further discouraging private car use.

Given the density of the population, the streets were remarkably clean. The traffic was orderly though drivers tended to go fast which meant that one should only cross busy streets at the designated crossings. At some large and busy intersections they did have pedestrian overpasses and they encouraged use of these by having up escalators from the sidewalk.

The main areas of Hong Kong are full of high rises, though the road from the airport passes through surprisingly remote-looking areas, with steep hilly sides by the road reminding me of driving on the highway through rural Pennsylvania, though with different vegetation. In fact, I was surprised at how hilly and uninhabitable most of it was, which is why everyone is crammed into the rest of the areas.

Although my visit was short, it was very pleasant. The people were hospitable and friendly. My hotel (Ramada) was not luxurious but the room, though smaller and with lower ceilings than a corresponding American hotel, was well-equipped. I particularly appreciated the slippers that were provided for guests. A nice energy saving feature was that you had to insert your room key card into a unit to get the electricity turned on in your room, which meant that all the lights and appliances automatically turned off when you left.

The legendary efficiency was on display. The bedside light did not work and when I told the maid, she first tried to fix it herself and when she couldn't, she called someone on her cell phone and within an hour a technician came and replaced the unit. And this was on a Sunday morning.

I managed to visit the Hong Kong museum which was excellent. They traced the history of the region from 400 million years ago to the present, starting with the formation of the island from volcanic eruptions. The whole exhibit seemed to be done on the basis of strict science and there seemed to be no accommodation of absurd religious ideas such as that the Earth is just 6,000 years old or that humans were special creations. There were no caveats or suggestions that the geological and evolutionary history they were presenting were 'just theories', which was refreshing.

In going through the Hong Kong museum, I discovered something about myself based on how much time I spent in the various rooms. I really like ancient geological and biological history, showing developments over the long time scale evolution of the world. And I also like modern political history, events that occurred within the last 200 years. What I find boring is the part in between, after humans appeared. I tend to skip over all the stuff about early human life with the development of pots and tools and agriculture.

POST SCRIPT: Jokes are serious things

As most people know, David Letterman made a tasteless joke about Sarah Palin's daughter. There has since been a concerted attempt to blow this up into a huge issue. A demonstration called to protest his show was held in front of his studio. But what the protestors lacked in numbers (CNN said that only about fifteen people showed up, vastly outnumbered by the media), they made up by being even more tasteless.

Watch this video of the protestors (thanks to Wonkette).

Sam Seder was also at the protest and had some fun with them.

I wonder about such people. Do they realize how silly such over the top rhetoric sounds?

The inimitable Tbogg weighs in.

June 03, 2009

Okie from Muskogee and Hardware Wars

In 1969 country and western singer Merle Haggard released a song called Okie from Muskogee which was a huge hit. Part of its appeal was the ambiguity of its lyrics. Released at the height of the Vietnam war protests with the country deeply divided, widespread campus unrest, and protests in the streets, some saw the song as a repudiation of the hippie, drug using, counterculture movement and an upholding of so-called traditional values, while others saw it as poking fun (in a sly, tongue-in-cheek way) of narrow minded, small town, flag-waving patriotism.

As an example of the song's ambiguity, the term 'white lightning' can be taken at face value but is also a euphemism for illegal home-brewed moonshine liquor, popular in some rural areas. So is Haggard praising the simple values of small town life or taking a dig at how people there really get their kicks?

Even after all these years, I still cannot decide which characterization of the song is true, which is a sign that Haggard is a clever songwriter. Whatever its politics, it is still a great song. You can see it performed here and judge for yourself.

Part of my reason for showing the clip is its tenuous connection with what I originally planned this post about. When the first Star Wars film came out in 1977, it caused a sensation. That same year at another film I saw a short parody called Hardware Wars, that was constructed as a mock trailer of the original film, a deliberately cheesy, low-budget production that used ordinary household appliances in place of futuristic technology.

I am not sure if current viewers will find Hardware Wars as funny as the audience in the theater did when we first saw it and hooted with laughter, since some of the allusions are dated, and people may not remember the details of the original film either. For example, to fully appreciate the parody of the famous bar scene with its weird assortment of aliens, you have to recall that scene as well as know the first line of the chorus of Okie from Muskogee ("I am just an Okie from Muskogee/A place where even squares can have a ball."), which was still hugely popular.

Anyway, here it is:

Part 1:

Part 2:

POST SCRIPT: Yet more parody

Kinky Friedman sings his own version of Haggard's song.

May 25, 2009

Language and Evolution

(Due to the Memorial Day holiday, I am reposting an old item.)

I have always been fascinated by language. This is somewhat ironic since I have a really hard time learning a new language and almost did not make it into college in Sri Lanka because of extreme difficulty in passing the 10th-grade language requirement in my own mother tongue of Tamil! (How that happened is a long and not very interesting story.)

But language fascinates me. How words are used, their origins, how sentences are structured, are all things that I enjoy thinking and reading about. I like playing with words, and enjoy puns, cryptic crosswords, and other forms of wordplay.

All this background is to explain why I recommend an excellent book The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, who used to be a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley but is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. In the book he discusses the complexity of language and points out that the evolution of language is very similar to that of biological life. He suggests that there was originally just one spoken, very primitive, language and as the people who spoke it fanned out across the globe, the various languages evolved as separated communities formed. And in the process the languages became more complex and sophisticated, and evolved intricate features in their vocabulary and grammar that now seem to have little functional purpose, in a manner very analogous to biological systems.

The precise origin of spoken language is hard to pin down. McWhorter argues that it probably arose with the evolution of the ability to form complex sounds and roughly synchronous with the arrival of homo sapiens about 150,000 years ago. Others have suggested a more recent date for the origins of language, about 12,000-15,000 years ago, but pinning this date down precisely is next to impossible given that spoken language leaves no traces. What we do know is that written language began about 5,000 years ago

McWhorter points out that purely spoken languages evolve and change very rapidly, resulting in an extremely rapid proliferation of language leaving us with the 6,000 or so languages that we have now. It was the origin of writing, and more importantly mass printing, that slowed down the evolution of language since now the fixed words on paper acted as a brake on further changes.

He also makes an important point that the distinction between standard and dialect forms of languages have no hierarchical value and is also a post-printing phenomenon. In other words, when we hear people (say) in rural Appalachia or in the poorer sectors of inner cities speak in an English that is different from that spoken by middle class, college-educated people, it is not the case that they are speaking a debased form of 'correct' or 'standard' English. He argues that dialects are all there is or ever was, because language was always mainly a local phenomenon. There are no good or bad dialects, there are just dialects.

We can, if we wish, bundle together a set of dialects that share a lot in common and call it a language (like English or French or Swahili) but no single strand in the bundle can justifiably lay any intrinsic claim to be the standard. What we identify as standard language arose due to factors such as politics and power. Standard English now is that dialect which was spoken in the politically influential areas near London. Since that area was then the hub of printing and copying, that version of language appeared in the written form more often than other forms and somewhere in the 1400s became seen as the standard. The same thing happened with standard French, which happened to be the dialect spoken in the Paris areas.

McWhorter points out that, like biological organisms, languages can and do go extinct in that people stop speaking them and they disappear or, in some cases like Latin, only appear in fossilized form. In fact, most of the world's languages that existed have already gone extinct, as is the case with biological species. He says that rapid globalization is making many languages disappear even more rapidly because as people become bi-lingual or multi-lingual, and as a few languages emerge as the preferred language of commerce, there is less chance of children learning the less-privileged language as their native tongue. This loss in the transmission of language to children as their primary language is the first stage leading to eventual extinction. He points out that currently 96 percent of the world's population speaks at least one of just twenty languages, in addition to their indigenous language. These languages are Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portugese, Japanese, German, French, Punjabi, Javanese, Bihari, Italian, Korean, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, and Vietnamese and thus these are the languages most likely to survive extinction. It is noteworthy that the population of India is so large and diverse that seven of these languages originated there, and two others (English and Arabic) are also used extensively in that country.

