j a c k *

Breaking News: News Broken...

There's a lot that can be said about the Shirley Sherrod saga, and there's plenty of blame and shame to go around, but I want to focus on one small aspect. Or, perhaps, the only thing that matters. Josh Marshall and David Frum have pointed out that this fiasco shows the media in this country is broken. My point is that it's deliberate.

The modern conservative movement and Republicans in particular work to destroy that which opposes their radical, redistributive agenda by controlling it. In governance paid-for politicians strive to point out how inherently bad government is at the same time that they, themselves, enact disastrous and destructive policies. Deficits are bad, they tell us. And yet massive tax cuts are touted as an economic boon, while social and stimulative spending are routed as budget-busting in opposition to logic and common sense. Of course the result is even more deficits. So Republican politicians in power can now turn around and tell us -- despite the policies that they, themselves, enacted -- "See? Government doesn't work."

The exact same plan to subvert a thing against itself has succeeded, brilliantly, to destroy journalism. Objectivity is impossible, they say -- everyone has a bias, and media bias is almost entirely liberal. Somehow this allows them to justify a right-wing bias that would make the worst butchers in history blush. From this position of authority they spout a constant stream of attacks, smears and innuendo against their political opponents. And when one of those attacks -- as in the Sherrod case -- turns out to be almost criminally lacking in the most basic of journalistic ethics, what do they do? Those same paid-for media faces turn around and tell us, "See? Journalism is inherently biased."

Our system relies on two systems as a final check on authoritarian power. The first is the vote, which depends on citizens having confidence in elected officials acting in their interests. The second is the free press, which reports when elected officials aren't acting in their constituents' interests. We cannot afford both parts of this feedback cycle to be deliberately and systematically destroyed by a cynical but powerful minority.

- jack*

Why I Hate C++, intro...

I've been a software engineer for a pretty long time. I'm not completely grey and insensible yet, but that's because I started young. My first professional gig, when I was a high-school student in the late 70's, involved programming in FORTRAN. The C language had very little traction at that point outside of universities.

That changed. C practitioners struggled and fought their way into the mainstream, until eventually C had displaced most other languages based on pure popularity. I was also a C convert because I could get more done in C than in nearly any other language. It was parsimonious and straightforward, and you could save a lot of keystrokes by typing "{" (open-curly-bracket) instead of the word "begin".

Sometime in the late 1980's there was a market struggle between C++ and Objective-C as to which would be the logical follow-on to the reigning C language. Both were object-oriented and had some strengths and weaknesses relative to each other, so it was kind of an interesting debate. I was a bit of an Objective-C partisan but I was open to being convinced. But never mind. C++ won not because of superior design features but because of something like nepotism. C was a standard, and C++ was the new standard designed by a duly anointed standards body. Thus the heir apparent assumed the throne.

But C++ was a benevolent dictator. You could still write in "standard" C if you wanted to, and as long as you eschewed the magic keywords like "class" and "new" the C++ compilers would let you do it. So, for another decade or two, I continued to write plain old C code. C++ held very little appeal for me.

To be clear, I am an object-oriented programmer. I like object-oriented techniques and use them routinely -- in C. Anyone who thinks you need object-oriented language constructs to write object-oriented code is very confused or -- more likely -- just young. I was writing object-oriented code in FORTRAN before some of these C++ programmers were even born.

For various reasons, but mostly because (a) I need to develop an SDK that will appeal to today's programmers, and (b) I'm interested in expanding my own skill set, I have been writing a lot of C++ lately. I am not, by any means, a C++ expert. There's a very great deal of knowledge required to make that claim, and I am nowhere near that level. But I have a good background in many languages and have designed many of my own.

So hopefully it's clear I'm not an idiot, and at the very least I can give good reasons why this old engineer hates C++.

Grab Bag of Bad Ideas...

Normally here at jaskasterisk.com I try to provide mostly vertical analysis, delving deep enough into one topic to come to some kind of (hopefully) useful conclusion. But this weekend I'm moving from my old computer to my new one and there are some links I've been sitting on which I'm going to pass on without much in the way of additional comment.

(1) The Rise of Rebublican Nihilism is a long but worthwhile piece about why the right wing seems so out of step in understanding modern issues and incapable of offering solutions. Author Jonathan Chait argues that the intellectual core of the conservative movement has its back against a wall -- their policy proposals cannot solve today's problems, yet they cannot retreat from their commitment to conservative ideology. I would only add that perhaps they've succeeded too well. After 30 years of gutting the tax and regulatory code in the name of righteousness, it's reached the point where doing more of the same makes things obviously worse.

