Octopodial Chrome

Today marks eight years since Black Sunday, that sad day when I donned cap and gown and was cast headlong into the working world. I’ve since spent twice as many years out of school as I did in it.

When I look at what I wrote on the fourth anniversary of my graduation, I don’t see that I’m much further along at 29 than I was at 25: making a little more; still ensconced in my condo; still single; still driving the same car; still with very few local friends. But there’s hope: I’m working on a shift in my career to something I find more interesting; I’m renovating my condo; I’ve actually been on some dates. I’m actually pretty happy with my car, though. It’s nice driving an auto that will be old enough to vote next year. And I’ve added a few friends, which is progress. Finally, I’m working on a pretty big change—one which I’ll announce here if everything works out as planned.

So things are looking up. But, today just as four years ago and as eight years ago, I miss school. I miss being surrounded by my friends, guys with interests the same as mine. I miss being surrounded by the highest concentration of attractive women I’ll ever experience. I miss being able to pull three all-nighters in a row. I miss employing some of the best minds in the world to educate me. I miss not having bills to pay every month. I miss getting three months of vacation every year. I miss being young and foolish and unconcerned with the real world.

On the other hand, I quite like having money. I quite like being able to afford the things I ant to own. I like owning my own place, and setting my own rules. I rather enjoy not being a complete and utter git (well, by comparison with by 18- or 19-year-old self anyway).

Still, I miss sharing an apartment with Phil and Darren, brewing beer in the dorm kitchen, sneaking girls in past visitation hours, going to parties, hanging out at the library, cutting class to go golfing, going shooting in Oklahoma on the weekends, walking to class with a pipe clenched in my teeth, wearing a tweed coat every day and otherwise just plain having fun.

Today, as four years ago, as eight years ago, I miss school.

Dr. Lawrence Huntoon has written a great article about health care costs. He says pretty much what I’ve been saying for years, so naturally I think him a genius. Medical insurance is no longer insurance at all, but rather inefficiently pre-paid medical care. Since it is generally obtained through an employer (due to tax laws dating back to the Second World War), it is more inefficient and harder to keep. The uninsured face a nasty tax liability ($19,000,000,000 per year). The way to fix rapidly-escalating health care costs is via a market mechanism using medical savings accounts.

Of course, this applies to just about everything. We’d all be better off if the money we’d spent on Social Security all these years were in a 401(k) or IRA or other investment vehicle.

We’ve all seen those credit-card-entry (and other) forms which ask us to leave out dashes, spaces and other punctuations when entering our numbers. Never mind that credit card numbers are naturally written with spaces, that Social Security numbers use dashes and that phone numbers have a number of different representations involving dashes, parentheses, spaces, periods and plus signs. The really ridiculous thing is that removing extraneous punctuation is dead-simple for a computer to do. But these lazy programmers offload a single line of code’s worth of work onto the thousands or millions of visitors to their sites.

Well, Steve Friedl has decided to shame these morons. His well-intentioned attempt is probably doomed, but I wish him luck.

One week ago early this morning (very early this morning…) my youngest brother returned from his first deployment to Iraq. Thanks be to God, he is healthy and unharmed. It was good to hang out with him, Mom, Tom and Em in San Diego for a few days.

It appears that American soldiers overseas have rediscovered the utility of washboards. America’s last surviving washboard company makes a portable kit consisting of a small washboard (originally designed for travelling salesman), a tin bucket, lye soap, clothesline, clothespins and foot powder. They’re $25 and thousands have been sent to the troops.

I’m thinking of buying a set for myself…

Since the black date of 11 September 2001, many folks have been concerned about nuclear, biological or chemical terrorist attacks on American soil. A retired US Army sergeant dispels many of the myths about NBC warfare. Basically, as long as you don’t die immediately and keep your head, you’ll be okay. A must-read.

Crist aras! Crist soþlice aras!

Today is the greatest of feasts: today we celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Today we mark the destruction of death’s power over man, because (while we still die) we know that we will each rise again just as Christ did.