He also points out that languages are never 'pure' and that this situation is the norm. Languages cross-fertilize with other languages to form language stews, so that language chauvinists who try to preserve some pure and original form of their language are engaged in a futile task. For example, of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, more than 99 percent were originally obtained from other languages. However, the remaining few that originated in Old English, such as and, but, father, love, fight, to, will, should, not, from turn out to be 62 percent of the words that are used most.

McWhorter is a very good writer, able to really bring the subject to life by drawing on everyday matters and popular culture. He has a breezy and humorous style and provides lots of very interesting bits of trivia that, while amusing, are also very instructive of the points he wishes to make. Regarding the ability of language to change and evolve new words, for example, he explains how the word 'nickname' came about. It started out as an 'ekename' because in old English, the word 'eke' meant also, so that an 'ekename' meant an 'also name' which makes sense. Over time, though, 'an ekename' changed to 'a nekename' and eventually to 'a nickname.' He gives many interesting examples of this sort.

Those who know more than one language well will likely appreciate his book even more than me. It is a book that is great fun to read and I can strongly recommend to anyone who loves words and language.

POST SCRIPT: Rhythm of Life

I didn't care much for the musical Sweet Charity but there was one song by Sammy Davis, Jr. that was terrific.

That song was used in a great advertisement for Guinness Beer that linked it to evolution.

May 05, 2009

Spam comments dilemma

My policy with comments to the blog is to leave them unmoderated. So anyone can post any comment any time without getting prior approval from me. My feeling is that people have a right to express their opinion. So even though there seem to be some people who scan the web to find anything even remotely related to their pet topic and then post very long screeds about their pet theory that has only marginal relevance to my post, I have let those comments stand, not wanting to be in the position of censor.

But one problem with such an open-door policy is that it allows for spam comments to fill up the comments section. One of the curses of the internet is the amount of spam that goes around. Every day my mailbox contains a large amount of it that I have to delete but with the blog has come a new form of spam, in the form of comments that are generated by so-called spambots, automated devices that crawl around the web being a nuisance. The purposes of these are to either advertise a product (often sex-related) or to post hyperlinks that will boost the search engine ranking of a particular site.

Most of these comments are obviously spam, some consisting of random phrases or gibberish or even the alphabets of other languages, others fulsomely praising my entries with repetitive phrases, such as "Cool site", "I love this site!", "This site is cool/crazy", "I just discovered this terrific site and will bookmark it", "Nice design", and "I'm happy. Very good site."

Some reassure me that things are going well for them, saying things like "I'm fine" while others try to keep me up with popular trends by saying "Punk not dead."

Since the point of the blog is to generate meaningful conversation, I have to take steps to prevent the comments section from being filled with spam and discouraging genuine posts. The server that hosts my blog has some features built in that detects and prevents spambots from posting most of their comments. But some still sneak through and I have to go through all the comments a couple of times every day to eliminate those. If a comment looks robotic and has no relevance to the post, I delete it. I also use the opportunity to rescue and publish some genuine comments that the filter has wrongly eliminated

But spambots are getting cleverer. Sometimes I find comments that seem as though they are written by a real human because they are sort of relevant to the post, but yet seem vaguely familiar or slightly off. On closer investigation, I find that it is because the spambot has taken part of the text of a genuine comment by a real user, or even my own words in the post, and inserted them as its own comment, in order to get past the filter. I delete those comments too.

More recently, though I have encountered an even more difficult situation. This is where there is a brief comment that seems to be written by a genuine person, but which seems to be advertising a product. The comment feature has a space where people can insert their url and I have no problem with genuine commenters using that to link to their own website, even if that website is a commercial one.

But what is happening is that companies are apparently paying real people to visit blogs that have vaguely relevant posts and post comments that are mainly meant as advertisements. One of my posts has been especially hit by this phenomenon, generating 35 comments, most of which appeared to me to be of doubtful origin. Take a look.

This is apparently part of a trend called viral marketing where companies are using real people to create fake grass roots buzz about something, because it turns out that studies suggest that people trust word of mouth information, even from people they don't know, more than they do official sources and vastly more so than commercial advertising. So you may find 'friendly' people you meet in a bar or a coffee shop (they are called 'leaners' in the trade) talking about how great some product is, and you do not realize that they have been paid to go around doing this.

Andy Sernowitz, author of Word of Mouth Marketing, talks to On the Media host Bob Garfield about how this phenomenon is now being used on the internet.

ANDY SERNOVITZ: There's two big ways that people try to sneak past you: either they lie about who they are, so you think you're reading an honest comment on a blog and it's actually a marketer in disguise with 20 different logins, or they're paying other people to recommend something on their blogs or email or Facebook and not telling you that those people have been paid.

You usually see it most from either sort of low-end, sleazy, like, health remedies and get-rich-quick schemes and that end, or you see it from entertainment companies, from folks who are out there to hype a song or a movie.

BOB GARFIELD: Some of this is called pay-per-post, right – bloggers getting X number of cents for every time they post a favorable appraisal of a new song or something?

ANDY SERNOVITZ: Yeah, you see a couple of big operations. One company's actually called PayPerPost, and it pays you to write blog posts about stuff. There's a new one called Magpie that pays you to send stuff out over your Twitter account under your name.

And where it gets more interesting is the way things get repeated in social media. And this is what concerns me more, is that a company might pay through this pay-per-post service to get 200 people to blog something about them. And it says this was a paid placement in the blog post, so technically that's okay. They did say it was paid for.

But then those blog posts get repeated on their Facebook page and then on Twitter, and then someone else copies it, and suddenly 10 times more posts have the exact same paid review. Well, we've lost the disclosure that made it honest. I mean, really, the big idea here is this word "disclosure." And what it says is, it's okay to pay for coverage. That's called advertising. But you have to say, and now a word from our sponsors.

So what should I do when I suspect that a comment is being posted by a real person but for commercial reasons rather than for having a genuine conversation with other readers or with me? Should I delete them or give them the benefit of the doubt?

I am leaning towards this policy: If I suspect that a comment is either spam or being posted purely for the sake of advertising something, I will delete it unless the comment contains some redeeming features, such as advancing the discussion or providing relevant information.

What do you think?

POST SCRIPT: Corruption in medicine

The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine is published by Elsevier, an outfit that publishes many leading journals. It is sent to many doctors. But the magazine The Scientist just revealed that this "journal" is not a real, peer-reviewed journal publishing original articles. Instead it is funded purely by the drug company Merck and contains reprinted or summarized articles favorable to Merck products.

George Jelinek, an Australian physician and long-time member of the World Association of Medical Editors, reviewed four issues of the journal that were published from 2003-2004. An "average reader" (presumably a doctor) could easily mistake the publication for a "genuine" peer reviewed medical journal, he said in his testimony. "Only close inspection of the journals, along with knowledge of medical journals and publishing conventions, enabled me to determine that the Journal was not, in fact, a peer reviewed medical journal, but instead a marketing publication for MSD[A]."

He also stated that four of the 21 articles featured in the first issue he reviewed referred to Fosamax. In the second issue, nine of the 29 articles related to Vioxx, and another 12 to Fosamax. All of these articles presented positive conclusions regarding the MSDA drugs. "I can understand why a pharmaceutical company would collect a number of research papers with results favourable to their products and make these available to doctors," Jelinek said at the trial. "This is straightforward marketing."

If there is one area of science where fraud and corruption will threaten to discredit the whole enterprise, it is medicine, because of the money and influence of the drug industry.