(2) Many pundits hyperventilated that Obama made some kind of gaffe, or broke with precedent, or violated something about separation of powers by criticizing the Supreme Court in his state of the Union (yeah, I know, I said these were old links). They need to read this quote from FDR. Pretty strong stuff there, Frankie.

(3) This kos analysis of the poll it commissioned on Republican beliefs kind of book-ends (1) above. The conservative media have done such a great job convincing their base to believe anything that supports their ideology that now they have nowhere else to go.

(4) Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame is an atheist. I've heard him a couple of times in person and he's an engaging public speaker.

(5) The site 538 shows, as it often does, the power of empirical data -- in this case its power to refute conservative tropes. Republicans always argue that not only do Americans pay too much in taxes, but also that the rich have a disproportionate tax burden. The data says no. Not only do we have the least redistributive tax code of all first-world nations, our government is quite cheap as well. Don't expect facts to change any Republican minds, however. See (1) and (3).

(6) Finally, Dan Dennet helped to create a real interesting (but long) study on non-believing clergy. Many liberal pastors don't really accept the basic tenants of Christianity but stay in the church because they have no other form of income. They tell themselves they want to further liberalize the church from within, but end up living a lie. Tragic, really.

- jack*

iPad iReview, pt 3…

Having previously covered the good and the ugly, now we get to the genuinely bad. These are things that really didn’t work for me when using the iPad.

(1) The button. There is one physical button on the face of the iPad. Mirroring the button on the iPhone, the main button does one of two things: it either exits the current app to the main app-selection screen, or, if you’re already there, it opens a search function. That’s it. What justifies an entire button so apps don’t need a close box and the main view doesn’t need a search icon to tap? I suppose there’s the pragmatic concern that since the iPad doesn’t multi-task (in 2010, no less) if an app misbehaves the user still needs to be able to quit. OK, fair enough, but why make the button have such limited function? It could operate as a general escape, so it would first take you back to the app’s main interface, and once there back to the iPad’s interface. I could have used that a few times. (What if the app crashes, you ask? Just hold down the main button, analogous to a reboot.)

And once you’ve gone to the trouble of putting a button on the face, why stop at one? Steve Jobs seems to have a quixotic fixation with one-button interfaces. Was he traumatized as a child by something with multiple buttons, or does he just have an unnatural kink for making people poke things with one finger? A second button would have really helped with the controlling/viewing dilemma. Watching a video, for example, you mostly want to just look at it so the on screen controls fade away. I’m told that to bring them back you tap, but that never worked consistently for me. I’d tap, I’d whack, I’d press and hold, I’d flick – sometimes I’d get the controls, other times not. In a different app once the controls faded they never came back. A dedicated button would have really helped here (as would a finer-grained escape).

(2) The browser. The iPad seems like it should be the ideal web appliance. You can curl up in a comfortable chair, in front of TV or out in the yard, and surf the information superhighway. I wouldn’t recommend it. The experience was uniformly awful.

The first thing you want to do is search. So you tap on the search field and it opens a virtual keyboard which, although it belongs in the ugly category for UI features, does the job. The trouble starts when you try to do a second search. The search field and keyboard open again, but this time with the last search still in the field. If it had been selected, like it is in most browsers, so typing would replace it that would have been fine, but the insertion point is at the end. The reason became clear pretty quickly – there are no cursor keys on the keyboard. You would think, as I did, that perhaps you select the text by tapping or dragging on it directly, but no dice. The only thing I could do – and what I had to do for every single search – was backspace enough to delete the last one. Even if I just wanted to change one letter I was forced to backspace to the edit point and retype the string from there. It’s hard to understand how something so basic is so flawed.

Once you get to a page you run head-on into the controlling/viewing dilemma again. Here it’s much more serious than in a simple movie player. As usual the multi-touch navigation works beautifully. Gesturing to scroll and zoom is intuitive and fast, and the text and graphics resolve quickly and clearly. The problem is that most web pages are covered with links, and if your finger lands on one of them accidentally you are whisked away to some random location in cyberspace. The borders of many websites are particularly thick with active regions, so just holding the heavy device would often trigger links as the support hand strayed into the sensitive area. As result, scrolling a web page was like navigating a minefield, trying to find inert space for fingertips and ready to pounce on the back button when I invariably followed an unintentional link. The first time a link opened a new window I was really longing for that general escape ability as I tried to figure out how to get back to what I had been trying to read.

