What Charlie Pierce Said

Charlie Pierce often crystallizes, cogently and entertainingly, something that I think. His endorsement of Barack Obama for re-election is a good example of this.

I miss Molly Ivins

The late great Molly Ivins said of George W. Bush (and Rick Perry): "The next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please, pay attention."

I feel the same way about Mitt Romney and Massachusetts.

Review: The Better Angels of our Nature, by Steven Pinker

Every so often a book comes along that literally changes the way I think about the world. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions was probably the <cough> paradigm case for me.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is one of these books.

His core thesis, supported by a huge array of data and documentation, is that violence has declined dramatically over time — not always smoothly, not always consistently, past performance does not guarantee future results — but there's a clear downward trend.

The kernel of insight is one of those really-obvious-in-retrospect ideas that changes perspective on a huge amount of history: if you look at conflicts and categorize them not by how many people they killed, but by how many people they killed per capita (i.e. divided by the world population at the time), then generally speaking, the fraction of people who die in armed conflicts has been getting smaller over time. A lot smaller.

Review: Among Others, by Jo Walton

I recently read Among Others, by Jo Walton, of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day fame. (She blogs entertainingly at tor.com. She "live-blogged" re-reading the Miles Vorkosigan saga in publication order, which I found quite interesting. And I commend her post on The Suck Fairy.)

Among Others came out last year and got such effusive praise from other writers that I wondered whether it was a case of a book from "a writer's writer", who (similar to "an actor's actor" or "a comedian's comedian") is someone doing stuff that is interesting but not compelling to anyone other than people in the same field. I am happy to have been proven wrong. Or maybe what it is is that Jo Walton is "an SF reader's SF reader", and since I'm an SF reader, it really worked for me. I do fear that it would not work as well for someone who hadn't been an SF-steeped 15-year-old.

Among Others is the (first-person) story of fifteen-year-old Mori (Morwenna), who has fled her half-insane mother in Wales after an accident that killed her twin sister and shattered her leg. In the summer of 1979, she ends up with her father (who had abandoned them as children), because British law prevents her extended family in Wales from being able to take her in. She is sent to an English boarding school, where she is basically the designated outcast: Welsh, semi-crippled, academically talented, and constantly reading SF and fantasy, which buffer her from the pain of her life.

Oh, yeah — there are also fairies and magic. The magic is (usually) subtle and intertwines slowly through the story.

Half-autobiography (Walton explains in an afterward that getting her own childhood right was way harder than historical research), half-fantasy, this setup could have been a twee or treacle disaster. But Mori's whip-smart, clever-but-not-worldly, astringent voice is a treat to read. I laughed out loud multiple times and subjected everyone within earshot to (sometimes extensive) quoting.

You could argue that "not much happens" in the book — most of the action is interior, but that hardly matters. I enjoyed reading it immensely.

As much as anything, the book is a love letter to reading and interacting with other readers, and to libraries and librarians. A central part of the plot is Mori discovering an SF reader group in the town where her school is located; she had performed a small magic to find herself a group with which to fit in (a karass, in Kurt Vonnegut's language from Cat's Cradle), and it is an open question (for Mori herself as well as for us) whether the magic caused this or if it was just luck, or fate. We get to see Mori read, discuss, and analyze books that were just coming out (or just arriving in England), and there are occasional in jokes for those of us who have read the books she's reading (e.g. Mori wonders about the implication of some feature of a book that, which that book's [still-in-the-future for Mori] sequel will address).

If you've ever been fifteen and reading was an escape, or "merely" a joy, and especially if you were reading SF at that point, I strongly recommend Among Others.

Also of potential interest: Jo Walton's "Big Idea" post on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

Places to purchase Among Others: Amazon BN Powell's Harvard Bookstore

Why I Oppose SOPA and PIPA

I oppose SOPA and PIPA. Here's a good summary why: http://nielsenhayden.com/503_sopa.html.

The argument I included in my notes to my Congressional reps was this:

Imagine that Walmart and Target got up in front of Congress and argued that since people shoplift, they should be able to stop cars and trucks randomly on the streets and highways looking for stolen goods, and to take away drivers licenses at will. They would (I hope!) be laughed out of Washington. But that's effectively what the RIAA and the MPAA are demanding with SOPA and PIPA -- except that it's not just roads, it's the Internet they're demanding police powers over (with no oversight or appeal).