April 06, 2009

God save us from the Queen

One of the things about America that most endeared it to me when I first arrived for graduate studies was the lack of stuffiness in personal and business relationships. There was an easy informality, casual yet respectful, friendly yet polite, that I liked and found easy to get used to. I put this down to the American revolution, that decided that along with getting rid of direct rule by the English king, they also decided to get rid of all the pomp that went along with the English court. It seemed to reflect a sturdy democratic and republican (small 'd' and small 'r') spirit.

So it always surprises and amuses me that whenever the US president goes to England and meets with the Queen, the media of the very country that inspired the rest of the world to overthrow colonial and monarchial rule, gets into all of a doo-dah at the alarming prospect that the president or his wife will commit some awful faux pas that will embarrass the country because it will reveal to the world that Americans are ignorant hicks who should not be allowed into polite society.

We are not talking about things like the president picking his nose at the dinner table or chewing tobacco and spitting on the carpet. We can take as a given that such things are generally understood to be not done. We are not even talking about making mistakes of esoteric etiquette at formal dinner parties, like which fork to use for what or what one should do with one's napkin after one is done or what one should drink at any given stage of the meal. Although these latter issues are trivial and I do not understand why anyone even cares about them, I am talking about the even more arcane rules of etiquette that involve just the Queen. Apparently one should never turn one's back on her, not touch her, not speak to her until she speaks to you, and so on. If you do any of these things, the journalists covering the event suddenly get transformed into a bunch of Victorian ladies either getting the vapors and reaching for their smelling salts or raising their eyebrows and peering disapprovingly through their lorgnettes with a lot of harrumphing and tut-tutting, saying, "This is perfectly frightful. This will never do."

The hot topic this time is whether Michelle Obama should have touched the Queen and whether their gift of an iPod was appropriate. There was little discussion about the fact that the Queen gave them in return a signed photograph of herself and her husband, which struck me as quite odd. If an American president had done that, the press corps might have collapsed with apoplectic embarrassment.

But the real question is: Why the hell should anyone care about any of this? Why should anyone else be bothered by the possibility that the Queen will be offended by the violation of some private rule of etiquette? Just suck it up, Queenie baby!

These absurd rules were imposed by the kings and queens of yore because they wanted people to be afraid of them and to grovel before them. The way you keep people off-balance and apprehensive is by making them not know whether they are transgressing a rule or not. And the monarchs of those days had the power to create and enforce rules arbitrarily. Breaking any of the rules could result in them ordering the offender's head to be cut off and placed on a spike for public view. That's how "civilized" the British royalty were. And yet we admire them?

The Queen may be a nice old lady but the respect she deserves is the same as what one should give any other nice old lady, such as the grandmotherly types of one's acquaintance or the cashiers at the supermarket, no more and no less. All this bowing and scraping is unseemly. Who knows, maybe the royal family makes up weirder and weirder rules just to see how far they can make gullible Americans tie themselves up in knots, and then secretly laugh uproariously at their expense afterwards.

Furthermore the British monarchy is a totally parasitic institution, living off inherited wealth that was taken by force from the people, and it should be abolished rather than pandered to. To abide by these arcane rules and not to ignore them or treat them with contempt is to endorse some of the worst legacies of feudalism.

In the unlikely event that I receive an invitation to Buckingham Palace and decide to go, I will not say upon meeting her "Yo, Lizzie, what's shakin?" but I am definitely not going to bow to her or follow any of the rules that somebody decided long ago was the proper way to behave in her presence. I will treat her like I would treat any elderly lady of my acquaintance. I will stand when she enters, offer to shake her hand, and make appropriate small talk. That's it.

The British have been warned.

POST SCRIPT: John Oliver explains why one should not touch the Queen

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Poisonous Queen
comedycentral.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

March 30, 2009

Road rants

It is time for another edition of Road Rants where, after going on a road trip where I have time to think of these things, I note the driving practices I see that annoy me and make suggestions for improvement. The previous rants were here, here, and here.

Turning on lights

On the highway several times I came across a sign saying that there was construction ahead and to turn on the headlights. In each case there were about six or seven cars ahead of me, not one of whom bothered to turn on their lights. On the other hand, when there was a sign saying that we were about to enter a tunnel and to turn on the lights, everyone people did so. Though some only after entering the tunnel

Why is this? I suspect that most people do not realize that turning on the lights serves two purposes. It helps you see better but it also helps others see you better. Most people only think about the first. As long as they can see without turning on their lights (which is the case in daytime), they see no point in turning on their lights. It does not occur to them that it helps the construction workers on the road see cars earlier and better and take evasive action if necessary.

This reluctance to turn on headlights is annoying and dangerous when driving in heavy rain or snow where the visibility is poor. Turning on your headlights doesn't enable you to see further, so some drivers don't turn them on, not realizing that by keeping them off, they become largely invisible to others on the road. Very often you will find cars suddenly emerge from the gloom without warning because they did not have their lights on. I wish Ohio would enact and enforce a law that some states have that says that when your wipers are on, your lights must also be on.

Hogging the passing lane

Another practice that puzzles me is that of those drivers who get onto the passing lane of the highway and stay there. Apart from the fact that it is against the law, what are they thinking? People who do that in moderate levels of traffic can block traffic behind them for quite a distance. Surely they must notice that other drivers drop back into the slow lane after passing? Surely they must wonder why they do that? Or are they so oblivious to others that they think that as long as they are going close to the speed limit, it does not matter which lane they are in? I used to think that the people who did this were the stereotypical old geezers but on my last trip I noticed that the culprits were middle-aged and even young drivers.

Cameras

Recently cities and states have been increasing the use of cameras to detect people who go through red lights or speed in built up areas or construction zones. This has generated a remarkable level of angry opposition with citizen petitions seeking to outlaw the practice.

I am a little puzzled by this reaction. While I am usually concerned by invasions of privacy, this does not seem to me to be such a violation. It seeks to deter dangerous driving practices and nab those who do so without the wastefulness of having police idling for hours in hidden spots, when they could be doing far more useful things like preventing and solving more serious crimes. So what is the problem with these cameras? Do people want the freedom to drive dangerously? It is true that some communities are using these devices as a means for increasing revenue but that does not seem to me to be a disqualifying factor.

Highway merging (again!)

Some time ago, I suggested that when the number of lanes is reduced on a highway (which usually creates a bottleneck), that it was most efficient if traffic in both lanes went up to the merge point, the so-called 'late merge' policy, rather than merging much earlier which is what traffic etiquette seems to require.

In response to other points of view, I modified that stance to say that perhaps the most efficient way to merge was if both lanes could maintain speed while doing so, which suggested an 'early merge' policy, before traffic congestion built up enough to prevent merging while maintaining speed.

It now turns out (thanks to a subsequent comment on the first post by Chandra, who is both a traffic engineer and an old school friend of mine who stumbled on my post while doing some research on this topic) that a study finds that during congested times, the late merge is best after all, while at other times the regular merge rules should be followed.

A new book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt cites other research that supports the late merging policy.

Among Vanderbilt's findings is the discovery that "late merging" may actually cause traffic to move more quickly, contrary to popular belief. When a sign warns that the lane will end in a given distance, standard driving etiquette causes many to move over as promptly as possible. However, if everyone were to merge at a single point when the lane ends, the road would get maximal usage and lane changes would become more orderly. The result would be traffic that moves 15% faster than current behavior allows.

"If people were told exactly to not leave the lane that was closing until the very point it actually did close, and then we did a nice alternating merge — it would be faster," says Vanderbilt. "Another benefit would be the queue of vehicles stretching back from the construction site would be smaller."

More traffic circles please!

Vanderbilt's book also supports my feeling, based on my driving experience in Australia and New Zealand where traffic circles (or 'roundabouts') are ubiquitous, that we should have more traffic circles here.