It turns out that even areas without links can be active. The browser allows you to select text, as it should, but this is done by swiping a finger over the text to select, which is the same action used for navigation. I never did get the hang of why it would sometimes scroll and sometimes select text; it’s a mystery forever beyond my understanding. Once text was selected it would put up more buttons and widgets for manipulating it, making it even harder to find an open spot to tap to get rid of it without jumping along a random hyperlink.

Finally, this is Apple’s own browser app so why doesn’t it respect the iPad’s orientation like everything else? Many other apps would reshape their content as the device was turned, but the browser stayed strictly in landscape mode. It would have been much nicer to read long columns of text in portrait mode. Not a huge deal, but again it detracts from the experience in a way that seems sloppy and unpolished.

To wrap up, the iPad shows that there is probably a niche between phone and laptop for a flat device with elegant touch-screen UI. Unfortunately the iPad isn’t it, not at this stage. There are three main things I’d do for version 2, or for a competitor. First would be to make about half as heavy, even if that meant a reduction in runtime. Second would be to add grips of some kind, so it can be easily held with one hand without interfering with the screen. Third, and this is the main one, I’d add a physical button for toggling between viewing and controlling. In the view mode the basic controls would work, like navigation or touching explicit buttons, but nothing would get in the way of watching your video or reading your web page.

In the control mode, which could be activated intermittently by placing the button in easy reach of the hand holding the handle, more controls and gadgets would overlay the content, perhaps providing menus or palettes for performing multiple functions. If you need to rewind the video a few seconds you’d hold down the button to bring up video controls, drag to rewind with the other hand, and then release the button to hide the controls again. If you’re viewing a picture and want to make changes you press and release the button to toggle into control mode. Then you’d have control overlays for adjusting levels or doing other markup.

Apple probably won’t do that due to Steve Job’s deep-seated button phobia, so thinking beyond one button will have to rest with someone else. And while you're at it, make the damn thing multi-task for crying out load.

- jack*

Socalism, Schmocialism...

The thing that I do find about Barack Obama is that -- and I think America is starting to catch on to this -- this guy really is a Marxist.

Glen Beck

This rhetoric confuses me. Does anyone – in the 21st century – really think that Marxism, socialism, or communism are serious political theories? Has any influential American in the last 30 years said anything that could be interpreted by an unbiased observer as promoting Marxism, socialism or communism? Is there any way in which the modern liberal platform can be interpreted as an endorsement of Karl Marx?

The answer to those rhetorical questions – in case you missed it -- is no, of course. Marxism’s heyday was about 100 years ago, when it helped to found the 20th century labor movement. Since then a lot has changed. Yes, we had red scares and domino theory wars and cold wars and then … well, we won. Yay team capitalist! And yet the right wing in America isn’t celebrating. Instead they’re wallowing in a kind of cold war nostalgia that helps to justify the most pro-corporate policies in terms of being – even today – opposed to nasty insidious commies.

This isn’t a simple disagreement over policy – the left and right in American politics don't even agree on what the disagreement is about.

I’m not much of a scholar of history, but it seems to me that in the 1930’s the political spectrum was understood to be from fascism on the far right to Marxism on the far left. (“Socialism” is a more troublesome term since it was used by both extremes.) Even when people disagreed about policy, everyone, on the left and the right, at least agreed that those were the correct parameters for the discussion.

Today we have a complete disconnect. The right defines the possible political spectrum as being from “dyed in the wool Patriot” on the right to “European redistributive Marxist” on the left. Given this is the entire range of political thought that the right even allows, it's no great surprise that the conservative movement has been pushing further and further to the right extreme. Everything evil, from Stalin to Hitler, has been redefined to be leftist. They get away with it because while few modern people are willing to openly defend Marxism, equally few are prepared to condemn the right's so-called patriotism as fascism.

Thinkers on the left, I think, are more realistic, seeing the political argument as being over the relative power of citizens, corporations, and government. But right-wing thinkers aren't having that discussion. They're fighting imaginary battles with modern-day Maoists, which somehow always involves giving giant corporations more power at the expense of everyone else. Funny how it works out that way.

- jack*

iPad iReview, pt 2…

Before: Part 1

This time, I will report on what I consider the more mediocre aspects of the iPad. The "ugly" in the classic trio.

(1) The design. The aesthetics of the device are pretty weak. It certainly looks like a small iMac or a large iPhone, but is that really a good thing? That’s not really a great goal. For those who haven’t held one in your hands, imagine a large rounded rectangle thickened to about 5 centimeters. While that sounds awesomely thin, in fact the device gets even thicker in the middle, making it unstable when placed flat on a table. No doubt the designers wanted it to seem thin, but making the edges thinner than the middle is like a bald guy with a comb-over or a fat guy in a muscle shirt: it’s just pretending to be something it’s not. If you insist on sticking with the bland design, at least make it uniformly thick.