Christus ist auferstanden! Er ist wahrhaftig auferstanden!

There are a few competing theories of the exact mechanism of how Christ’s Passion and Resurrection achieved salvation. Was it His Passion which did it? Was His death a sacrifice to pay for the sins of all? Was it His Resurrection which did it instead? By uniting the human and the divine in Himself and rising, did He make it possible for all men to rise? Was it both together? Was it something else, the Harrowing of Hell perhaps? I’m no theologian—all I know is that Christ died, and rose, and that consequently we all shall.

Christus resurrexit! Vere resurrexit!

Speaking of the Harrowing of Hell: as a boy one of my favourite images was what the scene must have been like after Christ died. In St. John Chrysostom’s famous Paschal sermon (which is worth a read in itself, and is better than anything I can write), he has this to say about what happened therein:

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.
It was in an uproar because it is mocked.
It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.
It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.
It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.
Hell took a body, and discovered God.
It took earth, and encountered Heaven.
It took what it saw, and was overcome by what it did not see.
O death, where is thy sting?
O Hades, where is thy victory?

I always imagined Hell’s receiving-room to be something like a modern-day mailroom, with a legion of demonic clerks taking in, sorting and filing souls. I had this mental image of one of them hiding behind his desk, frantically trying to get ahold of Satan on the phone: Ummm…Boss, we’ve got a problem down here. He’s here. Oh d—— And then the line goes dead, and Satan reflects on the ideaalises that his scheme is rather finally broken. It’s a silly little thought, but I always enjoyed imagining it.

Христос воскрес! Воистину воскрес!

Just to show off Unicode, here’s the Paschal greeting in a few other languages:

Քրիստոս յարեաւ ի մեռելոց՜ Օրհնեալ է Յարութիւնն Քրիստոսի՜

ئەيسا تىرىلدى! ھەقىقەتىنلا تىرىلدى!

ക്രിസ്തു ഉയിര്‍ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു! തീര്‍ച്ചയായും ഉയിര്‍ത്തെഴുന്നേറ്റു!

!المسيح قام! حقا قام

ქრისტე აღსდგა! ჭეშმარიტად აღსდგა!

And of course, in the language which made it famous: Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Christ is risen! Truly He is risen!

Adam Petersen demonstrates how to create a simple polling web app in Common Lisp—in around 70 lines of code! It’s not perfect (as one reddit comment noted, he needs to escape his strings for HTML), but it’s a pretty cool demonstration of how Lisp can serve as a rapid development platform.

Lisp isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives out there.

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m a reasonably strict libertarian in both economic and social issues. I tend to think that the State has no business regulating private affairs, and my definition of private is fairly broad. I don’t believe, for example, that marriage should be an institution of the State (it is God’s creation, not man’s). This has led me to oppose the anti-polygamy laws not because I support polygamy (I oppose it) but because I don’t think that punishing polygamy is the proper business of the State any more than punishing the wearing of shorts by grown men (an offensive practise far more common) is the proper business of the State.

Rich Lowry has an article which gives me pause. He points out that polygamy as practised in Islamic and fundamentalist Mormon circles inevitably results in some pretty severe social effects. The most notable is that a few high-status men have many wive, leaving low-status men on the fringes of society, with little hope of marriage and children.

He’s right about the problem, although he doesn’t seem to realise that this is an effect of polygyny (multiple wives) rather than polygamy. A similar effect would probably be seen with polyandry (IIRC that was common in Tibet at one point, with brothers marrying a single wife).

The article provides a good reason for polygyny to be illegal: its negative effects spill over to the population as a whole. It may be that even a few polygynous marriages would be enough to have widespread negative effects.

I wonder though if those effects would hold in a generally polygamous society in which there were group marriages, polygynous marriages, polyandrous marriages and true marriages. And I wonder if polygamy would actually be all that common even were it legal. Certainly the majority of the churches would refuse to perform such marriages (though no doubt the Episcopalians would rush to be the first to allow them). Most women would object to a plural marriage as strenuously as they would to an affair. And I think most men really don’t want the extra bother.