Vanderbilt also argues that round-abouts may be safer than traditional stoplight intersections. Though traffic circles may seem confusing, they have fewer "conflict points," places where cars can physically hit an object or person. Intersections have 32 of these conflict points, where round-abouts only have 16. The round-about is particularly safe because it completely eliminates the left-turn, one of the most dangerous driving maneuvers.

POST SCRIPT: Common food myths

Following up on my recent series on food, I was sent this interesting article on common food myths (Thanks to Ashali).

March 26, 2009

The Nigerian 419 scam goes meta

Is there anyone by now who has not heard of the 'Nigerian 419' scam or been approached by the people behind it? Hardly a week goes by that I do not receive several of these things in my email (sometimes several in one day). Word must have spread in the confidence trickster world that I look like a real sucker because I used to get these solicitations long before they became well-known as a fraud. Even before the internet I used to regularly get actual letters. But despite their notoriety, even now it appears that there are still people falling for it. In the US alone, it is estimated that about $200 million is conned per year.

The fraud starts with the arrival of a letter or email from someone in another country saying that a vast some of money, running to many millions of dollars, has come into their hands and they are seeking ways to get it out of the country. They have heard that you are a trustworthy, responsible, and discreet person and if you are willing to have your bank account used as a conduit, then you get to keep a third or so of the total.

The letter preys on the greed or desperation of people. It usually is purported to come from an official in a bank or government who has stumbled upon a dormant bank account of a diseased rich person with no heirs, or it is the secret stash of a dead or deposed ruler of a country. Sometimes it comes from a lawyer (these letter writers are seem to think that British lawyers have credibility) who says that he is acting on behalf of a client. Sometimes it comes from the widow or other relative of a former ruler who is now being persecuted by the current regime and is in hiding or in a refugee camp but knows where the money is secretly hidden. Sometimes you are told that you are the winner of a lottery. Sometimes it is from a dying wealthy, religious person, who wants their money to be spent in the service of the poor after they are dead and they have heard that you are a religious person who does good works and they want to support your work.

These letters are an art form in themselves. Douglas Cruickshank writes of the:

almost poetic sweetness (swaddled in lavishly stilted prose excavated from an 18th century protocol handbook) in how the letters begin. "It is with a heart full of hope ..." reads one. "Compliments of the season. Grace and peace and love from this part of the Atlantic to you" is how another starts. "Goodday to you, I would here crave your distinguished indulgence" begins a third." And still another opens, "It is with my profound dignity that I write you."

My favorite is perhaps this one (the phrasing is less lyrical than the others, but its deep sense of purpose and utmost sincerity can't be matched):

It is with deep sense of purpose and utmost sincerity that I write this letter to you knowing full well how you will feel as regards to receiving a mail from somebody you have not met or seen before. There is no need to fear, I got your address from a business directory which lends credence to my humble belief. I also assure you of my honesty and trustworthiness.

You've no sooner started to read one of these slyly poignant pleas before you're bathing in the warmth of the author's lofty intentions, a soothing hot tub bubbling over with reassurance, honesty and trustworthiness.

Whatever the story, you are asked to furnish information, including your bank account number so that the money can be transferred to you. What happens next varies. In the simplest case, they find some way to empty the sucker's account of whatever money it has. They are the lucky ones.

In other cases, when they hook a sucker, they then say that a minor glitch has occurred and that they need some small amount of money to pay some fees or bribe an official. Once you send the money, you are hooked and you get requests for a little more money to solve another minor problem, etc. all of which are hard to resist, since you have already invested some money. It has sometimes got so bad that people have even traveled to the country to help facilitate the release of the money they've been promised and only then discovered that they've been had.

There have been people who have had fun reversing the scam. Here is one hilarious story of one such counterscam, though it is better not to have anything to do with the scammers because they are criminals, and just ignore the emails altogether.

Perhaps because the original forms of the scam are now so well known, I recently received a more sophisticated meta-version that exploits the very fact that the original appeals are largely known to be frauds. Here is the email I got last week:

Dearest One,

I am Susan Walter, I am a US citizen, 39years. But I reside and work here in the States, and my home town in the States is Texas. My residential address is as follows. [Street address provided].

I am one of those that executed a contract in Nigeria years ago and they refused to pay me, I had paid over $70,000 trying to get my payment all to no avail. So I decided to travel down to Nigeria with all my contract documents.

And I was directed to meet with Barr Mat Oto, who is the member of CONTRACT AWARD COMMITTEE, and I contacted him and he explained everything to me. He said that those contacting us through emails are fake. Then he took me to the paying bank, which is Oceanic Bank Int., and I am the happiest woman on this earth because I have received my contract funds of 4.2Million USD.

Moreover, Barr Mat Oto showed me the full information of those that have not received their payment; and I saw your contact. This is what you have to do now. You have to contact him direct on this information below;

Name: Barr Mat Oto [Email, phone, and street addresses provided]

You really have to stop your dealing with those contacting you, because they will dry you up until you have nothing to eat. The only money I paid was just $1,200 for IRS, which you know. So you have to take note of that.

Thanks.

Mrs. Susan Walter.

It is really sweet of the now-very-rich Susan Walter to take the trouble to track me down and let me know that I too am the genuine recipient of millions of dollars and to warn me away from all the swindlers out there and point me to the one genuine individual. Unfortunately, what with one thing and another, I am a little busy now and don't know that I can spare the time to contact Mr. Oto myself.

So here's my offer. I am willing to share my good fortune with someone who is willing to do all the work to get me my money. I have heard that the readers of this blog are trustworthy, responsible, and discreet persons. If any of you are interested, please tell Mr. Oto that you are my authorized agent and once I get my millions of dollars, I will wire you one third of it. Just give me your bank account number, ok?

March 04, 2009

Paul Newman, 1925-2008

I want to pay a long overdue tribute to Paul Newman, who was one of the truly great actors of our time. Although his good looks and acting talent alone could have secured his place purely as a romantic leading man, what made him special was the roles he chose, taking people who were flawed in some way, people whose moral compass did not quite point true north, and making them sympathetic.

He also did not seem full of himself, shying away from the celebrity culture that films spawn. Despite his success and fame, he did not seem (at least publicly) to suffer from excessive ego and was self-deprecating, always a good trait to have. He delighted in telling the story of how he once spoke to a group of school children and one of them raised his hand and said, "So what did you do before you went into the salad dressing business?"

Paul Newman's films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting have given me hours of pleasure.

I cannot really pick a top favorite but surely Cool Hand Luke, which inserted into popular culture the line "What we got here is a failure to communicate", must rank high on anyone's list.

Here are two other back-to-back scenes from that film, featuring that other great character actor George Kennedy.

Although Newman's politics was progressive (he was very proud of making it into Richard Nixon's 'enemies list'), his films were not overtly political. But that did not mean that they did not have political meaning, since they often dealt with an individual fighting the odds, finding deep reservoirs of inner strength, and not giving up.

Newman aged gracefully. As one observer put it, he did not seem to get older, just purer. Here is a scene from a later 1982 film The Verdict that is apropos for today's political climate.

Paul Newman grew up in the suburb of Cleveland called Shaker Heights where I now live and went to the same high school as that my daughters attended. That is the full extent of my links to him but his death brings with it the kind of sadness that follows the loss of an old and good friend.

I spent some wonderful times with him.

POST SCRIPT: Spotting a hidden religious agenda

In this 28 February 2009 New Scientist article, Amanda Gefter lists the cues by which you can identify people who are pursuing a religious agenda while seeming to talk about science.