(2) The affordances. “Affordances” is a fancy word for doorknobs – physical (or virtual) elements that help you use a device. Designed well, they invite you to interact with them to do what you want and need; designed poorly, they confuse and frighten you. The iPad has five physical controls, and they are all terrible. I spent a long time in the graphical UI looking for volume control before realizing that the toggle switch on the side was the only way to adjust volume. There were no clues written on the device for any of the buttons – even simple, standard icons were missing. One of them I never touched because I was afraid of what it might do.

Under affordances I include the lack of any kind of handle. Related to design (see point 1, above), the basic rounded rectangle shape and touch screen provided no useful way to hold the thing. If you want to use it for any length of time you might want to hold it in front of you with one hand, but since there is no handle and any fingers on the front of the machine could be interpreted as input – well, there’s just no way to do that without fatigue of some kind.

(3) The weight. Speaking of fatigue – the first time I held the iPad I was flipping through a colleague’s vacation photos. At first it was awesome. The finger flip UI and the clear, bright screen were clear wins. Then I realized my arm was about to die. The design (see point 1, above) tries to hide the heft, but it can’t be avoided if you hold it up for long. That continued to happen over and over as I used the iPad. The thing is just heavier than it should be for its intended niche. (Maybe a handle would help.)

(4) The phone. Once you get past the signature apps, most of the things you can do with the iPad were actually created for the iPhone. The fact that it looks like a comically oversized iPhone (see point 1, above) is underscored by the apps, that are also comically oversized and incapable of adjusting to the altered aspect ratio as you rotate the iPad to make best use of the relatively large screen space.

(5) The screen. I understand that there are tradeoffs with screen coatings. Non-reflective screens block some of the light so they take more power. Nontheless, the shiny reflective screen makes the iPad pretty hard to use outdoors or in brightly lit environments. I tried to watch a movie in the back yard and even in the shade all I could see in the dark scenes was my own face. It also collect fingerprints, and since it's a touch-screen device that means you have to polish it quite often.

(6) The keyboard. It's kind of a necessary evil on a device like this that the keyboard has to be virtual, without tactile feedback. And to avoid mistyping it has to have big buttons which means that numbers and letters are on different pages. (Although I don't know why you don't flip between keyboards rather than using mode buttons.) But the fact that it's all necessary doesn't make it any less ugly.

Next: the bad!

- jack*

iPad iReview, pt 1…

Our CEO came into my office a few weeks ago and tossed the company iPad at me. He wanted me to come to understand the user interface opportunities that it represents by playing with it for a while. So I did. Here is my multi-part review of the highlights and lowlights of this technological ink blot, followed by my verdict and proposal for an iPad killer.

The good:

(1) Interactivity. The “multi-touch” interface is ideal for navigating 2D content. Google Earth is a perfect example. Zooming in, zooming out, rotating or panning are simple and intuitive. Even for less physically dimensional data sets the metaphor of flipping between pages with a flick of the finger or of scaling up and down with two fingers works really, really well. It helps that the system is fast enough that the UI and graphics respond to touch interactively.

(2) Speed. The essentially zero startup and shutdown time make the device seem like a physical appliance rather than a computer. I don’t know how many hours I spend booting up Windows, or on the other end, shutting it down. In any case it’s too long to make it seem like a tool – it’s more like a chore. The iPad, on the other hand – you turn it on and it’s on, you turn it off and it’s off. Unlike a laptop whose state has to be managed, the iPad is more like a book. You open it and use it, close it when done, just like you want to.

(3) Portability. The battery in my laptop pooped out years ago and turned it into a strictly wired computer. Even when the battery works, the keyboard and track pad on the laptop give it a hands-off, indirect feel. It’s like trying to hold a book with oven mitts and leaf through it with tongs, as if the pages were 500 degrees. The iPad, however, is a truly portable device. The form factor, speed and direct UI make this the only computer I’ve tried to take to bed or to the bathroom with me.

(4) Plants versus Zombies. Not to focus on a particular game, but the iPad platform has an affinity for certain types of applications. In particular anything especially two dimensional that requires minimal interaction, like the aforementioned brilliantly designed RTS game. First person shooters will not be flocking to the iPad, but for some kinds of games and interactive experiences it will provide a unique niche.