The Internet is the greatest force for free speech since the printing press. It is the medium through which a huge fraction of our news, entertainment, political discussion, and, indeed, of our economy flows.

Intellectual property piracy may be a problem -- although all independent research says that the RIAA and MPAA are exaggerating the problem by several orders of magnitude. Giving the five Hollywood studios, four multinational record labels, and six global publishers the keys to the Internet is an awful idea.

Read Charlie Pierce

If you're not reading Charlie Pierce's blog, you should start. Warning: includes Bad Language and might be offensive to idiots and Republicans.

Amazing Nerdiness

I was listening to Tom Lehrer's "Silent E" (one of my favorites; I'm always happy when that pops up on my iPod), and decided to figure out how many pairs of words differ only by a trailing 'e'.

So I whipped up this nerdstrosity. I felt I had to share:

perl -e 'my %words = (); my @ewords = (); 
while (<>) {
    chomp();
    $words{$_} = 1; 
    push(@ewords, $_) if (/e$/);
} 
foreach my $eword ( @ewords ) { 
    (my $noe = $eword) =~ s/e$//; 
    if ( defined($words{$noe}) ) { 
        print "$noe -> $eword\n";  
    }  
}' /usr/share/dict/words

Things I've Learned, #1751

If you review your Spam/Junk email folder regularly, sort by sender -- it groups together (and hence allows you to easily skip over) the repeated spam. And there's LOTS of repeated spam (in my spam folder, anyway).

(This does require that you either pick a date range -- or otherwise look only at messages that have arrived since your last review; or move everything you've review somewhere else after the review.)

Paul Krugman Finally Understands

So Paul Krugman finally figured out why the Very Serious People^TM Really Really Hate inflation: because it costs the creditor class money.

You can see the penny drop over the past week in the following blog posts: The Rentier Regime, Wir Haben Auch Rentier, and Who Are the Rentiers.

What I find kind of surprising is that I thought this was obvious. If nothing else, Molly Ivins was making this point back in the 1990s, in her inimitable style:

These guys are economic nincompoops; our Federal Reserve Board, composed of people none of us have ever heard of, knows better. They want to slow the economy down, you see. In the world of the Fed (as we cognoscente call it for short), it's bad when the economy grows fast, and it's worse when everyone can find a job. You see. Because these conditions are believed to cause inflation, which the Fed hates worse than anything. Inflation means that rich people's money is worth less and is especially bad for creditors, those make money by loaning money to those of us who have to borrow money. Got it?

So basically, arguments over inflation targets are an interest group struggle: people who make money by loaning it to others want low inflation, because it benefits them. People who borrow money would like higher inflation, because it makes it easier for them to pay the money back.

NOTE: no one is arguing for Weimar Germany/Zimbabwe hyperinflation. This is an argument about whether we should have 1% inflation or 4% inflation.

I Think I Figured It Out....

I realized why Republicans don't like the Health Care Individual Mandate: because it includes "man date", and that's just too gay.

Unix sort Insanity (Or is it Just Me?)

I just discovered (after way too much time poking about) that Unix sort does not split fields the way I naively assumed. I had thought that it split on whitespace, the way that awk does, but it does not. It splits on the zero-length "character" between a non-space and space character -- and then the space characters become part of the next field.

The nasty consequence of this is that whitespace-tabulated data that have a varying number of spaces (or tabs) between fields -- as opposed to fields separated by a single space, or a single tab, or single comma if you use '-t,' -- will not sort the way you might think.

For example:

$ STRING="fibble ab  de\ngorkle  bc cd\n"
$ printf "$STRING"
fibble ab  de
gorkle  bc cd

$ printf "$STRING" | sort -k 2,2
gorkle  bc cd
fibble ab  de

— i.e. the two spaces in front of 'bc' make ' bc' sort ahead of ' ac'.

And

$ printf "$STRING" | sort -k 3,3
fibble ab  de
gorkle  bc cd

— where the two spaces in front of 'de' make ' de' sort ahead of ' cd'.

 

This explains a great deal of bizarre behavior I've dealt with over the years, stuff I never had the time to drill down and deal with.