February 02, 2009

Relative and absolute loss

Change is difficult to deal with, especially if it is a change for the worse in one's financial status. Losing one's job and being forced to accept a lower paying one or having to lower one's lifestyle is not easy to accept, irrespective of what one's initial and final level of living was.

In the wake of the Bernie Madoff fraud, we hear of many people saying that they are 'financially ruined', that they have 'lost everything'. When looked at closely, though, some of those descriptions seem to be based on a relative rather than an absolute scale.

For example, take this article by someone named Alexandra Penney who was a Madoff victim and was so traumatized by the prospect of her loss that she did not leave her apartment for days. But when you read her piece, you realize that she lives in a nice New York apartment, has another studio for her work, a cottage in Florida, and employs a maid who comes in three times a week to, among other things, iron her 40 'classic white shirts' because she likes to wear a clean new one every day. Every year Penney travels to many exotic countries.

Penney will now have to give up some of these things, and she is so traumatized that she thinks of suicide.

I’ve lived a great and interesting life. I love beautiful things: high thread count sheets, old china, watches, jewelry, Hermes purses, and Louboutin shoes. I like expensive French milled soap, good wines, and white truffles. I have given extravagant gifts like diamond earrings. I traveled a lot. In this last year, I've been Laos, Cambodia, India, Russia, and Berlin for my first solo art show. Will I ever be able to explore exotic places again?

The article reeks with self-pity and in doing so betrays a certain lack of awareness and sensitivity of how it might be perceived by people for whom the words 'lost everything' or 'financial ruin' may mean becoming homeless or going hungry, and not the loss of a maid or a beach vacation home or trips to exotic locales.

In Penney's case, she seems devastated that she may have to give up her studio and her maid and that she has to learn how to take the subway in New York. (I had thought that all New Yorkers routinely took the subway but apparently there are some people for whom it is a totally foreign experience.) As the comments on her post indicate, she received some scorn from people who see her self-pity as signs of a self-absorbed and pampered life.

I do not doubt for a minute that Penney feels a genuine sense of loss and am not saying that she should not feel sorry for herself. Loss is loss and if, for example, it should turn out that some personal financial setback results in my being forced to give up my home and move into a small apartment in a cheaper location or have to carefully count pennies in order to meet the basic necessities of life, it would undoubtedly be difficult for me to adjust and I would feel as sorry for myself as Penney does.

But even in my loss I hope I would retain enough of a sense of proportion to realize that it is a relative loss and that, as long as I still had food and shelter, it is not ruin on any absolute scale. We need to always bear in mind that there are people who are in far worse straits than us and what to us may seem like an almost unbearable lowering of living standards may be luxury for them.

POST SCRIPT: Denis Leary remembers his own films

Leary is a really funny guy.

December 24, 2008

Betraying both principles and friends- the famous Milgram experiments.

(As is my custom this time of year, I am taking some time off from writing new posts and instead reposting some old favorites (often edited and updated) for the benefit of those who missed them the first time around or have forgotten them. The POST SCRIPTS will be new. New posts will start again on Monday, January 5, 2009. Today's post originally appeared in February 2007.)

During the McCarthy-era HUAC hearings, some people who were called up to testify but did not want to inform on their friends and colleagues and name names, refused to answer questions using the Fifth Amendment, which says that people cannot be forced to give evidence that might incriminate themselves. While this was effective in avoiding punishment, others felt that this was a somewhat cowardly way out. The Hollywood Ten, including Dalton Trumbo, decided to use a more principled but risky strategy and that was to invoke the freedom of assembly clause of the First Amendment that says that people have a right to peaceably associate with those whom they please and thus do not have to say who their friends and associates are or otherwise inform on them.

In those charged times, this right was over-ridden and they went to jail for various lengths of time. Albert Einstein was actively involved in fighting these anti-communist witch-hunts and approved of using the First Amendment for this purpose. Writing in 1954 in the book Ideas and Opinions (Crown Publishers, New York, p. 34), he said:

Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin. … This refusal to testify must not be based on the well-known subterfuge of invoking the Fifth Amendment against possible self-incrimination, but on the assertion that it is shameful for a blameless citizen to submit to such an inquisition and that this kind of inquisition violates the spirit of the Constitution. If enough people are ready to take this grave step they will be successful. If not, then the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.

This kind of situation where one is compelled to turn in one's friends is not uncommon, either in real life or in fiction. Harry Potter fans will recognize it in book four Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire where Karkaroff reveals the names of other Death Eaters to the Council of Magic in the Ministry of Magic (a group remarkably like the HUAC) to avoid being given a life sentence in Azkaban under the dreaded Dementors.

But back in real life, Dalton Trumbo's letter reminded me of the famous and controversial 1962 Stanley Milgram experiment. Psychologist Milgram was interested in answering the question: "How is it possible that … ordinary people who are courteous and decent in everyday life can act callously, inhumanely, without any limitations of conscience … Under what conditions would a person obey authority who commanded actions that went against conscience." His interest in this question was triggered by the 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann who claimed in his defense that he was just following the orders of the Nazi government. Milgram was interested in the question of whether people would follow orders that went against their basic human instincts.

Most people have heard of this experiment in which test subjects, perfectly ordinary people, were willing to apply increasing amounts of voltage to an unseen person despite hearing the victim's increasingly distressed screams of suffering. The screams were fake but the subjects did not know that and their willingness to impose so much pain has been marveled at.

Although I too had heard of the Milgram experiment, its full force did not hit me until I saw actual footage of the experiment as it is being carried out. The first segment (out of five) of is shown below but you really must see all five to get the full impact of it.

The video showed that the subjects were not callously or sadistically increasing the pain they were inflicting on the victim. In fact, most had the normal aversion to inflicting gratuitous pain on others, were really anguished, and wanted to spare the victim further suffering. They kept asking if this was the right thing to do and repeatedly sought reassurance that they were not causing harm.

What made them continue to inflict increasing levels of pain was that the person giving the instructions looked very official and respectable and authoritative, dressed in a white lab coat and speaking in a calm but firm manner. The clincher was that this official person told them that they were not responsible for the outcome of the experiment or the health of the victim, and that the official took full responsibility for both. This shifting of responsibility away from themselves enabled 60-65% of the subjects to overcome their qualms and push the shocks all the way to the highest level, despite the fact that they thought the victim had a heart condition, and to ignore the screams of the victim and his pleas to stop the experiments.

This is precisely the danger. As long as people feel that they are not responsible for the outcomes of an action, as long as there is some official-looking person telling them that all this is quite proper and normal and they are absolved from the consequences, they seem willing to do things that their basic human instincts tell them is wrong.

This explains why so many otherwise decent people are willing to condone the use of water-boarding and other forms of torture that are being carried out by the government. They have been reassured by the president, vice president, other high officials, and 'respectable' opinion makers, and that everything is fine and under control, that the victims are not really suffering any real harm and that these actions are necessary in order to achieve some greater good.

As Milgram himself reported:

Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

This brings us back to the question I posed at the beginning of yesterday's post as to whether we would be willing to inform on our friends just because some government official asked us to. For myself, I hope that I would say no. The older I get, the more I value friends and the less I trust the motives and intentions, let along the competence, of the government and other official agencies to do the right thing.

The request to betray a friend is an ignoble one. But it is unlikely to come in the form of a bribe offered by some sleazy person in a dark alley. Instead it will come in the open, by very proper and official people, and the offer will be wrapped in the flag and decorated with bows that appeal to one's honor and duty and patriotism. Failure to inform on a friend may well result in one being called disloyal and even a traitor. And 'tortured liberals' play important roles in this persuasion, providing an intellectual cover that makes people who instinctively revolt against violating their deeply held principles feel that they are somehow extremists and outside the norm.