- jack*

UPDATE: part 2

Science and Values…

Sam Harris, late of End of Faith, has decided to come out for scientific values. This is a big deal, and his argument is one of the most interesting things I have heard for a long time. As I have written before, despite how esoteric it all may seem, this is a critically important debate to be having at this point in history.

What we’re talking about is a conclusion by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume that it’s impossible to derive an “ought” (how we should act) from an “is” (a fact about the world). He believed that what we should do in response to anything real depends on our values, which are an entirely personal and subjective matter. For example, if you’re a vegetarian and I’m not, given the objective fact of an omnivorous buffet we will make different decisions about what we should eat.

Unfortunately, this philosophical edict from two centuries ago has had the effect of reducing all morality to simple chocolate/vanilla choices, even in the modern world. No one in the western tradition today dares to use their personal moral intuition to judge members of other cultures lest they seem imperialist.

On one hand it’s good to be “enlightened” about the possible value of other cultures. On the other hand are we out of line for condemning so-called “female circumcision”? What about a social system that requires women to hide themselves? Is there any way that we can call that wrong without being arbitrary.

I think these are important questions and I hope that the larger discussion results in some good ways to approach them. It’s my curse as an enlightenment idealist to believe that hard problems can be solved by talking.

- jack*

How to Make Sex Uncool...

The sex-crazed right-wing crazies are at it again, trying to put a stop to sex education because it encourages sex. And by encourages sex, what they mean is that it acknowledges that sex happens. Given their apparent default view of sex as something that occurs between an “offender” and a “victim,” wouldn’t it make more sense for young adult to be informed?

Of course, making sense is not something we expect from the hysterical right. Instead we have to decode and interpret their real motives and intentions.

Pharyngula’s PZ Myers has something like the same response that I had, that giving kids the knowledge to protect themselves before they actually need it is no worse than encouraging seatbelt use. But never mind that. Let’s take them at their word. They want to discourage young people from having sex, so what’s the best way to do that? Let’s start by considering the general parameters of “coolness” in the teenage mind.

Cool: acting on impulse; being carefree and rebellious; a sense of danger; the thrill of breaking the rules; the ego strokes of acting mature; what everyone else is doing.

Uncool: weighing risk and benefits; using safety equipment; doing what your parents tell you; doing kid-safe things; anything your parents talk about.

So, conservatives believe -- opposite of liberals -- that when we teach kids about sex we should describe it as forbidden, dangerous and illicit, while avoiding any discussion of practical considerations, messy biological facts, or the boring details of how to properly use contraception. And they think this will discourage teenagers from seeking out sex.

Which way makes sex more cool, the conservative approach or the liberal approach?

- jack*

These Kids Today...

For example, last semester, I wanted to reference the ending of Chinatown to highlight a couple of points about the legal system, so I asked a class of about 55 students how many of them had seen it. A total of one student raised her hand. She said "do you mean the one in San Francisco?"

Paul Campos, LGM

I'm fascinated by this discussion. As we get older this question comes up more and more in one form or another: "Are young people now living up to the standards we set when we were their age?" Are kids today really squandering the promise of the cultural legacy created for them, or are older people just seeing the past through rose colored lenses? I think the answer is somewhere in between, although it may be simply meaningless because there is no objective way in which to answer it. There are several issues that may converge on some kind of answer.

1) Time. If you look at the so-called classic films that professor laments, they are Chinatown (1974), Dirty Harry (1971), and Death Wish (1974). They all come from a very narrow and very specific period not only in time but in the history of film production. It's not hard to guess that these all premiered during a formative time in Campos' life and acted as cultural touchstones. They all also represented a kind of early 1970's milieu that doesn't recur before or since.

2) History. There was a strange period, somewhere between the invention of television and the invention of cable television, when nations had a unified mass media experience. Baby boomers grew up when there were four networks and no internet. What was on, was on. You watched it, or if you didn't you were teased at school because you didn't know what happened. With 500 channels plus YouTube there's no reason to expect that media is a shared experience.

3) Accident. I'm probably about the same age as Campos, and yet he and I had different media experiences. Why? Because while we're both nerds, we're different kinds of nerds. When I was about 13 my sister and her friend took me to a theater showing Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). I was enthralled. About the time the Black Knight was losing limbs in showers of blood, they decided that it was too nasty and forced us to leave. That might have been it except that a year or two later I discovered Monty Python on PBS and I found the culture that would serve me into adulthood. About the same time as Chinatown and Death Wish, and yet by chance it was a very different outcome.