My usual fix for this sort of situation is to collapse whitespace into a single space character, sort, and then use my ~/bin/tabulate script on the end:

$ printf "$STRING" | 
  perl -pe 's/[ \t]+/ /g' | 
    sort -k 3,3 | 
      ~/bin/tabulate
gorkle bc cd
fibble ab de

I hope someone might find this useful. In other words, I hope I'm not the only one who took this long to understand this. :-)

 

---

From 'info sort' on Ubuntu:

`-t SEPARATOR'
`--field-separator=SEPARATOR'
     Use character SEPARATOR as the field separator 
     when finding the sort keys in each line.  By 
     default, fields are separated by the empty 
     string between a non-blank character and a 
     blank character.  By default a blank is a space 
     or a tab, but the `LC_CTYPE' locale can change 
     this.

     That is, given the input line ` foo bar', `sort'
     breaks it into fields ` foo' and ` bar'.  The 
     field separator is not considered to be part of 
     either the field preceding or the field following,
     so with `sort -t " "' the same input line has 
     three fields: an empty field, `foo', and `bar'.  
     However, fields that extend to the end of the 
     line, as `-k 2', or fields consisting of a range, 
     as `-k 2,3', retain the field separators present 
     between the endpoints of the range.

     To specify ASCII NUL as the field separator, use 
     the two-character string `\0', e.g., `sort -t '\0''.

My Favorite Sign from Wisconsin

I know I'm late on this, but here's my favorite sign from the Wisconsin protests:

Imperial Cities

I'm coming more and more to the conclusion that Washington DC is an Imperial City.

I not making the argument here that the US is an empire (although the argument can certainly be made). I'm talking about what it means to HAVE an Imperial City.

I would suggest the following as archetypal Imperial Cities: Versailles, Beijing, and Edo (now Tokyo). (Given China's long history, Beijing is merely the most recent of its Imperial Cities.) I would contrast them with other Imperial Capitals like London and Rome. (Interestingly, Delhi/New Delhi forms an instructive hybrid.)

Imperial Cities are those that were built from the ground up to be capitals; they aren't centers of commerce or art or scholarship, except secondarily. They were often built to avoid commerce and art and scholarship, in fact. Usually they were explicitly created by a strong central ruler (Chinese Emperors, Louis XIV of France, the Tokugawa Shoguns) as a place to hold hostages — nobles would be required to send some members of their families to be in residence at all times in the Imperial City, or be themselves in residence.

Another major feature of these Imperial Cities is that the Court became its own society to the exclusion of almost everything else. Court Society dictated what people did, what they wore, who was in, who was out, usually in obsessive detail. This was directly or indirectly to the benefit of the central ruler, as anything that distracted the courtiers kept them from doing anything to take away from the center of power.

This is not to say that Court life in London, or its equivalent in Rome or other large capitals was not intellectually inbred or navel-gazing. But as an instructive contrast, if you were a courtier in the British government in the 17th century, you could physically leave the court and be watching a play, or in a coffee house discussing the events of the day with Samuel Pepys, or dining with the founders of modern science at the Royal Society, within a matter of minutes. There was nothing comparable at Versailles.

Washington DC was built from the ground up to be the capital city of the United States. There was little or nothing there before the current city was laid out. Whatever art and commerce that is there is a follow-on to the government.

If the capital of the United States had stayed in New York, or Philadelphia, instead of moving to a constructed city that had no other existence before the government arrived, what might have happened? Would various government functionaries feel closer to the people whose lives they affect, closer to some of the modes of life that exist outside of government?

Most importantly, would the press be so much like Versailles courtiers, dependent for their existence on the people they are, in theory, supposed to be challenging and whose statements they are supposed to be verifying instead of merely repeating?

Cynically, I wonder if having our capital in our primary commercial city would actually make that much of a difference. The New York Times certainly has failed in its duty often enough (they pursued the Whitewater "scandal" long after it was clear that there was nothing to find; they were slack-jawed credulous in the runup to the Iraq War, and so on, and they certainly participate in Broderism at a high level, although not quite at the pitch of the Washington Post). But I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't be worse than what we've got now.