As I said, in actual extreme situations there is no knowing what we will do. It is possible that I could be coerced into doing things that I think are wrong. But the action will still be wrong. Most of us do not have the internal resources to resist the more subtle pressures brought to bear on us by the modern coercive state and its propaganda arms. We have to systematically create those resources.

The Milgram experiment suggests to me that what gives us the strength to challenge authority is the availability of others to support us in our actions, to reinforce in us the belief that we should do the right thing whatever the authority figures might claim. And friends are our most valuable resource in this fight. I wonder what the result would have been if the people applying the shocks had had a friend with them.

In the end, friends are all we have. When we betray them, we become nothing and have nothing.

POST SCRIPT: Have friends, live longer

A study found that having good friends leads to more tangible benefits. It found that "People with extensive networks of good friends and confidantes outlived those with the fewest friends by 22 percent." Close relationships with relatives or children did not have the same effect on longevity.

"[T]he authors of the report speculated that friends may encourage older people to take better care of themselves—by cutting down on smoking and drinking, for example, or seeking medical treatment earlier for symptoms that may indicate serious problems.

Friends may also help seniors get through difficult times in their lives, by offering coping mechanisms and having a positive effect on mood and self-esteem."

December 23, 2008

Friends

(As is my custom this time of year, I am taking some time off from writing new posts and instead reposting some old favorites (often edited and updated) for the benefit of those who missed them the first time around or have forgotten them. The POST SCRIPTS will be new. New posts will start again on Monday, January 5, 2009. Today's post originally appeared in February 2007.)

Here is a hypothetical scenario to ponder. Suppose one day government agents, say from the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security, come to you and say that they suspect that one of your close friends is a terrorist sympathizer and that they would like you to act on their behalf, secretly observing your friend and reporting all his or her activities to them. Would you do this?

There are some problems with this scenario. I do not think it is standard practice for government agents to enlist amateurs to help them in such ways because they are unlikely to be good covert operatives and are very likely to give the game away. But given the level of paranoia and fear-mongering that has been deliberately created and the disregard for civil liberties and fundamental rights that characterize government actions these days, variations on the above scenario are not as far-fetched as one would like to think.

I have also written before that extreme hypothetical situations such as this one are not good ways of predicting how one would act if such a situation would actually arise because it is hard to predict how one would behave in situations which are far removed from those with which one is familiar. But such extreme hypothetical situations are useful devices to think about what principles one lives by.

If faced with the above scenario of betraying one's friends, for some the choice will be simple. If the law requires us to cooperate with the authorities and inform on our friends, then that is the right, even honorable and patriotic, thing to do. Although they may disagree with the law, they may feel that they are compelled to follow it, that it is not our prerogative to challenge the law. While we may work to change it, good citizenship requires us to follow the law that is on the books and to obey, or at least cooperate with, the authorities charged with enforcing them.

But it is not that simple.

I started thinking about this about three years ago when a letter that Dalton Trumbo had written to a friend in 1967 was published in Harper's magazine (March 2004, page 30). Trumbo, who died in 1976, was a very successful screenwriter who refused to testify and name people as Communists or collaborators before the McCarthyite-era House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings. The film Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) dealt with the events and atmosphere of that time.

As a result of his refusal to name names, he became one of the original Hollywood Ten, a group of writers and directors who were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios and could not get work anymore. He was also convicted of contempt of Congress and sentenced in 1950 to 11 months in prison. After being released, he lived abroad but his work was still sought after and his screenplays appeared under pseudonyms and fronts until 1960 when influential actors like Kirk Douglas got him re-instated. One of his screenplays (under the pseudonym "Robert Rich") even won an Academy Award in 1957 for the film The Brave One.

In his letter, Trumbo makes some important points about the nature of the choices that we have to sometimes make:

[A] prominent and liberal producer was quoted as saying: "Look, you people are simply stubborn and foolish. Regardless of what you think of informing it has become a part of the law. The committee and its requirements are part of our time; they are the country; they are the flag. That's the way it is, and those who refuse to recognize this no longer arouse sympathy; they only isolate themselves and prevent their voices from being heard."

The more I think of that the more I disagree with it, and the more puzzled I become about the workings of the mind that produced it.

I know and can read the First Amendment as well as anyone. I know it is the basic law of this country. I know that if it goes, all will go. The Warren Court has carefully and specifically outlined the exact method by which persons can refuse to inform. It is almost as if the court had decided to provide citizens with a textbook on how to avoid turning informer.

Thus the court has presented us with a dilemma that lies at the heart of all philosophies and religions, the dilemma best symbolized in the Faustian legend: yield up your principles and you shall be rich; cling to them and you shall be less prosperous than you presently are.

That's the problem: choice. Not compulsion. Committee or no committee, law or no law, capitalism or no capitalism, movies or no movies, it is the constant necessity to choose that dogs every action of our lives every minute of our existences.

Who is it then who compels us to inform? The committee does not come and ask us to change our minds and give them names and reinstate ourselves. Who is it that denies us work until we seek out the committee and abase ourselves before it?

Since it is neither the court nor the law nor the committee, the man who compels informing can only be the employer itself. It is he, and not the committee, who applies the only lash that really stings - economic reprisal: he is the enforcer who gives the committee its only strength and all its victories.

Disliking the nasty business of blacklisting but nonetheless practicing it every day of his life, he places upon the country and his flag the blame for moral atrocities that otherwise would be charged directly to himself. And thus, since informing has nothing to do with the law and the country and the flag, and since the necessities of his life, as he sees them, oblige him to enforce what the committee can never compel, and since without his enforcement that committee would have no power at all, - what he actually said is that he is the law and the country and the flag.

Then in a moving series of montages, Trumbo reflects on the wide range of jobs he has had all over the country and the wide variety of people from all walks of life that he has met on that journey.

And if I could take a census of all the Americans I have seen and of all the dead whose graves I have looked on, if I could ask them one simple question: "Would you like a man who told on his friend?" – there would not be one among them who would answer, "Yes."

Show me the man who informs on friends who have harmed no one, and who thereafter earns money he could not have earned before, and I will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable scoundrel who will, if new pressures arise and the price is right, betray not just his friends but his country. Such men are to be watched; I cannot imagine they are not watched.
….
I look back on two decades through which good friends stood together, moved forward a little, dreamed that the world could be better and tried to make it so, tasted the joy of small victories, wounded each other, made mistakes, suffered much injury, and stood silent in the chamber of liars.

For all this I am grateful: that much I have; that much cannot be taken from me. Barcelona fell, and you were not there, and I was not there, and perhaps if we had been the city would have stood and the world have been changed and better. But we were here, and here together we remain, and our city won't fall, and if it should, better that we lie buried among its ruins than be found absent a second time.

Every time I re-read Trumbo's letter I am moved by its eloquence. It is a powerful statement about what good friends, acting together, can achieve and our responsibility to our friends.

POST SCRIPT: The shoe hurled around the world

I have not written anything about the incident where an Iraqi journalist threw a shoe at Bush. There was more than enough chatter about it elsewhere. The best commentary that I encountered was by Bob Garfield on the weekly radio program On the Media.

December 22, 2008

The problem of tipping

(As is my custom this time of year, I am taking some time off from writing new posts and instead reposting some old favorites (often edited and updated) for the benefit of those who missed them the first time around or have forgotten them. The POST SCRIPTS will be new. New posts will start again on Monday, January 5, 2009. Today's post originally appeared in November 2005.)

I have been traveling a lot recently on work-related matters and this requires me to do things that I don't routinely do, such as stay in hotels, take taxis, eat at restaurants, and take airplanes.

I generally dislike traveling because of the disruption that it causes in one's life and the dreariness of packing and unpacking and sleeping in strange places where one does not have access to the familiarity and conveniences of home. But another reason that I dislike these kinds of trips is that they force me to repeatedly confront the phenomenon of tipping.