4) Ignorance. It's not clear that those who complain about modern youth have followed Harry Potter or Twilight. Is it possible that Pokemon or Lady GaGa could be cultural reference points equal to Madonna or the Spielberg oeuvre? It may be that baby boomers have simply closed their ears to anything that they didn't grow up with. Perhaps they should listen to what their kids like and learn from it instead of trying to impose their own values.

5) Experience. As we get older, we know more. It's the benefit of age; it's called wisdom. We shouldn't expect teenagers to have the same level of understanding that we do. To the extent that we use our longer experience as a cudgel we should be ashamed. To the extent that we are wise, we should use that wisdom to help the young, however much they might whine about it.

Dan Dennet has developed a very good model about how culture works. Using archetypal cultural touchstones -- like significant movie references -- allows us to off-load the problem of understanding the world into the world itself. We don't have to represent a kaleidoscope of ideas in our own minds if we can just react to "That's not true! It's Impossible!". The culture we grew up in has done the work for us; the touchstones of culture are our inheritance. We should be proud of it, but understand that it's as temporary and mailable as the rest of the environment that we live in and create.

- jack*

True Capitalist Heros...

The United States government doesn't govern all that well. We'll concede that. But the American private sector does deliver unbelievable things. [...] And we're sitting here at the end of a period of extraordinary technical innovation. And not just -- I mean, the Internet, we're all familiar with. But all kinds of products, and products that people want.

David Frum, CNN

That lie – the defenders of unrestrained capitalism staking claim to the Internet as if it was the product of the out-of-the-box genius of private industry – is becoming very annoying. How many times do we have to explain that the Internet in general was the product of public research and investment, and that the Web in particular was invented by a scientist who wanted to share research results in a way that mostly undermined the profits of professional journals?

The first businesses to colonize the government-sponsored Internet were pornographers, who found broader reach and lower overhead relative to subscriber-based bulletin board services. Pornography enthusiasts drove the development of digital imaging, embracing emerging technology like standard image formats, cheap digitizers and high-fidelity display buffers. And yet, like the Internet itself, these pioneers were inspired by a desire to share more widely the products of their labors, and not by profit for the most part.

If this is the communist legacy that David Frum wishes to embrace, fine. He just needs to understand who he’s hugging. And what diseases they might be carrying.

- jack*

Diets Don’t Work…

Good Eats was a transformative show for Food Network. My wife and I used to watch it back in its earliest days when the best original programming was David Rosengarten doing a one-camera shoot in a set that was little more than a cable-access studio with a cooktop. Alton Brown’s combination of high production values, low budget, high concept and low humor created an entire genre based on theme cooking vignettes. He has been a fixture at the network ever since and became one of their senior TV practitioners.

His best formula was to take a complex culinary process and break it down to fundamental principles based on a combination of history and science, and then turn that into something the regular home cook could accomplish. Sometimes his history was suspect and occasionally his science went awry and more than once he got sucked into a geeky gadgetry vortex that entertained mostly himself. Nonetheless his approach was always based in reality. What he tried to do could be done by regular people, indeed in many cases substituting cheaper equipment for fancy “single-taskers”.

Until now. When he looked a bit skeletal guest-hosting Iron Chef a few weeks ago I thought, “Huh, he looks kind of skeletal. I wonder if he’s been sick?” No, he wasn’t sick, at least in the conventional sense. He had in fact succumbed to a far worse malady than a mere infection of the body. As I found out a couple days ago when I selected a recent episode of Good Eats, the ever-practical Mr. Brown had a much worse condition. He had written a diet book, and had starved himself to sell it.

It was a let down to say the least; in fact I felt somewhat betrayed. I’ve never had a lot of interest in “body shape activism” or any of the anti-anti-fat movements, but I do understand one thing: given the intense social pressure to be thin, and the overwhelming multitude of weight loss books, seminars, videos, programs and theories, the fact that there are still many overweight people mean that those weight loss methods don’t work. If any one of them did, everyone would be using it, and they would be thin.

That’s not to say that weight loss is impossible – of course it is. People are capable of losing incredible amounts of weight; that’s what keeps the dream alive. I’m sure someone came to Alton Brown and said, “If you can write some crap about nutrition, and then lose 50 pounds, we can sell your book as a miracle and you’ll make millions.” And he did, and will. If you starve yourself and spend every waking minute at the gym, you’ll lose weight. As Milo Bloom put it, summarizing simple physics, “Eat less, exercise more.”