Still, it does demonstrate that private choices can have public consequences.

Those of us who grew up camping and hiking in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly warned of the dangers of giardia lamblia and giardiasis. We were cautioned that if we ever drank water from a stream without first purifying it we risked our health and perhaps our very lives. Giardiasis was reputed to cause six months of uncontrollable diarrhœa; it was supposedly found in almost any stream, river or lake; it was bad juju.

Upon reflection, this didn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Old books are full of ways to find good water—they aren’t full of ways to purify water (although they might recommend boiling when in doubt). It always seemed a bit strange to me that the purported symptoms lasted for six months, a curiously round figure. Wild animals drink wild water, and they rarely seem to be suffering from intestinal trouble. Our ancestors—and many in the uncivilised world—drink wild water all the time. And then there are many of our fellows who do the same. I’m proud to say that I’ve been drinking water from streams for years, and I’ve never had a problem yet.

Well, it turns out that the giardia threat is massively overblown. Back in the 1980s some testing of wild water in the Sierra Nevadas was done: it turns out that the most contaminated water was purer than that found in San Francisco and that all but the two worst sites purer than that in Los Angeles. Even in other parts of the country, at the very worst sites one would need to drink almost 3 gallons of water in order to have a 50% chance of getting consuming enough giardia to have an effect.

Worse, it seems that 1 in 14 people have giardia in them already, and that the most likely path of contamination when camping is by food. Whoops.

All that said, there are plenty of other nasty microörganisms which can be found in water, and one needs to exercise some care. Areas which are commonly used by people are less safe than isolated areas; water that is stagnant is less safe than running water; it’s always safest to purify water one way or another. But really, it’s just not that big a deal.

I don’t really plan on carrying a purification kit. If I need to, I can boil it. And there’s something wonderfully tasty about ice-cold, crystal clear water from a mountain stream which runs through a stream bed lined with leaves. Iodine-tainted, bleached, boiled or filtered water are not the same thing.

Mark Gimein argues that the mortgage crisis will worsen considerably, especially in California. Apparently year-over-year prices have dropped 28%. One might wonder if they’ve bottomed out, but there’s an issue which will result in an even worse drop. It turns out that the fall in prices (due to the sub-prime crisis) means that it will become economically sound for prime mortgagers to simply leave their homes rather than owe (and pay for…) twice their market value.

This in turn will lead to still more foreclosures and abandonments. It could be a real estate perfect storm.

The president of Blue Jeans Cables recently received a cease & desist letter from Monster Cable. His response is a stunning smackdown of them, their claims and their business. The best line is perhaps this: Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it. It’s a long read, but every bit is worth it.

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network of size n is proportional to n². This follows from a simple observation: that the number of possible connections for each user in a network is n - 1; and since there are n users, then the total number of connections is n × (n - 1), which is roughly n². This all seems reasonable and makes sense.

But it’s wrong. It begs one simple question: what is the value of a connection. Metcalfe’s Law assumes that each connection is equally worthwhile. This doesn’t really make sense: is my connection to a bushman in the Kalahari as useful to me as my connection to my brothers, or to my bank? Not very likely.

It turns out that there’s another law—Zipf’s Law—which addresses all sorts of distributions. The article goes into more detail, but basically the second-most-important item in a list is one half as valuable as the first; the third is one third as valuable; the fourth is one quarter as valuable; and so on an so forth. It turns out that adding up 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4…1/n approximates log n reasonably closely. One might say that the value of a network of size n to any single user is proportional to log n (that is, the sum of the value of his most important link, his second most important link and so on until we get to his link to a squid-fishing boat in the Atlantic).

Thus Briscoe, Odlyzko & Tilly suggest their own network-value law: the value of a network is in proportion to n log n. They present some economic predictions based on this law, which seem to be borne out by the facts.

Anyway, read the article. It’s good and detailed and makes sense.