I hate the whole practice of tipping. One reason is structural in that tipping enables employers to avoid paying workers less than the minimum wage, let alone a living wage. People who work forty hours per week at the minimum wage of $5.15 per hour make about $11,000 a year (Note that in terms of inflation adjusted dollars, this is the lowest rate since 1955.) But there are exemptions from even this low rate for those jobs where there is an expectation that the employee can earn at least $30 per month in tips. Some jobs pay about half the federal minimum wage rate and employers can justify this practice by arguing that tips more than make up the difference between this and what is necessary to support themselves and their families. But note that all you need is to be able to get $360 per year in tips to be not protected by even the currently miserable minimum wage laws.

I feel that people should not have to depend upon the kindness of strangers (which is what tipping is) to earn a living wage. Anyone who works full time should be able to make enough to live on, which in the US means roughly doubling the current minimum wage, although there is strong regional variation.

I hate tipping because it seems like it is meant to force people to be nice to me. In general, I find people to be nice and polite and helpful without the need for extrinsic motivators for such behavior. I think that almost all people are like that and do not need to be paid to extend the common courtesies of life to one another. People smile, greet each other, assist each other if necessary, all because we feel a sense of empathy and oneness with those around us, not because we expect some reward.

But when I tip someone, I feel as if I am implying that that person performed that act of kindness or service because of the expectation of payment. And to me this cheapens that human interaction, transforming it into a commercial transaction. Unfortunately, I don't know what to personally do about it. I tip people because I know they are not paid well and depend on tips to make ends meet. But if at all possible, I try to bury the tip so that it is not obviously an exchange of money between the person being tipped and me. In restaurants, I add it to the bill and pay by credit card so that no money directly changes hands between the server and me.

But in some cases, you cannot avoid a cash exchange so I try to avoid situations where the tip is the only money that exchanges hands, but instead is part of the overall cash payment. For taxis, for example, I can add it to the fare so that I am not due any change and so can act like I am paying just the fare. If that is unavoidable and I have to give a cash tip to a person that is not part of a payment for other goods and services, I try as much as possible to do it when the recipient is not there, like leaving it on a restaurant table when leaving, or leaving it in a hotel room when checking out.

But there are some situations, such as with porters and hotel doorpersons and bellhops, where the tip cannot be so disguised. I try as much as possible to avoid those situations by doing things myself as much as possible and if I cannot do so, tip as unobtrusively as I can.

We do not live in an egalitarian society. Society is stratified by class and wealth. But tips seem to rub everyone's noses in that reality in a particularly revolting way. The jobs that depend on tips seem to me to encourage servility and an almost feudal sensibility, throwing us back to a former age where the 'noble lords and ladies' dispense largesse to a fawning and grateful peasantry. Fortunately I do not spend time in places where wealthy people hang out and where there is an expectation that you will be waited on hand and foot and treated obsequiously. I live largely in a world where people carry their own bags, do their own chores, and open their own doors, or do so for others simply out of politeness.

Perhaps I am overreacting to what is 'normal' practice, seeing a deep social problem where none exists. But then I wonder how I would feel if the university did not pay me a living wage but instead had tip jars in each classroom and I had to depend upon satisfied students to give tips after each class supplement my income. A colleague tells me that in the old days of the Greek philosopher-teachers, students would pay them for each class if they were satisfied, so this is not an unheard of practice. What would that do to the student-teacher relationship? I cannot imagine that it would be good. So why is it good for other relationships?

What I would really like is for everyone to be paid a living wage.

POST SCRIPT: Sand sculpture

I have always been impressed with the time and effort that some people put into such temporary things as sand sculptures. Here is one in Italy where tons of sand was used to create a huge nativity scene which includes approximately 200 figures and 100 animals.

December 11, 2008

On being a contented loner

I have a confession to make: I am a bad Facebook friend. Although I have a Facebook account, I don't do anything with it. From time to time someone will request that I be their friend and I almost always say yes even if I know them just remotely or they are just a friend of a friend. But to accept them as a friend is about the only time that I even log into my Facebook account. I have the vague sense that I should be doing more with the site, that somehow I am neglecting my Facebook friends, but am not sure what I should be doing.

So why did I join Facebook at all if I was not going to do anything with it? It started long ago when I read about Facebook in an article, when it was still limited to a few ivy league schools. I was intrigued by the concept because I felt that there were not enough avenues for students at Case to meet and socialize and I felt that Facebook might be a good thing to get started here. Since I was not quite sure how it worked, when the opportunity arose for non-ivy leaguers to join up, I was one of the first to do so to check it out. It seemed like a good thing and I recommended to the computer and student affairs people here that we should consider promoting it strongly amongst our students.

Of course, Facebook exploded in popularity without any help from us, and so I let the matter drop and forgot about my account. But after some time people discovered that I had a Facebook account and I slowly started getting requests to be friends. It seemed to me that the polite thing to do was to say yes. After all, how can you say be so churlish as to say no to a request from someone to be your friend? And so my list of Facebook friends slowly grew. Of course, the total number of friends I have is still tiny, in the double digits, unlike some people who have thousands. But I still feel guilty that I am ignoring this small group of people who took the trouble to reach out to me and I sometimes wonder what they think of me ("What a jerk. He never calls. He never writes. He never tells us what he is doing or feeling at the moment.") I have thought of closing my account but that seems even ruder, like abruptly moving to another city and not giving people a forwarding address. So I am stuck.

(I am also puzzled by the occasional request to be a friend from people whom I do not know in the least, with whom I have no common Facebook friends, and who live in places I have never even been to. Why would they ask a stranger to be their friend? Is there some social networking dynamic that I am not aware of that is causing this?)

My problem is that I am somewhat of a loner. I do not actively seek out the company of people. (This is consistent with the post last week about how my writing pegs me down as an introvert.) I am perfectly content with my own thoughts and books and the internet. I do enjoy occasional socializing with friends, but even then I prefer conversations with a few people than large and noisy parties. If I do attend such a party, I try to find a few congenial companions and spend the entire evening in their company. I enjoy meetings with colleagues at work provided the meetings are not too frequent or go on for too long. After about an hour I start looking forward to going back to the solitude of my office where I can sort out my thoughts and put them into writing.

I also still do not own a cell phone, which shocks many people. When asked why, I reply truthfully that my job is such that emergencies do not arise and people do not need to contact me at short notice. Also my habits are fairly regular so that people can usually reach me at my office or at home. Furthermore, I have lived all my life quite happily without a cell phone and am not convinced that it has suddenly become a can't-do-without item. In short, a cell phone has not become a functional necessity for me and I try to not clutter up my life with things I don't need.

But there are two other major reasons that I usually leave unsaid. The first is that I hate talking on the phone. I am much more comfortable writing an email to someone or speaking with them face-to-face than picking up the phone and calling them. If I have to talk to people on the phone because the matter is too complicated to write about or requires a personal touch, I tend to get to the point quickly, and when the matter is settled, try to end the call as politely as I can.

I don't know why I dislike phone conversations but I know I am not alone in this. Recently on some blogs the discussion turned to this topic and almost all of the bloggers said that they hated talking on the phone too. This is perhaps not too surprising. Bloggers, after all, are people who like the written word and have chosen to express their thoughts in writing.

The other reason that I do not have a cell phone is that I like to be left alone. There are many times when I simply do not want to be contacted. Once you have a cell phone, the presumption becomes that it should always be on, that you should always have it with you, answer all calls immediately, or call back within a few minutes. I have noticed that people get annoyed and frustrated when they call someone's cell phone and it is not answered or they do not get an immediate callback.

There is an explosion of new ways of being in contact, social networking systems such as Twitter and Second Life being just two. I steadfastly refuse to join any of them unless I absolutely have to.