One can avoid pregnancy by employing abstinence, and if used correctly it’s 100% effective. The problem with this approach, like Milo’s or other any other diet program is that people want to have lives too. A prescription based on willpower is doomed. The physical drives will always overwhelm feeble conscious manifestos, and even if the mind has a temporary triumph it will eventually turn. The fact beyond “diets don’t work” is that the diet that worked yesterday doesn’t work tomorrow.

I would expect the young Alton Brown, the perky host that questioned conventional wisdom, to ask these kinds of questions. It would have been interesting to see his take on diet-book history. But it was easier for him to go with the flow. When his book stops paying royalties he’ll chub out again.

- jack*

Good Riddance to Weird Decades...

Happy new decade to you and yours! That is assuming that you believe that 2010 starts the new decade.

Some arithmetic geeks continue to argue that the decade doesn't start until 2011. Their argument goes like this: Decades have 10 years; The first year in the A.D. calendar is year 1; Therefore all decades start with a one and end with zero. I know it sounds absurd -- and it is -- but that's their entire argument. Like all geek arguments it starts from first principles, ignores historical, popular and rhetorical precedent, and hopes to win only by force of smug certainty and endless restatement. Fortunately there are many nuanced counterarguments, which I won't go into. I keep them in reserve for when I meet a calendar geek at a party and want to make their head explode, but that only happen every ten years or so.

The more common definition of a "decade" is a sequential group of years that share a common tens digit. So the "70's" include the 1970's, the 1870's, the 570's, etc., and when I say "the 1970's" I mean the years 1970 to 1979. The numeric foundation is modulo arithmetic: divide a year by ten, round down, and multiply by ten. This gives you the "decade number", which is really just the name of the decade. By this definition, years between 0001 and 0009 would be part of the "00's" -- the decade with zero in the ten's digit -- same as the one that just ended yesterday at midnight. It so happens that the first 00's had 9 years instead of ten.

There is another legitimate way to feel that the last decade still lingers. Decades are never so much numerological as they are cultural, and the cultural decade always lags the actual date. The cultural decade encompasses a gestalt: an overall tenor of the timespan. This is something that is hard to know in advance. The 60's mean social change and youthful rebellion; the 70's mean political scandal and personal excess; the 80's mean Reagan and cutthroat business practices. These all started in earnest a few years after the start of the technical decade, and spilled a little into the next decade before they were supplanted by the next.

There are often specific events that one can point to after the fact that mark the start of each new cycle. The 1960's, in my opinion, started November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. The 1970's began in 1972, sometime between June 17 with the Watergate arrest and December 19, with the end of the Apollo program. The last (or current) decade, which I like to call the "double-oh's", began without question on September 11, 2001. We have not yet seen the end event of this cultural decade. I'm shooting for 2011, with a definitive end to the Iraq adventure, although sadly it may be later.

Here's hoping that the cultural decade that follows is much, much better than the last one. In fact, let's make it so.

- jack*

War Makes me Queasy...

My wife and I are ambivalent about the President's most recent address on the Afghanistan war. She is ambivalent because she is more hawkish than me and supported the Afghan war, at least in principle, from the start, and yet after 8 years it seems like a bit of a lost cause. I'm against expanding or even continuing any kind of pointless war, and yet I don't want to be a liberal fifth column that undermines the best hope we have for progressive governance for the foreseeable future.

I see the Afghan war as pointless for one main reason: literacy. The UN puts literacy in Afghanistan at something like one quarter, which cannot sustain a modern nation-state. Modern governance is based on a combination of rule-of-law and bureaucracy, both of which require a minimum level of reading and writing, both among civil servants and among the populace. It also requires consent of those who are being governed, which cannot happen when most people hear about national matters secondhand. Would you agree to progressive policies if everything you knew came from what your grandfather told you? Or your village elder who has a political stake in the status quo?

The other mitigating factor is that "Afghanistan" is not a nation. Not really. There are a lot of people there with some regional similarities and some common interests, but they also have tribal rivalries and legitimate differences that are not subsumed under the rubric of national identity. It took two hundred years and a civil war to get Americans to argue about which values make us more American rather than which values make us want to void the Constitution, and yet we still argue. Afghans aren't even at the point that they think Afghanistan is a valid concept, let alone even wanting to defend or reject parts of it.

So if the President's strategy really depends, as he seemed to argue, on Afghanistan pulling itself together as a country, then the effort is doomed. On the other hand, if what he really wants is the time and manpower to kill or capture Osama bin Laden -- as my wife thinks is the true hidden objective -- then I freely admit that would be a good thing and well worth it. I only wish that was the stated goal so we could align ourselves and the international community in accordance with it.

- jack*

Selfish Reasons to Buy American...