I think the biggest sign that we have an Imperial City on our hands is the signal failure of the press "corps" to actually look at the substance of policy proposals, and their propensity to go with the conventional wisdom (especially when it is dependent purely on superficialities), and to go with horse-race or Inside Baseball-type coverage. ("Democrats say Earth is round; Republicans disagree.") And it's quite sad that this hasn't changed much, or has possibly gotten worse, in the five years since Stephen Colbert nailed them at the 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner.

Take this GUI and Shove It

Here's a great explanation of why GUI's suck and should only be built on top of command-line interfaces.

More Facts That Will Not Make Anyone Change Their Mind

Ezra Klein on Why Elections Matter.

Convincing friends to choose their political party based on actual statistics.

Dan Savage May Be On To Something Here

Dan Savage has this to say about September 11th (while walking around Manhattan):

On some level I think social conservatives are angry that the terrorists attacked New York City and not Branson, Missouri. Al-Qaeda wanted to attack real America—and real Americans—and they knew that here is where you find both. So in addition to murdering 3,000 innocent people in New York City on September 11, 2001, the terrorists insulted the vanity of America's social conservatives and demonstrated that they shared their prejudices. They're still reeling from the blow.

Not Scared Yet of Atmospheric CO2? You Should Be

It's my impression that most people, even those fully convinced by the science of global climate change, picture the changes that are coming as being pretty gradual, and being such that we (even if only the "we" in high-tech Western countries that don't share borders with low-lying poor countries) will be able to adapt to them to some degree, whatever (nasty) pain they inflict. I've pretty much been thinking that way.

That is: we'll see hotter summers, changing rainfall patterns, more and more powerful storms (Minnesota beat Texas this year in number of tornadoes), beach erosion, and so on. Not to mention the social and political and military implications of climate refugees (the Pentagon is taking this very seriously). But, we think, life will go on, and the human race will survive -- even if life is a lot harder and there's a lot of suffering.

I am no longer so sanguine.

This Scientific American article, How Acidification Threatens Oceans from the Inside Out, is one of the scariest things I've ever read. (The full article is not available online; it's in the August 2010 issue.)

The oceans are getting more acidic due to dissolved carbon dioxide, which forms carbonic acid. (Dissolved carbon dioxide one of the main reasons that Coca-Cola has a pH around 3 in the can.) Not coincidentally, the oceans have been absorbing huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air -- keeping the atmospheric CO₂ levels from increasing even faster than they already are.

Ocean acidification is seriously problematic because most plants and animals in the ocean have evolved to live in a given range of acidity -- and changing that acidity can seriously mess up body chemistry. We're already seeing corals damaged by it, and experiments have shown that small shifts in acidity levels can have big effects on ocean life — reducing reproduction rates, impairing immune system function, and so on: even before acidity gets to the point of simply destroying life, cells and systems in oceanic life forms have to work harder to maintain their internal acidity levels, which takes more resources and impairs their ability to reproduce and thrive.

We're nearing the acidity range where we'll see serious impairment for a large range of sea life — and it might happen quickly, rather than gradually.

The REALLY scary thing about this is that if the acidity messes with phytoplankton (the source of half our atmospheric oxygen), then it's quite simply game over. We're not just talking about a lot of pain and suffering. We're not talking about merely the end of human civilization, or even the end of the human species: we're talking about the end of the biosphere as we know it. Game over, we took off and nuked it from orbit — but we forgot to take off first.

 

The thing about ocean acidification is that there's no wiggle room at all for global warming denialists. We've got the data on ocean acidity. We've got the experiments on various sea life and the effects of acidity change. There's no remediation possible — no giant space mirror or sulfur in the stratosphere is going to help this. (Sorry, Space Cadets.)

We simply have to lower (or eliminate) our carbon dioxide output. End of story — or end of us.

PhD, In Pictures

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.. This seems pretty accurate to me.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over

In what world is it a reasonable Sysadmin action to stop cron entirely, just to avoid an (otherwise-harmless) email alert from one cron job out of 30+ jobs on a host?

I am not sure why this particular insanity is boggling my mind so much today. (Perhaps some of it is due to the Sysadmin in question first trying to use 'svcadm diable cron' -- FOUR TIMES -- before realizing their typo.)

Space Science Win

This video of a solar eruption may be the coolest thing I've seen in months.