Joel Spolsky applies a lesson from his infantry days to business. A bit gimmicky, but he has a point.

This article on war pigeons is serious and interesting, but I’m shallow enough to just love the phrase war pigeon. It’s absolutely wonderful, really. Loose the war pigeons! Beware the mighty war pigeons!

I want to have a boat so I can name it the S.S. War Pigeon.

On the shores of Burundi’s Rusizi River lives Gustave the man-eating crocodile. He is quite possibly the world’s largest croc, measuring 20 feet long and weighing a short ton. The article is incredible: it’s amazing how the natives still keep going back to the water, regardless of the fact that hundreds of them are slain by crocodiles.

I think this rather proves my theory that civilisation requires extinction of the megafauna. One cannot have a civilised society in which rampaging elephants or lions or crocodiles can snatch up a child—or a man. It just doesn’t work. My reader will note that all three of those animals are to be found in Africa, and that Africa is, overall, the least civilised of the continents. This is, I think, no coincidence. Australia too has its issues in the Outback—and Australia too is rife with deadly animals.

Here in North America the aboriginal inhabitants killed and ate the majority of the megafauna millennia ago. That worked to their disadvantage (lacking horses, camels or any other domesticable animals they never really got anywhere), but it’s turned out very well for us.

Robert H. Frank offers economic-naturalist explanations for a host of questions: why women wear high heels; why milk comes in rectangular containers but soft drinks in cylindrical ones; why whales are nearly extinct but chickens are not; and quite a bit more. He has a book out soon entitled The Economic Naturalist; I’d like to get a copy of it.

Readers of this blog are no doubt aware of my opposition to most organ donation and transplantation. To be specific, I consider the harvesting of organs from corpses and their subsequent re-use to be morally abhorrent. I don’t think it should be illegal, but I do my best to oppose it and to persuade others not to participate in it.

In that spirit, then, here are some organ donation scandals. Zach Dunlap was pronounced dead by physicians eager to steal his organs: luckily for him, his relatives noticed that he wasn’t actually dead and he recovered and walked out of the hospital. He heard the physicians saying that he was dead. Rather poor medical job there, guys.

Then there’s the disturbing case of Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, who is accused of using drugs to speed the death—in plain English, murdering—a physically & mentally retarded patient in order to take his organs.

Human organ transplantation is wrong, regardless, but even were it right these incidents would argue for much tighter supervision of the system.

For the first time in over twenty years Americans drove less in 2007 than in the previous year. I know I did—I filled my car but seven times the entire year. When my brothers and I visited Chicago, we walked and took the trains or buses; when we visited San Diego we did the same; when I visited Phoenix on business I walked rather than rent a car. It was a lot of fun, to tell the truth.

Encouragingly, public transit ridership is at its highest level in over fifty years.

A purse snatcher robbed the English minister of justice, then tan into a bus full of cops. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

A Denver radio station aired a commercial for a housing development in Castle Rock—roughly an hour from Denver. It advertised a new housing development (in an era when the real estate market is flat). And, to top it all off, it proudly proclaimed that a three-car garage is standard. A three car garage. For a family of four.

A garage is a nicety. A two-car garage is a luxury. A three-car garage is an obscenity.

Here’s a nice takedown of the BOSE Acoustimass system. The short version: save your money and spend less on a better product from a reputable company.

A list of some skills you’ll need if you wish to live off-the-grid:

• Gardening/farming
• Building
• Hunting/fishing
• Canning/smoking/drying
• Sewing/tanning/weaving

I’d add that you definitely need cooking/baking (fairly obviously) and soapmaking (if you want to be clean). Brewing too would not go amiss—after all, man does not live by bread alone.

Granted, a life of subsistence farming wouldn’t be terribly exciting or fun. Well, except for the excitement of droughts and crop failures.

Desmond Warzel applies the Wikipedian ethos to time travel. Hilarious if you’ve ever worked with Wikipedia much; I suspect it’s utterly unintelligible otherwise.