I did join Second Life out of curiosity when it first came out and because Case was getting deeply involved in it, but stopped doing anything with my avatar soon after, thus repeating my unfortunate Facebook experience. I am probably now as much a social pariah on Second Life as I am on Facebook.

I am not a total Luddite who rejects all new technology. If I need something I will use it. Recently I actually initiated a private social networking group on Ning (thanks to help from Heidi) to facilitate the organization of a college reunion, so I can and will use these devices if I feel the need.

I am well aware that I am fighting the tide on this one. Eventually, everyone will be on many social networks with everyone else, each person constantly aware of what other people are doing. And scattered here and there will be these isolated individuals like me who have no clue as to what is happening all around them.

That realization is a little disturbing. I like to think of myself as a social being and the thought that I am actively shunning avenues for being in touch with other people is troubling, suggesting that I am somewhat of a misanthrope. But not really. I do not hate or distrust humankind. And I am also not like Linus of Peanuts fame when he said, "I love humanity! It's people I can't stand!"

I really do like people and humanity. I just don't want to be in touch with a lot of them all the time and there does not seem to be any word other than 'loner' to describe people like me.

POST SCRIPT: Christmas cheer for the godless

British comedians like Ricky Gervais and Robin Ince have organized a program of Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People: A Rational Celebration of Christmas.

[Gervais's] motivation is as benign as it is pro-rationalist. "I wanted to do events around Christmas for people who don't have any belief, to show that they're not bitter, Scrooge-like characters. Everyone is going to be approaching the evening from a passionate scientific perspective rather than from a bashing-the-Bible slant."
…
For Ince and his missionary friends, the word that needs to be spread is that the universe is wondrous even without faith in a divine plan. Dawkins will read from his book Unweaving the Rainbow, "which is about how science makes things more beautiful and more exciting - not less".
…
But by holding this rationalist jamboree so close to Christmas, are they not guilty of provocation?

"If it riles people," says Ince, "it does so because they're fools. Anyone who feels we are 'stealing Christmas away' would just be half-witted. Some people are desperate to be offended."

For those who do not know Robin Ince, here is a clip that I have shown before where he compares evolution with creationism and intelligent design.

December 05, 2008

The internet is watching you

Recently I came across two sites that made me realize that the internet is getting too smart for its own good.

One is the site Typealyzer. You insert the URL of a blog and it does a Myers-Briggs type analysis of the personality of the author.

The results of a Myers-Briggs analysis places the subject along four axes:

Favorite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).

So I inserted the URL for this blog into Typealyzer and got the result that I am an INTP-type, broadly classified as 'The Thinker':

Private, intellectual, impersonal, analytical and reflective, the INTP appears to value ideas, principles and abstract thinking above all else. This logical type seeks to understand and explain the universe--not to control it! Higher education often holds a particular appeal to this type who tends to acquire degrees and amass knowledge over the entire course of life. Abstract or theoretical subjects are usually the INTP's cup of tea, and academic or research careers may seem attractive to this type. From science and math to economics and philosophy: just name the discipline, and you'll find INTPs perched on the loftiest rungs of theory and analysis. In whatever field they choose, INTPs take on the role of visionary, scientist or architect, and they usually prefer to make their contributions in relative solitude. The mundane details of life may be the INTP's undoing, since this type lives in a world guided by intuitive thinking. Often perceived to be arrogant and aloof, the quiet and sometimes reclusive INTP may have to struggle in the personal realm, as well, for feelings are not this type's natural forte.

I then compared this with one of the many quasi-Myers-Briggs assessments available on the internet for free (you have to pay for the real thing) and got the result that my personality type is INTJ.

Of course, each of the four axes is a continuum and few people are at the very extremes of each. The strengths of my individual preferences were given as 44% Introverted, 50% Intuitive, 25% Thinking, and 89% Judging. These can be expressed qualitatively as moderately expressed introvert, moderately expressed intuitive, moderately expressed thinking, and very expressed judging.

The Myers-Briggs site describes the two types in the following way:

INTP: Seek to develop logical explanations for everything that interests them. Theoretical and abstract, interested more in ideas than in social interaction. Quiet, contained, flexible, and adaptable. Have unusual ability to focus in depth to solve problems in their area of interest. Skeptical, sometimes critical, always analytical.

INTJ: Have original minds and great drive for implementing their ideas and achieving their goals. Quickly see patterns in external events and develop long-range explanatory perspectives. When committed, organize a job and carry it through. Skeptical and independent, have high standards of competence and performance – for themselves and others.

The URL analyzer seems to be in pretty good agreement with the more detailed questionnaire-based analysis. The main difference is the last quality that switched from the T in the blog analyzer to the J, which switched me from the umbrella category 'Thinker' to the 'Scientist'.

Since I was in the mood for navel-gazing, I also tried GenderAnalyzer, that says it uses Artificial Intelligence to determine the gender of the author of the home page of a blog. I did it twice over a couple of weeks and the first time it returned 77% male and the second time 83% male.

I am not sure how to interpret the results since the basis of the algorithm used is not given. Presumably it does some kind of textual analysis of key words in comparison with a database of some sort.

But what would be a 'good' result? If for some reason a reader really wants to know the gender of the author, the closer you get to 100% accuracy the better. But from the view of the blog's author, that may also mean that you are highly gender-stereotypical in your language and/or choice of topics and/or views on them, depending on what the algorithm does. Should an author be aiming for 50% so that one is writing in ways that are free of gender bias?

Jesus' General (from whose site I first heard about this) who proudly claims that he is "an 11 on the manly scale of absolute gender" was horrified to find that he scored only 72%, lower than even some women bloggers, and he took the necessary steps to raise his manly score.

There also seem to have been a few anomalous results for some well-known people.

What all this tells me is that the internet knows us better than we think or may like.

The old cartoon joke "On the internet no one knows you are a dog" may no longer be true. It not only knows you are a dog, it can even tell the breed.

POST SCRIPT: Put down the duckie!

One of my favorite Sesame Street music segments.

November 28, 2008

The evil of the consumer economy

(Due to the holiday, I am reposting something from last year, updated and edited.)

Each year, the Thanksgiving holiday is ruined by the revolting attention that the media pays to the retail industry in the days immediately following Thanksgiving. They wallow in stories of sales, of early-bird shoppers on Friday lining up in the cold at 4:00am to get bargains, fighting with other shoppers to grab sale items, people getting trampled in the crush, the long lines at cash registers, the year's "hot" gift items, and the breathless reports of how much was spent and what it predicts for the future of the economy. The media eggs on this process by giving enormous amounts of coverage to people going shopping, a non-news event if there ever was one, adding cute names like "Black Friday" and more recently "Cyber Monday."

Frankly, I find this obsessive focus on consumption disgusting. In fact, I would gladly skip directly from Thanksgiving to Christmas, because the intervening period seems to me to be just one long orgy of consumerism in which spending money is the goal. The whole point of the Christmas holiday seems to have become one in which people are made to feel guilty if they are not spending vast amounts of time and money in finding gifts for others. There is an air of forced jollity that is jarring, quite in contrast to the genuine warmth of Thanksgiving. And it just seems to stress people out.

Since I grew up in a country where people were encouraged to be frugal, often out of necessity, I still find it disquieting to be urged to spend as if it were somehow my duty to go broke in order to shore up the retail industry and help "grow the economy." I still don't understand that concept. An economy that is based on people buying what they do not need or can even afford seems to me to be inherently unsustainable, if not downright morally offensive.

One of the few silver linings in the bleak outlook caused by the current financial crisis is that people are likely to cut back on their purchases. I know that this is supposedly 'bad' for the economy but perhaps we need to change the basis of our economy, to one in which services, rather than goods, are the drivers. For example, we should be more willing to pay people to