Well, this could have gone better. Ultimately the lesson here is that whatever short-term political changes there may have been recently, our public discourse is still dominated – perhaps even smothered – by right-wing framing.

The debate starts with the proposition “Buy American, hire American polices will backfire,” and then solicits arguments for and against. Not only is the proposition worded in a pro-free trade manner, the supporters of the proposition have a much easier job. While those who oppose the proposition have to argue the positive claim that “Buy American” polices are definitively good, the argument for “backfire” can just be a grab bag of random assertions about things that might possibly go wrong. Any argument that poses careful weighing of evidence versus Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt is doomed, and the latter is the currency of conservatism.

This debate was an exemplar. The pro-trade faction pulled out wild claims one after another and threw them at the wall to see what stuck. It will depress trade and therefore the whole economy; it will waste money; other countries will retaliate; it will encourage bad practices that will lead to some other lack of competitiveness. The most academic proponent of the motion simply said that the international system was super-complex and that lots of non-linear and unpredictable things could go wrong. Booga booga! I believe his Ph.D. was in FUD.

The fog of so much nonsense left the opponents reeling. Time and again they had to make difficult and nuanced rebuttals to the unsourced claims from the other side, so that in the end they had little time to forward their actual case.

Right-wing memes have also permeated public thinking so deeply that’s it’s sometimes hard to see where our own beliefs have become perverted. One such moment for me was when an audience member asked, in essence: what’s the moral case for spending more for American products if it only rewards laziness? If this question resonates with you at all, congratulations! You’re a latent Libertarian. Libertarians believe that the cost of goods is entirely a function of the personal intensity of their creators. Lazy workers like those in France and Detroit make expensive union products, while industrious workers like those in China and Peru make cheap entrepreneurial products.

And yet the reality is – like the right-wing smarty-pants argued – somewhat more complex. Costs can vary by orders of magnitude from country to country. Labor costs dominate the textile industry and compensation for American workers is 6 times that of their Mexican compadres. Is this because Mexicans are 6 times more motivated? Are Americans 600% more lazy? Of course not. A factor of 6 is also impossible to transcend with a clever application of technology. Any automation that affords an American worker 6-fold productivity can be quickly replicated south of the border. Even if the knockoff is only half as good as the American original, the Latin American plant is till 3 times cheaper because Mexicans need lower wages.

The current difference in standard of living between first and third world countries is free money to those who can exploit it. Free trade advocates are arbitrageurs, just milking a natural wealth pump. They don’t have to do anything except create (or invest in) the same goods in cheaper countries and they make a bundle. The fact that it impoverishes you and me and wrecks our social ecosystem means nothing to them. There’s your “moral argument”.

You want another? Let’s stipulate that American goods are more expensive than imported equivalents. The big issue is equivalence – with American-made goods you know that they were made in accordance with federal health and safety laws, and that they comport with accepted legal standards of quality and non-toxicity. Or if they don’t there’s easy recourse. With imported goods that’s not so clear, since such disputes often are resolved by shadowy bodies accountable even less than our elected officials. But let’s stipulate all that. You have a choice of product A made in America and imported product B, both of equal quality, both non-toxic, and made with equal respect for the rights of workers.

If A and B cost the same it’s clear you should pick A – the American product. Financially the argument is very simple. Money paid to an American firm becomes corporate profits and personal income. Both are taxed. Taxes go into the general fund which benefits everyone, including you. Every dollar that you pay to an American firm instead of a foreign or multinational firm benefits you personally. What more libertarian argument could be made?

The moral argument is also clear. If I spend my dollars on my neighbor, then they have money to buy local products, to buy materials for their kid’s education, to make their lives better and our neighborhood better. If I’m no worse off, I’d rather pay someone I know. If I spend those same dollars on imported products then I enrich the importer and perhaps send a fraction of that money to someone in a distant country. Meanwhile my neighbor, who makes the same product at the same price, suffers. Morality is parochial. We must support our neighbors if we can. Even if you want to send money to third-world farmers, buying their products is the least effective way to do it.

Once you accept the fact that, all things being equal, buying American is the self-interested and moral choice: the question becomes what is that worth? Would you still buy American if it was 1% more expensive? How about 5%? How about 10%? Ultimately in economics a choice must become quantitative. If you continue to profess that “Buy American” is a vanity that hurts competition then you demonstrate a blindness of both economic self interest and morality that can only be attributed to mental poisoning by right-wing ideas. My hope is only that you will think harder about the way you are being forced to think before you decide.

On the other hand, I wish this debate was available in any form.

- jack*